Remember that promising little game called The Long Dark from a decade ago? And how it turned into an obnoxious, yet half-assed survival sim with clunky story beats still crammed into it? This game is that story as an actual point of the game, rather than bowing to the whims of the vocal majority shouting for a hardcore wilderness survival sim. And it is glorious.
It's a painstaking recreation of GameDev Tycoon, a game that kick-started the subgenre of small tycoon games about "from shoemaker to millionaire" entertainment enterprises. Except this time, the end result is (finally) great and worth playing. The choices to make and work out are intuitive, but there is still some fine-tuning; the genres combine nicely, and even the steep research costs eventually stop being an issue once you figure out the basic gameplay loop. Fantastic experience If I have any complaint - it's the absurdly high requirements for a game this size and (not really) complex. Precisely because of how close it is to GDT. That game could easily run on Win XP machine from 2008. Meanwhile, this game requires at the very least 8 GB RAM. What for? What kind of super-math is the algorithm doing that it takes actually 12 GB to make this game work smoothly? And both content- and display-wise, it is pretty much identical to GDT, so I have no idea why something so simple has such high specs and is so poorly optimised. Still, well worth playing and having a bargain price for this sort of game.
I'm torn. Part of me wants to give this game 5/5 and call it the best game of 2007. Part ot me is aware that this drivel came out in 1Q2024. Both of those stances also know that this game is nowhere near worth nor just your 40 dollars, but also time spending playing this antiquated mess. It feels like someone tried to re-make Gothic 2, run out of money halfway the production and then decided to use instead Polish shitty dark fantasy novels to cover the blanks and use "fandom" (of about thousand people) to save its sales. What a monumental trainwreck it is!
You've got to admire the sheer audacity and gull of people at Paradox who sit on one of their biggest bombs for exactly a year and then re-release it on GOG as a "special offer" for "only" 30 bucks and the regular price of 60. Sixty. Let that number sink in - they are calling for this game 60 bucks. For a game that is one of the most infamous bombs of 2023, with unfun gameplay, horrendous performance, and got panned to death in reviews for both of those reasons. They are literally fishing for naive customers and people who somehow missed the memo how hard this game bombed in October 2023. You would have to be insane to give them not just the money they are asking for this dumpster fire, but any money at all.
I'm slashing two stars for the following: -1 for the fact this should be in the (already absurdly overpriced) base, rather than being the testimony to Gameloft's unlimited greed -1 for the fact just how horribly bugged the base is, and thus this expansion can't shine properly, dwarfed by the plethora of carry-over technical issues Otherwise, this could be the actual good modern take on the classic Oregon Trail, adding bunch of features and new gameplay elements to the formula.
Pay 30 bucks for a game that's hardly working in the first place, to experience the worst aspects of OT2, 3 and 5, without a single good element from either of those versions of the classic. No, but seriously, it's almost admirable someone is asking 30 bucks for a game that STILL didn't fix the UE4 bug, two years after the game premiered and been panned to death all around the net for shoddy programming and zero bug fixes
This game is the worst case scenario for having a bunch of great ideas and issues with executing them. And those ideas are really neat - picking your patron, the way how farming is done, the whole tech system, the restriction on unit count, the bonus sites and how they change gameplay with different patrons, the hold the line challenge option... ... and each of those is instantly balanced by shitty execution of different ideas or general gameplay loop. The SP is a joke - the AI is brain-dead, the SP "campaign" is a glorified tutorial (and not particularly interesting one), and various maps can end by AI just starving to death on regular basis. MP, or at least as much of it I tested within 2 hours with a friend, is completely unbalanced and undercuts majority of the unique or interesting elements - you ALWAYS want to be Assyrians and you ALWAYS want to rush swordsmen, settling each and every game to be 15 minutes of rushing and/or anticipating a rush. Why even bother with picking Egyptians? And since there is no real campaign, variety of elements are effectively tutorial gimmicks - you are shown them in a tutorial for the sake of them being there. I wish this game was better made and especially better balanced. But right now the lack of proper campaign is killing its options, while the banality of gameplay has one-strat-wins-it-al problem for MP
1) Endless beta 2) Dev kinda lost interest 3) GOG version is consistently few patches behind The idea is there, the basic gameplay loop is also there, it's the snail's pace of development that's killing it.
