Recent reviews by lnxpnk

I'm sorry I can't recommend this game. Nothing wrong with it, but I keep finding new games that try to bring back the Westwood's Command and Conquer / Red Alert formula and don't quite cut it. They achieve the general dynamics and feel of the old Westwood RTS, but otherwise don't bring anything else to the table. Battlefall: State of Conflict has unappealing graphics that somehow look more blocky than the venerable Westwood titles. The asymetric sides are also uninteresting, one being the human like "good boys" and the other the deranged mutated "bad guys". You could argue that Westwood's C&C and Red Alert also had shallow, Manichean sides, but they were a bit more interesting.

Maybe it's me, maybe I've outgrown the old 1990-2000 RTS formulas, but I moved to play something else very quickly. maybe it's your ball, but considering you can play the old Westwood titles this is based on in many ways, including the free OpenRA project, I'd rather recommend you to play those than this title.

For anyone interested, the game runs excellently in Linux via Wine/Proton.

The translation is unusable, you simply can't play the game in English.

• As other reviews said, parts of the UI aren't translated.
  
  
• Chinese, being a ideographic language, takes less space than English, therefore the boxes where text appears are overflowed in English. This could be solved with a scroll bar, without it the text that overflows the box is lost.
  
  
• Chinese grammar is very different than English, not having gendered pronouns and verbal times as in English you draw from the context who is speaking and when the action took place. Sadly, machine translation can't read the context, so the text is usually in present tense without clarity of who is speaking or when the action took place. This makes the text nonsensical, you can't tell in English when the action happened or who did it (unless the player draws from the context what the conversation is about), the translation also changes characters's genders, so female characters turn into "young men" in the dialogue. You can get the whiff of what's going on with a little effort if you consider these differences, but it makes for a poor experience and breaks immersion.
  
  
• For some random reason, the names of the NPC are changed into English. This is terrible. You're roaming in a Ming (or prior) Dynasty era Chinese village and you encounter a bunch of John or Jane Doe. This is a terrible decision!! It totally breaks immersion, there's no reason why you would change the names of characters that are supposed to be Chinese into English names.

I understand Carp Dragon Studio is a small, fledging studio, but there's no reason why you would ruin your game in such a way. This game looks great, the beat'em up gameplay is good, the 2D art is spectacular, I want to believe the story is also good, but if the game is unaccessible to English speakers and sold as if it does have a translation you are only going to get bad reviews. You need to either hire a professional translator or let the fan base make a proper translation. Please, is as if you cooked a delicious dish and then made it inedible by pouring a full bottle of ketchup over it. Don't boycott your own product like this.

I love Chinese culture, I love Wuxia films and stories, I even practiced a little kung fu when I was a teen, I'm really looking forward to playing this. Translation and localization are not easily done and you need to take special care to make your game available to Western audiences. It's not only native English speakers, English is my second language, but as I, there are millions of Spanish, French, German, Portuguese native speakers that can't read Chinese but do understand English.

I'm not refunding the game as I'm sure the translation will be revisited, but as it is right now I can't recommend what appears to be a great ARPG to English speaking audiences.

To anyone interested, the game runs perfectly in Linux via Wine/Proton.

Relatable.

This is a very good game, bringing back everything good that Sins of a Solar Empire had to offer.

However

• I didn't read the fine print about AI being used for this title, otherwise I wouldn't buy it. The AI use is limited to art and UI elements, but its still unacceptable. We pay good money for games, and the least we can expect is that game studios hire and pay artists and designers. In the end, AI is about replacing the human workforce for overrated autocomplete slop, and everyone should frown on that.
  
• The tutorial is lengthy and comprehensive, separated into several chapters, but a "tutorial campaign" of sorts would have been better, linking the mechanics to actual gameplay instead of presenting them without context of how said mechanics interact with the game at all.
  
• A lot of game content I'd expect to be included in the base game will be delivered in DLC, including a campaign. What you get in the vanilla version is basically single player skirmishes and multiplayer games.

Those are my main complaints, otherwise this is a fun RTS with 4X mechanics, some rock-paper-scissors, beautiful graphics. It doesn't play like a full fledged 4X, more like a massive RTS in the spirit of Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander, but you already know this if you played the prequels.

The game runs perfect in Linux via Wine/Proton

There's no USSR campaign. Of course, you can play the USSR in the sandbox mode, but the devs decided one of the main participants in WW2, the ones that actually took Berlin, aren't interesting enough to make a dedicated campaign.

I really want to love this game, so I'll give it a thumbs halfway. The game has many good aspects, in particular the Three Kingdoms Setting, the art and the music.

The game has two modes, an open world quests and exploration map, really similar to Battle Brothers, and a real time auto battler. The general map and quests are good, in spite of some harsh translation here and there, but the auto battler fights are underwhelming. Battle Brothers had a great turn based strategic combat, really well integrated to the general game, the auto battler in Three Kingdoms Mushoden is rather boring, and I don't feel the upgrades in equipment and weapons are as well integrated to the general map and quests as BB, as they feel less impactful.

So, it's not bad, in particular if you like the Three Kingdoms lore and know the name of the main characters (The starting character in the tutorial campaign is a bastard son to the treacherous and entitled Yuan Shu!) and the quests are interesting and engaging, even if you encounter the same side quests over and over, but the real time auto battler really is the short leg of a game that could have been great with a better tactical battle system.

TLDR: Get it on sale if you really like Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

The game runs ootb in Linux via Proton.

This is brilliant, and runs extremely well in mi Linux system. I only wish it had two options.

1. Windowed mode, so I can change tunes while the animation is on (you can do this by alt tabing and then alt tabing or clicking back to the fullscreen app, but a windowed mode still would be appreciated.

2. A way to change colors via keyboard. You can change the colors via launch commands, but it'd be cool if you could change colors (or even better, color palettes) on the fly while using the app.

If you played Delta Force back in the day, you'll feel at home with this title, if you didn't, you might feel Dagger Directive has a bunch of weird gameplay decisions. It tries to be a MilSim, but it's way too arcadey (no iron sight, a green cross marking your aim), so it feels like a game that's too slow and awkward compared with other FPS (CoD, CS) but too arcade if compared to modern day milsims like the ARMA series, Insurgency, SQUAD, etc. The reason for all this is that Dagger Directive tries to emulate they way a "realistic sim" felt like in a console 20 years ago, and in that they succeed.

Is it good? Well, if you have a taste for old school controls and retro graphics, it is! Like Delta Force or the earliest Operation Flashpoint/ARMA Cold War Assault, you can play the missions any way you want, customize your inventory, scavenge the enemy's weapons and equipment, and even use drones. It does achieve a realistic, military feel.

The Early Access roadmap includes a mission editor, modding and Steam Workshop support, which are HUGE pluses for me..

For anyone interested, the game runs perfectly in Linux via Wine/Proton, and should also run flawlessly in a SteamDeck.

I've spent quite some hours on Armored Brigade 1, and am loving everything AB2 has to offer. This is a very good, carefully detailed game, but might not be for everyone. tldr: if you played the Close Combat series you know what this is about. Now, if you didn't, AB2 strives for a level of realism not common in other RTS games, factoring in morale, delay in units receiving orders, ammo, training, terrain, complex maps, cover, etc. Therefore, the gameplay is neither arcade nor fast paced, you need to plan a strategy and play it out, knowing that changing orders will mean your troops will take some time to adjust and carry them out, or simply won't obey you if they are pinned down or in panic.

The game has a bunch of good aspects, you can tell there's a ton of work in making all armies as realistic and close to history as possible. It's not a game with a lot of eyecandy, the 3D models being good but low poly, and the smoke and lightning effects not particularly impressive. However the complex gameplay, the well researched units and setting, more than makes up for that.

I'm looking forward to see the DLCs available in AR1 make it to AR2, as I love playing with Yugoslavia.

Armored Brigade 2 also has a bunch of different play modes, from single missions to campaign and player generated missions, you can make complex maps out of GIS data, and there's workshop support. A full package.

To anyone interested, the game runs out of the box in Linux via Proton, and probably runs in a Steamdeck although is not a game I imagine playing on a handeld console.