To start with the positives: The overall gameplay balance feels fair yet challenging, and the production chains make sense. Visually, the game is quite appealing. There’s something almost meditative about watching your trains roll through the landscape, a bit like a model railway from childhood days. But it's still far from finished. The game crashes frequently, and the graphics stutter noticeably. There's no planning mode for roads or rails. Once you click, the section is placed, and if the route doesn't fit (which happens often due to curve or elevation limits), you have to remove it again. The money spent is gone, and you'll only get back a fraction of your original investment. And then there's that thing I hesitate to call AI, it's more like Artificial Dementia. The pathfinding and the algorithms supposedly managing logistics behave oddly, far from being sophisticated or even reliably usable. It's quite common to see an entire fleet of trucks leaving the depot, each picking up a tiny amount of a resource, when a single truck could easily carry the full load. Naturally, those trucks are then unavailable for other transport tasks. Sometimes, routes are ignored completely for no apparent reason, leaving goods to pile up at waypoints. Tweaking route parameters doesn't help. Occasionally, changing the depot assignment does - if you're lucky. There's no way to manually reschedule the internal queue or anything of that sort. Trains, on the other hand, work fine as long as your rail network consists of just three or four factories in a line. But once the network becomes even slightly more complex, the pathfinding starts acting up. Trains take massive detours to reach their destinations. Or sometimes just stop for no reason, blocking the tracks. Maybe it’s simulating a mandatory coffee break. These issues are quite problematic for a game that's all about building and fine-tuning production chains and logistics. It's hard to enjoy that aspect when the game keeps working against your efforts. Although the "1" in the version number still feels a bit premature, there's reason to stay optimistic. With a few solid updates to fix the existing bugs, improve performance, and polish usability, this game could easily reach its full potential. But for now, I could give only two stars. PS: I had to revise my rating. The developer stated, that this game won't get any improvements or new functionality. So this game was released in an unfinished state and then effectively abandoned. Don't pay money for it. Grab it as a giveaway, as it is still quite some fun to play, if you ignore all those drawbacks. It's a pity. It's wasted potential.
Disco Elysium is not like any RPG you've played before. The game mechanics are all walk and talk. The battles, if you want to call them that, can be counted on one hand, and they are resolved within two or three rolls of the dice. There is a criminal case, but the game doesn't push you to solve it. Far from being a hero, the protagonist Harry is a man who has been broken by the reality of his life. On an emotional level, Disco Elysium feels like the hangover after a party night you can't even remember. Harry woke up in a world he wanted to escape, with the dreadful knowledge that his next opportunity to escape is days away. Or the fear that he has already crossed the line and it's all just a delirium. Disco Elysium is more of a story you tell yourself. If you want to completely abandon your duties as a police detective and just bathe in misery, the narrative will continue in that direction. And it will still be a totally gripping story that will eventually come to a compelling and consistent conclusion. It is, after all, a somewhat 1980s detective-noir tale, with consistent world-building and storytelling that create a unique and immersive atmosphere.
