Recent reviews by Rabbit

I want to like Millennia. I really do. It's venturing down a unique path, I find Civ's dominance rote, and Humankind never really caught on. The problem with liking Millennia, however, is that you have to be able to play it. The performance is not good. It's not good in a very odd way - the graphics are... dated. There doesn't seem to be something that's causing the AI to struggle through its calculations. So why does it run so poorly?

I have no idea. It's bad enough that I have a book propped up on my desk that I've been reading while the AI takes its turns. I've been reading reviews and first looks to see if the performance is just me. It's not. Why would you release it like this? It's Paradox, yes, polished releases isn't their thing. They're usually better than this though. Maybe I'm just playing 'too quickly', but my turns are a lot faster than the AI's. Every turn seemed to noticeably make the performance worse.

Eventually, I just surrendered to the inevitable. I closed the game and gave my book my full attention. I've dealt with slow games before - Stellaris most notably, especially before they cleaned up good chunks of the game. It was good enough to tolerate the rough performance. Millennia?

Well. Points for bravery.

[Also, what is with the low amount of civilisation choices? It's only city names and a flag. Jarring to see European civilisations almost outnumber the rest of them combined. Poor Africa's just got two! There's National Spirits which are clearly based off certain empires in history that are completely absent in the game. It's baffling AND sloppy.]

Book of Hours is the second game from Weather Factory, coming after Cultist Simulator. As someone who has played a lot (but perhaps not nearly enough) of CS, Book of Hours is an improvement in every way. It is the far more accessible and quite frankly, cooler and more entertaining one of the family.

The basic gameplay loop is exploration. You're exploring in quite a few different ways. One is the simple act of restoring the library, opening up each room and seeing what is behind it, watching the beauty of the Hush House come to life. A more significant one is the exploration in what the librarian can actually do. Crafting, researching, learning about the world they are in, with the occasional visitor to distract them from their experiments. BoH does not hold your hand in this - you will spend a bunch of resources to discover not a lot. That's part of the joy, in a way. When you do find something useful, something that works with your current skills and soul cards, it's exciting. It feeds right back into exploring the Hush House as you use your new resources to delve deeper in.

The story part of the game... well, it's a game by Alexis Kennedy. Did you expect anything different besides excellence? It's neatly woven into the game, placing the names of past custodians of the Hush House and the world around you. Putting together the list of librarians in order is a very simple, natural thing to do - I love that sort of thing.

The game is tied together with a feeling of warmth. It's hard to put into words, but there's this distinct emotion that carries from the UI to the art to the pets you stick in your constantly changing bedroom. It feels homely, in a mad scientist sort of way where you can sleep right below a morgue.

This is not a game for everyone, just like how CS was not a game for most people. But it's a game for a lot more people than CS's audience. It's the right mix of esoteric but approachable - WF avoids the handholding so many other games do to let you experiment, without falling too much into CS's trap of frustration.

My main complaint is for a library, there should be more shelving. That's it. I just want a nice room that isn't the reading room where I can store books in giant bookcases. Otherwise, it's a lovely game. I cannot recommend it enough.

Victoria 3 has its problems. In no short order, the significant ones to me are:

Naval side of things just seems to not work at all. It technically works in that you can assign orders but it seems to do little besides naval invading and an utter blackbox to what's happening and what you're meant to do about it.
The game is almost completely flavourless. Entities like the Ottoman Empire and Qing have some special mechanics, places like Russia do not. There is a definite feeling of 'sameness' that is everywhere. Also, the US doesn't have a civil war most of the time. That's bad.
The AI, compared to pre-release, seems to have been lobotomised to reduce weird outcomes. If the AI sits around doing very little, it can't randomly take landlocked provinces in China.
The political side of things doesn't seem to model anything particularly well. It doesn't represent the power of feudalism and serfdom very well and it doesn't represent the established democracies very well.
The game is too easy. The AI struggles with the economic side of things and it's not difficult to pass through laws your country is fundamentally opposed to. Rebellions are too infrequent and radicalism is extremely binary. It does basically nothing until a civil war starts, where it does everything.
There's no real reason to establish a democracy and the social welfare net is like it came out of a Randian wet dream. I do not believe welfare is meant to be as bad as it is right now and democracy certainly needs either a reason for a player to go for it, the masses pushing extremely hard for it, or preferably both.

But on the other hand, Victoria 3 is not even anywhere near as bad as Victoria 2 was. That's a controversial statement, but I do not think most people saying it's worse than Vic2 know what they are talking about. I have about a hundred hours on Steam and before that, I had an actual physical copy with all the hours over the years that entails. It's an old game. Victoria 2 was an absolute mess.

Its economy was so byzantine that it chewed through Paradox programmers attempting to fix it. Even in its finished state, it still is a buggy, broken mess. Optimal strategy relies on popping between different parties as much as possible. Relying on State Capitalism or Command Economy to build industries and fix the mess capitalists create, before going Laissez-faire for the massive bonus it provides. The game was extremely easy to cheese and was quite buggy. Vic3 just cuts the capitalist-AI out and is all the better for it.

Vic2 was not a good game. Even in its finished state, it's playable and you get over the more pain-inducing elements eventually. Before that? I would argue that base, no DLC Vic2 might be one of the worst games Paradox has ever released. Vic3 blows it out of the water and it's not even close. The reason why Vic2 had such influence and impact was because it did something no other game did. The reason I played it so much is because it was a game that did something different, unique. It was interesting. It tried to model a democracy is a way few other games did, it built an economic system that never really worked but had the illusion it did, and it gave WW1 the horrifying proportion is should have.

But Vic3 is just better. Even compared to other launches, Vic3 has had the smoothest launch and most enjoyable release I can remember. It's not Imperator, it's not Stellaris, and it's certainly not Hearts of Iron IV. Stellaris took ages to become a fantastic game, HoIV still isn't, and Imperator is dead. The UI is leagues better than some other Paradox titles. Unlike EUIV, you will not immediately end up searching the workshop for UI mods.

It's not good, but it's pretty functional compared to the usual horrorshow Paradox has. The information is there, just not presented in the most accessible format. It has solid feedback loops and it treats important subject matter so much better. There is some beginning differences in economic systems. Running an agrarian economy is different than an industrial one. Depending on where you are, the starting situations do diverge in what you do to start the snowball. It does lead to a very similar end-game for the economy, but that is unavoidable. The most powerful economy at the end will run on oil and be lit by electricity. You can vary it up between relying on trade and filling your treasury with tariffs or focus on autarky. You can stack up huge piles of steel and subsidize it to benefit other important industries or try to keep a careful balancing act between profitability and affordability. There is some differences even in a late game economy. Between the three countries I've played, I've had to do very different things in the beginning in all of them. The political sphere feels more impactful. You want an education system for literacy, you want better tax laws to fund construction and your military, you want multiculturalism so you can integrate your African colonies better. You really want to get rid of slavery and serfdom. There are reasons to be proactive in law passing as opposed to reactive.

The military is certainly functional and not 'extremely broken'. It works just fine and ensuring that you can fund an industrial war is actually pretty fun. Trying to navigate between what you can afford and what you need is pretty cool. If there was an actual AI to engage in trench warfare with, I'd probably like it a lot more. Colonial exploitation is surprisingly engaging and reasonably models the desire to harvest resources in Africa to build industries at home. The incentives are there and it is functioning appropriately. The game itself is very stable - at least for me. I've seen others report the game runs glacially slow or crash a lot, so I feel like this is a YMMV. The tutorial is kind of garbage and I wish they went over it with a finer comb, but I picked the core concepts up very easily with some minor screwing around. It could do with encouraging historical outcomes.

There's a lot of valid criticism to make about this game and it is my hope that these issues will be the focus of coming patches.

But if the goal was to make a better Victoria 2, then it was never a hard goal and they succeeded. The game's definitely more niche than HoI is, but it's a solid step forward in a genre I thought was dead. It should be considered with this in mind: it has problems(some significant), but it is enjoyable in its current state. The price is higher than it should be for what you are getting, but you will get something at least decent at the end of the day.

That might just speak for the low standards we have for release titles more then anything.

The Planet Crafter is just one of those games that you have to wonder why no one else thought of doing it before. And it's really quite good to boot. For an early access game, it feels and plays more complete then some full release games I've seen. No surprises, pay attention to that one email (you'll know it when you get it), and you'll be golden. It's a really pleasant time and has a nice, smooth incremental feel.

You craft a planet. That's all there is to it. And this game has nailed it perfectly. What else could you want? I honestly think 20$ is a steal - this game's worth much more then that. What a great game.

There is no game that I'm aware of that feels as personable as Inscryption. From every aspect, there's this unique love put into the game that is hard to match. The game itself is much more then just a deckbuilding game (a genre I'm not super interested in) but as a genuinely perfect atmosphere. The visceral behavior, the sound and visual effects, and the art design as a whole is a holistic and incredible experience.

The game excels in environment in a way most games dream of. To whether it's a good deckbuilding game, I have no idea. But the design in the world adding together makes for a lovely time, at least for me. Ripping your teeth out has never been so enjoyable. That and the sheer freedom the game provides in absolutely destroying it? It's like nothing else I've played. An incredible game.

This game wears the Zero Escape title on its sleeve. If that doesn't turn you away or sell you on the title, nothing else will. With that said, it's a competently put together game. It's got a good level of polish to it, an interesting presentation, and manages to be more of a hook the longer you play. I played this game with a few friends and we were chatting a lot, and it was honestly a lot of fun. We got increasingly into calling twists and trying to figure out what was next. We even succeeded a few times! I wouldn't exactly call it a party game, but hey. It was a fun couple of hours to kill.

It's not as good as 999 or VLR, but it's very unfair to hold it to such heights. It's good on it's own and has a satisfying, interesting conclusion to it. It's very obviously a title preparing for a series and there's no masking that. Almost in spite of itself, though, it's still got a finished feel to the end. That's unique amount series titles, where you feel like you can walk away and go 'yeah, this was enough for a complete story'. It does that. It's probably the highest possible praise you can get for a title in the series.

The only issue is that the 20$ is probably a bit high, but I hardly know how to price games. I feel like a 15$ would be fair and anything below that, honestly, a steal. Music's a bop, characters are fun and memorable, and it's almost a shame it is so heavily 999-based. If I hadn't played 999, this would've been excellent. As it is, I feel like I've been spoiled with something incredible and now it's hard gushing about something that was merely good and well put together. Yet on the flipside, if you haven't played 999, how would you ever know about HASC? Chicken and the egg. So, I'd honestly recommend it as it stands. Indie dev with a competent product? If 999 appeals to you, this is an excellent way to burn twelve hours.

I've played Dicey Dungeons for a while - first on Itch and then when it came to Steam, on Steam here as well. The best way to describe Dicey Dungeons is it's a very simple and yet very elegant game.

It's well polished in a cartoony and charming art style, with mechanics that are very easy to grasp. You have a set amount of dice and you assign the dice to items in your inventory. A unique take on the deck building game, but there's a lot more fluidity then that. These dice can be manipulated through cards such as the Cauldron (1 damage and a reroll), Spatula (flips the dice so that a 1 becomes a 6), or a Bump Sword (1 damage and the die's value increases by 1). There's items that afflict status conditions, some that steal coins, others that heal you.

And they come together in great ways, especially when mixed with abilities. You want to use your item that lets you repeat your action on your Taser, which then does six damage and two shock status? You can. You want to bump up a 6? You can, and you'll get a 1 die for your troubles. It's simple, it's intuitive, and it's rewarding to use these items to come out from behind and win. It's fluid, because you'll know what you have to do with that turn with the dice you've gotten. Games go by quickly because no individual mechanic requires a lot of thought, it's all about preparing and managing your dice. The point of the game isn't to make do with the hand you're given, but to use items to get around the fact that dice are by their very nature random.

The classes are very unique and are all generally pretty simple - the Witch is the most complicated class and the Witch isn't that complicated insomuch as it takes a while to figure out how to leverage her abilities to your advantage. There's even challenges when you run through the game once with the main five characters with inbuilt variants. And even then, the game holds up remarkably well. It asks you how to deal with a constant cursed status and there's actually ways to get around it. Use the Spatula item (able to go 3 times in a row) to burn the curse status at 50% odds, for example. Or using status effects to get around upgraded and tankier enemies. It works out amazingly well and there's a lot of different ways to play. Unlike in FTL where you tend to end up going the same route (beams, lasers, and flak I), Dicey Dungeons has a lot of varied options to go with. You can focus on disabling the enemies, brute-forcing past them, or using stackable poison to deliver a devastating hit. They all work, it's balanced between all your options.

There are problems with the game, but I think they're minor ones. The lack of an Options button on the title screen is a weird and annoying design choice (can be accessed in game using Esc to turn sound down) and the difficulty stars aren't really representative of how difficult the classes are. If you replace difficulty with complexity, then they're pretty right, but I've always found Thief having the toughest patch to hoe of any of the classes and Robot generally being the easiest class. The cursed status is arguably the worst game mechanic in the game, with the randomness of the 50% being pretty hard to counter. The best solution has been the Spatula trick but is by far the most random part of the game and can be a source of frustration on the challenge involving it.

The music is well put together but sounds very similar and is tiresome, but reading other reviews makes me think this is a personal gripe. There's some minor interface bugs (reading the W/L scores and title name from char select bugs out frequently), but nothing horrible. The dialogue falls flat a fair amount of the time, but most of these can't compare to the simplistic beauty of the game.


In summary, Dicey Dungeons is a game that just gets it, providing a surprising amount of depth for it's simplicity, combining it with polish and packaged in a charismatic and cutesy presentation. It's good, quick, and a brilliant amount of fun.

Civilization VI is the equivalent of an European board game. The game built around a longterm plan and executing it, successfully netting you the game if it's built well enough. Civ VI mirrors this. You plan districts around your cities, you time technologic/civic boosts, the movement rules are constrained so that you have to have a defence or offence together at that exact moment, you plan on grabbing wonders and taking great people, and on and on. This isn't necessarily bad game design but it relies on polish and the fact that your opponent is relatively competent. Civ games are notorious about a lack of polish on release and the AI is the AI.

Typically what happens is patches upon patches until the game becomes 'workable' or even 'fun'. VI hasn't had anything close to that. Some dominant strategies have been nerfed but that's about it. It just seems so apathetic. I'll highlight the UI for a moment. Easy fix but nothing has actually happened to improve it. But I digress.

I'll start with positives - what did VI do well?

THE POSITIVES

• Districts
  
  For the most part, districts have been nailed. They require you to specialise your cities and think about placement, meshing with the terrain and not overwriting it. Not all districts are good [aerodrome] but for the most part, it's a well thought out system.
  
  
• Builders
  
  Builders are essentially workers but they have such a clever fix. They're one-shot allowing you to instantly build an improvement. It works so well with the one unit per tile system. It's such a clever fix.
  
  
• Government System
  
  The government system as a whole is a positive. It's divided up into four sets of governments each allowing a different amount of policy slots along with the bonus associated with it. In general, it's a very good idea allowing maximum flexibility in swapping and rewarding you for thinking longterm about what you want to do. The problem is that there's too many worthless ones but it's less of a negative and more of a 'this could have been implemented better'.
  
  
• Culture Tree
  
  Essentially a tech tree but for culture. It's largely barren but offers good trade offs and is better then any other system Civ has made for culture, so I think this falls into positives.

NEUTRAL

• City States
  
  One of the AI or I keep getting surrounded by them and make expanding peacefully impossible. A system in which they were taken off the map entirely and was instead in a UI would easily fix this and hopefully make the people who like city states and people like me happy.
  
  Yes, you can turn them off but it's a bit like turning off all warfare for the game. It's blatantly supposed to be an important part of the game.

NEGATIVES

• Artificial Intelligence
  
  The elephant in the room for this entire game and its downfall. There's no way to sugarcoat this. It has absolutely no idea on how to play the game, no hope of ever getting an idea on how to play this game, and even massive advantages can't bridge the gap. The game is all about planning things out long term which is something the AI cannot do. When it comes to military, intelligent use and placement of your troops combined with bombardment is important. The AI cannot do this either. I can't be confident because you can't see the AI's policy selection, but based on what I've seen they cannot do that either. I also strongly believe that it simply doesn't ever have a chance of figuring out how to play the game through patches.
  
  This would be bad enough. However, the devs have insisted on making things worse for the AI. The warmongering system is such a bad idea but it's only worse for the AI. You'll see one AI declare on someone and then get universally denounced and hated. Guess what happens then? Someone else declares on them and everyone denounces them. So on and so forth until the entire world is mad. The player can deal with this with frustration. The AI can't.
  
  The AI sometimes completely ignores settling their own territory and starts sending settlers over to you for no practical reason. Sometimes they are completely unable to defend against barbarians even into the late game.
  
  I can't really say anything else. The AI is bad and is almost certainly likely to stay bad. The warmongering penalty is unlikely to ever leave the game at this stage which I think is the only way for it to improve. It's not something you can buff until they're magically somewhat decent like in other Civ games because of the game design around long term planning.
  
  
• Religion
  
  The only redeemable part about religion is the pantheons. It's interesting without being that powerful and it's a nice uncomplicated touch for a complicated game. After that, it just gets dreadful.
  
  Religions are extremely limited and about half of the game will miss out on them. 50% + 1 leads to a weird exclusive win condition club and can actually make you powerless to stop a civ from winning. Benefits are mediocre and aren't really worth your time and the AI is too incompetent to actually win via religion so ignoring this entire thing just seems to be the ideal play. It's also poorly documented with a lot of numbers and words that don't actually seem to mean much. The worst part of this is that the AI insists on flooding you win tons of religious units making you completely and utterly unable to move any units in your empire onto their tiles. We're talking a religious carpet of doom here. This hasn't been fixed in any patch so far.
  
  
• Poor Documentation & UI
  
  Self explanatory.
  
  
• Movement and the One Unit Per Tile System
  
  Units can only move onto tiles they have the movement points for. This seems logical but it slows down gameplay so much and practical reinforcement is impossible especially with how specialised you want your cities to be. 1UPT also has inherent problems from combining two separate systems together and hoping they work. There's simply not enough terrain to move around in a randomly generated map instead of a properly designed from a developer map. Slow movement times make this worse. The AI has no idea how to work with this system making combat easy but also frustrating. Movement rules and roads desperately need fixed but this is something that the devs oddly proudly announced and as such I have a sinking feeling that it won't be addressed. This is another problem that isn't 'as bad' because of how incompetent the AI is.
  
  
• Agendas/Diplomacy
  
  Good idea, bad execution. They add flair but the AI just seems predestined to hate you making this all irrelevant. I've gotten some policy combinations that make it literally impossible for them to like you. What does classify as diplomacy is just 'throw money at them until they like you'. AI desperately needs a dash of realpolitik - the enemy of my enemy is definitely not the person I should be denouncing and annoying.
  
  
• Ending the Game
  
  Takes such a long time to end once you've reached a dominant position.

How do I summarise VI? It's a game with the dreaded death knell words of 'potential' and 'has promise' along with 'good ideas, bad execution'. I can't really say I regret playing the game since I've had fun with it and the money that went to purchasing this game was given to me. I just don't see myself playing much more of the game. It's nothing I will return to like Civ IV or a Paradox game, but it has entertained me. If not everything has to be a deep and significant experience, then VI fits the niche of a fun fling for a few hours. I can't recommend it if you aren't into the whole European board game style theme or if you're looking for a long lasting strategy game. If you're into that style of game, buy on sale and skip the DLC unless you really want to play as Superstralia.

[EDIT - Coast has been buffed and I've removed it accordingly from my review. It's definitely not godawful anymore.]