Recent reviews by lotherius

Fun time waster for the price.

Lots of "Google It Stupid" quest design. Gameplay mechanics are good but the quests and puzzles let it down. Basically it depends on vague objectives and hidden mechanics that you would have NO IDEA what to do unless you google it. You can blunder through, but you'll miss out on half the game and frequently get stuck on "Oh sorry you weren't supposed to be here yet" battles.

The game has so much promise, but it is let down by an arcane UI with lots of undocumented and unexplained gotchas. Almost every single step of learning the game requires intense googling with cryptic and incomplete answers. The tutorial doesn't explain many of the game basics and assumptions.

A lot of things just do NOT work intuitively or as expected. For example, you turn off permadeath? No biggy, the game will make sure to destroy certain items for you such as power cells, so you can end up deadlocked anyway and dying over and over, with no alternative but to trash your multi-hour playthrough because you didn't "git gud" fast enough with no guidance.

Made a backup save manually to try something out? No problem, the game autosaves over your manual save to ensure that your carefully made backup save is blown away.

EDIT: I tried again, really did. Managed to get decently far into the gameplay, but sever lag spike issues have essentially made the game unplayable. It spends more time frozen than it does moving. This is apparently "normal" in this game. I don't understand how anyone plays it.

I have a 10900k, 96gb ram, ssd, rx 6800 xt video, etc. No reason it should be lagging whatsoever, let alone constantly stutter freezing.

Finally got it figured out and end up in combat? Managed to kill your enemies? No big deal, you'll die anyway because you bumped into a wall.

Buggy mess. Every update breaks more things than they fix. Constant "Hotfixes" as they try to patch up everything they broke with the last hotfix.

You'd think for a game that's several years old, has regular updates and several DLC, they would have bothered to even consider taking fixing bugs and testing updates seriously, but they don't.

Don't waste your money. As fun as the game might appear, it is a buggy nightmare.

EDIT: The Spring 2024 Update and "DLC" is a joke. Done with this game. Wasted my money. Not going to waste any more.

Original November 2023 Review Below:

This game should not have been released. It has a lot bigger issues than the publicized performance.

The graphics glitch out often, showing distant LOD when viewing up close, and getting stuck on low-res textures when zoomed in. It is very barebones, missing a lot of features.

Map editor? Missing. Asset editor? Missing. Mods? Missing. All Delayed at least 2 months (if we are to believe it this time, as every prior estimate has been untrue).

Disasters? Missing.
Terrain editing costs? Not implemented, yet there is an item on the budgets for it.

Numerous items are broken or not fully implemented. You can bulldoze landfills because they didn't implement anything to stop you yet.

Numerous economic/demographic statistics have been shown to basically be faked rather than simulated. Many simulated statistics do not update properly, such as elementary school enrollment which just goes up and never goes down. You have to bulldoze and rebuild full elementaries to fix them. No amount of building more buildings will ever alleviate an overcrowded building as those numbers get "stuck".

Characters don't have LODs yet (per Paradox) which is why having your citizens enabled hurts performance so badly. Are you even kidding me? They haven't even made the LODs yet for one of the most common assets on the screen.

And overall the graphics ... just look bad from many angles. If you turn off the fog, and zoom just right, you can get a good view. But turn on dynamic resolution and everything goes wonky, so that's unusable. The fog makes everything washed out, but helps hide the fact that distant terrain outside your cities border looks like play-dough. Roads/trains/rivers, etc all end immediately at the border. This makes screenshots difficult as you have to angle the camera to hide all of that. Up close you realize that while the buildings are ultra-detailed, many other things are just .. bland.

I honestly don't know if this game will ever live up to CS1. If it does, it won't be any time soon and you should wait to buy it until that question is answered.

I could keep going.

Faithful to the D&D franchise, fun to play, and a good story. What more could you want. And miniature giant space hamsters.

Game does not properly support gamepad controller without use of 3rd party utilities, complex and arcane setup that is not documented, or plain doesn't work. Could not game gamepad operate. This is basic gaming 101. I will not use a keyboard to play a driving game. Period.

Concept is great, and it's pretty. But the UI and controls are horrible.

For the price, you can't beat it. Fun little game - though it has a few quirks. Again, for the price it's very good.

The Dartboard minigame however is very broken. The controls are not explained, and even once you "figure them out" it's incredibly hard to get the ragdoll to actually do anything proper, and getting anything other than last place is just a lot of "do it again stupid" restart restart restart garbage. This mode needs SERIOUS work, and currently is absolutely ZERO fun.

Even after several years, worth playing. Be prepared though if you have an ultrawide screen, you MUST mod to make it work, it will not support ultrawide out of the box due to hardcoded (braindead) resolutions.