If you're unfamiliar with the Exile series, the two on TGCD (the first was also on Genesis) are side-scrolling ARPGs.
According to Victor Ireland, Working Designs made a last minute tweak to the enemies, which made them extremely overpowered. Even at one under the max level (experience given is so minimal that you would have to grind for hours to hit the max level), the 2nd to last boss will kill you in 3 hits at full HP. For most of the game, the difficulty wasn't bad, but there were a few locations where I could really see this tweak in full force. I'd actually say that about 80% of the game is pretty easy, while the remaining 20% is pretty difficult. Except for one generic enemy, I didn't find anything cheap about the difficulty. After having just played through the cakewalk that is the first Exile, it actually being difficult past the opening dungeon (and the opening dungeon was extremely easy in this one) was a breath of fresh air. A tower about halfway through the game forced me to do some serious grinding to survive, and it served to keep me at a high enough level to be able to manage the rest of the game.
The biggest problem with the game is the hitboxes. If you envision your character as two squares high, your hitbox starts at your waist and continues up 2 squares. So, your legs are completely invulnerable, while getting attacked in the space above you that constitutes a 3rd square will damage you. If you crouch, the hitbox does not move, so no luck trying to duck out of the way of those attacks that were right above your head while standing. The enemies' hitboxes comprise the entire area of all sprite animations. So if it has something like a spear of chain attack, attacking the space where that spear or chain would reach will damage the enemy.
The only other issue was a technical one, as several times it would nearly freeze up while loading the Game Over and Continue screen, taking 15 or more seconds to load it.
Unlike the first Exile where you have these other characters in your party that don't actually enter battle, this is like Popful Mail where you can switch between any of the 4, or 5 during the brief time you have Lawrence, characters during the battle stages. Unfortunately, except for a handful of places, the others aren't all that useful, so you'll be using Sadler (or Lawrence while you have him) probably 90+% of the time. HP are "pooled", so you can't switch characters if you're on the brink of death for a bit of safety, since the new character will have the same HP as the one you switched away from.
One feature I didn't really experiment with is mixing tonics -- tonics boost attack or defense for a short period of time, or restore HP. Tonics don't take immediate effect after selecting to use them, but rather requires backing completely out of the menu to take effect. So, if you use a second tonic before backing out of the menu, it will do something unexpected. I only ever mixed two Peyote healing tonics, which ended up either reducing HP or fully healing the characters. I got a string of bad luck during the run up to the final boss that almost cost me a game over.
The bosses are either extremely easy or pretty tough. A few of them actually had me needing to learn their patterns and attacks, and with how hard they hit, this took several tries. The final boss could be a bit on the interesting side. If I ended up doing due diligence and softened it up in advance, it sure helped me out since it only took about 6 hits to finish off and it didn't even damage me.
Even though I gave it such a low score, I really liked it. It had just the right kind and amount of challenge for me for this type of game. Now I'm going to play through the Japanese version, which I understand is extremely easy.
