Under my reviewing microscope today is Lessaria, a high-fantasy real-time strategy game developed by Rockbee Team and published by Polden Publishing. Lessaria purports to be “bringing back the RTS genre” by itself. That’s quite a bold claim, and I intend to thoroughly examine how well (or how poorly) Lessaria manages to accomplish that goal within this review. You play as the Duke of the titular kingdom, and your main job is to use your tactical prowess and your royal authority to protect Lessaria from all sorts of external threats. I’ve gotten fairly strong Warcraft III-esque vibes from Lessaria, albeit with an important twist.

Lessaria contains much of what you might expect to find in a real-time strategy game in a bog-standard high-fantasy setting. You must protect your castle from being destroyed at all costs, and you’ll be able to order the construction of buildings and the recruitment of units to help you do that while simultaneously making sure each settlement you create doesn’t go bankrupt. That last bit is important because the twist I mentioned is that the heroes you can recruit won’t charge into battle out of any sense of patriotic duty: They’re in it for the money and nothing else.

Combat units you can recruit have certain tasks they prefer to do automatically, and allowing them to do what they’re best at will cause them to level up quickly. For example, Rangers prefer to scout out the lands near your current settlement, and Knights prefer to go on patrol looking for enemies to fight. Each unit will default to its preferred activity unless you assign it a task, and even then, they’ll only agree to participate in those tasks if you offer them enough money as a reward. The larger the reward, the more heroes will drop what they’re doing to follow your orders.

Since your ability to accomplish your objectives in Lessaria’s campaign depends on paying your units well, it’s important that you construct buildings that generate money. You can construct lumber mills and quarries to harvest nearby natural resources, blacksmiths and magic shops to outfit your heroes with better equipment, and taverns to give your units a place to relax during downtime. The best part about constructing economic buildings is that a portion of each building’s income is given to you in the form of taxes. In that sense, it’s like you double your benefits from each building.

Having a fully upgraded blacksmith shop not only allows your heroes to buy better equipment and, thus, perform better in combat, but each time your units purchase something from the blacksmith, you get a cut of the profits as taxes. Making sure your units are well-trained and properly equipped is more important than you might expect because your settlements in Lessaria’s campaign are pretty much constantly under threat. Every few minutes of in-game time, a wave of nearby enemies will attack your settlement. There’s a tab on the HUD that tells you when the next attack will come and how dangerous it will be.

You can reduce the threat level of incoming waves of foes by sending combat units out between waves to destroy the spawn points of enemies that would otherwise attack you. Since you have to have units explore the lands around your settlement to discover enemy lairs, and then issue orders (and rewards) to have your units assault said lairs, it becomes increasingly important to make sure you can afford to pay your units well. I really like Lessaria’s twist on the high-fantasy RTS genre by putting so much emphasis on actually paying your units for their efforts.

In pretty much every other RTS game I can think of, your units gladly follow your orders out of nothing more than a sense of duty and the pursuit of honor and glory. Lessaria’s core gameplay loop proves that, although honor and glory are nice to have, your units can’t spend honor or glory to put food on their tables. Some might call this a cynical outlook. I would agree, and that’s exactly why I like this aspect of Lessaria so much. Unfortunately, that’s just about the end of the list of what I like about Lessaria.

Most of the voice acting in Lessaria isn’t great. The one exception to that is your adviser, whom I enjoy listening to because I think he sounds like a grocery store brand version of Sean Connery. I’m glad the adviser’s voice acting is decent enough because he’s the one whose voice you’ll have to listen to most often. Still, Lessaria is let down by the lackluster quality of the voice acting outside of that singular character. That’s compounded by the fact that the captions in Lessaria frequently don’t quite match the spoken dialogue, plus the occasional error in spelling, grammar, and/or punctuation.

Lessaria does autosave, but not very often at all. Nor does Lessaria warn you upon exiting to the main menu that any progress since your last manual save will be lost – unless you go back into gameplay and manually save right then. I don’t take issue with the infrequent autosaves so much as I dislike the fact that Lessaria doesn’t warn you that it doesn’t autosave frequently. If Lessaria at least made that clear to the player, I wouldn’t have a problem with having to manually save whenever I think it would be a good idea.

Lessaria also appears to be plagued by significant technical issues. I once encountered a bug where all in-game audio, with the exception of sound effects that only played when I clicked on a building or unit, suddenly disappeared until I exited the game entirely and launched it again. If you use an ultrawide monitor, as I do, you might initially be concerned by the fact that Lessaria doesn’t seem to support ultrawide screen resolutions properly at first glance. Thankfully, however, this only seems to be an issue in the main menu; my screen resolution was always properly filled during gameplay.

In conclusion, Lessaria makes a valiant effort toward single-handedly “bringing back the RTS genre,” but falls short of accomplishing that rather lofty goal in numerous ways. I can always appreciate an RTS game that gives me fond memories of playing Warcraft III in my youth, but I know that’s not a universal sentiment. Besides that, Lessaria falls victim to several major technical pitfalls that, to me, indicate an inexperienced development team. If Rockbee Team really wants to “bring back” the RTS genre, Lessaria certainly doesn’t manage that, but its issues could provide valuable learning experiences for any future games they may release.

A PC review copy for Lessaria was provided by Polden Publishing for the purposes of this review.

Phenixx Gaming is everywhere you are. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Also, if you’d like to join the Phenixx Gaming team, check out our recruitment article for details on working with us.

Phenixx Gaming is proud to be a Humble Partner! Purchases made through our affiliate links support our writers and charity!

Lessaria

0.00

6

Score

6.0/10

Pros

• Enjoyable twists on common RTS tropes.
• A valiant effort at reviving a classic game genre.

Cons

• Lackluster voice acting.
• Poor communication about saving progress.
• Frequent bugs and technical issues.