Recent reviews by kinggimped

Longtime Civ player here, all the way back to the original Civ on Amiga. Yes, I'm old. But I've also played a lot of Civ. It's one of my favourite video game series ever. So take what you want from that. Perhaps I'm biased, but I'm certainly not uninformed.

Modern Civ games tend to have difficult releases; a large part of the criticism is often entitled gamers annoyed at specific changes they didn't like. They gripe about these for a while but by the time the first DLC arrives there is broad tacit agreement that yes, the newest Civ game is the best one. In Civ 5 the big gameplay change was you could no longer stack multiple units on the same tile. People whined about this, claiming they'd stay with Civ 4 instead, then they got used to the new mechanic and now it's hard to imagine them ever going back to stacked units. Similarly, Civ 6 introduced city districts, which were pretty negatively received until players got used to the new mechanic, and it quickly became a staple.

At first glance, the release of Civ 7 seems no different - under the hood, the gameplay guts of Civ 7 are pretty decent. It's a bit of a new direction for the series, focusing more on player narrative and having them forge their own civ's legacy rather than just following the core biases and abilities of the civ you choose at the beginning of the game. Most of this is directly ripped from Humankind, especially in how you can pivot to another civilisation at the end of an era. Ideas like this aren't original, but this is the first time we've seen them in Civ.

The new diplomacy system is neater. The game's graphics look pretty enough. But - and here's my single biggest gripe - **the UI is absolutely abysmal**. Seriously. There's no excuse for a studio who has made this many 4X games to put out a AAA release with this UI. It's not just annoying to use and ugly beyond reason, but there's SO much information lacking. Information that you need to make thoughtful decisions. Even in today's industry where it is commonplace for half-baked early access games to be released, using your most dedicated playerbase as your free beta testers, it honestly shocks me that they released the game in this state.

Here's a good example - you can build 2 city buildings in each urban hex/tile. When a new era begins you are given a whole host of new building types to build in your cities. If you choose to build one in a hex that already has 2 buildings in it, it will replace one of those buildings. But not only do you, the player, not get to decide which building gets replaced, there is no way to view bonuses the buildings in a hex give after the building has been built. So not only are you not given the power to make the decision, you're not even given the *information* that you could use to make that decision.

The entire game feels like it was made without ever hiring or even consulting a UI/UX team. And unfortunately, in a game like Civ, where you are entirely dependent on the reams of statistics and data offered in order to make informed decisions on what to work on next, this just doesn't fly. It's so bad that after only a week it has essentially rendered the game unplayable for me. I have no desire to fire up Civ 7 for just "one more turn", because the interface and user experience is THAT shoddy. Playing Civ 6 without the CQUI mod feels poor compared with the modded experience, but it's still playable and the information you need is still there, though maybe buried behind 3 or 4 clicks. In Civ 7 they simply do not give you the information you need, and even when they do it's often inaccurate.

Forgetting the staggeringly awful UI for a moment, the game is also lacking many basic features that previous Civ games all had on release. There's no hot seat multiplayer (multiple players playing on the same machine). You can't choose to be on a team with another player in a multiplayer game. You can't change the names of your cities, or even the colour of your Civ. There's no automated exploration for scouts or other units. The tech tree has been pared down to a single, smaller tech tree for each age, removing a lot of its complexity and branching paths and making your technological route through each age very linear. The animations that showed when you completed a wonder used to have many frames, where upon completion you were rewarded with a little animation of it being assembled brick by brick; that's now been reduced to 3-4 static frames, as if it were a Civilisation game from the 1990s. The AI still sucks - nothing new there, but would have been nice to see a tiny bit of improvement in that area.

Also, and this may just be me not being used to the new age mechanics, but I found the fact that at the end of each age you *lose most of your army* and *all your cities besides your capital go back to becoming basic settlements*... well, I thought that was kind of terrible, and felt far more like a punishment than a reward (especially considering I finished the age way ahead of my competitors).

I understand it's likely a balance mechanic but from the player's point of view it's a very sudden change and kind of a huge disruption, after a period of slow and progressive development to suddenly have your armies disappear and most of your buildings rendered obsolete in a single turn. It's jarring, and like the awful UI, gives you the feeling that you don't really have control over your civ's choices. Which, in a game like Civ, where the intention is for you to mete out orders from the sky like a deity... is not great.

Personally, I'll be waiting for at least a major UI overhaul before I jump in again - whether that's provided by an official patch or a mod, I don't really mind. But I won't be going back to this game until then, and there's no way I could recommend this game at full price. I mean, the game is *playable*, sure. But personally I don't think studios should be able to release half-finished games like this and charge such a huge amount of money for it, especially when they are doing the usual price gouging for the Deluxe and Founders editions.

With all the preorders, Firaxis now know they can release a half-finished, shoddily made game and fully get away with it. This same exact thing happened with EA and the Sim City franchise, and the result of it was the death of Maxis and the world's best-loved city building video game franchises. It would be sad to see Firaxis and Civilisation go the same route, but that appears to be what we're heading towards. Previously I've always laughed and rolled my eyes at all the entitled gamers whining about new mechanics in the latest Civ release, but this is the first time I've ever not been able to grit my teeth and bear with it. I really hope they spend some time fixing the issues with the base game, rather than cynically pushing out paid DLC as I'm sure their gameplan is.

At this point, I absolutely regret my purchase of Civ 7. Whether Firaxis will actually listen to players and bother to overhaul the UI or just continue to collect profits from a half-finished game is yet to be seen. I hope one day I'll have a reason to change this review to positive.

Decent game, but the PSN account linking thing is absolutely braindead - massively compromising my account security for absolutely no practical gain. It's sad that the death of this game's playerbase will likely be due to a braindead corporate decision than any fault of the game/developers.

It's a fun game but I can't recommend búllshit business practices like this. They had a surprise hit and Sony got greedy.

is good

A valiant return to form for Company of Heroes, far closer to the glory of CoH than the direction that CoH2 went in. While there is balancing to be done, bugs to iron out, and more battlegroups and maps to be added, the core of what is here is vintage CoH.

The original Company of Heroes was one of my favourite games ever, with the sequel being something of a disappointment. CoH3 feels like a love letter to the original, with the focus returning to what made the first game so great. Four armies, plenty of unit variety, and a nice mixture of classic and new units and abilities.

My main criticism would be that the theatre of war style campaign map for the Italian single player campaign is, for want of a better term, a bit shít. It does the job of setting up the next mission and giving the player some kind of choice in how they want to tackle their objectives, but it's basic, buggy, and clicking "end turn" can take forever in the mid to late-game, with no information relayed to the player during enemy turns. But once you're out of the campaign map and into a battle, whether it's a skirmish or a scripted mission, the core game shines once again.

OK, look. I have an embarrassing number of hours in Vermintide 2. Here's my verdict after around 150 hours of Darktide.

The core game of Darktide... is really good, OK? I don't think there's much argument about that. The melee combat is meaty and impactful. The gunplay is decent. The teamwork elements work well. There's a good amount of enemy variety and the visuals are stunning. The maps are huge and sprawling. The grimdark setting is beautifully rendered. Sure, there are a few bugs, it's not well optimised yet, and it's going to take a while to balance all the weapons so that there aren't just one or two standouts for each class, but *the thing that you spend most of your time doing works absolutely solidly*, and it's fun as hell.

Oh, and the soundtrack absolutely *SLAPS*. Jesper Kyd knocked this one out of the park. It doesn't just fit the atmosphere of the game, it straight up supplies a lot of it.

The rest of the experience, sadly, seems like a bit of an afterthought. The game right now is not finished. I know it's common for games nowadays to be released in an unfinished state but honestly, this one feels particularly poor. The most egregious element for me is that they released the game with the real money cosmetic shop fully completed and available, but with no crafting system, which is apparently coming "soon".

Oh, and of course all of the unpaid skins - earned via levelling up and completing arbitrary challenges ("penances") are utterly boring. If you want any kind of interesting outfit or any clothing outside the colour palettes of black or red, you're going to have to spend real money.

There is no story - do not expect an epic 40K narrative with twists and turns like they promised during development - the grimdark 40k setting and background lore is all you get. You're an escaped convict. Prove your worth by doing missions. OK, you're doing missions but we still don't trust you. OK, you did a few more missions and we trust you now. That's it. That's the whole story.

Most crucially, there really is no endgame, besides checking the store every hour for a better roll on a weapon, then running missions to slowly collect crafting materials to upgrade them to the highest tier. Beyond hitting level 30 there's no reward, there's no higher difficulty or special mission types. Just improving your gear, which given the fact that the crafting system is still MIA, at this point you are entirely reliant on RNG. After levelling all four classes to lvl30, there is very little in the current game to bring you back, and honestly that's bordering on sheer heresy.

Unlike Vermintide 2, where collecting scriptures and grimoires would reward you with higher tier rewards, in Darktide everything is random. Higher difficulties net you more XP (pointless once you hit lvl30) and money (pointless as you'll end up accruing so much as you play), but otherwise no further reward over doing a low difficulty run.

There's no crossplay between PC and consoles, which is understandable. But there's also no crossplay between PC players on Steam and those on Gamepass. That is an insane oversight.

Stability wise, I personally have only experienced a handful of crashes. But some people have had technical and server issues with the game that make it border on unplayable, and that's not really acceptable.

All the lessons learned from the 2 or so years to get Vermintide 2 into its current, eminently playable state, appear to have been forgotten here. It's almost as if a totally different team were responsible for Darktide.

Valid criticism aside, this is still a "recommend" for me, because the core game is a gem and there's a lot of potential here. My hope is that they eventually get it to a better place as they did with Vermintide 2. Because if they can fix the crafting system and technical issues, add some more content (more classes, maybe another difficulty level?), and hopefully tweak the reward system so that it rewards skill... this will be an excellent game.

Sadly, unless you're chomping at the bit to praise the Emperor, I'd wait for a sale.

I honestly have not had this much fun playing a video game in YEARS. Amazing to think it's still in early access considering it has more depth and replayability than most full releases these days. This game is clearly a labour of love by the developers - it's coming up on 10 years since the first release, and all that time investment has resulted in a hand-crafted world that feels incredibly detailed and encourages exploration. Buildings are not copy-pasted, each one has been lovingly designed and it shows.

The game has a steep learning curve and a VERY unforgiving game world. But that just makes those little victories over your dire circumstances that much more satisfying. They tell you at the start of every run that "this is how you died" - you are expected to die and learn from your mistakes. This introduces an interesting roguelike element that makes the game nearly endlessly replayable.

Absolutely brilliant experience, whether playing single player or multiplayer. I've thrown 50 hours into it in a very short time and I genuinely feel like I'm still just scratching the surface.

Great game. Good luck out there!

I stand with Ukraine.

Also, this is a pretty good game. It's certainly challenging. But it's atmospheric, has some interesting procedural storytelling, and forces you into some interesting decision making.

It's a wonderful game and a decent port, though nothing beats the experience of playing the actual board game.

Bit of a shame it's taking them so long to add the European and Oceania expansions, and that they'll be paid DLC, but hey.

Great game, well worth learning.

I really wanted to like this game, but they just made it too difficult.

Actually, it's not that it's too difficult, they just purposefully made food so scarce in the early game that it's a completely frustrating and pointless experience. You don't have the resources at the start of the game to trap animals or store meat, so you'd think that going on expeditions to nearby houses and farms would be a good way to find enough food to survive. Nope. From what must have been at least 30-40 expeditions across multiple games, I only ever found about 3 food rations. Plenty of wood, nails, bottled water, and all the other things you need to survive and continue teching up in the game, but no food rations. When you do find them, it's always just one or two, which is generally much less food than was used while they were out on the expedition in the first place.

This is obviously a purposeful choice by the developers in order to make the early game arbitrarily difficult and disguise just how repetitive the core gameplay loops are. If you recruit another person in one of the many recruitment encounters the game throws at you in the first hour or so, it just gives you another mouth to feed, and so hastens your inevitable death from starvation.

Expeditions are not only rigged to give you no food (despite the map telling you that a place is good for finding food), but if you don't arbitrarily answer the radio calls that come in during the expedition they will literally just ignore the place you sent them to and return to the shelter completely empty-handed. It seems that once they leave the shelter, having mapped out exactly what places they're supposed to check out while out there, they need to radio home to ask permission for whether they should actually check the place out, as well as whether or not to loot the place of useful items. This is a completely pointless addition from the devs, and just adds to the frustration of the expedition mechanic.

It's also pretty stupid that children are just reskinned adults; they are capable of doing all of the same jobs adults do, including fixing a broken power generator, excavating extra rooms for your shelter, and going out alone into a nuclear wasteland to look for resources. I get that the devs were going for the "family" theme; maybe they originally intended children to play a different role from adults but clearly that didn't pan out.

If you want to play a game like this, try This War of Mine, a much older game where literally everything is done a lot better. That game is punishing because it's actually difficult and forces you to make difficult decisions; not because the game is arbitrarily cheating you out of being able to gather its most primary resource.

Sheltered is a good concept and I quite like the presentation, but I can't really recommend any game where the developers have purposefully put up a frustrating barrier so early in the game just to disguise the weaknesses that become apparent as soon as you progress past that roadblock. It doesn't make for fun or immersive gameplay, it just renders starting a new game pointless 90% of the time, because you'll last about a week on the initial rations, and even if you're constantly making expeditions to places that the map marks as a safe bet for finding food, you return with everything but.

After around 40 hours and 3 completed campaigns I feel like I'm ready to deliver a verdict on this one.

You can't really talk about this game WITHOUT the obvious comparisons to Civilization games, but I believe that even with the huge experience and success Firaxis have with the Civ series, it's a massive compliment to Amplitude that their first real attempt at a 4X game of this scale is begging for those comparisons. So many people will talk about exactly how the mechanics of the game work and how they differ or are the same as Civ, but as a long time player of Civ I think it'd be better to talk about what I really *liked* about Humankind.

I have literally thousands of combined hours in Civ, from as far back as the original Civ game on Amiga, all the way through to Civ 6. People may not agree with my opinions, but they're not coming outta nowhere; it's based on more than a few years of "just one more turn"ing late into the night.

In short, while this game is not currently in a position to topple Civ from the 4X throne, this is a fantastic start, and a decently playable 4X game. If you've never played a 4X game, this might actually be a pretty good place to start. It's a little quirky in a few areas, but the systems and mechanics that exist in the game are fairly simple to understand for new players, compared with the dizzying array of intertwined systems in Civ6+DLCs.

The first thing I liked about Humankind over Civ was that rather than picking a specific civ and playing to its strengths era to era, you are instead an unnamed nomadic tribe who forges their own path through the game by reflecting the *qualities* of a different culture in each era, progress towards which is earned by succeeding at the game's primary objectives (increasing population, generating influence, researching techs, killing enemies, etc.). So what you end up getting is very much *your own civilisation*. You are really forging your OWN path through the game, rather than picking a strategy at the start of the game that plays into the powers and biases of your chosen civ and following that route for the entire campaign.

For example, if I were playing Trajan (Rome) in Civ 6, I'd be expected to play a very expansionist, militaristic style because of the huge advantages Trajan holds in those fields. You wouldn't even attempt to pursue a diplomatic or religious victory, because your civ gives you no bonuses towards those. You're locked in to an expansionist, militaristic play style by virtue of your chosen civ.

But in Humankind, I can do what I want - which includes pivoting to another playstyle when the new era comes around, to complement parts of my empire that are lacking, to go with a militaristic civ to fight back against an aggressive enemy, or to go with a builder or agrarian civ to capitalise on the availability of new territories. You forge a legacy inspired by many different real-world civilisations, but your overall civilisation is still firmly moulded by you, not the game.

The second thing I vastly preferred over Civ was the combat. Combat in Civ is a pretty basic affair - one unit per tile, an auto-resolved AI battle that takes into account the units that are fighting, the terrain and environment around them, and any flanking or general bonuses/debuffs that might apply.

In Humankind, the battles feature multiple units, they take place across turns (with 3 combat rounds per turn), and you can use the terrain to your advantage in ways that Civ cannot even dream of. This is a slightly improved version of the combat system used in Amplitude's earlier fantasy 4X game Endless Legend, and it works brilliantly here. Careful placement of your cities has never been so important, since hills and mountain passes give you positional advantages that mimic the defensive strongholds of real life. Being able to bring in reinforcements during long, multi-turn sieges brings a tactical battle level closer to the Total War series than Civ, which seems incredibly simplistic by comparison.

The third thing is that personally I like how the "one outpost per territory" system works in Humankind, over the free-for-all way Civilization works. In Civ you can plop down a city wherever you want so long as it isn't within 4 tiles of another city, which always results in AI players founding cities right on your borders and in any gaps you left for expansion, throughout the game.

Having said all that, in general Humankind fails to capture the breadth and array of gameplay mechanics and content. Civ has more factions, more units, more wonders, more techs; and more importantly, more carefully intertwined gameplay mechanics and systems. While the combat in Humankind feels much more substantial than that of Civ 6, the sheer array of... THINGS in Civ means that, in my opinion, it maintains its throne as the king of 4X games.

Humankind isn't faultless in its minimalism - some systems in the game may as well not really exist right now with the way they're implemented (I'm looking at you, religion). The tech tree is largely uninspired and very static with 4 'paths', but it ends up very linear. The civics and affinities need more content and a lot of rebalancing. Map generation and opponent players' AI needs a lot of work to make games more interesting and balanced.

Also, multiplayer seems like it was an afterthought; different game speeds don't really play out properly, alliances with other players don't really do much (you can't even use allied reinforcements in battle, which seems a major oversight), and there are issues with allied victory conditions (as in, you have to defeat your ally to win the game, rather than winning together). This is all, hopefully, stuff that can be fixed in later updates.

With some balancing, improvements to AI, and new content in the form of expansions, DLCs, and mods, this is going to give Civilization a real run for its money. Civ 6 right now, with the Rise & Fall and Gathering Storm DLCs, is a tough game to beat. At the moment, Humankind has a nice balance between its systems but with relatively few intricacies, relatively few units, and relatively similar civilisations. That's to be expected at such an early point in its lifespan, but what is there is very solid.

Every future introduction of a new mechanic, a new resource, a new civilisation, a new unit, a new building/district, etc. is going to be difficult to manage. You can already break the game fairly easily in some ways - certain civs and buildings can snowball to ridiculous levels. I won my most recent game by researching every tech in the game at turn 200 of a 300-turn game. My civilisation had giant space lasers, satellites, and a nascent Mars colony while others were still working out what gunpowder was all about. So yes, balancing this game going forward is going to be a tough task, but it's something that Civ eventually got the hang of and I hope Amplitude do the same with Humankind.

It's certainly not a perfect game, but it's playable in its current state - something that nowadays not every game can boast that on release, sadly. I'm really enjoying my time with this game and would heartily recommend it as a 4X timesink. Time will tell whether future updates and expansions turn this into a true Civ beater, but for a first real attempt Amplitude should be proud of their success.

Many of the negative reviews on here are obsessing over very specific things that will likely be improved or fixed in future updates; don't forget that every Civ game was also poorly received on release and it was only through content/balance updates and expansions that the game won players over. I imagine many of the people leaving these incredibly negative reviews for this game are the same who vowed they would never play Civ 6 as Civ 5 was so superior; who are the same who vowed they would never play Civ 5 as Civ 4 was so superior, etc.

Edit: devs need to pull their thumbs out and improve the game, it's been a while now.