Ability to make every fantasy/movie race you've ever thought was cool? Yep.
Ability to have somewhat dumbed down (not in a bad way) total war gameplay? Yep.
Scratches the "one more turn" itch? Definitely.

game gud. Will most likely be the -only- civ like game I play for decades. Unless the next one in the series blows this out of the water, I'll probably be trying to make compatibility patches for this to run on windows 18.

---edit---
We dive together or not at all! We pushed back sony's tyranny and AH and Helldivers prevailed. That's what we like to see, that's what gets my review spun around to positive.

Block the game from 90 countries like 4 months after release to the point steam won't offer a refund for a game you cannot play? I'm one of the people who could link a PSN account.. but why? The game worked fine before. Only reason is sony wants to harvest more data and make PSN look better by virtue of literally extorting PC players by saying "Do this, or you don't get to keep what you bought"

Do I have ubisoft accounts? Yeah. But ubisoft was required for everything they made with zero exceptions from the start. Horizion zero dawn didn't require me to do anything with sony, and is also a sony game. This is just lame, and I won't be playing anymore.

So I felt I should kinda leave a review here mainly for my friends but also for pretty much anyone.

This review was massively edited. and within the first week, it used to be a positive review.

It's been 6 months since release. The devs have practically lied to our faces about what we were going to get, and basically made a fool of everyone who bought the game assuming it would be just as good as cities skylines one. We don't even have mod support yet. Something cities skylines 1 came with on release.

Do yourself a favor. Don't buy this game. Wait for a sale, buy CS1 and all it's DLCS that interest you, and don't buy this until it is well and -truely- fixed.

If you need a list of what's broken:
Import/export of any cargos into your city.
Civilian movements through your city. (pathing bugs, infinite loops, staying home indefinitely until they die)
RICO is a joke. You'll have 1,500 pop in your very tiny town and they'll all want high density skyscraper apartments. huh?
Building variety. Yeah, those asset packs we were supposed to get 'right after launch' never came, don't think they are, to be honest with you. despite being advertised in the trailers.

Everything listed above? Works flawlessly in CS1, with mods to supplement where DLCS didn't do enough.

it's a damn shame what happened here. and I don't think I'll ever trust them with a DLC or city builder again. if I could refund it, I would.

Lemme just say this, Divinity 1 and 2 took around 7 hours to get through act one on your first new play through learning about the mechanics and talking to people before you were free. Then around a good 3-4 hours on your second and third playthrough, and I'm definitely no speedrunner.

I am 36.9 hours into BG3 here, and I'm still not done.. In fact I might not even be close to done exploring and getting everything done in act 1, and i'm already halfway to level 6. This game is crazy. I love it. Cannot recommend it enough. It has honestly been the first game in over a decade to make me stay up for more than 24 hours just glued to my screen on a weekend. No sleep, only baldur's gate.

I can't explain how much I genuinely enjoy a game just delivering what they say they're going to deliver.

Pretty much the best successor to Open TTD.

Line management is simple but can grow very complex, Pretty much if you could imagine it, some form of cargo would travel upon it.. but if you are a powergamer, you'll be able to finagle the system to do what you want on typically infeasible routes. Though even with that said, "long" routes and large trains in this game are very practical at times with how industry ranks up. It might prove more useful to ship oil practically across the map. Just be warned that if your train has 40+ cars, It better have the resources it needs to make profit.

Profit is also very simple in this game but it's one of the reasons i'll play it for years, It's low enough in the beginning to incentivize efficient planning over end goals, It's more cost effective to go around the mountain than through it, bridges are typically unfortunate hurdles with speed limitations, slowing down profit margins on lines. But towards the end, it's 'free' enough and not so locked to making direct straight paths to the nearest industry and you can definitely make it 'pretty' as if it was your own model trainset.

Cargo is the next up, and honestly the first game (transport fever 1) and the two train fevers were abysmal at was showing you where and how a industry needed something. Gone seems to be the 'timer' on goods, as long as you're shipping freight in Transport Fever 2, It'll be paid for. The only thing that takes some getting used to is the fact you are not creating demand (initially) you are simply being paid to move product from A industry to B. It has a destination in mind when it spawns. Which sounds like a bad thing but it's amazing in practice. An example is having every resource in the game shipped to one trainyard or massive hub, The cargo 'knows' where it needs to go, And as long as you provide the route and the vehicles needed to take it, It'll ride with you.

A bonus to the 'cargo knows where it needs to go' design, Is that there aren't many 'dead' cargos. Plastic is a good example of this, You have to ship raw crude oil to a refinery for.. refining.. That refinery won't make any refined oil unless it has a destination to send it to (the plastic plant) and the plastic plant will not make any plastic until it has a consumer, and so on.


As far as models for vehicles go, There's a pretty good mix, But I do wish that there were more variations between the them. Depending on scenario, electric power may become -highly- feasible with double units in the 1920-1940s, or you may be using diesel ad infinitum. They really tried here, but I don't think you'll notice -very- much difference. The biggest issue might be polution, but since electric trains generate.. massive amounts..?? I don't notice a change between running a coal train through the middle of a city, to an electric option. And that's just madness.

tl;dr great game, even better with mods, one i'll never stop playing.. and so good the next game would have to blow my mind for me to buy.

I wish there was a "Middle of the road" recommendation. With the changes and DLCs that have been released for this game, This is probably one of the more important ones in terms of structure to the mid-game gameplay. Ancient Relics and Distant stars for the early game padding, which combined with trying to secure territory in the early game, give you plenty to do, Utopia and Apocalypse help the late game with megastructures and planet crackers / titan class ships to increase the depth of combat with new ways to overpower your adversary along with the planet/sector managing you'll be doing by this point as well.

Federations is essentially a massive early mid-game boon, and with the addition of the council, and galactic community, may make two runs play out extremely differently even with the exact same empires in the map, One run may be heavily biased towards pacifism, another making not having a massive fleet a violation of galactic law. It's pretty good content. For what it actually adds for payed content is a little on the light side, the free update that rolled out along side it doing a majority of the changes.

If you're a powergamer, you're not going to have much trouble swaying the federations or galactic community/council, and the AI, while improved massively (As in, they have the faintest understanding that ships shoot now, and moving a 30k into a 220k deathstack is not a grand idea) still -woefully- lacks in the diplomacy department, and I'm not sure there's going to be much ol' paradox can do about it. I just don't think they'll ever have an AI that can see the player's nation having a ton of sway and saying "We should put a stop to this." while also believably letting the player "pull one over" on them. They're either omni-present, or artificial idiots.. and that probably won't change without heavy development (and CPU intensive) work. It's probably balanced around large PVPVE environments with +10 humans and AI mixed in.

If you play RP style, limiting yourself personally to not "abuse" certain things, playing a faction from a series or tv show, yeah, I think this is 100% worth your time, the AI, While ... acceptable at best, Is very much capable of shaping the galaxy on their own, and some people are going to love that. If you only play this game to go against the AI, make a cool nation and see how it all works out in the end, You'll get some real enjoyment out of it.

TL;DR:

If you play this game to push metas and attempt to find the most rediculously powered combinations, potentially for pure pvp, this'll fall flat fast, and you would be better suited getting other DLCs with much more content to 'play' around with. Skip it. Your best features came for free with 2.6.0.

If you play or plan to play with a large group of friends/players (around 5-15) Every empire will want different things out of the galactic community, and it'll very, very rapidly fill up your midgame with busywork and things to do, and the diplomacy changes and favor system added in this game will shine brightly. There's nothing wrong with any of the mechanics, It's just impossible for a computer to do it well enough.

If you play by yourself and go on campaigns that are mostly casual/RP based, This is -definitely- worth your time, and will easily boost the content density from 'somewhat lacking' around midgame, to action packed, right up until you start getting near the victory years.. And probably past them, But by then, you've got more things to worry about. And I think it does it's purpose well for getting you to it.

Don't listen to the people complaining about the fact this game has poor mouse support or joystick support or is a money grab, Ace Combat 4, 5, and 6 did not have mouse support, they weren't even -released- on PC.

This is an incredible throwback to every great Ace Combat that existed, The missions will remind you of decades past missions but with new flare every time.

If you liked 4, 5, or 6, Just buy this game, seriously. It's amazing. And you won't regret it. Picking up a gamepad to play this game is part of the fun.. I too have a joystick I wish I could play the game with, but at the same time I feel using a full blown hotas setup for an arcade game.. Defeats the purpose.

Don't buy until they fix a ton of bugs.

Dev's abandoned it, don't buy. Buggy.

So I'm going to give this review a thumbs down and this is why. As someone who played DayZ when it was a mod in the early days, And copious ArmA 2 before this. There were no auto-mod downloaders or public hives really. But this game/mod has taken a huge, huge step backwards in design and general gameplay than when it was a mod. And I'm not sure if you can still play the mod versions on Arma, But I'm sure they will be better. Here's why I give this a thumbs down with only .. ehh.. 4.5 hours.

1. There's no real risk in this patch or.. version.. I ran through chernogorsk, On a public server, and I mean /ran/ and only saw one zombie.. One. In the old DayZ I'd be swamped by at least 50 or more. I mean, The zombies are a little better scripted.. But I'd rather have 30 - 40 badly scripted but highly effective zombies than 1 nicely scripted one. And what I mean by that is it's pathfinding and AI, The old DayZ had quite blocky pathfinding, but in retrospect, So did ArmA.

2. The graphic settings and entire option menu has been cut/copy/pasted and not only that, But it was done in such a way it butchered the, almost-sometimes-good option menu from ArmA2, And changed it to something that was.. Prehistoric.. I mean.. the original Doom had better option menus. Ontop of this, When I first tried playing it, It set itself to like.. 400x640x16 or something.. incredibly stupid. I have two monitors, and everything on my left monitor was almost burried on the right one, A easy fix.. But this shouldn't happen in a modern game. Even early access, Not acceptable. Look at KSP and Project Zomboid, Kenji or any other early access game. Games in 2015 do *not* need to start in a "safe mode" for any reason. Whatsoever.

3. The inventory system is.. awkward, That might be a personal mark against me, But I'm not happy with the way it's been handled, It's very.. figity.. Sometimes you'll see stuff in your vicinity, That you cannot see whatsoever, And vice versa. That's just bad handling of loot in a game that again, We should not be seeing, I'll go easy on this one, It is early access, And I'm not asking for polish I should be seeing in a 59.99$ game, but that's just.. rediculous? Why did you add so many loot spots on a new chernarus and not /at least/ Bug test them? Maybe even a little? I'm fine with seeing objects sticking through walls.. but.. But things under the floor/invisible loot spawns? That's really not okay IMO to release a map/code loot to spawn under floors of cells.

4. Riding on the coat-tails of #3, What on earth did they do to the loot tables? Now, I know that there are servers labeled "High loot" But I want to play the original DayZ, Y'know, What we're paying for here. Not a slightly customized version, But it's litterally impossible to find any type of weapon, Which.. Isn't a problem since there aren't any zombies to use them on at all, But I mean.. Come.. oonn, In the 4 hours I played, I took very common routes after spawning, Solinchny towards NW, and through countless barns and hunting shacks.. I know it's suppose to be hard and I respect that but.. Damn.. You normally could at least find, I don't know, A pistol, before you hit the NW airfield, Where I'm assuming they've piled on every possible weapon spawn ever to compensate. Or one of the new Military bases.

I'm really disapointed in the state this game is in, even for alpha, When it went standalone, I expected better. Not far, far worse. It's such a cakewalk now and that's not okay. The public hive thing? I like that, But the whole mod-y feel of DayZ and how awesome it was seemed to die with a direct relation to money earned. Pretty hard.

And for people who might say I'm cracking on a alpha game, Damn right I am, This game was in alpha like 2 years ago as a mod, And it felt like a finished product, There was some broken things and some bugs, But it was a mod, Nobody was really making bank off this game, Now we've got the full game, the standalone game, and it's in worse condition than the mod was.. Why not just charge for the mod like it was? I'd much rather play that.