Recent reviews by ArthurPoondragon

Game is good, but could be great. Needs more variety in terms of mission types and situations. Also a bunch of little bugs that need squashing, but understandable given the game engine is no longer supported.

And for the love of liberty, let us choose the colour trims on our armours. It's such a small thing that would bring so much hap-democracy.

Good, fun stand-alone. But wish it could be tied to your DRG profile so progress and resources were shared.

The best time you're gonna have with your buds for the price. Game is solid and only a couple gigs.

- Sword
- Sandal
- Sand
- Sorcery
'Nuff said.


Okay, a little more:
Pros:
- Good leveling and character personalization
- Involved crafting system
- One of the best building systems I've played with
- Huge map
- Fun lore

Cons:
- Animations and building kinda clippy sometimes
- Have to buy battle pass to unlock all of season's items
- Some items in the bazaar cost more than a whole battle pass

You think you're good at chess, huh? Think again.

This game is...perfect. A perfect form of craft. The gameplay is tuned and tight, the writing is probably the best I've ever seen in a game with some of the choicest voice acting I'v ever heard to accompany it, I listen to the soundtrack on its own, the art is gorgeous and so are the characters, and every game mechanic has a narrative reason. Nothing is arbitrary in this game nor included simply because other games have it or do it. This was my favourite game of 2020 and will probably be your favourite game of the year whenever you do your future self the favour of playing it.

This game is good, not great, but quite good. However, I've given up trying to play this game on keyboard & mouse. I know it was originally intended for a controller, but if you're porting it to PC it feels so disrespectful to not put in the effort to make competent controls or at least give the player the options to do that themselves. Hopefully they fix it, otherwise this negative review will stay.
(I know I could get a controller, but I shouldn't have to go get an extra piece of equipment to play the game on the system the developers themselves have released the game for.)

The game we needed to play with friends.

NOTE: This review is for as it is when originally posted. I fully expect updates and DLC to change my opinion and I'll update my review accordingly.

(tl;dr at bottom)

To me there is one fundamental flaw with this game. (And numerous other smaller ones, but I'll get to those further down.) The only way to currently win is Fame - specifically having the most of it by the end of the game condition. This presents two problems. One, fame is an abstract concept and not necessarily a goal in of itself. In Civ for example, Science and Domination are specific things. They have clearly defined criteria that must be met to fulfill those victory conditions no matter how long it takes. And this leads me to point number two. The game ends at some arbitrary turn limit which doesn't bode well for the free-form storytelling theme they developers are going for. And games that are based on score against a limiting factor like time are inevitably going to be anti-climatic in their endings because the end will most often be misaligned with anything significant the player is doing or pulled of. It'll just kinda...end. I wish there were more game modes like Space Race or Deathmatch, or being able to scale the cost of units, districts, etcetera, to make a more customizable experience and I hope more options get added.

And now, in no particular order:

Progression feels incredibly slow and entirely too fast at the same time. Technologies are relatively quick to research once you get some actual science going, but the production ramp of each subsequent district makes it feels like you can only build a few districts before you progress to the next era. Related to this is some buffs and emblematic districts are just far better than others. There have been times where I just couldn't pass up a culture even if it wasn't really relevant to my current ambition. Instead of nerfing these cultures though, the others should be buffed. The player should want to play every culture, not pick the least worse option.

Combat...combat is a mess. A lot of the rules are obtuse, especially sightlines in ranged combat. And potential movement is unclear too. Like, what do you mean the enemy can literally run directly through my unit and then attack them from behind? AND HOW IS THERE NOT AN OPTION FOR ADJACENT UNITS TO SWAP PLACES?! I watched the combat tutorial video in hopes of understanding (and the other ones for other aspects of the game), but didn't give me any new insight. It's also buggy and far more than once I've had to reload a game because the battle gets stuck in some logic loop and I can't end the turn.

Religion feels like a half baked idea that never gets fully integrated in your civilization, almost like it's a minigame within the game. Religion often snowballs and within twenty turns a continent can be fully converted. Also, religious pressure can be confusing. For instance, in one game everyone else had converted to my religion except for one continent. Somehow the continent was receiving ABSOLUTELY NO religious pressure from me despite having many trade routes, adjacent territories with my religion, and everyone still being in the early modern era. And I could find no explanation as to why.

Diplomacy is really quite limited, and sometimes buggy. It seems to be a complete binary between you and someone else and not a collective choice at any point. (There should be a world congress in the late game.) Also alliances hardly mean anything. I've gotten popups saying an ally is about to lose war support and I'm wondering why I didn't even know they were in a way, let alone why I wasn't called into it as well because I'm their bloody ALLY! There's also no precision in diplomacy and feels like you're swinging blind sometimes. Also, the game prompts you with the glowy particles around a proposition and then the civ refuses and grants a grievance. Like wtf? Why is that suggestion even there then?

Other small gripes:
- Wish you could rotate wonders.
- FoW within your attached territories doesn't make sense.
- The icons in the top left for each civ, should tell you the name of the civ when you hover over it. With peoples' names changing every era it can be difficult to remember who is now who.


tl:dr: This game has great potential (and looks pretty), but until it gets a (major) balance pass and a better interface to communicate information to the player (and more bug fixes), I recommend giving this game a pass for now.

This DLC is what I've been waiting for since I like to play tall. Started playing Hour 0 and I have hardly seen any of the bugs people are talking about. Even still I'm sure they'll be patched quickly like they always do.

One medium gripe is I wish there was a map filter for monuments. (Ledger is useful, but ultimately doesn't cut it.) I know generally where they are, but it'd be nice to see each monument's specific province on the map at the same time. (Like the map is grey save for monument provinces and those are all shades of green to reflect their tier level. I dunno, something like that.) Hopefully the developers add one.

EDIT: Oh sick, seems like they actually took my idea.