13
Products
reviewed
586
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Recent reviews by Tiler

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Showing 1-10 of 13 entries
3 people found this review helpful
107.8 hrs on record (31.8 hrs at review time)
Early Access Review
they have an ingame option to give you alerts of your playtime. which can only be a sign of a guilty conscious on the devs part, like a meth dealer writing an addiction hotline number on their dime bags.

i turned on that option btw this game is a menace
Posted 8 March, 2023.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
1 person found this review funny
77.9 hrs on record (21.3 hrs at review time)
pigs can go ssssssssssss apparently, who knew
Posted 25 April, 2020.
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3 people found this review helpful
272.3 hrs on record (121.3 hrs at review time)
it is really good. the negative reviews are not about the game, but about people being mad about DLC. the DLC is also good, but the game is complete and fun without it.
Posted 10 February, 2017.
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27 people found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
43.9 hrs on record (24.4 hrs at review time)
This isn't a bad game. However, its a game that very much seems to resent being played.

Firstly, if you want to play this game, you must read this guide written by a dev ( ). It details some of the mechanics that are not covered well, or at all, in the ingame tutorial, or guide. or otherwise conveyed in any way by the game interface.

This game plays very similarly to Sid Meier's Gettysburg, and can be thought of as a spiritual successor. If you had played that game and enjoyed it, then you will probably find something to enjoy from this game as well. The game is a single "battle" that takes place over several engagements; battle setups are generally pre-arranged scenarios with some variance depending on what occurred in previous stages, and what stages are available later depends on what "victory points" are controlled by what side at the end of an engagement. Reinforcements are also scripted, with some variance on their arrival times; their actual arrival times and locations are not told to you, which can lead to your army being suddenly flanked if you're unlucky.

The AI is fairly competent, and benefits from the mechanics of the game being fairly forgiving towards the occasional boneheaded move that the AI is wont to try to do; units are fairly resilient, preferring to rout rather than die, and as the battle takes place over a series of "engagements" with escalating troop counts, earlier loses become irrelevant, as even when the AI loses over half its total forces, it will still easily match or outnumber your forces. However, even though the AI is frequently a selling point, its capacity to provide a challenge comes more from the nature of game mechanics than the AI being terribly clever. The AI also has a propensity to "know" gameplay rules that players are forced to guess at (the AI will never have difficulty managing its cannons, for instance, and is also able to "guess" where it can position its forces perfectly to avoid your own guns) and to know when, for instance, it will win a charge, when yet again, a player must estimate.

The AI gets to avoid much of the frustrations with a very fickle "Cover" mechanic, where a player must yet again guess at which terrain and facing will result in high cover based on the often tiny features on the map; a minute distance can result in a huge drop in unit cover, and the game's control scheme, based on drawing movement lines on a map, are deeply unsuited for these tiny adjustments you must make for each one of your units. Map features can also block LOS, which can at least be deduced by clicking on your unit, but a problem arises where a unit can fail to have a firing line while still having a clear LOS, leaving you deeply confused why a unit or cannon battery "refuses" to fire. There is no feature on the interface that tells you when or why this happens.

The AI also does not have to cope with one of the game's selling points, the "Unit Self Awareness", that causes your own units to move and act on their own, often to your great disadvantage. Although the idea of removing "micromanagement" is an attractive one, this "helpful" feature (than cannot be disabled except via a very limited "Hold" command) means that your units will often move on their own, often out of cover and into great danger, for a variety of undocumented reasons. Ironically, this means that, compared to games such as the Total War series, you will be forced to actively micromanage your units to a far greater degree, lest they decide to wander down your own battle lines while under fire, blocking the rest of your troops from shooting. Your units also very stubbornly will refuse to change targets once this "Self Awareness" AI decides what they are to shoot at.

Much of the game mechanics must be guessed at; knowing, for instance, what contributes to a units morale dropping (a incredibly critical feature) is not documented, only hinted at in a frustratingly coy manner. The advice from the development team seemed based on the idea that their game is highly realistic and much of their mechanics are "common sense"; suffice to say, I do not agree with this viewpoint, and much of the difficulty of the games involved coming to grips with unintuitive and undocumented elements, leading to an incredibly grating experience when things fail to behave as you'd expect, and leads to a huge "trial and error" element; given that the battles are so slow paced, combined with the strictness of the battle time limit, means having things go horribly wrong due to factors you can only guess at is rather unforgivable.

This is the primary reason I cannot recommend this game in good faith; although there is much to praise about this game, even in comparison to more popular titles, the constant issues of coping with a variety of frustrating design decisions and defects taints much of the experience, even in comparison to the game it borrows so much of its mechanics from, Sid Meier's Gettysburg. If you are willing to put with with a lot of frustration, there is a good tactical wargame worth playing here. But this is a game that does very, very little to win itself over in comparison to other series.
Posted 10 January, 2016. Last edited 10 January, 2016.
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1 person found this review helpful
10.6 hrs on record
a game about games.

okay, a really GOOD game about games.



like, really really really good.

really really, really really, really really really, REALLY. R. E. A. L. okay this is too much work just go play this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game. i really don't want to write more about it since it gives away ♥♥♥♥ thats best left ungiven but let me be clear, this is game that plays you and you will ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like it and wish for more.



seriously you ♥♥♥♥♥♥ play this game.



there's nothing else to say! there's nothing else to write! piss off!
Posted 22 September, 2015.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
62.8 hrs on record (35.9 hrs at review time)
played it on hard. it was hard. it was also _really_ good.
Posted 22 August, 2015.
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2 people found this review helpful
2 people found this review funny
0.4 hrs on record
do not select adventure mode
Posted 24 June, 2015.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
176.0 hrs on record (141.4 hrs at review time)
Rome 2 had a really bad release. Everyone acknowlages that.

It has been fixed, and it is now at the point where it is at last, at a point where nothing that truly be described as "broken", and is as playable as any other Total War title. It is, however, still the weakest Total War title to date, and along with Empire, a game that I would not recommend that someone buy without some major caveats.

Firstly, there was an effort done by the dev teams to "streamline" the game. The end result is that the UI hates the player, and little information is conveyed to them. Wanting to see what a unit actually does, or how any of the unit stats factor into their performance, requires you to dig around inside the ingame encyclopedia, which compared to the encyclopedia in Civilization, is a laggy, clunky interface where trying to find relevent information is a chore. Trying to actually learn the game from reading it is a fools errand.

The streamlining, however, stopped after gutting the UI. Most of the campaign mechanics have been redone, but are now done in a way that are byzantine, unintuitive, and boring, compared to previous titles. To even attempt to explain the basics of empire management invites pain.

For example, city management. Cities have slots for buildings, which give bonuses, but also give or remove food from your empire or happiness from a province. Provinces are groups of cities, predetermined arbitrarily. Buildings will add x happiness for y food, or give y food for x happiness, or give some minor benefit for a cost. Deciding what to build or upgrade means doing dull, fiddly math, and as your empire expands, the amount of +/- balancing increases. Failing to balance it, means the game kicks you in the shin with some punishment, such as rebellions, losing troops, or loss of income. Doing well, means not getting the shin kick. You're often stuck having to double check what you are building and where the numbers stand with your entire empire every turn, lest you forget you were building an arena in the ass end of gaul, tipping your entire empire into starvation on its completion.

Oh and if you leave a slot open for buildings in a city, slums can appear. They give little, and cost a lot of food. The game will not warn you when you might have slums appear; guaranteeing that they wont means having to manually look at every single city you own to make sure. Its a a mechanic seemingly designed to rub ♥♥♥♥ in your eyes for no real reason.

Income, meanwhile, flows readily once you grow enough, meaning that the balance of units themselves becomes pointless. Using gold to upgrade buildings is often incredibly cost-inefficiant as the bonuses they give are either negligible/unintuitive (1% boost to research, great, awesome, if only the game told you how much research you had, or how much you need, or really anything at all) or often utterly counterproductive (for instance, an economic building that will never pay for itself), so the gold is best put into getting the best units you can. This means that much of your factions unit roster is simply never worth bringing to a fight, as the strength of strictly superior units is counterbalanced solely by their cost, which you can easily meet. So all your armies will be fairly identical.

Which is great, because you will also be fighting the same armies over and over. Although there are indeed many units, most factions in the game draw from very similar unit pools. The factions in gaul are all gallic, those in greece to babylon are hoplites and pikemen, and those in germania are german. So if you say, play a german faction, you will fight germans, for many, many turns, as the map is huge, and full of identical minor factions. You will then fight either gauls, or greeks, and you will fight the same units over, and over, and over again. If you are lucky, you will fight Romans, but they tend to die off fairly quickly, murdered by some minor Gallic faction. Playing as Athens, you will fight greeks, and possibly you will go your whole game fighting nothing except greek armies.

Late game is an utter bore, as the AI is too incompetent to muster large empires to challenge you quickly enough. Playing to the victory conditions is largely a joyless endeavor as you steamroll over the map as your own color.

There is a chance, however, for civil war, due to the Politics system! The politics system is awful. There is nothing good to say about it. It is, however, yet another fiddly mechanic that demands you tinker with it every turn in a mind numbing fashion, and if you ignore it, you can get a civil war. Most of the mechanics of the system, the game refuses to bother explaining beyond the most basic terminology. I have never gotten a civil war despite ignoring politics every time I played, so, best of luck.

Now, it is still a Total War game. The core gameplay is just as enjoyable as always, although the unit balance is less interesting than it was in Shogun 2. However, most everything that marks this game as different from its predecessors renders it obtuse and frustrating to get into, especially if you are new to Total War games. Much like Empire, it can offer many hours of gameplay, but that gamplay won't be as enjoyable as other games in the series.
Posted 6 December, 2014. Last edited 6 December, 2014.
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2 people found this review helpful
59.2 hrs on record (59.2 hrs at review time)
one of those games which, on one hand, looks and plays rather crudely compared to other fps games, and yet, outshines them in that strange way you can't put a finger on. if you find yourself into this game despite the initial impression it grants, you will have an experience which many games offer, but few games can actually present, of being isolated, exploring a strange, dangerous wasteland, and yet somehow feeling an odd alien wonder to it all. it all comes together in a way that leaves a lasting impression, if you dont just end up hating it for being a janky hunk of ♥♥♥♥.
Posted 6 December, 2014.
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1 person found this review helpful
1,390.4 hrs on record (1,182.0 hrs at review time)
i used to hate mobas until i actually played one. now i hate mobas, hate myself, and have wasted 1000 hours in this horrible game.
Posted 6 December, 2014.
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Showing 1-10 of 13 entries