[Played on Steam / refunded] I tried to like this game. It has a lot of things that I generally like in a city/village building sim. But the zoom/pan mechanics are inexplicably strange and jarring and got to the point where they nearly made me nauseous. Specifically... When you use the mouse wheel to zoom out or in, it doesn't just change the height/perspective of your view, it shift it to one side, seemingly at random. I could never figure out if it was trying to focus on something "important" at the new zoom level. So imagine that every time you zoom in or out, the camera also randomly "bumps" about 30-degrees to one side or the other. Very distracting/annoying. If that gets fixed, I might give it another try.
I love this game. The 3D is very well done, with atmospheric effects, smoke contrails, nice lighting... all kinds of goodies. On a decent machine, you can have many dozens of units all going at it and notice no slow down. Good tech tree and vehicle design options. Do not neglect the "+" key. This doesn't speed up the game like normal, but fast forwards to the next "important" thing... basically, any event you might need to respond to. So if you need to build up a chunk of units to take out an objective, stack 20 of them in the build queue and keep hitting the + key. Poink, poink, poink. They all come bopping out. Or if you're sending units on a long slog, same deal. Press + and they will go till they hit their mark, or enemies. A nice touch. Controls are great; some of the UI gets a big boggy, but you get used to it. Fun to build bases, research units, design and build 'em, defend the base, etc. Just fun. Which is the point, eh?
