Similar issues carry over into the matches themselves-readability is poor, and key information is lost in random menus. Once you do manage to log in, you're confronted with a messy, awkward UI that hides core features in unexpected places and forces you to keep moving between different areas just to perform basic functions like managing your team. Some of the animations are fun, but quickly get repetitive. That's awkward enough even without the frequent account problems and server instability I've run into so far. If you want to go offline you can, but everything is totally separate-none of your progress or teams carry over between the two. The game defaults to being always online, even for singleplayer, and you have to create an account on their server to play. But the real problem is, even if all the bugs are quickly fixed, there are more fundamental problems at play. I am admittedly playing a pre-release build, but it received several updates and server resets during the period to no noticeable improvement, and it seems to me like there are more rough edges than a day-one patch can realistically smooth over. Needless to say, this makes progressing through the campaign an exercise in frustration.

One bugged match can mess up your overall results and, thanks to the upgrade system that requires gold and XP earned in matches, put you at a disadvantage for the whole competition. That's infuriating enough in a one-off friendly, but it's ruinous in the competition sets that make up the campaign mode. To make matters worse, even in singleplayer there's no way to save and quit out of these often 40 minute+ matches-if you leave, you're conceding the match, and that's it. The turn timer is another oddity-in singleplayer it counts down but never does anything, and in multiplayer it seems to stop working every other turn.

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