Fantastic game. Worth it to get it, just to have experienced a novel take on the city builder.
I had finished the game multiple times on Steam, then got it on GoG to make it easier to install Fallout London. Afterwards, I tried playing just the unmodded game, and I'm getting bugs that I have never gotten on Steam (across multiple playthroughs!).
Massively, breathtakingly unstable at the moment. I'll update this review if/when they fix it.
The core of the game is the writing, which I don't find all that good. And without the writing, the gameplay is far too weak to stand on its own two feet.
This game really, strongly expects you to stick to the main storyline as much as possible. If you don't, you'll be wandering around a mostly empty world, occasionally punctuated by random encounters that are either way too easy, or way too hard.
- Decent production value. - Has some interesting ideas. - The UI is quite poor. - The card minigame is just lame.
After multiple attempts, I keep dying to an early-game encounter, even on easiest difficulty. I'm sure I'm just being bad, but I have no information that I can use to get better. This feels like only a mild improvement over a game that doesn't start at all.
My personal litmus test for games like these is whether diplomacy does anything (or is just the place where the Declare War button lives). This game didn't pass. To be fair, it does add a few ideas of its own -- but only superficial ones.
The game starts out really strong, with lots to explore and mysteries to uncover. The late game doesn't live up to the built-up anticipation, though. I kept feeling like I was being asked to care about things I honestly didn't care about, over and over again. It made me appreciate the "stoic" dialogue options, which amounted to just asking the other party to get it over with. Full playthrough on normal difficulty took 44h 42m. That included scouring the entire open map, and finishing every single quest that wasn't blocked by my chosen course of action (or simply bugged). It was nice.
Every game that mixes tactical battles and a strategic overmap has the same core problem: if that tactical battle is challenging, you've failed at the strategy part, and vice versa. But at least within this narrow subgenre, AoWIII is still the best game available, even years after release.
