Glorious Companions

My first session with Glorious Companions ended prematurely because a quest refused to spawn the enemies I needed to kill. That is not a great start. Ancient Forge has been working on this thing since a 2019 early access launch that then went largely quiet, and the December 2024 full release still carries the fingerprints of that troubled development cycle: long load screens between battles and the world map, quests that break, and UI decisions that feel unfinished. Steam sits at a mixed rating around 61 percent, and that split is honest. The game is not in great shape technically. Here is the part that keeps you playing anyway. The core mercenary loop has real pull. You pick a race and one of eight classes, choose between the disciplined steam-tech Valrenay or the lizardfolk Scarres faction, and then build out a warband at your own pace. There is no hard cap on roster size, so you can snowball into a comically large company if your coin holds out. Wages, food stocks, camping logistics, resource management between fights: it all borrows the right DNA from Battle Brothers without outright cloning it. The open world of Terscara spans nine biomes from icy tundras through scorching deserts to a volcanic region, and those environments feed into custom battle maps that feel distinctly different depending on where you fight. The grid-based tactical combat is where the game earns its keep. Units move and act on action points, facing direction actually matters because backstabs grant bonuses and attacks of opportunity only trigger from the front arc. There is a light-versus-heavy armor split that gates which weapons perform best against which targets, and while the logic is counterintuitive on paper (a warhammer performing worse against light armor than heavy is a head-scratcher), the practical effect forces you to think about loadout composition across your whole warband rather than just spamming the hardest-hitting option. The captain mechanic adds a chess-like pressure point: lose your leader mid-fight and the battle ends instantly. Cover tiles exist on the maps and reward positioning. Dungeon vaults, which are multi-room sequences with escalating enemy types and a boss at the end, provide the clearest sense of structured progression the game has. Equipment comes in tiers with enchantments that add status effects like burn or poison, which is a decent layer of itemization even if the depth does not yet match what the system promises. The problems are real and should not be papered over. Customization outside of combat is thin. Starting companions have locked stats and weapons you cannot freely swap. Random world events repeat themselves quickly and lack variance. The skill branches are shallow relative to what eight classes would lead you to expect. The PvP mode, which pits Valrenay against Scarres in point-limited wargaming-style battles online or locally, is a genuinely interesting addition but the playerbase is small enough that matchmaking is basically a coin flip. Developer responsiveness in the community has been positive, and patches are moving, but as of now the gap between what the game wants to be and what it currently delivers is wide enough to matter. If you are someone who cleared Battle Brothers on Veteran and wants another sandbox mercenary fix while accepting rough edges as part of the deal, there is something here worth poking at. Everyone else should probably wishlist it and check back in after a few more patches close the gap. Fred, Scout Team