Pit People

I just can't find a good game lately, I swear. I tried Pit People, which is supposedly a big game by a famous developer that has a lot of very positive ratings. To spoil the review, it frontloads all of its quirkyness and fun in the first 30 minutes, and then sharply falls off to absolute tedium, or maybe a silly checkbox ticker at best.

The Behemoth, developers of Pit People, are quite well known for the humor and weirdness their games extrude. I've played most, but not all, of their past games, and they're all about in the same vein. The art style is very colorful and, quite often literally, bouncy. There's a narrator telling jokes, who quickly runs out of lines as you complete the opening bit of the game, and keep in mind that the rest of the content has been passed through a 300% silly filter, examples being a number plate as a shield, a blade of grass as a sword, and paper airplanes as arrows. It's a lovely atmosphere, but sadly does nothing for the gameplay.

Pit People, specifically, is a turn-based strategy game where you control a group of fighters and can run around a medium-sized map picking fights, completing quests, levelling your characters, and earning loot. It sort of plays like other TBS games, except majorly dumbed down, where the only command you can give each fighter is where to move. They handle all the attacking and abilities on their own.
The town allows you to customize your characters, fitting each with whatever equipment you want, suddenly negating a lot of differences between characters. You do have the possibility to capture enemies as your fighters, and while there are different character types which can equip different kind of attacks and equipment, there still isn't much actual use to it. You quickly unlock all possible weapon types, and while, again, they have some variety and counterplay mechanics to them, you'd be no worse off for any practical reason if you just outfit your 6 characters identically. The strategic depth just isn't there.

There's the combat, which manages to be the worst part of the game, as you're just forced to watch your characters slowly make their animations. The enemy AI also visibly queues their character actions one-by-one for you to see before executing the move and then there's more animations to watch. It doesn't help that every single thing is a massive damage sponge and there might just be a healer in the party too. The amount of time these battles take is an insult to the player, considering there is no depth to them at all.
What's left is a staggering amount of "checkboxes to tick", as I put it. Collect all the items, collect all the characters, level stuff up, do the quests, etc. etc. But it's meaningless. These things are supposed to complement the game, not to be the game, considering how tedious they are to achieve.

Pit People tries to lure you in with an hour or two of promising a vibrant game with oh-so-many features and things to do. But just a bit beyond that time, you come to the realization that the game is shallow, repetitive, and boring. I'd recommend this to your child who is in elementary school or kindergarten, but to no fans of strategy games, RPGs, or other respectful game genres.