Recent reviews by Zustel

Great game, no performance issues. Some crashes though, but nothing game breaking.

Extremely addicting, crazy challenging and yet maybe the most balanced deck builder out there. One of those games where you narrowly manage to achieve victory only to find out, that it just gets harder and harder after that. Albeit it's still winnable on every level.

Stellaris condensend into a 45-90 minute multiplayer boardgame. Really well done and with huge future potential. We had lots of fun already, no bugs encountered so far. Great quality overall especially for an early access title.

Despite all the problems the game suffers from at the moment I had fun with my first city. I've played for 70 hours up to 200,000 population. The performance was alright until it significantly dropped around 160,000 pop and became pretty much unbearable around 200,000 pop.
On my second city I'm starting to notice what's missing and what features I had hoped for in this game. Therefore I'll list what I'm liking, what I'm not liking and what I'm missing. And keep in mind that I had 70 hours of fun with this game.

Like:
- road tools: very versatile, easy to use
- terrain tools
- Import/Export
- outside connections
- sound design
- the feeling when zooming into a street, it feels "alive"
- level of detail on many assets is incredible
- traffic AI feels very realistic
- having so many different aspects of a city that there's always something to do

Dislike:
- public transit UI: it's very hard to see what's going on, lines on the same street can't be selected individually
- rectangular zoning on curved roads pushes you to build in grids, having the zoning change to trapezoids and sticking the borders of these trapezoids together if the road is curved would be cool, assets would have to change their fences/gardens to match the new form
- european style assets, especially low density residential buildings don't look like european suburbs to me
- the look of the zones of specialized industries, the giant blobs on the map look kinda out of place, a few more details, different textures for these areas would be nice
- no Steam workshop
- performance, especially shaders and textures randomly kind of crashing, textures turning into blobs, shadows flickering etc. (see my specs for reference at the bottom)

Missing (maybe content for future DLCs):
- european style cities
A european city in my opinion isn't just about the look of the buildings. It's in most cases a city that's older then the United States and that grew and evolved over centuries. I'm missing the tools to create the old city with narrow streets and old buildings you'll find in most european cities.
- different climates
All maps look like temperate climate zones from the eastern US or central Europe. I'd like to have maps in a mediterranean/tropical/subtropical/desert/tundra climate zone with the challenges these climates bring like water availabilty or heavy frost.
- water and rain water physics
One of the most important aspects of modern city planning in times of climate change is rain water and flood management. At the moment the terrain is mostly an aestethic challenge with next to no gameplay mechanics bound to it. I'd love to have to think about rain water when building in a valley or on a slope or having different water volumes in a river depending on weather and season (snowmelt). Sealing of soils, storm water sewers, natural river banks, spongecity are key words of modern city planning. All surfaces would need to have a "sealing value" meaning how much water can permeate the surface and how much runs off during rain. The water physics as a whole would have to be rebuild, because the existing river physics aren't what I'd call realistic.
- heat
Similar to the water management you have to consider heat in a city. On one hand more asphalt, metal and concrete means more heat is trapped, more trees and shades on the other hand reduce the temperature. I'd find this an interesting mechanic if that's possible to implement in the game.
- bike infrastructure
probably planned as a DLC, but seriously how can you release a city planner in 2023 without bikes?
- more road management tools
traffic light control, lane control, right of way signs - basically everything the Traffic Manager mod from CS1 did.

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Specs for reference: RTX 4090, i9-13900KF, 32 GB RAM, Samsung 970 Evo NVME SSD

I can't build a backstory for my character like I'm used to from tabletop D&D. That's my only point of criticism. Yeah that's it. Everything else is incredibly well done, meeting or surpassing every expectation. If I could pick from a couple of backstory options to fill my own character with a bit more life this would be a 100/100. But even without it it's really close to being THE perfect RPG.

It's hard to review this since I don't feel like I understood what I'm doing yet. I've started several campaigns because I felt like I totally screwed up after a while. You really need to invest time and effort into it, but the scale and potential is enormous. No game I've played before combined planetary with orbital and stellar/interstellar gameplay so well together. Sure it's early access and thus still a bit rough around the edges and needs a lot of tweaking, but I have high hopes for it.

Warning: You might get diabetes by playing this game.

No less than the best city builder ever made.

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I've loved Life is Strange. It was a game unlike any other out there with completely relatable and genuine characters, an awesome story and so many hard decisions to make. Totally captivating.
It had just one flaw (in my opinion, caution: minor spoiler ahead): It started as a quite realistic highschool/coming-of-age drama and evolved into a psycho-thriller and then into some sort of supernatural mindf*ck. It still was a masterpiece, but not really what I expected.

Before the Storm is different. There's nothing supernatural and the whole story is very grounded. Such a game is not easy to find.
The characters from the original game were brilliant - but the prequel manages to develop it's main character Chloe even further and extend this character to a whole new level. Every decision you have to make, no matter which you choose, is fully reasonable and the events following are conclusive. And this helps us understand Chloe's character we already knew better. Everything not only adds up to the finale of Before the Storm, but to the events from Life is Strange, too.
The dedication to detail is incredible, because in a way you're building the scenes for Life is Strange. Replaying the original game after Before the Storm is absolutely worth the time, especially because you've got a new angle on Chloe and now know who Rachel was.

There is really nothing more to write here. You'd be a fool not to play it.
Best game of 2017
10/10