I can see now why people would be angry with Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms (the sequel to Kult: Heretic Kingdoms), considering how the remade/extended version itself isn’t exactly a stellar gaming experience.
Awakening is an incredibly gimmicky Torchlight-like kind of game. Not only does it wholly revolve around a gimmick (swapping between the real/shadow versions of each map), but most of the boss fights involve some sort of annoying scripted behavior, there’s a few inexplicable backtrack-heavy sections, a couple potential party members spontaneously become unavailable depending on your choices, and its chock-full of busywork puzzles and forced party-swapping.
On the technical front things could also use a bit of work since both movement (left-click to move) and attacking (also left-click to attack) lack precision. It seems stable enough though and I didn’t run into any crashes or slowdown on my first playthrough. So that’s nice. Also nice is that a cheap Respec option’s available and healing’s easy to come by.
As far as the optional DLC go, I haven’t bothered with the Armor (if you’re playing on Normal you definitely won’t need it), but did pick up the Golem party member:
While I would’ve rather had another mage option (since 3/4 of the current ones are missable), it’s a pretty solid addition to the early-game party makeup. Being the same type of fighter as Carissa (who’s amazing) though it’ll lose most of its usefulness once she finally joins unless you want to try comboing it with the lizard shaman. So while it would have made more sense as a 2-handed weapon user… it works well enough as a placeholder.