My stance on Impire is somewhere along these lines
1) It crashed about 20 seconds before the end of mission 4 for me, after 3 hours of playing. Usually I'd say, whatever.. because a good game is never the same a second time, but this one is....... unskippable cutscenes (all of them!!!!) are extremely, EXTREMELY annoying. I literally nearly went insane, because it crashed once before right at the end of the 3rd mission. Typical paradox release. bugs, bugs, and crashes.
2) It is like a mix of Evil Genius and a facebook time management game. The gameplay looks like this. Every 5 minutes ladders spawn, every 4 minutes your squads have to eat. Which involves
#a manually teleporting them to the place you want em to eat at
#b ordering them to eat there (manually!)
#c teleporting them back to whever they were actually needed
So basically, 90% of the game you are either microing the eating habbits of your imps or your are teleporting them to ladders and/or enemies. This makes exploring the maps a pain in the backside... ;/
But worse than that is that guys NOT in a squad, do NOT automatically go to eat. That means if you want quick reinforcements, they start with 0 food usually.... unless you microed THAT too....
And the ladders, you have to manually order your troops to attack them, the time between ladders appearing and insanely hard groups of guys spawning at EACH LADDER is so very narrow that you need to INSTANTLY stop EVERYTHING you are doing and teleport squads to kill ladders, manually. That involves often a lot of very annoying scrolling and clicking....
3) The humor is great and some of the cutscenes were pretty funny...
4) What made DK great (unique minions with unique personalities and the great flair of it all. CHICKENS) is completely missing here. Also I find the game over-spans certain.. ehm, "jokes" which means that the writers didn't notice when to stop a joke. They often repeat things in dialog which is extremely annoying as well (see 1) since you can't skip it.
Box-Quote
"If I could get the demon Impling without the game around it, I would."
Essentially, I played it for about 6 hours at a friends and.. well he said the game has a cool story, so I believe him. But what I have seen of the first 4 missions was enough for me to not bother. I guess you should wait for a demo. And as usual, never pre-order paradox games ;P