Really conflicted about this one. The developer’s passion for character-action is apparent from the moment the tutorial encourages guard-canceling your moves together, and stresses the importance of player expression- of finding ways to make the combat system your own. But in the game proper, a hybrid strategy/beat‘em up, it’s surprisingly easy to forgo all the intricacies of combat in favor of a much narrower playstyle.

Each combat encounter has an optional objective, stuff like “Parry two enemies'' or “Don’t get hit more than three times.” Complete them and you’ll get an item or some extra resources which are invaluable for conquering the map; the problem comes from the fact these objectives are the only metric you’ll need to consider, so you can spend the entire round fishing for parries or playing as conservatively as possible to take no damage. It’s a strange way of motivating players, giving them such explicit directions for each encounter, stifling much of the freedom the combat seems to have been designed around.

Seems like a better solution would’ve been to capitalize on the scoring system that’s already in the game and have an ever-increasing minimum rank to aim for on each encounter, something that would still give you an extra incentive to play well without being so limiting. The game is also a bit conservative in its encounter design- despite adopting a roguelike structure, with random events and hazards, it’s surprisingly easy to mitigate most of the dangerous events, so you spend a good chunk of time in docile encounters that can be beaten in seconds.

Comes into its own when Cortez’s forces enter the fray though, seeing them cut through the network of cities you’ve spent the game conquering conveys a dread that wouldn’t be possible if the game was just arena after arena. And actually fighting the Conquistadors ends up being a lot more engaging, their rifles encouraging you to stay in the air and their armor making them a more substantial target (most other enemies you can stunlock as soon as you hit them), so you have to weave between targets, whittling down groups while keeping an ear out for the hiss of a lit fuse.

There’s an undeniable tension to these late-game encounters, all the systems that felt so listless finally working in tandem- maybe it’s just the underlying sense that the action is now imbued with a righteous fury, fighting off a bunch of colonizers in a battle for your own survival, instead of the more bureaucratic concerns that characterized much of early game, where you were suppressing uprisings and trying to bolster your forces.

This purely a hypothetical, but if there's ever a mod that has the endgame tension inform the entire experience and gets rid of the rigid requirements for combat, then I think this goes from something I’d tentatively recommend to becoming a must-play.