Recent reviews by Tonits

Costly with all DLC, although worth it. Buy during sale.

Feels quite bland, nothing special. Would skip, atleast for now. It gives a solid base for, you guessed it, DLC.

---SUNFLOWER 1.2.1 patch---

Take this review from a relatively new HOI player. The first HOI and Paradox game i played was HOI 3, back in July 2015. It was the base game without any DLC. I absolutely fell in love with it. It played it around 80 hours, just learning the mechanics of the game. 80 HOURS! Just learning the machanics! I have played HOI3 around 350-400 hours (my steam profile says 240 hours, but i have played a lot offline), and around half of that is just the base game without DLC. And when i bought every DLC to the game, it brought more mechanics to be learned!

But that doesnt mean that the game was perfect. Not at all! It had a lot of problems, like the multiplayer. It was horiffic. Hard to connect, even if you had the right ports open, it would sometimes just not connect. One time i had even problems with a LAN connection... And the game would crash, a lot. In singleplayer it was pretty stable (for me atleast. My friend had a lot of problems, the game would crash every 5 min or so for him), but in multiplayer it crashed more frequently. And the AI in the base game, was horiffic. But it got a little bit better with the expansions. But it wasnt perfect.

But when it comes to HOI 4, i learned the mechanics in just about 10 hours, and started to get bored after 40 hours. The AI was very dumb at the release of this game, but it has gone a little bit better in the 1.2.1 sunflower patch. When the game was released the AI made dumbass invasions all the time. The invaded with around 3 divisions, took a port and left. I didnt even try to stop them, they just left. They could have occupied my country, but no, they just took a port and left. But they have stopped with this behaviour in the 1.2.1 patch, which is good. The AI got better in patch 1.2.1, but it is far from good.

And the reason i fell in love with HOI 3 was its complexity. It really felt like i was in charge of the country. And HOI 4 has complety lost that feeling. It is very far from complex, its a very arcade style of a game. When i play i feel like i have almost zero control of what is happening. I loved to play small countries in HOI 3 and see what i can do with them, when i control every single unit separately, but in HOI 4 it kind of forces you to let the awful AI control your units, even when you have very few of them. And the horrible naval invasions... Why do you have to let the AI do it. You absolutely have no control of them, except for choosing from where your units will start the invasion and invade and choosing when they start after, the AI have "planned" the invasion, and thats it. No really, you have no control of them. You cant even choose how many units land in what province.

Often it goes something like this:
1. You select the units that will invade
2. You select the starting port, from which they will invade and the province/provinces that you want to invade (Often you cant choose more than 2-3 provinces to invade, and they have to be next to eachother)
3. You wait until the AI have "planned", takes often from 30-100 days
4. Then they cant invade because they think the water are too unsecure, so you send ships to cover the curvy path that the "wise" AI has chosen, that goes through as many seazones as possible
5. Then the units start the invasion and when they invade the AI has chosen which units attack which provinces, often like Province 1: 1 unit, Province 2: 1 unit, Province 3: 22 units, like wtf? What did they plan exactly?
6. And then the invasion will fail or succeed, depending on the enemys defence.

And when we are in the subject of battleplans, we can continue with it... Why do you force us to use a broken system? And force us to pay for a fix. I know that Paradox is a company and want to make money, but come on... I have always thought that Paradox was a pretty fair and a good company that cares about its customers, but really, 15€ for focus trees and events for some countries (that you can do probably better yourself, as you get to customize it as you like), a new autonomy system (you can find a mod for this probably) and a probably working battleplan system (that i think should be free, as it is a core feature of the game and is forced upon you to use), and a "ask for lend-lease" feature (that i think is OK, but there is probably a mod for it, if you really want it). These are all good features, but is it worth 15€? No way! You still get a free patch when the expansion comes out.

But paradox made also a good move with the expansion pass. They promised 2 expansions, worth 50€, for 39.99€, but they changed it to 3 expansions for the same price, which raises its value!
"Due to development limitation, we've decided to release a smaller expansion at first. As a result, the expansion pass is being extended to cover 3 expansions." A quote from Björn "BjornB" Blomberg on the official paradox forum. You can find it here [forum.paradoxplaza.com]. This is a really nice move from them, and i have gained respect for them for doing that!

The trading system is ok, but there is a minor annoyance, why cant we stockpile our resources? We can stockpile almost everything else, so why not stockpile resources?

The tech tree, is kind of meh. There arent really any specialized techs, its just generic. In HOI 3 there were TONS of techs to be researched, but in HOI 4 there arent so many techs to research. I guess its enough, but in the late game (past 1945) there arent really anything to research. I guess you could mod the techtree, but as the game continues to 1948, there could be a few techs more, like industry tech for 1947, or something like that.

You can leave a faction when the faction is in peace, but you cant kick a country from your own faction. Why?

Espionage doesnt exist, i dont really care about it anyways, but it could be there. Doesnt matter much.

There are bugs. But that is to be expected, right? No, it should not be expected to be bugs in any FINISHED game, but there still are, and there will always be. And some minor bugs arent that bad, but when you are in a faction, and a country in the same faction gets a wargoal on you, and declares war on you, something is really wrong. This happened to me, but i think its fixed now. It had something to do with the national focus tree i think.

The national focus trees should be expanded, they are almost always finished quite early.

And the Pro's:

The game looks gorgeous! It really is beautiful!

I like the new production system, its really simple and easy to use. Even though i often prefer a little more customization and depth, i think it fits in HOI 4 well.

The logistics tab is AWESOME! i really like it, it brings more depth to the game, which i like. BUT why cant we stockpile our resources? Doesnt it make sense to be able to stockpile resources, when you can stockpile almost everything else?

The division designer is good, as is the ship and plane upgrade system. But more options and customization would be nice.

The multiplayer connectivity is really good now, but i have had some problems with the multiplayer gameplay.

I cant recommend this game in its current state. But i think as time goes by the game will only get better, as it is with most, if not all, paradox titles. They often start poor, but they get better with free patches and paid expansions. I mean, if the game got worse with updates and expansions, there is something really wrong... :D

I would give it a 4/10 right now. I was really hyped when it came out, but it was a huge disapointment for me, as a hardcore HOI fan.

The game is definitely more arcade stylish, simplistic and casual type of a strategy game. I really dont feel like it belongs to the HOI franchise, which is a quite hardcore strategy series, and this is not really anything like that.