cakrit

I really wanted to like this game, because Paradox has made a couple of my favorite games of all time. Unfortunately, it was impossible. It was neither the tons of dialogue reading that destroyed it for me, nor the boring characters, I really don't care about these things. I only care about gameplay and that's where this game really comes short. After breezing through the initial, excruciatingely linear campaign, I found myself finally given a couple of options. Go for the library, or to some other place, I didn't care much for. The library seemed interesting, killed everyone easily, until the last floor, which the enemies summarily wiped with my remains, time and time again. Gave it up, thought it was a silly mistake by the devs, who hadn't learnt anything from the Bethesda series, so I went another way, to a town with a single way to wherever I was supposed to be going. Low and behold, another unbeatable party, kicking my arse. I don't know what this is supposed to be and I don't really care. I always play at a normal difficulty first, to get a feel for the game. This one **** and it didnt really make me want to try again. Fighting a battle three times is enough for me, unless I play a rogue-like game, which this definitely isn't supposed to be. Other than the weird, unexpected difficulty, there really wasn't much to keep me interested here. Weird power ups with timers, spells that take ages to cast, some kind of base building crap that is supposed to give you advantages, they mean nothing, unless you're having fun kicking arse, in an RPG. I never had any fun with this, so 10-20 hours of my time is all it was worth.

With such a wonderful variety of enemies, I really wanted to get past the annoying parts of this game, but I had to give up after only 10 hours. - This must be the laziest console to PC port of all time. The UI and controls are simply terrible and make no sense on a PC, but they didn't bother to make any changes. - The constant waiting for auto-saving and loading new scenes is aggravating. - Single save and having to go through the entire intro to restart a game? Really? - Absolutely crappy story and no characters whatsoever. The whole idea of pawns is a pure excuse for not giving party members personalities. - The difficulty of enemies you encounter in the first couple of hours is strange, to say the least. It felt as if the game was telling me that I have to grind until I level up enough to explore even the nearest areas. Why on earth would I want to do that? The game crashed on me after completing a particular mission and that was the last straw. I have no interest in playing it ever again and I'm glad I didn't pay anything to try it out.

I tried hard to ignore the terrible deficiencies of this game, in hope that they were somehow there by design. I mean, who in their right mind would force you to slowly repeat every painstakingly slow move you made, after dying? It has to be part of the experience and the uniqueness of the game, right? Well, if it is, kudos to the people patient enough to do the same things over and over, "discover" the exact same places again and go through the same sequence of events, until they find the one with the highest chances of keeping them alive. It would have been quite a different game if there was some kind of randomization each time you started with a different captain but nooo... Practically everything remains the same and you have the extremely tedious task of doing everything all over again. How hard would it have been to move a few islands around, randomize a few rewards and add a fast forward button? I will give it a few more tries just because the atmosphere and stories are indeed cool, but someone needs to accept that it just isn't a fun game as it stands.

I am a big fan of strategy games and geo-political simulations especially (my all-time favorite being Democracy 2). I had spent enough time on GPS2 (Rules of Nations) to know what to expect, so I purchased the game only because I want to support such efforts. So I knew that the interface would be generally poor and that I would have to spend lots of time doing tedious, repetitive tasks. However, I did expect certain infantile mistakes to have been resolved by now. I should have known better. The annoying issues one encounters in this game are too many to mention. A lot of the time, you'll be wondering what you did wrong, because the feedback you get is abhorrent. Well, if you have the patience to endure, you eventually realize that it's not you, it's the simulation that is all messed up. After endless saves and reloads, I did have the patience to circumvent the things that made no sense and get Greece to a sustainable budget surplus and some decent growth, with low inflation and unemployment. I knew I had to turn off war, in order to enjoy the game, so I had all the time in the world to figure out what makes this game tick. The answer is, that it doesn't. The simulation engine is so deeply faulted, that it's not really worth trying to figure out what they got right and what they got wrong. At the end, you feel that the reason you never get any advice on the actions you are considering, is that even the game creators have no clue as to what is actually going to happen. The simulation engine may decide that the 25Billion Euros you were supposed to get from privatizing the Energy sector will just disappear. Don't buy the game. I will play it again, because I love the genre so much, but only to go to war and have some fun, maybe as a dictator. The reasonable route leads nowhere, so what the heck.