Just like Darkest Dungeon, this is a rough gig. Fail to treat their injuries, and they might die. Keep relying on them, and they might just snap. The drawback is that the more you lean on a select few mercenaries, the more stressed and injured they become. Players can upgrade and customize each mercenary in their party, and send their favorites out on more missions for XP. This is an early access game, but there’s still a good amount of meat on the bone. Of course, nothing is ever that simple, and so my story branched out as I met other factions, explored new cities, and expanded my company. By the time I was out of the game’s intro and into the open world with my starting mercenary party, I felt pretty confident that I would be able to catch up to the ne’er-do-well who stabbed me in the back and get revenge. It’s deeply satisfying to unleash a charged electrical torrent on an enemy or have a valkyrie soar through her enemies, spear first. Luckily, the game gives me the tools to succeed in this dangerous world because the mercenaries at my disposal are powerful wizards, rangers, warriors, and elementalists. There are also some wonderfully granular difficulty settings, so The Iron Oath can either be a relatively chill cakewalk or an unforgiving trek through hazardous territory. It would be easy for these things to blur together into an indistinguishable mush of numbers and goals, but developer Curious Panda Games introduces each layer of complexity gradually throughout a well-paced tutorial and the early hours of the campaign. Cook it all in a pan with some gorgeous pixel animations, an epic musical score, a fantasy world constantly on the cusp of an apocalypse, and inventive demonic enemy designs, and baby, you’ve got a stew going.Īs I adventure around the fantasy realm of Caelum, I have to navigate between the open world, cities and towns, dungeons, and individual battles. You take a pinch of Darkest Dungeon, throw in some XCOM, and sprinkle in some Divinity: Original Sin.

The Iron Oath will be, in some ways, very familiar to fans of strategy games and RPGs. If you want curated lists of our favorite media, check out What to Play and What to Watch.

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Games like darkest dungeon and xcom