Recent reviews by Athinks

A decent game marred by odd gameplay choices and poor storytelling.

As I write this review, the game rating stands at mixed, and that about fits where it should be. I rarely write reviews, but felt compelled to here. I am a huge fan of the original game (and its sequels) and was awaiting the sequel with cautious optimism. I enjoyed Deserts of Kharak, and even with the retconning feel they captured some of the majesty of the originals. I wanted to like this game. I wanted to give it a fair chance. But, having played through the campaign, this just isn't up there. It isn't terrible or broken or atrocious. It just... isn't very good.

What follows is a breakdown:

Beautiful but flawed.

• The game really makes the most out of modern technology to make some stunning renders and effects. The megaliths and backdrops and environmental effects are really well rendered. Explosions and lasers and attacks are impactful and epic. In that sense it looks like how the original felt it looked all those years ago.
  
• Unfortunately, the designs of the ships are far less interesting and visually distinct than in previous games, and that applies to a lot of the settings as well.
  
• In addition, due to gameplay choices and scale and visual clutter (and some dodgy camera) you spend very little time up close and have very little opportunity to appreciate these ships. I spent most of my time looking at overlapping class icons.

Okay. The original featured haunting epic music that evoked the desert-vibe and the unique cultural backdrop. Agnus Dei lives in my soul from mission 3 of HW1. Even "The Ladder" in the credits was special. The music in this seemed... just there. A lot sounded vaguely similar or like remixes, but none of it felt as specifically targeted to specific moments as in previous entries, and none of it hit hard.

Mixed.

• I appreciate that they tried to do something new with the megaliths and space landscapes. They made for cool backdrops. In theory they are interesting, but in practice they didn't add much. There are attempts to make them useful for sneak attacks and blocking shots, and in early campaign missions this happens, but due to other gameplay issues (see below) they are generally more trouble than they are worth.
  
• Units are extremely fragile and a lot of vessels are all rounders. Combat encounters end very quickly and any tactical redeployment or hit and run is very difficult. Early on this isn't such an issue, but it rapidly reduces the potential for any tactical gameplay or clever deployments.
  
• A big one: Despite some levels being built around it, units hate verticality and will always try to get on the same horizontal level rather than shooting up; this caused many issues in combat.
  
• Units also tended to be unresponsive to commands and be unpredictable in their behaviour (chasing units or not).
  
• AI and pathfinding are very temperamental (especially around megaliths), and need a lot of babysitting.
  
• I tried with both the new camera and the "original" but both didn't quite click.
  
• On top of this everything feels a bit clunky: units are finicky to select and hard to see, sometimes you select multiple by accident, I wasn't sure if it was just me getting a little old, but immediately after playing I went back to HW Remastered (which I haven't played in years) and it just clicked immediately better: unit selection, unit control, camera control, sensor zoom, unit behaviour, balance.
  
• Campaign on hard was 17 hours. Not an issue in and of itself if there is replay etc. Not every game has to be a 100 hour epic. But this felt abrupt and like something I won't revisit.
  
• The War Games mode only highlights the issues of unit fragility (especially with the low unit caps) and control issues.

Not good. This is probably the killer for me. I play these games for the campaign.

• The original gave me shivers. HW1 is a story about a people's struggle for survival. The approach was minimalist but effective. The mothership and the vessels themselves were the characters. It was bigger than any one person, and the universe the Hiigarans encountered was full of wonder and mystery and tragedy, evoked and only sometimes spelt out. Music and worldbuilding and visuals combined to tell a tragic and epic story (think mission 3 or the nebula). A larger world existed and was hinted at. Cataclysm made a smaller (sort of) story of different people in that wider world. I didn't think the retcons in HW2 were great, but there was a similar minimalist frame and sense of world.
  
• The story of this game feels like someone took all the well-intentioned suggestions in writing advice books and applied them with no nuance or awareness of the possibilities of the genre.
  
• Everything is reduced to a handful of characters (shown in some bizarrely low quality cutscenes which show nothing of the game's beautiful exteriors).
  
• The story and antagonist are paper thin.
  
• The personal stakes feel out of place (and not well-written).
  
• We see nothing of the wider world, or sense of mystery or scale, or exploration of the society from which they come or how it has been transformed by the events of previous games.
  
• It ends abruptly.
  
• There was definitely an attempt at establishing emotional stakes, on a personal level not in previous games, but it was done through thin character drama in cutscenes divorced from the game.
  
• I couldn't help but think as I played through that it would have served the game better to cut out the cutscenes, replace them with a few lines of dialogue in the mission start and end (or over some hand-drawn art as in the originals) and leave it at that. All the cutscenes showed were people in 3 different rooms, more or less.
  
• Story should fit form, and the RTS offers the possibility for interesting and novel kinds of storytelling. Instead, they spliced in a generic story in a totally different format. Bizarre

I could say more, but this is long enough. There is the frame of a compelling game here, and I really wanted it to work so that we would get more Homeworld, but after giving it a fair shake, I honestly can't say it is there.

This is the best shooter I've played in as long as I can remember.

The mechanics are hyper-focused on delivering an intense, adrenaline-fuelled, whirlwind of action and motion. Some people have complained it is hard, and it is, but I think a lot of those feeling frustrated are those who failed to understand the kind of gameplay it is offering. In all things, Doom: Eternal goes big. The core gameplay isn't about hyper-accurate twitch-fire. It is about taking all the many, many tools the game gives you and using them to their fullest. It is about managing the resources of health, ammo, armour, and a whole arsenal of weapons while all the while prioritising targets. It is about never stopping moving, jumping, dashing, swinging. It is so compelling because it requires you to use all of your attention and wraps that up in design choices and mechanics that are viscerally satisfying and always pushing you to move.

Tonally, I preferred Doom 2016 in some ways. Its world was mysterious, with an edge of satire, and gave a sense of depth to the world through environment and background without overloading with information. Doom: Eternal throws that away. It goes big and silly and fantastical, and very often contradicts itself or the game to which it is a sequel (although a lot of this is just in Codex entries and serves as the justification for amazingly cool backdrops). I'm not sure. But you have to respect the genius of Doom: Eternal's designers in recognising and embracing the truth of all the hyperviolence and hypermasculinity and hypereverything of Doom and the metal that so clearly inspires it: it is very, very silly. It is camp and cheesy and impossible to really take seriously, and that that is part of the fun. In the vein of bands like Powerwolf or Gloryhammer, it embraces the high fantasy and the cheese and the overwrought language and silly messianic pretentions some people put on the Doomguy (the game makes very clear that he is really a monster in any real sense and this only gets clearer throughout). It kept me grinning and laughing all the way through at every uptick in amazing fantasy backdrops and ridiculous mythical ideas and taking it all the way to the most extreme and ridiculous possible conclusion.

XCOM: Chimera Squad is a fun, (comparatively) bite-sized, and slightly streamlined version of the XCOM you know and love.

The shorter missions and pre-kitted characters make for an easier drop-in experience, although there are still plenty of tools to play with and combined with the agent abilities you can pull off some really cool combos. It scratches that tactics thinking itch. In short, it is fun, well-designed (again, got out of many clutch situations with clever combos), and generally bug-free. It makes some alterations to the formula (initiative order instead of team by team, streamlined missions, characters, etc) that make it a nice change, and having played it I now am gonna go back and finally finish WOTC and then maybe a LongWar campaign in XCOM 2.

If I had one big critique it would be the tone. The main games felt more like war movies about struggle and survival. They weren't "realistic" but this game suffers from MCU syndrome, where every character is lighthearted and make jokes constantly, no matter the situation. This makes the characters identical aside from a single additional character trait. The setup is about building a postwar peace and working alongside part-human aliens (a really cool idea and interesting topic), but they seem to have chickened out. All the alien squadmates are effectively just humans. They really have almost nothing alien about them (and there is only one representative from each side) and there is absolutely no conflict between the characters (even in the between mission banter) despite the whole backdrop meant to be the difficulty of reconciling people from opposing sides during war. In general while the story was presented well enough (some nice animations) it was pretty lacklustre and generic. This issue with tone and cahracter is an issue because this game tries to lean MORE into telling a story and focusing on character than previous games.

Also, the games is pretty easy. I'm fairly experienced with with XCOM, but I don't profess to be anything like a pro, and I played through the whole game on the second hardest difficulty and only had agents downed once or twice. This may be food for some, and may be because of initiative order, but I'd recommend experienced hands playing high difficulties.

Pros:
- Fun.
- More XCOM.
- Lots of fun combos and abilities and tools to mix and match.
- The initiative order (and tools to manipulate it) makes getting out of stick situations more possible.
- Shorter missions make it easy to drop into for bite-sized sessions.
-

Cons:
- Tone doesn't really fit with the rest of the series.
- Perhaps a bit short for some (although it is super cheap and this can be a pro).
- Pretty easy.
- Storyline is pretty lackluster.
- They kind of waste the premise of working with aliens and postwar rebuilding.

Verdict: It is worth a play if you like turn based tactics, or if you are new to the genre, especially at the price.

Edited for 2.2 release:

While I know that this latest update (as with the 2.0 update) has upset a lot of people, having put some time in and learnt the mechanics, I RECOMMEND IT. It is a BETTER VERSION OF STELLARIS. It allows for more variation, more interesting stories, more engaging gameplay. It definitely has some issues with AI at times (mods and patches have resolved a lot of this already), and some are experiencing more severe bugs (I have not and I'm on a two year old laptop). But the fundamental experience is GOOD.

In short, the game combines the interesting early exploration and discovery stage with mechanics that make war and peace in the later stages have purpose and development. The overall progress of a game shifts from exploration in a huge and empty galaxy to managing expansion and vying with your neighbours for territory, to building an economy and butting heads (perhaps warring) with neighbours, crises, and terrible abominations. The Grand Strategy is definitely stronger now. The only area still lacking this kind of engagement is diplomacy.

Below is a point by point overview:

Negatives:
- The tutorial is still rubbish, and the game is more complex than before. I genuinely believe this (and people jumping in with the expectation that gameflow/meta etc would be exactly the same as before) is a major cause of complaints.
- As mentioned, at times the AI after release was really dumb. I (like many others) am using Glavius AI mod, and they have done an excellent job (and are doing it fast). The devs are also working on it (and recently announced they will spend more time on bugfixing.
- There are some bugs and balance issues (see Machine Empires). For me these have all been comparatively minor and the latter often can be taken as an extra challenge. Again the devs are working really hard on this already.

Positives:
- ALL the major changes are free (as are now some things locked behind DLC before). The rest is mostly for specific flavour.
- They have made the mid-game FUN! I REPEAT: Mid-game has stuff to do in it. In short, even without war now the choices and options of planet development (and just slowly shifting your homeworld or major planets from resource mines to massive overpopulated seats of complex production and research) are actually engaging. It does take a bit of getting used to, but it is worth it.
- The economy system has really upped the sense of galactic geography, empire variability, and overall purpose to an empire. For me planets really became places that I remembered and thought about (rather than plonking down whatever buildings/tiles were available). Losing a food-world can be devastating.
- The economy system has also made for a greater sense of social depth in empires (and also for civics to have more than flavour-text differences for pops). No longer is it simply miners and scientists. We have administrators, culture workers, fabricators. With consumer goods, strata, and living standards there are now options for greater RP with material difference from other empires. Pacifist egalitarians can really DO pacifist egalitarianism.
- There is the base here for even greater things (and they have hinted at diplomacy as the next possible expansion). I suspect the diplomacy and espionage expansion will combine with the 2.2 and 2.0 economy and war reworks to make trade war, devastating economic raids, and all kinds of hijinks possible. Even without it, the game is fun.
- Also sliders. They have added so many galaxy/game customisation sliders.

[Original]
I always loved the idea of Stellaris (as I love many of the Paradox games), but before 2.0 every time I'd start a game I could never make it very far in. Either I was nigh-invulnerable due to having the strongest blobfleet (and so no one would attack and there was nothing to do during peacetime) or I'd try to go a pacifist route and be wiped out. The midgame felt like a very long wait for resources, and very little happened.

The changes of 2.0 (plus the previous DLCs) have finally made this game fulfil its potential. The player is constantly making choices about how to use resources, where to expand, what to do. I finally have got that just one next decision, one next plan, cycle that I get in the other Paradox games.

The changes to war make more a much more fun and balanced system. If you concentrate your forces too much enemies can slip by. If you have a large empire, good luck trying to control that with one fleet. Even if an equal or slightly weaker empire attacks (AND THEY DO NOW FINALLY), if your fleet is on the other side of owned space the enemy will take a lot of your infrastructure before it can get there. Of course you can slow them down (even stop them) if you have space fortresses, but what if they take those? Or find a way round? Ideas of supply and resupply are now important. On the frontier you will probably need a Fortress, and a couple of systems back a supply and shipyard station (where you keep the fleet). You have to PLAN.

Finally (the big one) I know people were upset about the changes to FTL. But (though I had my doubts) it works SO WELL. You can head off fleets, meet in big in-system battles (rather than weirdly chasing from jump point to jump point). When you finally get to building Gates it FEELS like something special, linking up the distant parts of your empire. After having to spread out and carefully distribute and rebuild stations, now you have an incredible power. Not from guns, or from armies, but from logistics and mobility. BUT BEWARE, if that critical infrastructure falls you are in trouble.

The 2.0 update and expansion has made getting EPIC stories out of the game much easier.

Well done Paradox! I love it.

While it may be hard to get into, the sheer scale and complexity of this game is wonderful. It blows all other games of a similar genre out of the water and offers ACTUAL REPLAYABILITY due to the diversity of the content, events, different playable social structures, etc.