I DL'ed the first beta build and got a chance to sit down and play a game. I had a bunch of performance problems and video glitches at first, but somewhere between updating my video drivers, rebooting, and starting with a fresh save game, the issues seemed to go away for the most part.

The game is very barebones in it's current state, but what's there shows a lot of promise for what's to come. To start, I chose my faction, started my game used some essence to found a city. From there, I sent my sovereign across the spider infested lands (seriously infested) to hunt for items and grind for exp. After I got a level, I bumped into another sovereign who was still level 1... and I killed him. By the time I was level 4, I found another sovereign.... and I killed him. Eventually, I found some cities belonging to the remaining 2 factions. I conquered them and killed their sovereigns. Game over.

Along the way, I got to play with the unit designer- which looks like it will be really cool when finished. I also spent time researching tech that unlocked new buildings and weapons/armor to use when designing units.

The AI seems pretty rudimentary at this point. Obviously, it was able to found towns and raise a few troops, but none of the sovereigns I encountered were above level 1, whereas I was level 6 before the end of the game. Spiders were by far the most prolific monster- the only other creature I encountered was a troll. So far so good...


This was the game's title screen:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read: