Recent reviews by Raikin

Honestly just an incredible strategy / city-builder / colony management / roguelite game that everyone who has any interest in that kind of genre should have played.

One improvement suggestion to the devs:
Some kind of notification other than just a little sound when a building or an event gets finished (especially off-screen in large settlements) would be great. Maybe this could also be solved by giving a notif when a building has no workers for a while and is not deactivated (indicating the player has just forgotten about it).

Now, I'd like to write more about the game here, but I really need to get back to playing it, those seals won't forge themselves!

This game is an absolute must-play for any fan of Civ-like games!

After finishing all missions in Railway Empire I was looking for something new of the same kind.

Transport Fever 2 is definitely one of the better transport / train - games out there and I struggled to make out the reason I couldn't enjoy it as much as Railway Empire. The game became stale to me after i finished the second chapter (out of 3) and while I like the ideas they came up with for their scenarios, they were never as engaging to me as the RE maps were. And I think the main aspect responsible is the lack of challenge. I was wondering if I was still in the tutorial after 5 missions, because they game was extremely narrow in what you had to do each mission.
Build from A to B, then to C. Deliver more from A to B, maybe connect C. And while these tasks were creative (for the most part), they were never challenging. Now the reason for that is the money in the game.
In campaign mode you start with a huge budget, and you have to play very inefficient to manage to run out of money. Very rarely a task involves making a certain amount of profit. So usually the campaign games just feel like guided sandboxes.
Now in free mode, you start with less money. But is that the solution? No, even less. Because the profits you make on each line are usually pretty marginal compared to the initial investments. So after you start building a few lines you will wait a long while until you even made back what you invested. This might surely be more realistic than Railway Empires style where a line earns itself back after a year max, but it makes progression extremely slow, so it doesn't surprise me that they decided to just shower the player with money in the campaign mode.

That was a lot of criticism, but now you might wonder that I recommend the game anyway. Well, I had a lot of fun with it. The missions and tasks are pretty creative, have a good bit of humor and you can learn a bit of history while playing. The trains and vehicles in general are wonderfully animated and the track laying has some advantages on how it works in RE (and some disadvantages). I enjoyed my time with Transport Fever 2 and I'll probably come back to it at some point to finish the campaign.

I wouldn't pay the full price for it tbh tho, so get it when it's on sale if you like this genre, it's worth it.

A true successor to Verdun. Where Tannenberg fails, Isonzo succeeds!

While I still miss some features from Verdun, like the tighter squad-play and the back-and-forth gamemode, Isonzo shines with other improvements, like the map design.

I could still do without the bots. Please. Stop. It's not fun. But at least this game has enough full servers, at least at the time of writing, that you dont have to deal with bots often.

Don't get me wrong, the content of this expansion is not bad in itself. It's just not enough to justify the price tag.
The court itself might be nice to look at, but it barely influences the gameplay.
The much more important part of this expansion was the culture rework, but that's not worth 30 bucks.

Honestly, the Northern Lords flavor pack felt more impactful than this expansion. Really disappointed after all this waiting time.

Also quite a few bugs, small but annoying were introduced.

This "not recommend" is mainly meant to signify my discontent with Paradox' dlc policy.

This review is aimed at people who played CK2:

CK3 is still lacking many features that are part of CK2 and its dlcs. The number of events are far fewer and I would still say that CK2 offers the better gameplay experience. BUT CK3 is a great base to build upon. In the future, CK3 will probably become a much better game. And at the moment, QoL, UI, graphics and even balancing are much better than in CK2.

So first off: This game is 90% a copy of the base features of Rimworld. If you didn't play that yet, go play it instead, it has far more features and a ton of great mods.

At the moment, this game adds two things:
- 3d graphics and multi-story-building, which is a great addition, that i always missed in Rimworld.
- Some things fit especially to the medieval ages, for example the ability to make smoked meat.

There are still a lot of things missing, that I'd consider base features:
- Consequences if someone has low mood besides just leaving the settlement
- Social interaction between settlers
- Animal husbandry
- More interesting raids than simply "We're trying to kill your settlers"-raids.

Most of this is mentioned as part of the road map, so I'm very optimistic about the future of this game.

Why am I recommending it already now? Well, I've played it for 26 hours, which was bringing 2 settlements into lategame on different difficulties and the core gameplay loop works that far. So yeah, if you like Rimworld, you'll probably like this. If you like seeing castels built, you'll like this.

I didn't expect much from this game, but I was positively surprised.
Even without DLCs, there's a lot of content, because additionally to the campaign, there are scenarios which are sometimes pretty challenging. There is also a challenge mode that sometimes features completely new maps. (the current challenge plays on the whole US map, something not possible in any other mode)

If you like building tracks, managing trains and see cities grow, get this game.

Only minus point: I would wish that I could manage all trains that run the same route (e.g. Washington - New York). Having to change every game individually is very time-consuming in the late game.

not a bad game

I didn't write a review, back when I played this game competitively.

Looking into it now, like 3 years later: Wow, what a change. The game is so much more polished:
The framerate is good, the UI looks incredible, WHEN WRITING IN CHAT IT MAKES TYPEWRITER NOISES!

Update in 2022: 64 players are far too many for those maps. And bots ruin all the fun you could possibly have on those overcrowded maps.

Do not buy this.