Recent reviews by Rioshi

First off, please understand that I don't recommend this game not because it's failing to live up to the quality I expected, but because simply put, it was marketed as something it is not- a sequel.

Like watching a RPG suddenly make it's sequel a racing game! Even as a beta player who absolutely loved the original I just couldn't get behind this one. I will continue to play it, and hopes I can be proven wrong but I doubt it.

The story itself continues from the original games, but unfortunately it does have some pretty major flaws. For starters, it's essentially if frostpunk met civilization rather than the gameplay we came to know and love. Innovation for the sake of innovation rather than building on an already promising unique game design. The UI is clunky and often plays to the detriment of the actual game, new mechanics are played out on the equivalent of a in game tutorial wiki page you have to read to learn how to play, and so on.

They also unfortunately focused on difficulty for the sake of suspense rather than good gameplay. You have to pay resources and manpower for every single tile you want to build on and they can change these values randomly at any point. For example, I believed I was ready for the expansion into a derelict generator area... and they arbitrarily increased all prices for building by several times the usual amount while demanding technlogies only with the faction you sided with- watchtowers have to be the type of the group you agreed to help or they don't count, etc. sorry surveillance watchtower, you're not the watchtower technology so all my people are going to instantly sabotage buildings that cost five times as much to repair as an income focused economy can march!

Know an action is going to piss off an entire group and blow up a future home? Don't just use the established negotiation function they added into the game, have everyone go insane and start a civil war! Want to take your time, slowly build the perfect society? Sorry, resources are all limited and New London randomly forgets how to make settlements to send resources if you want to learn how to make a deep mining drill!

At times, it feels like they were so preoccupied with giving the illusion of choice that they forgot we liked being able to actually choose. 'You HAVE to always have moral decisions, have constant choices between lesser evils' seems like it's practically the goal of the developers. Want your society to have warmer homes? Infest their buildings with asbestos, every faction wants that! Refuse to have child soldiers?! How dare you, what a horrible person. Try to let them have unions to help workers? Guess what, they're blackmailing you for money or they'll tell everyone to hate you.

Part of the delight of playing Frostpunk was seeing the human spirit, the ability to rise above adversity and come together. Here? No matter what you do, it's always two options and both are morally gray making them kill each other. I mean, the civil war is forced to happen even if they're all parading and starting festivals in your name because they love New London so much! I had them celebrating and still had reported death tolls from murdering each other in the streets ...

Anytime there are benefits the game wants you to feel bad so it's going to involve doing evil things- no matter how much you could realistically avoid them! Want that extra oil node? It's a burial site and you can't relocate the bodies respectfully to save lives, you have to burn them and desecrate the graves because ... Reasons?

All in all, they made a good game- nobody is denying that. Even the reports with positive reviews? All warn that it just isn't frostpunk. This isn't a sequel, it's merely a different genre from city builder to civilization game set in the same universe as frostpunk.

Like I said, I'll continue to try it, and hope that maybe some of things I saw were just not indicative of the final result! However, given I already finished the storyline and had the game crash eight times on me, I'm incredibly hesitant to recommend this one until they improve it or address some of the glaring plot holes.

Also, choosing to sell out their IP to a mobile micro transaction Chinese company who blocks anyone who gives them bad reviews was a scummy move. Just saying.

Fun game, but has some serious bugs. For example, it was programmed to not end the siege of hogar until the gates were broken. But I built up massively.... so it took 20 minutes of cinematic mode unable to play as they slowly broke through.

A wonderful game, only frustrating the sequel looks like it will be 3d and post apocalyptic silliness- while it seems a lot of their playerbase enjoy this bgame because it has low system requirements. Part of the wonderful delight in the game was also the idyllic peaceful and beautiful backdrop to contrast with the more urgent and dangerous side of things, so no idea how they'll be able to compete with that. A lot of their audience seems to enjoy base building 2d and time management, so might be hard to meet the high standards Mr Prepper set with Mr. Nomad. Still, trying to be optimistic with their future releases!

A high quality group FPS with level up mechanics and different modes. While some of the upgrades are lackluster, where this game really shines is the building mechanic. Able to build ammo caches, auto turrets, gates, and firing mid walls, it allows for a unique take on group defense mechanics! Voice chat is clear without distortion despite larger groups, and it feels like they could do something special with established groups- Cerberus getting building boosts, etc.

Problem is, without a dedicated 'builder' role, the game suffers as a result! Too many cooks spoil the broth- and when you've a time limit, having someone able to troll 16 players by erasing walls- or deleting them and placing them wrong can mean the difference between victory and defeat. (Not to mention when others get greedy and build all of the limited ammo crates on the wall next to him and starve the other defenses) Unfortunately, this is further stressed by the fact that you get absolutely no extra exp compared to say medic healing or killing bugs, so builders seem rather undervalued.

Still! We have the excellent start to a game that needs polish and can really stand out in the genre if the proper resources are devoted to improving it instead of the usual several month delays between minor updates a lot of starting titles suffer from. Good responsiveness, satisfying guns... hopefully they improve on this by the final release!

A fun little game, but needs a couple things.

= More publicity. Havent even heard of this, and a number of antivirus programs like norton even warn this may be a suspicious file which stops people from downloading it.
- Overcrowding: There isnt enough room to build all buildings on screen naturally, making it incredibly hard to find buildings. Suggest more land plots, because as is? Build a mausoleum or great fortress, and you're screwed if theres say a quarry behind it on the upper level that got hit by an earthquake.
- Need a one click repair button for those unviewable buildings hit by fire or earthquake.

Other than that, I genuinely enjoyed this. You miiiiight want to actually add an animation or in progress pictures of the pyramid being built though. Kinda anticlimactic throwing resources at a building which doesnt even appear.

Excellent gameplay, dynamic storyline, and hundreds of hours of gameplay. Broke the mold a lot of triple A game development studios worked very hard to advance, and doesn't demand a plethora of microtransactions or other detracting concepts. At its heart, it remains solo a single player experience with optional multiplayer, and lives up to the FromSoft model that has served to distinguish them in today's market. 9/10, and probably one of the few titles I would feel comfortable actually buying an expansion for, if previous souls titles are anything to go by.

Fun, engaging, and actually getting to be popular now! Best success story of videogames.

I loved the gameplay aspect. It feels amazing. But is also insanely shorter and.... Well. A lot of reasons why I can't upvote this. To start, no select all military units/citizens button like even rts from ten years ago have. And two, the big one? I enjoyed Age of Empire II's cutscenes MASSIVELY more. Immersive, from the perspective of characters during the events. Now we just have bland narration! A boring re-enactment thing with just characters pasted on real life backgrounds to save money,

At least AOE 2 had in game cutscene moments, here its like they tried to saveevery penny they could showing real life scenes with like...maybe 20 seconds of ACTUAL graphics. So lazy they didnt even use real in game models but glowing frames of people lol. And its all completely told with every battle already explained how it went, so you can pretty much tell from the dialogue who wins or loses every fight before you play it. Every hero is disposable, there's like zero immersion in this whatsoever.

I genuinely think people are giving this good reviews because we're starved of quality RTS lately. But the gameplay is the good part- not the graphics, not the narration, not the storyline. They LITERALLY were so starved of content they recreated the siege of orleans from the second game, and made it somehow WORSE.


How do you mess up so badly, one of the fan favorite maps becomes pathetically bad quality?! Simple. They remade it.Cut out the entire approach to orleans, removed the allied bases, all the extra enemy bases on the map replaced with two camps infinitely spawning soldiers, and replace sending trade convoys to your allies with one magically appearing supply caravan that infinitely comes to orleans every five minutes.



Ah, but it gets even better! In the campaign, even if you remove ALL their resources, just gets infinite resources to spawn units anyways. Im 90% sure they dont even spend resources for units, theyre just on a timer. I unlocked gunpowder, guns, etc- BUT. But there's not a single map in all the campaigns where I could build a docks. Like, they didnt want to balance naval combat, so they just removed all navy from every single campaign. Why So they could use rivers as unbreakable walls! So you play the game the way they WANT you to!

I destroyed every single bandit camp in the russian trade campaign for example, and enemy units would still appear and spawn on the map. I was barely scratched during the defense against the Golden Horde, and yet it instantly forced me to protect fleeing civilians while all the enemy units were dead, and told how I lost the fight just because that was historically accurate. History books trumps having fun after all!

There was an entire part of the map in the Mongol campaign that was walled off by trees that, when I waited for an npc to chop through the forest, was just blocked because they couldnt be bothered to finish it. And then you RETURN to that map, just because they couldnt be bothered to make a new map for the campaign.

I could go on about the multiplayer fails, too. Like how people are adding 7 hardest allied AI against one weakest AI just so they can afk and win achievements for beating skirmishes on the hardest difficulty. How if teammates quit they continue to mine and take all your resources, or carve out forest barriers for enemy troops to storm through. How map generation can randomly give all your opponents every resource on an island and you'll get NOTHING. How the swearing filter feels like it is made from pure loathing of the english language, how mongol can cheese the game harder than a zerg rush, how forests can give your opponent a natural wall protecting a fourth of the map, and so much more...!

And yet people praise it. Because they're so starved of good RTS, and the community suffers from people supporting the devs when they get lazy like this. Cheaters and exploiters on every third map alone cement how I feel.

I miss the old Age of Empires. At least that wasn't a soulless husk of what it is now.

A good game, but while they partially fixed the AI in the beta, the fact that on the *easiest* difficulty, you can be attacked by 30+ special zombies on ever recruit just is insane when you're trying to show your friends the levels. Since I start with 5/5 stars here's the breakdown.

-1 Point for Solo: making it so solo players get no supply points whatsoever, forcing you to play with others online negates the purpose of playing solo. If you play alone for the most part but you play multiplayer with your friends when they get online, they're gonna be ridiculously, insanely stronger than you.

-1 Point for Swarm, since it forces everyone to load three different maps and can take forever to finish one map
-1 Point for Swarm, because you're forced to play human when you really don't want to instead of giving players the choice.

-1 Point for Coop, because the continue system means unless we want to play all day and night, we physically can't continue our progress all the way through without sacrificing our continue or starting all over again.

-1 Point across Coop and Solo modes, for harder difficulties having progressively less spawn points to choose from. Yes, we absolutely want to replay 3-5 maps for three hours if we die right before the last map in a row! How did you know?!

All in all? 2/5. I'll play the ever loving ♥♥♥♥ out of this because I personally like this- but until those problems are fixed I'm waiting to actually *recommend* this game to others. These aren't technical problems- it's mechanics shoved in to try and build artificial difficulty and force replayability on solo players to try and keep the game more socially active.

A fun, good quality game for a low cost. If there was any complaints I had, it is that it seems like all progress is rng- even the new skills you unlock. I spent several hours on the first mission alone, only to have to start over from an attack supposed to hit one target suddenly attacking them all and draining my essence out of nowhere.

Still. That implies you were hooked enough to play that long in the first place. Maybe some stats the more you play characters would fix the progression feeling like you lost hours if you accidentally die to one attack out of nowhere?