Introduction to Battle Brothers Review

Welcome to our Battle Brothers Review. Today we will discuss the mostly fantastic game called Battle Brothers which is a marvel of indie development.

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Battle Brothers is a rpg/rouge like where you take control of a Mercenary company, and the aim of the game is just to thrive, the difficulty on even a beginner setting is crushing so don’t get to attached to your company as even if you play well at the beginning, it’s very each for characters to get killed.

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The Good
The Bad
Summary

Now be aware I haven’t played the game with most of the DLC just the base game and free DLC which is the Flesh and Faith DLC and the Lindwurm DLC so my review will be of the base game with the new company

Now one of the interesting things about the game is that there is no overarching story and but there are events that happen during the game that give it a story-like quality and there are different starting companies you can have which will affect the different goals in the game you can go after.

Now one of the really great things about this game is the uniqueness of everything in the sense that each of the weapons you can equip has different types of attacks making each class of weapon unique and having differences between the one-hand and two-handed variants.

The enemies in this game also use different tactics and if you try to treat each of the battles the same way you will get crushed thus understanding how to handle each encounter and having the right equipment and strategies will make the difference between surviving or not.

There is also a perk system and a levelling up system that is very interesting but extremely important in the late game and not necessarily intuitive if you don’t understand the game which I will touch on later.

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Battle Brothers Review: The Good, Bad and Dead

The Good

Next in this Battle Brothers review we discuss the good parts of the game.

Now I am going to go into specifics here and into more detail than I did in the introduction. The uniqueness of everything is a lot of fun and makes this game more replayable than you might think as there is always something to learn.

The AI in this game is exceptionally well thought out, especially in terms of strategy and it really feels like each of the creatures/factions has its own way of fighting. Also, because the weapons have unique features you really start to get attached to your band and you really think about what weapons you’re going to take into battle.

Also, the difficulty scales well (maybe too well) as the game never really feels easy though it does get better as you get better armour and weapons making battles again weak creatures (like brigands) more profitable and greater for almost free xp.

Also, what’s different about this game is that there are no classes per se such as an archer class or tank class as each character has access to the same perk tree. But when you go to each town you have the option to hire people for your company and they each have different backgrounds that will affect what their base stats are likely to be such as Farmhand and Thieves (there’s way more) and also they may have talents for particular stats which is determined randomly and not related to the background.

Now what you see above this is the stat line for one of the characters and you will notice that there are stars next to three of the stat lines. The one listed as 100 is obviously health and that has two stars the one showing the sword and shield with the value of 18 also has two stars is melee defence and the one listed as 72 has one star is fatigue.

Now the way levelling up works in this game is that when you level up you get to select a perk from the perk tree (you get access to more tiers of perks as you level up) and you get to increase the value of 3 of your stats.

Now the number of the stats for stat increases are generated randomly an example is seen below:

Battle Brothers Review Image showing level up options

So, as you can see above that a number has been generated for each of the 8 stats you can improve by levelling up which from the top left are:

Health
Fatigue
Resolve
Initiative
Melee Attach
Ranged Attack
Melee Defence
Ranged Defence

Now when you level up you get to improve 3 of the above stats but the number generated to improve each of the stats is random and can be as low 1 or as high as 3 or 4 (for most stats) now this is where the stars on each stat come into play.

For every star on a particular stat it will increase the minimum number generated for the stat so in the example above if the number generated for melee attack was 1 and you have two stars on melee attack then that will increase the number you can increase you melee defence by two(one for each star) to three.

This means that it is very important to find characters with the right stars on certain stats for certain late game builds which you will need to worry about as if you don’t you will get crushed after day 70 (even if you have good equipment)

Now which stars are generated on each stat are completely random so the only way you’re going to find good characters for the late game is by randomly hiring lots of people and to cycle through the good ones and get rid of the bad ones as you can only have so many people in your team.

Now due to the random nature of where these stars on stats end up (as they are not related to background) you can really end up with some unique builds (if you know what your doing) based on where those stars end up which adds to the fun and makes the game replayable.

The Bad

Next in this Battle Brothers review we discuss the bad.

Now I just want to start by saying this is a very great game and I have played it for 131 hours so it must be good for it me to have played it that long and restarted many times and had fun along the way but there are some things that you should know about this game before you buy it.

The first is that the difficulty is really crushing in that it’s very easy for character to get killed even on beginner difficulty or suffer a permanent injury and the learning curve for this game is exceptionally high and there are systems that are different in this game from any other game I have played such as the fatigue system.

So, when a character does anything from moving to attacking to forming a shield wall it uses up fatigue and you only get lose 15 fatigue a turn normally (in other words recover fatigue), so you really must manage the fatigue of your characters.

Also, the more durability an armour has the more it reduces your maximum fatigue and armour in this game is important in fact in my experience having good armour means the difference between keeping a character alive or not but if you don’t prepare a character to wear heavy armour by bumping up their fatigue stat you can have really great suits of armour you can’t equip because they reduce your characters fatigue too much.

Also, there are certain battles in this game that can absolutely crush you if you don’t have the right stats/perks/strategies/equipment and the only way to learn about these without reading about them is by playing the game.

For example, when you encounter Undead early on if you don’t have cleavers on each of your character to decapitate them, they can keep reanimating and Undead don’t have fatigue so if you’re not careful they can wear you down.

Also, Ancient Auxiliaries are a nightmare early on if you don’t have flails as because they are undead, they have no fatigue and so can shield wall and attack you every turn making them very difficult to kill while they do a great job of killing your guys.

There are many such examples of this in this game and while you are not forced to fight any faction early on you constantly must worry about paying your troops and expenses in terms of food, ammunition, and tools to repair your equipment and there’s also the fact that if you don’t take the job you might have to spend money travelling to another town only to find that that town has not contracts for you to take which is how you primarily make money in this game.

The difficulty also really spikes after day 70 when either a Nobles War, Orc Invasion and Undead Invasion occurs and if you are not ready for that you will get crushed. Speaking of that the game can lull you into a false set of confidence by about day 50 to 60 where you can have good equipment by that point quests are not that hard for you until day 70 hits and you realise you are woefully ill prepared to deal with the Orc Invasion or the Nobles War.

Summary of Battle Brothers Review

Battle Brothers is a great game for hardcore/rogue like players as the randomness, difficulty and uniqueness makes this game incredibly replayable and fun even to restart but be prepared to lose a lot while playing this game and you will benefit by reading a perk/build guides for characters (of which there are plenty of guides for).

If you want a game that holds your hand and isn’t super punishing probably look elsewhere.

Introduction to Battle Brothers Review

Battle Brothers Review: The Good, Bad and Dead

The Good

The Bad

Summary of Battle Brothers Review

Links