Recent reviews by zaaephod

Makes a dot on my screen so I can see my cursor in Phasmo. That's all I can say :)

Surprisingly good, considering the price. If you liked The Settlers, this should be right up your alley. The only thing missing is combat. There's a nice long tech tree to work through, with all kinds of buildings and items. I can't say it'll be a thousands-of-hours game for me, but it has certainly been fun.

Excellent game, love the atmosphere and the detail, very immersive.

Controls take some time to learn, and you have to advance far enough into the game to be able to do "real" building, but it's been lots of fun with a couple friends in multiplayer!

I got the game during a half price sale, and I'm glad for that, because for me, I can't see it being a long term game. That said, I've had fun with it. If you like these sorts of tycoon games, I think this one is worth it, on sale.

The bad:
Once you get past the learning curve of when and how to balance your staff for each store in your mall, the game becomes pretty repetitive, clicking through the same menus over and over. I feel the UI could be more friendly, with less clicking involved.

The good:
The customers and clerks with their giant heads and oddball faces are entertaining. FPS never became an issue for me, the game seems well optimized. Mods are good, and add to the somewhat limited decor items, as well as new product lines.

Wishes:
The sales events are interesting, but there's room for lots more. An option to have disasters enabled like fires, flooding, car wrecks, or Black Friday riots would be nice :)

A copy + paste for store layouts or even partial selections of things like shelving would be great.

There are a couple ways to apply what products you want on which shelves, but I'd love to see an option to drag a box around a group of shelves, and apply a product to all of them at once through the tree style menu. I know this can be done through the assign menu, but then there's no way to sort only 'sporting goods' for example, you have to sift through a long list of products that can be put on a shelf, and try to remember what items fall into that category.

Very fun game all around. I played through the game with three friends in multiplayer, and we'll likely play it again on a harder difficulty.

EDIT: Now over 1,000 hours, I can hardly believe it!

I noticed I'm just short of 500 hours of play time. I don't think I've ever left a review before, but I feel at this point, this game deserves one before I load it up and play some more. Finally getting a new system stable and reliable after hours of tweaking and testing causes me to pester my wife about what I built and how it all works, even though she doesn't play the game or understand what I'm so excitedly telling her. It's ok, she's patient.

Speaking of being patient, this game requires a good bit of patience and preserverence. In the beginning, you will fail. Embrace it, learn from your mistakes, and try again. The graphics are interesting and fun, but the true depths of this game can't be reached in 50 or 100 hours. At 500 hours I'm still learning, making mistakes, and figuring out how to solve problems that I most likely created myself.

Pros:
It's hard.
It's always being updated.

Cons:
It's hard.