Recent reviews by Shion

I've played this game since launch and I can at least say that Tripwire has done a great job of cleaning up bugs, which were once the biggest complaint players had. But aside from that the devs have let down the community, especially those familiar with the older games. There is still a lot that could be improved. Maps and mods are limited, The HUD is cluttered, the gunplay is too forgiving, and most of all team and squad coordination is far too difficult. Because when you play with a team that is organized and focused against a similarly tough enemy there are few games that can match such an absolutely thrilling experience. But it doesn't happen near often enough. The modding community does solve a lot of these problems, but without official support none of it appears in populated servers aside from a few custom maps. This game can still be very fun on its own, the atmosphere is one of a kind. But it hasn't reached its full potential, maybe it will someday.

I cannot play this game anymore. At first it was fun, but the lack of immersion and removal of core features has killed the experience for me. Many parts of the game don't make sense but this is excused by calling them "abstractions". Even HoI3 had abstractions, for example leadership points. But this made sense since each country had a distinct number of leadership points along with tech practical that allowed specific focuses. HoI4 then further "abstracted" research by having only tech slots, with no practical or tech teams or anything.

There are a dozen other examples of such poor abstraction but they all have the same result: taking depth out of the game so there are less options and very little distinctiveness between countries. This along with the poor AI is what leads to the strange outcomes that are usually seen, such as Germany losing the war by 1941 or so. There are some good additions however. The national focus tree is a good idea, but it is not properly balanced. Unit design and production is a wonderful advancement that I've always wanted, although even it is not right due to problems with resources and trade.

Again, the game is fun if you want to live out your historical revenge fantasies without hardly any difficulty, and that is why so many people like it. But it is a Hearts of Iron game only in name, there is not the challenge or richness of content and features that existed in previous installments. I feel that all this was done due to the complaints that HoI3 was too "autistic" or "had too much micro" . The game really was not hard to get into, but it had somewhat of a learning curve and some things needed improvement so as to be easier to manage.

However, it looks like Paradox went the easy route of removing features and simplifying the game instead of making it more accessible (which is NOT the same thing as watering down). Even if Paradox had completely forgotten about HoI3 and built the game off of HoI2, it would have been fine. But instead they decided to go off the rails and take the future of the series with them.