Recent reviews by CelsiuZ

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This is a very surprisingly good game!

The railroad simulation does seem to have a bit to go!
In sounds, effects, realism, etc. But no doubt it will get there as the foundations that the devs are working with is solid gold.

The good:
- It runs well!
- It has a big map, with progression - similar to games like Snow Runner, you can build bridges, infrastructure, etc.
- Lots of locomotives and rollingstock.
- Solid economy, with many different types of jobs from passenger, to freight both local and main line.
- It's very pretty.
- Multiplayer - this game is really fun in multiplayer and the "limited" track means that you actually need to coordinate to break up freight consists and to ensure that nobody enters a segment of track that is already occupied.

The not so great yet
- The graphics... it's a pretty game, but the map and many set piece models are clearly placeholder.
- The sounds... They are good... but they can get so much better.

Well worth it in single player OR multiplayer if you can get some friends together!

Well done devs for coming out with a highly functional and fun to play EA game.

Genuinely one of the best city builders out there.
Very hard difficulty curve - but so rewarding.

I wish I could have a "wait for it" instead of saying "no".

The game needs to cook for a few more months before it will be "good".

The game is just not ready.
- Road building tools are amazing - but without "move-it" mod its beyond frustrating.
- I don't understand the economy at all - no matter what I do its never balanced, people can't afford their rents, stores go without customers, etc.
- Why does my city only want low residential suburbia? No matter what I do that's all they want. While I understand that everyone wants the dream of a house - in for example North America this dream needs to die. You will rent an apartment, and you will be happy.
- What's going on with the service buildings? Why are there not like 3-4 variations of schools?
- Why are the service buildings the size of city blocks? This makes 0 sense.

I will be interested to re-try this game in the spring and next summer to see what has changed.

CS2 is absolutely on to something here. But... it's just not there yet.
Foundations and bones for this game is A+.

I am joining in on the Creative Assembly / SEGA "feedback" train.

What happened CA / SEGA?

The good:
- The games you make are now very beautiful.

The bad:
- What happened to proper city sieges?
-- The sieges suck and nobody plays them anymore, this has been CONSTANT and CONTINUOUS feedback yet you keep not addressing it. You had it nailed in Rome II, why did you mess it up in later games?
- Why can we build towers during the battle?
-- You should not be able to magically build defensive structures DURING a battle, this is a no-brainer.
- Where are the deeper RPG elements?
-- In Total War Empire we could build forts - why can't we do this in later Total War Games?
-- We had to manage population, food, etc. Why is that not a thing in this game? or other games?
- Where is Empire 2?
- Where is Napoleon 2?
- Where is Shogun 3?
- Where is Medieval 3?
- Where are the historical games?!
- Where is your transparency and communications?
- Why are you not patching and supporting older games with game breaking bugs?
- Why are you increasing the cost of your games and reducing the mechanics?

You say that you listen to your fan-base? But how?

"Nobody" wanted 3 Kingdoms fantasy Total War - "nobody" wanted Britannia, Troy or Pharaoh.

Where are the games you used to make? The global ones? The impressive siege battles? The passion for the little details?
What happened after Rome II?

I love these games - but it is ridiculous that the prices are constantly increasing when the scale, complexity and details of the games are decreasing.

Do better - you have 0 competition in your field.

This game was originally really good.

I have 471 hours on steam (but more overall as I played via the original client since launch).

I would strongly advice everyone to stay away from this game until they update the monetisation model. Gaijin is one of the most hostile and predatory developers I have ever seen when it comes to how they treat their player base.

The positives:
- The selection of vehicles
- The graphics

The negatives:
- Grind, grind grind
- The playerbase is toxic due to everyone being laser focused on grinding in every game or they risk going bankrupt.
- The economy forces you to pay for expensive premium to earn in game currency and research points.
- If you do not have premium, you will almost never turn a profit (pay for ammo, repairs, crew training and vehicles).

Do yourself a favour and stay away.

A surprisingly good game!
I was very hesitant towards picking up this game, it just seemed like another "life sim game"

Boy was I wrong! This is "Papers Please" in 3D and with extra game mechanics.

It is not the least bit janky, and has a great degree of polish and attention to detail.

I am not review bombing, but I am however responding to recent events that do impact this game.

This game is $44.34, DO NOT purchase this game.

That is a full game price for a game that has very little content, and as far as I can tell has no future.

I will not elaborate too much, but today (2022-08-16) is the 3rd time that all, some or a large part of the development team has walked off the job.
The reason is always the same: "Internal team drama".

It is clear to me that this game does not have sufficient, strong enough leadership with a coherent plan.

Stay away from this game, stay away from this development team.

Obviously, I will update my review should the game somehow make it through this and become something fun.

But as it stands as of today, the game is dead, the community is outraged, and I don't see how they can move on from this disaster.

Do I recommend the game? - Yes, it really had great foundations here, but it's gonna need some work.

This is NOT a chill city builder, this is a hard-core survival city builder.

The game is unforgiving, if you make 1 single un-optimised design your map and save is done, you will enter a death spiral so quick that it's not possible to pull out of it.

I am 6+ hours into the game, I have yet to have a village over 300 pop.

The reason for this is the economy, it needs a hard re-balance in the early game to prevent death spirals.

Currently unless you min-max build like your life depended on it (which in this game it does) its not possible to survive the early game.
With 180 pop, you cannot break even in your money, coal and wood supply.

Money you need to buy trains, wood you need to build buildings, and coal to run the trains.
You should at least be able to break even or make a minute increase.

The game encourages you to build slowly and methodically, but this is untrue as you need to rush with all your available resources to get to "mid-game" whatever that is, I never got there. Where you're breaking even in all 3 main resources.

This dev deserves support as they're definitely working on a diamond in the rough, but ouch, its very rough around the edges currently.

Do I recommend the game? - Yes on sale.

If you have played EG1 and like EG1, then this may or may not be the game for you.

It is hard to explain what this game gets wrong, because to be fair to the devs, they did get a lot of things right.
Here are some features that I find are not as fun in EG2, as they were in EG1.

- The art style is even more comedic than EG1. I feel like EG1 had a better mix of realism & comedy, whereas EG2 threw "realism" out the window and just gave some minions superpowers.

- Balancing. The game has 0 balancing, you should get used to 6 soldiers or 8 saboteurs wiping out your 300 strong minion base. There's nothing you as a player can do to stop you from getting your minions wiped out if a fight breaks out in a hallway.

- Construction and furniture placing is waaaay more restrictive than in EG1. EG1 furniture worked in the following way:
-- Say you needed to build a food counter. The build blueprint will show a bunch of footprints (similar to sims) of where your minions will need to "go" in order to sit on a chair, or work on the counter. In EG1, only the chef's "footprints" were required to build it. You could block off 2/5 chairs and it would still let you place the bar, the bar would never allow more than 2 people to sit down.
This issue persists in ALL furniture in EG2. You want to place a bed down? Well your minion will need to access both sides of the bed, why? Who knows. List goes on. But it makes compact base building impossible.

- Enemy art variety? and animation variety? NOPE. HAMMER, PATRIOT, JAWS, etc. all have the SAME models, just different colour. Super lame imo. I loved that in EG1, the different factions LOOKED, WALKED and were ANIMATED differently.

- Sometimes things are OVERLY animated. Does guardposts really need a red blinking light when its manned? If you build a few of them it gets really annoying really quickly. Same goes with the guard post that has cameras that are supposed to reveal enemy agents using a disguise (it doesnt work but heyo). It's sound effect is literally "WAH WAH WAH WAH" on repeat. Its cool if you have 1 built, but once you have 2, 3 or 4 in your base. You will eventually not be able to escape the sound.

The devs really did a great job on many things in this game. It just COULD be so much better.

Overall 5/10, I will keep playing it. I am 52 hours in, I still haven't finished a single campaign.. maybe eventually.

If it is on sale, go for it. You will probably enjoy yourself. But you might also not.

Just beware EG1, by and far. Is still a superior game and that is disappointing if you're returning to the franchise like I am.