Lords of Xulima
I've had this in my Steam library for some time now, but finally decided to play it. I ended up getting quite addicted to it, and played it for 5-6 hours straight. It's been years since I've done that!
The best way of describing this game is classic Might & Magic with an isometric view instead of first-person, but with combat closer to the that of the Wizardry series. You get "full" party creation right from the start (though one spot is taken up by a fixed main character you must use). I thought this would annoy me, but it feels less like you are tagging along with the main character, and more like he is tagging along with you.
The main character is set to the "explorer" class, which is not available for other characters. He is sort of a jack-of-all-trades character, but many of his skills focus on exploration, such as finding hidden things and gathering herbs/food. He can also be turned into a pseudo-thief character as he has access to those skills, if you don't want to have a dedicated thief in your party.
The basic game loop and exploration, etc. are HEAVILY inspired by Might & Magic (specifically M&M III&IV/V). The world map even looks like it came straight from a M&M game. It is however quite more linear than the M&M games, as you are constantly "gated" by encounters that are basically impossible if you are not within a few levels of the encounter itself.
Encounters are mostly fixed and are represented by enemy sprites; you can click on these to see which enemies are included in the encounter and the game will rate its difficulty level compared to your current party. Although you can defeat encounters above your level with careful use of tactics and items, there is definitely a limit to how much you can push this. There are also areas with random encounters, but you can actually clear them out completely after winning a certain number of battles. It's a good mix imo.
Combat is a lot of fun and much more tactical than the M&M games. Positioning and weapon range matters a lot here, and one interesting twist here is that you can arrange your six characters anywhere on a 4x2 grid. This actually provides for some extra variation in party composition, as you could choose from a 3-3 party (balanced between melee and ranged/magic) or a 4-2 party (with a stronger focus on melee).
Leveling is EXP-based, and earning a level gives you 2 points to spend on attributes and several points to spend on skills. I usually don't care much for skill-tree type systems, but it's not bad here. You don't have many skills to choose from at the start, and I found it pretty obvious which skills I should focus on for each build I had in mind.
Graphics and music are both fine. It's a decent looking game, but is clearly the world of a small team with limited resources. Some assets don't seem to match, such as some trees being noticeably blurrier than others... small stuff like that. Overall it looks fine though, and monsters are fully animated during combat. The music isn't bad, but it's not memorable either; it's mostly your typical 21st century fantasy RPG music, but some of the moodier tracks are quite good.
So far, it's a great game. Like most modern RPGs, it's got both an automap and quest journal so you don't really need to take any notes of your own, so it's quite easy to just jump and play.
