Recent reviews by Spectre Rose

It's a simple, casual paced game where you rebuild, rather than build your areas. Clean up, demolish, repair, and rebuild structures as needed to make your way through post-war Europe. The story going on in the background among people you don't know is rather interesting, as you put together the pieces of what went on with their lives during the war. Well done.

On the surface, this may appear to be similar to another well known FPS/RPG that takes place in the Zone of Exclusion, however the play styles are different. This game incorporates elements of base building and daily missions to move the story forward. Also, if you make a mistake, you can undo that mistake at a later time. If I had to put this game into a single sentence, it would be:

HP Lovecraft writes the script for Groundhog Day after a month-long STALKER binge.

Still enjoyable so don't let the comparison detract from expectations.

Played around with this for a little while. I'll be fair here. First, the positives: The buildings look very nice. Many of them are modular, being designed to stack against each other to create larger, more ornate buildings. That's something we don't see much of in Cities: Skylines, so that's a plus. Also, for anyone with a sharp eye, you can find many of these buildings in Berlin, South and West of the Spree River, but East of the Brandenburg Gate, so if you're one of those people trying to recreate Berlin, Ami Polizeifunk just helped make your job easier. (I would recommend this pack for those people without hesitation.) The only limitation I've seen so far with their classification is that they are High Density Commercial, but them's the breaks.

Okay, on the negative side, there are a few of these buildings (not all of them) which do not appear to have abandoned textures, and what I've noticed is that when people move out of them, rather than looking like ratty, dingy, run down buildings like so many others do, they just simply disappear. Zoning the area under them as HD Commercial doesn't seem to help, nor does marking them as Historical Buildings keep them from being removed like that. I would hope that there could be a little additional support to address that particular issue. That's about my only complaint. Otherwise, I'm content with what you're getting vs. the price.

Don't you just hate spending good money on a game that's over before you really dig into it? Not happy when you find out there's hardly anything you can do after starting a game?

Well, this game isn't like that. In fact, every time you feel that you might be coming close to the end of the game, you find out that all you've done was kick those end credits further down the road. Made me feel like I was chasing a Groshen tied to a string. Hell, there's even content after that point, and I'm not talking about the sandbox you get to play with afterward.

I've played many RPGs over the years, and I feel that this is one of the more fulfilling ones I've played. Give it a shot, it's hard to be utterly disappointed.

I've played a good handful of resource management games whether they be sims and city builders to RTS games, but none of them have infuriated me like this one. I get that these kinds of games are supposed to be challenging, but Banished takes it to the level of complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. It can take days to build a stable community as it grows, and if you cannot forsee a problem long before that point, the next thing you know is you have a cascading failure that leaves you with a town of 0 citizens. Hmmm... Will it grow back? Will someone wander in to resettle, letting you continue trying on the map you spent quite a bit of time on? No. Did the tutorials actually cover details you need to know to keep things going while your population rises? No. I had to go to Reddit to find answers to my questions. This is a shame considering that this looked like a fun game to play in the videos. Granted, there is an element of that there, but it all evaporates with the population in a matter of minutes. I'm done, and I won't recommend this to anyone.

I'm not going to lie, I still have my original release of Age of Empires II with the Conquerors expansion, so why did I buy it again on Steam?

It's because they updated the graphics so that my computer doesn't freak out every time I steart up the game. It's because they created new content, an entire expansion with new campaigns and new units that I do not ever recall coming across before. And lastly, it's because after all these years, it's still a good game.