Recent reviews by Tazilon

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NOTE: My play time in Endless Legend 2 appears low, but I also have over 200 hours logged on Endless Legends 2 Insiders.

Endless Legend quickly became my favorite 4X fantasy themed game and Endless Legend 2 is carrying that torch and improving on it. From my experience with the Insiders program, I will say the devs are quite responsive to feedback and have incorporated many ideas from the Insiders program into the game. By the time it hits full release, EL2 is going to advance beyond amazing.
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Let me start with the quibbles first:

I think the way Zone of Control is handled needs some work. A unit will take no penalty if they remain in an opposing unit's ZOC as they move. This means they can completely circle an opposing force and take no ZOC penalty. Not good.

The UI is great for many things, but not so great for others. For example, trying to see where one stands on victory conditions will baffle many players for awhile before they figure it out.

Along the same line, the number of possible victories is both good and bad. Smart players in search of specific victories will find themselves turning off most other victory types because some are far more easy to achieve than others.

While the graphics are very good overall, trying to figure out what some of your buildings do can be a challenge at times. This is important as buildings grant proximity bonuses; knowing what you are building next to has meaning.
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Those small things aside, the rest of the game - and it is a huge game - is outstanding.

Factions play differently, both in how you grow them out and how you fight. Bonuses that are great to pursue for one faction won't help a lot with another.

Because of the difference in factions, randomized maps, many types of victories to pursue, replayability is, well...endless.

Even within the faction storylines, you get choices at times. So, if you are playing the same faction multiple games in a row, you can take different quest paths and change your playthrough up.

When you start the game, you don't need to feel pressure to plop down a city right away. Take a few turns and find a great site upon which to build, The game accounts for the number of turns you took searching for that perfect site and compensates you. No longer do you have to restart 4-5 times in a row because of poor locations at startup! (You can turn this feature off in the game setup if you wish.)

The Tidefall system is novel. The map actually grows in playable area as the game progresses. This can take some getting used to, but again, smart players will quickly learn to check out what Tidefalls expose because beneficial resources frequently reveal themselves as the sea drops away.

Because most factions start to take penalties for having too many cities, knowing you will be building on the Tidefall areas in the future adds another element of strategic planning you will not find in other 4X games.
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In the beginning, the amount of choices may seem overwhelming. But, get a few games under your belt, start to learn how all the various systems work together, and a big, beautiful game reveals itself. Keep the maps small and the victory conditions easy and you can do a complete play through in several hours. Go for a big map with a hard victory condition and you will spend many hours, perhaps days, playing.

It's all up to you.

And I think that is the best thing about EL2: once you learn how it works, it lets you decide exactly how you want to play it.

Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to go suck some Dust, turn up the difficulty another notch and pursue a Victory type I have not yet obtained with the Last Lords. I have a bone to pick with those ever annoying Necrophages.

I think I'm officially done with the OOTP franchise.

OOTP24 takes the Perfect League side of the game and somehow makes the most blatant pay-to-win game ever in the history of pay-to-win games even more pay-to-win than before.

On the offline side of things, all the same old problems remain with little improvements added.

Coaching ratings remain a complete joke. On a scale of 0-200, the supposed best coaches, managers and GMs in the world rarely get ratings over 100. In other words, 99% of them are below average! How? How can your entire field of coaches in the entire league be below average?

Player salaries continue to escalate out of control within a few seasons, no matter what you do. I even tried setting inflation to -1%-0% and my salaries still quickly escalated far above what they were set to be.

Offered trades continue to be inane. Why would I want to trade my best prospect for your 37 y/o, washed up player with 3 years left on his inflated contract? And stop asking me every day, too. Maybe 5% of the trades other teams offer actually make a modicum of sense. Most just drive you crazy and waste your time.

The new graphics for base runners makes them look like they have physical disabilities and can't use their legs properly.

I could go on and on, but I think you get my perspective already. One expects a franchise to improve its product each year. OOTP stopped improving several years go and now they are backsliding.

Time to hang up the cleats on this one...

OOTP23 is such a mixed bag, it is hard to review.

On the franchise side of it, it remains fantastic overall, albeit with some curious problems that they refuse to fix year after.

On the plus side, you can adjust your settings almost every way possible to create the exact game experience you desire. Coach, manage, GM, set your league sizes, set your minor leagues, set your own rules, the list of possible tweaks goes on almost ad infinitum.

For what is basically a text based game, the graphics are pretty good.

On the down side, in league play, coaches continue to under perform. And after 6-7 seasons, you will have very few coaches to choose from should you want to fire one of your own. In fact, I have been in situations where I fired a coach in a minor league and had ZERO - 0 - zilch - coaches available to hire. This literally NEVER happens in real life.

Yet, this kind of problem exists edition after edition after edition.

Another repetitive problem that should have been fixed years ago: star and superstar players have really strange rules for negotiations.

Here is a sample negotiation (that actually happened to me several season ago with a 5 star player):

A 31 year old, 5-star outfielder currently making $29,000,000 a year, demands a contract extension worth $42,000,000 a year for 9 years.

I counter offer 7 years at an average of $35,000,000 a year.

Players responds by demanding $45,000,000 for 9 years.

I offer 7 years at $38,000,000 a year.

Player responds by demanding $47,000,000 a year for 9 years.

WTF? That isn't how negotiation works.

This kind of crap has gone on for years and they never fix it.

The real problem with the game in 23; however, is with their money make: Perfect League.

To begin with, Perfect League has devolved into the most blatant pay-to-win game in the history of
pay-to-win games.

Worse, this year, OOTP Perfcet League is plagues with server issues. It won't sync your card on login, it sits on "simulating" for hours and doesn't let you join, it has been down today since early this afternoon. Then, when you can get in and try to play the Perfect Draft tournaments to gain points so you don't have to spend cash, while you are trying to draft your team, you frequently get "Waiting on server..." and the timed draft times out before you get to complete your team - meaning your team can't play because it isn't full strength.

It has never been like in previous editions server-wise.

Do not buy the game now. Watch the reviews and see if they ever get it figured out.

My advice is flat out - don't buy the game at all. The devs have let money go to their heads and they have stopped delivering a product that is designed to do anything but generate huge flows of cash for them via Perfect League.

This is a fun, little arcade racer with an interesting mix of tracks. You will most likely figure it all out and complete the world circuit in a few days of playing (or less depending on how long your play sessions are).

You can't upgrade you car (although you can win the best AI driver's car in a head to head shoot out at the end). However, you do get to pick from 3 car setups which change your grip and how you have to drive. The most grippy set up has lower acceleration and top end speed. The least sticky set up has the best acceleration and top speed.

Shorter races are just drive as fast as you can and try to win. Longer races require you to refuel; a process handled in a typically arcade way - you slow down and drive through a refueling area in the pits and your car refuels as you go through.

After you complete the world tour and win the head to dead against Dickmann, you can still replay tracks to try to improve personal best lap times and high speeds or try to set track records, so there is some replay ability if you care to do such things.

If you are looking for an in depth F1 simulation, this definitely isn't it. Hey - for less than 15 bucks, what did you expect? But if you are looking for a fun arcade racer, this is worth getting.

On the surface, this is a great game.

Whether you want to play historic leagues or totally create your own, it lets you. Whether you want to control everything on you team or just one certain aspect of team management, it lets you. DH? International leagues? Deep minor league system. Check, check and check - IF you want them. In commissioner mode, you can even set the stats of all the coaches in the game! Heck, you can even design your own ball field to play in.

The game play and graphics are better than what you might expect for what is essentially a text based game.

So why the negative review?

For starters, the online Perfect League is blatantly pay to win. Unless you drop a significant amount of money, you will never advance far through the ranks.

Second, although they tell you non-stop how accurate the game is, it isn't. Babe Ruth struggles to compete at high levels; something he never did in his entire career. Not just the Babe, but with many players, the performances don't match their history. It all seems kind of arbitrary. The OOTP dev team picks who the best players are; stats be damned.

Third, when you make a fantasy league, forget trying to keep salaries under control. Within the few seasons, the top players will be demanding far more than the top ends you set, no matter what you do.

Fourth, the coaching system sucks. It is amazing how many BAD coaches there are at the major league level. One would think the best coaches would have risen to the top, but no. 80% of the coaches you can pick are horrible; below average at many things. And why do we know so little about coaches who have been coaching for 20 years plus? coaching has been a complaint by players for many iterations of the game and it remains uneffectively addressed.

If you want a fun baseball simulator, buy the game. If you want a realistic baseball simulator, pass. It pretends to be realistic, but it isn't.

A Legionary's Life is a great example of what a single talented, motivated dev can achieve. Unfortunately, it is also a reminder of what a single talented, motivated dev can not achieve.

It is basically a text based look at the life of a professional soldier in a Roman Legion during the Punic War era.

The graphics are old school, but that is not a bad thing for a text based game. In fact, they seem quite appropriate for a game that time period.

The game play is fairly fast paced. You can easily do an entire play through in several hours. Faster if you die. Because death is permanent. Jupiter apparently has no desire to resurrect even the best the legions have to offer him.

You start off as a basic grunt. Think 11 Bravo, but in a Roman legion. Adept fighting can earn you promotions. It isn't a normal RPG, though. Promotions don't mean better stats. (At least, not this play through.) Promotions do give you a better score at the end and more options in the rest of the play through.

You do, however; get to train your skills and attributes in between each segment of the campaign. (Skills can also be bumped up at the end of each segment you play well and in some mini-games.) For your first several play throughs, you will most likely be building your stats to do better overall. Later on you will most likely be building your legionary to meet specific goals to have a chance at specific awards.

Nothing you do or don't do will affect the outcome of the wars/campaigns you are in. After all, you are just one solider in a war of thousands and thousands of warriors. Your decisions only affect how well you fight, how your troop and superiors feel about you, options you might get during the rest of the play through and, of course, your final score.

By now, you've probably noticed i keep mentioning multiple play throughs. That is the weird thing about this game. In order to get the top scores, beat the biggest bosses, etc, you MUST play the game many, many times.

Why? Because in a strange system of player progression, each time you replay the game, your beginning stats and equipment can get better and better. Every play through results in a final score. As your final scores improve, subsequent rerolls are rewarded with more beginning points to allocate for stats and/or equipment. And only after you have several crap-tons of beginning points do you really have a chance of achieving the highest ranks or killing the biggest, baddest bosses. I say bosses, but in game they are really highly skilled fighters or leaders of the enemy units you end up facing.

The net result of this somewhat strange way of doing business is you have to play the same 2-3 hour game a god awful number of times to really have a chance at the best rewards the game offers.

After a while, you start feeling like you are Bill Murray starring in a remake of Harold Ramis' Groundhog Day set during the Second Punic War. Yes, I will go investigate that noise again even though I know it is the same freaking owl it has been the last 16 play throughs. You get to where you wish there was an option to loft a javelin at the damned owl so it would stop making you go check the noise it makes every play through.

To me, that is the huge downfall of the game. The premise keeps you interested and engaged. You become attached to your character each play through.

But, it keeps repeating in order to advance overall.

I wish the dev had researched more battles and made all the awards and ranks available in a single, but much longer play through.

I see most players playing to the end a few times then moving on to other games, having never achieved all the ranks and scores possible. I see a few players sticking with it long enough to get all the awards possible.

Unless you are one of those stubborn folk who will grin and bear the repetition to grind out the hardest to get ranks and awards, only buy the game when it is on sale.

It is well worth the sale price, even if you move on after several complete play throughs.

I have really mixed feelings about Conquest of Elysium.

It is the Jekyll and Hyde of computer games.

It is such a great game; yet, at the same time it sucks really, really, bad.

Taken at face value, the game rocks. Think old school Warlords on steroids with a dash of psychedelic drugs thrown in for effect. Crazy numbers of items, spells, factions, units etc. Better yet, since you can't upgrade your holdings, think Empire: Wargame of the Century in a fantasy setting with devs who ignore feedback from their players.

Factions that truly play different. They need different resources to create troops, they have different abilities, and definitely have different units. If you try to play the Baron like you play the Druids, you will not last long.

There are multiple planes to explore- and they are as varied and unique as the factions you can play.

The game play is clean, the artwork good, the music good, and the interface makes sense. They even have a detailed manual!

So why is it also bad?

Because of several reasons:

Number one, your starting location seems to have no link to your faction. You can select Druid - a faction which needs forests and swamps to survive and get plopped down in the middle of a desert to start. You may as well just quit and restart. And it can do this type of stuff to you 5, 6, 7 starts in a row before you finally get a starting position that makes sense for your faction.

This would not be all that bad if you cold save your starting setup before you press OK to start the game. But, you can't. So every restart means you have to re-select your era, re-select the number of opponents re-select your faction and several other options. That is what makes restarting the game multiple times in a row due to horribly bad starting positions so painful. If they would let you save your starting setup before starting the game, they would make the game much more user friendly.

Worse, when you do get a good location, you end up having 2-3 strong NPC positions right next to you. So you have to either skip them and branch far out to get traction or fight them early on and lose most of your initial army doing so. Either choice puts you so far behind the power curve vs the AI factions, your game is doomed.

Second, when you finally get a decent starting position and expand outward, looking forward to engaging opposing forces in battle, along comes some event that destroys the game.

Ants which spawn new mounds faster than you can kill them until the map is literally nothing but ant mounds and ants, Inferno descending on Elysium in numbers so vast you have zero chance of defeating them no matter how well you developed your forces, etc. To be fair, if you can destroy the portal to Inferno before their forces start to spill forth, you end the event, but, in my experience, the portal is usually too far away to reach before their invasion begins.

Here is an actual verbatim dev response to complaints about OPd Inferno invasions in game:
"I like to lose due to unforseen (sic) events that tells me a story of the world.""

Almost just as bad, you start a game, miraculously get a decent start up spot and then, curse as all the AI factions are killed off by mobs before you ever get to expand enough to even find them. Yes, you win, but wth good is a win when you didn't even meet your opponents?

Some players say you can offset this by setting your AI opponents to higher difficulty levels, but I am seeing 2-3 of them die to Empire forces (neutrals) early on in most of the games I play and I do set my opponents to higher difficulty levels.

It seems like Illwinter does not want you to get to actually play the basic game - fighting against the factions you start against. They seem to think you want your game destroyed by events you have no chance of beating.

Perhaps they sit up late at night peering into their crystal orbs watching players grow increasingly frustrated by their evil events, cackling sickly into the night as they sip their grog and and stab themselves with poisoned daggers of despair.

It boggles my mind why they would create such a good game, then go to such great lengths to prevent you from enjoying it. As is, CoE5 has potential to be a great game - but the devs are too stubborn to make it great.

And then there is the combat...

You have almost zero control over it. You can't select your troop locations. You can't give them even basic orders. The problem is the AI controller appears to more senile than Joe Biden. You sit there and watch your mages with devastating offensive spells waste turn after turn buffing your forces with buffs they already have naturally. Or your archers wear down the biggest, baddest, most lethal dude on the opposing force to 2 hit points, then spend the next 3 rounds shooting everyone except him, so he gets to smash more of your army with impunity.

To be fair, the enemy AI is just as bad, so at least there is that. But the key word here is BAD. As someone coming from a military background, it is painful to sit there and watch how inept your supposedly experienced forces can be. How can my highly intelligent wizards play so freaking stupid? I understand and accept my mud eaters playing stupid. But my off the charts intelligent people? Why did you just heal my left flank 3 rounds in a row when no one has attacked them yet? Why are you lobbing fire attack after fire attack at enemies with 100% fire resistance when you have non-fire attacks in your arsenal?

Or how about total inconsistency in victory conditions? Its a quasi-4X game, with zero politics, so you just kill everyone and win, right? Sometimes. But if Inferno invades, then, as previously noted, you don't need to beat Inferno - you simply have to be the last starting faction left standing - no matter how powerful Inferno is. But then, if Hades invades - that is no longer true. You kill off the last starting faction and think " Yeah! I won!" just to see a message pop up saying Hades has decided to take over Elysium so you have to destroy their portal before you win. Really? What? Was Inferno here simply on vacation making TikTok videos of their fun with the folks from Elysium? That time they invaded, they didn't really mean it?

I just "won" a game as Voice of El. In the course of playing not so friendly forces from the planes of Celestial, Inferno, and Hades showed. When I finally killed off the last of the Barons leaders and was declared the winner, Celestial and Inferno owned about 80% of the map. I had 2 armies left I suicided at the Baron just so I could "win". I had maybe 50 troops total and was down to 3 of my 13 or so citadels I had had at my peak. No way did I win this game. I have no idea who would have eventually conquered Elysium but it sure wasn't me. I was about to get slapped around worse than one of Bobby Brown's girlfriends.

If they would tone down the events, add some balance to them, or something,and make some other changes to how the game works, this game would be Game Of The Year caliber. Seriously, I like the premise that much.

But, in its current state, you should only buy this if you literally do not care about winning. Buy it to see how stupid it can get - you will get your money's worth in spades.

Waited way too long for this game to come out. Very good game, but frankly, I expected more. If you have never played Mount and Blade before you will love it. If you have played the entire series, you will like it. Either way, buy it; you will enjoy it, but you probably won't be overwhelmed.

The game is nothing like they make it seem. Refunded.

Let me start by saying this is a very good game. It needs to have more players!

If you are familiar with the Evolution board game series, then you know exactly what it is; Evolution The Board Game brought to life on PC.

If you are unfamiliar with Evolution, then imagine....

...a prehistoric world, where new species are emerging and flourishing - or dying off because they are not well adapted to their environment.

...imagine this world is constantly changing, so the species must also change if they want to survive.

....imagine some eat plants, some eat meat.

...imagine different defenses against the meat eaters; horns, numbers, hiding in other species, armor-like skin, etc

...and now imagine, you are one of this world's creators - you get to pick what some of the new species are and what traits they have. But, there are also 3 other Creators designing their own species - and your species are competing against each other for a sometimes extremely limited food supply.

What species will prevail? What works this game will not work the next. Can you consistently out-Create the competition?

Yes?

OK - buy the game and prove it!

That said, be aware, the game does have some bugs. Every so often a game will freeze. Sometimes (not often) your mouse cursor disappears randomly during a game, only to re-appear a short time later. You can still play when it does it - you just have to kind of guess where your mouse is.

If they solve these bugs, the game is amazingly good: fun to play, lasts only 15-20 minutes, and high replay ability.

I say buy it!