Recent reviews by Dielerorn

Carpal Tunnel Sim 2014

You can squish little blob people.

If you're reading this, it's safe to assume that you have an Internet-capable device with all of the modern comforts that typically implies. But what if you didn't? What if you were forced out of civilization as you know it, to live in the wilderness? How do you think you'd fare? Banished asks those questions, opening with a dozen or so outcasts seeking to make their way in the wilderness. It's a humble setup, but the game is masterfully constructed with dozens of interlocking mechanics--the perfect foundation for a stinging emergent narrative and a focus on empathy in the face of a Malthusian world.

People, more than anything else, are your vital resource. They need homes, food, decent clothes, tools, emotional support, medicine, and more. Every mechanic, every building you can place, and everything else you can do relates back to that central theme of survival. If you can't gather enough food, your people die. If they're stuck outside for too long, or don't have warm clothing, they die. Each time you fail as their leader, you're reminded of the loss with a grating sound and a yellow gravestone. These serve as a one-two punch to punish you for failure because losing citizens makes it that much harder to keep up the resource flow. One fewer worker means you can't gather food, stone, wood, or anything else as quickly. When children die, it's even worse, though you likely won't know it for some time. As your population ages, you eventually lose more than a few citizens to old age, and the best way to replace them is to give your younger citizens houses in the hopes that they'll reproduce and bolster your future numbers.While the process of survival is never-ending, holding out against the elements amid the hostility of the untamed natural world is a small but powerful personal victory. Villagers have names; they're born, grow up, and eventually die under your intense supervision. Banished reinforces the human drama with its brutal difficulty and negative feedback loops. It's fertile soil for some of the most remarkable emergent storytelling around. With relatively few, well-designed mechanics, the game weaves a powerful tale of empathy and desperation and is a high-water mark for narrative elements that mutually reinforce mechanics. Even better, this is a very human story divorced from the Western tropes common in the loosely imperialistic messages of other, similar games. It's just you, your people, and their strong desire to live.

Please Note: I have played nearly 100 hours of Civ III-Civ V, and are going to be comparing these a lot

If you're familiar with the Civilization series, then you're already well aware that they've traditionally been turn-based strategy games that let you play as the political leader of one of the world's nations (such as Gandhi of India or Julius Caesar of Rome) in a fictitious bid to take over the globe, starting from the Stone Age and continuing right on through to the Space Age by having a lone settler unit build your first city on the way to establishing whatever advanced society you choose to design over the course of dozens of turns. The series gives you plenty of ways to do this, such as conquering your neighbors, researching advanced technology, or, in Civilization III (and IV), creating the most cultured society on the planet. It's this great variety that helps give Civ IV the same alarmingly addictive quality its predecessors carried. And thanks to its many improvements, major and minor, and its greater emphasis on strategy over bean-counting, Civ IV isn't just as good as Civ has ever been...it's better.The Civ series' gameplay has several components, and almost every single one of them is improved in Civ IV. For instance, the series' combat system, which pits different military units against one another based on relative unit strength and technology, has been changed to a "strength" system that seems more intuitive. Units that are greatly advanced will have a clear advantage over more-primitive ones (to avoid the commonly cited, though rare, case of a tribal spearman defeating a tank in previous games), and military units in general have many different upgrades they can earn as they receive experience points and gain power levels. In addition, artillery has been tweaked to be much more useful. It can bombard targets, such as enemy cities, to lower defenses and to deal collateral damage to large "stacks" of armies. These improvements don't make battles all that much more complicated , but they do add more depth to combat, since both attackers and defenders have more factors to consider.