Recent reviews by ukgamer

Been playing this on and off for years - great game.

Obviously it goes without saying that the graphics are great, and it does a good job of catering to both casual gamers and hardcore sim enthusiasts.

I think that having to rely on Bing for the photogrammetry data is really letting the sim down (but it's not like Microsoft was going to use Google).

The first-party aircraft available are OK, not study-sim level, but then they never have been - that's why third parties exist.

The system of downloading game updates and marketplace content is still terrible, with the patcher waiting for each file to download and extract before moving onto the next and not nearly saturating my bandwidth.

Although the sim was obviously rushed to release, it has finally reached a state with Update 5 where it is mostly stable and performant.

A worthy successor to Theme Hospital, with the same great humour. Expands on the gameplay of the original, simple yet challenging; the difficulty curve is manageable and nothing feels unfair. Fantastic soundtrack and overall great presentation.

An excellent love letter to the Wipeout games of old. Faithful gameplay, great tracks, fantastic soundtrack, moddability, and I love the retro graphics mode.

physics

It's difficult to explain what I like so much about this game. It's relaxing in its own way.

The map area is large and even larger and more detailed with the DLCs, especially the Scandinavia and France ones. It's nice to see how the detail of the map has increased with the later DLCs as SCS has been able to grow their team. I just hope they will continue to revisit older parts of the map and spruce them up as the transition from old parts of the map to new ones is very noticable.

The official multiplayer convoy mode makes it even better - no need for TruckersMP anymore.

This game will devour hours of your life as you seek to maintain, protect and upgrade your factories.

Runs and looks great, simple to learn but difficult to master and the devs are very involved with the community and their feedback.

The building damaged alert sound is forever engraved into my brain.

Recommended for anyone who loves building and strategy games.

I'm disappointed, Avalanche.

The game looks and sounds great - but poor performance (hopefully this will be patched) and lack of multi-GPU support is a big let down. Ridiculous loading times, even on an SSD - and I must be missing the option to skip the intro. Watching Rico blow up the boat in the distance was nice the first time but I don't want to wait a minute every time I start the game to get to the actual gameplay. I think this may be something to do with the "online" element of the game as it seemed to take a long time to login after this.

I've been informed that the studio that made JC2/Mad Max (Avalanche Studios Stockholm) didn't make JC3 (New York) - so that partly explains the rift in performance.

If you lose connection to Square Enix servers while ingame a big annoying message interrupts gameplay, asking you to retry connection or go to offline mode - why couldn't you just automatically go offline and periodically retry and just notify me in the corner?

Rico feels like an OAP when he isn't in the parachute or wingsuit. No rolling or sprinting.

Some elements of the HUD are poor - waypoints/objectives are hard to see sometimes (tiny white markers and text blend in with the background). What happened to the minimap?

AI effectiveness seems to vary a lot - some are capable of sniping you out of a full speed helicopter, but get close and they can barely hit you. Enemies have tendancy to spawn right next to you without warning.

On the upside - voice acting is a lot better (no BOLOOOO SANTOSIII), driving is slightly improved over JC2 (though still a bit iffy) and the writing gives you a few laughs. The improved tethering is a welcome addition and the wingsuit is great. The game also tells you what you need to do to liberate areas now which is a helpful addition.

There is a good game in there but these issues are spoiling it for me.

Miles better than SimCity. Mods make this game even better.