Trying to finish the Horizon Forbidden West story, but it’s a bit meh. Really sad about that! The HZD stories were great, and the world is as beautiful as ever, but I stopped caring at some point with the newest one. Other than that, I just bought the Age of Wonders 4 season pass and am trying out the new races and traits.
It’s reeeaaally good imo, but also a freaking time machine. You start to play it, and 1 hour later you traveled like 10 hours into the future.
To be a bit more serious, the game has a very nice and cozy vibe, an interesting construction system with buildings on top of other buildings and intricate road and energy transmission planning, great water mechanics, and a good economy and survival loop. You can spend hours trying to figure out an optimal way to stack and connect certain buildings, and you have to be really careful about when to expand, cut back, or build more production and storage, because the next drought or bad water season could very well be your last!
One thing I really don’t like is that you kinda have to play it with the time sped up, because many things just take a ridiculously long time to build. It also gets much easier once you manage to get your water supply under control, almost nullifying the survival mechanics.
Ah yes, we all know that performance problems on consoles are unheard of. And CS2 runs really badly even on some of the most popular and powerful hardware, so that argument makes no sense here.
Always have been, that’s why calling it a scam has always been ridiculous. You can think about the feasibility of the project and quality of their decisions what you want, but they were always very honest and transparent about the work they are doing and the huge goal they are chasing.
I like the way Age of Wonders 4 does it: Keywords in tooltips are highlighted, and you can hover over them to get another tooltip with an explanation and more highlighted keywords to hover over. This means you can easily explore the basic mechanics right there in the tooltips.
This is not what I’m talking about, because the vast majority of people buying the game won’t have seen this. It’s not enough that the info is somewhere on the internet, it needs to be front and center when buying the game.
The problem is that they don’t communicate this and still ask for the full price.
Imagine I’m a gamer who wants to buy and play a working game today, not in half a year. Nothing on their store page indicates that the game isn’t in a playable state yet, so I’d pay full price for a game I can’t actually play. That’s misleading at best, and a downright fraud at worst.
They could easily fix this by delaying the game or launching it as early access for people who don’t mind playtesting a half-finished game, but they didn’t.
If you’re the only reviewer that doesn’t get one then you won’t have a review up for when people read them most, right on release day. So game companies can threaten to exclude you if you write something they don’t like.
Imo they should be an everyone or no one deal, probably even by law.
A true modern successor to The Guild (aka Europa 1400). That concept has soooo much potential imo, but the games after the first were notoriously underfunded, half-baked and riddled with bugs!