Recent reviews by Mai

The game presents you with an evolutionary progression tree, each element of which is unlocked with in-game currency, entropy. You click to get entropy, buy new creatures with it so they generate it for you while you're away, buy upgrades for these creatures to increase their output and so on. Unlike other idle games, it has a very high replay value and interesting style.

Up to a certain point the game was an extremely aesthetically pleasing experience. Simple textures and graphics are done very decently. With the emergence of apes and more complex humanoid and tech models the aesthetic component, though, deteriorates to a point where you find yourself avoiding screens that present newly unlocked 3D trophies. This element, as insignificant as it is when it comes to actual gameplay, makes the game feel extremely bleak. And it's so disappointing because from the very beginning the game greets you with highly pleasing visuals.

Apart from weird models and graphics in mid-late stages of the game another aesthetic nitpick I can think of is that the tech tree, a place where you spend most of your time in, doesn't look as cool as it could. It's hard to precisely explain why. UI scale, its transparency, shape and color, the tree's background and some other very tiny elements factor in, contributing to this weird early 2010s look. It's a minor complaint, but still something that bugged me a tiny bit for some time while playing.

Gameplay wise, some prices and conditions to unlock evolutionary tree branches seem too high, making it so by the end of the run you can have rovers exploring the surface of the Moon, while fish in Earth's oceans still doesn't have gills or amino acids didn't form more complex chains, vital for human existence.

Cell to Singularity, despite complaints above, is still one of the best idle games. You can play it both on the PC and mobile device and microtransactions are very optional. It offers amazing and unique experience on one hand, while significantly and strangely lacking quality on the other. In my opinion, the former still outweighs the latter.

Stellaris is definetely the most unique grand strategy game developed by the Paradox. Not a big fan of sci-fi setting myself, I found it extremely enjoyable both as a story-telling game and political grand strategy. Space exploration, anomalies, events, unique empires and so much more elements contribute to its depth and flavor at least in early and middle stages of your compaign. Since you have to forge your own empire from nothing, seeing it develop and grow into a galactic power is more enjoyable than in any other Paradox titles.

As of now, late stages of the game could feel a bit empty and extremely slow if your hardware isn't good enough. Those are my 2 main issues with Stellaris but both are not really present in a multiplayer session if you're able to participate in one. There also are numerous small things like size of the UI, its color, galaxy texture, empires having the same colors on a political map and so much more subjective and insignificant things that you can solve personally with Steam workshop as you wish.

The game just got released and as it always happens with young Paradox titles, seems a little repetitive after a couple of runs. For now it still has some performance issues and just overall lack of content, but I still quite enjoyed it. I really liked how combining various mechanics from different games came out, warfare system is great and the map is just amazing. Despite all problems, I believe the game is in good hands and will greatly improve over time. With a large number of already existing mechanics, hopefully future DLCs will not be a money grabbing tool and will actually add ssufficient amount of content.

If it wasn't Paradox Development Studio, I would have probably left a negative review. But frankly, every single game they release would qualify for that. I didn't really list problems Imperator has because there are plenty of other reviews that do so. Perhaps I'm reviewing a product to come, but that's how mafia works.

If you want to play a full game, you should probably wait for DLCs or at least some patches to roll out. This game has a great potential.