Recent reviews by Wenchbane

This is one of the finest games I've ever played, for a number of reasons. The main ones are:

1. Well-scaled factory sim. The game lulls you in with the perfect amount of simplicity at the start to make every added bit of complexity make sense in the larger scale of the game. Often factory sims drop you in, teach you a couple of things, then let you get overwhelmed with the scale of the project in front of you. I felt this particularly with Dyson Sphere Project - the game tells you what the endgame is, then gets you started on a scale that seems so impossibly small you don't feel like you're making progress. It's not a bad game at all, but I think the drip-feeding of ever-increasing complexity, depth, and scale make Satisfactory a real winner in this regard.

2. The first person perspective is a terrific choice. Often the top-down/isometric view factory sims seem too remote, too abstract. Being on the ground and walking around your factory makes it really rewarding to indulge in...

3. your architectural dreams. The game is all about systems planning, throughput efficiency, and logistics, and you can indulge in all of that without ever dressing up your factories or making them look nice. But if you like designing a brutalist monolith as an homage to Arne Jacobsen then this is possible. The game has plenty of scope for aesthetic sculpting.

Drawbacks: not many, but I do hope they will be implementing some story elements, and the game can feel a bit lonely and empty of purpose as a result of this I think. Purpose is provided by your own ambitions and by finessing your production lines to achieve the next level of complexity - this is fine, but it would be nice to have some flavour or unexpected reasons to adapt production from time to time. Special projects or the like.

Tough one. I didn't play this game when it first came out, and a lot of what's been said about Imperator condemned it in that format. I can only comment on what I've played, with the game in its current state with the couple of DLCs that exist now.

Main positives:

Flavour: This period and its cultures feel nicely brought to life by the beautiful map.

Ambition: Conquering the ancient world was an incredible feat in real human history, and the chance to relive that ambition feels brought to life by the game's intricate weaving of civilizations.

Religion: I like the religion usefulness in the game. Adds a nice layer of flavour and competition between civs other than more obvious ways.

Characters: So nice to have characters be more meaningful than the abstractions you get in EU4. That's a big part of this game and I like it a lot.

Overall I am enjoying the game. If you like EU4 and CK3, there is a game to be enjoyed here that has its own flavour. It incorporates the map painting and troop management of EU4 with a CK3-'lite' character management process. I think there is enough flavour to building different civilizations/empires/kingdoms/tribes/nations, allowing you to manage the kind of society you are building and its culture. However. There are caveats. This game could be so much more. The engine has so much potential.

Problems:

Trade, particularly its UI: Oh my God. When you click Import on the Province window, WHY does the import page COVER your province window so you can't see what you're trading already? Yes you can move the window off to the side, but you have to do this every time you click Import - and micromanaging imports is a big part of the game. I would say the micromanagement of the trade could be fine as a game element but the UI makes it so frustrating. It is not stated clearly in a province what is produced and what is traded, and the UI doesn't let you control limits for what you'd like to trade away at a province level. Every request has to be evaluated manually if you want to make sure it doesn't affect you in a way you didn't want. You can choose to protect your capital bonus, but it should be more layered than this. Also it's not clear what stacks and what doesn't. The UI should make it really clear what's affecting your province's stats, and I feel the information is hidden beneath the surface of the game and not spelled out sufficiently. Trade is not explained in any meaningful way by the game's tutorial in my opinion.

Map painting: Eventually adding territory to your rule can feel a bit monotonous. There is little variation to dealing with the different flavours of land you are conquering. They get a malus from differing culture or religion until assimilated sufficiently, but there's nothing unique about dealing with the people of Britannia compared to the people of Syria.

War menus: EU4 - a that deserves no praise for its UI - is positively crystalline in its clarity compared to this. The consequences of war decs are not made sufficiently clear by the menus/maps, with troop numbers and quality of the varying allies not specified by the war dec menus. You have to search manually for each nation you want to take on. It doesn't add challenge, it just makes the process fiddly and unattractive for the user.

Political intrigue and loyalty: This mechanic feels shallow. I like the idea of factions and families and dynasties vying for political prestige and gain. The way it's implemented currently feels like fighting an RNG machine with little insight into why things are the way they are. Why is a particular dude so disloyal? The game makes it very hard to see their motivation. They're a general who has won your entire campaign, and they feel unrewarded? The game should make this clear to the player and then give them tools to manage it. Instead of management in a prescient way (ie planning your actions to form a cohesive plan) it feels like constant mini crisis management (ie short term plastering of little fiddly nuisances). And then the resolutions feel shallow. A famous family feels slighted because they have insufficient official positions - so I spawn a supply train donkey regiment that I will use in campaigns as a refuelling shuttle, and put one of their low-pip morons in charge of it and suddenly they are content that their ambitions are fulfilled. A governer becomes disloyal, so I bribe him, and it goes away. The cost of the resulting corruption is hard to feel, its impact is not spelled out by any of the game's surface level interfaces. You'd have to dig to see how it's impacting your efficiency. And because the game gives you a poor understanding of the competing interests and no obvious tools to manage them ahead of time, this, and other quick fixes with some shallow cost, is the only way you can fix these problems for the most part. So it stops feeling like intrigue, and like a mini game inspired by the EULA licence acceptance process - ie "Click click click - go away I want to get back to the real game".

Finally why can't my troops feed on an ally's tile if they let me? A diplo option? My army got stranded on the far side of a fortress, trapped in an ally's land that I was defending - and they couldn't even feed me to stop me dying whilst I defended them at death's door.

Classic 4X with a lot more national/cultural depth than I'm used to, which I'm enjoying exploring.

'Alien' was a masterpiece of a film particularly noted for its beautiful, detailed, and believable set and character/prop design. Two separate teams designed the human portions and the alien portions, the latter drawing on the works of HR Giger to create one of the most memorable and vividly terrifying creatures in the scifi or horror genres. 'Aliens' was the schlocky '80s James Cameron (Terminator 2, Avatar) sequel, and its sets were flimsy and largely uninteresting, but the practical effects were cool and the expansion of the universe was welcome. One setting that was fascinating was the space station that Ripley is brought to at the beginning of the film. After that the film is just about the selfish nature of humans, their ability to form bonds in adverse circumstances, and about shooting aliens to get out. If you want an experience of this latter film, this game is not the one for you.

A lot of people say it's odd that they can't shoot the alien. This is super irritating to read. This game is a homage to the original film, one of the most important pieces of cinema of all time. The fact that the alien is an insurmountable foe is the point here. You should be scared of it. You should avoid it where possible.

This game revels in the above mentioned cinematic triumphs, and does so whilst giving a unique and gripping first person campaign. It plays unlike anything else, with clever scenes, puzzles, and a groundbreaking AI system. If you love the films, you must love this game.

A modern classic. Can't believe I still play this all these years after release, and it feels fresh as the day it came out of 'early access'.

Active dev, appropriate updates corresponding to the direction the game needs to go to be complete and also the short-term needs of the current community in EA, a vibrant modding community, great stories from other players on Reddit, and human leather hats. Great. Can't wait for the next Alpha state.