Recent reviews by SamBC

I was a little dubious looking at this game, but I trust the developer, and I was pleasantly surprised. Engaging story, gameplay that balances accessibility and depth, and absolutely beautiful visuals.

An admirable conversion of the general principles of Paradox's Grand Strategy style to a Space 4X. All of the Space 4X staples are present, with ship design, fleet composition, exploration, colonization and so on, while maintaining a real time (with pause) and high strategic overview that might be daunting to those who haven't played a PDS grand strategy before, but once you are used to it flows very easily and comfortably.

Taking all that was good about 10,000,000, and amping it up to 11, with refinements and somehow creating a much greater feeling of depth to the gameplay.

Good, solid Civ & Scenario pack, just like we saw in the first year or two of Civ5's release.

For me, this is worth it for the variety brought by the CS and NW additions, more than the scenario. More variety is good.

A lovely take on a couple of different game-styles, very approachable and fun.

There's lots of different ways to approach the game, and while you have to put effort into it, there's not much that will have you gnashing your teeth. This makes it a good, relaxing and engrossing game.

The addition of the different farm types, as well as the different romance options, makes it a more replayable game than it was at release.

So, this pack is basically giving you Anarchy's Children almost free. It's not worth getting if there's any of the DLCs that you are sure you won't use.

However, I personally think it's good value for all three, and I enjoyed all three of them - Anarchy's Children perhaps only for dressing up my friends in silly costumes and making a better Mister T for my character pool. The rest add fun and challenging bits to the gameplay, which is great.

I found the narrative mission really fun, albeit a pretty long slog. SPARKs themselves are a little underwhelming in the field, but far from completely worthless. They provide some things that other classes don't do, but a lot of what they do is very similar to other classes. The devs said they were meant to be tanks - able to take damage, including take it for the team, but they don't really have the HP to fill that role.

However, the mission is a lot of fun, and SPARKs add a lot of extra interest to the game for me, so a definite (but not unreserved) thumbs up.

The rulers are definitely a shock to the system at first - they are more difficult than usual play for their difficulty, certainly. There are mods to make the rulers take normal turns instead of reactions, if you want to go that way, but I don't find them game-breaking at all (except maybe the Archon King, if you're wedded to low-damage runs and thus don't have backup soldiers). Appropriate use of the extra equipment will generally see you through - killing the Viper King in one encounter isn't much of a stretch.

This certainly adds more interest to the game, even if you already completed it.

This pack has vastly improved the Mr T I created in the character pool.

Who still hasn't appeared in-game, dammit.

In seriousness, there's a wide range of different cosmetic elements in the pack, all of them off-the-wall, but in different ways. Use the bits you like and ignore the rest (except to remove them from random soldiers, I guess).