The one thing all paradox fans can agree on is that the company is spiralling downhill in terms of quality control.

• Legends of the Dead,
  
• Pivot of Empire
  
• Graveyard of Empires
  
• All of City Skylines 2

Stellaris has had its fair share of weak DLCs and updates, but 4.0 is another example of this company releasing something before it's ready to meet shareholder expectations. I don't know what crunch culture is like at paradox, but I wish developers were given the time to finish complete products, rather than relying on post-update hotfixes

An absolute gem, the writing, music, and art style are brilliant and I was completely hooked on the story after Act 2. Well worth the price and up there as one of the best RPGmaker games

This game seems to lack vision going forward, aspiring to be both a sandbox and guided historical simulation. It succeeds at neither

Hiding characters behind preorders is disgusting. Overpriced, underwhelming and shallow, just like the game itself

Not because my opinion of the game has fallen after 30 hours, I still do undeniably enjoy the game, even if I might not recommend it to everyone in its current state.

No, the reason I changed my review from a positive to a negative is that the UI is so atrocious that it's honestly unforgivable. I'm not exaggerating, even if you ask the most die-hard supporter of this game, they'll agree the UI completely fails at its only job, to consistently convey information to the player.

So much information is hidden behind several clicks, and so many icons are so massive that it's as if you're meant to play sitting 2 meters away from the screen. So much useless fluff covers the info you actually need to know as a player. Strategy games at their core are merely choices in how to react to information provided, but it's very hard to react accordingly to something when it's buried under 3 excel sheets.

I'm not one to blame developers, they crunch their lives away to make the games we love whilst getting barely any recognition, all whilst shareholders pocket most of the profits, but something clearly went wrong during the development of this game if this UI is the final product

If I had to describe the game, it's like a political choose your own adventure book set in a fictional cold war. You lead a country situated in the equivalent of Northern Europe with a very similar political situation to Turkey in the 1950s. If politics or history interests you, and you're willing to read, this game is a must buy. The number of ending and branching paths are almost limitless, after two playthroughs I felt like I only scratched the surface of the possibilities

However I have some minor criticism with the game. These include minor spoilers, but shouldn't turn you away from buying the game, but are simply critique based on my limited experience.

Firstly, the economics system is disappointingly bare bones. Whilst I understand this is first and foremost a political story and not an economic one, it was extremely difficult to visualize the actual health of the economy and the economic modifiers are extremely indescriptive. The economic development slider was inconsistent and erractic, and in my opinion is a bad stand in for more concrete measures of economic health. More grounded economic indicators are provided to you through rare discussions with your economic minister, but you still feel extremely disconnected from the economy. This is best exemplified by the fact that in a single turn, I went from having modifiers such as unemployment crisis and rust belt to Booming economy and high employment, making it seem less of a gradual growth and more a of instant economic revolution.

However my biggest complaint is the fact that the games story only covers the president's first term. This is disappointing because many of the reforms implemented during the first term seem to be the ground work for greater change in the second term, as in most instances, a presidents second term is more ambitious than their first. There are many unresolved personal disputes and issues left to resolve that a single term seems limiting, and debates over the focus for the second term implied that the game would continue, instead of ending abruptly. I completely understand the developers choice to only implement one term, especially when considering the sheer volume of alternative paths that the game offers, however it still feels extremely anti-climatic and limiting to only be shown the first out of potentially several presidential terms, especially when the game itself seems to be building up to it.