Recent reviews by Gantolandon

As tends to happen with Paradox games, this one came out riddled with bugs and questionable design decisions. As of 1.1.2, it just got to the point when it's actually playable.

However, two months after its release, it still feels like an Early Access game. The newly added Legitimacy system is very janky combined with democratic countries, sometimes making parties that straight out can't do anything. Fronts still split without rhyme or reason, actively preventing you in some cases from winning the war. The weird price calculation means that the nation importing a resource effectively pay less per unit than the one producing it; this means if you're producing oil, everyone in the world but you can get it for a reasonable price. The AI is very janky, frequently getting into wars with landlocked nations and waging them for years.

Buying it right now for its full price means you're signing up to be a QA emploee who pays for the privilege of working for Paradox. It's best to get this game later, while it's cheaper and more polished.

Remember "That Which Sleeps"? It looks like someone read its developer diaries and delivered exactly what they promised. It's still in Early Access, but it's already playable.

Half-Life didn't really age well; Black Mesa lets you play the old classic while enjoying the (relatively) modern graphics. Levels were also overhauled: Sector C Test Labs no longer look like a long corridor leading to the Anti-Mass Spectrometer, the most boring and tedious parts of On A Rail have been cut, while Surface Tension was expanded. Xen has been changed completely and stopped being the most disappointing part of the game. Hopefully Opposing Force and Blueshift will also get a similar treatment one day.

The beginning was promising. It started as a well-written V:tM story, with the main character Embraced against their will and forcibly induced into Camarilla, similar to the protagonist of Bloodlines. It even makes more sense here, because instead of working for the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Prince, you work for the person that persuaded her to spare you. You are asked to build our own coterie while running errands for Sophie Langley and this part is actually where the game is the strongest - all four potential candidates are interesting.

However, nothing we do actually matters. After an arbitrary time limit, the game just wraps up by itself. Your coterie shows up in the ending exactly once and they aren't even necessary there. You aren't necessary in the ending too, because it's resolved by more powerful NPCs talking and fighting while you stand there like a statue. It ends with some guy, whom you had spoken to maybe once or twice, giving you a villain monologue how it was his plan all along and Blood-Bonding you.

Can't recommend this game with clear conscience. Not yet.

It starts out great. The race creator is great. The galaxy is beautiful, as is the music. Exploring planets and discovering things is really fun. It looks and plays like a great game. Then it grinds to a screeching halt.

Plenty of promised features are absolute bare bones. There are, for example, very few diplomatic options compared to other Paradox games - mostly standard 4X stuff like declaring war, trading for resources, border access, etc. It could have been enough if half of this stuff wasn't broken . For example, you can't ask for civilian or military access if your borders don't touch, which means you can get blocked off by the AI and can't even remedy this short of going to war.

It's still better than the state of some other features. Sectors? They barely build anything, don't clear tile blockers, destroy strategic resources to build a Hydroponic Farm. Federations? Just a super-alliance witht he ability to build an additional fleet which counts towards the Presidents naval limit (so the AI will disband it as soon as it takes over). Internal politics? For 53 years I didn't even see a faction appearing, let alone a rebellion.

The AI also isn't anything to write home about. It used to have problem with expanding, though this seems to have been fixed in a beta patch. Still, it's pretty passive and content to leave you alone in your corner of the galaxy (unless it's some hyperaggressive personality). Sometimes it definitely has problems with waging war - when my enemy finally decided to crush me, they just flew their ships through all my systems then disappeared somewhere and didn't react as I bombarded one of their worlds into oblivion. Your allies and vassals just follow your main fleet, not even defending their core worlds when attacked.

And ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, the lack of polish is glaring. I already wrote about broken sectors, which is compounded by the fact the game won't let you micromanage them and wants you to pay Influence just for taking a planet out. When the AI demands a planet as a wargoal and someone else takes it, it will never end the war. There is no automatic survey, you're supposed to click on every star you want to check out. At least one late game crisis is impossible to be resolved because of broken triggers. There are plenty of examples where the game could have used more testing.

Don't expect another CK2 - currently it's more like Sengoku,

I bought this DLC because I heard it improved the game - and it kinda did, but not that much, unfortunately. The main appeal was supposed to be the reworked diplomacy system - and it failed to deliver what it promised.

In Rising Tide, there are two values the AI use to rate you: Respect and Fear. The latter means purely the ratio of your military strength to theirs. The former is supposed to change according to your deeds in the game and your adherence to the values this particular leader considers important. If any of these values is high enough, the AI player is going to be friendly. If both are low, it will get increasingly hostile. That's pretty much all. They will never attack you because they covet what you have. They are not going to find an ally against you because you are too strong - in fact, being strong usually means their Respect and Fear are both high.

What's worse, your in-game deeds (if it's not you going for any of the four victories) matter very little for your Respect value with the AIs. What matters to them the most depends of their leader traits. It doesn't mean they care about your ethics like in Alpha Centauri, because there is no such thing in Beyond Earth mechanics. They like when you build a lot of satellites, or develop your cities a lot, or have plenty of soldiers, or do a lot of espionage. They either praise you or pester every several turns about these things. This means the most important factor deciding if you have a war with the AI or not is if you care enough about their pet issue, Sometimes it gets comical, like when Rejinaldo praised my spies after I stole a lot of technology... from him.

There are five possible stances the AI can have about yourself and each other. "Alliance" could as well not exist, since I have never seen them allying with anyone. "Cooperation" means you get a better bonus when you have an agreement with them and share open borders. You can also trade strategic resources. "Neutral" is the default one. "Sanctioned" means the AI is completely useless to you, as they won't trade or engage in any diplomacy. "War" means what it advertises.

Diplomatic Capital is another potentially cool idea that wasn't thought out well. It's a currency you can either spend to buy or improve your leader traits, or trade with other factions for bonuses. The problem is, you can have only five of them active, while there seems to be no limit on the amount of agreements you can sell. In the middle of the game, I pretty much could swim in Diplomatic Capital like Scrooge McDuck. The AI is very poor at managing it, though, which means they will frequently break their agreements and renew them a few turns later - expect a lot of requests.

Rising Tide also failed to improve my other gripes with the game. Affinities matter even less than before, as the AI doesn't care for them. The new factions, except of Al Falah maybe, are as bland as the original ones.

What's worst, the AI is still bad at playing this game. It doesn't try to get an affinity early, which means weaker units. Doesn't explore well, which means slower growth. When it attacks, it frequently doesn't bring enough units to even make a dent in enemy defences. A war between two computer players looks like poor man's Somme - countless units are sent to their deaths one by one with barely any effect on the enemy. Even if they manage to capture a city by sheer tenacity (or better Affinities), their losses are so heavy they are not ready to wage another war for some time. If you don't play with tour eyes closed, they won't be a problem for you at all. The chances are, most of the computer players won't attack you at all because the diplomacy system works how it does.

This means there is little point in playing this game at all. Victory is the matter of getting the right techs, building the right wonder and waiting X turns to win. The biggest obstacle is your patience, since the game will refuse to let you finish a turn before you give orders to every single unit that doesn't have them.

I had mixed feeling about the game, since I was content with the game until the end of the fourth episode. I would have recommended if I had written a review then. It is a fun game with good premise, faithful to the TV series (and, in some cases, even better).

The reason I write a negative review is that the basic premise of the game has turned out to be false: your choices don't matter at all. The whole plot runs on tracks and if you try to leave the railroad, the universe will stretch and bend in most horrific ways to keep you there. The characters will behave irrationally to force a specific outcome, their accomplishments will get ignored, failures will turn out not to be that bad after all.

Some examples (spoilered):


1. Didn't manage to secure a betrothal which would give you warriors necessary to fight your antagonist? Your beloved will come anyway, stealing twenty elite soldiers from her father like they were robots that can be hacked.
2. Succeeded spectacularly in Essos and got rewarded with a chest of gold? It's only enough to hire less than a dozen barechested former gladiators, half of whom die five minutes after reaching Westeros.
3. Don't want to fight the murderer of your family when on the Wall? He'll attack you himself. It appears that despite everyone being on guard because of Mance Rayder marching on the Castle Black, no one hears two people screaming and hacking each other with swords. Everyone thinks you're guilty, even if it means disbelieving the only witness of the fight that even doesn't like you.

I still want to see how the Season 2 will unfold, but I don't have much hope after what I have seen.

Yeah, I get this game is hard and sometimes seems random. I don't mind. I knew it before I bought it. Sometimes you lose because you needed one point more than you rolled to repair that one damage. Or because the void has sucked out four of five die. ♥♥♥♥ happens.

What I feel shouldn't happen is the game crashing to desktop in those rare moments everything goes fine. Tharsis, unfortunately, is as shoddy as the spaceship the unfortunate crew has to repair. Graphics, for example, is nothing to write home about - but judging from the framerate, it strained my GPU like Witcher 2 in high details would. Stability is something you could expect from an early beta. Subtitles in cutscenes between the missions are out of sync with the narrator's speech. Balance of in-game choices and damage is questionable. This game needed more polish before having been released.

Despite its Early Access status, this game is surprisingly playable and fun. At first glance it's a standard RPG hack&slash. You gather your party of adventurers, visit the dungeons and dark forests, slay monsters and win magic trinkets and experience. There is a catch, though - adventuring here is not an occasion to get fame and money, but a punishing activity that will ruin your body and mind. As your heroes survive battles, their skills grow - but they catch wasting diseases, get more antisocial or slowly go mad.

Heroes sometimes commit actions on their own. My greedy crusader would frequently need bandages, because he just couldn't pass any obviously trapped cabinet. The bounty hunter I left in the tavern to relieve stress by gambling liked it so much he refused to leave the following week. Afflictions are definitely most punishing though - they are severe behavioral changes that happen when the character fills out their Stress marker. They demoralize their compatriots, giving them more Stress, refuse certain actions (Paranoid and Masochistic characters, for example, are very hard to heal), or do some on their own during the combat. It sometimes can lose you a battle.

Graphics is nice and reminds me of Warhammer. Old, crumbling mansions, dark forests, dungeons populated by grotesque mutants, a hamlet populated by grizzled townfolk, etc. The game is also quite well-written, though the narrator's style of speaking sounds a bit pompous. I especially like the character monologues next to the campfire - it's a rare moment when they show some cordiality towards each other. At least until none of them is Afflicted.

A terrible disappointment. From the announcements, it was supposed to be a SMAC spiritual successor. What we were given is a re-skin of Civilization V with lackluster writing and shoddily-coded stubs instead of new features.

Here is a short list of most annoying problems.

1. Affinities, one of the core elements of the game, are poorly thought out and implemented. There is nothing that prevents you from trying to max out all three of them, but the AI will only count the highest one and chastise you for your choice even if you have more points in their chosen affinity than them. Other than that and requiring different resources, they don't change your gameplay too much. Harmony doesn't make you more at tune with the planet; in fact, you will probably kill more aliens than ever, because their nests tend to spawn on Xenomass which you need for your units. Supremacy and terraformation don't upset aliens one bit and one of the first bonuses you get actually make them never attack your explorers, Beyond the flavor, all three paths to victory are pretty much the old Spaceship victory.
   
   
2. Aliens are a non-factor. They will rarely ever attack your units and won't go through your borders most of the time. Once I were taking potshots at the siege worm with ranged units for about 30 turns and it seemed content to just wander around and mind its business. I'm not sure why they are even in game, because they certainly don't hinder or help the player in any way.
   
   
3. Braindead, passive AI. It doesn't explore too well, expands quite slowly and doesn't even try to compete for resources. It also doesn't engage in any meaningful diplomacy. Three leaders will repeatedly pester you with cooperation and open borders treaties, speaking the same line every time. The rest will almost never interact with you except to complain about some random things (like removing miasma from your own city or exploring Progenitor ruins beyond their borders which they didn't touch since the beginning of the game). Sometimes they also ask you for free stuff. They will rarely, if ever, go to war. When they do, they tend to never send enough units to even make a dent in your city. You can spend an entire game just sitting in your corner of the world and researching technologies, never having to fight anyone.
   
   
4. Blandness and bad writing. Building a wonder usually gets you something that looks like a technical outline and +x to Production/Science/Food/something else. Leaders are devoid of any character whatsoever and you won't get any information about them without actively searching for them in Civilopedia. The devs promised the characters' appearance will change with each path and it kinda does - they wear slightly different clothes. The factions are: Space Russia, Space France, Space USA, Space Brasil, Space China, Space India, Space Australia and Space Africa. There are 5 different ways to win the game, except that 4 of them are pretty much the same one but requiring different techs and buildings.

To sum it all up, the game simply isn't worth $50. I could maybe justify buying it for this price if it actually had decent, but unpolished content that needs a few patches and maybe an expansion to fully shine. The main problem with Beyond Earth is that it doesn't actually show much potential - the new core features simply don't work out and the poor quality of the game content suggests it was done on a budget. It's better to wait until it's cheaper.