Recent reviews by Hexecutive

I have played and dismissed many digital CCGs over the years, chasing something that is more like Magic: the Gathering (which I played for 20 years and quit when they removed the extended format)

This is it! There's not a lot of randomness to compress the skill curve like in the über casual Blizzard or Valve ones. You build a good deck; you're going to do well! Amazing concept, right? And the only RNG is the shuffle of the deck and the draw of your hand, except for a couple of cards that have a 50% chance to do 1 more damage (whose effects are still very good even if you don't get that 1 extra)

Progression is very intuitive; getting tiered achievements like for example doing increasing amounts of damage with a faction or a card type will award you good cards to expand your collection. You also get achievements for number of deployed units and other things that don't require you to win. So you'll never be "stuck" because your deck is weak.

The starter decks are sub-par but definitely better than the chaff they give you in other games like this. After unlocking the decks, I made a British and Soviet-allied deck that has gotten stronger and stronger very quickly (I did buy the $5 introduction discounted pack bundle) and now I win about 80-90% of my games.

BRITAIN should always be in your deck if you're a beginner, either as an ally or as main. Reason: Convoy. Strongest draw card in the game (don't let the Japanese one fool you, don't be a chump)
BRITAIN also has the first "special" rarity card you should craft once you get 80 Koins: Carpet Bombing.

It basically revolves around British guard cards paired with Reserves, Frontal Assault and Katyusha from Soviet. Play aggressively and never let the opponent have the front line so you always have room to send in more reserves. It has only one weakness; heavy armour, so bring removal.

Prices in the shop are a bit high. 3 packs of 5 cards in this game equates to 1 physical pack of a game like Magic: the Gathering. And I don't have to explain why that's a problem. A digital game should never attempt price parity to a physical one, that is nonsense. And the 3 packs of Kards will get you less rarity-equivalent cards on average than an MtG pack. But I still bought some to support the developers. The intro offer and I threw another €20 yesterday which I haven't opened yet. Another redeeming quality is the Koins you get to craft cards you need every time you get a duplicate past the maximum of a card. For example, if you have 4 of a common card already, and you open another in a pack, it gives you koins, and it costs 8 koins to craft another common you might need. Very nice. There are also "golden" cards which you can recycle to get a big influx of coins if you don't use them. Almost always recycle these is my recommendation. For example the Churchill you get from an achievement. I would never use more than 3 Churchills in a deck. So I recycled that 4th one and crafted something else.

Another good thing about this game is the animations. They don't waste too much of your time (except Carpet Bombing, but I'll allow it) but are still really nice. The audio feedback is also very well done. The music is grating though and I had to turn it off.

Overall highly recommended. This is the second best digital CCG on the market after Pokémon TCG Online.

No campaign.

So effing sick of 40K licenses being handed out to amateurs who can only afford to do the basic "Spess Muhreens only" thing. Bring back Dark Crusade quality licenses, until then I'm done with 40K games forever.

This is a hard one to decide between recommending or not. Ultimately I choose not to, but it's a taste thing. Let's start with the good stuff.

The foundation is absolutely great. I was never a fan of turn based RPGs but this series is an exception. Its environmental mechanics are a lot of fun and not just a gimmick, but perhaps poorly optimized when literally the whole map is on fire. The art direction is pretty decent and the UI is fine. The music is merely serviceable, it's sample based and transparently low budget but the compositions are overall fine with both inspired and uninspired points.

There is only one "bad" to this game but for me it's the most important thing in an RPG, which is why I ultimately chose to not recommend it. The world. It can't decide if it wants to be low or high fantasy, and the vast expanses of non-urban content really grinds my gears. I need a city every now and then to feel like I'm in a living world. There's a village in act 2 (which has the best quest content in the game!) but after that the game drags on through wilderness after wilderness. This is the reason I'm writing this review in the first place; I saw this great game sitting unfinished in my library 2 years after I bought it, because I got so fed up with the world. I want to play it, but then I remember the part of the story I'm on and I just lose the willpower.

Great game, but hopefully if there's another game in the series they can mix it up, and make the world feel as immersive as the foundation allows it to be.

After 1.30 I can recommend EU4 again as the septic estates system has been fixed, requiring less hand-holding and eliminating the excessive clickfest it was before. This also means Cossacks is finally a buyable DLC.

The game has gotten very well-rounded and over half of the nations are interesting to play for some reason or another, and only a few regions lack a lot of content like mission trees and such.

As anyone else will tell you, buy the game and the DLC you want on sale...

My main complaints:

- Navy doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how overpowered AI-controlled Britain, Norway or Portugal's navies are, navy won't win them any wars. At least it feels better to work with than Hearts of Iron's naval system, which is a pain in the neck.

- The antiquated engine needs a lot of work. It's simply unacceptable for this game to not be able to speed 5 properly on an overclocked CPU without occasional stutters and lowered framerate. It's not parallellized enough.

- Too many DLC with questionable functionality, even if their sale price was the normal price it would be hard to justify buying some of them on an additional 50% off. Like Golden Century or Turd Rome. And they are also prone to putting dealbreakers into DLC. Like the aforementioned estates garbage that made Cossacks and everything after it worthless for the better part of 2 years. I can't wait to see the next plan they come up with to ruin the game for a while.

Edit: Nominated for the "Better with friends" award in Steam awards 2018.

As a CCG veteran (Magic: The Gathering since early days) and RTS dabbler since Windows 95, I wish I could say my worlds are finally colliding. In my opinion, the game is too little CCG and too much RTS. I was hoping for vastly greater specialization and variety in units. (Remember, I'm used to building decks from a 25,000 card pool)
I desperately hope the game gets enough traction to where that can become a reality in the future.

However, what it does do it does really well.

If you are expecting insurmountable vertical progression from 'rarity' or RNG, then don't worry. This is not that kind of game. You expand your glyph (card) pool steadily and easily through gameplay. (No micro transactions)
In addition to being awarded anywhere from 2-4 new glyphs after most games, you also get an in-game currency to buy glyphs from the 'forge', a selection of 5 glyphs which get refreshed every day.

The game is fast-paced and looks (and sounds!) stunning. Apart from some occasional pathfinding quirks it is also relatively bug-free.

I hope as many people as possible give this game a try, this is definitely the kind of game you already know if you're going to love or hate within the first 2 hours.

Obscene profits, no service. Week in, week out is lag, lag, lag. Horse autopathing interrupted, pets (you paid minimum €50 for) that don't loot, warping off a bridge with your horse into the river where it drowns and earns a death count which affects breeding and resale value.

This is by far the video game in the world whose revenue most outstrips the actual service on offer. The service provider, LeaseWeb, is actually so bad they should be illegal for video game companies to use.

Stay away. The developers and publishers are locusts with zero ethics.

Review based on 3000 - 5000 hours on the non-Steam client, Steam version was downloaded on free weekend.

20 seconds of unskippable logo videos every time you launch.

Thanks for making me break several keys on my keyboard.

I would be upset about the paid mods if it wasn't for the fact that recently Bethesda have been putting Denuvo into everything, so it's highly unlikely I'll play Elder Scrolls 6 even though it's my favourite franchise bar none.
And to call the franchise hit or miss would be generous, as to me Morrowind was the only huge hit while Oblivion was offensive and Skyrim is a passable "Going Outside Simulator" for a Norwegian.

Making it easy for modders to get paid for their work? Great!
Trying to insinuate even 1% of that payment into your pockets? Get out.

Launch patch was a bit rough and I crashed a few times, but since then it's been patched numerous times which have all been noticeable improvements.

I have not noticed the FPS drops people are complaining about on my R9 290x / 3570K @4.4Ghz so your mileage may wary.
EDIT: Though note that I'm playing on a Freesync monitor, so even if frames dropped to 40 I wouldn't stutter and possibly not notice depending on how distracted I was :P

The game itself is fun, but it really needs a "group join as friends" function so you can reliably get on the same bucket with all your mateys on the first round. Still, I'd recommend this game for any fan of the genre or setting.

Bye lol.