Recent reviews by Turin Turambar

Very good neat narrative game;

Excels at immersion, decisions are meaningful and the characters believable!

Too bad we can't play a second term.

Northgard is a very much needed breath of fresh air into the RTS world. It feels, plays and it is indeed different, for the better.

Instead of clashing mindless hordes produced in minutes through click and click here you have to carefully manage a limited manpower pool. Soldiers are men absent from the settlement economy and that comes at a cost. Buildings and units have upkeep and every casualt can impact your campaign.

Did I mentioned varied victory conditions?

There are clear trade-offs between focusing on tech, expansion or domestic economy. The game will challenge you at everyturn.

It is, simply put, a masterpiece of the genre, oh whose developers we can only hope they keep building upon.

The only minus I am aware of is the still limited lore and stories to explore ingame, that can easily be fixed though.

Ignore the countless whiners. Ignore them.

I have played Stellaris since the very beginning and, though it was always a fun game, It had something arcadey to it. The planetary system was certainly not appropriate for 4X/Grand Strategy. It felt arbitrary, repetitive and, ultimately, meaningless. Oh look, elecricity, here is a central to exploit this. Boring, dull, childish.

Expansion was the same, grab everthing you can! Go go! Yeah, you spent most of the early years jumpstarting an endless snowball to which, somehow, the capabilities of your bureaucracy and state of internal politics were largely something you could ignore. Milk the factions, build yet another farm, prepare for the next war.

How is this apropriate for suposedly the paradigmatic change which is a space race across the galaxy.

It all demands immersion, not dumbing down.

With the new planetary system there are meaningful startegic choices concerning your planets and, lo and behold, building tall is becoming more of an option. There are clear opportunity costs and you, God forbid, actually have to think!

Paradox's challenge is to ultimately shelve the player qua direct godlike immersion breaking controler of an economy and society. Instead, and 2.2 was huge in getting us closer to this, we should be put under strain as rulers by a constantly evolving environment.

That's the way forward.

If you want to not use your brain and repeatedly click all around making obvious choices go play Master of Orion 3.

Stop complaining about a good thing.

This is simply one of the best narrative based strategy games ever made. Stunning.

Europa Universalis IV brings you the perfect combination of a great Grand Strategy game and historical immersion. Challenge yourself by playing a small European nation, a Native American Tribe or a Daimyo in Japan; nedless to say, it has a huge replay value.

Also, it will probably cause your gilfriend to dump you. Oh, and you will fail your finals. 10 on 10