Recent reviews by Dr Hell_Bent

Fantastic game, not as hard to learn as it seems. Lots of fun, well worth the pick up

Man this is tough. I really want to like the game, I love the deep simulation of all parts of the space economy and private industry. The early game can even be quite fun.
However over all, I found myself bored. Most of the time you are just waiting. Waiting for research, waiting for your fleets to move. This at times feels more like an idle game than an RTS. I don't feel like I am making any meaningful choices or decisions that change the universe/ my empire.
I have been playing since release and my enjoyment of it has not changed. The game still crashes, is buggy (infinite requests for you to investigate enemy threats in a system in the middle of your empire, with nothing there), fleets will just get stuck in hyperspace on auto and your need to manually move them etc.

I have been hugely enjoying Victoria 3.
I have played all the PDX serial grand strategy games, including Vic2 for 1000s of cumulative hours.
That might be enough of a review for you to make your mind up.

In more detail I think this is a great start to the game. However there is a lot of missing content, and while I don't mind the new war system, it needs more levers to pull and feedback to the player to be enjoyable. The economy simulation is excellent, and the urbanisation system is a high.
This game is not for everyone, it is not a war game like HOI4, it does not have the character depth of CK3. It is not the map painter that is EU4.
If you are looking for games like this, you will be disappointed in Vic3. If you are looking for a nation and economy simulator, you'll enjoy Vic3.

This game is a lot of fun, fantastic value for money and tonnes of content, tonnes of updates.
Really glad i bought it
My only negative with the game is you cannot save mid-level

Update 14/10/23: Wanted to give the game another go as they have come back to update it, the game refuses to launch. I remember it was also doing this not long after I posted this review. Game is now unplayable.




This is a hard review to write because i want to like the game, i can ALMOST like the game
But I don't.
Let me describe my current game for you as a way to explain why.

I play as the vaulters who are not the most interesting gameplaywise, but have a cool story and lore.
So they have a special colony ship that gives you a golden age when colonising after a cooldown. Cool concept
Except that i used this once, then the galaxy was fully colonised and i didn't get the opportunity to use it again.

Diplomacy:
i start next to an AI (i'm playing on hard FYI) who hops over my planets are colonises enclaves within my nation, splitting his nation in half to do so. A bold move, that definetely weakens me, so far so smart. I spend 50 turns building up a pretty small, weak navy and attack and start invading worlds, the mechanics of which i think are OK. During this war which lasts 20 turns, i see maybe 2 enemy ships, despite the AI having maybe 3x my population. I don't fight a single battle, taking his worlds without a fight. I get auto truced by my AI alliance partner (more on that later) a few times against my will but have no penalty to attack again. I've taken 3 systems without resistance and i am now dissapointed and bored.
Back to that alliance i'm in. I think ES2 probably has the worst diplomacy in any 4x game. The AI always hate me forever, for no reason. The game is meant to tell you when the AI will accept a deal, but this doesn't work.
I am at turn 120 and other AIs much weaker than me are still at cold war with me and sending threats
My alliance partners who apparently love me won't sign trade or science agreements.

Hacking: a mediocre idea, terribly implemented. Its boring, tedious and i just don't care. Detracts from gameplay

Lastly quests: the game has large, long quest lines which are a form of victory. My current quest requires me to reach a planet at the OTHER END of the galaxy and scan it. Through 3 hostile AIs.
I've had this mission since turn 20... this is the 3rd quest in the chain.

I keep buying the expansions thinking "this will make me enjoy the game" but its not working. Every campaign i've played has similar issues to the above and i just end up getting bored and most of the time it honestly feels like the AI is just plain brain dead.

EDIT:
Its been a long time since I played. And despite some updates, the game is if anything, more frustrating. I completely ignored hacking this run and nothing happened. I played on the 2nd from hardest difficulty, and i think I lost maybe 5 ships the whole playthrough. The playthrough I couldn't finish as there was a crash on the same endgame turn every time.
The game is just plain boring, the AI is an annoyance, not a challenge. Sending their tiny 1 frigate fleets into my 3 battleship fleets forever. Ground combat is awful and unbelievably slow. I come out of this playthrough, just extremely frustrated. I will not be installing again

What an incredible gem, had my eye on this for a while to buy in sale, but just bought it full price.
I will just say, for the price, this game is a steal, i was really shocked by amazing the quality of this game is: everything from the little-to-complex animations (some of which like the trade shuttle are lovely to watch), amazing art style, awesome looking drones, buildings everything, the game itself is beautiful
The gameplay is a hell of a lot of fun. Its tough, it took a couple of tries to get a city working (i would really turn off disasters), but my 3rd attempt was the charm and I've reached the end-endgame. I've loved every minute, the main story after the tutorial is entertaining. Its a great city builder, more Anno than Skylines.

To nitpick, there are some annoyances; the disasters are often too tough and with the penalties for failing missions can abort your campaign, those random missions themselves are a pain, some of the city-city interactions can be a bit finnicky in trading goods, the gameplay is a little reliant on being left to run for several hours: once your city is stable you might need to let the game run in the background for some time to get enough money banked.

Overall this is an incredible city builder game well worth the price a couple times over. I would have paid double for this and still have felt its good value

An incredibly fun, complex simulation game that is still being updated with free content many many years after release.
Some effort has been made to modernise the game and it now runs on 4k monitors with UI scaling which is fantastic.
Like many older PDX games, this game can be incredibly obtuse and things are flat out not explained in other cases. This can be quite frustrating, so I would recommend not playing in ironman for this reason: failing at something because the game has not explained things clearly, is not fun.

My favourite ever couch co-op game
So much fun
See it on sale get it, its a no brainer

I loved the first game a lot, so much fun, a nice progression curve and fun combat.
Unfortunately I don't equate any of that to its sequel. I was so excited about this game and really wanted to enjoy it but the fact is I just flat out don't.

The move to 3D:
things look ok visually, but the camera is awful (one of the worst game camera's i've seen in a long time) and the fact that you are stuck on one vertical plane means that your view of the battlefield is very limited and there is almost no tactical gameplay from the move to 3D.
Combat itself is just clicking and holding on an enemy ship until one of you blows up. There's no dodging, no tactics. Thats it.

Modular ships:
Seems like a great idea, except I hate it. The inception is clunky, fiddly and frustrating. All the ships look ugly, synergy is poorly explained. There is no way to easily compare parts and ship builds and there is pretty much just one optimal way to build a ship: I spend most of the game driving round a bloated space whale that i hate and feel no connection to

AI captains:
Like mount and blade, you can set up your own empire and recruit captains to fight for you. The issue is the AI is awful. Its very easy to recruit captains, which is balanced by the fact its super easy to lose them: the AI will constantly run itself into fights with weak ships, without any coding put in to take into account reinforcements. What happens is your AI captain will chase a weak zombie ship into zombie territory and then be dogpiled by 5 other ships and die and presto you've lost a captain and the zombies have gained a new one.
This constantly happens so I feel like i'm running around putting out fires constantly. This goes the same for trying to expand territory. This is not fun.

In the end this game was a disappointment. I do not like the ship-ship battles, ship upgrade/ creation sytem, the move to a mount and blade like campaign (the idea i like, the implementation is poor). I tried putting a lot of time into this game and its telling that I was shocked it was only 10 hours, it had felt like a lot longer to me

I think this is one of my favourite ever games.
It is so much fun to create your own city, building it how you like, to look how you like and be how you like (an industrial powerhouse or tourist trap) and then watch the people live their lives in the city.
Its not a challenging or difficult game but it does have its challenges and difficulties.
If you like Sim City, OpenTTD, Roller coaster tycoon or planet coaster, you will love this game.
The modding community is incredible and has built some amazing mods and tools that let you further build the city you want to build