I’ve long been a fan of Kalypso Media and what they publish, particularly in the simulation genre. Known for series like Tropico and Port Royale, the focus of late from them has been more in other genres. When Disciples: Domination was announced I was intrigued, but I knew nothing about the series or the first game of the current trilogy, Disciples: Liberation. Could I play a sequel to a game I hadn’t played? And if I could, would I enjoy it? The answer for the most part is yes indeed.

The events of Disciples: Domination take place 15 years after the events of the first game, Disciples: Liberation. You play once again as Avyanna who is now the Queen of Nevendaar. Since Liberation the weight of being Queen has weighed on Avyanna as she all but abandoned her duties of Queen which has left the world broken and divided.

You start the game with Avyanna finally overcoming that burden as she works to become an active Queen once more. With word that an old Dwarven stronghold has been active once again, Avyanna goes to see what is going on. What she finds is that the Dwarves there have been all dispersed and chased off or killed.

Here you will meet your first companion Helmer, who claims it was the cultists of the church and that they must be stopped. As you emerge from the stronghold you will see that the rivers are now flowing with a strange blue glow. The rivers in Nevendaar are mana, however it appears that the mana is now becoming corrupted and slowly killing the entire world.

While the story weaves through the problems all of the factions are having amongst themselves, the overarching theme of the 35 or so hour campaign is trying to save the world from the corrupted mana and those who want to use it to take power and control of Nevendaar, and to become gods.

I am also happy to say that you can still enjoy Disciples: Domination even if you haven’t played Liberation. I myself never got around to Liberation so I was a bit worried about how I’d be with Domination. While I definitely think I would have enjoyed the story even more if I had played Liberation, I don’t feel like I was lost.

The biggest thing I felt I lost out on was the backstory behind all the characters. I cannot tell you how many characters you speak to who have a previous connection to Avyanna, and while the game does a decent job of connecting them for new players I still felt like I was missing quite a bit.

Taking Care of The Factions

One of the new mechanics of Disciples: Domination is the Grievance system. When back in Yllian, Avyanna can go to her throne room. Here the Queen can talk to and train her companions, check on resources and listen to the other factions via the grievance system.

The Grievance system is split up into 3 sections. You will make decisions on what to do with main campaign missions at the throne which will alter some aspects of your story depending on how you handle each situation. You will also have some grievances heard from NPC’s while exploring the world.

The third aspect of the grievance system is the one you will use most and that is dealing with the factions. Every 30 minutes or so you will get the factions coming to you with issues. These issues range from them wanting to open new trade routes, to dealing with attacks from other factions.

Each grievance will have multiple options for you and ways to handle them, as well as what resources that option will require. The choice you make will then often times raise your standing with a faction and lower it with another, though sometimes their will be options for multiple factions to like your decision. The more you raise your standing with each faction, the more bonuses you will get when using that factions units in battle.

I personally quite enjoyed the Grievance system, however there could have been more variety in the grievances themselves. After you go through about your 4th set of grievances you will notice they all become the same with the exact same options for answers and rewards. Because of this I mostly just fell into a pattern of finding the best option and choosing it the constantly. Hopefully with the third game they flesh this system out a bit more because I truly think they have something here with the system itself.

Resource Overload

Speaking of the grievances and resources, you will have to be on the look out for resources out in Nevendaar. There are 3 ways to obtain resources. The most basic is to simply find them scattered about the world. The second is to dismantle items you find that you no longer want to use. There is no way to sell the items for gold, so make sure you take the time to dismantle lower level items to help gain you some extra iron and wood.

The third option is to capture buildings in the world that produce the specific resources. Once you see the specific buildings you can attempt to capture them right then and there, or you can head to the throne in Yllian and head to the resource section. From there you can check to see what one’s you’ve captured, which ones you haven’t and which ones you haven’t even come across yet.

There is also an option here if you are a much higher level than the enemies protecting the building to simply conquer the building which will automatically give you the win and the building. These buildings give you a certain amount of resources every hour depending on how many you have captured, so they are definitely worth doing.

Overall the resource system is well done once you fully understand it. Considering how valuable resources are to most things you do in the game, especially early on, you should want to make them a priority every chance you get.

The one drawback on the resources was by the time I got near the end game I was swimming in them and had no real reason to use them or be concerned about running out. Mind you I had done virtually every side quest and companion mission by then so perhaps if you are focusing more on the main campaign this won’t be as much an issue for you.

Party Management

There is plenty of variety in terms of how you setup your party. You can have as many as 10 units go into battle as well as 3 backline units. The backline units are simply support that you have no control over, but each unit has its own backline ability. I tended to just use healers for those roles.

In order to create your party, you have to select units, each of which has a leadership value attached to them. The amount of leadership points you have available depends on Avyanna’s level. It doesn’t go up every time she levels, but it does slowly go up.

It’s an interesting system and ensures that players can’t just stack the most powerful units into the party. Do you want to go with only 2-3 really powerful units or would you rather stick to 1 or 2 and have a full party of 10. Typically I preferred having a full part as even some of the tier 1 units did some decent damage and helped quite a bit while costing very little.

You also get to have 2 of your companions in your party at all times and they don’t cost any leadership points. If your companions die in a battle, they are revived and still in your party once the fight is done. Regular units will permanently die and you will need to recruit new ones at the castle.

You can also recruit NPC’s you meet along the way in the game. These characters that aren’t your companions are just named units that could be recruited otherwise, though their stats are a bit different than the default unit.

While there is a lot of mixing and matching you could do with your party, once I found a crew that worked, I pretty much just stuck with it. I had 2 large, powerful melee enemies, a few ranged and then my companions. 

Hit or Miss Combat

The actual combat is where I struggled the most to decide on when it comes to this review. My ultimate conclusion is that it is the very definition of average. There were moments, particularly the boss battles that I was highly engaged and into it. There were other times that I thought “ugh not another battle” as I got kind of bored of it. 

And I can’t really put my finger on why. It is a turn based, tile style of combat. Your units can move so many spots at once and depending on their attacks and abilities, have a range at which they can hit enemies. If you can’t hit an enemy and have moves left to spare, you can choose to end that units turn and gain some health if they are injured. 

You can temporarily skip your unit’s turn in the round if you want the enemy to come to you rather than you go on the offensive. Doing so will put that unit to the end of the line in that round. Generally speaking, I ended up just going on the attack. I tried the more defensive approach a couple of times and it just felt like it dragged the battle on longer rather than giving me any tactical advantage.

The only time I ever would really use the skip is if I had some characters stuck behind more characters. You can generally avoid this though before the fight starts, as before each battle you get to see the battlefield and move your characters around to setup. Depending on what difficulty you go into the game will likely depend on how much you think your initial formation through.

There’s also no ability to save in the middle of a fight. I wouldn’t say this is a good or bad thing, but depending on your style you may love or hate this. 

Technical Issues

While I was playing through, I did run into a few technical issues but thankfully it was nothing major. On a few occasions the game froze on me in battle. I could move the cursor around the battlefield but I couldn’t actually select anything and had to reboot the game. This typically arose if my controller went off because I left to go take care of something.

I also had a few minor sound issues where I’d heard the sound of my attack like 5 seconds after I did the attack. Nothing crazy but a bit annoying. There was also one occasion where I defeated a boss and one of the rewards was some points for one of the factions. These points actually allowed me to level up the faction so I got the pop-up message for it in the middle of a conversation and I couldn’t remove the pop up or advance the conversation. I repeated the battle and it happened again.

This meant I had to load a prior save and make sure I levelled up that faction enough to unlock the next level for it in order to proceed to that fight again. Luckily the game auto saves after almost every single conversation and battle so I never felt like I really lost anything, but it definitely was annoying.

Well That Escalated Quickly

Also while not a bug per se, the middle of the game saw a big spike in difficulty for me. I was cruising along doing mostly the main objectives with the odd side quest mixed in without much issue and then suddenly the next battle was multiple levels higher than me and much more difficult. This then caused me to make sure I went back a little and leveled up some before continuing the main missions. 

Lastly this is more of a game design flaw, but the game won’t always show you the level of the encounter until you are in the pre-battle screen. This shouldn’t really be an issue, however it doesn’t give you the ability to back out, so if you enter the mission and decide this battle is too hard, you have to start it and then reload a save. Considering there are other times you can walk up to a mission marker and it will show you the levels of the enemy I thought it was odd that it didn’t always do that.

Verdict

I went into Disciples: Domination with no prior knowledge of the series and have come out the other side a fan. Its grievance and resource system builds a solid foundation for a sequel and Nevendaar and its casts of characters is a world I want to see more of.

If Artefacts can flesh out some of the new mechanics to have even more variety and get the combat to require just a bit more strategy they truly have something here. As is Disciples: Domination is a very good RPG that should be worth a look to anyone into turn based RPGs.

Disciples: Domination was played on an Xbox Series X. We’d like to thank publisher Kalypso Media for providing a review code for purpose of this review.

The game releases on the 12th of February on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.