Recent reviews by agriba

It's alright.

Honestly, this doesn't do much to differentiate itself in the genre with games like Age of Empires. The best way I could summarize it as less building and management and more stream lined to get right to the action. Good for some people, bad for others. It's really down to your preference.

But for the price, its an okay game. Worth the buy if you're a fan of strategy games. If not, this won't do it for you.

5/10

A bit of a twist on the city builder genre.

Banished is a simple mix between survival and city building where the player takes control of settlers with minimal technology or rescources. It has the capacity to challenge you but lacks the depth and size to be engaging beyond the basic mechanics it presents.

In other words, its a very fun game if not a little simple. If you enjoy city builders and like a challenge, its a good game to pick up and sink a few hours into every now and then. Banished shakes things up a bit from the more popular city building games.

Perhaps its biggest plus is the fact that it manages to differentiate it self so well, because the most ammount of enjoyment you will get is the first few hours figuring the game out. After that sturggle, it just becomes a unique style on a fun genre.

If city builders are your thing, give it a try.

6/10

As much as I hate to take credit away from the original, there is a clone that is a better version.

Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds is this game. But its better. It's rare that a clone is as good as the original. But this game is straight up the exact same game, but better.

Go buy that one. I can't recommend buying a worse version of a game.

6/10

This comes from playing the first two games in the franchise and thouroughly enjoying them.

To begin, this isn't a horrible game in and of itself. But it suffers, struggling in almost every area.

1. New people are going to have an impossible time getting in to it. It starts slow out of the gate just trying to catch up newbies with a massive information dump, and it's going to create a lot of head scratching. There is some dense dialogue about premises from the previous games that is hard to swallow. Its still possible to approach for new players, but I can't possibly see it being as enjoyable for the first hour.

2. For fans of the series, there are some red flags for you as well. The presentation completely restricts the narrative and makes no sense. Unlike the previous two games, this isn't strictly a choose your own adeventure story. By adopting what the game calls "fragments", you basically play only snippets of a story, before jumping to another line of the story. Your choices don't result in a feeling of accomplishment or weight. Instead of encouraging choices about how to progress through the story, its really just an inane system where you put check marks in a box as you move along.

3. And the story.

Don't get these games wrong. There are always puzzles, but the puzzles always play fiddle to the story. There aren't very many and they aren't hard enough to challenge someone who likes puzzle games. In the past, this has been okay because the story was so good. But the story is lacking in this installment.

The first half is addled by the presentation like I've already said. The elements are all present to be interesting, but its a slog; however, the third quarter is where this game shines. For a brief moment, it gains some direction and feels like its headed somewhere big, and the excitement is there.

But then. Without spoiling anything. The home stretch of the story is the most ridiculous series of deus-ex-machinas that I have ever seen. There are huge concepts that are introduced at the very end with basically zero set up, and, somehow, even less explanation.

Its borderline offensive how stupid it becomes.


In summary. There are moments of greatness, but most of it is a slog. The puzzles are fine and the story is a slow build that nose dives just as it becomes satisfying. Players of the first two will inevitably play this, but it won't live up to the previous installments.

New players? Just go play the first two games (999 and VLR) if you can get your hands on them. They are fantastic.

I was excited to play this game. I loved the first two. But I am extremely conflicted about this one. It's not a bad game, but its not good.

5/10