I have always been excited for city builder especially when it's in space. This game, however, is nightmarish in all the wrong ways. The game isn't challenging because of good game designs, but because of bad game designs. So as you can see from the screenshots above, your buildings are pods that you have to connect to each other. All buildings have to connect to each other which is well & good, but it's not obvious on where you can place the buildings because sometimes the game just won't let you so you'll have to think very carefully on where to place your buildings. To make it even worse. Nobody can move crates out off the way. So when you recycle your buildings, you get your resources back. Say, you just got a tech upgrade on your windmill & you want to replace it with an upgraded one on the exact same place. Well you can't do that because the AI are too dumb to move the crates out off the way & there's no way to order your colonists to move them either, but you can destroy the crates, thus destroying the resources you need to build your upgraded windmill just to clear the area. Now, try imagine that you're placing something crucial like an oxygen generator or a bio dome your module connection was off & you wanted to realign your modules. You can't, because the crates are in the way, and now your colony will collapse due to starvation/suffocation. Can't assign jobs to colonists. Colonists are specialists at certain tasks, but you can't tell them what to do. For example, biologists grows food for your colony, but if they don't want to, everybody dies. So make sure to set your crucial modules to top priority because your colonists won't do their job. Some jobs you can't toggle as priority so you might tear off your hair from that. Can't rotate indoor furniture. When you place down something, they'll have an ugly angle & you can't fix it. Can't disable workstation. You have to shut down that entire dome. Hard skip, go play Surviving Mars.
My biggest problem with the game is that it's too short. Just as when I started to have fun, the game is already over. As much as I actually like the game, as much as I want to give it 3/5, I'd be lying to you, so 2/5 is the best & honest score I can give. Again, I really love the game. I recommend you buy this game on a 50% or more discount ONLY. So basically, you run a stone age village. You expand your village, you hunt for food & gather resources, people will either join your or try to destroy you, you fulfill some conditions to get points to unlock tech so you can progress to a new era. You start from the early stone age & the end game is the iron age, the game gets less fun as you progress because there's no extra challenge to come along with it which is the historically authentic but it makes for a boring gameplay. By the end of the Iron Age & you managed to get steel tools, the game is on easy mode & the only "challenge" would be the marauding hordes trying to take you down. But you have steel swords & composite bows so they can't fight you. I would also recommend to put your village where you can geographically create choke points to maximize your kill zone potential because raiders can tear down your walls. It's almost as if the devs know the game is short, you'll run out of metals in your mine pretty quickly, so by the time of iron age you'll rely more & more on traders. You won't have a hard time finding things to trade with because you have plenty of tools you loot from dead raiders to trade with. If there's a game that need DLCs & expansions, this is the game. Other than that, this game is actually very beautiful to watch. So much so I wish there's a Wallpaper mode or Screensaver mode so I can watch my villagers living their lives while I work or do other stuff.
If you love Papers Please, low your expectations. And if you're wondering, you are not just pub bouncer, eventually you work for the immigration. The world building is shallow & there's only 1 right way to play the game. You have 4 multiple endings, 3 bad & 1 good. All of them are obvious, from the theme & the angry reviews, you can guess what's the "good" ending. Basically, all Brits are racist, you are a victim, but you have to work for them so you can pay the bills & foreigners tax(comes every week). Only 2 characters are likable, your first boss who learns to not be so racist towards you & a girl who tries to bribe you. There's also the other "good guys" whom I can see the devs want you to find them funny but I don't find them funny at all. This game has character creation & clothes to customize your character & also your own apartment for you to decorate. Later on, the game wants you to balance your personal health & work life or you get a bad ending no 1. But if that day has a storyline mission, then you're out of luck, so I advise you to plan your game around the storyline. But don't be fooled, this game has illusion of choices & fake promise of choices. You have to buy clothes for buff & furniture for your health anyway. You don't get to choose what tools for your job to upgrade either, you just get them as you level up. Your only impactful choice is whether or not you want to sell drugs but you don't really need to because your job bonuses & double pay as head bouncer helps a lot. If this game exist because the devs want to be political, it only shows me of their personalities & their lack of knowledge they have on the world. By the time you work for the immigration, I find the documents to be unrealistic, in that it doesn't make sense. But that's just my professional criticism on the matter. I only recommend to buy this game when it's on sale. You can find something better for 20 dollars. But yeah, Brexit bad, Brits racist, terrorism ftw, EU 4evah!!
I have the disk copy of the game but not the Battle March so I'm focusing on base game. The story line is standard for Warhammer, but the Chaos story line is straight up predictable and boring, so I'd recommend playing the Empire and forget about the Chaos campaign. The game sets up very similar to a Total War game, you have a world map where you choose where you want to go, then you have the battle mode just like in a Total War game. What makes this game different is that you don't have a freedom on the world map, you just walk forward to your next stop which might be a city where you buy stuff or train soldiers, or the next battle in the story line. You only get to choose when you find a crossroad where you can take a quick detour for a side quest or stick to the main road. The battle mode is where you can see how this game is inferior to a Total War game. The fighting animations is puppet-like, and I feel like the models were sliding above ground sometimes. The only interesting aspect of this game is that sometimes you get to duel the enemy general is when the game changes to an rpg-style of choosing your attack abilities or healing yourself while the soldiers from both sides gather in circles to watch both of you fight. I find the feature rather pointless I always decline the duel and swarm the enemy general to death. There is also a hero specific map like raiding tombs or dungeons alone or with other heroes in your army for loot, but I find them boring, expect that 1 time I raided a vampire's tomb, I always liked that mission. I was also playing a Warhammer mod for Medieval 2 when this game came out. I find the modded game to be way far superior and far more entertaining in general. The mod offers a huge range of factions of unit variety and actual strategy in the game. If you were to ask me should you buy this game or buy Medieval 2 and install the mod, I would tell you to get Medieval 2 and the mod. The mod even borrows the soundtrack from this game!
GOG doesn't say I own this game, that's because I already have it on my Steam. I broke my own vow not to buy any Early Access before it came out because I thought this game would be good. It isn't. It has an interesting mechanic which will keep you hooked for a while. But when you realized that's all there is to the game, you'll want your money back. You start out with a HQ & a few scouts. Your job is to build your city, clear the map & protect yourself from the zombie hordes. The only thing that changed about the game is the randomly-generated maps. Since the game is out of the early access, the campaign is finished & you have a map editor so there's that. The campaign is pretty much the same as survival mode except the map isn't randomly generated. The campaign also adds Hero missions, but the game only has 2 heroes & you can only choose 1 & you can't even use your hero to defend your city so it's pretty much a waste of opportunity. These hero missions aren't even that good, I find them to be boring most of the time. But I have to do it because they do give out good rewards which you can use to upgrade your tech tree in the campaign & a backstory in the form of old newspapers & documents. So yeah, no story in the campaign, just build your city & try not to die. I was hoping to be some sort of politics when it comes to managing your city, but there's none. You just build your city, obey the Steam Punk Darth Vader, guide your hero through mazes & hope you'll still be alive by the end of the game. I would recommend Rebuild over this game, and you can even play Rebuild for free on Newgrounds! Heck, you can even find Rebuild 3 on GOG & it's half the price of this game! But if you want to buy this game? I recommend wait for a steep discount, I'm talking about 75%+ discounts. Like seriously, this game loses to a free flash game on Newgrounds. Just go play Rebuild.
This review is so hard for me to write because I don't want to be too negative, I have to spend at least 2 weeks just to try to give this game justice. I played this game on PS2 and it's the worst shooter I've ever played. I'll start with the positives. -If you're a 40k fan & you want to explore 40k environments in a more personal detail. The main 40k theme is hopelessness & depression, that is exactly how I feel when I play most of the time. Back when this game was made, the Tau was painted as the good guy. Their interiors tend to be clean & bright to give you that hopeful feeling & this is actually the reason why I pick up the hobby as a Tau. If you are a hardcore 40k hobbyist, I would recommend buying this game if you want some ideas for your maps. -The game gives you an authentic experience on how does it feel like to take on Space Marines as a mere mortal. When a 7 ft man covered head to toe in armor coming at you with a chainsword, you will rightfully fear the Emperor & the Imperium. -Thanks to the 40k lore itself, the difficulty scale is perfect. When you piss off the Imperium, first they sent lowly guardsmen to fight you. If you survive, they'll start sending stormtroopers, space marines, assassins. This game has a long list of negatives, and it is rightfully so. I won't go over them but I'll give you my fair warning. -The aim is terrible & it will be the reason why you'll die pretty much all the time even with auto aim (or at least, it's the reason why I even die). -Cheap jump scare tactics. Chaos Space Marines may feign dead & Chaos Raptors will start appearing behind you and since you're a Tau you can't fight in melee so you're basically dead. Your character has a sword but you'll forget it exist for just how useless it is. -Sometimes the game gives you a mission that you can't finish just so you could fail it. I learned not to care & just go through the stages. If you want a good 40k shooter to play, play Space Marines.
I can only recommend this because it includes Galactic Adventures & it is definitely a must have when it's on sale. The reason is, Galactic Adventures is the only thing that keeps this game from becoming boring, Galactic Adventures gives you weapons & abilities to create scenarios, missions & mini games which keeps your game from becoming dull. Which it definitely will be when you reach the Space Age. If anything, Spore gets boring when you reach Tribal Age. I should explain, This game selling point is that you create & evolve your creatures any way you wanted to. But in Tribal & Civilization age, the game turns into a simplistic RTS where you can no longer evolve your creatures. But instead, you control their societal evolution which only shows any signs of effects in the Space age, and in Space age, the game became an rpg, whereby the game keeps making you do the same old stuff over & over again which makes the game stops being fun to a lot of people (me included). Galactic Adventures help making Space age better, but to me, it feels like "better than nothing" than an actual improvement. If you've heard people comparing Spore to No Mans Sky but better, believe them! But hey, at least you could design buildings, vehicles & play dress up on your creatures, so there's that. But if your creature has some sort of ultimate badass abilities from the Creature age? Yeahh, you wouldn't get to use any of that... Unless you have Galactic Adventures, then it matters! Not by much, but at least you get to play with your creatures again. Oh, I forgot to mention, you might have to make an account at Spore homepage so you could upload or download creations on their servers.
