Recent reviews by billybob_jp

Enjoying it at 100 hrs in. Plotting out early and mid-game roles for characters based on their personality traits is pretty fun. It can be kind of a slog to navigate the worldmap and do their questing system, but the real joy of the game is to form a smoothly operating unit for the battle sequences.

Bought the DLC, it isn't necessary for the experience but I think adds to the replayability.

The best platformer out there? maybe, maybe ... tight controls, vibe soundtrack, and you get to clean dust off of cute animals in a game with only one achievement (100% completion).

Some of the scene transition visuals are very high quality, pretty graphics. The images of rooms which provide the scenery at each of the locations is usually very well done. Also the characters seemed like they were interesting but somewhat made flat by having to jam all their details into a few rushed along dialogue bits. The dialogue options themselves were ok and felt pretty clunky or random at times, and I think the product really suffered from them "gamifying" the story they were trying to present. It felt bad whenever I chose the wrong dialogue option and missed out on details that would give the world some additional depth. Some of the acts began to feel long or boring when I couldn't figure out what to do next because the game is waiting for me to search for a specific dialogue option.
Overall I wish I could replay it and see all the content they created, but the presentation was too frustrating to convince me of a second playthrough.

Incredibly well balanced, unit and tech tree decisions are important, all of the units have useful roles in combat, and the economy and diplomacy aspects are required to be played with high finesse in the harder difficulty settings.

While I miss the old battle interface from CKII, with it's detailed maneuvers for each round, its successor has a much more intuitive and abstracted interface. Many of the mechanics are more developed versions of features introduced in the CKII DLCs, resulting in a game both pocked and polished by many iterations of improvement. While I'm still exploring the current release of CKIII, it seems like the developer has committed to the model of trying new features (as ~DLC releases) and hanging onto the most successful ideas. Nowhere near perfect, CKIII is a result of a ton of information packed into a hefty overbearing interface that is initially frustrating to navigate, with more moving parts than you could wave a stick at. Still, the tutorial advice tends to be IV'd at a slow enough pace that anyone committed to learning the game mechanics could do so. Aside from all that, the historical setting provides a great backdrop for many stories to unfold, and is delivered in a consistent way that maintains some credibility.

Many moving parts, but if you like learning each of the tools it'll provide a pretty nice scaled recreation of medieval life and politics.

Would've been nice if the main character wasn't just scurrying around in pipes and vents the last half of the game. Did he really need to put his hand in that guy's goo? Whyyy