Recent reviews by Bob

The first game I've preordered since Warcraft III: Reforged, and I'm glad to say things have gone much better this time around. I played one skirmish match against the CPU. Built a titan gate as soon as I could and then proceeded to stomp the CPU (literally and figuratively) as each crushing blow of my glistening titan caused massive destruction effects on their buildings. 10/10. The static screenshots and Youtube videos don't do this game justice, it looks great in-game.

Fantastic value at only $20 or $15 for HD owners. This is a full-fledged remaster with a lot of love put into it, far superior to the AOE 2 HD offering. If you're interested in playing AOE2, this is the version you should be playing.

Pros:

+ Classic and great AOE2 gameplay
+ Fresh new graphics and animations
+ Packed with content. Includes ALL prior expansions and a new expansion campaign + 4 entirely new civilizations, which roughly doubles the content, civilizations, etc. from the original release and expansion. Tons of campaign content (150+ hours). 35 civs total, more than two dozen campaigns, numerous historical battles, etc.
+ Lots of quality of life improvements including on-screen control groups, default QWERTY-grid hotkeys (can toggle to classic), auto-reseeding farms, improvements to queues, numbers telling you how many villagers are gathering each resource, and more - but nothing that feels like it's dumbing the game down.
+ Revamped campaigns with new voice acting and thematic polish
+ Updated music and sounds
+ Camera zoom
+ Server based multiplayer instead of terrible P2P connections (a bit rough at launch, have patience people)
+ Improved AI
+ New official tutorials to help people ease into online and competitive play
+ New "Empires War" game mode allows for Random Map style games without the first 7-10 minutes of monotonous sheep herding/scouting and boar luring. Of course, RM is still there for the purists.

Cons:
- Optimization isn't great and hopefully will be improved. It runs completely fine for me on a Ryzen 7 and a 1060 GB, but a lot of AOE 2 players have potato PCs. Judging from other reviews, if you have a potato PC this release may frustrate you.
- Multiplayer was rough at launch but has been rapidly improving. I hear there are crossplay issues still but it's been very smooth for me, especially in ranked.
- Pathfinding could have been improved more.


Tl;dr
WOLOLO

Long-time Total War player since the first Rome. This is a pretty solid and polished historical Total War release, which the series desperately needed after Rome 2's launch and extended periods of Warhammer titles. I had no hype for this game prior to release but ended up picking it up once I saw the launch was going decently.

Pros:

+ Best diplomacy system to date. Factions make semi-reasonable decisions instead of arbitrarily betraying you - unless they are someone with a personality known for arbitrarily betraying people, which you can plainly see.
+ The campaign map experience is pretty in depth with managing your council, characters, cities, retinues,etc.
+ Not too many crashes or bugs, even at launch.
+ Performance is pretty good and the game seems fairly optimized, turn times aren't insane.
+ You can pick between romance/records and aren't forced to play one way or the other.
+ Playing as different characters grants different abilities, so faction campaigns are varied beyond just starting positions.
+ Fairly unexplored historical period in Western games that I personally knew very little about.
+ End game isn't a terrible slog as has been the case in some titles, as the other kingdoms will abdicate to you and you will just absorb them instead of having to capture every single settlement.

Cons:

- Battle diversity is a bit weak, they tend to feel very similar. Warhammer and Rome have a lot more diversity due to the settings. Shogun had this problem to an extent but FOTS helped considerably. This might be in part due to my ignorance of the history, but the game could provide some more historical descriptions of units, etc. to make me care more.
- Some of the character/council micro management can get a bit tedious and feels unimportant. I didn't bother updating all of my character level up stats on my play through and I didn't need to do any real work to keep people happy. The court mostly just granted passive bonuses. Maybe this requires more tuning at higher difficulties.

All in all, a solid and polished release with maybe the best Total War campaign map experience to date. The battle map is more of a standard Total War experience that doesn't really do anything for the series you haven't seen before. It feels kind of like vanilla Shogun 2.

I'd score it:

Campaign: 9.5/10
Battles: 8/10
Overall: 8.75/10

Here's a flowchart to help you decide:

- Does a modern combat version of Mount & Blade sound interesting to you? If yes, continue. If no, pass on this.

- Are you okay with spending $12-15 for a rough game you know is unpolished and unfinished, and understand that it might remain that way forever? If yes, pick it up if you want. If no, don't get it yet. Wait and see.

- If you do buy it, you can refund it. I think 2 hours is plenty of time to get a good idea of this game and understand the state that it's in.

Great game. The only real problem is that it's far less fun playing without a team, and the player base is small so sometimes you have to wait for a game.

Basically you and Groot, Ratchet (from Ratchet & Clank), and a flamethrower wielding Don Quixote try to push a cart that is guarded by Bomberman, a dragon with a rocket launcher, and a turtle.

Bought it for the nostalgia.
Stayed for the wololo.

I'd give this game an 8/10. It had its problems and haters at launch, but it cleaned up pretty well.