Stellen

This follows the route of Hearts of Iron 4; taking the fantastic and complex Hearts of Iron 3 and strips everything from it, leaving an incredibly shallow and bland version of Crusader Kings 2 and Europa Universalis 4 with Roman names. Don't even bother trying other nations or cultures, they all play exactly like Rome, with the same units, research options, Government, and gameplay, in and out of combat.

This game had the potential to be good, but any quality is buried under predatory microtransactions, characters locked behind future DLC, and pay-to-win models, while if you try to play in the online lobbies get used to server disconnects and lag. The developers have really let themselves down here. Then again, they also blatantly lied to and mocked the fanbase, so possibly karma has come back to them.

Unfortunately, it's a game with serious issues. Save game issues can wipe your progress, and gameplay mechanics are extremely limited. Basic concepts like overwatch or differing reload/recycle times are missing, the design for looting and salvage is very poor, and the economy in general seems fairly suspect. It has very weak AI, and a completely forgettable story. Player choice on who you work for and ally with is an illusion at best. Rather disappointing.

So many bugs! Crashes and graphical glitches. Weird animation and cameras which get stuck in dialogue scenes and won't follow the character, NPCs and companions who freeze and don't respond, and worst of all, save game corruptions. This game is not release ready.

So many crashes and bugs, not to mentioned corrupted save games, it's just not worth it. It's not even a good game, the story is nothing special and inconsistent and characters just don't seem genuine.

Compared to HoI2 and HoI3, the game has had a lot of its complexity and appeal removed. While there has been some improvement in unit production, every other aspect of the game has been streamlined and automated to death, to the point where the game is designed to be played by the AI on your behalf. When you attempt the take control back, you'll find only the most basic options from the previous games are left. At the moment there are so many other issues. The AI is so terrible that it has no idea how to fight a war. It constantly gifts you victories by not defending vital provinces and allowing units to be cut off and destroyed without any attempt to rescue them. The simplified air combat and logistics, the reduced choice of using either AI control or direct control, the research options which take away a lot of the choices from HoI3 and which mean you can end up with nothing left to research by the early 1942. The completely unrealistic coups and civil wars which you can spark in other countries to distract them. That every major country in the world has the exact same research capacity, and the minor countries have almost as much. In previous HoI games, there were some rough patches at launch, but the core mechanics were there and it was immediately obvious that there was a good game underneath, despite the issues. I'm not seeing it yet for HoI4.

Very disappointing. Weak scripting, completely disposable quests, bad ability options and abysmal, broken controls. This is the worst title which Bioware have ever released, it's probably the end of the road for them as a studio.

This is very heavily based on Harpoon 2/3. I still have the original Harpoon 2 command cards, and all the keys in-game are even bound to the same values. I've played a great deal of Harpoon 2 and 3, and this is Harpoon 2/3 with nothing removed, but with a lot of extra detail added. The multi-monitor support is very nice too. In a nutshell, it's Harpoon 2/3, with a graphical and UI over-haul, better performance, improved sensor modelling, mobile ground units, and with rates of turn and acceleration added for aircraft and vessels. This game is the ultimate in its genre, truly fantastic.

Really not ready for launch yet. A lot of bugs and missing or incomplete features. Total Annihilation 1 was fantastic, Total Annihilation 2 was good, Supreme Commander 1 was amazing, Supreme Commander 2 was pretty good, but Planetary Annihilation is very weak by comparison. Serious lag issues in single player games, planets which are tiny, the size of small asteroids, a huge reliance on the random number generator to decide whether you'll be allowed to build good forces, completely unmatched opponents, due to the random number generator, worse graphics than the first Total Annihilation, and the AI only knows how to zerg rush. Luckily for it, zerg rushing is really the only viable tactic anyway. Edit: I'm downgrading this to a zero. I'm consistently having games fail either due to lag, with units becoming completely unresponsive, or the game freezing up for minutes at a time, to come back to find my armies destroyed or my base levelled, or just having the game crash or drop out completely. This appalling lack of quality is so far beneath what we're entitled to expect from a 'finished' game that the 0 rating is completely justified.

Fun, for a little while... Then it soon seems generic, and the interest evaporates. There are few classes, and the difference between the two sides is only cosmetic. The Dominion quests and NPCs were much less irritating though; if you really want to try the game out, go Dominion.

Made for consoles. Massively dumbed down from the previous titles, everything which made them good has been removed and replaced by a buggy action-adventure game. Someone obviously played Mass Effect and thought, "Me too!" The interface is terrible, and support for the keyboard, mouse, or joystick is barely there. If you're not playing with a X-Box gamepad, you're out of luck with this title.

Fantastic title. Delivers the true Operation Flashpoint experience, and over time it will just grow and grow in terms of both quality and content, just as BIS's previous titles have.

A large, interesting, and engaging game, with a lot of gameplay options and variety. Lots of different classes and quests, good graphics, interesting fights, interesting storylines. IMO, this is the best MMO to have been released in years.

Truly dreadful game, it's as if no-one ever play-tested it. It plays like game written by some third rate company, trying to make a Total War clone, but running out of money half way through and just dumping it on the market unfinished.