Recent reviews by hay man

Was waiting for mod support and performance updates and bug fixes before I played again... the patch still has not come 6 months later.

Serious simulation breaking bugs, no mod support, no map editor, very few assets in the base game, and even my beastly rig runs this at an astonishing 30-45 fps once a city has more than 20k people. Oh and it actually looks uglier thank CS1. Absolutely incredible.

Only word from CO is these insulting "Word of the Week" updates which do not update you on anything.

Shame I can't get a refund. Absolutely astonishing for a developer to totally throw out all goodwill they've accumulated in one release. I guess the Sim City throne is once again empty.

Someone needs to drop an anvil on the head of the CEO of Colossal Order.

Wonderful game. Great plot, great writing, great setting, and great mechanics. Like their previous full RPG, Age of Decadence (Dungeon Rats is primarily about combat), it is short enough to be highly re-playable and there seems to be a lot of variation in how things can resolve story wise. The setting, while not wholly original (as the developers state, it is inspired by Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky) is wonderful. It shows how sci fi can be used in video games for something more interesting than space opera or Star Trek-lite. It also reminds you of how bad Bethesda is at writing since Starfield has a quest also inspired by Orphans of the Sky (I assume) that is completely idiotic.

The combat is tough but fair. The game teaches you to understand what you're good at and can punish you appropriately for going beyond your build(s). You cannot needlessly hoard resources OR use them willy-nilly. I like the stealth system as well, but, other than one stealth encounter near the end of the game, I never really felt like the game forced you to engage with all the nuances of the stealth system. That and the somewhat rushed feeling of the final quest would be my only negative feelings about the game.

If you are curious about this game, I encourage you to pick it up. It would be a shame if such an original developer went out of business.

This is the real Gothic 3. Thank god I remembered I could play this for free instead of buying Elex II for half off.

Imagine my shock when I opened the map of the BRAND NEW state of Texas and look over to where my hometown is... ah here we go... the highway intersection we sit on. Except I DO NOT see Nacogdoches, TX. Instead I see the town to our south--our hated football rival--Lufkin, TX. 7 and 59 meet in NACOGDOCHES. 7 does not even go to Lufkin!!

Throw this DLC in the garbage.

Buyer beware: This is a Paradox Game at release.

The good:
Victoria 3, unlike other mapgames (or "grand strategy games" if you like), is primarily about building an efficient economy. At times it can feel a bit more like Anno than anything else. The economic sim is definitely the most developed aspect of the game and the most significant flaw in that system is the AI is not as good at it as it could be so you will often find yourself the greatest producer of a few certain goods with no AI to trade with to plug those holes of you don't produce enough. There is (of course) a mod already out that helps them do this a bit better.

The other significant flaw in the economic system is it is quite micro-intensive and the UI to do that micro is.... bad. There's no real way around it. The UI is a damn headache. I swear one of the developer streams showed a more streamlined version of the building UI but I guess that wasn't ready by release.

The 'Needs Work':
The political system (interest groups) is quite interesting in how it interacts with the economic side of things but a bit too easy to game by the player. Have a problem with aristocrats? Simple solution: research Mutual Funds and flip all of the farms to publicly traded companies. Now the only source of aristocrat power is undeveloped subsistence farms worked by peasants (meaning they are largely irrelevant as these buildings simply do not earn them enough profit for them to be influential).

I can certainly see the potential in this aspect of the game and I'm hoping it will be balanced a bit more over time so that the the forces of reaction are not so easily paved over in the player's path of upending the old order or whatever damn thing you want to do. By the same token, industrialists (as in my US game) should not be willing to let me switch to a command economy without a fight as the second you HAVE a command economy their power is going to be totally annihilated as you turn every industry into into a state run enterprise. I don't care how pleased the actual pops that make up the interest group are with my enlightened rule. If i'm changing the country in a way where I'm annihilating their way of life then they should be up in arms.

Generally I also think the armed forces interest group is much much too weak. They should get far more power from just the fact that your country is dotted with barracks and naval bases.

I think Paradox also missed the mark in that the political system and economic system interact but the political system does not "plug in" to the diplomatic and war system. Interest groups and leaders can have traits or beliefs like pacifist and jingoist but these only affect what laws they support. A pacifist industrialist government did not in anyway prevent me, as Japan, from smashing the Qing in order to take Korea and Manchuria. At no point did I feel like my pops or interest groups had any particular care for if I was colonizing Africa or crushing Mexico under my boot. In Vicky 2 a pacifist party in government could be disastrous as your military funding went into the tank. I'd like to see something like that. Or radicalism from pops backing pacifist interest groups. Fascist movements appear and don't seem to give a damn if I'm waging war against enemies both without and within.

As for the bad and/or controversial...

First diplomatic plays. I certainly see the POTENTIAL for diplomatic plays but the problem at the moment is two fold: First, weak nations are too willing to give up even when the demand is for their termination. Second (and most important), when they give up you only get your original demand. This leads to situations such as... The Mexican-American War will end with Mexico surrendering just one state at a time as you are locked into a truce after each surrender. My thought? Simply let the player / ai designate war goals which are essential to player / AI aims. This would help the AI be much more aggressive about certain goals (getting the US borders, uniting Germany, uniting Italy, retaking the Levant, etc.). There are definitely potentially interesting things to do... for example you could (as the US did in real life) do a treaty with Mexico where you take the entire west but give the Mexican government money (by accepting an AI demand for war repayments). Now there is no REASON to do this but I could imagine a way where you could make such a give and take advantageous by having it soften the infamy blow from grabbing so much land.

The other problem (the biggest problem) is the most controversial: war. Now unlike many I actually do not have a problem with the idea of the war/front system. I actually do not in anyway think the simulation aspect of the game is improved by letting me cheese the AI into attacking me on a fort or locking up the British army into crossing into Northern Ireland as I would do in Vicky 2 (I'm not actually sure if the "strait crossing" to Northern Ireland was even in base Vicky 2 to be honest).

The problem is the fronts are finicky. Sometimes a front will break up into multiple fronts (especially during invasions of places like Italy) and your army will choose to.... screw off to some totally different front that you're fighting in on the map and let every single one of those fronts collapse. Encirclements appear to happen but the armies stuck in them escape unscathed other than taking heightened attrition damage for a few months. Odd things like that.

Again I am not against the system at all. Paradox combat has never been anything to write home about. This isn't Gary Grigsby's War in the East. There are complaints that "oh all I have to do is have more troops with more tech and better generals and hope for the best." Okay? And? Please listen to yourself. The problem is that as it works right now it feels like a beta of whatever war system we will have 3 years from now. I would like to have something in between. Let me designate war goals for my generals to aim toward and point them in the direction (not dissimilar to HOI4's system when you let the AI handle it). Let my general's skill level determine if they want to try to do encirclements and things like that. Make these generals feel a bit more alive. As it is their skills are important but only in battle not in how they act. McClellan is cautious but that doesn't translate to him being battle avoidant. Just a bit more character... sadly I'm not sure how feasible these types of details are. I'm merely a game player. An Ideas Guy if you will.

The last problem with the game is the flavor is a little flat (for some places non-existent). I kind of expected that but certain things things that DO have flavor do not work the way they should either.

Let's take the US as an example (though other areas also have this problem--the Taiping Rebellion should not be able to occur anywhere in Qing China). The CSA will appear wherever the "Southern" Planters are powerful... at the start of the game that is literally anywhere with a lot of farms so you can see an early game CSA stretch from Louisiana to New York. It is also incredibly easy to avoid the US Civil War entirely. I outlawed slavery without a hitch in 1855, but I could have done it much earlier.

In the real world the power of the southern planters over federal politics was almost a stranglehold. In Victoria 3 they are an annoyance that you can marginalize in 10 years. I did not in any sense feel like a movement existed to either preserve or destroy slavery. I did not even bother thinking about which states were free or slave. It only mattered in the sense that that labor for factories was harder to come by in the south so I avoided setting up factories there until I abolished it. Flavor like this, I imagine, is the realm of DLC. Hell, maybe we can get an entire federal politics system. Who knows?

I'm at the word limit so let me say: get it if you need maps now (I do). Don't if you can wait. It needs time to cook for sure.

Imagine Holdfast but with no players. Oh and instead of the civil war as promised the one single server with people is serving up a horrible space man mode.

Pure crap. The devs should be arrested. Gabe Newell should be arrested for allowing this to be sold for even a dollar.

cool and sexy. i respect the makers of shantae for staying horny after all these years.

too easy but every shantae game is so what can you do.

Thank god I only paid $20 dollars for this hunk of crap. Good lord.

I had never even seen a shooting star before. 25 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and to my memory I had never witnessed burning debris scratch across the night sky. Murder Miners is the only good video game ever made. Murder Miners is the Game of the Year, the Game of the Century, the Game of Eternity.