Recent reviews by Bungd-up

EDIT: Apparently I beat the game just before the new Windows update dropped and made it unplayable. Still going to recommend, based on my experiences prior, but until you hear that these new issues have been fixed, I suggest holding off on buying it.

TL;DR - Although it isn't a complete remaster, and you shouldn't pay full price, a lot of people on here are overreacting and/or don't remember how bad the original PS1 game actually looks now.

FF8 was my favorite PS game I owned back in my childhood. Weekends and summer holidays I'd stay up until the wee hours of the morning, my PS1 mini (The one that looked like just a slightly bigger Discman) whirring away as FF8 beat out Gran Turismo, the original top-down GTA, and 2 or 3 other games for my attention.

I was cautiously excited when I saw the FF8 remaster last year. I was over the moon that the characters and enemies got retouched textures and models, and the game had been given some bug fixes and an optimization pass or two over the original PC release, but I was also hesitant as people claimed the overworld map and most of the backdrops looked like they weren't touched up at all, and at full price that'd be something of a cardinal sin.

I ended up waiting until it went on sale, and while I'm glad I bought it at a reduced price, it is not the utter disappointment that hyperbolic people are claiming it is. Characters, GFs, magic effects, and many of the enemies have beautiful new HD textures and some subtle model adjustments.

Contrary to what people are saying, the backgrounds DID receive an art pass to smooth them over as well, and gone are the jagged, pixellated background textures of yore. For people claiming that the characters stand out too clearly from the backgrounds, you need to play the original discs - they've always looked like that. You're either just forgetting, or you never played the original release.

The overworld map and battle maps are a different story, and have been sadly neglected. This isn't a deal breaker at all, but considering about 2/3 of the game involve you freely roaming the world map, and you'll spend a considerable amount of time in battles, one would think that more care would've gone into updating them.

A few QoL improvements have gone in as well, namely the "3x Speed" mode (F3), which makes battles to item and/or draw-farm mobs actually bearable. There's also a "God Mode" cheat (F1) that basically functions like casting Regen and Aura on your whole party - Barring a hit that does more damage than a character has HP, their health will stay full, and they have constant access to their Limit Break as long as the F1 mode is active. While it obviously makes the game far too easy normally, If you don't really understand how FF8's systems work and you've buggered yourself into a corner against a boss that you can't beat, this cheat could save your whole game and let you get past that part without completely restarting a new game.

The audio also sounds a bit cleaner and less 'tinny' than the original. I'm not much of an audiophile though, so for me this is more just a bit of extra icing than an actual prop point.

Ultimately, am I glad I bought the game? Did it give me back some of that late-night childhood nostalgia? Did I abuse the absolute piss out of the Junction and GF-abilities system to min-max my characters? Is Squall a whiny, self-centred dink for most of the game? Should you buy this -on sale- if you loved FF8 as a kid?

Yes, yes, hell yes, absolutely, and do you really even need to ask that last one?

Just one last thing: Do yourself a favour, and play it with a controller for maximum nostalgia. Just trust me on that one.

Gaijin has absolutely no idea how to balance a game, but as long as you disable chat completely, just play it casually, ignore the battlepass, ignore whatever challenges they put out, and wait for sales to buy *anything* in-game or from their (mostly) ridiculously overpriced list of digital content ($80 CAD for premium modern tanks or aircraft lol) you'll be fine.

Game's also vastly better if you have a friend or two that you can reliably play with.

SSSSSSIIIIINNNNNDDDRRRRRIIII/10

I remember buying the disc when this game first came out, and then spending virtually all my savings from my summer job just to upgrade my computer so that I could actually play it on decent settings.

The intro alone will cause you to go through a second puberty regardless of your age, and will put hair anywhere you don't already have it.

Played this a TON when it was only on ModDB for the original CoH disc. Seeing it here gives me the happies. It's a free mod, and it's better than CoH2. Why are you reading reviews for this? Download it already! It's free! Stop being a blyat!

This is an ode to oldschool 90's no-reloadin', gore splatterin' monster killin', first-person fun for the whole family.

When humans want to scare their children into behaving, they tell stories about demons. When demons want to scare their children into behaving, they tell stories about Doomguy.

Once upon a time, there was a handsome-ass Canadian from Kamloops, BC that enjoyed the simple things in life - Cold beer, real maple syrup, bacon, poutine, and tax-funded healthcare. He didn't want after much, but one thing he did desire was a quality sci-fi grand strategy game that was highly customizable, with various 'endgame' challenges and an excellent random faction generator. He searched high and low, or at least he waited patiently and hoped, and one day his patience was rewarded by none other than Paradox. And from that day on, he Grand Strategied happily ever after.

Yes, friends, Stellaris is that fabled game. It is a wonderful introduction not only to sci-fi space strategy, but to the real-time grand strategy genre as a whole. Taking cues from past Paradox titles, as well as successful turn-based 4X titles such as the Galactic Civilizations series, Stellaris delivers an experience that frankly, has been sorely lacking. As a huge fan of other Paradox titles, as well as anything to do with SPEHSS, this game grabbed my eye easily and then pulled it out of the socket and proceed to make sweet hanky-panky with my skull.

Where to start... Stellaris is easily one of the most accessible, least intimidating grand strategies out there. It has enough complexity that you still need to pay attention to what you're doing and who's around you, but especially for people that have never played a GS game or have only lightly dabbled in the genre, you'll likely really enjoy this one. Veterans and hardcore fans of Grand Strategy might find Stellaris a little to simple and easy mind you, so keep in mind that YMMV.


-MODS-
One of the things that I love most about Stellaris though is how easily and extensively it can be modified however. Want to add a Star Destroyer, the Pillar of Autumn, or a Mars Class Battlecruiser as a ship model? Custom ship themes will allow you to do this. If it can be made into a 3D model, imported into a theme, and then packaged and put up on the workshop, then you can have it in your game! The same goes for everything from your empire's symbols, flag backgrounds, race portraits, names, etc...


-GENERAL GAMEPLAY-
Gameplay in Stellaris plays a lot like Victoria, Hearts of Iron, CK, EU, etc... in that you're given the world map (In this case, a galaxy populated by anywhere from dozens to hundreds or thousands of stars) and left to conquer it through a variety of means. This could be done by peaceful acquisition of occupied planets and settling of unoccupied ones, it could be through the flexing of military might, or through shrewd diplomacy, by getting other races to fight eachother so you can swoop in and "clean up" the leftover mess. Standard fare. But be cautious, because there are some crazy powerful "Fallen Empires" that you can include in your game, and frankly they're massive ♥♥♥♥♥. Never trust them. Ever.

Politically, you may have to deal with everything from elections to usurpers to racial, independence, or economic driven riots and rebellions. The political system, while not terribly deep, does make the game more interesting and the fact that some of the people of your worlds may develop new traits that put them at odds with the rest of your empire will keep you paying attention to where you draw future colonists from and where you station your fleets. Some of your more distant worlds may require a peaceful "persuasion force" of battleships in low orbit to keep the population from getting any smart ideas.

Star systems are handled in two ways: Cores and sectors. Core systems are few, and allow the player to have direct control. Typically, these solar systems will be either in the heart of your empire, or they'll be on a particularly dangerous border where you need to be able to control military defense infrastructure directly. Sectors are basically automatically governed, but you can set some rules and limits to how that's done. One of the good things with sectors is that a governor applied to a sector will apply their bonuses to every world in it. So if you have a sector with a ton of industry, and a governor with a bunch of industrial production bonuses, then you've got yourself a recipe for fleet spam!


-COMBAT-
Battles are handled in real time. There are some formation orders that you can issue to your fleets, but battles are pretty much hands-off affairs of "Point your fleet at their fleet, fly at eachother, and shoot ALL THE LASERS". Basically, the *FREEM*ing will start and won't stop until one side is dead or runs off. It leaves something to be desired, but with how big and crazy battles can get, I see why they did it.


-COLONIZATION-
Colonizing worlds is really similar to the Galactic Civ series - once your scientists scan a habitable planet, you have colony ships loaded with colonists who carry the traits and ideals present on their world (multiple different groups of ideals and/or species on one planet will give you a choice of which group to recruit from if applicable), and you tell said colony ship to colonize a world. It will do so, upon which you pick the tile to make landfall on, clear away any hazard tiles, and then have a finite number of tiles available to settle on in direct relation to the size of the planet or moon. Be aware that your race's homeworld ecosystem type will directly influence which planets you can settle on at first. If you play a race of anthropomorphic Polar Bears from an arctic world, then you can only settle on arctic, alpine, or tundra worlds to start. Anything warmer will be too inhospitable for you until you research the right tech to either settle them or, better yet, terraform them. The same goes for other climates.


-UPGRADES-
Upgrading and designing new ships was done with ease-of-play in mind. This is great for the player that wants to just come up with new configurations and play the game itself, but for players more partial to Galactic Civ's method of build the whole ship piece by tiny piece, it won't satisfy. However, for the former it is extremely satisfying. You pick your ship class, you pick the hull design or hull segments you want (IE Front A/B/C, Midsection A/B/C, Engines A/B/C) and then populate it with weapons and modules that correspond to the available size or type slots on the hull pieces (S/M/L/X/T/P/H). When updated versions of the weapons or modules become available, you simply open that ship, replace them in the design, and overwrite it. All ships of that design will auto-update over time and for a fee. No deleting mountains of obsolete designs like in GalCiv, Paradox knows how to make things simple!


-RANDOM EVENTS-
In terms of random events, I don't want to spoil anything but rest assured - there are a ton of them and they're all over the place. From planet-based events, to entities and units in star systems, anomalies, multi-stage investigation missions, election promises, and more!


-THE GUD STUFF-
Honestly, and we all know Canadians can't lie worth a damn anyway, Stellaris is one of the best games to come out of 2016 in my opinion. It takes elements of what make Grand Strategies so great, combines them with elements of what makes Sci-fi 4X so great, and then gives a simplified version of both styles of game that still has enough challenge, depth, and complexity to keep the average person entertained. And while some criticize Paradox for their habit of supporting games for years after release with mountains of tiny, cheaply priced DLCs and a few big expansions, I for one love this model. It will keep the game fresh in exactly the way I want it to be, without having to pay for the stuff I don't want.

TL;DR, Stellaris is something of an underrated diamond in the rough. Paradox created a real gem here, and if you love strategy games (and moddable ones at that), then you absolutely don't want to miss out on Stellaris, which deserves a solid 8.5/10 in my books.

So many broken promises... I bought this game about 2 or 3 years ago, when it was brand new out of Steam EA.

In that time, as you can see, I've played a total 2 hours... And yes, actually experienced pretty much everything it has to offer.

If you're looking for a fun, functioning, albeit simple team MP arena, this is an alright game. If you're looking for an eerie, unforgivingly tough set of singleplayer missions, this is an alright game.


If you're looking for a game that's likely to ever be finished however, avoid this.

If you're looking for a game where the developers make good on the features they initially advertised instead of changing the store page description to only reflect the current abandonware, avoid this.

If you're looking for a game that won't lose your interest in a few days/weeks at most, avoid this.

Let me start out by saying that I want to give this a *good* review. I really, really do. Because for the first 25-30 hours it was a refreshing change from Civ 5 in a lot of ways. Yes, it has its bugs and flaws (Diplomacy in particular), but I figured that Firaxis would be quick to patch out some of these nagging little issues, as well as swiftly release the integrated modding tools (as they had talked plenty about) and that winning combination would help solve these issues and allow modders to add further depth and quality to what I considered a decent basic framework. Certainly, at least, the game actually runs stable and could be played on release, which is more than anyone could say for Civ 5 even today.

So why am I giving this a thumbs down?

Well, for starters, the diplomacy flaws I mentioned. If you've played Civ 5 you'll remember that once an AI denounced you, that was pretty much it for the rest of the game. You were going to eternally be re-denounced every time the modifier expired. As well, a denunciation from one AI often meant a dogpile of further denunciations from several other leaders in a laughable gongshow of virtual feces slinging that wouldn't end until those AIs were eliminated (Which usually resulted in further denunciation, et cetera)...

Well, Firaxis, in their attempts to "fix" this somehow actually managed to make it even worse. It seems that in Civ 6, just being a player in the game will get you denounced by AIs. In my first game, I was actually denounced by 3 different leaders in less than 100 turns, and all I did was focus on development inside my own borders. This continued to snowball the entire game until I had every leader, -including my allies-, denouncing and subsequently declaring war on me every few turns without discernible cause. Usually these wars would end in their surrendering and paying me. At one point I was earning 75 GPT in surrender deals across the board Banks HATED me. Learn how I was making 180 GPT with this one simple trick!.

Diplomacy rating: Wat/10

But Tyler, what about the district system? Surely that's a great addition!

Well, I'm glad you asked, poopypants. I like the idea. It's a good idea. It was one of my favorite parts of Endless Legend. And it would be a favorite part here too, if Firaxis didn't manage to make it so My-Steam-Username. For starters, cities generally look like one coherent, sprawling entity. Not so with Civ 6! Apparently Firaxis' definition of a city is "Looks like a bunch of tile improvements loosely clustered together". Now, I'm not asking for Cities Skylines when I play Civ 6, but having the ground texture around districts change to something akin to Civ 4's city ground textures, and/or having more of the small buildings fill in the gaps between districts, or just making the districts take up the -whole- tile instead of only occupying about 2/3 of it would all look better than what we got, visually. But visuals aren't all that matters, so here's the real issue with districts:

The garbage UI makes it almost impossible to plan them thanks to almost zero information, and it isn't until the late game that you can actually see *all* the effects the location will have on a district. Indeed, I actually had to resort to Reddit to figure out efficient district placement, because Civ 6 itself does such a crap job at providing any useful information. But the real kicker is that I found by late game district planning hardly even mattered. I would build my cities to crank out as much production and gold as they could while completely ignoring the other currencies, and I would somehow still be coming out in first place in 4/5 victory conditions I checked during setup.

"Okay so the city building changes are total duds, at least the combat is good right? I mean, Corps and Armies and stuff - pretty cool right?"

Oh you naive little bumnugget. I was like you once. Then I tested these systems out. Turns out they fulfill the same role as combat strength promotions in previous Civ games, except now you have to destroy a perfectly good unit (or 2) to use it. I honestly don't know what the hell the point of this was. When they talked about Corps and Armies, they made it sound like you could combine an infantry unit with artillery and AA (for example) and have a unit that, while weaker than those 3 individually, could fulfill the roles of each unit within one tile.

What we got however, was again, strength promotions that require you to kill up to 2 units to promote the intended unit.

I believe this short clip sums up my feelings on this accurately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEV_0VqZTXE

"At least Firaxis introduced culturally diverse units like they talked about in Q&As and dev videos!"

Fahck you. Digganobz.

In other words, no. They gave us the same unit models with different skin tones/paint jobs. So everyone still uses Sherman tanks, it's just that some civs get GREY Sherman tanks, while some get TAN. Or GREEEEEN. OooOOOOOooOOh

Much wow. Such diversity. Very multiculturalism.

And your cities? Step backwards. They're diverse up until the industrial age and then they all look identical. I mean, even Civ 5 had at least distinct cities based on ethnicity.

"Alright, Captain Crabbypanties, why don't you just get mods for these things then and fix them?"

Shut your sausage hole, that's 'MR. Captain Crabbypanties' to you. Also, Firaxis has added Workshop Support after -half a year- of the game being out. Hey, they still failed class, but at least they got at least one point toward their grade. Of course, we're gonig to have to take it away thanks to their DLC policy being straight out of the SEGA bible, but you know. Thought that counts.

"Did Firaxis get -anything- right, according to you then!?"

Sure, it's just that for everything they got right, they seemed to get 2 things wrong the more I played. The art direction is so-so. I'm *okay* with it, but I'm still not a fan really. If I wanted to play something that looks like Clash of Clans, I'd play Clash of Clans like a filthy casual. It's not unpleasant, it's just... Not what I think of visually when someone says "Civilization".

They were right about this being the most fleshed-out base game in the series. They've managed to include spying and religion as base game features, which is cool. Leaves more room open for totally new features to the series in further expansions/DLC. However, religion suffers from the same dumb AI as Civ 5 when it comes to picking bonuses and any time you lose a founding to an AI, you can consider it an opportunity completely wasted for the rest of the game. And I really only found spying useful from the perspective of preventing enemy spies from annoyingly destroying my districts. Maybe these systems will get more refining and weight down the line but right now they don't feel particularly influential towards the outcome of a game, at least in singleplayer.

Like I said, the bad rating is a huge shame, since Civ 6 has a lot of really great ideas that just haven't been that well executed. I get that it's a first try for a lot of this stuff and new systems take some tweaking and patching to get just right, but until that happens I really can't say that Civ 6 has much going for it right now to make it worth paying $80 CAD

Would give a 50/50 review if possible.

Turns out that you can open your rides without actually connecting the exit to the park's path system, and your guests will just get back onto the rides.

Yes. You can now literally make EVERY ride in the game "Mr. Bones' Wild Ride".



Oh, and the rest of the game is pretty good I guess. I mean, you have most of the good systems from RCT3 in place so if you've played RCT3, things like building blueprints to make shop and ride facades will be familiar to you. The coaster/track system is excellent - track is placed in segments and then you can adjust the length, curve, height and twist using buttons that control spline manipulation.

There're also a large variety of shops and premade scenery. Workshop integration is fantastic, downloading/uploading is as simple as clicking the subscribe or upload to workshop buttons respectively. That's it, no activating/deactivating or anything. Just click and go and it's in your game. This can even be done WHILE playing, which is awesome if you need something new on the fly.

My only two criticisms are:

*The rides - or more specifically, the relative lack thereof. There really aren't very many options even so far as alternate themes go for rides. Yes, you can build blueprint ride skins AROUND the rides for decoration, but the rides themselves only have one skin that you can recolour. I would like to see different variations of skins for each ride, so that (for example) you have the normal carousel, a wild west carousel, a sci-fi carousel, and a fantasy carousel. Right now, there's only the one visual style which can be a bit disappointing.

*And the management aspect. This is not a big deal to me, being someone that just wants to build rides and coasters and then find hilarious ways to kill guests, but for someone that really wants to play "Paperwork Simulator 2016", it might be. That criticism would be the lack of deeper management gameplay.

Actual management is a bit lacking. You have the basics there, and for the most part it DOES feel like the original RCT, but there's some backend stuff that people seem to think is missing.

But unless you're the weird kind of person that buys games solely for their tedious micromanaging aspect (In which case you probably also like ketchup on your hotdog and are completely alone in life. Mustard, onions, and sauerkraut only!) you won't notice or care at all because you'll be too busy building your newest coaster and naming it "Severe Rectal Trauma"

I award this game "Not Rollercoaster Tycoon World/10", which is the highest recognition within my power to bestow.

Fething Eldar.