Recent reviews by scottbowyer

THE WORST PZ DLC EVER. The kind of game you win by not playing. Bad things happening to people in a terrible situation, just what I need after a long, hard day at work. 'Victory' by running away. I got tired of running away after 2 scenarios, took 1 look at Westerplatte and "runany Victory 0" time. Went to the next scenario with all the saboteurs, and decided it's not worth trying to finish the campaign. Go through hopeless situation after hopeless situation, to what point? Fun? I'm considering that Vichy France campaign, it might actually be better. Do not buy.

Simple, but nicely done. Levels build nicely, and you can reset to a lower level when you feel the difficulty has gone too high. I come back to it periodically.

Had this since the DOS days. It and MOO1 are the classic Space 4X game. Even after 20 years, I like to go back and replay it occasionally.

It's a nicely done game, really like what the cards do for it. Unfortunately, the harder levels take away the cards so I haven't done them. My Napoleonic "Fire" Department goes around Europe, spraying everyone with Artillery

Very well thought out little game. You can play it very simply, buy cargo on sale at one town, sell at the next, watch your train chug along the tracks. Or you can upgrade cars, build stations, plan routes, attend events, and optimize your train. Plays well, plot gets a little boring after a while, but worth my money.

Since I spend most of my time offline, my play time is considerably higher than the 15 minutes this probably says. This game fails in 2 basic areas:

Poor history - For Coral Sea, you need to lead with ship AA to weaken enemy fighters, then hit
their aircraft with yours, then follow up by naval bombardment. Basically the ships lead the
airstrike in. With this, it's easily possible to wipe out all the Japanese task forces. For Midway,
first you have to destroy the transport group to keep them from taking Midway right away, while
fending off a cloud of enemy aircraft over Midway. Then you have to destroy their battleship group
which starts out close to Midway. And all before sighting an aircraft carrier. Any knowledge of the
Pacific war would say this is not even close to how things were done.

Poor gameplay - Both scenarios are simply running the gauntlet. Hordes of enemies dropped on you
every few turns, with them compounding if you don't dispatch each group before the next arrives.
Suriving this situation requires very precise maneuvering and attacking, which means lots of reloads.
That and the high micromanagment means a lot of work for not much fun.

For Coral Sea, it was managable, but at Midway this was ridiculous. Horde of aircraft over Midway,
the transport group, and the battleships - all in the first few turns. At this point, I concluded
doing the dishes might be more fun, and said "forget this".

This is after watching over 2 hours of YouTube videos on how this might be done.
I'm going to delete 40 GB of wasted time from my disk drive.

This is still a superb game, despite it's many frustrations. It helps that there is also an extensive cheat system for those "A British cruiser beat up my Tirpitz" type situations. Many rules improvements over Panzer Corps.

Very shaky yes here. I keep my computer offline most of the time, I'd say my play time is 3 games and about 12 hours. This is a nicely done space 4X game, strongly reminding me of MOO2 with better graphics. Initial play is good, but as to be expected with any empire game that requires you to manage individual planets, the workload goes up tremendously as your empire expands. Even small galaxies soon become hard to manage. Your computer governors aren't much help - they don't know your intentions. As your empire gets larger, it is harder to see what is going on. I jump on election victory after the work piles up to a certain point.

It's a fine game in many ways, I think it's better than Conquest of the Stars, and I appreciate having the turn-based ship combat like Orion 2 did. I bought the expansion to try out when I'm ready to handle all the administration again.

This is just a tremendous game all over. Easy enough to learn, it's like a simplified Magic the Gathering meets Rogue. Tremendous variety of cards and items, with lots of replayability. I play most of the time offline , and I've put a lot more than the 5 hours I have listed. I wish there were more games like this. I believe the thousands of good ratings are justified.

This is a horrible game. Very limited tutorial, lots of screens I don't know what to do with. I'm so weak I can't do anything. It quickly becomes apparent it's time to ask for money back.