A solid, deep traditional isometric CRPG. An extremely long, in-depth story with lots of meaty choices that have real impact on the game down the line. A ton of race options and DOZENS of character archetypes to choose from out of the box, plus no level 12 cap here. This is the full 1-20 experience with lots of epic loot and god-like powers to boot. Want to wield angelic or demonic powers? Check. How about going full evil and becoming a true Lich, raising an army of the dead from your allies? Got that, too. Epic gold dragon powers? Yup. How about giving all that up and just going to level 40 instead? Sure, can do. You can even become a locust lord and just consume everything and everyone.

The only downside is that the graphics are very much traditional iso CRPG fare, but the scenery is well rendered and the character models just detailed enough to pass muster for what they are.

Overall, especially for the price you can get it on sale for, you can't go wrong with this or other Owlcat games if RPGs are your thing. They have a reputation for buggy releases, but unlike some companies they always come through in the end and deliver a solid game, so grab some of their back catalog and enjoy..

It's come a long way since its rocky start. The campaign is now much quicker between turns, and no longer takes 10+ minutes from clicking go to actually being able to play as it generates a hundred ship designs. The constant updates are a blessing and a curse; it is great that the game is so well supported in this age of games launching a week before the studio gets shut down, but be prepared to restart your campaigns on a regular basis as a new update breaks your saves.

I think my favorite part of the updates is the fact that they add new hulls as they go; this really breathes life back into a game that would have gotten old a long time ago if they didn't.

It took me forever to get around to playing this game, as is typical with Remedy games for me - they play best when you can commit to finishing them in as few sittings as possible, and as I've gotten older having that sort of free time has gotten harder to come by.

The game doesn't disappoint. Excellent 3rd person action (Remedy's forte), wrapped in an engaging story with some great unique elements thrown in. I was iffy about the "episodes" that they added to this one as cut scenes, but they turned out to be really interesting, telling a parallel story that is somewhat influenced both by the main gameplay and the secondary story choice gameplay elements. I found the "x percent of players made the same choice as you" statistic they flashed to be entertaining in itself, especially the third one where the statistics basically say "69% of people made the same choice as you, the rest didn't bother to read any of the terminals or notes that you went by while playing".

The graphics are a little uncanny valley at times, but look great even 2 years later (bearing in mind my system can run the game at max settings at 60+fps in 2560x1080, so YMMV) - great enough that occasionally it's nearly impossible to tell the difference between a live acion cutscene and rendered gameplay.

Controller support is great, and because of the complexity of the keyboard controls vs Xbox Controller ones, I actually recommend using one as your first option. This is a first person only game, so keyboard/mouse twich play isn't crucial anyway - you may as well save yourself the headache of using and memorizing another game with 10 different power activation keys and just keep everything you need under your fingers.

Overall, I highly recommend this game, especially for the prices you can find it on sale for now. It's tightly directed, smart, and doesn't overly rely on time sinks to keep the game engaging. This is one of my pet peeves - a game like this should be entertaining and never get boring even if you completely remove all time sinks and combat from it; this one delivers in that regard. Most of all, the time manipulation mechanics are actually FUN to use, and are much more interesting than the old Remedy standby bullet time, while still being mostly optional outside of a puzzle here or there.

For my gameplay, I used the following:
* Game at default difficulty settings
* Core i7 4770k (not overclocked, it's gotten unstable above stock clocks after 4 years)
* Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 Ti
* 32GB DDR3 1600 low latency RAM
* Cooling via EK Fluid Gaming custom water cooling
* Xbox One controller connected via USB
* Windows 10 x64 (Spring 2018 update)
* CheatHappens trainer To remove time sinks from item hunting to unlock powers. No health, ammo, reload, or power cooldown cheats used. This keeps gameplay same as default, but gives you all power unlocks as soon as you get them. I do this because time is always tight anymore, and saving a few hours hunting for ways into hard to get into rooms is necessessary if I want to actually finish games anymore. I sometimes go back and do the completionist thing later anyway though. :P

Good value for the price, especially compared to the single character expansions. All 4 of the new characters are interesting enough to want to play, and the new mechanics add a considerable twist to the game - desert spaces appearing randomly can really mess up the map and make the game more brutal. Bear in mind, the more you have active at once, the less impact each one has on the game as their cards are diluted in the deck.

Great conversion of a great board game. Some of the characters are broken (I am looking at YOU, Dark Cultist!), and some optional mechnanics are a bit hard to follow, but it's faithful to the origninal. Gameplay is just the right mix of complex and fast, with a lot of variety available once you add in the expansions with their new ending cards, extra mechanics and map zones.

The DLC is both completely optional, and very reasonably priced. If you are just now buying it looks intimidating to get them all, but if you wait for a sale they can be had for 50-75% off which makes it more bearable. It's worthwhile getting all of them, especially the expansions. While the individual characters might seem like something you will never play, playing against them as NPCs still adds replay value to the game as a whole.

For no reason whatsoever, this game is always online. When the servers are down (as they are now), you can't do anything but start a new game - and that includes loading a save from that new game.

IO Interactive is using the latest in file DRM, which is supposedly unhackable. They are using Steam to prevent game sharing. What possible rationale do they have for ALSO including always on server-based DRM?

To top it off, this isn't a complete game. The single player experiance is spread across multiple "episides" which will be released over time. So even if you COULD play it (which you can't), you have two main missions play. They basically shipped a mostly multiplayer-only game and are adding most of the missions over time as DLC. Don't let them fool you, they rushed this game out before the content was done and are spinning it as a feature.

It's a very pretty game, it's Hitman in the classic sense as far as gameplay, and it runs well for the most part (althout it requires a monster PC to do it and look pretty).

However, stay away until they get the game actually finished.

After spending quite some time with CivBE, I have come away feeling disappointed.

First and foremost, this game is not different enough from Civ 5 to be all that interesting if you have played it. While there are some fundamental differences (the web tech tree being the biggest change), it's essentially still the same game. If you were bored or played out with Civ 5, it won't take long to get that way again with CivBE.

Second, while the endings in Civ games has always been one of the weaker points of the game (I've been playing them since Civ2), this one takes the cake by not only being lackluster, but now also confusing. There is simply too much of the game's story buried in the help section (which you have to manually go and read). Descriptions of the three "paths" you can choose from are not well presented, progression in them suffers from a lack of narration, and the special victory conditions from them are a complete mystery if you don't wan to go into the help files and read what they are. There's an almost complete lack of immersion in the story, to the point where you can actually accidentally progress to the faction victory and not even realize you had done so if you are just working on building your civ. In contrast, this games's spiritual predecessor, Alpha Centauri, has voiceovers throughout giving flavor to the techs you are building, and interludes that pop up explaining the story progression of the game, giving you a clue you were heading in the right direction for a win. CivBE is a decided step backwards in storytelling.

Third, the actual tech and units in the game are boring and unappealing. Wonders are just stat bonuses with random fururistic sounding names - nothing to make them feel wonderous happens at all when you build them. Combat units are just the same as their Civ5 counterparts with different names. In Alpha Centauri, each unit and wonder felt like a unique item, with a purpose. You could customize each soldier or tank with new armor, weapons, and abilities - each unit could be unique, or you could spend the money to upgrade them. In CivBE, you literally get to choose between two options when you upgrade a unit, and all units are automatically given that change - no matter how far away they are on the planet. Your units aren't even color coded to your nation, leading to confusion when invading enemies move into your territory. It's boring, and it's badly designed and implemented.

Lastly, the game is buggy. You can read threads here about how many people have crash issues, or can't run the game at all. I personally have to run the game in a window because my 120hz monitor isn't supported by the game. Not even a "windowed full screen" mode like most games have these days - an actual window mode with a title bar. Given the game is basically Civ5 with a new skin in most ways, for bugs like this to make it into a retail release is inexcusable. Any decent amount of QA would have found some of these bugs, and it's readily apparent that another month cooking would have done wonders for CivBE, but as is the case in so many games this year, getting the game into stores before Christmas was obviously more important to Firaxis than delivering a game that actually runs. To make matters worse, we are several weeks past launch now and there has not been a single patch released.

This game has not just made me sad about the state of games today, but has actually made me vow to never pre-order another game that has a launch date after September 1st. The game devs have no reason to deliver a good game experience to us unless we stand up and let our dollars do the talking.