Panopticon

+ Great music + Cartoony advisors give the game character + Fair graphics + Tried and tested format of SimCity2k but with a few new mechanics (like negative buildings you get paid to host) - A bit easy once you get the hang of it, lacks new challenges

A very boring game. Some great ideas, like characters having their own assets and agenda who can try to take power, but not a lot for the player to do. This was a common flaw in early Paradox grand strategy games - the computer has more fun than the player.

Doesn't support PC controls, what a waste of my money. Looks very pretty with the waving grass and the toothless crones babbling gibberish at you but I'm not downloading third party scripts to fix it.

Nice graphics, music, characters, but very buggy, lots of features from the previous games stripped, and the controls are awkward with keyboard and mouse.

I just finished DA2 for the first time a few minutes ago and it's only now struck me how bad BioWare's writers are. The story is uninspiring. The references to DA:O feel forced (I'm meant to believe King Alistair came all the way to this crappy island just to say hi to a nobody, and that he's been wearing an impractical suit of armour the whole way?) The dialogue alternates between cringeworthy, skippable and jarringly anachronistic. Characters will shout their secret motivations in full view of their enemies, whose ears are probably bleeding from the booming echoes. The player's companions are one dimensional (I'm glad I was given the opportunity to tell the tragic and mysterious elf hipster to jump off a bridge, my score would probably be even lower if I had to bring him along too). The NPCs are largely forgettable. The ending is a bizarre sequence of boss fights that feel ripped from a Final Fantasy game, complete with oversized swords and screaming characters leaping around impossibly. Besides the writing, the music wasn't as good as it could have been and there were consistent texture issues with DirectX11 which I haven't seen in any other game. On the positive side, the graphics were generally good after reverting to DX9, and the art style (oversized Final Fantasy swords excluded) was coherent.

Got burned again. Told myself I'd never buy another Total War after Empire. Well, fool me once, shame on you, CA. Fool me twice, shame on me. I should have known better. In short, a terribly broken game missing many features that I just KNOW are going to cost me £10 each to implement. Sega need their pound of flesh.

As this game has had almost a decade of testing via its predecessor, a Half-Life mod, this game is extremely fun and extremely well balanced. It's easy to learn but hard to master, with intuitive gameplay mechanisms, a built in "rookie mode" to ease newbies in, and a great sense of accomplishment for participating in the intense and immersive battles. Teamwork and sportsmanship are encouraged by both the game and its player base (since NS1 was so old when NS2 was released, there was already a very well developed community). The graphics are great, the sounds feel just right (the roar of the Exosuit's minigun is everything you could hope for), the music is professional and there is lots of eye candy that make the whole experience sweeter. One of my most favourite games of all time.

This is a very interesting game. It took many gambles with innovating on the design philosophy but I think it lost its bet. Huge problems with this game: 1. It's slow. Both in the sense of it being a semi-realistic geostrategy game (not actually a problem for fans of grand strategy games like me) and that the fastest in game speed ("fastest" funnily enough) would be considered maybe medium on any other grand strategy game. It takes perhaps 10 seconds for a day to resolve at "fastest" speed (the time unit being measured in hours so that combat can take place with player input if need be). Doesn't sound too slow but it is. When you are beginning the game and you simply want to build up an army and infrastructure, you're talking several hours of staring at progress bars. A single research project will take at least an hour to complete (and there are thousands of research projects in the game). 2. There's very little immersion. You have to suspend **** deal to enjoy this game. There's nothing guiding gameplay (the scenarios simply alter the starting conditions), no flavour events, no high level diplomacy (you can see that the designers wanted to follow this path at some point as there are mechanics for the UN in game but these are, unfortunately, pointless without some kind of dialogue). It's a great big sandbox, like an international SimCity but without any of the charm. There ARE huge reams of text for units, technologies, nation descriptions and the like, but the tiny text boxes are a chore to read the the player needs to go out of his way to find them. They do add some immersion but it doesn't form a coherent whole. 3. The interface. Tiny text boxes for descriptions, like I said, but it's also a chore to find specific information on things (and I tend to forget where I found them because the menu trees are a maze). The information IS all there, however. It's just hard to get at. Changing the map display takes a half dozen clicks, for example, whereas your average Paradox developed game (this was published by them but developed by a smaller studio) takes one, sometimes two. Want to open negotiations to buy petrol from a neighbour? You can't just click him on the map, oh no. You need to open the "state" menu, then the continent the target is located on, then hunt down the target in the 40 entry long list, then hit the negotiations button. Reinventing some of the aspects of grand strategy games is good but there's plenty that have already been ironed out, and the developer should have taken note of how Paradox have greatly improved on the interface of their games. 4. Absence/simplification of politics. It's a very liberal game, and I mean that in the Marxist sense. Capitalism has triumphed and workers are simply another input into the machinery of production. There's no real internal opposition, no trade union strikes, just a simplistic "approval rating". Ideology is one of "liberal", "moderate" or "conservative" and seems to affect very little (I'm guessing it impacts the AIs decisions on social spending). How are "liberal" and "conservative" applicable to a communist state or a military dictatorship? I'm not sure, and neither are Battlegoat Studios, because the name is as far as things seem to go there is no state/private dichotomy in the ownership of industries. Your cabinet ministers are all "neutral and polite", so minister personality must be another mechanic the developer half finished. There don't seem to be elections or internal scandals, either, so Presidents and Parliaments get the same neglect as Chairmen and Juntas. Without internal politics it's nothing more than a glorified war game. What about the positive aspects of this game? 1. The scope of the game is impressive. Thousands of technologies? Hundreds of models of warships and aircraft accurately researched? Every nation in the world represented? These are usually the bells and whistles another game would try to add to after creating the basis, but the scope seems to have centre stage with Supreme Ruler. 2. The intricacy of the mechanics. The world market is very well thought out. Hard to actually get at the figures involved but it all makes sense once you find them. In fact the entire economic system is very good. As a product of the "end of history" it's purely based around GDP and other liberal measures of economic models rather than resource and commodity based as in Marxian-inspired Paradox games, but this adds somewhat to the atmosphere of the game. 3. Combat isn't a ridiculous rock-paper-scissors minigame, or a simple meatgrinder, but requires an overall strategy for victory. Modern conventional warfare is modelled well (although terrorism and partisan warfare are completely absent).

A step back from its predecessor in terms of depth and immersion. Many mechanics have been added that replicate existing mechanics, such as spheres of influence and social movements, and many have been rendered largely pointless, like consciousness. Much of this seems to have stemmed from the inclusion of a libertarian on the development team: as an overtly political game which attempted to portray the world according to Marxism, the overall vision has suffered.

I was a big fan of Harpoon Classic back in the days of Windows 3.1, so I was looking forwards to a modern iteration of that style of game. This title will probably deliver after a few months of patches and maybe an expansion pack (coincidentally, this is published by Paradox, and that's the modus operandi for all the games they develop, too!) As far as I can tell (I've only managed to get through the first three missions, see below) it's a good successor to the Harpoon style of game with very realistically modeled combat, although immersion is hampered by certain gameplay conventions (for example, all ships of the different classes in the campaign will keep the same names from mission to mission regardless of if that ship was sunk previously, and aircraft in the 3d model take off by gliding out of the side of their hangers and ships at 45 degrees to the earth). Graphics are better than are needed, which is nice: there's a (necessarily sparse) 3d rendering of the terrain, ships and aircraft. The music isn't very good, but music isn't a lynchpin of this kind of warsim. Right now, though, the game is far too buggy. My game will regularly encounted a game breaker which causes the simulation to stop updating (it basically looks like it's paused except the time keeps ticking and units carry on killing one another behind the scenes). According to the technical help forums I'm not alone in this problem, it has its own sticky and everything! Shame they haven't pinned it down after all that time in development plus two months of retail.

Quite a lot of fun in both single and multiplayer. The voice acting is atrocious, the models are low quality, and some of the levels are very difficult, but the game as a whole has a very nice blend of arcade gameplay alongside a realistic setting that make you feel like some sort of Western superman blazing your way through the mindless automatons of a third world dictatorship. The very basic inventory and item system adds a lot to the game, the music isn't too repetitive, the sounds (especially gunfire) are good, and the level progression is engaging.