Recent reviews by Neist

Pour citer un grand philosophe de l'entertainment: Incroyable du c*l!

People should know that the battles aren't like the original game but are instead automatically resolved as a small animation you would expect to see in a cheap mobile game.

I can't say the game shouldn't be played just because of this but I got to the first mission with battles and stopped when I saw this. It's honestly quite a disappointment even though the old battle system was a mess it was part of the experience. I'm considering a refund because the old game works just as well, the gameplay is slightly improved but the overal experience seems easier and with that battle system it just feels very boring to play and a part of the strategy is gone. To be fair, maybe the new system makes more sense while being much simpler to make, but it's also an easy/lazy solution that doesn't respect the original game. I don't feel like playing anymore.

There is one thing in this game that makes it more frustrating than fun: there isn't enough ways to remove cards from your deck.

I don't wish I never played the game in the first place because it has its moments, but the fact is that the player controls very little of what's ultimately happening.

After so many runs, I can say that getting rid of your starter cards is nothing short of exceptional; Let alone curses, transformed cards you don't want, and you know.. organizing a good deck.

There is so much random that even if you try to apply a strategy the game will remind you that it's not you playing the game but the game throwing broken relics at you sometimes, and if you didn't start gathering the cards that work well with that relic from the very beginning, you can already restart because you are wasting your time.

Now, one can say that I don't know how to play the game, that I don't understand it, or even that it's part of the 'fun'. Most of the runs are lost not because I made a conscious decision to have that many cards, but because I *cannot* have less cards. Random is fun until it isn't.

One time, I got a shower of events and relics to remove cards and that was honestly so pleasing it seemed surreal, I felt like I was finally 'playing' and not 'betting'. It felt like justice.

Of course I don't expect the developers to modify the game at this point, but if ever they make a sequel I dearly hope they understand that when everything in a game tells/wants you to do just one simple thing, then making that thing impossible to do is just bad design imho. Just like the glider in the new Zelda that disappears after 30 seconds, it's against the very nature of the thing you've created.

If ever the devs read this I would be really interested to know what motivated this design decision, or what they have to say about in general.

I would vote Yes but I can't play since I got bluetooth headphones it cuts my audio when I start the game because it wants to use the microphone of the headphones, even if I turn off the VOIP, and I couldn't find a way to tell the game to use my other microphone so I don't play anymore.

I ll be happy to update the review if that issue is addressed in the future.

I want to rate this game positively because in my opinion there are very few things that make the experience not so great but 95% of the game is outstanding to me.

There are 2 things I would like the developers to focus on:
1. Micromanaging your agents is fun only at the beginning when you set everything up. After some time, when you get to focus on space the micromanagement part of the game really kills the rythm and becomes very repetitive. You can become paranoid to forget to apply the "consolidate" action on one of your core countries while it's been 20 years that your organization is there so honestly it should be pretty well consolidated by default.
A possible solution could be to have a progress bar / value increasing over time once you have most of the control points of a country, a little bit like waiting the 160 days before being able to do certain policy actions, but in the form of a progress bar that increases very slowly and basically makes the place more and more secure. Eventually you can really forget about protecting your countries unless you make a real big mistake or very rare random events to shake stuff a bit, like a major popular trend that calls for change on a whole region of the world for example, something that makes you lose consolidation in your home countries but also weakens the others in the region, giving some opportunities to reshuffle.

2. Outcomes are not actually random and every time it happens it pulls you completely out of the immersion and it feels like the game won't allow you to be creative or get lucky. If you control too many control points, you will suddenly lose some no matter what, so that you don't get ahead of everyone else. Sometimes you try to crackdown or purge some point but you roll 1% off, and that happens when you have too many points or the other has too little. This feels terribly wrong for a game like this, there is already a mechanism in the game to block overexpansion as it costs you influence, and in my opinion that's a perfectly good logic that doesn't need to manipulate the rolls to make sure the story goes like the scenario wants it to go, I would watch a movie if I wanted that, a game is defined by rules that nobody can cheat with otherwise there is no game. AoE dies the moment you write woodstock and coinage right - at least it was your own decision.
If influence alone isn't enough I think it could bind well with the solution I presented for point 1, you could invest influence points every turn at a global level to increase your consolidation value in all your countries, the more influence spent every turn the faster it will increase, with a minimum fee to just keep it level. Then if you can't spend enough influence because you control too many points and/or your influence assets were taken down by others then your consolidation decays. Maybe the decay could be much faster than building it up, which would call for good decision making on the player's part.

Then it would be nice to be able to assign your agents to continent or global tasks. Like increase popularity, focusing one country is efficient sure, but why not focus world wide efforts on social media or whatever, it would be very very slow but at least I can forget about the guy for a while and come back to him when I need to focus on something more specific. Same with continents, or group of countries selected one by one by holding shift..
What's important is that as your organization grows more and more global, your agents can be tasked to do more and more global things, I'd argue that at some point agents shouldn't be really useful anymore, they should just be managing 20 orgs and investigating/assassinating anything that moves within your territory and that's it.

I spoke about the problems but like I said the game has incredible potential and it doesn't need much to become a masterpiece, just need to pin point what exactly has to change, and what exactly mustn't change.

One of the best games of my childhood.

Meh.

I didn't play long and maybe I'm getting bored or something, but the multiplayer really feels always the same.

To me it even felt less polished than other Halo titles. As if more efforts were put into the cosmetics (I personally don't care about) than the gameplay itself. The wide(-ish) range of capacities and weapons makes each game feel like a big mess, jumping into the fray is a part of the gameplay and no-brain mashing can be fun, so maybe only I feel that way, but I still think it's getting limitative: always starting with the classic gun that seems to deal no damage is frustrating, then all the interesting capacities and weapons are to be found on the map (if someone else didn't take them) which makes it hard to apply a specific strategy or even to find one for yourself to develop and train.

What I described can go against what Halo fundamentally is but what I mean to say is that there is no innovation to be found.

Another thing that made me stop playing are the controls, the scroll wheel to switch weapons (only 2 of them) is a horrible solution, and I couldn't get the 1 and 2 keys to do that job, although I must admit I didn't take so much time to dig into that issue because it wasn't the only issue with the controls. Menus and actions in toggle instead of hold mode, who cares about keeping the leaderboard open in the middle of a fight, I got downed multiple times because I pressed Tab by mistake and couldn't get it to close before I was dead (obviously..).

Being picky here but we are talking about a AAA game costing an arm, if simple issues like this were not foreseen it doesn't make me feel like continuing given that the game is not even really fun already.

Then again, perhaps the campain is worth playing, but for me the multiplayer cooled me down. Despite that it's still nice that they made it free to play.

It's relatively "small things" that make the game extremly frustrating at times:
- If there is something between the camera and your target (not your character and the target) you will shoot at the sky (and die if your opponant happens to have the camera oriented in a way where the game lets him shoot at you).
- If you throw a grenade and don't wait a couple of seconds before moving your mouse, your grenade will go completely off target.
- If you use one of those push guns and then dismount / stop pushing it, you can't select your weapons, you first need to press 3, and only after that you can press 1 or 2. It should go without saying that you're vulnerable when pushing a large gun, people will try to get around you and you need to be able to react quickly...
- Pressing space to climb obstacles is still very unstable and works 1 out of 10 tries in certain types of ditches. In combat situations it's like a coin flip, most of the time I don't even try anymore, I just crouch an wait rather that trying "crazy" things.
- The game does not remember the orientation of the camera between sessions, sometimes the camera changes orientation after respawning or when leaving a vehicle after entering a different region. This is super disorenting and frustrating because if seems so simple to fix.
- You can get stuck in the floor at random placed, such as entrence of bunker base or corner of tranches.
- Making the respawn timer longer if you die quickly creates an insentive to not go fight, and feels totally unfair and unbalanced when you die from an artillery shell, wait 40 seconds to reappear, go outside to pick up your stuff before taking another shell in the face.. thanks for trying to play, now wait even longer!
- Queues are very long and the 2 other servers are described as "for new players" so nobody goes there even when the first server is completely full.

I really love the game.. when it s not full of cheaters. Don't buy any EA games until they fix this, it's not like they don't have the means to do it.

Pretty nice game! worth playing with good friends :)