Recent reviews by dracoix 🐉

Gameplay 9/10
Gameplay Interface 5/10
Campaign 1/10
Mission/Mechbay/Progression Interface(s) -1/10

The good..

Gameplay: Holy hell that is some beautiful chunky controls which are perfect. At least selecting 'classic mode'. Simple elegance that can make any MW3 fanboy cry. It actually feels like piloting something the size of a building and not a model robot. Weapons push their weight as well, and taking heavy hits actual makes you want to run for cover to gtfo. The map progression bounds are a little annoying, but I get it, an excellent feedback to areas so one doesn't get lost. The minor bugs of the triggers for the map bounds can be eventually, hopefully, fixed. Lot of double checking/scanning your area and backtracking to untriggered navs. But that's in the campaign, the gameplay as a whole is excellent.

And the bad...

Bugs: A lot of minor but incredibly obvious ones. Both physics and graphical.

Interface: Very few Mechs to unlock, mostly fan favs, but also the trash just to fill 'we have to have 1 Mech per 5 tons' checkbox. It's dumb. The out of battlefield experience like research and mechbay interfaces are terrible. They could have carbon-copied it from Mercs or MW0 for clan omnipod-rule mechs and it would have been half-way decent, but what ever this monstrosity is needs to be modded to oblivion.

Campaign Story: Cut-scenes are jarring due to bad writing, and the story itself is meh. It's like they took the entry from the animated series, grabbed some tropes from MW4 Veng and MW4 BK, then spent the rest of the time studying the lore. But it almost seemed like there was writers infighting about trying to push elements that were never suppose to be there. And with the lore advisors telling them 'the hell are you thinking? no! fix it! now!' but still keeping the framework there, awkwardly. The time jump in the campaign feels like there was several cut missions and/or cinematics. The 'true(born)' ending was underwhelming and empty, the final cinematic before the credits made it more so.

Voice Dialogs: The voice diaglogs do not queued up properly half the time, and there are a few in-story mistakes and oversights both in and out of cinematics. Almost every time someone gets a vehicle or turret kill gets a repetitive voice line.

Overall they have the sim beautiful and finely tuned with some unfortunate engine physics bugs and graphical glitches, but out of it is a terrible experience. I'm adding this to the negative statistic until they can fix it. If any mods are created, the most popular ones going to be fixing that stupid out-of-sim interface and adding in the mechs that should been available to CSJ. The campaign story is a lost cause. Maybe we'll get a new Nova Cat or Steel Viper campaign, or a revamped Ghost Bear campaign from MW2. Until then, this game needs more work and not worth the $50 right now. It should have been $30 with a $15 season pass or whatever.

Some people say war crimes, I say it is profiting on unexpected surprise investments.

Nominate this for "GAME THAT DESERVES A SEQUEL"

DONT BUY IF: You are a diehard Civ5 (with DLC) fan.
BUY IF: You are new to the Civ genre, or a causal Civ5 player.

Does the game stand on its own? Yes
Is it better than Civ5+DLC? No
Are there bugs? Yes
Are there exploitable overpowering mechanics? Yes
Are there missing interface features from Civ5+DLC? Yes
Is it the same exact engine as Civ5? Sorta*

Why should you buy it?
It's something new and creative, a testing ground for what Sid Meier use to do back in the late 90's, high risk, hoping it will pay off and create a new line of Civ. This is more of a proof-of concept than a 'new' game.

Although there are no direct conflicts and no hostile forces, this is amazingly well designed, well coded, and beautifully crafted. If Caesar II and Age of Empires made a baby in peace time, this would be it. I have a few slight beefs for those who want more in depth issues to the current features...

Point one. The town can entirely survive on firewood and food indefinitely as long as supplied. There is no reason to develop much further, nor is it required. This ruins the whole concept of progression and expansion and vise verse.

Stone and Iron are incredibly difficult to amass, then again, not really needed as to point one. No need to send child labor into the mines and quarries to gather the resources needed for their headstone in the graveyard outside the incredibly expensive chapel.

Citizens choose the shortest path, regardless of roads when transversing long distances. When I say well coded in the first part, I mean algorithmic and procedural, not intelligently. The path finding will set you off guard should you accidentally indicate a collection of resource across a river or mountain, and then wonder why your people are freezing to death. Then again, that is some of the best path finding I have seen in any game, if only AoE2-HD could take some notes. The procedural map creation is astounding, though the coder inside me thinks using dome punchers for lakes is a bit cheap and fuzzy, and makes it look like crap. If the same person knew how to implement great path-finding, at least turn to the next page in the epic-code manual to find noise generation and applications, it's right next to river and mountain generation, how can you be missing just one page? Of all things to make look cheap, it had to be lakes. Which brings to next point...

You cannot flatten land... this makes children in your town cry because their new house can't be built on a slightly elevated hill. Also about buildings...

Area bounded buildings are size limited. If I wanted a huge farm that sprawls, I can't. Even at small scale, to fill in some 'gaps' of layout planning it is restricted by a draconian width and length limit. Why can't the nice old lady in the last wooden house have her own 1x4 cherry garden before she dies?

Speaking of age, one world year is 4 citizen years, I know, difficult for me to grasp to when I saw a one year old going to pick up stone at the local quarry. It was a different time back then, or when ever, better question where ever? I think I now know the reason these folks were banished, they age incredibly fast, navigate the wilds with ease, AND can crush rocks, cut trees without tools all at the age of three. Hell, I'd cast them out too, freaks.

In the greater scheme of things, difficulty is up to you and you alone when progressing the town, how long can you keep the town alive is the real goal. You'll be rage flipping tables as soon as your food and firewood hit zero and little 12 year old Timmy the harvester is the only one left with his more 'experienced' wife expecting. He gets crushed by a tree, and she dies at age 37 in childbirth. Population: 0

I'm just happy I can still create mods for it. :)