Recent reviews by The Golden Student

I have many fond memories of Civilization. Ever since a friend of mine convinced me to get into Civ IV with him I've been hooked on every subsequent entry until this one.

I can see the potential, I really can, but it's just not fun anymore. Instead of "Yes, mom, one more turn!" it became "Come on man, you paid for this, one more turn..."

- Ages: The idea is solid, the execution not so much. You essentially play 30% of each era gimped because you are in "crisis". This crisis feels disconnected from whatever occured in the game before and brings with it nothing but debuffs, unlike dark age cards in Civ 6 which at least gave you a positive effect in return for a negative one

- Navigable rivers are a nice addition, wanted to say something purely positive

- Culture switching: Honestly, this can work, but not if you're just allowed to pick any culture you want just because you reached a certain milestone. Roman don't become Mughals not matter how many cities I've build, thank you very much. And it's one thing if that would be player exclusive, but it's jarring to go up against confucius leading Spain. I would very much like
A) an Earth map with TSL
B) an option to make cultures only progress into their next logical 1 or 2 options when played by AI

- Combat: This one is actually almost better than before. It's a bit sad my defending archer can kill 20 units without ever even getting so much as a slight experience boost but I love the commander system. Just: if I want to reinforce my commander, let me do it without having to zoom in and click on the exact correct spot instead of selecting my comander by accident. I mean, no QA worth his salt should have let that PASS

- UI and Jank: The UI is terrible and makes me want to murder some devs. The controls aren't much better (read above: selecting commander while reinforcing)

- Graphics: I'm just not that impressed. Color coding aside, I feel there are older 4X games much prettier to look at, such as Humankind. The map generation is a joke, even after the last update I see block basically.

All in all: I really hope they fix it, I really hope it doesn't take 200 Eur in DLC and expansions to get there and for now I recommend HUMANKIND with the Tripple alliance and the TSL earth mods

The Incredible Wizarding world experience we all waited for marred by poor performance.

THE GOOD
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- Atmosphere: It is the Harry Potter Open world RPG most of us have been dreaming about, fully capturing the magic of that world in general and Hogwarts in particular
- Gameplay: From classes to combat, the gameplay is just about as perfect as I would have expected, from the different wand moves done while chaining combos to the way new spells are thaught and unlocked, to flying both broom and mount, no complaints on this whatsoever
- Story: So far the story is of the same magical quality that made the original books so compelling. It's captivating and it's one of the few games were I just chose to walk instead of run and didn't mind an hour long story heavy tutorial at all. Simply captivating!

THE BAD
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- Performance: The performance in this game is appaling. from stuttering in every cutscene to random FPS drops every 5 minutes. It's seriously almost enough to suck the fun out of the game, especially considering my rig is quite high-end.
- No quidditch: Though this was expected, it would still have been incredible to have and I miss it
- No morality system: it really should have some consequences for using unforgivable curses: they're supposed to be unforgivable after all. a crime system maybe?
- It is strange to me that such love for detail is obviously present in the game (moving portraits, cats to pet, students talking, peeves being peeves,..) yet small immersion such as being able to go to sleep in your dorm room (as there is a day/night cycle) or sitting in a chair are missing

SOME WISHES
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- Fix performance before doing anything else
- Give us the trilogy we all obiously already want (as we're still playing despite horrible performance)
- Make quidditch part of the next game

* this review is based on the 72 hours early access on PC for those who bought the Deluxe edition. It is still valid criticism as those who ordered the Deluxe edition did so expection a playable game for that time.

EDIT: edited after a few more hours of playing

This is the way!

One of the first times I'm truely proud to be Belgian. This game is a masterpiece. As a software tester bugs bug me a great deal (pun intended). Thank (Insert chosen divine here) this game has so few of them... I mean, I can't even try to explain how rare it is to release such polished software in any branch of IT... Kudos Larian, Kudos

Pros
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- So far (and I'm talking definitive edition): Everything

Cons
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- So Far (again, definitive edition): Nothing

I'm not out of Fort joy yet (in the definitive version), so this review is incomplete.... Scratch that, I normally don't do revciews and will most likely be to lazy to update this one... so... Just buy the game, I promise, you won't regret it!

The game is completly broken at this point. I either have no freezing but super downgraded graphic in which all the trees are complete blogs of green and I can't see it untill I'm 50 meters in front of them, or the graphics are normal and every minute the game freezes for 20 seconds. on top of that there are multiple cheaters on official servers and nothing on this from the devs.
I see the potential in this game, I really do, but poor execution, a deaf ear to the western (NA and EU players). and an alpha that was sold of as an early access make me give this game a negative review, and I for one will have to be convinced to play this again