Recent reviews by Questionable

A good old RTS, a cool concept, the campaigns are actually quite fun in a campy kind of way, except for the chinese campaign that was kind of tacked on a few years ago but other than that it's a thumbs up

The best Fallout game according to almost everyone but it's heinously buggy and even with mods that're meant to improve stability I can't even get to Primm without being utterly bombarded with constant hangs, freezes and crashes everywhere I go, and it's even worse without those mods.

This game is not even remotely capable of running on modern systems, which is funny because I can run games from the early 2000s without a problem.

Changed back to a yes but you need to set it to compatibility mode and fiddle with some other stuff maybe, look in the steam community guides for help with that. May not work for everyone so buyer beware.

=================================================================================
I've changed my review to a no because sadly, as is the case with many other old games, modern systems are making old software unstable and run poorly. I've been experiencing severe instability, the game dropping to 10 FPS tops after a few minutes of running and severe mouse flickering.
=============================================================================

Old Review:
An old but great RTS that focuses much more on logistics and long-term strategy rather than moment-to-moment unit management, to the point where there's barely any micro to really speak of as your armies are organised into customizable regiments with passive abilities and spells that are automatically activated on cooldown through-out combat, making battle mostly a case of taking advantage of counters and weaknesses.

There's a lot of great visual design though sound design leaves quite a bit to desire, especially in the way of unit voice lines. You'll be hearing "SAJA LIGHT OUR WAY" and "FOR THE LIGHT" in your gosh darn dreams if you don't turn off unit responses. The game's music isn't much to write home about but it's inoffensive at worse and quite pleasant at best.

The campaign is pretty fun with a lot of neat maps, though the story is hardly mind-blowing, I still think it's a good bit of fun, with Melchior standing out as the best character as a hammy 'anti-hero with a tortured past' type who's always got a pithy come-back for his allies and enemies alike, a great foil for the otherwise quite self-serious campaign.

In Skirmish mode there's a good amount of variety, not only are there 6 races with unique units, structures and construction methods there are also five factions that certain races can pick that change your available technologies and dictates which of the titular "Kohan", special commander units with powerful abilities that you can select to lead your armies. So even playing the same faction you can shake up your strengths and weaknesses by picking different factions.

I love this game but the little things that bring it down have become increasingly frustrating every time I try to play these days.

Simultaneous turns are forced to always on, so every turn is a race to command your units to attack, retreat, move, claim territory, everything. THis is a TURN based strategy game, I shouldn't be having to race the AI or players to do actions at the start of every turn during a war or when competing to claim land. The UI is sometimes unresponsive and won't register commands which if this game were properly turn based would not be a problem but because of simultaneous turns it is incredibly frustrating. To top this off if you and the AI finish a wonder on the same end turn the AI takes priority 100% of the time. If two players do its a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ coinflip. ONE TURN AT A TIME PLEASE.
Forced Simultaneous turns is an issue that plagues all Amplitude strategy games and is something they should at the very least make optional, it degrades the quality of gameplay and I'm pretty sure its one of the reasons all their games have horrible Desync issues.

The combat. There are quite a few people who will die on this hill but I"m sorry you're wrong, the combat is horribly hurt by every unit having its own independent AI and you as the commander only being able to vaguely suggest moves for them. You can command them to move to a tile and attack but they won't do it until you "Initiate combat" at which point all units will move one at a time in order of their initiative score, meaning that unless you have higher initiative (which you rarely will if you play on higher difficulties or play a faction plagued with low base initiative) meaning enemies will move away from wherever you planned to have your units attack could no longer be reachable and tiles you wanted them to move to could become occupied. If this happens the unit will default to its chosen "Stance" either Aggressive, Defensive or Hold Ground. The Aggressive & Defensive stance is incredibly stupid. Defensive will just run away and Aggressive will just auto-target the "weakest" target it can find, even if that target is outside its movement range and there are other targets available, meaning its an almost garunteed wasted turn and can end up meaning you don't finish off a unit. Hold Ground will just stand there and is functionally the same as wasting a turn.
Even Amplitude ended up agreeing that this system was bad and detracted from the strategy cause their latest strategy game "Humankind" created a proper strategic battle system where you personally control the movement and attack of each unit ON THEIR TURN instead of making vague suggestions for them.

I find this incredibly frustrating because instead of addressing this glaring issues in their current games they just abandon them to hop ship on to their next project. I am very hesitant to buy Humankind after both Endless Legend & Endless Space 2 were left in rather sorry states.

Game Gud

The vaulters are a fun, pretty easy pirate-like faction that have special interactions with pirates and a focus on having a few high output systems linked by portals and boarding and stealing enemy ships. They're a fan favorite that've been featured in every Endless Strategy game and are pretty much always a good time.

If you played Endless Legend this is a continuation of their story from that game.

If you like the Hissho get the DLC.

The Behemoths are window dressing and very easy to miss in games on the regular.
They have a pretty niche usage, getting extra strategic resources, destroying systems, building special improvements.
You can only get a certain number of them that get increasingly expensive to maintain, they feel kind of clunky to me and you have to get specific techs to get them so unless I really need a specific niche utility I often just don't bother with them.

A massive update overhauled how this DLC works, both the Nakalim faction & the Academy.
The Academy as an active faction is no longer horrible, there are more options for interacting and diplomacy with Isyander, including getting systems and populations off of them.

The Nakalim are much less janky and their core mechanics of relics and temples are a lot more straight forward.

Game is horribly infested with aimbots as of posting.

3000 hours x--x