Recent reviews by bloodstone

Visually this is a very pretty game, but the UI, game mechanics, tutorial and controls are so bad you're fighting that more than you're fighting ennemies. Gave up after 7h.

The problem with Cities Skylines (and 2)
1) A bit about myself. I LOOOOVE city builders, and have been playing them since the original Sim City, way way back at the dawn of civilization when your computer was a clone and ran with rocks and fire.
2) Cannot recommend Cities Skylines. It's a great game, don't get me wrong, but
2a. Base game is 40$, but contains so few assets that you have no choice but to use the workshop.. i.e. the sweat and tears of a dedicated and thriving community, for free, mostly. But the assets have evolved over time, and so many of them don't work with vanilla anymore, and the mod shop is horrendous at filtering which assets work for the base game and which don't, which forces you to download the asset, test it out, and often unsubscribe. Or you can buy all the DLCs, so another 70$ for a game that's 10 years old, and you will still feel like you don't have enough assets to make cities unique and not see the donut shop pop up on every other corner.
2b. The achievement system is so in your face 'oh here's an achievement to force you to buy the DLC'. The really didn't try very hard, like an achievement for snowfall, which all you need to do is buy the appropriate DLC and turn it on and voila, out pops an achievement. If you don't think you've achieved anything other than fork over money to a company that's designed a gaming model around extracting as much of it from its players as possible.. you'd be right.
2c. Chirper. Minor gripe, but essential to understand the mindset. You can't even turn it off, well with mods you can, but it was one of the first mods to come out and you'd think after 10 years of so many players no liking it, that they'd find a way to option that out of the game, so once again, the game gets better only because its modded. oh but modding turns off the achievements.. oh but there's a mod to turn back on again. siiiigh.
2d. Well if you want the complete game, there's the live service option, whaaaat? This isn't a live service type of game, what the heck are they smoking in those executive offices? Oh there's another option.. you can buy 600$ worth of DLCs all at once, like that's not a ridiculous number. It'll avoid you having to pay a monthly subscription, but guess what, you'll still want/need mods to improve the game play, and because 600$ worth of extra stuff still doesn't give you enough assets for a truly diverse and unique city.

These games are way too expensive for what they are. Love the franchise, but even on special these nearly 40 year old games are ridiculously priced. I'd pay 20$ for the 1-VI bundle, not the 100$ current price, which is more expensive than most modern triple AAA games with thousands of supporting staff, high end graphics, and millions of lines of code larger. Sad to see Square Enix be so greedy. MHO.

Big Wizardry fan. Played all of them when they originally came out, but Dosbox versions on Win 11 are just unplayable in their modern versions. This needs the TLC that Digital Eclipse gave Wizardy 1 or InXile gave to Bard's tale. All these titles, the original Heroes of Might and Magic series, the Ultima series, and etc, deserve to be preserved for the next generation of gamers and be playable on today's machines. I can't recommend it in its current state.

Don't get sucked into the deluxe pack. You get extra characters that should really come with the base game, but you're limited to only 1/3 of the quests/map/story. It'll cost you another 10$ in game purchase to get that, and that never goes on sale. good game but insulting to gamers the way they try to monetize it.

A game where you can stop almost anywhere, sit down, enjoy the view, take a picture, save it as a wallpaper.