Recent reviews by Bob Boblington

The best medieval-ish city builder. I happen to be a historian specialising in the Middle Ages, and games that market themselves as “historically authentic” often leave a lot to be desired as such games often don’t even try to emulate the time period beyond basic aesthetics. Since a lot of the hype around Manor Lords comes from its commitment to historical accuracy, I'll be reviewing it from that perspective. This game, although there is room for improvement, is clearly an earnest attempt to enable players to recreate reasonably authentic medieval towns and villages and gets closer to that goal than any of its rivals. After spending about a dozen hours building a large town, it's very much unfinished but what's there is good.

There is currently one map with some RNG elements, such as your starting location and the starting location of a rival lord who also wants this land and whom you will eventually have to fight. You will build houses which can, as was typical in the Middle Ages, have a productive plot of land to the rear for a vegetable garden or household animals like goats or a chicken coop, and the system for building them is intuitive, flexible, and a joy to use. You’ll have to manage trade with off-map settlements as well as maintain a militia to deal with bandits or the rival lord. On the whole, I really like it.

There are some issues with the mechanics of the game:

1. There is no way (that I can find) to limit the production of certain goods without micromanaging employment. It would be good to say “have a stockpile of 50” like you can in other settlement management games, and like you can with the trading system. I would like to not have to micromanage 14 houses just to regulate what planks are used for.

2. Combat is trivial assuming rough parity between the size of the armies. You have to try to lose a battle to lose a battle.

3. Bandit raids on your village happen off screen a lot of the time. Like, you can’t defend your settlement, you just get a notification that you’ve lost goods to bandits. Let us defend ourselves please, or let us have a bailiff to reign in the thieves.

4. Trade is overpowered, you can get to a point where the player can run the whole settlement through trade. Trade has no risks, so the game steers the player toward relying on trade rather than managing their villages.

5. The rival lord expands far too aggressively, even on its lowest settings. By the time you can claim a single neighboring parcel of land, you’ll be lucky not to have been boxed in completely. The AI takes one parcel a year, there are 8 provinces, and it starts with two while you start with one. This means that by year 5 the AI has the map locked down entirely while you’re still trying to get a decent harvest in. This sucks and is the game’s biggest problem right now.


The game has a remarkable ability to enable the player to create authentic medieval town layouts, and you could probably recreate some medieval towns in the game pretty accurately. However, the game seems to be based on central Europe around 1400, so it does tend to lean toward villages and towns from that time and place. While you can emulate, for example, Norman town planning with its focus on commercial high/fore streets, you cannot build a medieval Italian town in this game because plazas are not a thing (yet), while building a village around a central green would be aesthetic rather than the functional heart of the village.

This leads on to an area where the game and its commitment to historical accuracy will hopefully improve as development continues, which is forest and land management. In most medieval-ish town planning games (this one included) you put down a logging hut and they just cut down trees, then a forester plants new trees. This is not how medieval people generally managed their woodland, if only because it’s remarkably inefficient prior to mechanised forestry. Although the villages are historically authentic, the same effort has not been put into those villages’ relationship with the land (yet). Some suggestions:

1. Coppicing. Coppicing was the practise of cutting a tree down to the stump to stimulate the growth of shoots around the stump, essentially tricking one tree into growing many trees. This would result in a large amount of harvestable wood within 7-10 years. However, the shoots were vulnerable to being eaten by deer.

2. Pollarding. The same idea as coppicing, but it’s done about 2m up the tree trunk. You get less wood that’s harder to access, but deer won’t eat it.

3. Deeper deer management. Of course, if deer keep eating everything you could just kill all the deer. Deer culling was (and still is) an important part of forestry. Although the game does have deer management it is as simple as “don’t over-hunt”. It would be good to see this expanded to reflect the real world impacts of deer overpopulation or underpopulation.

4. Wolf management. When creating new villages, they often encroached on the habitats of wolves. Wolves don't usually attack people, but if they get used to human contact and become habituated, they do. A mechanic for wolf packs similar to deer migration (except rather than going further away when bothered, they attack) might work well. It would be nice to fight something other than the tropey RNG bandit camp.

It’s got a lot of promise, I’m sure I’ll enjoy sinking hundreds of hours into it over the years, but you might want to wait a year or so until it’s further along development.

I was so excited for this, and it's not good. It really seems like what they did is take the Xbox version, upscale the textures (leaving them raw rather than compressed, hence the massive file sizes), and that's kinda it, though I will say the colourblind options are solid and should be standard on games in general. The UI is the console one, not well suited to PC and still left formatted for a 4:3 aspect ratio so everything's in weird places. The hit detection is AWFUL, I had a shootout with a stormtrooper where our blaster bolts were clearly going right through each other. This is not helped by the pinging about, which is chronic. On Mos Eisley players are pinging in and out of walls, it's nuts. One of the selling points was a bigger, more stable multiplayer, but frankly I'm not seeing it. There are currently only 3 full servers because nobody wants to play this hacked together version of the game.

I thought they'd done a much better version of 1 than 2, that is until I joined a multiplayer game and experienced two server crashes within 20 minutes. Unless the devs get their act together, it will be dead within a month. This is nowhere near worth the money.

The game is too short to actually do much. Here is how almost all HoI4 games will go:

- Build factories for 3 years
- Fight a war
- Run out of things to do

And that's it. I even tried to find the weird stuff, like playing as South Africa to fight a commie crusade against colonialism. I build factories for three years, fought a war, and then the game ended.

And yet I keep playing. Get some mods (modding teams sadly understand what's appealing about the game better than the devs I think) like Road to 56, and it's solid.

I'm leaving a negative review for one reason and one reason only: pre-launch promotional videos showcasing how the new missions work and guides on the revamped countries were, in my experience trying to emulate guides for the Byzantines, partially misleading. The version of King of Kings given to YouTubers and the version launched seem to have different diplomatic arrangements. For example, in the guides Albania has a +65 opinion of Byzantium out of the gate meaning you can ally them easily and get their amazing general to help you in the first war against the Ottomans. However, in the launch version it's -10. In the guides, you can ally the Papal States, Austria, Hungary, even Poland pretty easily within a couple of years. In the launch version you might get the Papal States if you're lucky, but not Austria or Hungary and certainly never Poland. This drastically changes how the campaign progression works because you can't lean on allies, making all those guides Paradox promoted - in which allies are leaned on heavily - a bit useless.

Difficult runs like reviving the Roman Empire certainly can be done, and I will say that going the Zoroastrian Persia route is even more fun than when I last did it, but it's unfortunate that some of the guides are out of date at launch. That's not fair on the players, nor on the work of the people promoting your games.

I created a city of 100k before coming to a judgement, and having done that I can safely say that Cities Skylines 2, while a decent game, offers very little over Cities Skylines 1, and is in some ways inferior. Firstly, some good things:

- The road creation tools, once you get used to them, are very powerful. The ability to merge roads into specific lanes of highways, for example, is a huge improvement over Cities Skylines 1, which could only do that with several mods.

- Roundabouts for everyone!

- The result of these road building improvements is that you can build roads that the traffic AI can actually work with, so the traffic acts in a vaguely rational way. In CS1 it often felt like I was fighting the traffic AI, whereas now I see what the traffic AI does in CS2 and don't think it's clinically insane.

- I like the new milestone and development systems, that enable players to b-line for certain things like trains rather than having them arbitrarily tied to population.

- Many of the buildings now have an appropriate sense of scale - the cargo port actually feels big, the nuclear power plant is larger than a modest apartment block.

And now the bad:

- The "supply chain", if you can even call it that, doesn't actually work except for the supply and demand of electricity. I noticed during my build that my cargo port was bringing in everything from garbage to animal products to ore even though I did not need or want to import any of those things. I built up my ore mining to see if that had any effect, and even producing a 100t surplus of ore the port was still importing the same amount. I'm not sure a supply chain system actually exists in the game, let alone one that functions. In this respect, it's a massive drawback compared to CS1. (UPDATE: CO has stated that this is a bug, there is supposed to be complicated supply/demand but it's all broken right now)

- Similarly, the education pipeline doesn't seem to function well either. Why do I have citizens who finish elementary school then don't go to high school? Why do I have 9000 eligible college students, only 868 of which are in college. all while my industry buildings are telling me I don't have enough skilled workers?

- Same deal with commercial buildings and their customers. If you build enough commercial buildings to satisfy the blue bar telling you there's demand, they won't have customers. If you build more houses, they still won't have enough customers. Make it make sense!

- Performance. I have a 10700k CPU and a 3070ti GPU. I can't get 30fps at 1080p on medium settings once the city population gets above 20k. For comparison, I can run CS1 modded to hell at 4k, 60fps until a population of about 40-50,000, and at no population does it go below 30fps. The lack of optimisation is a major issue and one that will take a herculean effort to resolve.

- Would it have killed the developers to include local transport assets rather than only big hubs!? The 3 platformed monstrosity is not suitable for every local railway connection. Same deal with the local ferries - my citizens don't need a cruise terminal to cross a river.

- Post doesn't work.

Unfortunately, most of the game's problems are core issues. The basic economy of the game is so nonfunctional I'm not even sure there is one. Education is broken. Commercial is broken. Intercity trade is broken. In other words, this is NOT a city building or management game, because those systems aren't functioning. It's just a map painter.

I'm sure the game will come good, but right now I'd recommend holding off on buying it for maybe 6-9 months.

Edit: So it's been 6-9 months and far more game breaking bugs have come to light. The simulations for trade, public transportation, land value, and industry are all nonsense. The result is that the player - despite doing everything - is a passenger beholden to the will of the game's bugs. I'm now worried about the game's long term future, because I can't see this matching CS1 any time soon, perhaps ever.

I really want to like KSP 2 - I have hundreds of fantastic hours playing KPS 1 - but unfortunately this was not ready for sale.

The big issue is performance. I have a 3070ti and an i7-10700k. I can run any game over 60fps at 1080p, most over 1440p, and many at 4k. For a game like this I'd be happy with a consistent 30fps, and I think smoothness is the most important thing; stuttering when staging is bad. Unfortunately, that's what happens and at ANY resolution this runs at 17 fps while launching. It's shocking.

So far I have carried out 3 launches. In the first one, the game became a slideshow while going through a cloud and the rocket flipped. Because the game was running at single digit fps, I couldn't really do much to correct the flip and restarted. On the second launch, the fairing began to ping up and down and then came off. There were no audio cues or staging UI changes to indicate that I had released the fairing, but the game was behaving as if I had. This destabilised the rocket and I reverted again. The third launch went well and I deployed a satellite to an orbit of about 200km.

There are many bugs, which is to be expected of an Early Access title and I don't mind most of them, but the quantity is a lot. Even in half an hour of playing, there were a lot of bugs, including one that stopped me selecting parts when building rockets. I bought KSP 1 early on and I don't remember it being this buggy, or running so poorly on - for the time - high end specs. And of course it was half the price of KSP 2 at that time, and was an indy title rather than being backed by one of the biggest publishers!

There are some positives. It's beautiful. The sound design is great. The wing system is genius. I like that I can paint the rockets. But that leads me to think that the developers focused on style over substance, resulting in a game that looks wonderful... at 15fps while selling points like thermals, science, colonies, tech tree, and interstellar travel are all shunted to the nebulous roadmap without any indication of when those things might show up.

I wasn't expecting it to be polished or complete, but I wasn't expecting it to be this unpolished and incomplete either, not for £45. This is a AAA priced game wanting to be treated like its indie game predecessor, and that seems a bit rotten to me. I want to like KSP 2 so much, but first I have to be able to play it! The developers need to focus their efforts on getting the fundamentals in place and not so much on shiny graphics.

Also, for the love of god give us back KSP 1's fairing construction system.

I think I need the bucket.

Unfortunately, while I recognise that this game holds immense promise, my opening hour in the game was a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ nightmare in all the wrong ways. I'd probably love this with just a few small tweaks so I hope I can come back to it some day.

- I had to rearrange the controls because buttons were seemingly mapped according to random lottery
- Found that roll, dodge, and sprint were all on the same button. Since Mass Effect 3 did this back in 2012 and got crucified for it, most games have known better. Whenever I pressed that damn button, there was a lack of consistency as to what it actually did. For a game where precision of movement and control is important, this was extremely frustrating.
- Keyboard options were absolute ♥♥♥♥♥ - this game wants me to use the arrow keys like its 1998. Using a controller was better but still frustrating given that customisation options were very limited.
- The camera movement made me feel queasy after half an hour
- Despite having a 3070ti, 32GB of RAM, and a 10700k, it ran like crap
- I opened the door to see a majestic and beautiful open world, just in time for the game to crash
- It then kept crashing, and if the product doesn't function then I'm getting a refund
- I do wish I could pause the game. I get that it's a design choice but it's a bad design choice for those of us who have lives outside of gaming and occasionally want to do things like answer the door or pet the cat

I'm sure in a few months I will buy the game again, have a less frustrating experience, and enjoy what this game has to offer. But for now it made all the wrong first impressions.

When I first got the game it was unplayable due to UI and resolution issues that were resolved after a couple of days. Now that I've had the chance to play it for a lot longer, I'm honestly a bit disappointed given the price I paid for it. In terms of feel, it's Stellaris but presented like Sins of a Solar Empire.

Firstly, the UI. It's really bad at explaining what I'm looking at. Obviously a complicated game is going to run into problems displaying all that complexity, and 4X games are notorious for having bad UI, but it's to the point where I literally don't know what I'm looking at. Are the empires in the galaxy even labelled!? Only if you go into certain menus. Are they at least colour coded? No, there are only 4 colours: blue, green, purple, and red, so if you've got more than four empires in your galaxy good luck telling them apart. Stellaris nailed this, so I don't know how a UI can be so bad at displaying information that it doesn't even label the empires.

Then there's the automation. Most of it is good once you tweak the settings a bit to your tastes and I appreciate that the governance AI is leagues better than Stellaris' (which is so infamous that nobody automates their planets, ever). But the military AI is truly awful; suicidal and chronically disorganised. The AI took my fleet of 9000 strength, put it against an enemy fleet of 1400 strength, and LOST. The ships trickled in one at a time and there was nothing I could do.

Finally, and the bit that really falls flat in my opinion, is that I've started 4 games of Distant Worlds 2 and they have all been the same. In Stellaris, I might spawn next to an ancient, disused megastructure that incentivises me to rush certain technologies. Or I might encounter an empire made of murderous robots that throws my plans for a pacifist run out the window. Or there might be a robot uprising that makes the galaxy's largest empire implode. In almost 20 hours, I've reached the mid game twice and seen nothing like that. It's all the same.

It might be really good in future, and I can see there are many really complicated and interesting systems going on under the surface. But if the end result is bland and overly consistent, there's no point to that complexity.

To be clear, Mass Effect is really good and you should play it. The remaster massively improves the visuals and tightens up a lot of little flaws the original games had. There are three really good games here for £54 in total, and that's a really good deal.

But the PC port is ♥♥♥♥, and I can't endorse that. There is surprisingly little customisation for graphics options, which for a game in 2021 released by a AAA company for £54 is taking the piss. There are indie games with more graphics options. There is no FOV slider, and they've moved the third person camera so it feels a bit claustrophobic at times, and there's no way to fix that. There is forced mouse acceleration and no option to change it. Support for ultrawide aspect ratio is not what was advertised. Sometimes the framerate drops for no clear reason (Dr Saleon's ship was really bad for this). There was a great opportunity to fix the bad ports of the original Mass Effect games, but that opportunity was not taken.

It's not enough to ruin the game. I'm having a great time. A lot of love went into it from the developers (especially the art team, you rock), but none of that love went into making the PC port a good PC port.