I dedicated a lot of time to Paradox games. Thousands of hours across multiple campaigns in multiple titles. The true near infinite sandbox replay value. Some are better than others, of course. Victoria 3 fells like the worst, least interesting and most half-baked of the bunch.

Average people think that all Paradox games are "boring map games", an opinion I strongly disagree with. Victoria 3, however, is incredibly boring, even for a long time fan of the genre. Then again, Victoria 3 is the disgrace of Paradox games.

The early game consists of waiting for a building queue to finish, meanwhile your economy slowly falls apart due to AI countries sucking up whatever useful ressources your market had in positive supplies, causing your economic buildings to all bleed away money due to the previously correctly priced ressources now being incredibly expensive, due to the ressources magically vanishing into foreign markets, to the point where you have virtually nothing left to supply your own country, within the first few weeks of the game. Time to fix this...

Oh no, you don't have workers available for your buildings, because hundreds of thousands are essentially serfs wasting away their time in unimportant fields for the nobles, creating nothing of value for the economy. Only farmers working in official food producing buildings, count as producing food or grain. The land owners only exist to watch their serfs doing nothing in their empty plots of land. Time to reform the government and start fixing this mess...

Oh no, the law passing system is a frustrating RNG nightmare, devoid of logic. Simple reforms over basic laws require years of in-game time to get passed and are full of RNG events that can either advance the law passing, delay it or give your entire country negative buffs that last for years. These events can happen in a loop, depending on nothing but dumb luck.

Exemple of illogical gameplay nonsense: You want your country to have "interior affairs" and a national guard, granting certain positive buffs in exchange for a cost in admisistrative points (that you pay for with administrative buildings, paper and wood, basically). Normal government procedure, right? Any other game would have this normal state upgrade available by spending ressources, or researching a technology. But not in Victoria 3, because the 8% of "intellectuals" in the country, who strongly oppose any kind of "interior affairs", become radically angry as soon as you try to pass the reform law to unlock it. Does it lead to events involving player choices and negociations? No. Instead, as Prussia, 8% of pencil pushers, being unhappy about the proposed institution of "interior affairs", trigger a massive civil war, where they start with Berlin and most of the country already under their control, including 77 out of Prussia's 128 regiments.
Absolute, immersion breaking, nonsense.

Going into the topic of wars, in this game where world powers can regularly fight each others across continents, with their full armies, either over who gets to control a trade port, or over less than 10% of the population being angry with a mild government reform, there barely is any "gameplay" involved, really. Sure, you can influence warfare with technology and supplies of extra ressources like booze and candies for your armies, but you don't actually get to control what they do. You get automatic frontlines, automatic battles, dice rolls, military ships sitting on important trade nodes to sink the trade ships of their enemies into negative numbers, random advances across frontlines, braindead AI, useless allies and that's about it. At least in other Paradox games, you can move your armies around, properly decide when to engage individual battles and capitalize on the enemy making a mistake, but here, you just wait for the damn thing to end, with barely any input beyond selecting an army stance and choosing to what frontline you send what army (if there's even a choice).

Fun fact: In the event of a war between Russia and the Ottomans, both sides of the Black Sea, meaning Bulgaria and Georgia, somehow count as the same "frontline". In a full priced game that is essentially meant for history buffs and geography nerds who spend hours looking at colored maps as a hobby, what even is this?

In a game by the same publisher that gave us Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron and Stellaris, this warfare system with barely any player interaction is such a sad, pathetic joke.

The UI is stale and uninspired and the gameplay loop does not offer much in terms of random events to make the world feel alive, but somehow the game takes FOREVER to load when starting it. Paradox games usually take a good moment to load into the main menu, but Vic 3 takes the cake, in a category of its own.

Years of patching cannot fix the glaring issues with the core game design choices at work here. The DLC certainly can't fix this either. What a waste of time. I cannot recommend this game, even to hardcore fans of other Paradox titles.

Still pales in comparison to Vic 2. The only really good thing about this game is the market, but everything else is just bad. Especially the military stuff. "huh dur you just want to move toy soldiers around" there should be no reason my alley, who I called in, should want to white peace out when WE ARE WINNING AND THEY ARE OCCUPYING THE ENEMY

I was really hyped for this game before it came out, then read the reviews and decided to let them cook until a recent Steam sale. At this point I think the game is much improved since time of launch, especially with expansions. As with other Paradox games, the scope of this one is very ambitious and the devs deserve credit for sticking with it. I think the complexity of Paradox games is the reason they often suffer from rough launches. Victoria 3 is very playable at time of review, if not quite exactly bug free. Understand that this game is primarily a political economy sim, and warfare is a secondary aspect of gameplay. I actually think the much hated warfare system is a good concept, as it allows you to experience frustration similar to e.g., Lincoln's before he hired good generals. Armies still at times behave in ways that don't make sense, even, I think, within the framework of what the devs are trying to do, but it's not game breaking and they are working on it. I overall have had a good experience over 100+ hours with this game at time of review. Buy it when it's on sale and still possible to pick up the full package with expansions for not too ludicrous a price.