I just bought this game on a super special, so ... it's ok, I do not have buyer's remorse. My opinion however is barely favourable. I've played both in the campaign mode and in the sandbox mode. I like this kind of game because I love tinkering with production lines, setting up an economy and getting it humming along nicely, even balancing the population's needs and wants against what's necessary and what's desireable and what's affordable. What I do not like is having every set up so everyone is in prosperity, general population approval is in the 90% range, my relationship with all factions is 50+ and suddenly there is an uprising of nearly invincible rebels. Who continue to annihilate first my army, then my palace. Oh, I tried again, in the campaign this time instead of the sandbox, things were going even better after studying the almanac, and: guess what? Yupp, rebel uprising. Some of those rebels approved of my rule 100% and there they were, chucking grenades at my bauxide mine. This was the invasion stage, so I had a considerable military force built up, and the rebels got scared off by a 5:1 overwhelming force, but again ... these dudes and dudettes had jobs, loved el presidente, and yet had to go demolish things. If you thrive on that kind of thing - you may get your money's worth. I hate it. It's disruptive, and, in both cases I experienced, it was completely senseless and counter-intuitive which breaks the game for me. It's got to make sense, or I cannot plan a strategy. Big "FAIL". I expect if I want to play Tropico, I'll go back to Tropico 4, where to the best of my recollection no such thing happened (even though I must say the interface of Tropico 5 is MUCH improved, but that does not change the problems with the balancing of a few rebels wiping the floor with my tank plus infantry without taking a single casualty, nor the in-game logic). If, like me, you're in it for modelling economic development and city building rather than real time combat that you have absolutely no control over ... go for the predecessor. -Peter
I played Seven Kingdoms v. 1 when it first came out. I thought, at that time, that it was over-complicated with the spying and the micro management of leadership, generalship etc. Eventually I moved on to other things (I prefer tbs in the first place). But it was one of my happier forays into rts games nevertheless at that time. So against this background I thought I'd give 7 Kingdoms 2 HD a shot. Having forgotten most of what the game mechanics are like, I had some difficulty following parts of the tutorial. It's not always clear exactly what they want you to do from the description of the tasks, and it's not always explained HOW to do that. Had to abandon tutorial games and back-track severally to get a feel for what was supposed to happen that I hadn't done, hence locking up tutorial games. Oh well. Try again. But: it crashes a fair bit on my Windows 7 box. And that is not a good thing. Another 2-3 crashes, and I will give up on this before even finishing the full set of tutorials, I am afraid.
The guys at Frog City created one of the best strategy games of all time, in my opinion, with this game that for the most part depends on the player's skill in resource allocation, a smart economy and diplomacy with the 'minor nations'. 20 years after it was published I still wheel it out from time to time. It's quite a deviation from the Civilization style of 4x games, great fun, and worth every cent. Having said that, I can also not in any way disparage Imperialism II, a game that radically changed some of the predecessor's mechanism, yet turned out a great game in its own right. By the bye: There was a lively discussion forum with the developers very engaged at the time - hosted on Ubisoft's servers. Until Ubisoft one day simply shut the servers down, without any notice: even the developers of this game were left in the dark until it happened. Again, Ubisoft did something similar when they simply shut down the multiplayer server for SSG's Warlords II. Which is why I don't buy new Ubisoft product any more: they cannot be trusted to support their gamers, customers, or not-in-house developers. :-(
I was tempted by the rave reviews to give this a try - I was looking for something in a different genre from MMO and 4x, which I've been playing exclusively for a couple of years now. The good thing first: this game is very pretty. I also think the interface is well designed, moving the characters around the screen, pressing space to highlight the things you can interact with - very nice indeed. This could remove a lot of the tedium, I thought, as a first impression. Unfortunately I find this kind of game still does not appeal to me any more than the old text based adventures "I do not see a lantern here" of the early 80s Infocom Adventures. I find the puzzles tedious. This is different from the fed-ex missions in so many role playing games only in that you get to combine some of these items from time to time and then use them on something else. But, basically, run from place to place, fetch a, b, c, d. Try to figure out which to use on what. The task of getting a lit fidibus from the firemaker to the fireplace was horrid, because certain things ended up on different inventory pages - that was a "gaaaah" kind of experience. The dialogues I have encountered are meant to be witty, but to me they are mostly lame and tedious, sorry. Oh yes, the pop culture references, the allusions to other games, but ... nothing I could get remotely excited about --- and if I encounter that sort of thing in a Terry Pratchett novel I mostly end up laughing like a loon, just to put that into perspective. I played through the first, second, third episodes, I got part way through the 4th ("hangover cure" for the initiated) and I just gave up. I just can't be bothered to go on. ..... The rewards (seeing more of the story) just don't seem worth the annoyance of getting there. Yes, the tedium does get annoying, at least for me.
sadly, I don't even get to look at the game since it crashes every time I try to start it. I'm not the only person with that problem I have seen a few folk complain about it on steam (only place that showed this problem in a google search)
