Recent reviews by Albannach

I revisited this after a couple months, and while I can't say this is worth full price, it's come a long way! Handling is still iffy, Traffic AI chokes up sometimes, and gameplay isn't quite intuitive yet, but I've genuinely had a good time just soaking in the ambiance of the extremely impressive map. Performace has improved greatly too, at least on my system.

The decision to be making paid dlc's is definitely still a choice, but there's real promise to this game now. I wish I could give this a neutral review, but in six-or-so-months, if the game keeps going in this direction, it'll really have earned the thumbs up. Buy this at a deep discount.

Old review:
The map is extremely detailed and the only selling point of the game. However, it is unoptimised as all hell. Traffic AI is terrible, and the driving is terrible. The developer is much more interested in releasing cosmetic DLCs than working on AI and driving physics, so I can't in good conscience recommend this at all.

Incredibly beautiful and fun, but by god, DO NOT try to play this game with a keyboard and mouse. I adore this game but I want to emphasise this for anyone under the same illusion I was that "it'll be fine." it will not be.

I wish you could post a neutral review. Spectacular story and characters with repetitive mission design that I still had a lot of fun with. However the experience was dragged down by the many, many bugs, the worst of which required me to relaunch the game 5x in 36 hours.

This isn't really a "remaster". All the bugs remain and it's an identical experience to the original. It's a fun time, just not a jaw-dropping experience. 6.5/10

It's beautiful, true to Iberia in every sense... but it has its downsides. They've completely neglected side roads for whatever reason. Iberia indeed has a dense highway network but no attempt was made to balance this with the vast network of secondary roads. It results in a lot of the map feeling empty as the local road network has been sidelined in favour of the motorways.

Is it a great expansion? Yes, but it could've and should've been so much more.

If you use the console ONCE it disables achievements, which is... a choice. Especially for a Bethesda game when the console is often used to overcome bugs. I had an issue with being seen through walls in a stealth quest and kept failing after 7 tries so I had to use the console to get past.

I'm in favour of anti-cheating measures but a SINGLE PLAYER, BETHESDA GAME is probably the worst thing to implement them in. I mean this is 15 or so years after Fallout 3 and I still had to tcl myself out of walls and use tdetect to get past their awful detection ai.

That aside, the game was impressively bad but that was my main gripe.

Now it's about 1AM, I'm bored out of my skull, but then I thought, hey, might as well write my first review.

I confess I'm stingy. The first time I got this game I didn't immediately enjoy it so I got a refund. It was on sale so I figured, hey, why not buy it?

It's great, IF you understand that you will wake up, water your crops, give a gift to someone, gather resources and then go to sleep all to do it the next day, with few changes to that routine, for example, you can get to a point where sprinklers do all the watering for you so you can search through the town's trash earlier in the morning.

There's a Community Center introduced about 30 minutes in that requires collecting some items from all aspects of the game (seasonal fruits, ore, cooked meals, animal products etc.) that give you something to do other than water crops and listen to George complain about the cold for the 80th time, (we'll get to that in a sec) but generally, the community center is ingenious. It's hardly grindy, and it allows you to explore virtually all areas of the game and have a blast doing so.

Don't buy this game expecting a farming-themed dating simulator. Socialising boils down to listening to incredibly well-written dialogue over and over (many mods on the nexus that add dialogue so if it gets annoying, it's hardly the end of the world) and giving people gifts. If you become good enough friends with someone you'll get special events. For example, someone will tell you their sad backstory and you get to choose between saying:

~Wow that sucks bro, you're like, the awesomest person ever.
Or
~I hate you and all you stand for, you useless waste of a person, I hope you suffer a thousand deaths.

I'm paraphrasing of course, but depending on what you pick, most of what happens is you get a relationship boost or drain. Yes, even if you picked that second option, you could potentially marry that npc someday.

But it's not all FarmVille, during winter and rainy days you're given a break from the daily routine in the early game of watering your fields, allowing you to focus on other aspects such as a PvE area called the mines, which is where you'll fight monsters and get that sweet, sweet copper. Combat is balanced and any time you get K.O'd it feels fair, with a chance to lose some items. But no biggie, you can pay to get ONE item back once you've gained access to the Adventurer's guild.

Overall, if you value my trash opinion, i'd say buy it. If this seems like a game you're not sure about, try it, that's why we have steam refunds. 8/10 great time sink