Recent reviews by Armynator

I'm not entirely sure how they achieved this, but they made the worst moba I've ever played. And I've played a lot of them. Even Fangs and Vainglory are absolute masterpieces in comparison.

- The voice acting is cringe on another level
- Ships deal no damage and can't target on their own
- Your 4 main abilities have cooldown timers between 30 and 120 seconds
- Progression is between slow and none
- Every weapon feels the same, abilities have no good effects or feedback (they barely deal damage anyway)

Why on earth would you make players ship always attack the closest target, no matter what? Enemies can easily escape, you have zero control over the gameplay, and on top of that your auto attacks don't even deal any damage because the game is so slow-paced.
Why are abilities on 30-120 second cooldowns? This isn't a moba, it's an idle game.
Why is the scaling so bad? You can buy upgrades for 500 gold each, giving you 1.5% more speed or cooldown speed at best?

Just compare this to any other good moba: free movement, free choice of attack, 5-10 second cooldowns for abilities and fights lasting 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes. The developers of this game somehow managed to screw up even basic moba things like that. Just wow.

Buggy, unfinished, abandoned.

The game is completely unplayable. Yes, graphics are nice and ray tracing works fine. But the multiplayer has so many bugs and desync issues that there is no way to play it normally. There are so many minor and major issues impossible to miss, making me wonder if the devs actually ever played this game on their own for longer than a few minutes.

And the weirdest thing: the game is about driving, yet the driving physics are horrible?! I mean seriously, how can you mess up the driving physics in a driving game? The cars bounce around like crazy, have almost zero road friction, hand brake barely working AND YOUR MAIN SELLING POINT IS THE CAR DRIVING PART?

Game was somewhat okay, but they removed it from Steam so they can trick you into downloading their own shady launcher version which instantly gets flagged by anti-virus software. Looks like they use it to mine bitcoin now or directly grab your data and send it to China. RIP

TL;DR: They ran AI over the original game files, threw everything into Unreal Engine 5 and hoped it would be playable somehow.



Besides the horrible performance on a high end PC, the game also looks like one giant, blurry mess, thanks to AI upscaling. The moment it starts raining, the ghosting of the rain drops is all over the screen, leaving half of the world unrecognizable. When turned off, the game is unplayable in 4k, even on a RTX 4090.

The water uses screen-space reflections, breaking rendering when you have a weapon drawn. (The renderer doesn't know whats behind the weapon in your hand, so it can't render the reflections, replacing it with darkness)

The global illumination uses ray tracing (which they should have used for reflections instead), dividing your FPS rate by at least 2. With it enabled, the game looks somewhat nice like the screenshots, but you won't get more than 40 FPS anymore. With it disabled, the remaster looks worse than the original game.

The combat system was simplified, making it feel like some arcade game. Some people might like that, but imo it lost too much complexity.

The soundtrack and many voice lines are almost entirely unchanged. Probably because they'd have to hire a real composer for it, as AI isn't good enough for it just yet.

The UI and visual effects are nice. Especially the magic spell effects are impressive, as they contribute to the world lighting with ray tracing enabled. But as I already mentioned: it will also make the game unplayable because of the low FPS.

IMO it's sad, because this could have been so much more if they actually would have put some effort into the details. Optimise the game, remaster the soundtrack, add new voice lines, fix the graphics issues and you'd probably have a very good time.

The demo gameplay itself was pretty fun, but the full game won't work out if this is the technical foundation.

The game engine forces AI upscaling or a very bad TAA implementation on you, making everything look blurry. Just take the tree stump removal as an example: wood chips flying through the air, leaving smeary rendering artifacts all over the screen.

On top of that the performance is horrible. I couldn't get more than 40 FPS in 1080p on a GTX 1080 Ti or in 2160p on a RTX 3080 Ti, so I assume the devs ignored any kind of optimization during design phase and just agreed on something like "don't worry, RTX 5090 and AI upscaling will fix it ))))" internally.

If the technical problems won't get solved first, the game will be dead on arrival.

Besides the childish humor and the horrible performance, the game gives you serious motion sickness. Everything you do is delayed/interpolated, making you throw up after the first minutes of gameplay.

Got matched 3 times in a row against people with 50x my playtime. You can imagine how it went.

Horrible matchmaking. No way to get into PvP. CPU enemies keep standing still and die so you can't learn anything from them.

Anscheinend haben die Entwickler versucht, die Patrizier Spielreihe irgendwie zu modernisieren, und sind dabei komplett gescheitert.

Im Direktvergleich zu Patrizier 2/3 fällt mir nur ein positiver Punkt auf: das übersichtlichere Gameplay. Die UI ist besser, Features werden explizit erklärt, Gebäude lassen sich einfacher bauen und verwalten. Leider war es das dann auch schon.

Schiffe können nicht mehr explizit verwaltet werden, und haben immer eine unveränderliche Basisbesatzung. Schiffe können nicht mehr einzeln ausgerüstet werden, da die Waffenschmiede komplett entfernt wurde. Das Kampfsystem ist ein schlechter Witz, besonders verglichen mit dem Vorgänger.

Die Grafik ist zwar 3D, sieht allerdings schlechter aus als der Vorgänger in 2D. Die 3D Grafik trägt null zum Gameplay bei, und wurde wahrscheinlich nur gewählt, weil es einfacher war. Das gesamte Spiel wirkt dadurch leblos und grau.

Der Mehrspieler kam erst als DLC und kann nur kooperativ gespielt werden. Beim Vorgänger war im Mehrspieler noch ALLES möglich, Seegefechte, PvP, Intrigen oder was auch immer.

Das Spiel hat mehrere technische Probleme/Altersschwächen. Die maximale Auflösung ist zB. 1920x1200, lässt sich oft nicht speichern und benötigt einen eigenen Launcher mit externem Konto zum starten. (Selbst in 1920x1200 sieht der Vorgänger in 1280x1024 übrigens besser aus, weil dort nicht so an den Assets gespart wurde.)

Es wurde hier einfach zu viel verwässert. Städte aufbauen ist sehr stumpf und macht nicht wirklich Spaß. Bürgermeister werden ist ein simpler und einfacher Grind. Kämpfe und Piraterie haben keinen Nutzen mehr, und funktionieren eh nicht richtig, weil das Kampfsystem aus einem 20 Jahre alten Browsergame stammen könnte. Expeditionen sind schnell freigeschaltet und kommen ohne Risiko. Und es gibt noch so viele weitere Kleinigkeiten, die eindeutige Rückschritte darstellen...

Patrizier 2 lebt von seiner Komplexität und den ganzen unnötigen Features noch heute. Dass der Nachfolger an diesen Erfolg nie anknüpfen konnte, ist kein großes Wunder. Sogar die (seit Jahren eingestellte) Browser-Version von Patrizier IV konnte teilweise mehr Möglichkeiten bieten, was dieses Spiel hier um so lächerlicher macht. Schade drum.

The UI doesn't scale, the gameplay is way too simplified, the campaign cutscenes are cringe level 9000, mouse movement is laggy/bugged, game crashed 3x within 10 minutes and you can't adjust the game speed while playing the campaign.

If this game ever worked correctly it doesn't work today anymore for sure. At least not on 1440p or 2160p displays, on Windows 11 or on Steam Deck/Linux.