Скорошни рецензии на Azimuth

AOH3 Is a much welcome addition to the series, however it's not without flaws
At the time of writing, it's still getting small updates and fixes, so I won't mention what seems to be bugs or crashes I've encountered. While the negatives section may have more elments, don't let that discourage you, they're relatively tiny, and mostly just quality of life nitpicks

Update
Since originally writing this review, the game recieved a few updates, so it's only fair that I adjust my review as well. Some of the cons have been fixed, and I found a few new ones. Also I'm no longer crashing!

The good
- big and vast map to play on
- overall more immersive than the previous: It's real time now, there are units, and battles that are way more than what AOCII offered, and tech tree and oh my even nukes!
- easiley moddable game, a lot of the files are exposed
- still patched and updated

The bad
These are mainly related to international actions, and wars:
- When the war score falls bellow -90, the AI signs a peace deal with you, except you're not asked about it, which feels unfair, because you suddenly get a multiple year long truce, lose territories, while it's possible that you could still have overturned the outcome.

- Previously you could only take territories from your main opponent, not their allies - which has been since updated to allow you to take provinces from your opponent's allies! However, you cannot grant territory to your own allies, unless you do it outside of the peace, which is in the next point:

- You can give territory to other countries, but it's a very tedious process where you have to look for it in a dropdown menu instead of selecting it on the map with a brush.

- Aditionally you cannot adjust the lenght of the truce.

- You cannot release new vassal states that haven't been there before originally, for example if you play as yugoslavia, unless you change the scenario in the editor to add cores for those countries, you can not release croatia, slovenia or any of the member states that make up yugoslavia. Also you cannot seemingly use the brush when releasing a vassal (or excuse me if it's there and I just didn't notice it)

And come the nitpicks, things that aren't very important, but though I'd mention:

- The text over the countries doesn't always appear (and not because it's too small ex: Byzantine Empire), and when it does appear, sometimes it's not in the middle of the country ex: Modern day scenario Germany has it's name stuck to it's western border.

- Some of the graphics are AI generated, but you can replace that with mods

- While recruiting units, you cannot use a brush, only middle click select or individual click on each province
- In the editor while editing divisions, their count is not shown on the map, only in the menu where you can add and remove units from the regiments

- In the current situation menu, upgrade capitol prompt takes you right to that button, however the prompt to upgrade the general's academy takes you to the millitary tab instead of the appropriate government tab

- The UI only parses data on click in most cases, so for example if you upgrade the general's academy then it won't show the appropriatate level number on the government tab until you open it again

I only tried out modern versions of game maker because game maker 8 unfortunately does not support HTML exporting. There's a fair few improvements to the game maker language that I like and improve the quality of life. However the modern version also comes with a lot of downsides, mainly the UI, and the speed. Opening up Game Maker 8 takes only a few moments, and you can get game-making, while Studio 2 takes like half a minute, because it updates, does a bunch of networking stuff, and occasionally you even have to log in because your session expires. After that, when I got into the actual IDE, I wasn't very impressed either. Sure, it looks nice, however I noticed myself just scrolling a lot, and resizing windows. It's not very efficient with space, yet still feels overcrowded. Then I noticed that the default folders the IDE creates are practically useless, since the IDE doesn't categorize your assets, so you'll have to do it manually. You can put any asset in any of the folders, which isn't bad in itself, but the fact that these folders don't really work as one would excpect them just makes it a bit awfull, because either you sort them yourself, or waste a whole lot of time looking at the cluttered mess. There's absolutely no reason for those folders to exist if they do not work as expected. Things like the grid in the room editor are also hidden behind another button, whereas in game maker 8, you could just set it easiley. The room editor is also slow, and inefficient, having to drag each object into the room individually is really time consuming. You can press right alt to paint objects like in game maker 8, however it's laggy. It misses spots, it places multiple objects in a single place. There's also Feather, which is a strange feature that I disabled immidieately, since it slowed down my coding process, and kept warning me about code that is otherwise valid, but it didn't like. There's also just random lagging and slowdowns. When you write code fast, or sometimes just open a window or something, it stutters for a few moments. I admit, I may not have the most powerful hardware, but I do think that if I can run way more demanding software, or games then game maker stuttering isn't because of my hardware.

to sum up:
> lots of tutorials for many things
> wide range of export options for platforms
> better syntax than gml 8
> lots of features

> unfriendly, infefficient, often confusing UI design compared to game maker 8
> slow, clumsy level editor
> bootup time & updates, ocasionally having to log in
> weak performance in the IDE (games made with it run good)

I like this game, it was one of the first FPS-s that I've played, and I enjoyed it greately, unfortunately however due to neglect and malicious actors, the game has become unplayable, and full of bots and cheaters.

UPDATE:
They fixed the bot issues! :D

This is the first card game i ever played, and i am impressed. The animations are smooth, The gameplay is solid, and the graphics can run on a toaster such as my computer. It is really intresting to play. My only issue is that the enemy AI always seem to get rarer cards than me. It truley can be infuriating when the AI pulls the fourth card which give all their troops +2 Defence, while i rareley get any special cards. Overall i recommend you give it a try, and i certainly see myself playing this more.

> Simple, but sometimes pretty looks
> wide range of tools to use that you can use to craft pretty realms
> gameplay encourages cooperation: If you want to get anything done, you'll have to make friends.
> economy, and trading systems
> interesting world and references
> fun events every now and then


> The game doesn't feel at home on PC, the UI, the controls are a bit awkward.
> There is no support for non-standard characters. If your language doesn't fit within the standard English alphabet, you cannot communicate properly. Writing a' instead of á is awkward. That's not to mention zero support for any other script either.
> micro-transactions that give shortcuts to people who are willing to spend real world money.
> new players are sort of left in the dust, allow me to explain: In the ancient days, upon creating a new account, you'd receive a pretty decent-sized realm (a realm is in essence your own personal world that you can build in), and over time to prevent people from just creating new accounts, the size of the realm was decreased. There was a fairly basic, but pretty tutorial level to get you familiar with the mechanics of the game. It has been replaced with one, which explains more in terms of content, but is visually a bad introduction to the game. It's just stacked grass blocks, and some fences. The game has an opportunity to prove it's visual capabilities to the player who just created their new account, but instead opts for a design that just portrays carelessness instead.
>> before the Overworld update, there were several large overworlds, in which you could publish your realm into, allowing anyone to hop in, and see your little chunk of the world. This has been changed, in favour custom overworlds, that are just like realms, except you can place your realms there like you could in the overworld. Your own overworld costs in-game currency to buy, so you can no longer just have your little corner of the world be freely available. It's still probably available trough the search bar, but you can no longer get exposure from the overworlds as easily. And since there are so many tiny overworlds now, it's hard to find. A vast map full of realms where you could stumble on anything replaced by effectively a search bar. There's little to no dynamic exploration any more. Popular realms often have their name copied, so even the search bar is unreliable.
>> some issues reported in the public-beta of the overworld update still persist.
> updates are few and far between, and usually just consists of cosmetics or blocks that you won't see often after the initial sale.


I had fun with cubic castles for a while, but I could never fully immerse myself with it. I didn't have the dedication, neither the money to achieve anything major in it. I met some great people who I have become friends with, but those eventually faded, and they stopped playing the game. After the introduction of the new overworld system it lost that feeling of exploration for me, and I become aimless. I didn't want to work extra hard so I could get an overworld that would just get lost in the sea of the thousands of other ones.
Cubic Castles isn't the game for me, but it might be the one for you.