Recent reviews by Riz Gukgak

Still a fun game, so I'm leaving a positive review. Basically the same, the AI is still pretty broken (bad), better graphics and soundtrack though. Added a couple civs which I haven't played enough of yet to review, but I've played against and they don't seem all that broken. The new maps are nice, and the UI is awesome, where it shows exactly the uses of cards (tells you how MUCH collection upgrades come out to now, vs just saying "it makes your villagers collect coin faster," for example).

Biggest complaint is that they took away home city progression/leveling up. It was the only thing in the game that feels like you have a reason to work towards it. I know I'm probably in the minority when I complain about it, but I like having some kind of incentive to work for something, like leveling up to unlock new cards, etc. Having everything unlocked from the beginning seems a bit dumb to me, except during online play. But, it is what it is. Honestly I'm probably going to go back to playing the original AoE3 after giving Definitive Edition a couple more shots.

Fairly hard learning curve, and you currently aren't able to save during the "tutorial," which takes upwards of a few hours (god forbid you need to leave your house at some point in the day...). Overall, it feels as though the game wasn't quite field-tested enough before release, and certainly needs continual patching.

Since release, we've already seen a few patches, mostly fixing random, small bugs, rather than the larger problems in the game, such as lack of maps/map diversity, only having 4 families (character groups) to choose from, and the extremely disproportionate cost of things like infrastructue and amenities such as theatres to income potential. In addition, even if you play the tutorial to the end, a lot of the basic game mechanics go essentially unexplained, such as the importance of district infrastructure, density/spread, and how employment/business bankrupcy works.

It's definitely a good game, with a lot of potential, and I do recommend picking it up if it goes on sale, but it's not a must-have. With time, and a dev team that cares about fixing it, Urban Empire could definitely be a game to rival the great city-sims of the gaming world.

Wanna waste a few hours?
Play some Age of Empires II.
And hey.
It's in HD.