Recent reviews by Delnar_Ersike

So you know how when you play a city builder in a challenge mode (e.g., deliberately poor resources, certain industries disabled, no immigration, etc.), the game starts out interesting as you try to figure out how to deal with the challenge while building up your basic city? And then becomes boring and/or tedious once you've gotten far enough into your city?

Against the Storm is basically just all of the first part of that with none of the second part. Every map is a new set of challenges you have to figure out, but by the time you would get to the point where you have effectively "solved" the challenge, the game accelerates you to the map's endgame conditions (you either win fast or lose fast) and then starts it all over again once you're done.

Well... this game has been a disappointment, to say the least. It is the first Paradox game that I have played in over a decade that made me actively bored during my first session. And the worst thing is that this is extremely unlikely to get fixed with future patches and DLC.

The fundamental problem with this game is that, despite its Steam tags, the developers do not want this game to be a strategy game. And they have done their best to make that the case. What the developers want this game to be is their version of Sims Medieval, a roleplaying power-fantasy. Which is fair, people like the Sims for a good reason. Except that they have not bothered to actually change the game from a map-staring game to one where you would actually see your characters interact with other characters. So you are stuck reading a billion text pop-ups instead. And this is not something that any DLCs are going to fix.

The game is a roleplaying game where all your roleplaying is done through jarring text pop-ups, in between which you stare at the clock to wait for the next text pop-up to happen. It is a strategy game where it is so easy to bend the world to your will that you have to actively try to mess up to create the need to follow any actual strategy. By trying to be the best of both worlds, Crusader Kings 3 ends up being the worst of both instead. Disappointing, really.

This game is probably one of the best introductory games to the genre of grand strategy games, even though it is arguably more of a 4X game than a grand strategy one. Still, if you're interested in getting into the genre but have otherwise been intimidated by how overwhelming these games can be, Stellaris is probably one of the best entry points.

Just expect to fail a lot before you actually succeed. It's kind of a rite of passage among veteran grand strategy players.

A fantastic turn-based stealth RPG, and I cannot recommend it enough if you're into any of those labels.

The biggest weakness of the game is also its biggest strength, and that's that all of its maps are procedurally generated. Though the generation can create some extremely frustrating layouts at time, especially when playing on higher difficulties and/or with mods that add more guard types (which I would also highly recommend once you get used to the vanilla experience), the procedural generation also makes the game legitimately highly replayable.

Oh, and also, I would highly recommend playing with mods that restore cut content and add content that is otherwise exclusive to the Nintendo Switch version of the game. The new items and especially the new hacking abilities that are added can really give the game even more variety. For example, there is one hacking ability that stops all passive hacking power increases (meaning the only way to get power is through using certain items or hacking consoles on the map), but also prevents the alarm from going up at the end of every turn until you do something yourself that causes the alarm to go up. So for those frustrated by the soft time limit imposed by the passive alarm increases, that restored content has your back.

This is literally the very first Civ game I've played where I have not felt the draw of "Just One More Turn". Even Civilization Beyond Earth had that a little bit for me.

Every single good "new" feature of Civ6 has existed in some form in past versions of Civ and/or their mods: districts have existed as the improvement-heavy strategies of Civ4, amenities have existed as Civ4's happiness and health metrics, the great person special abilities system is ripped entirely from Civilization Colonization, the culture tech tree / policies system has been done many times in Civ4 mods with great person abilities that put you down particular paths, harvesting resources has been done in both Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and a large amount of Civ4 and Civ5 mods, and most of what is good about the unit management system is ripped straight from Civ5.

Worse yet, as an avid Civ5 modder, I can safely say that Civ6 has had some of the worst modding support from a Civ game to date. It took months after release to just get modding tools out, and 2K have made Firaxis pull the same thing with Civ6's DLL Source Code as they did with Civ5 (which is one of the big reasons we didn't get a lot of big mods for Civ5 like we did with Civ4).

A thorough disappointment. Just play Civ5, Civ4, or one of those two's mods instead.

Pretty good cyberpunk multiplayer game, one of the rare few that gets the whole cyberspace vs. meatspace thing correctly. Controls are a bit janky on some maps though, but that comes with the "mod" territory.

Biggest downside currently is lack of public servers (currently only two US East ones and one janky EU one) and lack of players. If you're interested in playing the game, check if some of the authors on the "most helpful reviews" list are currently playing; usually servers are empty, but if you log on at the right time, you can easily get a 6v6 or more going. If the game is crashing for you, make sure you go into the game's beta settings and switch it to the "Previous" setting.

The incredible game that League of Legends is based off of; nevertheless the two are about as similar as tennis is to badminton: both sports have rackets, nets, and a similar-looking field, but that's about it. DotA is more team-oriented, methodical, and proactive, while LoL is more individual-oriented, fast-paced, and reactive.

Oh yeah, and DotA isn't full of carries and lacking in all else like LoL is.