Recent reviews by Jazen

The game is fun at moments.

Positive:
- New production system makes more sense than previous titles and seems to have a more lasting impact on gameplay
- Focus trees are a nice mechanic to add flavor into the game. Can be restricting at times.
- Research is streamlined.
- AI seems more accepting and willing to work with diplomacy
- Being able to give clearer commands to automated troops
- Variant units add flavor and can help make more impactful units
- Most of the game is easy to understand

Negative
- Game appears overly easy, even on hardest difficulty, for veterans of the series. You can run the game on the highest speed and pretty much not miss anything impactful.
- Game seems to end much sooner than expected (WW2 ending in 40-41, focus tree exhausted early, tech only lasts till mids 40)
- AI makes odd decisions to automated troops and in deciding how to fight the war. Several examples of troops being brought hundreds of kilometers away just to guard one side of the front while there are plenty of unused divisions nearby. AI also appears overly easy to "game" and thus mass encirclements become common (more-so due to AI mistakes than your own doing)
- Country AI seems to refuse to follow-up and take provinces, leaving sprinkled enemy provinces everywhere. Not a pretty sight to see disjoint pockets of France, UK, Germany, Italy, Nationalist Spain, and United States all over North Africa.
- Incentive bonus to automate troops cripples manual control. Manual control is constantly overridden by AI control if you have the larger army set towards an objective. Controlling units should be other way around.
- War in Europe is decided by how many fighters you can build, and that's about it.
- Air Unit Interface is clunky and doesn't logically form well together (difference between airbase and air region)
- Complete lack of meaningful espionage and ways to impact intelligence
- No way to automate trade leading to constant "Lack of resource" popups. Should be able to set it so you can just get it from best source and save yourself two clicks every week in the later part of the game. (if there is a way to do this, I haven't found it yet)
- UI and Map is a clash of color, hard to find units with the mess of units that are displayed on the screen with all the other things happening on screen.

Needs patchwork. Wait and see on DLC filling out content before deciding to buy if you are on the fence. If you were a fan of HoI3, the game can feel like a let-down and too simple at times, so expect a different experience going in. More open to beginners and new fans of the genre. Would only recommend to players that are probably more open-minded in their expectations than I am.