Recent reviews by Shadownamesto

If you ever lose your microsoft account, then you've permanently lost your copy of this on steam as well, no ability to repurchase or anything thanks to microsoft and steam. Not recommended, but on the plus side cursed halo is a thing so it might be worth the risk.

Don't ever deal with microsoft. My copy was linked to a new defunct microsoft account and due to how utterly absurd microsoft can be, not only can I now never play this copy of mine ever again, I can't even remove it from my account to get a new copy on steam because steam doesn't allow that??? Just don't bother. Put your money towards something you can actually keep instead of this. Love the game, don't risk it.

Ixion, the new city-builder in space that everyone feels is akin to frostpunk. I mean it absolutely is similar, but that's it.
A lot of people right now are definitely unhappy with the balance of the game and just how buggy and broken some aspects can become, a fun bug I had was with a crop farm deciding that working wasn't on the order of business that day, and let's not forget the moment you start dipping into extra hours your "professionally trained" workers are going to start trapping fingers in doors, slipping on floors or deciding that dunking their head in the molten furnace on a dare is a really smart idea, not to mention that the infirmaries are insultingly slow at patching people up which means each sector needs a surplus of workers or else a single normal accident is going to cause a lot of "extra" accidents, and eventually you'll have molotov-throwing lunatics screaming about how earth was so much better and you're such a horrible person and the IQ of the station drops another several notches into -ERROR.

Fundamentally, is the game fun? Yes. The core concept is extremely good so far and I look forward to seeing more of it when the IQ of all the morons I have working under me hits the equivalent of a single tadpole, and when they can iron out some balancing issues and bugs.

Suggestions for improving the game:
1) Fix the god forsaken storage system and transfer between sectors. I can accept having population in each sector as necessary because of the bulkheads, the ship literally being the first one created and designed so that one failure in an area doesn't kill the whole damn crew (for those arguing about people travelling between sectors, I kinda agree as well but in a minor capacity) but it's somewhat infuriating at how awkward trying to set up storage and resource transfer between each sector when the loaders carry anywhere from 1-5 resources at a time at complete random, and often it's just a single resource because they're lazy. Make inter-sector haulers upgradeable to carry like 2 resources at a time and haulers that go between sectors carry up to a maximum of 5 resources ALWAYS or logistics just becomes annoying way too fast.

2) Fix and preferably balance/overhaul the ships and their roles. The science ship works fine, I like it overall, but I won't deny that the mining ship can be a bit weird with it's pathing logic of darting into the single part of the solar system with dangerous lightning storms and the hauler ships are just as braindead. It would be nice to have them avoid dangerous terrain but take a longer route, same with the ixion. The science ship is the only one we get to control out of the minor ships and it just feels annoying seeing highly trained individuals making fundamentally stupid decisions. Yes if you're holding a lot of resources and show little care for human life, or desperately need resources quickly despite the danger then hauling through bad terrain could be an interesting choice, but not having that option hurts my immersion in the world, and my desire to play, since I don't want to get screamed at for being a bad leader when I can't tell my pilots to not fly into a thunderstorm. (at the very least either make it an option, an upgrade or make another upgrade which prevents damage from bad environments)

3) Difficulty options. Frostpunk had them, every single city builder has them in some form or another, and yet ixion is a single slab of stone with the difficulty so heavily engraved it's looking almost like nordic runes. I've played a fair amount of city building games and while the bugs and weird balancing throw me off, I can just about sustain my ship and even a single slight mis-step forces me to reload, which isn't a good thing for game design. Difficulty allows us to balance the challenge for those who can think 50 moves ahead in a 7D chess game that hasn't happened yet vs an opponent who was born tomorrow, and those who actually play games casually, sometimes pay attention and don't quite realise that having two iron smelters in the second sector you open isn't just useful but outright necessary. Make the difficulty so that bad events occur more often because of low morale, environments are more difficult or there's just less resources around, but give us that option at least. I don't want to read nordic runes if I don't have to unless I'm bored on a wednesday.

4) I've said it a bit before but I'm going to say it again because it just really feels necessary, REBALANCE A GOOD CHUNK OF YOUR GAME. Some buildings are just hopelessly useless even at the best of times and don't need to be created even slightly, and some are so incredibly useful and necessary but nerfed into the floor that you have to build your entire sector in advance just to make things either optimal or functional at best. Players will find the path of least resistance quite easily and having multiple options with each being viable is a good idea, it adds for replayability and not feeling like I'm forced to build specific buildings just from sheer necessity. To cite frostpunk a bit, you have a couple options for food, that being hunter camps and hotrooms or whatever they're called which literally let you grow food. Both have their place in the game and both are equally viable.

Overall: Despite all my grumbling above and mildly strange tangents, I have enjoyed the game a lot and will continue to enjoy it for a fair while, and I hope the developers (if they even read my rubbish) take these thoughts into consideration and add the features that are lacking, while propping up that which needs a little fixing. 8/10 game, play it when it's a little more fixed up and depressingly strip several solar systems of their resources as you fly to a new home.

Bonus: I'm adding another little kicking to the freighters, because I just remembered before posting this that the starting ship in the prologue (the one carrying food and such) is the same size as your freighter ships and somehow carried 45 food despite your ships only carrying 30 resources at most. Why is IXION property somehow worse than normal?

Age of Empires 3 Definitive Edition Is a very gorgeous mess. The graphics look a lot better compared to the original with maps looking outstanding overall. But in terms of bugs, glitches and other issues it's somehow even worse than the original.

The best reason I could give right now for purchasing aoe3:DE is simply to play it on modern hardware without sound glitches. (a bug I had where the sound for the game would slowly vanish)

That being said, despite the poor showing this game has right now, it absolutely has potential if the developers actually realise the strange mess they're dealing with. AOE3 has it's own charm and is wildly different to any other AOE game, but a large issue with it is that the ai is.. braindead, and the Definitive Edition somehow makes it worse. Now admittedly I've played a large quantity of RTS games so difficulty is awkward for me to pinpoint, but luckily I have a friend who isn't that good at rts games, and even on hard difficulty he's barely having an issue. This is something that desperately needs to be dealt with, as without a challenging and competent AI the game is.. boring.

(spoilers beyond this point for the original campaign (Blood, Ice and Steel) So don't read beyond this point)

A prime example. The final missions of each act of the original game. Act 1 has you dealing with the circle and the fountain of youth with little ottoman help, pirate suicide boats and a giant cannon to hit the fountain. This is actually the best mission in the entire original campaign as gold isn't an infinite resource and your build area is highly limited. The AI has an enormous fort and will consistently send assault waves at you and even land troops to take back the cannon temporarily. It's frantic, difficult yet rewarding when you're battling off the boneguards with your own troops waiting for the last ounce of the fountain to collapse.
Act 2 is semi split into two missions. One where you deal with the antagonist's fortress by raiding supplies until you can wipe it off the map in a timed slog, and the other in destroying paths out of the area bar one to bring a mountain down upon a huge russian army. It's boring and not all that interesting, not much else to say.
Act 3 is the most depressing of them all. You've discovered the inca's hidden deep in the mountains, dealt with russian and spanish forces under the remnants of the circle and finally chased them to their final bastion, the last remnants of the prime antagonist. You arrive, successfully land and convince the local town to assist you in dealing with the fortress, while waiting for the american navy to arrive. In execution this is ruinously bad. The navy sends monitors that outrange all defenses in the game, meaning you can win in a couple minutes once the monitors arrive. Second, the AI can't do anything. The fortress is supposed to be the final fight, the toughest of the lot and yet it's so easy and broken I quite literally made myself dinner at one point, and my ally won the game for me. Amalia sat back and relaxed with smoked ribs while the villagers hired mercs and utterly devastated the circle, who retaliated with mass artillery spam against cavalry with.. obvious results.

Solution: Fix the ai and make it miles better. I'd like to point out this was all on the hardest difficulty available in the game (Hard) which should be.. well hard, not boring. If possible, improve the campaign missions too, but I know that's asking a lot. A solid suggestion however would be A "What if" scenario akin to historical battles, where you are placed with the task of defeating the heroes. Protect the fountain of youth from morgan and his pirate entourage with ottoman support. Help build your fortress and make it impenetrable while also assisting russians getting through the pass, protecting supply wagons and growing stronger with each success. Fight against the incas, the villagers, the american navy and Amalia herself as all the forces arrayed against you bring their arms to bear, and truly show the world the strength of the circle.
But I doubt that'll happen :P Overall, worth buying for a (more) functional copy and hopefully more bugs and glitches being patched out.

This game is fantastic if you want to have a fun power-fantasy of being a lich slaughtering the living. The game clocks in at around 7-8 hours depending on your play-style. That being said the game has a new game plus mode called eras, with units getting far tougher and requiring more to command and raise from the dead so the actual playtime entirely depends on how far you want to push the eras. Do bear in mind that there is no new content beyond era 1 and you are just retreading the same stuff as before, just with higher levels and unit stats.

Overall, fantastic fun, can keep you playing for way over 7 hours depending on your view of the ng+ mode, if there is a sequel I hope that it has more content and additional mechanics like perhaps some form of base-building or human attacks on the main base.

I recommend the game for the gameplay, and about half of the story. Maybe if it didn't feel so rushed near the end I'd completely recommend it with a full 100/10, but it's ruined by inconsistent characters, a fairly irritating late game and a plot that jumps ahead like a rabbit gone crazy. So it's a 7/10. Still pretty solid, just.. a lot of potential missing.

I haven't played this in a long time, but this is surprising even for valve standards. Now I haven't played the game in years and I don't plan to just because of this update. I didn't encounter cheaters, nor do I care if they want to waste their time getting a crap sense of achievement. What I am annoyed about is how despite my purchasing the game for far more back then, I come back and discover that no one who paid for the game previously gets prime status. Pardon?? I wouldn't have even cared if you had given prime status, but you didn't. One of the games keeping you afloat and you ♥♥♥♥ up like this, congrats valve. This might change in the future, but I frankly don't care, they ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up and it gets to stick around. Enjoy your extra money valve, make sure it doesn't bite you in the ass.

For those looking for an actual review of the game, search for anything before 12/2018, you should find something at least decent.

Call to Arms is a game created by the developers of men of war: assault squad and AS2 and features the unique mechanic of being able to control your vehicles in first and third person in addition to controlling them in a similar style to the men of war games. However, this is not a good game unlike men of war assault squad.

I'm actually quite surprised at how bad this game is because its by the same developers, but it's missing so much more content. In AS1 and 2, you have a wide variety of vehicles, artillery, soldiers and tactical options, from storming them with motorised elements, to blowing them up with artillery, and even setting down sandbags and digging into fortified positions. In this game there are very few tactical options. You can hide your men behind cover.. and that's it. You can't take over vehicles strewn about on the map naturally, so no free helicopters or tanks. Your soldiers have enough ammo in their guns for a short firefight and then need to be resupplied, making any decent amount of combat pointless. Helicopters die so stupidly easy and can't even deal decent damage against tanks or infantry, since the anti tank rockets number like 8 in total and more often than not do nothing even though by rights the tank should've had a hole the size of a skyscraper in them, and your heli's main gun can be damaged by a light shower of bullets from any unit down below, making it an expensive and pointless unit to acquire. Oh and you can't refuel or resupply any aircraft since the only item in their inventory is flares. Ammo for them doesn't exist.

As a whole, I'm shocked at the level this game is at. Yes it's early access, but it has a deluxe version, has locked off all but two factions unless you buy the dlc to unlock them, the strategic options which littered the previous games are non existant, and for the price of this early access game, I could buy men of war assault squad 2, which has far more content compared to this. Don't buy it. If the game updates and actually carries more strategy than the barebones nonsense it has currently, I'll consider changing this review. Until then, not recommended.

So having played this for the free weekend, and getting a fair bit into the campaign.. What the hell happened?? This game is such a tedious slog! I didn't expect that a campaign would take so long to get through. Units move slower than I feel they should. Units as a whole cost rediculous amounts of resources, even the basic ones. And unit preservation is a must, but there's no easy way to do that.

Resources: My god they butchered this. Resources take forever to turn up, and you get pitiful amounts. Control points give you a.. well an amount, but the big number on that point is per minute. So you might get 36 req per minute, but power is attrocious. 15 power?! Seriously!? And since power is your main upgrade currency, and what you need for high level units, you're going to be fighting for those points. But you need the troops to do that and if the map is giving you barely any resource points as is (looking at you, first eldar mission) you're going to be spending a while waiting for an army to slowly turn up, as you grow bored.

Units: The units in this game feel.. odd. basic units die really quickly, while the high level units take forever to die. that's fine, but again, basic units cost at minimum 300 req, which is going to take a while to build up. Each factions basic units are also vaguely different but equally ♥♥♥♥. Orc boyz become 'ard boyz with some scrap, but die a couple seconds slower anyway. Shoota boyz have the dps of dried spit against a window. Eldar howling banshees are rediculously overpowered with a shield and charge ability which murders anything in their path (zealots anyone?), eldar ranged units aren't worth talking about. space marine assault squads have the viability and survivability of an ice statue on the sun, and let's not forget the be all end all space marine squads, which again, don't do much. Speaking of different factions.

Factions: So each faction is unique right? well.. vaguely. They each have a unique quirk. Eldar have shields, plasma weapons (lasers at the very minimum, it goes pew pew, I stop caring) and can warp around the map wherever they like. The terra-I mean space marines have drop pods, which are a seperate production que and you can drop them anywhere, but it's a once off and it takes 3-4 mins to be able to drop another one (not including the production time of the unit itself), a banner which provides buffs as long as the enemy don't capture it, and dreadnaughts, tanks and other stuff. The orks have.. uhm.. scrap? Their wagh banners indicate their waagh level, which dictates their tech level. 5 waaagh banners is max tech, and each waaaagh banner generates scrap over time, which falls down around them for some reason. Maybe waaaaagh banners just do that? Oh yeah, and waaaaaagh banners are also filled with speakers and rock music, because y'know, orkz were made for rokkin. As for the scrap, each ork unit can upgrade itself ONCE with a pile of scrap. Ork boyz become 'ard boyz, ork shootas get a stikk bomb, ork nobz get a thrown weapon which stuns an enemy squad (the whole squad) and other things. Orks can also construct vehicles from scrap piles larger than a small scrap pile. Medium gets you killa kans, war trakks and such, while big ones give you deff dreads and artillery.

Faction Differences: There's very little. You'd expect eldar to be good at fighting, but apparently each eldar soldier has a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ shield too. Ok, then the orks must be pretty good at massing units right? WRONG! Ork boyz cost 300, which takes a while to get. And ork boyz aren't even good enough to be considered as meat for the grinder, because they die really really quickly. I know I'm complaining a lot about the orks, but this isn't how you do orks! DOW 1 did orks well. even DOW 2 did orks better than this. Orks are supposed to be mass up and throw it at them, not being slow, tedious and unfun. And let's not beat around the bush any longer. Relic, you ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up. You tried to copy Starcraft, and FAILED. Miserably. If you were trying to compare orks to zerg, then you ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up royally. Eldar are protoss, because everyone has shields and can warp around the map like it's their sandbox. High shields, crap health. Space marines are terran. No need to say anything there. The orks? Not even zerg. The zerg hit harder than these guys, and I can guarantee that I can get a bigger army than the orks with zerg, because units are cheaper than 300 req per squad!

Recommendation: Stay away from the game. If it's on sale for dirt cheap, buy it and give it a look, but keep in mind that the hours tick up quickly because the game is slow.

I played this game when it first came to steam, and I quite enjoyed it. My friends joined me, we got a guild running and it was all fine and fun. Then at the height of my fun, I reinstalled my anti-virus and the game didn't like that, refusing to launch until I stop protecting my system. To make matters worse, I discovered that their anti cheat system has buried itself inside my registry, and I can't actually delete it out of my own computer.

That aside, I did enjoy the game. It was challenging later on, but pathetically easy when you're caught up on gear and levels. The node management seemed quite good and workers are fun to control, so in gameplay it was fun, but the fact I can't play it thanks to files being locked and the anti cheat hating my anti virus is unpleasant.

Do I recommend it? I recommend it if you don't mind not having an anti virus on your system, and you can tolerate it being in your registry. Gameplay fun, Company ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ not fun.