Recent reviews by WUTVILLE IS A MASTERPIECE

Pros:

• Motor vehicle
  
• Addictive and open-ended
  
• In-depth
  
• Workshop support
  
• Licensed DLC that's generally worth the price
  
• Good

Cons:

• Terrible camera
  
• Warehouse is buggy
  
• Repair bench code was outsourced to the XCOM devs
  
• Item added | Barn location map

yes/10

Simple and with a learning curve, but consistently getting new content and improvements. Good maps. Eurobeat. Worth full price.

I'll spare you the "my childhood" monologue - those who know, know. This game will, however, let you make a few new childhood memories, no matter how old you are. Prepare for the most fun you can have in LEGO, sullied only by the immense pangs of guilt you will feel every time you accidentally force push a droid.

It's basically Trainz 12 with more. Not the best graphics or consistency, but if layout design is your primary focus, there's easily enough content, ease of use, and flexibility to justify this over any other simulator. Definitely worth it for avid sim players.

Review settings have been reduced for better performance.

EDIT: I'm gonna leave my original review text up since I think most of it still applies. The thing I need to add is that there's far too little focus on improvements and bugfixes and far too much on the (vastly overpriced) DLCs, and I can definitely no longer recommend buying this game, at least without a sharp sale.

Original review:

I have never more wished to be able to give a game a "Neutral" rating. It's clear that a lot of people enjoy this game, and so did I, for a while. Then the reality sank in that players were too busy sucking Colossal Order's colossal order because they'd made the game SimCity should have been to address some pretty gaping flaws.

If you want to know what this game does right... pretty much everything I don't cover in this review, actually. It's clear the devs actually cared about the game and were putting their hearts into a project they genuinely wanted to see finished. Let's give a special round of applause for the mod support. It turns out that when you actually let your customers do something with the product they paid for besides wallow in the dissapointing lack of building diversity, they start to like you. Imagine that.

Some things are not good though. The performance, for instance - I run the game on a decent mid-range rig with settings turned pretty low, and the game still suffers from poor FPS and frankly ridiculous loading times. Oh, and when I try to close the game it hangs for a while and then crashes.

The game looks nice, sometimes. Other times, it looks incredibly tinted, blurry, and ugly. Also, the roads become blindingly reflective and shiny even before rainfall actually starts.

The DLC for this game is overpriced to the point of being a little scummy. The prices are not worth it. Wait for a very heavy sale.

The traffic simulation is still God-awful, although anyone who points this out gets flamed by the rabid fanbase. It makes the game frustrating sometimes. The way emergency services respond isn't very legit either; sometimes you'll see police patrolling across the map from their home station, or a fire engine from a distant corner rushing to an inferno in the heart of downtown.

I mentioned the building diversity already, but it really is quite terrible, sometimes comically so. In addition, and this is really just me, the buildings can feel far too stylized and unrealistic.

Building metro tunnels is still an experience that ranks just below "seppuku with a dull, rusty railroad spike."

I wish there was a true "sandbox mode" without any gameplay where you could place down blocks of buildings by hand without worrying about powering them, and create a purely aesthetic city or small town.

Cities Skylines is a good game but can be frustrating. Buy it on sale.

For three bucks you can't really complain.


Pros:

- You can watch Gandhi bash Donald Trump's head in with a rock

- Good arena generation

- Adding characters is fairly easy, if occasionally subject to annoying bugs

- You can also create custom events with their own updates (Unfortunately you can't create regular updates yet)

- All sorts of sandbox options for shamelessly interfering in your own bloodsport


Cons:

- Bugs are frequent; thankfully, you don't encounter many during a match

- Can crash; particularly in the character list for no discernable reason

- As of yet features are somewhat sparse


Incomplete, but good if you enjoy being informed that Adolf Hitler has just punched Hillary Clinton in the face.

Every once in a while, you just need to blow up the Earth.

Pros:

-Excellent soft-body destruction
-Good physics
-Large vehicle selection
-Plenty of customization options
-Reasonable graphics quality
-Controls could be worse
-Cars and objects are very well-modeled
-Environments are large and enjoyable to drive in
-Mod support
-Able to add objects to a level with a few clicks
-Time can be slowed, providing a better look at the horrific vehicular destruction you've just caused, you monster
-I can smash semi trucks together

Cons:

-Frames aren't great
-Car durability also not great
-Sounds could be better, though aren't terrible
-Cars handle like globs of oatmeal loosely held together with craft glue and polished with castor oil

Overall a very good title. If you're short on cash I would wait for a sale or until the game is more complete.

Let me be expressly clear to start with: Grand Theft Auto V is an amazing game. It's enormously varied, the story and characters are well fleshed out, and there is a ton to do. Everything is detailed and looks wonderful, even on lower-end graphics. Its weakest point is probably its map - a little small and not enough city.

But for all its strengths, GTA V is only great at its best. At its worst, it is truly bad. I'll start off by saying that this game is not as stable as it appears. You will crash, and if your rig is a couple years old, you will crash frequently. This goes tenfold if you start modding the game; more on this later. In other words, this is a good game, but only when you can actually play it.

You've probably heard that Online is a hot mess. Can confirm. For all the draconian measures Rockstar has taken against modding, the hackers are real and they're everywhere. Now, I don't play Online, but I've heard enough horror stories of hax and general idiocy to know that if you join anything but a friend's private lobby, you're gonna have a bad time.

This also brings me to the most noteworthy point: Modding. I don't need to tell you that modding is almost a staple of the GTA series in itself; who among us has not dropped a Ferrari or a Crown Vic into IV's Liberty City? I mean, probably a lot of us, because not everybody mods the game, but moving on. Frankly, I think Rockstar's attitude towards modding GTA V is immature, selfish, and ultimately self-defeating. Remember the draconian anti-mod methods I mentioned earlier? Well, that barely begins to cover it. There have been so many patches to try and stamp out modding it's not even funny. Now, don't get me wrong. Even though many people mod GTA for fun and introduce astounding new additions such as LSPD:FR and the multitude of trainers you can find out there, I completely get that if Rockstar allowed mods into Online lobbies, that would be it. Game is dead, everyone go home. And that's all well and good, except for the tiny little problem of, oh yeah, they aren't even stopping the hackers from ruining Online. Download trainer, spawn 20 tanks, crash the server, get banned, create new account, rinse, repeat. That's all it takes. Sometimes you don't even get banned for it. Don't you go getting any stupid ideas though. Not that it matters.

Rockstar claims to not be against modding singleplayer, but they've borked up the situation so hard in multiplayer that it's become a real pain to do anything to the singleplayer game. I mean, even with mods, the game's more stable than IV, but what does that matter? Not only are they putting up a big "NO FUN ALLOWED" sign right in their front yard, they're heavily shortening the game's life span and consequently their income. And I know what you're thinking: "Alright, wise guy, how would you do it?" Well, I'll tell you. Instead of all this inane DRM, I'd seperate modded and unmodded lobbies and get rid of the hassle. Or better yet, just turn Online into something akin to GTA IV's freemode, but expanded, so that you can just create your own lobby. If Rockstar cared about this issue at all, they'd have already come to these conclusions and taken action. But they don't, because they are apparently just that shortsighted.

Okay, rant over. I'm going to wrap this up in a minute here, but before I go, let's talk about one final thing: updates. Rockstar's focus with updates, as you may have grasped, is entirely - not primarily, entirely - on multiplayer. And as I've already pointed out, multiplayer has gotten to the point where nobody bothers unless they have friends they can play with or they're a 1337 h4x0r themselves. And the updates aren't even done right; they often come with large bugs and performance issues, or even game-breaking glitches. This is a recurring issue, and Rockstar has never offered more than an "Oops, sorry, lol!" as condolence. There's no accountability, and from my perspective at least, it's very unprofessional.

As for the rest, I'm not going to touch on those Shark Card things people are ranting about, because I don't care. I will say that Rockstar's support is some of the worst I've ever encountered, and the Great Tech Support Gods of India would be ashamed. It may seem like I've been accentuating the negative over the course of this review, but after a while, the base game starts to bore you and the negative becomes all that you see.

So that's my opinion. If you want GTA V because you want to play through the story, collect all the crazy collectibles, and have fun with the numerous side missions and activities, buy this game right now; as long as your computer can handle it, that is. If you want GTA V solely for the Online, that's a nice tall glass of nope unless you have a large group of friends to play it with. If you want GTA V for its modding potential... honestly, I leave that up to you. Grand Theft Auto V is a good game, but with all of Rockstar's blundering, the enormous modding controversy, and the lengthy list of bugs and glitches, I'm afraid I just can't recommend it.