Recent reviews by Jack the Rah

This is probably the best game ever made. It's funny, it's absurdist, it's educational, it is emotionally devastating, it's beautiful. Play it. Play it now.

I like the game and I especially like the new features. I was skeptical at first but especially the leaders surviving through the ages and getting to lead a new civilisation is fun. In regards to historic accuracy: It's far from accurate but honestly so was leading Egypt as Ramses in the year 2300. But you can choose yourself which civs to play so it's fine.
BUT it's still rather unfinished a month after release. There are still bugs. The interface still looks bad and the natural disasters are an annoying side feature rather than something to consider. It really does feel like if you build your cities on rivers half your city gets flooded every three turns. Same for volcanoes. Storms are completely random too. I think they have potential and could become a cool feature in the future.

I really hope they properly update the game first before adding a bunch of paid DLC because Civ VII does have the potential to become the best Civ game. It neatly combines features from Civ V and Civ VI without making them too complicated or too simplistic.

The DLC originally broke my game. With the help of the devs I managed to fix this issue and can now enjoy the game!
Recommendation for that alone already, love it when devs are invested in their games and community like that.

It's a fun game. It's worth the 3 to 5 quid for sure.

Only game that let's you start an actual revolution. Down with tyrants!

The game isn't necessarily bad but it feels like a worse version of the games that came before and especially feels like a bad version of Hitman.
So many instances of just poor decisions on the side of the devs. You can't hide realistically, sometimes enemies can see through walls. If you lie in the dark in a bunch of grass and you can't see yourself anymore you're still visible to the enemy. Only certain kinds of grass allow you to hide in it.
The movement is extremely limited compared to Hitman (even Hitman 1). You can't climb down or around ledges you could in other games even though your character could theoretically do it but you're just not allowed to grab onto the ledge because the devs didn't intend for you to go down that route and decided to block it off with one poorly placed crate. Generally the movement feels very poorly done. Multiple times I've been stuck on ledges because the character would just not pull himself up, despite it having worked there on multiple other instances.
The "concentration" system which is just copying the system from Hitman (not necessarily a bad idea) forces you into an awkward crouching position even if you've been running while pressing the button to use it. And it's not like the system makes up for it in effectiveness, it's barely useful at all.
The weapons' upgrades progression feels really weird. Instead of requiring you to get a certain level or a certain progress in the story it's a mix of story progress and finding specific workbenches in the levels and if you've missed a workbench in level 1 you can be sure you won't get the upgrades in any of the later levels but instead have to go back to the first mission to search for the workbench and use it once so that you've unlocked the specific upgrades.
At some point the autosave just broke and never returned. It's also a bit weird how it limits you to a certain number of different save files, not for balancing reasons (like in Hitman with 3, 1 or no saves within the mission) but because it's just poorly optimised. Feels like PS1 era. Not a big issue but weird choice to implement that.
As mentioned before: The enemies behave in weird ways and sound doesn't take walls into account. You could stand in a bunker with a closed door and shoot someone with a silenced pistol with subsonic munition and the enemy outside the bunker that's 30 meters away would still hear it and know exactly where you are. That is not punishing you for being loud that is called "rushing a game into existence and not polishing its features". Paired with the fact that enemies can sometimes see through walls this can lead to great situations where you're being seen by an enemmy who is quite far away whom you can't mark or hit because there's a wall in the way but the enemy can not only see you through the wall but even shoot you through the wall.
Other things that griped me were that you couldn't place certain items but only throw them which enemies can hear. Meaning once you're run out of mines your strategic options in some situations are very limited.


All in all I don't really recommend the game. It's not complete ♥♥♥♥ but I'm certain you'll have more fun playing Sniper Elite 4 and/or Hitman 3. There is no need to buy the game except for the setting, if France 1944 is to your liking. A lot of features feel like half arsed versions of Hitman features. For example it's weird how there's a system for non-lethal attacks. Like it's not necessarily a bad idea there just is no use for it. Sure you get XP for not killing enemies but that honestly doesn't make a lot of sense for Sniper Elite. It's clear that they've seen it done in Hitman (where it makes sense as you have one target you're supposed to kill and the rest aren't meant to be taken out but can be if necessary) and decided if they'll slap it on to their game it would somehow make it better. The game feels extremely unpolished which is quite bad for a game that requires its features working flawlessly.

Great game. In many regards already better than Hades 1.
That said I would recommend waiting for a bit because the game is still very much unfinished (hence Early Access). Some textures are missing and some features are yet to be implemented and the balancing needs to be redone, with some bosses especially.

70 hours in and I've only really begun to understand the game and which strategies to use. 10/10 game.

I love the idea behind the game but the controls are weird (who thought it would be a good idea to move by holding the left mouse button?), everything looks the same which makes it easy to get lost and most features are poorly explained. It's overall a very frustrating expierence. It's not for me but it might be a game for you if you like puzzle games.

Don't look at the reviews. Play and 100 % the game.