Recent reviews by Katyusha

Ignore the bad reviews complaining about bugs; they've been fixed as far as I can tell. Yes, this DLC had serious issues at launch, but not anymore.

Airports is pretty much a "cosmetic" DLC that doesn't change anything about how your overall city functions, but it's a REALLY GOOD cosmetic DLC. It's a night-and-day improvement if you care about airplanes, because the vanilla airports are BAD. Real bad. And for a game so focused on transport, having bad airports is a pretty serious mark against it. Airports takes what was probably the ugliest, least realistic-looking, and most boring type of transport in the game and turns it into perhaps the most beautiful and engaging. Designing and detailing airports is really fun, and being able to custom design airports in a wide range of sizes and form factors makes it easy to fit realistic air transport into even the most cramped maps. It's also one of the better uses of Parklife-style areas, which seems like a weird way to implement airports until you realize that making the area also automatically smooths out the terrain, which is essential. The only real complaint I have is that Airports doesn't do anything to improve the Aviation Club from Sunset Harbor, which is really disappointing as a fan of general aviation. That, and there are almost no mods to improve Airports content or add compatible assets, but that's not CO's fault.

Game is unplayable for me due to a bug with the controls. Focus totally ignored my support ticket and forum posts and the refund window closed while I was waiting to hear back from them. Now I'm stuck with a defective product that can't be returned. I'm never buying another game from Focus ever again.

I love this game, though it's not for everyone. This is a game for people who like high lethality; where even a single bullet can kill you and you need to be extremely careful. If that sounds like fun, Insurgency is the game for you. It's one of the most tense, adrenaline-pumping games I've ever played. Multiplayer is definitely the meat of the game; it is playable solo but the solo experience is pretty underwhelming since the AI is TERRIBLE, to the point where the only modes that work properly in solo play are Hunt and Conquer, and only on day maps (since AI never carry flashlights or NVGs). It also relies on a very dated command line system to host your own server, which is workable but it's pretty pathetic that a game from as recent as 2014 doesn't have a GUI for something so important. I still recommend Insurgency despite these issues but they are something you need to be aware of.

I absolutely adore this game, have played over 200 hours of it, and yet I can't recommend it for one simple reason: the naval AI is completely broken in the campaign. It works if they attack you, but if you attack an AI fleet the enemy ships will simply sit at the back of the map and do nothing until you sail into range, at which point they will (usually) turn and engage you in a very disorganized fashion, making them fairly easy to beat unless you get your ships caught on the map border or make stupid mistakes. That is, when half their ships don't randomly run off to the edge of the map as though they're routing. This turns what should have been some of the best naval combat in the Total War franchise into a frustrating and unrewarding experience. Sega and CA have know about this bug since the game's release, yet never bothered to fix it. The rest of the game is mostly great, but ignoring a gamebreaking bug like that is completely unacceptable and you shouldn't reward their behavior with a purchase. If you absolutely must buy the game anyway, wait for a sale.

I really, really wish I could recommend this game. Despite its grindiness and numerous issues, it's still a lot of fun...when it works. To put it simply, the netcode is absolute trash. Minor connection hiccups that cause 1-2 second lag spikes in other games will cause this game to immediately drop its connection and force you back to the login screen, and often it will take several minutes and multiple attempts to reconnect. Unless you have a top-tier, highly reliable internet connection, STO is simply unplayable outside of very limited off-peak hours. If you have fantastically reliable internet, go ahead and give STO a try. Otherwise, don't waste your time. It's not worth the frustration.