Recent reviews by ChipPlays

god tier

crab

Overall, They Are Billions is a fun game that I recommend. That being said, it’s definitely not for everyone. Its difficulty ramps up extremely fast when playing sandbox mode (I haven’t played story mode so I’m not sure how difficult that one is), but at least in my experience in sandbox mode, you have to know exactly what you’re doing along with a combination of luck to beat the game. It’s fun, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a game that takes dedication to beat. Its difficulty does give the player a challenge to overcome, which entices them to continue playing, but once you’ve played the same map 10 times trying to beat a level, it can get frustrating. I’m not saying I know everything about the game, there’s probably strategies I don’t know about that are so much better than what I’ve tried to do, but that’s just my experience. Still, I recommend it.

Recently after I originally picked up this game awhile ago, I decided to try it again just to see if it got any better. In my experience, the game is just as unstable and unplayable as it was years ago.

From what I saw, this game is confusing and simply unoriginal. It plays like Minecraft but without the fun, addicting quality, and with game mechanics that are utterly confusing. The art style is also unpleasant, not because it's not graphically demanding, but because the goal was to make it realistic. The developer was never able to achieve this and instead it looks like an ugly mix of an attempt at realistic graphics with a blocky and cartoony foundation. I have never had as much trouble trying to progress in this game in comparison to the sheer amount of time I've played games. There's no tutorial and every single thing you try to do feels like your walking blindly into the dark, hoping you don't accidentally mess up in the process. Sure, I can look up a tutorial on YouTube, but I shouldn't have to do that to understand core gameplay or have any sort of enjoyment with it. There were a lot of poor choices made by the developer to include irrelevant content like bugs and flies, soldiers, and random structures seemingly just for the sake of it. The mechanics really need a complete rework so it feels like i'm not just playing an off-brand Minecraft.

To sum it up, it's basically a Minecraft clone that fails to have any sense of consistency or quality. If the developer is reading this, I highly recommend you changing the focus of the game. I will say, the building tools can be good in some aspects, so much so that you should focus on them. Instead of trying to keep this a survival game, you should convert it into a more creative application. It would be an amazing tool for people to create immersive and detailed worlds for D&D or other roleplaying purposes. I understand there's still a small number of fans who like it's current state, but if you ever want to make a game that people can take seriously, either change the "game's" purpose or start fresh with an original idea.

Developer, I commend you for your consistency and your consistent work on this game, but if you'd like to strive for something better, please take my advice. Use that good work ethic and put it toward something better.

Thanks for taking the time to read my review, I based this off of a video I did awhile ago that you can check out if you'd like (stupid thumbnail, I know, I like to goof around): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0XvxjtkNOE

With now over 200 hours in this game, I think it's time to write a review about this game. I really like base building and city building games, which is why I decided to get cities skylines. I have played SimCity for a long time and have become very accustomed to this genre. I have mostly pros about this game, in addition to a few cons (minor cons however). I will try to keep this review short and sweet, but there's a lot of pros to this game, so it might end up being a longer review.

Pros:

Huge building space - It's WAY bigger than SimCity's building space, and that gives you so much freedom and expandibility as a player. This aspect of the game is definetly my favorite.

Great modding community - There are tons of high quality mods that you can download, which really enrich your experience with the game. Theres not only mods however, as there are color grading packs, assets packs (like new buildings and such), and even road layouts you can download.

Good DLC - Now let me make this clear. I think the DLC is overpriced and I think the content of the game relies to heavily on the DLC. I don't think the DLC was a good idea, BUT, the DLC that the game does have is pretty enjoyable.

Traffic Managment - I really like how there's a lot of aspects to your city layouts. You have to actually design intersections and city road plans like you would in real life. It adds a lot of immersion to the game and I really like this. This is the opposite of SimCity, as there weren't that many options for building roads and intersections. I think Cities: Skylines did the traffic in this game wonderfully.

Economics - There are a lot of different ways to earn money in this game, which I really enjoy as it allows you to create a city that is completely different from your last. You could go a tourism route, office building route, industry route, and more. In SimCity, there was just commercial and industrial. This has specialized commercial buildings that you can make and specialized industry, which is cool.

There are way more pros, but this review would be a massive chunk of text that frankly, I dont think most people want to hear about.

Cons:

Excessive DLC. - This game has a ton of DLC. While I like the DLC and i think they're great additions to the game, they are way overpriced for what they give you and I think they should've been part of the main game. This is by far the worst thing about this game.

Long loading times (sometimes) - Sometimes it takes forever for the game to load. I have a fairly decent hard drive, so I know thats not the issue. Sometimes it can even take over 30 minutes to load a map. Ontop of that, sometimes I might click out of the screen while it's loading. I then come back to see that the game froze and crashed. I tend to play with mods a lot of times, but even with lots of mods and big maps, I still think the loading times should be faster. This doesn't happen all of the time, so it's not a very big problem for me, but its just something I wanted to pick out.

Bad car AI - The car AI is generally good, but could of been way better. The cars don't act like normal humans, instead they are all the EXACT same for every car. Highway logic is completely crazy with cars causing massive traffic james while there is an entire lane free on a highway. Because of this, my service cars literally get stuck on roads for years in game time. Then they dissapear. This always causes dead body buildups and then my entire city gets sick. Then all of my ambulances are trying to go cure people and then they clog up the roads even more. t became so terrible at one point, I had to get a mod that gives me massive roads, because they kept clogging everything up. I know theres traffic in real life like that sometimes and cars just seem to go on endlessly, but this happens all the time in the game, and i think cars need to have more dynamic AI.

Small amount of advanced utilities - What i mean by this is that there is only basic utilities. There are only water pumps and water towers. There are only a handful of power choices. There are only a few trash collection buildings. Basically what i'm trying to show is that there are only basic utilities. All you ever do is expand these few basic utilites exponentially everywhere. I would have really liked it if there were advanced water pumps and more advanced police stations, fire stations, and hostpitals. I know there are the big hospitals and big fire stations ect., but i still need a ton of these to satisfy my citizens. I liked how in SimCity you could upgrade these types of buildings over time. Power problems? Just add another smokestack to your powerplant. But in this game, that doesn't happen. You just have to keep endlessly expanding these forever, with almost no option for future upgrades.

Overall:

I love this game. Please don't let any cons that I listed discourage you from getting the game. I went hard on the existing cons because there's barely any. I highly reccomend this game if you like base building or city building games as the developers of this game executed this genre very well.

With the release of 1.0, I felt it was time to change my review once again for a total of three reviews throughout its development. For anyone reading this, I cannot understate the quality and passion put into this project. I first started playing the game quite awhile ago early in its development. Back then, the game was rough, not very pretty, and difficult to pick up, but boy oh boy did I love it. I've played consistently throughout the years and have always had fun doing so from the start of a save to the eventual end. Factorio's premise and actual gameplay is extremely simple, build machines to build more machines, but the sheer amount of content hidden within is impressive. This game allows you to spend thousands upon thousands of hours trying new things, optimizing production, and researching fascinating new technologies. The only game I have played before with this much replay value is Minecraft, which is saying a lot. The developers of the game have also been the most amazing developers I have ever seen before. They diligently work on the game without taking any considerable breaks and always release amazing new content that I couldn't have imagined being any better. They fix bugs like no other human beings I've seen (literally minutes after a release in some cases) and my time playing Factorio has been the most bug-free and least problematic I've ever had playing any game. I want to commemorate the developers for an amazing game with excellent gameplay, music, and polish. I can't wait to see what they have for us in the future.

10/10, one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had.