Recent reviews by Sword_of_Light

One of the more bizarre incidents of the war happened when PACT forces somehow made their way to Canada. Records of the original operation have mostly been lost, but it is believed that a small group of Polish and East German mechanized infantry were dispatched from Murmansk with the objective of securing either the oil transfer stations in Scapa Flow, or disrupting NATO operations in Iceland.

Whatever the reason, and why they found themselves instead on the shores of New Brunswick, may never be known. But on that day PACT forces found themselves deep in NATO territory with no way home. It was fight or die, and the Great North War had begun.

Frantic 9-1-1 calls reporting the PACT landing were initially dismissed, perhaps not unreasonably, as fear mongering and paranoia. One commander, however, saw this as an opportunity to conduct some ad hoc exercises. The 4th Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group had been waiting in perpetual reserve for the day they would be sent to Europe, their morale and cohesion decaying each day they sat on their hands. So it was that when it was confirmed that PACT forces had indeed landed in Canada, a single mechanized brigade was already constructing fortifications in preparation.

The following battle was extremely one-sided, with PACT forces taking heavy losses. By 13:00 of the first day they had entirely withdrawn from their assault, without taking any territory from the 4th. By 18:00, Canadian reconnaissance had begun probing northward into what they suspected was occupied territory. PACT forces were on alert and it was thought initially that very little intel had been gathered by NATO. But signal discipline was poor among PACT forces, allowing the Canadian forces to identify numerous high value targets. Throughout the night they launched several deep penetrating raids, targeting command and control centers, and the irreplaceable long range rocket batteries.

After that night's disaster, PACT commanders knew they had to break though this resistance before further NATO forces could be scrambled to the region, overwhelming them by sheer numbers. Launching a morning attack, this time with fresh Polish troops, they hoped to break through Canadian lines, gaining access to the TransCanadian Highway and beyond it, the shipyards in St. Johns. Maybe then they could find a way to friendly territory, or at least have a bargaining chip. Initial attempts were fruitless against another well prepared defense, but by afternoon, Polish forces had gathered enough forces to break through several first line areas.

Unfortunately for them, the Royal Canadian Air Force had spent a sleepless night preparing for daylight operations, which they unleashed with a fury. By 22:00, the Canadians had gone on the attack, each assault heralded by rocket sorties from a seemingly endless supply of RCAF fighter-bombers. By morning PACT forces had been pushed back to the beach, and with no defensive positions left, they surrendered en masse to the victorious Canadians. As quickly as it had begun, the first invasion of North America by a European power in two centuries had come to a close.

I received this game years ago as a gift, when it was just into early access. It was pretty crude at the time, and I stopped playing pretty quick, but it did show a great deal of promise. If it maintained a good development path, it might even be good enough to rival Silent Hunter III, which is my gold standard for U-boat games.

I'm pleased to say it has not only met its promise, it's exceeded SHIII in several ways. The game is a management sim, but it's also a solid sub game, starting at the Polish Tragedy in 1939. But because it's a sim, it's not just about putting torpedoes into unsuspecting Allied freighters - there are realistic side-quests, like scouting AA emplacements, or rendering aid to a damaged ally. Retrieving the code box from a sunken U-boat before the Allies get their hands on it, a priority for Allied command that would lead to the real world mission to capture U-505 in 1944 - so points for historic realism.

As there is a great deal of management, this game seems much harder than SHIII, you're dealing with the frailties of the human psyche, as well as destroyers and the RAF. I've just sent one of my sailors to a courts marshal for striking a fellow sailor - prior to reaching the mission area. Break while a destroyer is hunting us, that's one thing. Crack someones jaw because he said something about your girl, you get off my boat in handcuffs.

Part of the difficulty is that you start with a Type IIa, and there's not a whole lot you can do with one of those. In 9 patrols, I've only sunk two merchants, and one was at dock at the time. If there is a failing to the game, it's that the complexity isn't always explained. The ship I sunk at dock was because I'd failed to understand how one recons AA positions; in frustration I surfaced (after bouncing 5 torpedoes due to unreliable early-war detonators) and machinegunned the docked vessel. After some searching in the manual (when's the last time you had to do that?) I did eventually figure it out. Upgrades and tech trees are also difficult to climb, since you need the nebulous Reputation points, but it's also early in the game, so that's to be expected.

Small concerns. Other than that, it plays smoothly, without a lot of the pathing glitchyness of SHIII - don't want to spend 15 minutes on x45 getting out of port? There's a teleport button that gets you into the open sea. Graphics are not ultra-high, because that's not really the point, and overall glitchless as far as I can see.

This is a definite thumbs up.

So this is a solid dungeon-builder, with a fair amount of content - although I'll contradict that later - decent production values and some solid voice acting.

You build a hospital, but in space. And with each weird alien, you get weird alien maladies, and weird science to fix them. The humor is very Hitchhiker's Guide, and never takes itself too seriously. The learning curve is so easy that I was surprised when it got difficult, though it never got hard enough that I couldn't win a given scenario. A few patients died here and there, not so many that it got grim, but enough that there were real stakes for not being efficient enough.

It has a few bugs, but none that break the game, and the devs have been good about patch early, patch often. Honestly, if I have a complaint, it's that it's too short, having beaten the campaign in 25 hours. I could have done with a chapter 12 where you defeat the Big Bads or somesuch, but that's less of a complaint about content and more a statement of enjoyment. I wanted it to keep going, and I'll have to settle for a second play-through.

All in all, a definite thumbs-up.

My benchmark for Civil War games is 1997's Civil War Generals 2. CWG2 you fought both major and minor battles of the Civil War, with some flexibility with things like advantage and armament.

Grand Tactician Civil War scores well against this benchmark.

At its core, it's an alt-history game in the vein of the Hearts of Iron series, and simulates everything from economic development and industry, down to the fine details of battle. There are no set battles, rather, you form your units, maneuver across the continental US - from the Indian Territories to the East - and battles occur organically.

The management side is quite complex, and overwhelming, if I'm honest. Mostly I put it to AI mode, that's what your cabinet is for, after all, and only step in when they're going to do something stupid like print more money. This can be tricky, since it's not straight forward to, say, put rifles in the hands of your troops - as opposed to those Springfield muskets half my damn troops have. But the complexity adds to a sense of realism. Does not shy away from the reality that the war was fought over the rights of states to determine whether you could own other human beings as property.

The battles are more straight forward, brigade level, top-down maneuvering on old-timey maps that can be zoomed in to a 3-D rendering. This is where the game has both its strength and weakness. The maps are detailed and historically accurate, so you're fighting on the banks of Bull Run, or with the hill overlooking Chattanooga to your backs.

The problem is there are a finite number of maps - so you often find yourself fighting the 3rd Battle of Manassas, and and 2nd Battle of South Southeast Bull Run, and oh, here we are on that map again because the battle is happening somewhere in Virginia. While I do like the historical maps for historic battles, to be truly great, this game needs a map generator.

Bugless as far as I can tell, and the music is annoyingly catchy. Many games I've left with I Wish I Were In Dixie for drum and fife or Oh Susanna for twangy banjo playing in my head.

Solid tactical and strategic wargame.

There's no reason any sane human would find this as enjoyable is it is. It is a difficult, dangerous, lethal job that you start off doing in massive debt. It's as if I've got my student loans back, although Lynx Corp. isn't quite as brutal as Navient. I'm sure student loan companies are envious of Lynx Corp's ability to bring people back from the dead so they can continue to pay off their debt.

But I'm absolutely playing the hell out of it. It's a puzzle game set in zero g so you have to work out the puzzle all while thinking about pitch, roll and yaw. It's a time management game, and on top of that, an earnings calculation game. What gets me the biggest cash the quickest?

This is insanely addictive.

And there's a nice plot underlying it, all with the requisite dark humor of a capitalist dystopia.

Graphics are top notch, and the game is almost glitch free. Every once in a while it freezes for a second, but goes back to normal, so compared to a lot of recent releases, it is essentially buggless.

Unreserved thumbs up.

EDIT: Changing this to a thumbs down. Normal space battle pew pew bzzzzzzzzzz rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr black screen. No keyboard input.

When your game is so broken when it crashes I have to physically reboot my computer, no, you get a bad review until you fix your damn game.

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Star Trek: Stellaris

I haven't decided if this is an over-glorified Stellaris DLC, or Stellaris 2. This isn't a bad thing, Paradox has clearly applied the lessons learned from the development of Stellaris; a better UI, a few late mechanic additions to Stellaris that come right out of the box in STI.

As a Star Trek game, it's a little odd. 4X means the cannon politics of Star Trek do not apply - in my current play-through, the Federation and the Klingon Empire are friendly, Klingon warbirds coming to the rescue of Federation holdings against Nausicaan raiders on several occasions. And the plot of the game, as much as a 4X can have a plot, revolves around things like the Kitamer Massacre but the overall path is not set in stone.

What's missing from that aspect is the music. The whole game does feel like Stellaris pretending to be Star Trek, rather than a Star Trek game. The biggest problem is the music, which is clearly a Paradox composer making Star Trek-like music. Yes, those Klingon warbirds were a welcome sight, but James Horner's theme music for the Klingons would have made it epic. I suspect theres a DLC in the future with the "real" music - and I'm fine with that, oddly, because I know you have to pay through the nose for music rights, and this game would probably double in price.

As of this writing, the game is SUPER buggy. I forget if this is SOP for Paradox, by this point damn near all the big dev companies seems to be employing untrained chimpanzees for their QA/QC. Most of the glitchyness is minor - We have lost a true Federation hero. We have? Who? No one has died. We have lost a true Federation hero. No we haven't, one of my scientists has gotten a new trait. We have lost...STFU!

But there are some serious, almost game breaking errors - like the Romulan star going supernova long before you can stop it.

And there's a general sense that the game is half-baked. There are maybe a dozen ship names that Star Fleet uses. There's no tutorial, so even if you've played Stellaris, there are a lot of things you have to muddle through, and even if you have? Connecting trade routes was a simple enough task in Stellaris, I have no idea how to do it in STI. Ok, I need a bulk carrier to help the Romulans. What's a bulk carrier and how do I get it? Nowhere to look that up - I found out eventually (too late) it's a mission reward.

I like the game. I'm enjoying the play-through. I'm not sad I spent thirty bucks on it. But there's a lot that Paradox needs to do if this game is ever to be considered good. If you're a Star Trek fan and a Stellaris fan, as I am, buy it - maybe wait a few patches - if you're one or the other but not both, get it on sale.

I usually give a thumbs up if the game at least functions as advertised, and Balder's Gate 3 does do that. But I'm going to give a negative review if for nothing else because there's a better product on the market, namely Solasta. Same game, cheaper, more functionality, just not set in an official D&D world.

The essential problem with BG3 is that it's being DMed by a 14-year old edgelord who hasn't got the concept that he's not the enemy of the players. But he's also frustrated because the players are bright enough to work around his devious schemes, so he resorts to breaking the rules so he can "beat" the players. In other words, BG3 is a sixty dollar game of Munchkin.

The pacing is terrible, for one thing; no 4th level party should ever, under any circumstance, find itself in the Underdark. The pacing would improve with random wandering monsters, like there were in BG2 and in Solasta, but there's no world map, so you just go from Named Place to Named Place without any context. Or way to up your XP. There's no sense of grand adventure, visiting distant lands, making your way across Faerun.

Add to that, every boss fight requires some sort of gimmick, or you've got the sort of GM who makes a single way out of the encounter, but his thinking is so convoluted that you have to run through an encounter a dozen times before you figure it out (or give up and Google it). And that's assuming the level boss doesn't just outright cheat. Oh, I'm going to fight one guy, no, he has an unskippable ultra-high level Raise Dead spell and now you're outnumbered by a factor of 4. Hope you scumsaved. Which, at that point, is pretty much mandatory if you ever want to complete the game. And now you have to go back and figure out the bs trick you need to defeat the level boss, ah ha, I have to stop him before the cutscene, which will take another six tries before he fails his save. And because of that, I don't get any of the roleplaying aspect of the game. Its just rollplaying.

The game does work, and I'll give the devs points for frequent and early patches. The graphics are fine, although the character modeler is a little anemic, especially since it was hyped so much.

Voice acting is sufficient. Which is another reason to give a thumbs down, since the voice acting in BG2 was inspired. Some of the BG2 characters make an appearance, but at this point, it feels like using cameos to cover up a mediocre product, like they did in Stargate: Universe. Oh, hey, it's Col. O'Neal. Show is still dreadful.

So I'm really meh on this game. I'm going to complete it simple because I was foolish enough to pay full price, so I'm getting my damn money's worth. But its telling that while I'm playing this game, I can't help but think I should have spent my money on Starfield instead.

Yes, but only because it's bugless and well done.

As a game its... Well, there's a tendency after Dark Souls to make everything punishing and brutal, because apparently fun isn't a thing you're supposed to have in games. This game plays like a failed mission, like the lead up to a mission that finds your frozen corpse floating next to a cryptic message written in someone else's blood. Yes, the odds should be stacked against you, yes, space is harsh and uncompromising. And I want the game where I have the tools to succeed against that. With Ixion, its a matter of how long before your crew murders you - there's a timer, the longer you take to build your base, the pissier your crew gets. And you don't really have the tools to placate them.

-1 because doom. And another -1 because doom. And more doom that you had no control over. Oh, and they're sad, because space is lonely -1. And you can chose between appeasement, or fixing the hull. And eventually - for me, it was just past 500 cycles - they decide to give into the despair and you die, they die, humanity dies.

Pass.

Now, as a game, it's very well done. I haven't seen any bugs, the graphics are well done, the plot is interesting, if not a little depressing. Everything is right about this game, it's exactly the sort of game I love to play. And I hate it.

I might - might - go back a third time and turn off all the difficulty just to see how the story turns out, but no further.

Buy it if you like self-inflicted pain. And base builders.

You get what you pay for, and I was using the freeware version of this. It worked as advertised, sure, but lacked one vital component. If, in its operation, it rolled a nat 1 and screwed up the drivers, it would create a recovery point - to be expected from a utility program, right - if you had the paid version. If you paid them money and their program ate your Windows, you might be able to get your system up and running with no loss.

If, however, you have the free version, like I did, and Drive Booster broke Windows so bad it wouldn't even boot back under safe mode, and after nearly six hours of troubleshooting, you'd sunk so low you were reduced to calling Microsoft Support (what do you mean you don't have the password I've been using to log onto your product? You mean the one from when I first installed Windows and don't have written down because you're not supposed to write down passwords?)

If you've got that, you're screwed.

Buyer beware.

So, this is a thumbs up because I do enjoy the game as it is.

And there's the catch. As it is. And "as it is" was a good state for beta. The devs had just released a big patch, and I figured maybe another year in EA and it would be released.

We're releasing today! said the devs, and I said, wait, what?

Because this game is nowhere near release. Now, as a beta, it has a lot of good features - the campaign is playable, the ships are buildable, the economy seems to have been ironed out. Massive naval battles ensue, spectacular explosions as multiple torpedo hits touch off an ammo store.

But its flaws are numerous. Maybe the devs will actually spend the next year getting the game to a decent state, but word is they're known for releasing games half baked.

Here's what needs to be changed:

The AI is a Three Stooges sim. Individual ships work fine, and if you're in a small battle, say, three cruisers v. 2 cruisers and a destroyer, the AI is fine. Fleet battles are a mess - the first five, ten minutes of a given battle are me pausing the game to sort out my ships so the AI doesn't crash them into each other. The enemy AI doesn't have that luxury, and often I can find the enemy fleet simply by listening for the distant sounds of ships colliding.

The UI is miserable. It's difficult to navigate the world map, when a war breaks out there's no tab to examine it, and only one war is displayed - if its not yours, too bad, there's no way I know to flip through the wars until you get to yours. There should be some way to figure out logistics on the map, there should be some way to organize your ships into fleets rather than sending them to the same port. No way to tell if you're winning or loosing, no victory tab or any indication whatsoever as to how you're doing, surprise! You just lost!

Promised feature absent. If you've seen the clip on the game's main site showing how you can switch out parts of the hull, well, you can't. As far as I know, you never could. As far as I know, that clip is still up despite the game's release.

Now, I have a lot of time playing this game, it is enjoyable. I do mean the thumbs up, and I'm willing to wait and see if this game will improve. If it doesn't, thumbs down, and I never buy a product from these guys again.