Recent reviews by Vizkos

Combat: Really good. Everything else: Meh to very bad.
The story in this game starts off very promising, then falls flat on its face. Its actually crazy how bad the story is; plot set up and then completely abandoned to a cluster F of an ending. The combat is very nice and reactive. The game performs well when in the wilderness, but as soon as you step into one of the major cities it is awful. Semi recent patches (September and October?) have made an attempt to improve the performance in cities, but the trade-off for better frames and latency is ATROCIOUS NPC pop-in.

I got the game shortly after launch and enjoyed it as a time filler, mainly for combat, but it is very tough to recommend it to anyone new to the series.

More infinite load screens after mission completions than successful load screens at this point. Spend 30 mins of your life on difficult missions, and got a good XP/Loot haul? Nope, game infinite loads and you essentially wasted time that you won't get back. Getting really old at this point when you don't even know if your progression will stick or not.

Time-gated item shops and barely any maps is cringe. Gameplay itself is decent, but there is barely anything to do. Progression feels empty. Game is very incomplete at this point, you'd think they'd have learned from Vermintide...

Hype, turned to disappointment, turned to faith, turned to more disappointment.

I wanted to like this game, I really did, but the missing features, combined with the total lack of performance, really killed it for me.

First the performance:

My PC:
Intel 4770K
2x 980TI SLI
16GB RAM

When the game first launched, I had to throttle my settings and limit the game to 60 FPS to prevent tons of hitching. When new drivers and a new patch were released, performance was worse. To this day there is tons o f texture pop-in and it is someone nausea inducing and infuriating.

Next the missing features: Do not watch the videos associated with the game. They are out of date and irrelevant. The fact of the matter is, NMS is a game where you go to a planet, farm some stuff, go to another planet, farm some stuff, etc. The "discoveries" you make and "upload" might get wiped and not reflected in the game. There is no multiplayer (it is not an MMO obviously), but it advertised you might run into other players, but... There are articles out there about how two players found the same planet, but were invisible to each other, environment conditions did not sync, etc.

All in all a huge let down, especially for $60.

If you like Sim City, you'll love this game.
If you liked Sim City 2000, 3000, 3000 Unlimited and 4, but hated the latest one, you'll love this game.

Cities Skylines is the most in depth city creation game that I've played to date. It has a lot of different options and unique ways to build your cities. I really like how there are many different road styles (1 way, 2 way, 6 lanes total, 4 lanes total, highways, etc), you can elevate them however you want, and apply different curves to them on a whim. I am especially appreciative of the ability to elevate roads, because my city already had 70k population once I realized I could do it, but once I started employing elevated roads, all of my traffic problems in two districts vanished.

The level of management you can have on your city is also in depth. You can mark districts in your city, using a click and drag to encompass buildings. The game also auto-assigns a name to each district, so you can give each one its own identity. You can also assign district specific policies, to address certain problems in that district, give it a boost, or exploit it for your treasury. For example, I had a residential district that kept having fires. I used the district tool to make a district, then enabled mandatory smoke detectors, and boom, fires less often, without affecting entire city policies.

Much like other city building games, you can have a friendly tourist environment to draw in visitors and $$$. You can also have high value industrial that export a lot of goods to boost your economy.

You can also build HUGE cities.

The features it is lacking (though they don't matter to me) are socializing aspects and day/night cycles. Personally, I don't care about the day/night cycles, because I typically run the game at the fastest speed, which would be annoying. I did, however, like the social aspects in Sim City 5, where you can build a region with friends, but I'll take a far superior solo experience over it any day..

Like everyone else has said, Cities Skylines is the city building game Sim City 5 should have been.

My one gripe with this game is the traffic system. There are many occasions where the traffic would all be in one lane, even though there are SIX lanes on the road (one way road). If they were all trying to turn right onto a one lane road, I'd understand that, but they are all either turning right onto a 3 lane road, or left onto a 3 lane road. Traffic also seems to employ a shortest path algorithm instead of a shortest time one, so if one route is shorter, then cars will take that instead of a one that is one more block, but much faster. Compounding on traffic not moving for emergency vehicles, emergency vehicles and cemetery hearses sometimes get stuck in the 1-lane problem, so that severely hinders response times. This is less of a problem with proper road layouts/mass transit (plagued me earlier like I noted), but still noticeable. I suspect it will be patched eventually.

Overall, definitely worth the money.

Bought this game on a summer sale, and if you did the same, you will not be disappointed.

For the Dynasty Warriors veterans out there, this game continues the upward climb back to goodness since the dastardly downfall that was Dynasty Warriors 6. For new players, this game offers interesting fighting gameplay mixed with you personifying a character in history.

PROS:
The weapon system - Each character has proficiencies with different weapons, ranging from 1 to 4 stars. You are able to use whatever weapons you want as your primary and secondary weapons, but it would be wise to stick to the ones you are proficient with. Personally I find this system to not be worth much and stick to the weapon meant for the character (their 'Ex' weapon). So, for example, Lu Bu, I use two helberds, one for primary and another for secondary.
The levels - I like how they decided to add Hypothetical routes to the story modes. Granted these maps are largely "aww lets all come together and win yayyyyy" maps, but one could take the historical value in that these battles would happen should the path have been taken in history.

The rest of the gameplay is typical of Warriors games and can be watched on youtube for 5 minutes and understand what its about.

CONS:
Graphics - Why they decided to port the PS3 graphics of the game is beyond me, and whoever decided to do that should be slapped. Having played this on the PC and then seeing the PS4 graphics, it drove me to buy the PS4 version of the game and replay my progress there. One caveat that I had not considered was that my game looked much better if I turned the brightness settings all the way up! Strange... Graphics comparison videos are available online.
Character design - While I, and many others appreciate a dub to accompany the subs with the option to go back to Japanese voices, some of the English voices are just terrible. For example; Jiang Wei's voice is bad, and Sun Quan's is not well done but tolerable. There are also token words that get very old very fast, such as Jiang Wei/Liu Chan's overuse of the word "Benevolence". I also dislike how they are morphing many of the characters to look like they are ripped right out of an anime, but I guess we have the otaku kawaii culture that Koei caters to in Japan to thank for that.


All in all: For the new fan a suitable game to try, if you can get it on sale. For those that have been playing for awhile, give it a shot.

Given my experiences with this game, I would be hard-pressed to reccomend this game to friends, especially with the current asking price. Firefly Studios rigorously distanced themselves from Stronghold 2 when promoting this game, and rightfully so, the former being a disaster of a game that tried too many things with too little map space. Firefly also touted this game as being a return to its roots, Stronghold and Stronghold Crusader. Unfortunately, while the same level of complexity in the game was restored, many gameplay elements leave something to be desired and are lacking.

My first con for this game is the maps. My favorite maps in Stronghold Crusader were: I can't remember the names, but hopefully anyone reading this that has played Crusader knows which ones I am talking about and then continue with my review: 1) The map in which one player is in the center on top of a hill with all grassland. There is then one player in the top left, and two in each of the other corners. Grasslands are available in the corners and along the sides for a bit. 2) A Friend Indeed I think its called, 6 player map, you start within screen width of your ally, most of the map is grass. And a map where it is all a dense forest with little to no Iron, 6 players. As one might gather, I have a preference for maps in which food is plentiful but one would be hardpressed to defend the vast area, allowing one to strategically build casles rather than strategically defend a small scarce (or non-existant) farm land. Stronghold Crusader 2 does not offer this option. All of the maps have either small amounts of grass, no grass at all, or have it right next to your castle so you cannot build walls without surrounding the grass or building over it. The fact this game does not offer maps such as that dissappoints me. The game tries to make it easier to gather food by increasing each facilities output (I only need 4 wheat farms and 4 bakeries to support a population of 60), but that takes away from the experience for me.

Next, they tweaked how castle defences work, for the worse I think. One cannot build castle artillery on towers anymore, instead requiring wooden towers that are placed over straight sections of wall. This would be tolerable, if one could place these wooden towers diagonally, since I favor walls on the corners of my castles. In Crusader I would favor the strategy of building many large towers on the corners of my castle and stack them with balistae. Not possible here. They also changed how military units work: removing the need for leather armor on macemen, requiring metal armor for crossbowmen, etc. Not a big deal maybe, but these small things made the strategy for me. On top of that, a small group of bowmen can kill a similar number of knights' horses, nutralizing the appeal of mounted knights...I would expect horses in armor to have smilar health to a pikeman, not fall to ~2-3 arrows.

The "estate" system they have decided to keep is also an irk of mine. You cannot build walls in areas that are not assigned to an estate. In some cases, this means you cannot build walls 10 squares away from your castle. (~1/4 screen width). This is very annoying.

They also decided to keep the same graphics of Stronghold 2, Legends, 3, etc. I find it ironic that the sprites of Stronghold Crusader look better than these new graphics. I also find it semi annoying that there is no unit collision. Lack of collision kills the strategy of melee on melee formations and blockading. I recall numeroues times I defeated opponents that had a superior melee force by just running a majority of my force past their units, since that is an exploit with this system.

Ok one might say, I should expect changes in a sequel to balance the gameplay. I don't think these things are balanced. I find them to be a pain (balistae towers) and unrealistic (unarmored macemen). Because of all of these unfavorable changes, the lack of map variation, etc, I cannot reccomend this game to any of my friends.

Before I progress into my review, note that I have a "high end" machine, so lag is not an issue for me. I have read numerous reviews of people experiencing graphical performance issues, crashes, etc (more notably with AMD cards). I have experienced none of those. I am able to play on Ultra with no noticeable frame-rate loss and no muddy controls (perhaps I'm used to the mouse movement of the latest Splinter-Cell games?).
Specs:
Intel Core i7-4770K
EVGA GTX 780
GSkill Ripjaws 16GB
256GB Samsung Pro SSD

After suffering from some initial woes on launch day (I was one of the lucky ones to get into UPlay after ~15 minutes of waiting) this game is pretty fun. The story is a bit slow to start out, but once it gets going (probably about 3 hours in if you're playing the story only) it starts to get interesting. I often found myself getting distracted by all of the side missions that are detected by your "profiler" in the game. In retrospect, doing an insane amount of these side missions has overprepared me for the story, because the story seems easy compared to some of the side missions I had to do. That being said, most of the side missions have a typical formula of:
Pick one (kill one/two guys in a convoy of cars and kill/escape the others, identify a target in a restricted area full of enemies via cameras of your phone - melee said target - then kill/escape the others in the area, take a series of cars from point A to point B while taking minimal damage, identify target in a restricted area - hack them to get access code - use access code to hack a mainframe and be presented with a puzzle - kill others or sneak out of area, among others). Each one presents its own challenge due to the environment you are in, but they are all essentially the same -- what I've come to expect from side mission filler. The main story missions have similar mechanics, but tend to be more difficult. Where the game really shines in my opinion is the hacking that is present. Say I elect to take the route of escaping enemies in one of the scenarios above, I don't have to just outrun them, I can also take them out by raising metal bars, messing with stop lights, etc. The variability in the typical open-world gameplay is an intriguing twist.

Hacking people is fun too. I can be a bit of a money grubber, so I often found myself running around hacking people, getting money, and upgrading to the best weapons early. This is a small novelty that adds to the overall experience. If you hack the wrong target though, you get a bounty placed on you. This bounty is then updated on Ubisoft's servers, and people who are looking for an online target to hack will be invading your game more often the higher your bounty is. When this happens, you get a notification and then attempt to find the hacker in a set area. You also have the ability to invade other's games if you so choose. This experience is exhilarating, because people are quite unique in their play styles to evade you. Hide in a car? Blend in with some random people talking? Run around a building to avoid your target as they approach? The possibilities are endless for evasion and how to locate someone trying to evade. I recall one time where I found my hacker, he tried to flee in a car, I raised metal beams to stop him, he tries to reverse and take off, but there is only one way out straight back, I take my time lining up a sniper shot while he backs up, and boom. There are other activities too that I have not messed around with yet.

The driving initially caught me off guard and is pretty wonky. For example, some cars accelerate very fast and spin out, its hard to turn, etc. I initially thought "jeez GTA's handing is way better", but I then started to realize that, in a way, Watch Dogs' handing is more realistic. Duh if you slam on the gas you'll spin out, of course if you try to turn while speeding without slowing down greatly you'll fail miserably, etc. So while its different and takes getting used to, doesn't mean its bad. One complaint I have is that it takes an insane amount of damage to ruin a car, and there is a skill that can further increase the damage required. So I can be as reckless as I want while driving, but at the same time, I cannot ram people's cars into submission.

All in all the game is pretty fun, and it seems to take a special kind of person to like it. Unfortunately, I feel too many people are comparing it directly to Grand Theft Auto V and judging it based on UPlay's woes, graphical prowess downsizing, among other reasons. I would expect it to be obvious that if you go into this game expecting GTA, you'd be slightly disappointed. I have been guilty of this in the past personally; I started playing Dishonored expecting Assassin's Creed, and when it was pretty different, I stopped playing the game for awhile, but eventually went back to it and appreciated it for what it was.

You can run around as dinosaurs and kill people...whats not to love?! A fun get-me-up when playing with friends after buying the game on sale, but gets stale fast due to the fact that hardly anybodty plays it :(

Really good F2P game that takes a unique turn on Third Person Shooters and MMOs. The customization is truly amazing. Customize your body appearance, clothing, car, music theme that people hear when you kill them, make your own songs, etc. Main complaints are that theres not enough content to drive the game and the matching system is flawed. You can either do PVP in arenas where a team of Enforcers goes against a team of Criminals, or do missions in one of two mission district instances, which leads to grinding, as the tasks are repetetive. Upon doing these missions, you run the chance of getting matched up against people who greatly outclass you, better perks, weapons, etc. Think of it like four level 20s trying to take on one, two or three level 60s in WoW, along with three, two, or one level 20. GREAT social and competetive game once you level up in that you can customize everything, show it off, and PVP, but leveling up proves to be more frustrating at times rather than fun.