Recent reviews by Phaz

I like the game. The lore and factions provide a nice setting, especially if you've played the previous games. The gameplay is fun, and I like the companions. The graphics are, for the most part, pretty great. The ray-tracing features could have been a bit better, but they're okay. The music is good, with a Hans Zimmer main theme. The performance is also good; it has a great settings menu for tweaking graphics and supports all the modern tech from the three vendors. It's generally just a well-polished package.

What I don't like is the too-cartoony ("Pixar") art style and the overall lack of a "dark fantasy" theme, both in visuals and story/characters. I wanted a game for adults, but it feels a bit too friendly. Character facial features and expressions are exaggerated.

Lastly, the whole "the game is woke" criticism is a bit overblown (as it usually is). Yes, a definitely above-average amount of development time was spent on gender options, pronouns, and stuff like that. But when actually playing, after ignoring the corresponding options, it hasn't bothered me. They should tone it down a bit in the future, but rejecting the entire game because of this is just out of proportion.

The total package is a great game, but it already was in the previous versions.

The new version (FS25) has too many bugs, unfinished, or not well-thought-out features (like the limited usability of the new pastures, for example, for milk production). It generally adds too little over the previous version. The addition of new (Asian) crops and a map seems primarily aimed at attracting new users, while many fundamental community wishes were ignored.

The biggest improvement is the "AI" workers; they are at least able to finish a field now without getting stuck so often, even on non-rectangular fields. However, why hasn't the simulation itself been improved further? FS22, with mods, is significantly ahead of FS25.

The lighting, especially indoors, is outdated. Ray tracing support should be available by now, as well as NVIDIA Frame Generation support. Lastly, performance remains an issue, with single-core CPU limitations and frequent, significant micro-stutters.

In a year or two, when all the mods have caught up and the most egregious bugs have been fixed, FS25 might become the best iteration of the franchise. However, it's not there yet.

For entirely new FS players, FS22 is more affordable and offers a more refined overall experience. For existing players, FS22 remains superior with its vast array of mods that add features that should have been included in the base game long ago.

I genuinely enjoy the franchise, but in my opinion, GIANTS Software needs to significantly improve its game and potentially accept lower profit margins for a period to catch up.

I knew I was taking a risk, but even with patch 7, performance is still horrible. Terrible stuttering and uneven frame pacing. Running on a 7800X3D and RTX4090. Spent 3 hours tweaking settings, but it's basically impossible to get this to run smoothly. In the current state it's just unplayable in my opinion.

Awesome game!!!

(The only complaint is that it takes too much time, at least if you play on realistic mode. Construction takes soooo loooooong. Automated construction is an option, but that removes a lot of mechanics that I like, except for the time it takes.)

Fantastic game, already beat it on PS5 once. Playing again now with maxed out settings on PC and it runs great on my machine. Good port by Nixxes!

Great game and great PC port. It's running very nice and looks fantastic. The combat is fun.

Minor complaints:
- Aloy talks WAY too much when she shouldn't. Even with the game set to Explorer mode (instead of Guided) Aloy spoils 90% of puzzles. And many other comments are completely useless. After using Focus mode thousands of times she will keep commenting "Maybe my Focus can show me more" or "Hey, a crate". Also after the Playstation release this was already complained about a lot. It's an annoying blemish on this game, and it's disappointing that this was not fixed.
- NVIDIA Reflex in this game causes very uneven frame pacing and general unsmooth camera motion. So much so that it's just unusable. And because Frame Generation also requires Reflex, this also becomes unusable. I hope this gets fixed soon...!

Yes, there are some flaws. The biggest one for me is how the game is cut up in cells, with continous loading screens in between. There is barely any need to fly anywhere with your spaceship. It's all fast travel. Second is the bad facial animations. Everything moves, eyebrows, nostrils, eyelids, etc, but it's very robotic. Different parts of the face are not animating in one fluid motion. And there are more issues.

BUT besides all that there is a LOT of great stuff in here too. The spaceships, the "NASA Punk" semi-realistic design, beautiful interiors, many different activities, many voiced quests, good music, factions, and the list continues.

Overall I do recommend the game. You can have a lot of fun with it. But one caveat: mods are basically REQUIRED to fix some of the flaws, like lack of DLSS, excessive color grading, UI design, HDR support and so on.

PS. I'm already worried about TES6. The game engine still needs a lot of work to get truly modern...

Despite the pretty slick presentation of the game here on Steam, in reality the game is just way too simple to hold any interest for me and just isn't fun to play. Don't be fooled by the Motorstorm references some of the other reviews mention, and which the Dev also used on twitter. Superficially (mostly the color scheme and Canyon environment style) it looks a little bit like it, but this is WAY off Motorstorm as a game overall.

I you're interested in a really basic indie racing game it's not terrible I guess, but otherwise I'd steer clear of this one. Better of playing Motorstorm in an Emulator. :)

Great game, even better than Banished! The balancing and difficulty is really well done. Graphics are pretty good, sound is great. I don't think I saw a single bug in 35 hours of play and no crashes.

Ignore the few negative reviews about "devs abandoned the game" or "not worth the 25 bucks". They worked on the game for 4 years, it's complete. Of course you can always go further, but there's plenty of content here. Almost every reviewer here has quite a few hours played, definitely worth it value-wise. You'll pay less than 1€/hour.

Background: I played hundreds of hours in the Civilization and Paradox (grand) strategy games.

I think this is an awesome new game. A great addition to the turn-based historical genre. There are some gameplay/longevity issues, but I think these will improve over time and are definitely not serious for the first game in this series (I hope there will be more games in the future). I feel that some of the negative reviews are too critical.

What's Good?

• Absolutely beautiful UI design. So clean and polished. AAA class.
  
• Great artwork and there are a lot of pictures/drawings for events/units/civ's and so on. This really adds a lot of flavor to the game.
  
• Great music with a lot of variety.
  
• Nice Tech + Civ tree's with lots of unlocks.
  
• Plenty different buildings and units to build.
  
• Building stuff generally goes a lot faster than in Civ games. This really makes it more enjoyable.
  
• Wonders (and some other "Shared Projects") can be built by multiple cities at the same time. Great to get them built quicker this way.
  
• Nice Events with a picture and some flavor text where you have to make a decision. Basically like CK3. I don't know how many there are, but I've not seen any repeats yet during 15 hours.
  
• Great art style of the map.
  
• Fun gameplay. My first game took 15 hours, 11 of which I played immediately after booting the game for the first time. Not many games can hook you like the from the start!
  
• Roads get built between cities automaticaly (after unlocking a Tech fairly early on). You can move armies around the map pretty quickly. Maybe 5 turns over an entire continent. Much better than having to wait 15 turns like some other games.
  
• A huge potential for the future. If the game is succesful (commercially) and they keep developing it, this can be just as good or better than Civ 6.
  
• Great tutorial and help texts/popup's. Really, this is top notch.
  
• No issues with performance or stability. It runs (and looks) great.
  
• Pretty polished game overall. A few small bugs but that's it.

What's not so good or can be improved?

• The late game can become a bit repetitive if you're not at war with someone. (So just go to war. :P)
  
• Acknowledging the notifications can be annoying. PLEASE add a keyboard shortcut for the "Acknowledge" button! :) Spacebar would be perfect for this! Are you reading this Dev's?? :) I did read the notifications will be improved in the next update.
  
• Cities don't really have to specialize. If you are smart about how you develop, you can build almost every building in every city. It would be nice to have some more variety. (And sometimes be forced to specialize.)
  
• The AI keeps requesting the same treaty (trading goods) over and over again, even though I keep refusing every time. Make them get the message, or add a "And don't ask again for 15 turns" button or something like that please.
  
• Several AI Civ's absolutely hate me, break all treaties, make demand's of me (which I refuse), but they don't go to war. Some more pushback would be ok (although getting steam-rolled by cheating AI is not what I want).
  
• Add a keyboard shortcut for the Diplomacy screen (open to the last selected Civ) please.
  
• The cities/districs could look a little more built up in the later era's. It mostly remains pretty small. Where are the taller buildings? Maybe add some random variations and more iconic buildings between districs of the same type. E.g. add a windmill to some farms and stuff like that.
  
• You can stack multiple units of different types into an Army. It would be nice if you could decide which of the units was the one being displayed on the map.