Reseñas recientes de ♤ fek

A truly incredible game with the worst user interface I've ever seen in my life.

I want to meet the UI team. I just want to talk.
It's not that I'm angry. It's that I'm baffled.

How can a game with so much thought and care put into so many of its aspects have such an astonishingly little amount of thought put into its UI?

Was it interns?
Should we blame console players?
Nepotism, perhaps?

The truth of the matter is that this game's foundation is incredible. It's a significant departure from 6; the age transition mechanic is a big deal, and if you're just looking for more-of-the-same, keep playing 6.

But if you're willing to try something new, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Dividing the game into ages does an incredible job, especially in multiplayer, of making sure the game never feels like a foregone conclusion. There is always one more chance to pivot, one more chance for a rebound.

Learning to balance between the development of permanent infrastructure and short-term gains is where the game's meat resides. If you've played Humankind, Civ7 seems to borrow almost all of its best ideas and improve upon them. (The only thing that still feels weak, in comparison, is combat - but 7's combat is still a significant step up from 6.)

In four years, I believe we'll be looking at the best game in the series. But at launch, as is customary for the franchise, you will need to wade through mud to find the gold beneath.

And the mud, this time around, is that the user interface is absolutely garbage.

It's not just that it's ugly. Ugly, I could ignore. And trust me: it's ugly.

The problem is that the game simultaneously refuses to present any sort of useful information to the player, then demands it of them. A few glaring examples:

- There is, to the best of my knowledge, no way to see the precise, numerical construction progress of a wonder. You get a radial progress bar. That's it. If you want to know the *total* cost of a wonder, you have to dig for it in the civilpedia. You're sometimes given great people who provide benefits like "adds 200 production towards the completion of a wonder" - but do you wanna know whether that will actually finish the wonder you've been working on? Too bad. There is literally no way to know.

- There is no easy way to tell which settlement a tile belongs to, which is frequently important for determining where to activate merchants, among other things. You can see it in the town growth panel (which is not always available) and a few other obscure/not-always-available interfaces. But if you thought you'd be able to just hover over the tile, like you could in 6, you need to set your expectations much, much lower.

- There is no easy way to tell how many trade routes are available for each other leader. The best you can do is buy a merchant, wait a turn for them to be active, scroll through their trade options list, find a city belonging to the leader, and hover over it.

- There is no menu that shows you all of the independent powers you've found and your progress towards befriending them. If you want to see them at all, you must either find each one on the map, or - get this - click your OWN leader portrait (intuitive, right?), go to the relationships page, scroll through the city states (which are not color-coded or useful in any way; just a list of names), and click each one to see your current relationship with them. When you back out of that menu, it backs you ALL THE WAY out to the map, so you must start this process over again and hope you remember which city state you left off at.

I could list examples like this for a long time, and part of me is tempted to. But the point is that you will find inexcusable abominations like this all throughout the game.

And that really stings, because the core of the game is brilliant. The balance is significantly improved from 6. The commander system is incredibly fun, and improves combat tremendously. The happiness system (essentially stability from Humankind) ensures that you can meaningfully engage with warfare without ruining someone else's game. The age division system has a magical way of reproducing that "new game feeling" several times over the course of a match. The character art - which I was admittedly concerned about in the previews - is actually surprisingly wonderful in motion. The map is gorgeous.

There are so many brilliant things going on in this game, and several of those decisions seem to be deliberately focused on improving the competitive multiplayer experience, which is exactly what our group enjoys.

I really do recommend this game. Sincerely. But you need to be ready to roll your eyes constantly at the laughably bad UI until someone - either the developers or modders - finally comes through and does it RIGHT.

The only other complaint I can offer is that the game is obviously set up to milk us with DLC. It's blatantly obvious that the Atomic era was simply chopped off the tail end of the game so they could sell it to us, later. (The half-baked victory screen, the presence of Ageless improvements in the modern era, etc.)

I'm willing to overlook that because frankly, the game is good enough that I don't mind getting milked for it, and the base game is fun enough on its own to be worth the sticker price. But if you're particularly averse to that sort of nonsense, wait a few years for the first xpac and buy the game on sale.

Wonderful game. Terrible matchmaking / lobby servers.