Recent reviews by Prime Minister Sinister

I'm clearly going to be cutting against the grain on this one, but I have to say, this may be the worst game I've ever played that is this popular. I wish I had refunded it, but as you would soon find out when you boot it up, the loading screens themselves take up so much time that, once I had actually configured everything and got started, 60 minutes had elapsed. By the time I realized that I hate this game, it was too late.

In brief, the game controls so terribly that it is hard to believe and it makes the entire experience an exercise in frustration. There are other issues (especially with Build 42) but the main one to address is usability. Controls are terrible, I have to memorize more hotkeys for this than ARMA to play optimally, and the UI is horrendous and finnicky. It plays almost exactly like Space Station 13, the difference being that in SS13 you aren't also trying to avoid or kill hordes of zombies.


Doing even the most simple tasks is a chore of clicking through menus and sub-menus while finagling your guy into the exact right spot to interact with a world object. Movement is sluggish, unresponsive, and your character seems to be locked into 8 points of rotation rather than having a full 360 degree range of movement. This simply doesn't work, as a lot of interactions (like looting containers or opening/climbing through windows) require your character to be facing exactly at the object, but since they lock in to one of those 8 points of direction this becomes impossible. Why? Because Indie Stone in their infinite wisdom decided those 8 rotation points don't orient with the map, so houses and world objects will never be in completely alignment with the player. This also makes it painfully easy to get stuck on buildings and objects, and even the zombies have trouble with it.

Trying to click on objects is similarly awful, as the object's location data just doesn't align with its visuals. Trying to drink water from a sink before you die of dehydration? Good luck hunting down the one exact pixel you need to click on to interact with it. Need to close a garage door before a horde of zombies overruns your base? Clicking the quit button is far easier.

The UI is your worst enemy here. Looting is a nightmare because of the way the container system works. At the top of the screen are two bars that drop down into menus when you scroll over them. The left is your inventory and any containers on your person. The right is any nearby containers, corpses, or items on the ground. Doesn't sound so bad, right? Well, first of all, switching between containers requires pressing teeny tiny buttons next to the scroll bar. On 1080p this isn't so bad, but god help you if you want to play at a higher resolution, as there is no UI scaling option in game that I could find, which is just inexcusable for something that has been worked on for over a decade. There are two other major issues with this system, one being that the inventories are supposed to remain open while you loot, but I found time and time again that if I moved the cursor just a little too far, the inventories would close, which made looting in the middle of combat difficult (and yes, you can pin them open, but they take up a good portion of the screen). The other major flaw is that if your character moves even a hair, it will change which inventory you are targeting. It also defaults to choosing the worst possible inventory (so many times I tried to put stuff in the trunk of my car, but it defaulted to a corpse underneath the vehicle instead).

Targeting in combat needs some work as well. When fighting upright zombies it works pretty well, but targeting zombies on the ground with stomp attacks and the like is a crapshoot, especially in the middle of a horde.

The last major issue is performance. Significant amounts of the game's systems run on LUA, which is not a coding language that I'd recommend using for games, as although it is versatile, it is also inefficient and requires a lot of precaching to properly function (hence why old builds of Garry's Mod would take tens of minutes to load if you had a lot of mods, since that game also ran on LUA). This results in a slow start-up time and a game that is way, way more performance intensive than it ought to be. Even with my beefy computer and a $400 Samsung SSD, the game had horrible lag spikes when loading new areas. This caused me so much pain when driving, as I'd start turning the wheel for an upcoming corner, only to have the game lag out and send me careening into a lamp post.

Because of these performance issues, loading in new characters takes a not insignificant amount of time, anywhere from 10-30 seconds in my experience. That probably doesn't too bad, but it is frustrating since the game is designed to be incredibly difficult, unforgiving, and often completely unfair, meaning you will die, a lot. I wouldn't mind it so much, as you can spawn in as a new character on the same save and go reclaim your base/gear, but the extra loading time added on top of the time it takes to choose traits and appearance bogs the whole process down. With as lethal as the gameplay is, jumping in as a new character should be just about instant, and I would appreciate an option to have a random new character instead of having to pick out traits manually.

Are there things I can praise? Sure. Like the aforementioned SS13, there is a lot of depth and complexity to the game's systems, the customisability of the sandbox is welcome (and downright necessary if you play singleplayer, as the default settings spawn so many zombies that surviving more than a day in SP is a significant challenge), and overall it's the most comprehensive zombie survival game that I have played. None of that matters, however, as the core issues are so immense that it makes the whole experience frustrating and painful, even during times where it is supposed to feel rewarding. It seems designed around the multiplayer community more than anything, with a lot of the new features clearly being for MP players' benefit.

Had this game come out last year, I might be inclined to overlook these issues with the usual "small indie studio, early access game" dismissals, but given that Indie Stone has worked on this game for over a decade having the core functionality of simple things like walking be this bad is just inexcusable. I just can't recommend this game. You're better off just watching those hour long Youtube videos about the goings on on MP servers, because trust me when I say that the level of jank here is off the charts, and even my "plays crappy Eastern European trash games" self can't cope with it.

Edit: Apparently the "font size" option in the settings is for UI scaling, and there is an option to adjust the container icon size as well (although even the largest setting is still tiny), so I was wrong about their inclusion. I do still find the UI clunky, but with proper UI scaling it is not really any worse than any other jank indie game, so that is one part of the review I'd amend. Still not sure this is a recommendation from me though.

Finally caved and bought this on the summer sale only to open it up and find that HALF the roster is behind a paywall for virtually all the new factions.

And these aren't just nice flavor units like previous DLCs, they are essential parts of your roster. Kislev basically has no decent mid-tier melee infantry at all unless you buy the DLC, which is shockingly priced at $25 and never goes on sale for less than $20... which is almost the same price I paid for the base game. Bear in mind that these new units probably took only a weekend's worth of man-hours to create. I used to mod these games, so I am well aware of the time and energy it takes to add new units. I made a mod that added dozens of units FOR FREE meanwhile CA wants to sell me, like, 5 new units and 12 variants of those units for the cost of dinner for a family of four.

I didn't mind CA's DLC policies in the past. They were always generous with free content and none of their DLCs were essential to enjoy their games, but this time is different. CA truly has gotten greedy, and it's a slap in the face to boot up a game I already paid 25 smackaroons for only to find I'd better cough up even more or I'll be missing units that are necessary to enjoy the game.

That's not to mention the other glaringly obvious issues that are apparent at first glance, like the horrifically designed UI.

I'm torn between refunding it or modding in replacements for these units to fill the gaps in the roster myself.

Honestly, I dreamt about a game just like this as a kid. It's amazing to live in an age where it's basically a reality.

It's still rough around the edges but so far it is glorious.

The greatest video game experience of my life.

this is your dad's survival game

Revising my review as of April 2022:

I don't have much to say other than if you liked Warband, you'll probably like Bannerlord. It's effectively just Warband with a budget, with refinements ranging from the graphical to the technical.

The game has had a rough journey, but it's definitely shaping up. I'd recommend buying it in it's current state if Warband hooked you. IMO it does everything that game does, but better. The combat is more fluid and refined, combat and tactical AI is much better (although it still has its hiccups), the game is better looking, cities are larger and more lively, and there's a bunch of quality of life enhancements and mechanics. At this point, the vast majority of technical issues have been ironed out, and the game is perfectly playable. I just sunk 40 hours into a modded campaign without a single crash, so overall stability has improved a lot.

This is the highest rated DLC for the War in Heaven feature. That's about it, really.

The actual Leviathans are obnoxious, as there is no way to control how many can spawn in a galaxy or how close to your civilization they will spawn. Basically, if you spawn next to one of them, you may as well consider that save null and void and start over, because they are ridiculously powerful for mid-game bosses and will curbstomp your empire, rendering the last 6 hours of gameplay moot. They aren't actually any fun, because you'll either A.) know they are coming and be so prepared you wipe them out immediately or B.) are not prepared at all and they virtually obliterate your whole empire.

Enclaves and the War and Heaven are the only reason to buy this DLC, but honestly you can go without. The main feature, the Leviathans, are obnoxious and frustrating and add little to the game. It's bizarre to me that this is supposed to be the "good" DLC for Stellaris.

Honestly, from my experience, none of the DLC for this game is worth it. The base game is great as-is and the DLC doesn't really add much, and in this case I found it detracted from the experience and ended up just turning it off. Don't waste your money.

This review won't be very lengthy or detailed, but I'll tell you all you need to know:

Stellaris came out and was not very good. The team spent years subsequently updating the game, and as of the last couple of updates, it is beyond fantastic. It's a great, immersive 4X space sim with almost all of my major complaints having been adressed in the latest patches.

It took a long time, but in the end it was worth it. I'd recommend Stellaris in its current state to anyone interested in 4x games.

I am usually not the dissenting voice with this kind of stuff, but in this case I feel like I must've played a totally different game from everyone else. Playing this game is like pulling teeth. I find that I have to force myself to sit down and try it again, and every time I am let down by the same problems.

A lot of people compare this game to System Shock and Bioshock, and of course the comparisons are correct, for the most part. However, the game does little to improve on the weaknesses of System Shock's formula, namely the combat.

Seeing the trailer and the gameplay footage, I had avoided trying Prey for so long because the combat looked atrocious. A lot of this is due to the design of the enemy aliens, the "Typhon." They are straight up lazily designed, being nothing more than amorphous blobs of black goo. Their animations aren't very clear and responsive, because they are amorphous blobs, and this can make them hard to read at first. Besides that, there is a lack of enemy variety, with most enemies just being slightly stronger reskins of the base enemies, but with a special ability. Enemies that seem entertaining at first, like Mimics, will become a constant nuisance.

What enemies are in the game are joyless to fight. Almost all enemies have ridiculous amounts of health and are absolute bullet sponges, even on easy mode. The different enemies all have resistances to things in your arsenal, forcing you to adapt and change tactics against certain foes, but regardless of what their "weaknesses" are, they always seem to take an absurd amount of ammo and time to kill. Enemies also have ranged attacks that are difficult to dodge, with the damn technopath and the poltergiest being the most egregious examples.

Beyond that, weapons feel spongy, like peashooters. The game is infatuated with its "Gloo Gun" mechanic, which it seems to want to encourage you to use at nearly every opportunity, but that leads me to my second major problem:

Despite all the talk about "play it your way," the skill trees are incredibly unbalanced and even when there are multiple solutions to a problem, they are not equal. There is always a solution more optimal than the others, and this makes the skill trees very unbalanced. In the case of combat, you may as well give up and restart if you didn't select the skills that let you upgrade tools like the Gloo Gun, because you are ♥♥♥♥ out of luck otherwise. Plus, you can't sneak through the entire game. There are portions of the game where you are forced to kill enemies to progress, and plenty of other sections where the level design makes stealth almost impossible.

The game also encourages backtracking a little too much for my liking. It seems like an arbitrary attempt to pad out the games runtime.

Are there good things I can say about Prey? Well yes, not that it matters much seeing as the core of the game (combat) is horrendous. It is a very good looking game, being on CryEngine and all. The art direction is solid and the music is good. The first two hours are nice and suspenseful, creating a horror atmosphere that was far more enjoyable than the late game's insistence on action. If anything, the early portions of the game demonstrated to me that this would've worked better as a horror survival game in the vein of something like Penumbra, where combat is heavily discouraged, but far to often Prey decides that it wants to be an FPS and it drags down the experience.

The story is intriguing enough to keep me playing, for now, but my patience is running thin. Prey got everything right but the essential element: games are supposed to be fun. Prey is not fun. The monsters are frustrating to fight and the combat is a mess, and with the action being the core structure of the game, it causes the whole thing to collapse.

Eh.

It's hard to talk about Hearts of Iron IV. On one hand, it is incredibly addicting and I've spent far too much time on it. On the other hand, it presents a shallow and fundamentally broken experience, especially compared to previous titles in this series.

The game essentially does three things right: allowing you to manage and control the finite details of your armies equipment chain, allowing you a very large degree over the organization of your troops through the Division Designer, and allowing you to paint the map your color. While it represents a step up from past titles in this regard, everything else is incredibly barebones.

There is almost no diplomacy to speak of. Diplomacy is dead simple and plays out the same in nearly every game. Like-minded countries with the same ideology will join together in factions when world tension is high enough, but beyond getting countries to join your faction, diplomacy is utterly useless. Non-aggression pacts are about as effective as they were in real life (that is to say they aren't at all) and the only other thing you can do with diplomacy is trade for resources. Trading is the only incentive to keep other factions happy.

There's no espionage. I'm not just being facetious; I quite literally mean there is no espionage system. One of the most important fronts of WWII is simply absent from the game. Supposedly it will come at a later date, but knowing Paradox, they'll make you buy it as DLC, (2021 Update: called it) just like numerous other essential features that were missing at launch.

There's barely any politics or internal management of your country. You accumulate something called "political power" which you use to change laws and appoint advisers, but the system is honestly just plain stupid because every nation accumulates political power at the same rate (+2 per day) unless they are researching a national focus. For most of the laws, they are just straight upgrades, and thus there is no thought or incentive to choose one law over the other. You will always enact mobilization at the earliest opportunity, you will always enact conscription at the earliest opportunity, and unless you play a resource-poor nation, you will always get up to an export-focused economy. And those three laws are all you get, just conscription, trade, and mobilization. There are elections, but they are dead simple events. There are also political parties, but outside of player input or national focuses, their influence can't be changed and thus there is no challenge.

Warfare is a bit of a mess. The game uses a frontline system where the actual tactics are automated to AI generals, and you merely draw battleplans. You can (and should) directly order divisions around, but if they don't have orders then they get a penalty, so the game actively incentivizes the frontline system. The problem with that is the AI.

Oh the AI. Or lack thereof. HOI4 easily has the worst AI of any Paradox title to date. It often abandons active frontlines and leaves them wide open to attack, and the generals' AI has a habit of waltzing right into salients and getting cut off. Entrusting any large front to the AI is a death sentence, but you need to do it to get combat bonuses. As far as the country AI, is basically doesn't exist. The AI doesn't react dynamically or really have any long-term strategy. Instead, it operates on pre-programmed values; it is scripted to behave a certain way in all conditions, rather than reacting to a situation dynamically. This is most evident when the AI is losing a war but chooses a national focus that declares war on yet another country, because the AI literally has no idea that it is at war. Go ahead, look in the code. You'll see all the AI "strategies" are smoke and mirrors. It also makes diplomacy pointless, as countries are often scripted to be afraid of one another regardless of circumstances.

And the national focus system is just a cop-out for having to make actual, dynamic AI. It is basically just alternate history trees that allow you to take a nation down an ahistorical path, or it just gives you bonuses. The trees are poorly balanced, as every focus takes 70 days to complete, but many of them are just straight up not worth it. Not every country gets a unique tree, either.

Yet despite all this, HOI4 is hard to put down. It is so streamlined and simple that it actually becomes cathartic to play, at least until the AI craps its drawers again.

You are better off investing in the much cheaper and more complete Darkest Hour: A Hearts of Iron Game, as long as you can tolerate the dated aesthetics. However, the one saving grace of HOI4 is the astounding modding community. There are plenty of excellent mods to choose from, with Kaiserreich being the most notable one. Most of these mods totally blow the vanilla gameplay out of the water with a massive amount of events and custom gameplay features. I may have a disturbingly large amount of play time on HOI4, but trust me when I say that 50% of that was playing mods, 45% of it was doing my own modding, and maybe the remaining 5% was playing vanilla, and that's still being generous. Mods, and mods alone, are the only reason to invest in HOI4 right now. If you don't care about playing with mods, don't even bother.

Edit: After years of trying to enjoy this game, I have something even worse to tell you: most of the playerbase are terminally online fascist gremlins who just want to live out their fantasies of "[Insert X country] takes over the world." Even the mods themselves have fallen to this so badly that unless you are the kind of person who casually wears a Stahlhelm to parties and goes to bed at night dreaming of Social Darwinism, you probably won't enjoy the mods either. Honestly, any sane people should avoid this game. There's a reason the Paradox fanbase has quarantined HOI4 players, yet Paradox themselves can't seem to get the message and openly panders to ACTUAL NAZIS just to sell DLCs. Other than the Wargame fanbase, I have never seen a game with such a hateful and extremist community as this one.