After some load screens in English, the start menu appeared in German. After I figured out the correct menu choice to start a new game, it loaded for a few seconds then dumped me out of the game. Seems like someone should have noticed this before putting the product out for sale. Shame on you GOG
It's a game from around the turn of the century with little updating save for making sure it runs well enough not to cause an avalanche of returns. If this doesn't constitute a cash grab then maybe loot boxes really are 'surprise mechanics'
This is one of those games, in the mold of Crusader Kings or Emperor of the Fading Suns, where you can have a lot of fun if you’re ready, willing and able to jump down the rabbit hole and come up with a coherent strategy out of the minutia of courtly intrigue, the ebb and flow of empires and where and when to bring down the hammer on family, friends, enemies and unsuspecting neighbors. The tutorial is adequate to get you started, the graphics and interface are fine as long as you maintain a board game mind set and I suspect it will run smoothly on just about any PC that can handle Windows 10. If you’re in to the genre of slow cooking grand strategy games and especially if you like a ‘reach for the stars’ chassis, you’ll get your money’s worth with Star Dynasties
Once I mastered the mechanics and learned to decipher the visuals, I found the game to be fun to play with enough Master of Magic goodness to keep me in that one-more-turn frame of mind that all good strategy titles inspire. The updated production values are much appreciated, the game play is engaging, the music is pleasant and the rules e-book is well put together and worth a look. It’s priced about midway between a Triple A publisher game and a budget title and that seems to be good value for the money especially when I think of some of the painfully under cooked big budget titles I’ve wasted money on in recent years. As with any game I enjoy enough to play for many hours, I did accumulate a ‘wish list’. A lot of it came under the headings of wanting things to look better (such as jazzing up the dreary place-holder screen going in to battles or ditching the baseball card look of the Spell Discovered screen (I want to see Kali’s bod). There were a few game play issues like more building options for settlements, terrain having a tactical effect on battles and speeding up the slug-like load times. Maybe some of these things will come with patches, or more likely in DLC, if Slitherene numbers crunchers decide game sales warrant additional content. I bought the original MoM when it first came out way back in the Nineties and was hooked in spite of its game crashing bugs. I kept playing every day while I waited for the floppy disk with the fix-it patch to arrive in the mail (ah, the ‘good old days’). I have never stopped playing the game. I still have my 462 page Prima Strategy Guide from 1995. I’ve purchased plenty of titles since then with claims or at least hints of being MoM’s spiritual successor only for the games to be some combination of disappointing, underwhelming or pretty good but missing the level of ‘lose yourself in the game’ that MoM provided. This one is good, it’s immersive and it’s MoM.
As card games go, this one certainly is fetching, lots of color and good looking backdrops. Sadly, very little of the visual candy is interactive or adds anything to the game play but it’s certainly easy on the eyes. In terms of the game mechanics, I was reminded of both Microprose’s old Magic the Gathering game and the Etherlord titles. The player moves across an overland map encountering battles and power-ups on the way to building a deck fit for the inevitable boss battles. Freedom of movement is so limited and the environments so static that even with all the artistic glitz, the point-to-point moving got a bit tedious and I began longing for a straight arena format for what is a pretty good card game. The complexities and skill based elements of the game were engaging enough to keep me playing for over twenty hours and I ended up feeling like I got my money’s worth.
The aesthetics were attractive enough and the promised depth of strategic options were intriguing enough for me to get the game on Steam shortly after its release. I got about 60 hours of occasionally enjoyable and engaging game play before I moved on and never went back. My enduring impression is that this is the rail shooter of transportation and business simulations, short on options, short on choices and more disappointing than engaging. If you're looking for something to scratch your Transport Tycoon itch and don't need screensaver cute graphics, Industry Giant 2 is a better choice
I've been hooked on strategy games since the golden age of Avalon Hill and SPI board games in the early 1970s and on their computer brethren since the original Sid Meier's Civilization in 1991. Having logged thousands of hours on hundreds of titles, I can say this one is in my Top 10 along with the likes of Civ, HOMM, MoO, MoM, RRT and SC. It's easy to get in to, detailed without being obtuse, engaging and thoroughly enjoyable for hours at a time. The graphics and sound have aged well and the overall product comes across very much as a labor of love. The only debit for me was the removal of the audio portion of the tutorials which were in Patrician 2. If like me you're an auditory learner, their absence is a loss.
Every strategy gamer has a sweet spot in the push-pull between simplicity and complexity, playability and challenge and historicity and abstraction. This game is pretty much center cut for me when it comes to balancing those considerations. It skews toward the simple end of the continuim but with enough bells and whistles to require attention and reward with immersion. While emminently playable, it has enough challenge to afford a sense of accomplishment when well played. Though leaning towards the abstractions of a board game more than a precise computer simulation, it does so with enough logical grounding to allow me to feel like I am learning something about the inflection points that shaped ancient Egypt. The next time I try to pass on the bug for strategy gaming, this will be high up on my list of recommended titles.
I bought the original game off the shelf at our PX on Camp Casey in 1991 and played it through over and over and over again. I did the same with Civilization II which remains tied with Master of Orion 2 as my favorite follow-up sequel ever. Civilization III was certainly an enjoyable game. The mechanics aren't much more complex than its predecessor and the graphical and audio bells and whistles are good and stand up well even to this day. Then Civilization IV came out and once the Beyond the Sword add-on completed that game, I was done with Civ III and never returned. Games 5 and 6 have been enjoyable though the series is beginning to groan under the weight of chrome replacing elegance. As a stand-alone title, Civilization III is a very good game. So while for me its the least likely title in the series that I would go back to play again, if you've never played any of the series titles it's an excellent place to start especially given its low price on GOG.
I never cared much about trains until I got hooked on the original Railroad Tycoon on my Amiga 500 and began buying every railroad themed strategy game that came out including this one. It's certainly not a bad game but it does suffer by virtue of my expectations when it comes to a game bearing the name of gaming god, Sid Meier. There is some fun to be had with some interesting scenarios and very nice detailing on the trains. The biggest drawbacks for me were the claustrophobic scale of the maps (feels more a tabletop train simulator than a representation of intercity railroad commerce), micromanagement problems that make even the 1990 original game a more seemless gaming experience and occasional crashes that sink a mediocre title into the realm of 'I wonder what else is on sale'.
