Recent reviews by MTesseracT

Quite a few years ago I had bought this game on origin and I thought it would be fun to 100% it on steam for completeness sake as I enjoyed it back in the day and have managed to complete all other battlefield games offered on steam.

So let's start with the most obvious: the multiplayer of the game is mostly dead and you should only get it if you are interested in the single player campaign.

If you intend to buy this game for the single player campaign, go ahead, it's quite unique and plenty of people enjoy it. It's very different from the other games in the series with its episodic structure and unique setting.

The multiplayer mode, unfortunately, is mostly inactive. During peak times on weekends, you might find a few populated servers, but overall, the player count is very low (a handful of players during off-peak hours) and maybe 2 servers with sufficient players for a proper experience during peak hours in the weekend. This makes it challenging to enjoy the multiplayer experience fully.

For achievement hunters, there are significant challenges. Four achievements require 10,000 kills with each class, which is a daunting task given the low player count. Additionally, the "Test Your Mettle" achievement is no longer obtainable due to the shutdown of competitive servers in 2023-2024.

After completing this game I want to share some of my feelings about it. My "not recommended" rating comes with a reason and I'll also explain why I feel comfortable giving it, as I did enjoy the game and quite happily 100%'ed it (okay, I'm at 98%, but if you look why it makes more sense, in a week it should be 100%).
Throughout my play-through I've found quite a few flaws and inconsistencies that I feel take away from this game's enjoyment. From what I've understood, the second game improves on a bunch of these criticisms, so I feel fine giving a negative rating for this one and recommend people to give the second game a try as it's A LOT like the first game, but more polished and it looks like they have taken a bunch of the criticisms of this game seriously.

So let's start with the positives:
- You indeed do a lot of farming initially
- It's nice to see your farm and wealth grow
- Unlocks feel pretty good
- Playing it together is quite fun
- It's kind of cute and laid back.
- Being able to visit other people's farms is also really nice, some of the other farms are really crazy and inspirational.
- Farm customization is pretty fun, though a little limited. (they all kind of tend to look the same-ish since it's the same few handfuls of decorations, especially without the DLC's).

Then for the negatives:
- As you get further into the game, a considerable amount of your time is spent trying to sell off your produce since the selling is so slow. When you have to sell 9000 fish per 100, with an animation that takes a few seconds each, that means you are going to be spending like 5-10 minutes just sitting around with the spacebar pressed, and that is just for 1 resource.
- Income/costs of items are sort of opaque. You have no idea what sometimes might be draining your money halfway through the progression once you unlock the farm hands. Animals can cost a lot of money out of seemingly nowhere and you will be wondering while your money is close to 0. So an overview that shows the in/out for specific resources would be really nice.
- Animations are very slow. This especially becomes very obvious and annoying in the later stages of the game when you try to get some crops planted for which you only have 1 season, like chard and .
- Farmhands do not work while you are not in the game. This led me to just leaving the computer on way more than I probably should have, while letting my guy idle somewhere on the map. Personally as a developer, it seems fairly simple to simulate what they have done during your absence.
- Farmhands have zero customizability. I'd like to be able to prioritize certain tasks for example, like having them deal with plants that will not be pick-able anymore next season. They also really lack utility when it comes to normal crops. They are kind of slow and do not re-plant. To add to the previous point, it would be nice to "pause" a farmhand or tell if they should work while you are not in the game.
- Quests suck. They arguably scale negatively as they become harder and more tedious as you level and unlock stuff, while their rewards become increasingly irrelevant. Like everything you've unlocked can be asked by the quest, with many of the late game unlocks having rather long timers. It's kind of silly that a quest that has you gather 20 animal drops, 10 early game flowers and 30 of some crop with a 30-120 min timer will yield the same 30 ribbons and 3000 exp as a quest that requires you to plant 650 graffiti cauliflowers (that have a 2 day timer).
Even for ribbons quests become completely irrelevant. There's like 4 or more other sources that are all probably faster than doing most of the quests. Jobs, gift shops and honey/candy stands all are much more effective for getting these. Quests are also quite repetitive and feel like filler content, as what you need to get for them has nothing to do with the quest.
So I think quests are quite fundamentally badly designed and there's really no reason to do them beyond a certain point.
- The "premium" resources (jam, cheese and honey) seem a bit weird, they don't really seem to mean anything and by the time you need them, you will likely just buy them using gold nuggets as that's easier to get and less time-gated than these resources themselves seem to be, as you get gold nuggets very often in the end game. Also, there seems to be little reason why they cannot have a 'fast' building to sell them at, like the other resources. Also it's strange that there's no wine resource considering there are a few grape and wine centered resource buildings.
- Storage is kinda crappy too. The late-game storage (Warehouse) offers way too little storage, with a timer that makes it very slow to level it (why does this one have a timer anyways? You get like 50 storage per upgrade and it's not like it has any sort of exponential growth effect that the boost buildings have), so everyone just ends up with filling a massive area of their map with red barns, as they are just 250 diamonds for 2x more storage than an upgrade to the warehouse (and they don't have you wait 20 minutes before you can add another 50 storage).

Mixed feelings on this game, as it's certainly not perfect, but honestly... for the 5 euros I paid for it, it's decent and more than worth the money. It's just not worth a full price. Despite its issues, I've had a fair bit of fun while playing it trying to complete it.

Also to EA: Get back to your more user friendly anti cheat (one that also is compatible with linux), since I've encountered more cheaters in this game than I have in BF3, BF4 and BF1 combined, and it certainly does not have more players than those.

It's pretty good, it plays fluently and is generally quite fun. I did however find it strange they didn't add freelook to it. Though I wouldn't recommend playing through it immediately after playing through Doom I and 2 that are packaged with doom 3 BFG. (unless you want a breath of fresh air because of the contrast)

It's a fun game and I enjoyed most of it, but not without its faults.

First of all: Don't mistake my game time for actual time played. I got about 15 hours out of the full game with all secrets, expansions, golden skulls, etc. The other 115 hours are from trying to get the 66 hour achievement. Apparently the game uses a little secret in-game timer that only runs when you are playing the levels... would have been good to know, then I wouldn't have first waited 50+ hours on the main menu and then after it didn't work, I waited another 50+ hours in the first level, idling. Alas, none of that matters really.

But as for the game itself:

The story is barebones at best, but I don't think anyone is going into this with great expectations for the story. It works for its purpose and gives a bit of a thematic excuse for why it's in hell and there's metal playing.
The background music is really quite good and has some nice metal tracks that I found myself enjoying quite a bit. The rest of the sound is... okay. There's a few quips here and there which are okay. Bit Serious Sam-esque

If you are ultra competitive you will probably enjoy trying to get golden skulls and maybe high scores, some of the high scores are very suspicious though. However, there are some levels that have thresholds you need to get under that are simply not very fun to do (looking at you, B2) and might take you a few hundred tries.

For the most part, the game works fine, but there are some places here and there where movement doesn't feel... great. The jumping is a bit floaty and the hitboxes tend to not quite work as you'd expect sometimes, *especially* on moving level geometry, as if you keep some strange momentum that doesn't make much sense when you have air control and that you cannot cancel without landing. Jumping on slopes, especially if they move is almost random in terms of whether you will get some air or fall right into whatever is behind them.
I'm not sure if I'd recommend the expansions. The physics issues seem a lot more pronounced there and some levels really depend on you getting lucky with them, especially if you want to get those golden skulls.

Finally: Something I did quite enjoy was the great amount of secrets in the game. They range from collectibles to hidden QR codes (one of which reinforces my belief they took a bit of inspiration from Serious Sam) to other stuff. It's genuinely fun to find some of these accidentally.

In the end I did spend more time in the game than I had planned to, but the 15 hours I actively played I did enjoy a fair bit. :) Get the game on a sale though as it is kind of dated, and it's on sale often.

I'm a bit conflicted on if this should be recommended or not. But I feel I should because this definitive edition remaster does exactly what it sets out to do, but I want to touch on some things for people considering buying this game.

On one hand, it is probably the most faithful way to get the original AOE1 experience. It really seems to do a good job at that. So if a faithful remaster of your childhood game is what you are after and you want very little, minus the graphics, to be changed about it, this is the game you want to play.

On the other hand, the approach that the developers in remastering this title makes it quite clear why AOE1 is not the game that has most active players currently of the AOE series. When you are used to other games (AOE2 notably), it becomes painfully clear how badly some of the old engine features and design choices have aged.

Some of the most notable things are:
- Units are a royal pain to control. They don't form formations and unless you micro the absolute hell out of them, they will get stuck on just about everything (including each other) and not stay together.
- The AI plays in a very bizarre way, clearly having superhuman control over all of its units. For that reason assume you will never hit certain units with melee or long distance weapons (outside of bows) without getting them stuck in a corner or otherwise prevented from dodging/running away.
- Everything was made for 50 unit games. Back then, this was probably a choice made to give everyone, even those with really bad hardware, a chance to experience all of the game. Nowadays it makes everything feel very small scale and you feel like you are constantly interrupted by the pop cap limit.
- Many of the campaign missions frankly kind of suck. They come in a few flavours, but most commonly it feels like the equivalent of being stuck in the castle age in campaigns in AOE2. On occasion they have been remastered if the original was just too bad. Also there seem to be a few unintentional changes in the way the AI behaves that makes it even harder than intended. "The Holy Man" seems to be an example of this, becoming nearly unbeatable, while the rest of the Babylon campaign is easy.
- The balance is just non-existent.
- Many bits of QoL are missing.

If you are hoping for a smooth gameplay experience, steer clear and just play the Rise of Rome DLC for AOE2:DE. It seems to improve on things even further, without all of the jank present in this. After getting the achievements for this, I will likely not play it again, though I have enjoyed parts of the experience.

Really fun and addictive.
In my eyes it feels a bit like a combination of Hotline Miami and Cruelty Squad, but with a very unique identity. Exploring the maps is quite fun, since there's funny details hidden all over the place. The soundtrack is great and adds a nice rhythm to the gameplay, never expected to encounter hardcore/hardstyle in a video game like that. The game is also really polished.

My only criticism might be that some of the challenges are just too obnoxious. As in: they take long to set up and there's a good chance you end up losing the run in an instant near the end.

Used to really enjoy this, played it both on steam and on the EA client but now I cannot anymore since they just dropped support for linux out of laziness. Apparently because they are not capable of implementing anticheat that does not behave like spyware.

Great game with a lot to do. It has a pretty strong community with many regulars that have thousands of hours in the game.

There's a few little bugs which I suspect will be ironed out soon enough, but other than that it has been a great and very nostalgic experience.