I was really craving a game like this for a very long time and it has definitelly scratched that itch. It really reminded mo a lot of the old Commandos games. I've been ingame for 32 hours, but I would say it took me about ~28 to complete the story. If you can afford is, the game is totally worth the buy, I really enjoyed it, but that said I would like to go into details about some (not all) of the games mechanics and give my feedback about what I enjoyed and disliked. Please feel free to comment with anything and especially with updates if something has been resolved. PS: yes this is my first proper review on steam, because this is the only time I really wanted to share my thoughts as I hope there will be more games like this in the future from these developers <3


Leveling
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In this game you gain XP both during missions and outside of them. During missions only the squad members you bring with you will receive XP (static amount that is divided between the party members equally no matter who performs the action). Outside of missions you can sometimes send partisans for "Operations" during which they can get a flat XP amount (the game tells you how much you will get upfront) and same as with missions, only those who you send will get the XP.

This system is great if you can pick 3-4 favorites that you will use through out the game. But if you would like to keep things interesting by changing up your squad composition each mission it is not really worth it because of level differences between all your partisans. I have been using 3-4 members only and towards endgame they were around level 11 and the others only around level 7. The 4 skill points difference (1 point per level) can really make a difference on some characters so even when I wanted to bring someone new in endgame I never did it because i felt like I would be putting my self in too much of a disadvantage.

It would be much better if all XP gained would be added to all your partisans equally. That way they would all be the same level and it would not feel like putting your self in a disadvantage just for trying to enjoy the game by playing all the possible characters. If not as a update to the default way this game plays, it would be nice to see it added at least as a playthrough modifier that you could turn on at the start of a new playthrough and could not disable it later on.

Deciding who you will bring for each mission
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For each mission you can bring only 3 partisans. For some missions the game will force you to bring a specific 1-3 for story purposes in which case you can only pick 0-2 partisans yourself, otherwise you can pick all 3 as you would like. At first I did not really mind this system because I only had a few partisans to choose from, but once my squad grew I found some favorites that I wanted to bring to each mission and this just made that not possible forcing me to play characters that I did not want to play, that took a bit of fun away in those cases. There werent too many missions like that, and for all the missions where only 1 partisan was picked for me I didnt mind. But there was one mission where all three were forced and the reasoning for two of them for the story was just "i want to kill the nazi commander" and "no i will kill the nazi commander". Honestly, all the Partisans could say that :D so I really felt like in that case I should be the one deciding there. But for some missions the reasoning was "you need to come because you know the area" which makes sense, and its just one character so I am okay with that.

I would change this up for all the later missions where the player can only pick 1 partisans so that they can always pick two at least. If we fail to pick a combination that works, we can always restart the mission, that should be up to us. Maybe the game could just say "you should probably bring X and Z for this mission", but leave the choice to the player, because taking this choice away from the player when he had it previously is just no fun.


Only being able to bring 3 partisans for each mission
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A lot of times I was thinking how cool it would be if I could bring all my Partisans to a mission, especially past the first half of the game when you already have quite a large group. I understand that with how leveling works in the game now it would not be really balanced, because you would soon have a small army of really strong (high level) partisans. Just as with my suggestion for the different leveling system, I think being able to bring as many partisans as we have would make for another really cool playtrhough modifier which we could only enable at the start of a playthrough and not disable it later on. The way I would go about balancing it would be to lower all XP gains, somehow change up the formula to lower it enough so that towards the end game everyone is lets say only level 6 (I would also reward the XP for operations to all partisans, not just the ones that went - so lowering the operation XP would also be needed). If this was added to the game in the future I would totally go for a second playthrough.


Difficulty
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I played on normal difficulty, but would have really loved to played on hard. The only reason I did not pick hard was because in this  game on hard there is no saving the game. I love the chellange of playing game on the hardest difficulty, but seriously I need to be able to save the game when I need to, especially when a mission can take up to 1 hour for me to beat. I am no longer in a position where I can always spend a full hour gaming and neither are many many other players.

I would add the "no saving" as a playthrough modifier that can only be enabled at the start of playthrough and not disabled later on. This way players who actually have the time can still play like that, and the players who do not have the time can also experience the hard difficulty mode. Another group of players will be those who just want to get the perfect outcome of each scenario, of course that requires safe scumming, but still, doing it on Hard the perfect way is more challenging than on normal, so it should still be an options. Honestly this one is a no-brainer to me and I really hope they change the no saving on hard difficulty to a optional thing very soon.


Mission design
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Out of the 15 missions the game has, I really enjoyed 13 of them, the other two, not so much and they both shared one same mission objective - defend against waves of enemies. I was playing on normal difficulty and these two game segments were impossible to overcome using the same tactics I was using everywhere else. I have been trying different ways to deal with this for about 2 hours, but then I gave up it was really too difficult. I would love to see a video of how one of the developers deal with this the legit way. The only way I was able to beat this was to restart the mission, bring all the explosives I had stashed, and abuse the system in the game where you know roughly where the next wave will come and I would just put a mine there or throw a grenade there just as the enemies were spawning. This was the least fun I had in the whole game because I knew I am exploiting the system and was just save scumming to make sure my mines are in the right place....

I would change these two missions so there is only maximum of three waves. If i remember correctly that is how many the first of the two missions has and even that will be quite a challenge, but the second mission had about 11 waves!! just insane. Especially when this game has a hard difficulty that does not let you quick save, it really has to be impossible to beat this mission on that difficulty without exploiting the explosives mechanic I described above...


Resource management
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Outside of missions you will have to manage food and "scrap" (I am calling it scrap because the game does not have a label for it, only an icon and that of a cog). You will need food so your partisans survive the night and scrap to upgrade weapons, craft upgrades, and boost chance of success of operations. I do not want to spoil this too much, I will just say that overall these systems worked pretty well and were a nice feature in the game.

Only feedback I have here is on how you can generate food. Towards the endgame I had about 8 different activities for generating food. What was really strange to me is that even though there were so many options, the actual amount of food they would generate would always we +10 or +15 per partisan. I would only ever use 4 of them at once so having 4 more of the same just felt like its there for nothing. What was even more stange is that there were three activities "cook food", "cook some food", and "cook a lot of food" but they are were +10 food per partisan :D I would rework this a bit a get rid of the extra 4 activities that are the same as the first 4 and instead introduce new activities that have much bigger gains but for example require the use of scrap. Towards endgame I had soo much scrap I didnt know what to do with so at least I could have been using it to generate food. Maybe its not realistic, but for lore purposes it could be for example "buy a lot of food" and it would make sense that you pay with scrap...


Operations
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Operations are activities your partisans can do between missions. Each operation will let you pick 1 or 3 partisans (you do not have to send all three). There are many different operations and each has some rewards, either resources for base management or food to feed your partisans or even items like guns, ammo and explosives. I really liked this system and there is not anything I would change about it.

The only feedback I have is that the game does a terrible job of explaining these to you and it took me quite some time to figure out what the different numbers and icons on a operation card mean. For example there is a percentage indicator just above the rewards the operation is supposed to yield and another icon of base resources, so at first glance you do not know if it is the % chance of success of completing the operation or % chance that the mission will additionally give you (or take away even) your base resources. I eventually figured out that it is actually the first, a chance of success modifier, and the resources icon (which only some operations have) can actually BE CLICKED (hard to notice) and the way it works is that if you do click it, it will use your base resources to increase the chance of success. I really think this should be covered in one of the tutorial message boxes.


Upgrading weapons
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Really cool feature. Each weapon type has the same attachments, so it would be cool if in the future they would add more attachments, but even as it was it was really a nice thing to be able to upgrade the weapons I wanted to use mainly.


Bugs and optimization
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I did not want to start the review with bugs as they really did not bother me in contrast of how much fun I was having with the game when it worked fine.

Right from the start only had ~30fps and I noticed my GPU is burning when I play this game (84 degrees celsius, when playing call of duty 2019 I am on 69 celsius) so I knew something must be wrong, so I went to nvidia control panel and basically disabled all the cool features like AA and pretty much everything that could have been switched off I have switched off and boom that fixed the issue of overheating after that I was on 60 degrees and the card wasnt even on full clock speed on max graphics settings ingame. I hope the devs can figure out what is causing that, but I did not have the patience to turn on and off everything individually to figure out what exactly was causing the issue. With ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 2060 I had steady 60 fps most of the time, in few missions it went down to 40 so not great but definitelly playable especially for this type of game it was fine.

As for bugs I did encounter a few and I know the devs are already aware of all of them so lets hope they all get fixed soon. I will just describe briefly what I have encountered.

Doors can be a pain in the ass if you just click on them and expect them to open, they sometimes do not do anything and if you are sneaking around and every second matter it can get you caught and you are just mad at the game cause it was not your fault. I have found a workaround to this annoyance and that was to simply click past the door. Eg if I wanted to enter somewhere, instead of clicking infront of the door, then when I would get there, click on the door and then go in, I would just click directly inside and the character would always get in no problem that way,

I had one skill claim to do one thing, but not working (Thorin's Iron Body) so that was a bit sad as I had to reload the game and use a different skill that I did not really want...

I had one skill completely stop working. This got me pretty mad, as even reloading didnt help. But then as I went to yell on discord and turned the game off, when I went back to the game it was working fine. So if you have a skill just bug out and stop working try restarting the game

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If I had a chance to erase my memory of this game and play it again I totally would do that! Even in its current state. But because I can not do that I will be hoping that the devs add one of the modifiers I was suggesting in the future because I would definitelly love to try all of those (hard difficulty with saving / take all partisans to mission / all partisans gaining xp) and if note at least I hope there will be another game like this or a DLC :)