Darkest Dungeon

Darkest Dungeon is just an slightly-above-average dungeon crawler with a lot of style instead of substance; but it does drip with that style (fantastic soundtrack, neat gothic storybook style, W.J.'s narration).

The game suffers heavily from repetitiveness and a lack of cohesive direction in its mechanics; it wants to be a dungeoncrawler, a hardcore tense combat strategy game, and carry horror elements all at once, but the devs both couldn't decide where to take it and lacked the balls to dedicate themselves to a dangerous, difficult, or hardcore experience. This is especially evident with the final DDQ.

It's a Risk Management game, everything from the initiative order to the dungeon layouts are going to be subject to uncertainty, but always with set rules and patterns (The Weald extends and crosses over itself, its a 1d8 for initiative each round, etc).
The game has a nasty reputation for demolishing people with attack accuracy and critical hits, but it's bundled in a warm blanket of confirmation bias– If you take the time to understand the game and prepare for the challenges, there's very little that will surprise or overwhelm you.

The game's balance has improved over time, as of Crimson Court's release it has finally started to come into its own after several long-standing issues and character flaws were fixed in that update's overhauls. It's not perfect, but it's not "four crusaders spamming Holy Lance and wiping every boss in 3 rounds tops" anymore.
If you're interested in a more cohesive, dangerous, and balanced version of the game, one of the people who worked on the game runs an overhaul mod called Pitch Black Dungeon, which is basically an expanded re-release of the game.

Crimson Court adds a pretty large chunk of content to the game (the big new thing is the megadungeons you can enter and leave while maintaining progress), and the new class is relatively fun. I haven't completed it, but if you enjoyed/pirated and liked the base game, it's worth buying.

tl;dr
its a risk management dungeon crawler that's stylish
pirate it, if you like it buy it and CC, play with PBD if youre there for the gameplay

It's one of the biggest wastes of time I've ever played, and I've only played half a dozen hours or so. You can feel it's going to take fucking forever to master the game and minimize as much risk as possible, and an even longer fucking while to not get buttraped by the RNG in order to actually win. I seriously recommend not getting into it.

Not proofreading my posts is easily the worst posting habit I've picked up.
I even made a mistake in the post trying to correct a previous mistake, goddamn it.
But let's get serious, would you fuck the bitch in fetish gear? It's the only thing of note in this game anymore after they fucked it with all the shitty updates.

Whatever my be the final verdict on the game, the fact remains that it's a 10/10 salt generator as evidenced by

You will hear an endless stream of faggots complaining about the punishing nature of the RNG, but that's not actually the problem.

The real problem with the game is that it is a huge grindfest for no good reason. There will come a point when you have unlocked just about everything you need to complete the game but you still need to level your heroes sufficiently for the final dungeons (which are underwhelming), and if you haven't been minmaxing expertly during the earlier stages, the game becomes repetitive and boring at this point.

I always hated the art style. I played it in beta and never really got into it.

Is Risk Management considered a genre now or something?

The final boss isn't great from a gameplay POV. Lots of spectacle but if you have maximum autism you can make it a joke.

The journey however is great. Play with your favorites the first time, then you have new game + and a time-limit to beat the final boss for more of a challenge.

The devs idea of balance is "lots of people are doing well with this tactic- lets nerf it". Whether you like that or not is up to you.

There's also a "Pitch Black" mod which makes the game more challenging re-does how maps work, and adds variant enemies sort of like Diablo or Torchlight. IMO how they fixed a lot of abilities is so much better.

Try before you buy IMO. If you aren't having fun before you unlock your third area- it won't get any more fun.

I pirated this game when it first came out and loved it enough to buy it.

At first the game felt like a puzzle and the developers knew you were up against a dungeon of enemies so each encounter was essentially puzzle that could be solved with minimal risk.

Now it's boring and zero tactics beyond a good party composition.

Isn't a good party composition part of the tactics?

Or do you mean any good combo of classes + skills can complete any mission/area with no casualties?

Fuck me if I don't have almost 200 hours clocked in, but I still don't know if I think it's a good game. I guess not, since without the outstanding presentation I probably would think it's shit.