In what universe is this a "rebated price" for the bundle? Each White March expansion (I and II) is priced at 9.99 £. 2x9.99 = 19.98 £ if you buy them separately. The bundle costs 19.99 £, i.e. 1 p MORE. I know it's not much, but it bothers me conceptually. What's the point of a bundle if it's not cheaper than the individual items combined? With the current promotion (approx. -40%) it's even worse: 2x5.99 = 11.98 £ if you buy separately vs. 12.09 £ for the bundle. You can keep your "bundle", thank you very much.
I was somewhat suspicious initially, but I think I like Caesar IV better than III. The thing I absolutely hated about Caesar III and its family were the stupid walkers, delivering services along random paths. They condemned you to either build absurd cities with weird paths and no intersections, or to just accept that entire neighbouhoods would periodically fall into poverty as a key walker decided not to deliver some vital service for a few months. Personally, I chose the second option. Anyway, Caesar IV has a much more reasonable system for coverage, which is distance along roads from the relevant building. A few cons. - The interface is not very friendly. - Your advisors fail to give you some crucial pieces of information. - The combat system is horrendous. Consider yourself lucky if you're at all able to get your troops to attack the enemy (ok, not quite, but it's really awful). Luckily this is not a very big part of the game. - Somehow lacks excitement. There are no cool buildings to look up to building, unique challenges to overcome, or special map requirements. You can easily build a Circus and Coliseum on the very first day. Every map ends up being largely the same drill: build your city, develop trade, raise an army, send Caesar the required goods, wait. Just slight variations. Btw, I see some people complain about small map sizes... I had no problem with that. If anything, I regretted only using a small part of the map most of the time.
Let's start with the complaints. - While the list of random events is quite large, the same ones seem to appear at almost every walkthrough (while others almost never happen), making things repetitive pretty quickly. - Forget simple explorers and gatherers: if you're sending out a party, it needs to be big and tough enough to fight monsters of an increasing level of difficulty based on turn number. Even if you manage to avoid roaming monsters (which you can't really, because they keep spawning and most of the time it's dark and you have terrible visibility), some of the random events force you into some pretty tough fights. And you can't even accompany your gatherers with your fighters and then leave them to their work, because stationary camps are also subject to random events. - There's a good variety of resources and crafting recipes, but many (if not most) are useless: by the time you can afford to spend research points and have people gather the resource/craft the item, you will have looted enough with your fighter party or will have access to better options already. - There's a ton of micromanagement, especially with crafting. With that being said, the game is really fun and satisfying, and I've played countless hours, so clearly I'd recommend it overall.
To me this game looks like it's obviously designed for children. The gibberish talk, the constant unnecessary cutscenes, the "jumpy/bouncy" movement, the "overenthusiastic" sounds and animations... all this looks to me like the 6 year-old's equivalent of dangling keys in front of a baby to capture its attention. And, as an adult, I find all this annoying, so much so that I gave up on the game at the end of the second world. I like my platformers nice and clean, like Super Mario. Of course that's my preference, and I'm sure there are other adults who'll like Rayman. I just wish I had been warned who the target audience is. Also, for reasons I can't explain the controls are terribly counterintuitive... I just could not get used to them. With that being said, the game is graphically very cute and the levels I've seen are quite imaginative.
