Recent reviews by COW12X

After being forced to play this game for a good bit I have to say it's pretty bad. The basic strategy for it is to spam cities to a level that every one of your settlements are stealing tiles from another. Then you just build whatever district relates to your chosen win condition. The game even enforces this playstyle with the loyalty mechanics. If you aren't close to your other cities your cities will rebel, and if you don't have the means of stopping it that city is just gone, nothing you can do about it. Conquer it after the rebellion? It's rebelling again in six turns and will spawn two units to defend. Sorry, you should've settled two tiles from your capital.

The other thing enforcing this playstyle is that war is more of a slog compared to Civ 5, which is an absolute travesty. Civ 5 wasn't a perfect game, but it was fun. War was a matter of keeping up in tech/production and your city placement. Once A bombs come around things can get a little hairy, but as I said Civ 5 is not a perfect game. This game wants you to learn adjacency bonuses for the extremely important districts and also the ins and outs of the superfluous amount of new units. Civ 6 is like if mario party tried to add more mechanics to increase its complexity. That's just not what civilization is about. You could get your friend who only plays Call of Duty on Civ 5 and they'd intuit enough to be relevant. Civ 6 expects you to take the time to learn its tedious mechanics to succeed.

It's not as if I don't like more intense strategy games, I'm a big fan of grand strategy games in fact. Civilization will never be and should never be that though.

You have to be well onto the spectrum to enjoy this current meta. If you're a vet, imagine every deck if it played exactly like Exodia FTK. Actually, Exodia FTK would be more considerate to your opponents time than what's currently being used. The only difference is that Exodia isn't as consistent.

High level tactical gameplay for mature gamers

It's a fun unforgiving game. Now's the best time to try it while other people are still learning. It only gets worse when everyone knows what they're doing.

It's a nice guilty pleasure as the gameplay itself is solid. The problem is that just like all mobile games it is specifically designed to extract money from whales. So filling out your deck is a far off idea unless you spend hundreds of dollars.

Meh

A great game with a great premise. Half research/planning and half tactics.

I'd give it a 3/5. It's got a lot of interesting additions to it, but I think what really makes it feel lacking is that it's not as "fair" as the first game. There's nothing worse than to lose at a game and feel like it wasn't your fault. This can be inevitable in these games with the way RNG is tied to the combat, but XCOM 2 makes you feel that way outside of lucky/unlucky shots. The WOTC and Alien Hunters DLC especially made me groan with the enemy mechanics they added in. If a soldier is going to die, fine, that's XCOM. But the goal when that happens should be to make me feel as though I overextended or put them in a bad position. Bad luck is a staple in XCOM, but that doesn't mean it has to be accentuated.

All that said, I enjoyed the game and do recommend it. Enemy Within is a tough act to follow though, if you haven't played XCOM before I'd recommend starting with that.

fun game. very satisfying learning curve

The game is most definitely worth it for 4 dollars. It is however very simple in its design. As I progressed through the game it really felt like I was just going through the motions and not really strategizing at all. There are also a lot of abilities and characters that seemed downright worthless. All that said it was fun for a few hours and I don't regret purshasing it.