Recent reviews by Kawa

Ehm... the game is literally broken now?!?
Card in hand says "20%" farming efficiency, buff on hero from that card says "8%".
Fatty White says "Gives armor until taking damage, once taking damage remove all stacks" - but actually the hero in question even gets an extra stack that doesn't disappear every time worst named character hits someone?!? And it's not down to season changes either, it's literally in the second game of a new Hell run.

How the ♥♥♥♥ is the core game mechanic not working? Imagine a strategy game where the information to work with is just straight up wrong. Plus you can't even blame it on the god-awful translation that doesn't even get basic english grammar right - because how would a number be translated wrong.

Then there is the super cringy thirst trap AI generated character "art" aimed at 15 year old Hentai fans - which also explains how the top "mods" for this game apparently are nude character pictures. Wtf...

Sad, because the game was actually enjoyable on my first Hell run, but when the easiest game mechanics are broken there really is not point in playing anymore.

Overwatch in worse with the most annoying announcer voice imaginable.

Terrible balancing with a lot of straight up unfun abilities.

In fact it is quite sad. The game has potential, but somehow manages to feel ♥♥♥♥ both competetively as well as casual.
For casuals they decided to put in a couple of nonexistant skill floor heroes with lock on auto aim that would make Moira look mechanically challenging. Iron Fist being the worst offender in casual with a completely overloaded kit with 0 skill expression - only he is probably borderline useless as soon as you try to play him on a capable server with peel and cc.

Then in comp you have:
Hela, the left click simulator - Cree with more damage, no range drop off, a get out of jail free button and a massively strong ult on top - must have been an aprils fools joke, there is no other explanation.
Hawkeye, Hanzo again - one shots are still such a fun mechanic with fridge size hitboxes and basically no investment on his side.
Moon Knight, "i like aiming at the floor" - when aiming gets to hard, just use your ankh combo to melt squishies or whole teams.
Shark ultimate ability - the "you don't have a movement ability, you die" button, where you not even die instantly but get to watch for 10 seconds as he walks off the next edge.
K-pop girl - Zen Ultimate with 5 or 6 times the duration and a possible damage toggle.

Aiming feels very weird due to the off angle third person perspective, where you can literally aim well next to a head and still get a registered hit.

On top of that the entire design philosophy and presentation is clearly done to release as much dopamine as possible while keeping you in an addiction loop. The after game lobby literally only has one big highlighted yellow button saying "One more round!"
Try finding the exit game button in the main menu...
And overall the entire presentation both in and out of game has so much visual and audio overload fluff it's borderline insane.

It's funny to me how they're even getting praise for the big >30 hero roster at launch when at least 50% are lowkey not viable when playing to win, and 5% are so overtuned you basically can't get by without them.
And they're getting praise for a non-time out battle pass and actualy letting you play the heros right away. Looking back at the 90s and 2000s it's truly depressing how far gaming has fallen from grace.

Game is fun for a while although only playable in small chunks as it gets repetitive faaaast.
Basically abandoned by the devs, the 2.0 upgrade being promised on the store page still hasn't happened and the devs/publisher have gone completely radio silent.

But at least they offered 3 15% off promo bundles this year, hooray! /s

Love the game but after trying 4 different community recommended fixes the game still won't even start.
Used to be playable before and beat it multiple times, don't have the time or muse to spend hours to just get it running now though.

Hmm, this is one of those games that needs a neutral review option...

The game idea itself is great - collaborate with other players to stop a meteor destroying the planet while also making sure you don't destroy the planet yourself in the process by causing too much polution or making entire species go extinct.
It is an absolute time sink but very enjoyable when played with the right people, working as a team to advance through the technology tree. I thoroughly enjoyed the interaction with random players and forming trading connections, seeing the world transform. In the best case szenario you'll create a fair and thriving economy where every person can partiicipate with their own skillset.

Sadly the game has one maaaaaassive issue. Player retention. It's a niche game and when you commit to a server it can easily eat whole days. And a lot of people are not willing to do that. So they jump on a server, potentially play for 10 minutes and then leave to never return. This leads to a landscape of tents and claimed land which the remaining players can't even get rid off unless you have an admin monitoring the server.
Then there is a big chunk of players who play 2-3 days and then leave, giving large parts of the game a ghost town feeling. Because they mine/log enough to build their houses but then disappear. On my first server the mayor of the biggest town left after two days himself.
Player retention drops further and further during the server existence and eventually you will have less than 10 or 5 people playing at certain times, possibly on a large planet.
At that point it becomes an insane grind for the remaining players as they have to fill all the holes in the economy and makes the world feel very empty. It would be way better if at least there were no ghost towns/buildings all over the place.

On the current server there have been about 140 people joining at some point and possibly claiming land and by day 7 the player base dropped to about 10 active players. And this seems to happen on every single server, with people hopping on and then going to the next one after a few days or immediately.

For a niche game this playerbase fragmantation is an absolute nightmare. Instead of having a few big servers with lots of players there is a loooong list of dead or very sparsely populated servers

I'll give a thumbs up as it is an interesting idea and probably fun with the right group of people, i really do enjoy the idea of trying to get to a working cooperative "society" and forging connections with unknown players. But sadly the execution and split playerbase makes it hard to enjoy it over longer periods.


On a side note i'd absolutely love a mode where you can't see the entire world right away but rather get spawned somewhere random wiithout a map or global chat. You'd have to set up somewhere and go from being self-sufficient to meeting nearby strangers, interacting and building small communities that eventually clash/combine with other small groups all over the planet. That way exploration would be meaningful and possibly the markets more interesting. You won't know person X is undercutting person Y while selling their goods if you don't know they exist. I feel like that could encourage people to build these smaller networks that eventually connect with each other. Just food for thought.

Dated af. Possibly the worst options menu i've ever seen in a game.

Not for the feint of heart... also be sure to bring time as this game has enourmous depth.

First "win" easily took me above a hundred hours and when i got it someone told me: "Congrats, you now finished the tutorial!"

The sheer difficulty and the 0 ♥♥♥♥♥ the game gives about you turned me off in the beginning and i only got back into it years later. But if you get over the initial learning wall it's extremely rewarding and possibly a one of a kind experience.

Whew what an utterly frustrating experience so far. It looks pretty, the voicing is nice... but the pacing and the gameplay so far... oof.
Intro sequence went on so long without a rest spot that i ended up leaving my PC on over night to get some sleep, wasn't sure when it had last saved.

Once i got into the open world oh man... all quests seem to be "let's ride on a preset route for 5 minutes so we get dialogue done, shoot people for a minute, ride back 5 minutes for some more dialogues".
Then you have this inconsistency with realism. You die. And can continue. But without the game you hunted or the pelts you collected. But with all your guns. And your horse. And almost all your money. And all your consumables.

Also why on earth does the weapon wheel never save the previous layout? Feels like i have to readjust my layour every single time i approach my horse.

Honestly most of the "game" so far felt like a chore.

Oh and isn't it ironic that in a game about freedom and breaking away from society you're not even allowed to walk fast in your own home place?

Very rarely fun to play for a match or two. It's trying to be a mix of historical accurate WW1 shooter with modernized gameplay mechanics and thereby combines the worst of both worlds. It's like a more sluggish BF with mostly heavily unbalanced matches.

To me it feels like they have awful cheat detection... besides the obvious cheaters that cap your points before the game even starts there are some players that definitely feel... off. They don't take damage from shots that would have killed any other player or have perfect vision in a dense forest map, getting to 150+ kills before anyone else on the server even touches 50.

There are bugs that haven't been fixed since launch (for example if your commander uses his instant spawn ability it won't let you spawn on your selected point, you always have to click another point and then the one you actually wanted to spawn at). At least they seem to have fixed the bug where you fall through the map at least twice a match.

Climbing behaviour is godawful and in certain positions it's a coin flip if your guy will decide to suddenly point his gun straight into the air while crouched because there was a small pebble on the ground.

Also spawn points often are super scuffed, like spawning you in standing position in the middle of a free area miles away from the spawn point you selected... only to get killed before the camera even zomms into first person so you can play.

Was stupid enough to revisit this game for a day. 10 games. 6 times Fortress, 4 times Arena.

Amount of 5 minute leavers is insane. I've never witnessed anything similar in a competitive game. First, chances are you need 10 minutes to get into a game because of constant lobby dodging. And then there is a 50/50 chance that either team will have a leaver by the 5 minute mark. I'm honestly stunned how ♥♥♥♥ this game has become.
Also reports are 100% meaningless.


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Team Ladder. BF banned. Nomad favourited. 8 games played.

5 times Arena. Booooooring.
2 times Ghost Lake. Who the ♥♥♥♥ can explain why 40 sheep chill on a frozen lake?
1 time Arabia. Meta tryharding.

Why. Do. We. Only. Get. 1. Ban?

Please can you just let me play a map i actually enjoy?


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Oof, why did i waste 700+ hours on this game? It actively becomes less fun the more you play because it starts to actively be about learning a couple of strategies and build orders to perfection and then executing it better than the opponent. It was a lot more fun at an elo where people just played the game. Now im in that weird transition elo where games can get onesided stomps super fast because one guy for example learned fast Imp Turks on Arena. Or you're playing against a premade stack that goes for the boring meta strat.
Simply not enjoyable for me, wish i kept my childhood memories instead of destroying them playing ladder :(

June 2023 Update: Was about to give a thumbs up as the game had felt reasonably stable before the Rome DLC but now it's worse than it's ever been for me. Can just hope that their pormised stability patches help.
Plus doesn't seem to be just me, i'm experiencing an even higher number of leavers or non-loading players in ranked matches... i'd guess more than half my games are won/lost that way or never even happen.

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TLDR: The game has the potential to be very enjoyable and is nostalgic bliss but also still plagued with lots of bugs and connection issues in the current patch. Come back to this later once it's more stable (again?).

Enjoyed the game when i picked it back up last year, mostly due to childhood nostalgia and having been starved of a good RTS for a long time.

At the moment it's a bit of a love hate relationship for me. Why?

The unit movement/behaviour feels quite dated and clunky to me which sometimes can lead to the game overall feeling more like I'm wrestling the pathfinding and inputs than conveying orders and commanding a civilization.
On the other hand IF I get into a game which is reasonably well balanced on a map I enjoy it can be great fun... even if it's a bit stressful during the late-game with so much going on, especially when playing 3v3/4v4 without coms lol.

In the end what makes me not recommend the game at this point is the amount of bugs I'm experiencing lately. I highlighted the "if" earlier because quite often I don't even get into the game but instead get booted to the main menu with an "unexpected error" message. Which leads to increasing multiplayer timebans because the engine judges the crash as you abandoning a matchmaking game. Great.
On top of that the game creation process just decides to ♥♥♥♥ up sometimes. For example scrambling civs in my team - not random civs but players getting matched the wrong civs within the team. E.g I pick Spanish and get Huns while my teammate picked Huns and got Spanish.
I even ended up in a 2v4 ranked match where i had queued for 3v3 and we were three players on our team in the lobby. But once we hit loading screen one of our teammates was put into the opponent team.
And even if i get into a game and all the settings are indeed correct, noone is lagging heavily and teams are somewhat balanced there's still a good chance that AoE2 decides to completely hardlock my PC. Like sound keeps playing but everything else stops responing to any kind of input. Literally no other game i have installed does that. From competitive multiplayer games to single player adventures. And it's not because so much is going on and my PC runs out of juice, it can happen during dark age witch 2 players on a tiny map.

Last but not least it's quite irritating to me that I only get a single map ban when queuing for team games, but three for solo ladder. With the map pool being relatively deep at least two bans for team ladder would be such a quality of life improvement... I just don't enjoy playing what feels like half my games on either Arena or Black Forest.

Final verdict - there's a reason the game is still popular this long after its initial release and why so many of us remember the childhood days fondly where we noobed around against the AI or had LAN nights with aoe and wc3. But in its current state for the amount of development time there could have been I won't recommend it. There are enough other games to enjoy first, come back to this later when it gets more stable.