vomov

It's fun for a few hours, but that's it. If EA would've stuck with the original, it would've still been popular today, but they wanted to dumb it down.

Saw it some time ago, and loved it. Instantly put it on my Steam wishlist. Saw it at a friend recently, and wondered why I didn't get a message saying the game was available. Turns out the Dev used Steam for free marketing, and then pulled it and went to the Epic store. SHAME!

Initially, EA made the Sims 1, which was a good base game. Later, they expanded on the game, for which people were happy to pay. When the Sims 1 got bloated, they went to Sims 2; new engine, graphics, possibilities, etc. And they added expansions later. People paid, EA wins. When the Sims 2 got bloated, they went to Sims 3. Again, new, better, etc., with the addition of some odd mechanics. However, it had less content, so it required some expansions to be fun. People complained, sales dropped Now, EA had a choice: 1) Make a great game with new everything, and expand on it later. This would be the obvious, money-making choice. 2) Continue with the Sims 3 idea, without enough content. This would be the bad choice. EA went for option 3: make the basic architecture ****, but don't fill in anything. Then charge money for everything. The result is obvious; low sales, low reviews. It's not that we're spoiled after playing the other Sim games with all the expansions, it's that this new thing is practically unplayable; there's nothing to do. It is not fun. After seeing sales drop in Sims 3, I'm surprised they went this way. The answer to the current state of EA is simple; fire the managers, and let game designers make the choices again. Managers want money, now. They want Origin, because they don't want to pay Valve for putting games on Steam, but they also ignore the massive sales Steam brings. They want copy protection, and ignore that pirates will always find a way, while normal (non-pirating) people are the victims aggressive protection (also, note that Steam lowers piracy). They finally expect people to pay NOW for possible DLC LATER. Seriously, fire all of them, and start over making proper games.

It's bad enough that the game is unfinished and buggy, but it also ships with Battleye. Which I did not know when I wanted to try it out. So, here's what happens: 1) I get the game during the free weekend, to try. 2) I start the game, and get a message regarding Battleye. Some of the wording seemed very, very odd, so I decline. 3) It states the game "will not start" due to me declining, so I investigate Battleye a bit. 4) The game starts anyway, and crashes directly after the main menu. 5) My system reports 'system files being accessed'. Turns out Battleye tries to access system files, as well as practically everything else. 6) PiHole reports HUGE amounts of data from my computer to the internet being blocked. So, score one for PiHole. 7) I uninstall DayZ from Steam. 8) I manually kill the Battleye service, and delete the files it created without my permission. This gives an error on the next startup, but at least it's gone. I do not recommend.

Yet another abandoned game. The potential was huge, the ambitions were huge, and the letdown was huge. The developers suddenly cut huge chunks from the development track, and then were surprised at the reaction. By doing so, people were forced into camps; fan or disappointed. There were requests to open up the codebase, but the developers have gotten their payday, I suppose.

Well, it's under development. Right now, it's just a single guy, working part-time, on a huge project with ambition that approaches the Dwarf Fortress developers. It certainly has potential, but don't expect it to be done within the next few years. Especially since progress has been glacial; I've played this all the way back in 2013, and not much has improved since then. EDIT: it's now 2019, and while there has been some progress, it's been in the wrong areas. The base game is still nearly empty, there's no gameplay worth mentioning, there's no story, no progression, nothing. The visuals are quite a bit further along, but now they're overly present. I'm not sure what the developer is trying to achieve, but it does not seem to be for the general public.

In july 2012, Castle Story was funded on Kickstarter; I was one of the backers. In september 2013, it was put on Steam, without any progress of note. It was buggy, lacking in content, and crashed a lot. In october 2015, I started it up again, and noticed some minor improvements. The base was still the same, no major additions or improvements had been made. In july 2017, I started it up again. Apparently, it took them two years to add a save function, and make some minor improvements. Nothing major, again. I'd say this game went the way of Towns and Godus; the dev's effectively stopped development, as the initial money-grab tactic worked.

Last alpha was a reasonable tech demo of a 2D side-scrolling game. People paid for this tech demo to become a full game. The developers, however, announced after that alpha, that they wanted to completely re-design the game into 3D. They started in 2012, and at the end of 2013 they essentially said "you paid? Too bad, we're starting over." Now, the programmer left, and there's a single developer working weekends to produce the game. He did start over with a completely new style, though. Funnily enough, the studio is called 'near enough games'. The first iteration was 'near enough', in my opnion.

I've had this game on my watchlist since early 2013, and when it was on sale, I thought "surely, it's somewhat finished now?" I did the tutorial, which worked, if somewhat wonky. The campaign took me about an hour to get stuck in; doors that don't open because the content isn't there, areas missing where I'm supposed to meet an NPC. Of course, the campaign can be the last thing to be completed, but the rest feels defective as well; a lot of micromanagement, weird controls and menus that offer no information, as well as useful information hidden away. Finally, I looked at the roadmap. The aspirations of the devs are high, and given the amount of time it has been in development with this little to show for it, unattainable. This is nowhere near finished, and will likely never be completed.

To escape the terrible ratings of Godus, they rebranded it "Godus Wars". However, it's still not what the Kickstarted promised, and is still an idiotic and insulting pay-to-win moneygrab.

Funded through Kickstarter, and and hitchhiked on the promise of delivering a good game. Unfortunately, the developers thought they could get more money out of it, by releasing it in parts AFTER everybody paid for the full game. Shameless moneygrab.

Gameplay is easy and fun, characters have a lot of depth (and Dogmeat is awesome), and the map feels alive. Graphically not the best, but certainly head and shoulders above the rest. Regrettably, the choice to put this on consoles has impaired the graphics a bit, and forced some weird design choices, but the game doesn't feel clunky or ported. The story has always been a strong point of the Fallout series, and it's no different here; immersion is done well, and the stories are deep and interesting. Voicing the main character is a nice design choice, but can be a bit jarring (although the 'sarcastic' remarks make up for this). As with all Bethesda games, there are a few bugs; after 80+ hours I've seen some minor clipping issues, a deathclaw that disappeared for half a second, and a follower that was stuck until I moved far enough away. If I look at other games, and especially at previous Bethesda games, I am impressed with the low number of bugs!

As of now, the game is officially 'feature complete'. What they don't say, is that there are very very few actual features. Visually, it's not great, but a good game can allow itself some leeway in the graphics department. It looks like Fallout 2, and plays somewhat similarly to Fallout Tactics. The basis of the game is simple; zombie apocalypse, gather survivors, build shelter, survive. Zombie apocalypse means there are zombies and looters. A very basic AI means very easy gameplay after a while. There are a lot of items, but all characters gravitate towards the same overpowered build, with the same weapons. Character backstories, or any story for that matter, is wafer-thin, and even feels inconsistent from time to time. Building the shelter is nothing more than a set of pre-defined upgrades, that change values in a spreadsheet (not kidding). Surviving entails gathering resources, which starts to feel repetitive after the first hour. The maps are indeed different, but there's nothing that feels new; walk up to zombie/looter in a group, hit it until it stops moving, loot stuff, repeat. In short; boring, very sparse featureset, and a lot of time-consuming activities.

It is awesome. Simple as that. Building a MASSIVE army that swoops over a planet, then rolls through a stargate-like structure on to the next planet, only to be annihilated in a rain of nukes. Then use the the ultimate overkill to destroy the enemy stronghold; drop a moon on his planet. Awesome. However, then the downside: the camera rolls with every move, navigating between planets is difficult, if not impossible, units are frequently 'lost' (meaning I can't find them), and the speed of construction and destruction is such that the gameplay becomes a chaos of little icons. It's impossible to play the larger maps with this game.

Theme hospital was awesome; it had good humour, freedom to mess around (within the limits of the technology then), and was visually and otherwise (especially the music and soundeffects) appealing. The game dynamics were fun and challenging, and there were almost no bugs. This was supposed to be a re-iteration of that great game, using current technology. A transition to 3d is obvious, as are some other graphical improvements. However, the quality, especially with available technology, is laughable. The first thing you see is a start-screen in 640 by 480. Which does not scale after setting the resolution to HD. In-game, even with HD, the quality is severely lacking. The gameplay is somewhat unchanged, which is where they score a point or two. However, somehow they managed to make the gameplay a bit repetitive and annoying. There are copious tutorials, and you're never lost, but the amount of freedom is tiny. In the first level, one of the first things you hear, is the hospital administrator talking. It's not actually English or anything; the apparently only had the budget for a fake Sims-language. The "Ba ba, baba, ba" really gets on the nerves after a while, up to the point where I flip off ALL the sound effects. The three music tracks also repeat every five minutes, so eventually I played the game on mute. In Theme Hospital, the fun was in making and running a hospital. The doctors usually were a 'cog in the machine', and weren't that interesting. In few cases, they could mess things up by overworking, and then they were a minor annoyance. Apparently, the developers decided that annoyance was be the primary part of the game, so you're constantly bothered by some ridiculous drama that makes Grey's Anatomy look 'authentic'. Here's where the game loses most points; it's just not fun if this nonsense keeps popping up. Right, back to Theme Hospital, which actually can run on today's computers. Unlike this: it only runs on the laptop, while the three PC's are running proper games.

So much promise... And the basic game is awesome! The problem is that the devs decided they couldn't earn anymore, so they abandoned it. Right now, it's playable, for about twenty minutes. No endgame, or even middle-game content, but also no way to survive for that long since the raiders come every minute or so. Even if you select a starting area that supposedly has almost no debris, no contacts, and no raiders, you get swamped with debris, contacts every half minute, and raiders every full minute. Doublefine; another player-milking fraud. Like we needed any more of them.

Would be massive fun, if one were able to actually play it; fps stays around 8, while the same PC runs Crysis on highest settings with 60fps. Also, loads and loads of bugs. Graphics are decent to good, audio and immersion are great, buggyness is absurd.

How the hell did this get such a high score from reviewers? Did they actually play it? Fiddly controls, crappy visuals, weird gameplay. Only pay-to-win could make this worse!

The original kickstarter promised a god-game to eclipse all other god games, made by the master who made Black and White. What we got was pay-to-win nonsense from a guy who made Black and White a LONG time ago. After a community backlash the pay-to-win element was removed, in favour of a 'mobile experience', which means you spend a lot of time collecting things before you can actually do something, trading stuff for other stuff (belief to move followers, followers for gems, gems for stickers, stickers for incremental levels of powers, like building slightly larger towns), while at the same time you have to logout and wait for everything to complete. This is a casual micro-management timesink, built around Peter Molyneux' fantasies. Peter lied on multiple occasions, and has tricked a large following into paying him for something that he promised would have been VERY different, and finished a LONG time ago. BAD.

Shameless money-grab; this game did have quite a bit of potential, but a large amount of bugs. The developer stated, in 2012, that the bugs would be squashed, but eventually abandoned the game, stating he did not earn enough. What actually happened; he released a preview-game, rife with bugs, and let tens of thousands buy it. When sales started dropping, he abandoned it, and started talking about new projects.

And, once again, someone jumps on the freemium bandwagon. Apparently, the developers seem to think that people like to pay to play less, which seems to be working out for them. All the same; I do not agree, and find it an insult to my intelligence to provide a 'cheat' option.

And ANOTHER cheap dwarf fortress ripoff. With a fraction of the depth, a load of bugs, and weird design choices, this is not a good game. No challenge whatsoever, and the cutesy design starts working on your nerves real quick.

Initially, it seems like loads of fun, and it does do some things pretty good. The different types of planet and their pros and cons are pretty fun, the heroes can give specific systems a pretty hefty bonus, and the graphics quality is also quite nice. However; the amount of stuff you can actually do boils down to setting governors, select cards (yes, cards) for combat, and maybe build some ships. The tech tree is somewhat arbitrary, but especially the military end of the tech tree is a simple upgrade system with pretty names. In the end, I couldn't finish a single game, and went back to other, more fun 4X games, which don't need heroes to give the player some level of control over an otherwise bland and boring game.

I've played the original Cities XL, which had significant promise. So, when Cities XL 2011 came out, I bought it right away, soon realizing that there were a few minor additions, but no improvements to the game, and no bugfixes. Severely disappointed, I chucked it in the cabinet, never to play again. Cities XL 2012 is... exactly the same. Some minor additions, no improvements, and the original bugs are still there! For those unfamiliar with the problems, here's a personal summary in ascending order of annoyance: 1) the game is badly balanced in terms of trading, making it ridiculously easy to come up with a profit. I.e.; no real challenge. 2) the public transport-system is broken, resulting in no real value of busses or metro. 3) the game suffers from a memory leak, making you restart the game every 30-odd minutes to keep on playing. 4) and finally, the game DOES NOT SUPPORT MULTI-CORE ARCHITECTURES! I've got a pretty decent quad-core which can run anything from Theme Hospital to Crysis, but it struggles with Cities XL because it only utilizes a single core! This results in a very slow game, with seconds of delay between clicking a button and seeing a response. I find that to be a dealbreaker for a processor-heavy game. While the potential is clearly there, the bugs make the game unplayable, and as such I've applied for a refund (which I seem get, surprisingly).