Recent reviews by T. Russell

I want to give my thanks to the developers who actually do the coding and want to make the game better, the map developer said in his dev diary, "I hope people like the maps" I'm going to say I like your maps, they make me think very hard about landscaping. The developers are who I look to as the heroes of this game, thank you for doing what you can with the resources you have.

But I am quite disappointed that - Colossal order has officials who do not understand gamers and do not understand how to properly resource a video game, community managers that make no difference to the final product, they need to resign for the damage they've caused to the company and stop eating up Colossal order's financial assets - your developers are your real, and working employees, you(Colossal order) need to start giving them the resources they need, and get over the woke business model which accused the cities skylines community of becoming 'toxic'. In reality we offered criticism and advice and continue to do so. For that reason I do not recommend the game, nothing will change unless it changes at the top.

I have three suggestions as to what the company can do to win our trust back -
1. Tell us who was responsible for this disaster, I want to know who failed us so we know who should resign.
2. Tell us how much money you are investing into the game.
3. Return any bonuses you 'earned' and reinvest it into the game, you could also use it to refund players who were exploited.

I don't feel the need to offer advice on what bugs to fix or what content to add, the developers already know what to do assuming you didn't make this game on a whim.

After 31 hours I think I got a pretty good handle on the game. The tutorial truly teaches you how to play the game and gives you a story to play by.

Recent downsides are the fact you can't build dry walls to make offices/individual rooms(I have resorted to using wardrobes to make a wall..), there's no doors between rooms that open/close, the only doors that function are the ones you enter/exit the building from. There's no upper level/lower level function making the size of buildings a little disappointing, on that note the size and shape of buildings is pre-defined and there is no quick preview button, you have to navigate a couple menus before you get there making a quick look to find the perfect building tedious. Greater control over the building part, including the exterior, would be ideal, maybe acquiring the neighbouring building would allow you to merge them together to make a larger one.

Another thing I'd like to see is more functions to 'man the fort' say from your office you could sit at your desk and have something more to do yourself (you can't go to law school and be one of the lawyers at your firm, or a programmer, or as mentioned an HQ member), I struggle to have multiple cars cause there's not many car parks that we can safely store our cars at.

I have only been able to get a job at the supermarket.. would be interesting to get to the point you can work for someone else say a programmer firm.

so overall, more building options, some interface improvements, more interior variations, more work options please

But I do love the game! You can manage so much and do so many things already, what a great start!

I've played the game for 24 hours so far.

The way your army is automated(all hands off apart from building barracks) for you sucks. I have zero control over what I do with my army(apart from what front to go to, to advance or defend or stay at bases), the failure to give the player choice is a clear indication of listening to just one side of the argument, the people who dislike micromanagement, some of us want to be able to micromanage our forces to make the game more enjoyable, but we don't have the choice.

I'll lay it out for the potential buyer.
- Right click on Mexico (I'm the U.S.A)
- click conquer state (let's say it's california)
- the war preparations begin (I mobilize each army and decide if I intend to advance or defend and what front I do this on, set up my war goals)
- the war begins after a few weeks (this entire time my economy bleeds over the higher military equipment purchases)
- I advance or defend or standby for my 'General'(army)'s depending on how the war is going.
- they do their thing (I take ground or lose it depending what the AI does)
- throughout the war I don't get to make more war goals I can only select the goals laid out at the start of the war (fair for the player that wants it easy if they get attacked..)
- menus for war are clunky, and mysterious, buried under multiple other menus till I find what i am looking for, so if I've missed something here this is probably why

The economic system is very much player dictated, making the AI OP because as a player I don't necessarily have pin point accuracy as the AI does, they work on the numbers, I am working with clunky menus. The info boards are annoying, they get in the way of everything and I rarely see what I'm clicking on.

when you build a building you get a prediction of how much money the factory will earn by itself (I do like this prediction but I would have liked to see a prediction of how much revenue i'd get from it)

Victoria II your economy is pretty much managed for you by capitalists(provided you don't go the route of communism), but you controlled the functioning of the government/diplomacy and had sliders to optimise your government expenditure, the army was majorly micromanaged by the player(and some complained about that but it was better in comparison to vic3), Victoria 3 merely swaps it around, my economy is all managed by me the player, government/diplomacy me, expenditure me, army... Not me the player? why not give me choices (HOI4?)

There are clear improvements in the AI, and a heap of other things that are definitely better than Victoria II such as the graphics, the increased CPU requirements (the game lags like vic II did when it had no DLC added fixes)

Victoria 3 is a different game to me and should've been called something like "Victoria Industrialisation" cause it is different to Vic II in so many ways with few similarities. I don't recommend this for the person expecting an improved Victoria series game, I call this a downgrade. Back to playing Victoria II unless 3 improves enough for me to like it, game should be reduced by half price

This was a rushed review so just take it as my personal view(which isn't always reasonable) at the current state

Not able to customize your character? How do I create a character that reflects myself xP
The first edition of this game(years and years ago) was 100x better than what this has unfortunately chopped and changed to.

Company of Heroes 2, could have been this combined with NHC. We could have had some real massive battles, on a scale of wargame: Red Dragon with the excellent UI on CoH

Wow... What a storyline, and what a game. I played the original RDR on Xbox - the biggest flaw is that the earlier story is in RDR2.. I feel that is a redundancy. But what a beautiful game, that takes us back to the start and helps us relive those moments we were always wondering about. What I now wonder is, weather we'll play Arthur when Dutch and Hosea first met him? Maybe even go forward to Jack again and see what he ends up doing in his adulthood. Can't wait to see what more beauty and story we end up seeing from Rockstar.

The game, yes. The game is beautiful, you can admire so much detail, and such enjoyable hunting environments. It has a crafting system in currently, but it's not like you can build your own campsites out of logging or something fun like that (I'd like to see that in a distant game).

Rockstar could have quite a franchise here by maybe going into a full on ranching game, instead of cops & robbers for every game they make. There looks to be a lot of experimenting in this game with that, more so than RDRevolver and RDRedemption One. I am keen to see what else Rockstar release.

So far, I've been crashing repeatedly.
I like the Anno series, and this game very much is a fun one, no dispute there.
There appears to have been a lack of optimization for cards though, 2070, & 2205, always got me 60 FPS, that was with a GTX 770. My 970 seems to only get 50 FPS out of Anno 1800, which is a little disappointing.
Overtime I hope that is fixed, graphics really don't look like anything new or exciting, yet I did have to turn them down a little bit. It doesn't help Uplay appears to take up a lot of bandwidth.

TLDR; good game, needs harder work. Still recommend, hope you can run the game!

I've played about 5 hours, but never got re-interested in the game.

Reason being is the lack of depth

Automation is something that RTS games sometimes need. I'd love to see a group working together without the need to click on everything all the time. Moving units individually whereas in reality people would just do what they are trained to do. Sure I could pause the game and go full micromanagement, but that isn't fun to me.

So the virdict for me is, Emergency needs to not release the same game 10 times over, it's just not worth it and it makes people lose interest in the title. You need something really new with better depth and immersion to it.

An FPS game might provide this. Command and Control is hard to do with AI I understand.

those of us who went through the Sim City 5 suffering & pain will remember...
The game has much less micromanagement... and for a city builder, you can't have less of that.
So what we have is regions, in these are resources you need for the other one. Now my problem with this, this is not realtime management of regions, instead you load the region you want to go into (Temperate or Winter)
You don't get to build your battlefleet, you are stuck with the ones they give you that you can (Like league of legends) only level up what you get given. (Don't get me wrong i'm not a LOL player)

NO MULTIPLAYER
NO CONTINUES PLAY
COMPAIGN ONLY

I recommend this game, straight off, reason why? You can do litterally anything you want to, you can build a castle, you can have a smaller settlement, with a small guard. You can build a larger army, you can raise a group of traders, you can role play this game. However there is one downside and the downside that unfortunately all games have. It's called memory leaks, it's called lag, it's called performance, of course this is in alpha, so if you want to get the game be ready for bugs, i sure hope the devs are dedicated to this game forever, i know i will be playing this a lot, but when the game crashes, i need to find something to surpress my emotions after that point, cause it's the only reason i can't play it. Memory stacks up after time, and it causes it to crash in the end, so i reccomend it in it's future, that i HOPE it will be an amazing game.