Recent reviews by Swift

I love not being able to play the game that I paid for because of social club errors and external launchers.

Pure and simple, this game is a masterclass in supply chain management which balances realism with not being overly complex. This is clearly a passion project for the devs, and it shows in their attention to detail. I'm excited to see what will come in future updates.

This game is unfinished and should be early access, and if you look at the company's other offerings, it's clear this is their modus operandi; they release a new "dynasty" game every 1-2 years and it's the exact same thing with a new skin.

All of the following game elements serve absolutely NO PURPOSE:
- Upgraded food
- Taverns
- Alcohol
- Most potions/poisons
- Villager mood

Design wise, there are two critical problems with the progression in the game that severely hamper playability:
- Villager cooks are agonizingly slow, meaning you need to cook most of the food by hand. It's absolutely insane how slow they are.
- It is not possible to automate copper and tin despite them being used by the smithy very early in the production chain, which means you need to mine completely by hand. When you do unlock the mine, you can immediately transition to iron, defeating the entire point of having copper and tin limited to the mine.

Yeah.

The physics are way too overtuned. Driving a pickup truck up a hill or through some light mud shouldn't feel like ice skating. I get that this is the game's entire gimmick but the driving model punishes situations that should be relatively effortless and is unrealistic at best.

My 4 cylinder Honda hatchback handles mud better than the trucks in this game.

It's just not interesting or challenging. You spend a lot of time waiting around for stuff to happen. There also seems to be almost no tutorial at all, and I'm not sure I would have known how to play if I didn't have experience building computers. Finally, the camera controls are just awkward.

I owned this game on physical CD and am still coming back to it 15 years later. The definitive and best Total War game of all time. Shout out to the modding community, which is still thriving and continuing to give this game life.

The game concept is good and it's amazing to play with friends.

However, I'm leaving this review to protest how willingly disjoint the developers are from their own community. Despite the developers being active on both Reddit and Discord, they continually push out janky updates with obvious flaws, and then immediately backpedal them within days of release. The most recent update has issues that resulted in pretty universal outcry on their social media platforms, and all it would have taken was garnering community feedback or conducting focus groups on the proposed patch notes before pushing the release. Now we're stuck waiting for the devs to backpedal their changes (they have already said they will on Reddit), which could have been avoided had they done even a little bit of testing beforehand.

The worst part is that Steam literally supports version branching for testers. They could have just as easily pushed this update to people who opted in (AS THEY HAVE IN THE PAST) and gotten the same feedback that they are now getting.

Negative review for bad, amateurish development practices.

Update: December 6, 2021.

And here we are almost four months later and the same bugs still exist. Fast travel is still completely busted on several of the maps and has been for the better part of a year. This is simply unacceptable. The best part is that this garbage dev has released yet more DLC in the past four months. Hilariously sad.


Original review: August 13, 2021.

The developers constantly break the game with buggy patches and then go on vacation for months at a time. I just came back to the game after a year and have encountered nothing but problems that have apparently been present for several months now.

I have had a ticket open with the developer for 60(!) days because I have been unable to play the game due to the "download loop" bug that has plagued this game's forced launcher since release. Of my 130 hours of "play" time, less than 15 is actual gameplay, and the rest is staring it failing to install over and over.

This forced launcher also means you can't play other games while it downloads.

One of the "fixes" that the developer suggests is to use an unofficial third party tool called NetLimiter to deliberately throttle your internet connection to 2MB/s (to download multiple hundreds of GBs). NetLimiter has a free trial and after that requires payment. Incredible.

The other "fix" is to Disable Windows Auto-Tuning for your network, which Microsoft's Network team has said is a bad idea because it will slow your internet connection down. There is a blog post by them linked on various forums called "Networking Blog - An Update on Windows TCP AutoTuningLevel." If you search for these keywords then find the link on a forum, put the link into WebArchive or Google Cache to read it.

This problem is a SERVER SIDE issue where one of the content servers is forcefully rejecting downloads when clients try to go over 2MB/s. The reason that this problem affects only a handful of users is because of how IP routing/hopping works, and people in certain geographical areas are being routed to this particular problematic server.

I have been kicking and screaming in support tickets to the developer for months now and have received nothing but bad will and canned responses. I have offered to traceroute the connection and help single out the problematic server's IP address to figure out which server is causing this issue, but their support system is absolutely useless, and they refuse to understand that I will not BUY an unofficial third party tool to play this game, or artificially slow my internet connection by disabling Windows features that are meant to stay enabled.

This experience has been unbelievable from a consumer standpoint and even now Steam has offered me a refund that I will be accepting.