BeingDS

I was very excited for Victoria 3. Sadly, Paradox seems to have lost its touch. This makes two out of its last three releases that have been rushed out the back door in a flagrantly unfinished state, with clear evidence of a thoughtless, slapdash, half-baked approach. You'd think they would have learned after Imperator: Rome. Apparently not, however. Many design decisions are inexplicable. But even without getting into the weeds, the biggest problem is that at no point in development do any of the developers appear to have asked the simplest of questions: "What is the player going to do?" They sold the removal of armies that players directly interact with as a feature that would "reduce micromanagement", and that's fine... but now what is the primary gameplay loop? What is it that we are meant to be doing? Apparently, a lot of clicking and waiting. That is the "gameplay" of Victoria 3, such as it is. You begin in 1836, build buildings, wait for them to complete, then build more buildings to rebalance your economy due to the impact of the last set of buildings you built. Rinse and repeat, over and over and over. And suddenly is 1900, the game is 3/4 over, and you've been doing essentially nothing for most of it. At no point does the "setup" phase end and allow the player to actually immerse themselves in the setting. Not that there's anything to do even if that weren't the case. The user interface is a dumpster fire. This game requires the player to absorb and process vast amounts of information. What buildings to build in what order, how many to build, where to build them, what production methods to use, which things to manufacture versus trade for... all these require detailed understanding of a wide variety of factors. However, the information you need is fragmented, spread across many screens and tabs, sometimes hidden deep in nested tooltips--and at no point does the player ever have all the information they need readily at hand. You need a notebook to write things down in, and a calculator, and a whole lot of patience, to make optimal decisions. And I don't mean just "min-max" type decision. I mean lay-player level. There are mods that improve the UI, but not by much, and the glaring inadequacies don't go away. On to trade. For starters, you cannot stop other countries essentially stealing your goods. Any country that wants to can just start shipping away your goods, and you have no say in the matter, unless you want to embargo that nation entirely. Little is more frustrating than seeing a nation start a trade route for a good you are already short of or that is critical to one of your industries or pops. Starting and managing trade routes is a chore, and it's not clear how many units **** you'll get or send, or what the impact on your industries or economy will be. For a game where entire production chains can collapse unless balanced on the head of a pin, this is a real problem. The less said about warfare, the better. Wars in this game can be largely ignored. You send your generals to the front, and then you go back to building factories and farms in an endless loop. Armies and generals are tied to regions. You can send them to overseas fronts but cannot transfer them to another HQ. This results in asinine situations like being unable to do a naval invasion because your fleet wasn't built in the same region you built your army's barracks in. There are a heap of other problems with the military mechanics, but I'd need one or more entire reviews to get into them all. Suffice it to say that this is the worst part of Victoria 3. Diplomacy is similarly inadequate. Everything happens via "diplomatic plays". War? Diplomatic play. Annex a vassal? Diplomatic play. Rebellion? Diplomatic play. All diplomatic plays result in war, unless one side "backs down". And even backing down is broken--if your opponent backs down, you only get your first war goal. You have no choice. You can't reject a backdown, and it results in a five-year truce. Essentially, your target can say "no thanks, take this but not these and buzz off". Also, other nations can join any diplomatic play... resulting in 19th century world wars over something as simple as Belgium attacking an African tribe. And, since war goals can't be added once a war starts (there's no post-war treaty system), something like World War I would only result in Serbia and Austria getting anything. There's so much more wrong, but essentially the problem is that Victoria 3 is an early-access game being marketed as a finished product. It is not. It has all the polish of a 99-cent iPhone game, the width of an ocean and depth of a puddle. It is "Boom Beach" meets "Adventure Capitalist" meets "Plague Inc." -- for $50. Patches are coming, but I'm not optimistic they'll be nearly enough to save this mess. If you insist on buying this, wait for a sale. But I can't in good conscience recommend it.