Recent reviews by csebal

About the DLC.

Worth it.

For a decent price, you get a pretty decent addition to the game, with a new district, some fun gigs, new activities and a few great storylines true to the quality we've grown accustomed in the base game. All voice acted of course.

As for the base game, it is still having all sorts of technical issues, but in all fairness - and I cannot stress this enough - you are doing yourself a disservice if you skip this masterpiece of storytelling just because of a few bugs, glitches or CTDs here and there.

In my original review for the game, I wrote this:
"I am done. The game is a masterpiece of storytelling. I didn't realize until the end how much the story got me, but it actually brought tears into my eyes when I finished. A fitting end to an epic and awesome story.
The variety in endings and how many of the things you do throughout the game influences them in subtle, yet meaningful ways is actually kinda awesome.

It has been a miracle for me to finish the game at all, as I almost never have the patience to play a story based game for this long, let alone replay them, but I can tell you this: if there is ever a story based game I would consider replaying, it is this one, just to see how I can make the story take a different shape."

The fact that I spent another 100+ hours replaying the game says it all.

- Buy the DLC if you have the game.
- Buy the base game if you don't yet have the DLC and see what storytelling in RPGs should be like.

CONCLUSION (after 80 hours): The game is fun if you invest an ungodly amount of time into it. Given all its problems, I do not recommend buying it for the current price. You can actually play it for "free" if you own a subscription to one of the concurrent game stores, I recommend you do that, if you really are interested.

I will probably come back to this review once/if the game has dropped in price and had a few more patches.

UPDATE @ ~80 hours:
I've found it. The fun that is. It is very well hidden, but it is there. The trick is that you mostly ignore all the open world crap thrown at you by the game and focus on the actual quest lines, some of which - as it turns out - have pretty decent stories. Then you just have to push through the padding to get to the good stuff. It also helps, that mods are already out to address some of the most annoying UI issues of the game, making it a much more pleasant experience.

The first official patch was also released, though it is really kind of a let down given how long they have been working on it and given how many technical issues the game suffers from.

Overall I will not change my recommendation at this point. The game is fun, if you invest enough time into it, but that does not excuse the fact that you have to wade through dozens of hours of boring padding to get there. Neither does it excuse the reliance on 3rd party user mods to fix a full price AAA game or the overall sorry state in which it got released.

With this update, I close this review down for now.

UPDATE @ ~60 hours:
Having installed some mods to improve the inventory UI and having played enough to have access to plenty extra storage space, the game got more manageable from a mechanical perspective. The main story starts to become interesting after about 10 hours of non-stop grinding the storyline equivalent of fetch quests. The NPCs seem to have some story to them, but their voice acting combined with how they present their little story pieces combined is so uninteresting, you really have to WANT it to have the smallest amount of interest in them.

I really REALLY want to like this game, so I will keep pushing on to see where the fun is. Latest events in the game point to the potential presence of some fun somewhere in the next 30-60 hours. I just have to be very careful not to blink, or else I might miss it :)

ORIGINAL REVIEW @ ~30 hours:
Am I having fun? Not really. I can see how I could waste 100s of hours in this game, as when it comes to tedium, this game has no equal, but to what end?

Buy this game:
- If you do not need meaningful goals in a game to have fun with it.
- If you are okay paying premium, to get a second, unpaid job that you can spend your free time on.
- If you are willing to wait a year or two for the developers to fix their mess and the modders to fix what the developers fail to fix.

For the rest of you, here is a bullet point list of my main issues with this game (so far):

- graphics / textures: when I fired up Starfield and started playing, it brought back memories of Skyrim.. as in.. the graphics felt like they've been dragged over from a decade old game. The textures on max settings are unforgivably low res for a game in 2023. If you expect Cyberpunk levels of visual fidelity.. lol.. come on.. its a Bethesda game. I would expect it to meet the visual fidelity of an isometric RPG through, like Baldur's Gate 3.. but even that one has better graphics in EVERY regard.

- graphics / characters: Remember Mass Effect Andromeda's horror show of facial animations? Well, in case you missed that, here is your chance to relive some of it. Characters in the game range from lifeless wax dolls to horrific uncanny valley escapees. Lip-syncing is non existent, facial expressions are so limited, they might as well be absent. The characters themselves tend to be shallow, at least in 30 hours I have not found a single one that I have felt the slightest need to connect with.

- gameplay / exploration: just imagine a dumbed down No Mans Sky here. You can only walk on planet surfaces. You need to go to a colony? You land like 500m from it and have to hike there on foot for the first time. Sure you can fast travel once you've been somewhere, but let's be honest.. why would you want to be somewhere more than once, that is not a major port or city in a game that is about exploration. So be prepared to walk a lot. (a lot more than you expect based on my review here)

- gameplay / inventory: Starfield is a game about collecting stuff. You kill enemies, loot them. You find secret caches, loot them. You find abandoned spaceships and loot them. You find resources on the planet and gather them. One would assume, that you have all sorts of ways to store this, like on your ship for example?

Not so fast. Your personal inventory space is ridiculously limited (as traditional in Elder Scrolls games). Your ship is not a lot better. Right now, I can carry 215 units on my person (which is a lot actually, given you start with around 100) and another 660 on my ship. You would think that 9 times the inventory space of a starting character is enough, right? WRONG. My ship is full with nothing but construction materials. A single 'ship medkit' (item you use in space combat to miraculously put your ship together) weighs 10. A single spacesuit you might have looted from a pirate can weigh as high as 15. I have looted 15 laser rifles from the pirate base, thats like 60 storage or so alone. Not taking into account the helmets, booster packs, medical items, additional construction materials or random knick-knacks I might have collected.

Add to this an inventory management UI that hearkens back to the Oblivion days and you got yourself a management nightmare that you have to deal with oh about every 30 minutes or so.

- gameplay / AI: The AI is horrible. like.. extremely bad. In a game that's full of airlocks, it is kinda sad to see that your companion consistently fails to enter the airlock with you. Like.. come on.. why do you think I am staying inside here, get the Eff in so we can move on, but no... they just stand there, just outside the airlock
door and look at you with their blank, expressionless face.

The enemies bring the same level AI quality to the battlefield. They are only a challenge because of how bullet spongy they were made. Like even regular enemies can easily eat close to a full SMG clip (50 bullets) before dying, but some enemies have multiple healthbars (bosses?) and combat against them quickly turns from a challenge of tactics into a test of attrition.

- gameplay / bugs: nothing to add here.. the game has lots. Characters falling through floors, glitching through walls, etc. I once had to reload a derelict ship as the last enemy managed to glitch itself into a wall somewhere. It kept shooting at me quite happily, though obviously not hitting.

Overall:
I could really keep on going, but if the above list is not enough to convince you of everything that is wrong with the game design wise, then you just go ahead, buy the game and make up your own mind.

Apologists out there are saying, that the game becomes better after the first 10/20/30 hours. I am past 30 hours.. can I haz some fun yet, please? Well.. In all fairness, I can, just not necessarily with this game. Not in its current state.

Update after completion:
--------------------------
Having spent 176 hours on the single play-through (with about 40 hours lost to reloads, as the game itself has 132 hours of pure playtime) I can safely say this is one of the most intricate and detailed CRPGs I have played in the past 30 years. The amount of content, the many ways in which you can approach and solve problems, its awesome. Quite stimulating to play a game, where out of the box (or on the box) thinking is not just possible, but is actually rewarded.

Not a lot I can say that you haven't likely read in the news already, so let me just say this. In over 30 years, I have completed maybe a dozen games, from the hundreds I have played. Of the dozen, I have three that I played back-to-back, from start to finish, without taking breaks to play other things. Baldur's Gate 3 is the 3rd such game. The reasoning is simple. It has an interesting story with plenty of interesting plot twists. combined with a great deal of variety and zero grinding.

I cannot give any more glowing of a recommendation for this game, than this. I spent 176 hours since release, to play the game to completion. That's 7 hours a day on average for 25 days straight. Suffice to say, its going to be enough for a while, but it still was a fun 4 weeks. :)

Original Review:
-----------------
TL/DR version: Its good. Very good. So good, that even people who would not usually play RPG games flock to it and enjoy playing for the sheer depth and variety the game has to offer. If you like the cRPG genre, this is a must have for you, but then again, if you do, you will have already bought this game.

You should not care about the hype. What you should care for are these three things:
- dynamic storytelling: in the game, you have options stacked on top of options and the game reacts to them. It really would be difficult to give examples to this without spoilers.
- engaging characters and story: what would a game be without that
- a game that works on day 1, without live services, 0 day DLCs and features locked behind paywalls.

With that said, the game has its quirks, but frankly it is such a huge masterpiece, that listing them is akin to complaining about a slightly off stroke of the brush on the Mona Lisa. Still, this would not be a fair review if I would not list my gripes with the game - I'll help, it will be 100% ui related:
- the game's UI around character creation and character features is really one of its weakest points. You get very little information about the class you choose and zero information about what that class will turn into on higher levels. If you expect a comprehensive chart listing all the abilities you will get on higher levels, like in some other contemporary cRPG titles, you will not find those here.
- Managing the inventory is a little bit finicky. You can pick up virtually everything in the world and hoard it around. (you probably have seen the tower of boxes videos) the game is not well suited to deal with extreme hoarders and as the number of items in your inventory (and stash) grows, so will the amount of headache that accompanies finding anything or keeping a semblance of order in your stash.

That's about it. The game could be better with those changed, but I can't emphasize this enough: We are talking about reaching 100%, instead of being just 99.8%.

So in the grand scheme of things, BG3 has nothing to be ashamed of, but quite a lot to be proud of.

Overall: 10/10.
I am still struggling to understand how this game can exist, but I am extremely happy it does.
It restores a little bit of hope that gaming might not be totally lost and that we might have something to look for in this field after all.

I loved the original MOM, it was THE game for me that combined my love for fantasy and role playing games with civilization style grand strategy.

Here is the thing.. I would not play Civ1 or 2 again, no matter how much I loved those games. They were great games for their time, but we have much better, more modern alternatives for them today, some of it in the same brand/franchise even. (looking at you, Civ4)

Same goes for this Master of Magic. Much like the new Master of Orion game, this game cashes in on our feelings of nostalgia and longing for memories of older, simpler days. It does not bring anything to the table really, that you would not get from any of the otherwise decent successors, like Age of Wonders.

For someone who has not played the original MOM, the game is really just a dumbed down version of Age of Wonders at this point. MoM was great in its time, however that game is simply not good enough in 2022, especially not at this price tag.

The game has a horrible UI. I was fighting with the UI for most of my attempt with the game. Lack of tooltips on what different things do, obscurely hidden tile information, lack of proper contextual info. These are all things that you cannot afford in a 2022 title.

This game will appeal to anyone, who would want to play the original Master of Magic, but then you have emulators and ways of playing that game for a fraction of the price in its original form, which in many aspects I feel is much cleaner and polished, even if its low resolution can make your eyes bleed :)

Summary: pick this up at a huge discount, if you want to experience some of what the 4x genre was like in the early 2000s. Otherwise, just pick up Age of Wonders and you will have a superior game at your hand with game mechanics and UI elements out of this century.

Original review, written after about 20 hours of game time:
Definitely recommended.

Updated three times, after 80 and 110 hours + at the end, 121 hours into the game:
This is one of the best games I have played. Probably not ever, but definitely in the last few years to a decade. The story is solid, the gameplay elements are solid, the setting is solid, the atmosphere is solid and the graphics.. even on my 5 year old PC it varies between awesome and jaw dropping with a perfectly playable FPS... (subjective opinion)

Full disclosure though: if you are sensitive to minor issues, like animation glitches, sound glitches or the likes, I recommend to wait a few more patches, probably a DLC or two for the game to be "fixed". They are not game breaking mind you, I am having a blast, but they are noticeable.. so if those break it for you, you have been warned.. otherwise, you will have a blast.

Some more details from the original review:
Technical:
If you do not use ray-tracing, the game actually runs well on high-ultra settings in 1440p even on a 1080FE. I have not actually measured FPS, but I can tell you this: I have not really felt a stutter or degradation in my experience.

Gameplay wise:
It is awesome. The game has so much content, that after 20+ hours of actively chasing quests, I have yet to make any real progress in my main quest line. The gun-play is fun, though at times enemies feel bullet spongy, which is a bit against Cyberpunk canon, where shots are supposed to be more lethal. Cybernetics are done in a way that blends into the game really well. There is somewhat scary about hunting cyber psychos with superhuman evasion, dodging your bullets like Neo from the matrix. :) The hacking in the game is also meaningful and blends well into the whole game-play.

My first real gripe with the game is the GTA-esque vehicle physics, where they seem to have too much mass compared to world object and they pretty much handle like speedboats on water. The other is the inventory system. For a game that focuses so much on looting everything around you, the inventory system would really need some beefing up to make it easier to manage. It is not horrible, but far from being great either.

There were some funny glitches I have observed and the enemy AI is not particularly smart at times either, especially if you "exploit" their easy to spot weaknesses, however at that point, it is more on you than on the game. If you play the game straight, the AI will pose a sufficient enough challenge and you will die if you are careless. :)

The game does a good job with auto saving and the save-load mechanism is actually quite well done and easy to manage.

When it comes to the RPG elements, I cannot yet tell how much of the dialogues have meaningful consequences behind them on the long run, but the world is full of lore and tidbits of info, either funny or just interesting that you can find in all kinds of places.

Overall, I tend to call this GTA: Night City or GTA: Cyberpunk ed. It of course has substantially more RPG elements, like attributes and perks and more dialogues with NPCs, but at its core, the game plays and feels like a GTA game would and with you mostly running or driving around in a big city, I think you will agree it feels very similar :)

This is not a bad thing though, GTAs are great in their own right and Cyberpunk takes that formula to the next level through its unique setting and RPG elements.

UPDATE @ 80 hours
Still going strong, I reckon I am at about 2/3 of the content now :) At least that is my guess based on the remaining map markers. The story in the game is extremely good. Even the side gigs have variety to them in how you approach the problems they present.
- 1 CTD at around the 65 hour mark, graphics crash. Apart from that, rock solid.

UPDATE @ 110 hours
I am through with the gigs and crime events :) now its only the side missions and the main story left. Did a count, done more than 200 quests (gigs, side jobs or other activities) so far. Man there are some good stories in this game.
- Got 1 weird graphical glitch after an accidental windows update past the 1.05 patch (power outage forced my PC to restart, allowing windows to ninja-update on me). Driver update fixed it though. No hard tech issues since the freak CTD I had earlier.
- Noticed some strange sound artifacts as well lately, as in: sounds getting stuck.. reloading or quitting and reloading usually fixes it. Not frequent mind you, I think I have encountered it twice so far overall and only really noticed it the one time, as it was a very strong music sequence that got stuck on a loop :)

Final Entry @121 hours later:
I am done. The game is a masterpiece of storytelling. I didn't realize until the end how much the story got me, but it actually brought tears into my eyes when I finished. A fitting end to an epic and awesome story.
The variety in endings and how many of the things you do throughout the game influences them in subtle, yet meaningful ways is actually kinda awesome.

It has been a miracle for me to finish the game at all, as I almost never have the patience to play a story based game for this long, let alone replay them, but I can tell you this: if there is ever a story based game I would consider replaying, it is this one, just to see how I can make the story take a different shape.

DLC Entry: @250+ total hours
I binged the game for another 130 hours straight. The revised mechanics and UI are a lot better than they were at launch. If the game was a skull sized rough diamond back then, with the DLC, it is now a polished, cut piece of gaming history.

The DLC adds a meaningful, separately playable, yet also well integrated addition to the base game, As for the base game itself, it was still as good as when I first played it. Enjoyed every second. It did not evoke the same emotions, but that's not surprising for a replay, I still got misty eyed at certain points, which says a lot.

If you haven't played this one yet, you must.

3/10 I spent about as much time fighting the game, as I did fighting the enemies.

Not sure which one is more on rails. The story, or the fighters in this game. The story is nothing to write home about. Inconsistent mess, worthy of the star wars name as of late. Where the game fails spectacularly for me is the controls.

The controls are a mess by default. The fact that the control scheme and control tips change depending on where you gave the last control input makes mixing joystick with keyboard very hard. Some of those tips are ouright uselss..like when it tells you to activate something with joystick 1, even though it is not bound on that controller, so it does not give you an actual button to press.

Some of the controls are counter intuitive, the configuration UI lacks options and explanations for many important things. You cannot set dead zones, you cannot disable mouse acceleration either, should you be playing with a mouse.

Some controls that you would expect are simply non existent.. my pet peeve in this is the targeting.. you can target the enemy you are looking at, cycle through targets (one direction), or you can lock "your attacker". You cannot, for the life of you target the enemy closest to you, which is otherwise pretty much a standard in similar games. I cannot tell you how frustrating it is when during a dogfight, you see an enemy fly past your screen and then you spend the next minute trying to actually find that target and lock it, when clearly it is the enemy closest to you at that moment.

The combat itself feels okay for a star wars game, I haven't played enough to really comment on the balance between the various weapons, but some of them definitely feel more fishy than others.

The story could have been the saving grace for this game, but the story mode is, well, I am not impressed to be honest. I have played the beginnings of the story and have seen a few pieces of what comes after and I am not at all feeling the urge to play those missions to experience that story myself.

The characters are nothing but exposition boxes that you can turn on to hear some extra lines of inconsequential monologues.

Worth the 40 bucks? Frankly... if it would not have been for the 5 hours I already spent on this game (first few missions and some MP battles), I would probably refund it. I cannot find it in me to really pick it up and play it anymore due to all the annoying bits mentioned above.

I am having a blast with this. Sure, it has it's fair share of issues, but the game's value greatly outweighs them.

I am playing on normal, with "no-heal" option. I find the game fun enough, not too easy, not too difficult. Given that I am a very seasoned wargame player, I would say that the game balance for this difficulty is very well done. It does what it says on the brochure: gives you a challenging, but fair game.

If you are into min-maxing and abusing broken combos (which in part this game is about), then you should definitely consider bumping the difficulty by at least one (and be prepared for a world of hurt as the game can be brutal even on normal)

Summary
Pros:

• The game delivers a very enjoyable X-COM tactical gameplay focused experience
  
• The strategic layer is there and it is deeper than some think from a superficial look.
  
• Overall, the whole game is very easy to learn, but has a tremendous potential for mastering with all the different character and item combinations
  
• The mission variety and replayability appears to be great. Friend plays parallel to me and after defeating the second factions, we have some differences in both what soldiers we have, what missions we played and we play vastly different style tactical games.
  
• The characters and some of the dialogues were causing me to tear up from laughter
  
• The game performs very well.. on my PC (arguably a fast rig with a fast SSD) the loading times are barely noticeable. (much faster than X-COM was)

Cons:

• It is a firaxis game. Bugged to high heaven. You got your CTDs, your Freezes, your graphical glitches.. you name it, they have it.
  
• The UI of the game is a solid 2/5. Information that should be there is not. UI is often clunky to use, to move around in.

For a 9.99 price tag, this game is a steal. I bought this game two days ago. Fired it up only to check it out - as I was playing something else at the time, which I wanted to focus on. 23 hours later, I am writing a review about it.
23 hours in and I am still only about the 2/3 (or less). It never felt padded, if anything, I sometimes wished the story would progress a bit slower so I can prepare better for what is to come next.

Some details:
The tactical game plays and feels very much like X-COM did, however with several twists:

• each enemy and x-com unit has its own place in the turn order. You no longer get "your turn" where you move your units in any order at once, before the next enemy move. Instead you get to move one unit, then the enemy moves some of theirs, then your next soldier and so on. This forces you to make some though decisions overall on how you set up the order of your units. You want your support / crowd control guy come first? Sure.. but that means that the three enemies your big brawler could take out will all get to act before the big guy moves.
  
  
• death is a fail condition. If a unit goes down and you fail to stabilize it, its game over.. you have to restart the mission or lose in case of that nasty game mode. Downed (but stabilized) soldiers or those who are injured real bad get some scars after the battle (that you can remove at a price).. but otherwise all wounded soldiers heal up by the time the next mission rolls around. This means that managing health is actually an integral part of the tactical game. Deciding when to allow taking some damage or even allow a soldier to go down in exchange for achieving some bigger objective is a key to success.
  
  
• Maps are small and cover is usually either shallow or destructible or both. Missions often also have timed objectives that you have to chase in order to not fail the mission. This makes missions play a different than your classic x-com turtle advance.
  
  
• Breach is an interesting mechanic and you can manipulate it with all sorts of items to your advantage. These are also limited use and with most missions consisting of multiple breaches, deciding when to use a breach item can make the difference between an easy clear and a disaster on the third encounter.

The strategic game is genius in my opinion. It is simple enough to fit well with the game's main focus, however it has plenty of depth in it to keep you engaged:

• For starters, you have your squad of premade characters.. Every now and then, you get to choose a new one from a pool of 3. There are I think 11 characters total and which 3 are offered is random, so there is a wide variety on how you will play depending on which ones are offered to you and how your squad synergizes.
  
  
• Each soldier has its character.. like literally.. and there are some funny lines of voiced dialogues between certain pairs, if you happen to have them on the squad at the same time. Also, you will need to train your units, which take several strategic days, during which they cannot participate in missions, forcing you to - once more - adjust your strategy.
  
  
• The city map and the riot system is very well thought out. Again, you are constantly forced to make decisions: do you defend this district to get that awesome weapon knowing that the other one will go riot or do you play it safe and go to where it is needed the most and forgo the loot? Upgrading the districts gives some significant benefits, especially level 3 upgrades.
  
  
• However, and this is yet another nice twist in balancing.. the same intel which you need to upgrade districts is also the currency to buy sweet items from the black market. Choices.. choices...
  
  
• You have your staple research and manufacturing section as well, nothing new there really. Works like it did in X-COM more or less.
  
  
• Oh yes.. all strategic operations, be that research, training, spec-ops missions, require soldiers... soldiers of different ranks often.. so you cannot just have your rookies running errands for you, you will need to train those solders to be able to run important missions.

Finally, about the Firaxis syndrome

• Yes, the game crashes from time to time.. Over the course of 24 hours, I had 1 straight up CTD, two times the game froze and once it got stuck reload a previous turn. The game saves abundantly, so these are more of an annoyance than any sort of real problem for playability.
  
  I still would not recommend any sort of limited save game mode for now.
  
  
• The game has some graphical glitches. Units moving seemingly elsewhere to where they really are. UI elements collapsing onto eachother or outright disappearing. It makes the game a bit frustrating at times when this happens and you have to fight the UI instead of the enemy.. however again, most of these are minor and are only really annoying because of how Firaxis once again failed to do proper QA, than for their game affecting nature.
  
  
• The game's UI is very basic. You often wish for information to be more available (or available at all) or functions to be there when they aren't. It gets the job done, but makes you work more than you should.. It is sad that developers making such a great game only manage to make such a shoddy UI for it. It helps if you know X-COM and X-COM 2 skills by heart, as oftentimes the game only tells you that .. say: this item gives you lightning hands.. what does that do? Well, if you do not know already, then you do not deserve the item, so shoo.. It is just that they assumed too much. I am a great fan and probably a veteran of all X-COM games, but even I do not remember all skills by name.

This is an annoyingly deep colony survival simulator that will drag you into madness the more you play.
If you are a fan of building large, convoluted systems to support your colonists, then this game will definitely be to your liking. There is also a weird sense of underlying humor around the game, not necessarily pushed into your face as you play, but presented in a more subtle way through the expressions of your dupes (duplicant - what the colonists are called), in the tutorial videos, or generally just scattered around the map

What is there to dislike?
- The UI can get some getting used to.. it is not bad, but far from being great either. I recommend looking into some of the Quality of Life mods out there (building over plants, zoom out enhancements, gas overlay enhancements, etc)
- The learning cliff of this game is not for the faint of heart and the game does not hold your hand too much. the game's wiki and youtubers are your definite friends.

What is there to like?
- A very challenging game: yes, the learning cliff is both a curse and also a blessing as it allows you to find the game fresh for longer.
- A lot of things to explore: After 100 hours, I have yet to see all map features or all biomes the game has to offer.
- A lof of depth to experience: At the 100 hour mark, I am at the point where I might be having an idea of what I am doing. Though there are not too many building blocks in the game, the complexity of those is staggering and different interactions challenge you in different ways.
For example managed to dig into a pocket of super compressed chlorine, which quickly expanded, filling the caves around my base and now the area around my base is over pressurized to the extent where I cannot vent any other harmful gases out of my base because of it.

Overall, if you liked the industry mods of minecraft or dwarf fortress or rimworld, you will like this one too.

I did put plenty of hours into this game back in the day before it came onto steam.
I cannot honestly recommend it today, unless you are a die hard fan of retro. It was an okay, even novel game back in its day, but it has not aged well and at this price point, it is a ripoff today.

The good:
- The game offers an extremely high level of complexity in ship design and seeing your designs come to life can be satisfactory
- The game world feels alive with the civilian and military economy split apart
- The overall scope of the game is massive, allowing you to play on a truly large scale

The bad:
- The complexity of the resource system will make you feel that you are playing a trading simulator instead of a 4X, with the added difficulty of the trading being done by automated bots, who just refuse to ferry those last few bits of important material your fleet depends on for being built
- As suggested above, the AI is.. well, this is an indy / low budget game and it shows. The AI is simply not on par with the vision the game's creator had and fails miserably in delivering (pun intended)
- The UI is.. the words "Windows 95" and "Excel" jump to mind when I have to describe it. Even back in its day, the UI was adequate at most, slightly below the standards of similar games from this genre. Today the UI feels extremely dated.
- Performance: the game shoots way above its league when it comes to scope and scale. You can start stupidly large maps and even on smaller ones, the game will grind to a literal halt towards the end game, for one simple reason - the insane amount of AI traffic required to keep goods moving between locations. It is an unnecessary overhead in the game, which might look fun and interesting in the early game, but will demolish your endgame horribly

The game itself I would recommend to any 4X enthusiast for it is a piece of the genre's history. What I would not recommend is buying the game for this price point. If you pay more than 5 bucks for this, you will feel ripped off.

Do I recommend this game?
No.

Why?
Because in 2016, you don't roll with an AI as dumb as this one. Oh forget about the graphics. Unless you have one of those highly calibrated eyes that can see the non-existing flickering of a TFT screen or the screen tearing of a non G-Sync display running with v-sync off, you will not find it any worse than all the other decent AAA titles out there.

There are a few visual glitches and a rather annoying sunrise/sunset glare that makes you wish you wore shades, generally low res textures even on high, but that's besides the point here.

It's the AI (or the lack of it)

This game tries to be about storytellin' and all, but what kind of stories can you tell with 2bit brain less automatons running around the world? Let me tell you: the ridiculously weird kind. As it is the case with the ridiculous, it soon becomes boring and annoying, rather than funny.

I would whistle in amazement over how dumb the AI is, but that would painfully remind me of one of the most annoying and stupid gameplay features ever invented to demonstrate pathetic AI, luring the enemy in with whistling.

You can whistle, which will cause nearby enemies to be alerted and go to check out the source. Now you would think that its a bad thing, but its not. Since our anti-hero is a friggin terminator, he can just gut, behead, skewer or simply choke anyone to death that gets within 5 feet of him. He can do this from literally any angle and height as long as the enemy is not aware of him, or after throwing a few punches if the enemy is somehow aware.

So what does our dear boy do? He whistles, mobsters come and die.. one by one or in groups. The only real problem is when enemies further away actually notice him and start shooting, but thats rarely the case.

As luck would have it, mobsters are not quite bright, so only a few of them know how to use the phone and they are extremely proud, so they rarely call for help or fall back. For most of them, killing or dying is a matter of honor and running away would be considered worse then death.

This must be why they will go check out the whistling behind the crate swimming in blood and surrounded by gutted bodies of their comrades, just to die in a few minutes and add to the body count.

Pedestarians? No better to be honest. They don't care bout traffic or eachother the slightest. They have their own little lives and unless you unconvenience them somehow, like spilling blood on their shoes, they will ignore pretty much everything - sans the odd uni grad, who knows how to call the cops.

As much fun it was at first, as boring it is now. That plus the missions being all the same, repetitive n stuff.

The story started out awesome though and I was hoping it to continue in that style, but I'm not sure I will have the patience to grind through all the padding to enjoy it.

I also quite doubt that the AI will improve a lot. AI is not something thats fixed easy in complex games like this. Maybe with one of the first expansions or DLCs, they will roll out a better one. I might wait until them and frankly, I sugges you do too.