Recent reviews by Agent Washington

Buy it for a friend!

Now!

Yesterday even...

Edit: Sony relented! The game is back to being good again!

Hey Sony, please fire whoever signed off on that.

Actually, get rid of that whole department.

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Previous anti-sony-bs review.

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Poor Arrowhead Game Studios made a near-perfect game, and then Sony decided to make their third-party integration mandatory, and now I want a refund. Shame. Hope the devs already got their bonuses. Now how do I get a refund for this thing which they changed after I bought it?

TL:DR, the Voice Acting is so bad I'm on the verge of returning the game, and the fact they have better-voice-acting dlc for sale day one, while otherwise having garbage-teir voice acting in the base game, is deeply insulting to the customer.

Maintenance Report: The Universal Translator is Busted, for some reason every Alien Dialect comes out sounding like a bored accountant with strange and unexplainable emphases and inflections in their sentences. This is extremely jarring upon entering communications with the Romulans, Cardassians, and Klingons, all of whom lack any gravitas or force in their lines.

Recommend Repair by gutting all vocal files and replacing them with lines read by actual voice actors, rather than whatever programmers happened to be around that week. Also, buy a mic that won't max out while recording voice lines in a calm neutral tone. And definitely, definitely, don't release a game with garbage-tier voice acting, and then sell better-voices dlc, or even your most exited Paradox-StarTrek fans will get reasonably extremely upset.

It's fun some of the time but nothing will enrage you more than their garbage rebellion mechanic, which not only virtually always ensures your lands will rise up once you take them, but also does so by creating a new rebel nation without spawning any armies, thus taking whatever forces you had on hand, and exiling them, while also transferring any forts in the area to the enemy.

How do you fight against this? So far as I can tell, you can't. Every conquest is a never ending cascade of frustrating engagements.

What's even more frustrating is that they did a good job of this in every other game. But somehow, this one they messed up on.

To be honest, I was entirely satisifed with it's progress as it was being made. Fairly reguar updates adding lots of new content and improvements... and then out of nowhere they "launched" straight from Alpha. I have to imagine that this was a hard choice on their part, and left a lot of hard working devs sad that they'd never get to see the finished product. It can be fun, but it's not nearly finished and super buggy, so while I apprecate the effort, I couldn't advise spending more than 5 dollars on it max.

Civ:BE is a grapefruit. Difficult to get into, annoying to get stuff out of, and ultimately less satisfying then most anything else you could have spent the time doing.