weregamer

I applaud the attempt, at long last, to make a MoM-alike that keeps the most important features of the original: You are the big wizard in the tower, too big to be a unit on the map, and your choices about magic and magical resources are the most important choices in the game. I am among the many folks who would be ecstatic with a simple remake of the original with just higher resolution graphics and the bugs fixed. For years we have continued to play the original using DOSbox, and seen various attempts at the genre fail to remember what made it great. And on that front, this is a good game. The setup screens had me nearly jumping up and down in my seat, calling my wife (who plays nothing but MoM and Solitaire) over to share the excitement. Basically the same rules, presented nicely at a higher (if still not modern) resolution, with the slightly more sophisticated overlapping spell schools lifted from Sorcerer King and its predecessors. But sadly, the game is just not playable because of two crucially bad design decisions. Merely annoying (if you save before every turn) is the bad choice of touch-centric mouse/touch UI. There are no tooltips; to get information on a square you must double-click/tap *with no army selected*. To move an army, you must double-click/tap *with it selected*. This virtually guarantees that you will end up wasting two turns of an army's movement racing off toward some square you just wanted to get info on, and then moving back. The sad thing is, there are many examples of doing this right, where the first tap shows info and a path, and the second tap (not required to be fast enough for a double-tap) confirms the move. But what really kills the game is the grotesque choice of a busy, not even that pretty and poorly thought out 3D main map display. There is far too much visual clutter and it's hard to tell which objects are significant and which are just decorative or are terrain. This would only be annoying if the view angle were close to vertical, so you could still understand the geography, and so you could confidently know which square you were clicking/tapping. But at the shallow angle they chose, the clutter makes it hard to understand the layout of the terrain and things like borders, and makes it all too easy to click on the square "in front of" the one you want (and i shudder to think how much worse this would be with a tapping finger). If Wastelands were to re-work this game with a sensible click/touch screen and a simple 2D main map interface (or a 3D one with a high viewing angle and the option to zoom further out), this might be a really great game. But the current horrible UI choices make it unplayable.

(Argh, metacritic ignores paragraphs. For a more readable version I've posted pretty much the same text to my blog.) Apparently a surprisingly large number of fans were expecting to get a deep game like a Civ or a spacegoing Pirates! for $16 on a short development cycle; they also apparently did not even look at the gameplay footage that's been available for weeks. Going in with my eyes open, though, I have little to complain about in the gameplay itself. It's pretty much what the video promised. The tie-in with Beyond Earth, modulo the bugs I'm about to mention, is no clumsier than I expected. The requirement to set up a 2K account to get the tie-in is not yet onerous - we'll see where that goes, and hope that it's not like EA's player abuse system. Where the game totally fails, though is that despite being developed in parallel, and despite Firaxis' experience with PC games, it comes across as a crappy iPad port. Most of these things are inexcusable, showing either or both of a lack of testing on the PC or a lack of caring about PC quality: * It only plays in "full-screen windowed" mode. No true fullscreen, no choice of resolution. 2K's claimed "fix" for this is an ugly workaround telling you to change your desktop settings to hide the taskbar. Ugh for Firaxis and FY2 to 2K. * It crashes on exit, every time. Most of the time it crashes when you hit "exit" from the main menu, but last night I had it crash when I clicked "return to main menu" from the victory screen. Did they even test the PC version? * It has about a minute of unskppable video at game end. This doesn't feel like a victory celebration, it feels like punishment for winning. Ugh. * Right-click is treated exactly the same as left-click, even though a hover brings up a radial menu. Totally lazy. * Probably related to the crashes, the unlocks for Beyond Earth for playing Starships don't work. The unlocks in the other direction do, at least. Despite all of these issues, it is a fun little game, especially if you have Beyond Earth and either you're not tired of it yet or you use the in-game-editor mod to fast-path you to the unlocks.

Sunless Sea is perhaps the best "literate" game on the PC since Planescape: Torment. There is a light-handedness to the dark humor that keeps it from feeling silly or breaking the fourth wall. It is also among the most truly "roguelike" of the recent spate of games claiming that category; the game will kill you brutally the first few times you play, and you will meet many a death before you win, but each time you play you will learn more about how to succeed. Unlike the original Rogue, your character doesn't start over at exactly the zero point each time; each new incarnation can choose one set of things to inherit from its predecessor, and after you've achieved significant success you can write a will and stock a mansion with sellable curios to give your next character a further leg up. This last is perhaps the most brilliant thing, in a game design sense, about Sunless Sea. Permadeath is so painful that ameliorating it just this much, and adding the additional story elements of inheritance, makes all the difference between depression and eagerness to try again. That said, you can decide at any time to start saving and loading, implicitly removing permadeath. This will only affect your ability to gain the achievement for winning with permadeath turned on. I hesitate to give this game an unqualified 10 primarily because of annoyances about not living up to the UI flexibility expectations for a PC game, and secondarily because it will not be many players' cup of tea. The biggest of these annoyances is the complete lack of control over the text display in a game that's all about reading text. I run the game at my monitor's full resolution all the text is unreadably small; reducing the resolution makes the text readable but makes the log window (which is admittedly not the most important thing on the screen) too small to see much in. Overall, if you like games that reward paying attention to the text rather than scrolling past it in a hurry, this is probably your game of the year.

Overall CivBE lives up to the expectations set by the pre-launch publicity, and is blessedly free of game-breaking bugs (although I've seen reports of issues with specific monitor configurations). That said, it shows evidence of having been rushed out as a speculative product. Many little details of production quality are missing (for example all the technology and wonder quotes are delivered by the same voice actor, rather than by the actor for the leader they are attributed to). There are also some annoying bugs that need to be addressed, chief among which are assignment of building quests to cities that can't build that building and the really bad problems users on lower-end graphics hardware have with UI updates. Overall, I'd say that if you like the Civ series, and aren't one of the Civ 5 haters, this is worth your purchase, and supporting the game with your dollars will encourage both patches for the problems and better funding for future games in the series.