Recent reviews by steez

So, long story short, it's actually a really interesting and great concept. The game in my opinion is actually at an acceptable level at the moment, but it's far from what it should or could be. There are many minor factors that have huge importance when creating a grand strategy that are simply just no where to be found. I know I have little hours in the game so far, but as someone who is rather extra involved in the grand strategy genre, I can confidently say I navigated the depths of the systems within the game in a reasonably short time (Yes, it is that small of a game).

I am just going to start with the "Needs Improvement" items, most of these are in the quality of life department, but are important nonetheless.

- The UI is very difficult to navigate at times. There are some quality of life tooltips just straight up missing or feel difficult to find. I should be able to quickly see how much money per cycle is incoming and outgoing for the entirety of my empire. The diplomacy window is meeehhh. Sometimes you write something incorrectly in a letter and you need to exit the window entirely to reset (this was not 100% of the time strangely enough).

- The battles happen too suddenly. I understand that it somewhat falls in-line with the theme of the game, but the fact that they are very instantaneous means you have very little time to process your next moves, or even catch the battle incoming without spamming the pause button. I want an awesome sound queue, map icon, or SOMETHING to indicate a battle is happening on the map, and I want to be able to look at it as its happening and think about what I can do next, or if I can send another reinforcing army.

- Same thing with sieges/conquering. Most of the time, you issue the order for a siege and your general moves, but then just stands there, with no clear length of time in days you can expect him to be there for, and then after an unclear amount of time, poof the city is yours and you need to get a report from your general. Even if its not entirely accurate, an overhead tooltip timer of estimated days until siege is complete would do wonders.

- It can be difficult to spot your Generals/Spies on the grand campaign map. An easy fix for this would be to just add a "generals and agents tab" on the side of the screen that you can click the unit name and camera pans over. (just like total war). I should be able to do the same with cities and towns.

- Some better map animations for the movements of armies would be cool, and help a lot with the legibility issues of movement on the campaign map. Currently, each unit has a speed in X km / day. What is the point of this if I can't even see the unit properly move? I understand its about the messenger in truth, but its kind of weird to have the messenger move all willy nilly and then the army just teleports to where it's supposed to go? Seeing an enemy army slowly creep its way into your lands visually would evoke much more emotion an urgency from the player.

- Notifications need to be better implemented. I understand that correspondences are where youre supposed to look, but with how many updates come through in such a short time, there needs to be some small popup tooltips or something that I can click to instantly open the immediate correspondence.

Overall, the game just needs some fine tuning to ensure it doesn't force the player to spam the pause button to respond to everything happening at once. I know it sounds like I've just harped on the game for not including features that are present in its bigger brother grand strategies, but those features are pretty commonplace among the genre nowadays and asking players to revert to a game that is missing what has been a staple for so many years is just not realistic. the game needs to be easy to play and read to retain a playerbase.

Otherwise from all the minor issues the game has, it definitely is a niche and interesting premise/theme, something very unique to almost every grand strategy before it. The systems DO work in cohesion, and it actually functions. That is already a step ahead of most indie released grand strategy titles. On release day, the game is in a "reasonable" state. Once they polish up and improve quality of life features, I can see this title being one that players constantly return to for random playthroughs just to experience the game systems once more. Not only that, but the price point is far more than just reasonable, it'll be an absolute bang for your buck. For these reasons, I am actually RECOMMENDING the game.

Game tries to blow up my laptop. 9/10

To be serious its not bad for early access but it needs to be better optimized and gameplay needs a lot of tweaks.

This game took my DmC Virginity.

12/10

9.99999/10

This game is amazing, holy Gayben! The remaining 0.000001 score is the fact that the game requires a bit of experience and practice before you know where to go and when. Everything else is a solid 11/10 would bang.