Recent reviews by Washtali

Fantastic puzzle game, great value, beautiful aesthetic. How can you go wrong with restoring nature to a wasteland? I appreciate how much this game has changed and updated over the years, so many new features, new biospheres, and quality of life improvements

As a longtime Civ fan, Civ VII is a great foundation and easily the most innovative and best looking Civ game ever.

The only problem is that the game as it is now is close to what it should have been at launch. I really trust and personally like the development team, I just think that the game was released too early. It's been frustrating for me as a player because I feel like as soon as I learn the mechanics, a big new patch drops that completely changes everything. And while the changes have been for the better overall, it makes me hesitant to play because I can't adapt to changes that quickly.

I know all Civ games, since Civ IV at least, grow and change substantially from the time they are released. I do really think that Civ VII has a fantastic foundation to work from and I'm very much looking forward to the games innovations down the road.

Gaming culture is a part of why this game may have mixed reviews, and it's the tendency to focus on one thing that is such a small part of the experience but legitimately one of the best things the franchise has done for a long time: changing Civs every Era.

Very few, if any, Civs exist in the same form that they existed during Antiquity and I always thought the idea of playing as the Hittites (for example) into the 21st century was odd. Having evolving and changing Civs is for the best and no one can change my mind on that. That needs to continue because the way the game is designed it would be very difficult if not impossible to balance a Civ for 3 or even 4 (soon) eras.

A great adaption but it's terrifying and I can't play it that much because it freaks me out

It was an afternoon worth of content, and nothing I did was even noticed outside of the one planet I was on. Expected a lot more out of this including another way to enter the unity and was left pretty disappointed. The scenery was beautiful and well designed, but the puzzles and challenges were very easy. For how much the Va'ruun are talked about in the game it's hard to imagine people fear them starting a war when they have such a tiny footprint. Not really any new content other than a few guns, but no vehicles, ship parts, outpost parts, or any greater implication for the rest of the game world. Pretty lacklustre overall, BGS really has to do better and have choices with more impact if they want people to keep coming back to the franchise. This was a wasted opportunity that could have explored a massive and potentially consequential event for the entire galaxy.

Absolutely worth full price, and a tremendous value. Support the devs they have been actively working on this game for a long time and constantly add new free content that is excellent. Looking forward to their next game!

**UPDATED REVIEW** Most of what I wrote originally stands, but since my initial review so many new features have been added and it has gotten even better. Goats, chickens, pastries, and various other improvements:

I generally don't purchase Early Access Titles, but I had seen enough of this game on YouTube to know that I would enjoy it and I was correct!

The City Builder genre is one of my favourites, and Farthest Frontier stands as a great example of the genre being done right. It took only until my second game to really figure out the mechanics, and while the game is challenging, it's not punishingly so. Learning how to balance the economy is important, but so many other games of this style feel over-complicated. This game feels like it has just the right amount of everything, the information you need is easy to find and simple to understand. You can often see the results of your efforts to fix problems with your town relatively quickly, so it rewards my time.

By my second game I got a city to a population of 1000, which is a really big city overall as the final tier is unlocked at I think 500 population? It was really satisfying because once the supply chain is figured out you can pretty much keep expanding onwards.

I love the crop rotation system on the farms, I figured those out very well by my second game and basically once you do they require not much maintenance at all but also rewards you if you do take the time to micromanage them.

There are a few mechanics that I'm still learning, for example Cattle seem to be a bit tricky for me and I'm not quite sure how many Hunter's Camps can be supported by a source of deer but I am confident these things may be fleshed out more in the full release, or I'll figure it out the hard way.

The game looks great, the landscapes are vivid and realistic, the buildings look varied and quite different, and once your town gets to final tier it tends to look pretty fantastic. Like I ask with all city builders: please provide more variants of existing buildings if you can, it never hurts to have more choice. Having said that, Farthest Frontier does a great job of making most of the buildings look distinct and unique.

Soundtrack is nice and mellow, sound effects are great, although I could use a few more music tracks and maybe some with a tad more energy.

I am very much looking forward to playing the full release!

I hope that when the game is finished / in future we can see things like:

Pork and Chicken infrastructure
Horses, goats, donkeys
More types of wild game, like fowl, grouse, camelids etc
Dogs and maybe cats, for happiness and pest control
Some greater varieties of crops
Culture reskins (expansion content?)
Bakeries could use flour and other foods (meat, veggies, fruit) to make pies, cakes etc that work as both luxury goods and food
The housing options feel lean, there are probably a few ways to expand this
Ability to interact with raiders in other ways, like paying them off, hiring them for protection etc.
Missions, quests, or objectives


Some minor feedback on existing mechanics:

The wagon shop feels unfinished, I know I need one but it doesn't seem to do anything after that?
Brick layers need to be balanced a bit better, right when you get bricks in Tier 3 everything needs them in large quantities and it's expensive in labour and resources to build them as you end up needing several of them right away in order to build quickly.
Road pathing could use a little bit of work, some QoL improvements
More clarification on how many Hunter's huts can be supported by a source of Deer
Foods like preserves should maybe be eaten last, or be less prioritized and food that closer to spoiling should be prioritized first
The flatten tool seems not to work properly or needs greater clarification or some tweaking to make it easier to use

I really want to recommend this game. I was hyped for it for so long, and I suppose in retrospect I should have managed my expectations.

I've now played through the main story 3 times and completed all the major faction and location quests, so I feel confident in reviewing the game based on my playtime.

The biggest problem I have with the game is that it feels... empty. There really isn't any exploration that is substantial or meaningful. I am not being hyperbolic by saying that almost all the planets in the game are pretty much identical, and seriously lacking any real character or flavour. Bethesda does acknowledge that only 10% of planets support life (which is true), but even when they do the planets themselves are all very similar. I suspect this comes down to the fact that they are randomly generated.

The planets have no rivers, no lakes, no bodies of water aside from small pools of sulphur occasionally, and giant sprawling oceans with nothing in them. No beaches, no dense forests, no mountain ranges, and very few unique features. In an effort to make the planets easily traverse-able, the planets lose all sense of character and identity. All planets just feel like a flat boring wasteland with some rocks and a few sparse plants littered along the surface. Some planets do have an abundance of animal life on them, but the entire time you are on a planet the predators are roaming in packs just killing all the prey and leaving their corpses around with no purpose or meaning. Why bother having animals in the game at all if they don't interact in any meaningful way? It's hard to describe but because so much content is randomly generated, it has no real substance at all.

The Space Exploration side of things is just.... bad. You can fast travel between planets yes, but it is just pointless. Aside from the occasional space battle (Which are few and far between and have no real substance as all the battles are literally the same), there is absolutely NOTHING to do in space. There is nothing to discover. Real space is full of anomalies, unexplained phenomena, black holes, nebulae, gravity fields etc and at no point does the player interact with anything like this in game. Space is entirely used to get from one planetary location (Or occasional space station) to the other and that's it.

The planets as viewed in space are literally big round low res discs that just sit there and serve no purpose. When you are in orbit of a planet, you have to fast travel using the menu to get to it's moons, one isn't even able to fly between them in orbit. I was extremely disappointed when I was on Earth's Moon (Luna) and WASN'T EVEN ABLE TO SEE EARTH FROM THE MOON, which was a HUGE letdown. How can that be justified? Earth is literally visible from the Moon always, could they not even bother with even that level of immersion? Each planet has resources you can collect and whatnot, but there is no real reason to.

The game leads you to believe that Colony Building is both essential and interesting, but nothing could be further from the truth. You can completely ignore colony building with zero consequences. Building a colony is boring, tedious and uninteresting because you can only assign your own crew members to live there, and there is a max amount you can have so instead of sprawling colonies with tons of random NPC's that make the place your own (one thing that Mass Effect Andromeda did well), your colonies are barren and deserted storage facilities for resource generation. Also, now in 2023, there is no excuse for the item placement mechanics in the game. I build my colony hab modules and planned to create liveable spaces that would be well decorated, as unlocking new decorations and knick knacks for your colonies is a research option, but the placement mechanics are so frustrating and outdated I quickly gave up on it entirely. There is no snapping, no ability to finely place items, you can only do so by literally moving your character or though keyboard keys. When trying to place a bed up against a wall for example, it's always at a weird angle because when you try to line something up the keyboard presses make it move in too large of increments. It's so bad, and frankly inexcusable.

Some people say that you can use the resources to upgrade weapons and armor and whatnot, but there is no need to at all. The game throws so much gear at you (that you can never really sell because the merchants have pathetically minimal money pools to draw from with which to pay you), and once you get to New Game Plus you get the best Space Suit in the game and have ZERO Reason to take it off or upgrade to a different one.

The ship building is kind of fun, but has some serious issues as well. For example, you can't edit the interior modules at all, so they have the opposite problem that colony modules have in that everything comes pre-built with no customization whatsoever. The same assets are reused so much, that when walking through my ship, there is the same random spool of rope on the groud in almost every module. Like how many random spools of rope does my ship need and why are they just lying around on the ground on my Brand New spaceship? The most egregious issue that is truly awful is that fact that you have no control over where doors and ladders are placed on your ship, so you can often end up with ladders and doors linking different modules in very awkward places, that can even make it a total maze to get from your landing bay to your cockpit. Ladders literally in the middle of dining areas, doors linking habitats in weird ways. This means that most people won't get creative with how they build ships and use glitches, exploits, and mods in order to make their ship interiors navigable. Why anyone would ever design a ship with multiple levels is absurd because you'll end up having to go up two or three ladders and through several awkward hatchways just to get from you landing bay to your cockpit.

All the NPC's are the same height, have pretty much the same body proportions, and there are clones of the same NPC everywhere. How, in this day and age, is this still an issue? The game itself has a pretty extensive character creator so there really isn't an excuse why most of the NPC's look the same. They did make some effort with unique NPC's that have unique dialogue, but even may of those seem lifeless and samey with not much difference between them. There are so few children, you can't tell any difference in ages in the NPC's, and although they claim there is diversity in the characters there really isn't.

Most of the quests are still the same old fetch quests: Fast travel to X location, kill a thing or collect a McGuffin, and bring it back to NPC.

Some aspects of the game seem woefully underdeveloped. For example, there are several factions that players encounter that are given virtually no story whatsoever and serve only to act as enemies to kill. The Va'Ruun for example, are supposed to be a major power in the game, but there is only one main quest that even remotely interacts with them and it's simply a single NPC with a few lines of dialogue and nothing else. This is also true for the game's main Mercenary Faction, Ecliptic Mercs.

The Main factions are so badly done it's quite sad. Again everything is viewed through the lens of the United States. The United Colonies vs the Freestar Collective are literally just the Democrats and the Republicans. Bethesda, like most Americans, don't really seem to acknowledge that the rest of the world exists or have unique cultures that aren't in fact America. Ryujin Industries is literally the Evil corporation that makes an attempt to justify itself, and the Crimson Fleet is exactly what you'd expect being a group of sociopathic Anarchists that basically are just the archetypal "pirate faction" present in any video game.

The Main cities are bad. They have said these are the biggest cities they have designed, but they are so bo

AoE 2 is easily one of the best 5 games of all time. What needs to be said about it? The first Age of Empires is what inspired me to learn about ancient and classical history, and I remain fascinated to this day. How this game still manages to innovate and release new content DECADES after it's initial release and do it better than ever is a testament to how good this game is.

Easily one of the greatest games ever made, and a prime example of a studio that is focused on their game and cares about their players. So much could be said about this game, I can't wait to play through it again once Patch 8 hits!

Came recommended by so many of my friends. It seems well designed and well written, but it's not for me. A little dark and nihilistic for my taste and although I enjoy reading I didn't enjoy reading this game.