Rogerborg

Even fully patched and with all the DLC, this isn't worth stealing. Still fundamentally buggy, with outdated engine, anodyne combat, hugely unlikeable characters, a cringe Portland story, and an "open" world that only lets you do bad things to bad people, this was the canary in the coal mine for disastrous DEI updates.

High res cartoon graphics can't make up for a repetitive, clumsy, repetitive, unrewarding, and repetitive combat system, and far too many cringe struggle-session cutscenes, shoddy characterisation, and phoned in voicework.

High res cartoon graphics can't make up for a repetitive, clumsy, repetitive, unrewarding, and repetitive combat system, and far too many cringe struggle-session cutscenes, shoddy characterisation, and phoned in voicework.

A minor graphical update to Tropico 5, and a platform to push DLC that's become so aggressive that the game now breaks mid-mission when it find that you're missing an expansion. There is essentially no variety other than island design and a (very) few scripted events. The era / tech tree is always the same, so play one mission and you've played them all.

An effective little Skinner Box, but with very little depth or variety, and replate with bugs in the animation, physics, and environmental interactions. The developer clearly has no interest in fixing these now, only in selling increasingly pointless DLC that adds trivial tools and features that you'll never actually use in the game once you realise that they're all literally a waste of your shift time Regardless of what you've been tasked with doing, you'll find yourself spending most of your shifts running to vehicle crashes and doing the exact same sequence of photographs, questioning, ID, DUI tests and records lookups over and over and over and over and over again, just like real policing. What's different is that you have to hope that the game won't jank out and put an invisible fence around one of the drivers that you need to investigate, or another vehicle will plough into you, vibrate in place for a bit, and then spin off into the stratosphere. If you make the mistake of getting into a car, you'll instantly regret it as the console-style driving physics and user-hostile camera ensure that you plough into poles and pedestrians or get t-boned by other drivers, then have to spend your shift clearing up your own crash scene. Even if you do avoid the kamikaze traffic, you'll soon figure out the traffic lights and junctions make running faster than driving in most cases. Whether you'll enjoy the experience or not it really down to your tolerance for repetition and bugs and repetition and frustration and repetition.

This review reflects the state of the game as of 03/03/2013, which could best be described as an abandoned wasteland of **** dreams and burned out potential. The game is now played mostly by a hard core of veteran griefers with occasional new influxes of fresh meat who are preyed upon remorselessly. If you're reading this, then you'll be in that latter group, and you will NOT have a good day. There's little sense of community, with vets focussing only on racking up their own kills rather than advising and supporting new players. You may receive an occasional tirade of incomprehensible abuse from your "team", but that's as far as the socialising goes. Team play itself is minimal, with the veteran players going on solo rampages with their uberships, pouncing on the weak and the lame and dragging them off for yet another inevitable but mercifully brief death. Now, don't get me wrong. I learned my trade playing pickup Netrek 20 years ago. Heck, I may have invented the taunt macro. I could deal with the surly grief in Stellar Impact, but I don't feel inclined to do so, because of the glaring and ongoing technical flaws. Lag, freezes, flawed interpolation, and the disconnect spin-of-death just rip the guts out of the game. Far too many times I would see enemy missiles go from launch to impact while I mashed the countermeasures key fruitlessly. When the only way to not be a liability is to simply skulk at the spawn point and do nothing, that's a poor definition of fun.