Recent reviews by ItsGoodToasted

Great game hindered by an otherwise terrible server system.

Just based off the performance issues, I wouldn't recommend this. While that's not an uncommon thing on a lot of newer releases, they at least make up for it by looking decent-good. If you told me this was a 2010 PS3 game, I'd believe you. It doesn't look awful but in no way should it run like it does.

However, even if you look past the visuals the gameplay doesn't do much to make up for it. This game puts an extreme focus on stealth but feels like the system to support that focus was thrown in last minute. The primary use of gadgets boils down to incapacitating enemies for 2-3 seconds so you can sprint past before they inevitably start shooting. You could brute force them with the damage of a lot of gadgets, but all you'd be doing is wasting resources. You also have a gun and some melee, but in the heat of the moment I would find 90% of my shots winding up in level geometry 1-2 feet from the reticle, and the crowbars I found put me in more danger than the enemy.

On top of this, taking cover seems to be a dice roll as to whether an enemy will see you. Half the time I was in hiding guards would notice even the slightest strand of hair peaking out and begin pointing guns in my direction. Really, how enemies act in general just feels jank. They'll be elite psychic soldiers one second and lifeless dolls the next. I could lob an explosive can at someone's face and they'll get up off the ground without even a shrug.

There's supposedly a focus on character dialogue and choices but I haven't and won't be playing enough to comment on this. I encountered two of these in the first mission before I quit after reaching the second character's first mission. It could get better later on, there could be some deep character interaction further in, but I just don't care. At $60 I've no interest in keeping this purchase and the issues present aren't something I see ever improving. Even if you are dead set of playing this due to its Front Mission ties, don't. It's as tied to Front Mission as Metal Gear Survive was to the Metal Gear series.

"Mixed bag" is the only way to describe Civ VI.

If you're new to the 4X genre, the game is user friendly enough that you could be a competent player after around 30 hours. However, Civ V offers that same accessibility, and given how frequently the game and all its dlc goes on sale, you'd likely be better off starting there. You'd be getting hundreds of hours of content and a far more fleshed out entry in the series to sink yourself into. You'll have a better appreciation of the changes that came with this game, and you'll have a far better understanding of many of the flaws I mention below.

For the players like myself who put hundreds of hours into Civ V, the game offers a treasure trove of new features as well as updates to old systems. The most important addition is the district system which makes your city's tiles feel valuable now. This allows you to specialize your cities to a far greater degree than you ever could in Civ V, and forces you to put care into city placement as well as how your workers shape its land. Its one of the nice things I've seen put in a 4X that helps break up the early to mid-game slog. Overall, the first 60 hours I played when it first released felt wonderful, and if the game remained that way I could happily recommend this as a good sequel to Civ V. The problem is that it didn't.

Passed that point, it became increasingly evident how broken certain aspects of the game are and how little care went into making the game good. The AI is disgusting in how stupid they are, even for a Civ game. The new agenda system gives each Civ certain priorities that affect their opinion of other civs. This is interesting on paper, but works like ♥♥♥♥ in practice. Civs will almost always find something to be angry at you for, and the most egregious case is when a leader favors a civ set up for domination victory (strong military, surprise war declarations, etc) but also ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hates them for warmongering, a penalty that is never forgotten in your 6000 years as a civilization. "Just avoid war" you might say, and that would be easy if every game there wasn't at least 2-3 AI that introduce themselves, offer you trade deals, and then declare war on you a turn later. These wars consist of them never actually sending any troops, plundering your trade routes, and then asking for peace 10 turns later. The game feels like it's forcing a gun to your head so you go for a domination victory. This isn't helped when the developers insist on releasing overpriced dlc civs that are horribly imbalanced and almost all favor war; Macedon in particular is loving it so much that he may as well be considered p2w given how hard he can steamroll the game.

Other minor issues: (1) The game wasting Sean Bean on a collection of quotes that are about 45% made up or falsely attributed ♥♥♥♥ the devs pulled from blogs. (2) Civ imbalance in general. Civs like France are laughably weak while things like Scythia get to ♥♥♥♥ out horse archers that later can be helicopters. (3) Some of the leaders themselves are either ridiculous choices like Catherine de Medici for France or poor representations of the historical figure like Qin shi Huang. (4) The lack of mechanical diversty in the civs themselves. The majority of them are a give some decent war capability and then a bonus to faith, trade, culture, etc. Each new game feels bland when few civs have mechanics that make them stand out.

All of this combined makes the game incredibly hard to recommend, and unless you can grab it on sale I'd wait for the game to improve with future expansions. It's not like the game is unplayable or even bad; it makes enough changes to the Civ formula that that you'll manage at least 100 hours of fun. The issue is that for a 4X, you'd have to release a trashfire of a game to not manage that. This isn't someone's first attempt at a 4X, it's Firaxis. For a studio with so much experience, the product feels surprisingly amateur.

$14.99 for a dlc that took me and two of my friends an afternoon to complete.

Granted, the content within the dlc is excellent, and I imagine if you are playing alone the time could increase by an hour or two, but compared to the dlc for previous entries in the series, this one is ridiculously short and lacking.

This might not matter in the long run for season pass owners if future dlc is longer in length, and this dlc hasn't made me regret said pass, but if you only bought the base game then I'd reccomend staying far away from this dlc at its current price tag unless you have money to burn and really want more content for the game.

While the gameplay is nearly unchanged from Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I don't enjoy it any less in this game then I did in HR. For the $19-ish I paid, I'm not going to complain about reusing formula that worked.

However, when I can barely appreciate the gameplay without frequent interruption from crashes because "my hardware isn't good enough," then I will be more than elated to complain and request back my $19. Two 980's, 32gb of ram, and an i7-4790K aren't good enough to run this game on low-medium settings without it throwing errors in my face after freezing up.

Only purchase this game if you're comfortable with the possibility of it never functioning properly.

The best Berserk game we'll ever get.

Play the sequel/10

Even your friends are your enemies.

A Japanese Spy Stole Technological Secrets/10