Recent reviews by Johnny Testickle

TL;DR: Trade has the biggest performance impact on the game, and this hasn't been fixed for years. Please fix this.
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This is a good game but something I would like to see them fix is the trade system. Trade, market dominance, and employee productivity are the driving factors of your nation's growth in power and prestige in this game - and increasing standards of living through profit margins and funding public programs is crucial for maintaining political stability and high taxes for further growth.

Naturally, your nation is not going to have all the natural resources available to it needed for such growth, so trade is a natural alternative in the absence of the possibility for military intervention.

The problem with trade, however, is that A.I nations will not always trade with you if your products are cheaper - and this itself wouldn't be an issue if the player was easily capable of setting up trade routes themselves.

This is the catch: Player-led trade routes have the largest impact on game performance than any other aspect of the game, bar-none. It's 1935, my game hasn't slowed down a single bit from the start. I set up trade routes to hit the much coveted $2billion gdp as China - what do I get? An FPS drop from 60fps to 4fps. So long as the trade screen is open, the game is a slideshow. Even when it's closed, at best you might hit 10fps.

I see people complain all the time about culture groups slowing the game, but the biggest culprit is hands down ALWAYS trade. Devs, PLEASE fix this core aspect of the game. It's literally a game about economics, TRADE shouldn't be broken like this.

Me and my friend bought this DLC to try a coop campaign together - unfortunately, despite this DLC literally being labelled as having Online Co-Op, it doesn't actually have online coop. If this is a bug please let me know how to fix.

Crawling In My Crawl

Expected a city builder, got dark souls

An absolutely terrible interface that is difficult to navigate, difficult to operate, and painful to tolerate.
The interface also does not present any information whatsoever as to the effects of your decisions -
Instead, the interface actively presents you with contradictory, or false information - in short, the game lies to you.
The music also sounds like a discord call being played on loop.

Even though it's free, it's an experience not worth having.

They have listened to the community and returned some key features, as well as fixed some bugs, and allowed reconnection to a game incase of a crash. They recently added some new optional game modifiers to further spice up gameplay.

This is without a doubt the best iteration of Online Risk.

This game is not even trying to hide its inspiration from naval simulator Rule The Waves.

However, the RTW series is known for its abysmal user interface, lack of graphics, and incredibly ambiguous mathematics that require hours of pre-game knowledge before playing.

Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnaughts has none of these flaws. This game, IMO, is what Rule The Waves should have been. Great graphics, physics, and user interface. This gives you the historic naval combat simulation you were looking for.

Obviously inspired by the Mount And Blade: Warband Napoleonic Wars expansion, this game is essentially a standalone version of that expansion. Holdfast does a good job at this in a lot of ways, and even tries expanding on them with Naval Battles and the WWI expansion. There are however, a few small complaints.

The melee combat in this game is far too slow and clunky for competitive duels.
Holdfast Supports 150 players per battle, whereas Napoleonic Wars supports 200 + Bots.
Holdfast does not support Commander Battles, or any A.I driven gameplay
Holdfast does not support Singleplayer gameplay
Holdfast has barely any cavalry to speak of - and the horses, for some reason, do not sound like horses at all.

Overall though, at $20, I'd say despite its shortcomings, Holdfast is still a decent game worth purchasing at full price.

If you like community driven events and line battles, or just want to hop on and fire a blunderbuss casually for a bit, then this game is for you.

The Campaign is the only functional aspect of this game. The primary selling point - the battles - are non-functional. If I wanted to play a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ version of Civ6, I would play Humankind - not this.

This game has not ceased to amaze me upon its release. The support it has gotten from Paradox, and the Dev team who has continued to make every update of this game an improvement on the last is remarkable, and almost unheard of in today's games industry.

The Man The Decks DLC to allows you to build your own ships, and the most recent No Step Back DLC allows you to modify your tanks. These DLCs are by far the most important, and game-changing, and amazing fun DLCs I have ever played in a Paradox game - right next to the El Dorado DLC of EU4.

I sincerely hope, and can not wait, for when they release the next DLC - which fingers crossed, will allow us to design our own AIRPLANES of WWII!

Good job HoI4 Dev team. Amazing work.