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This piece of delicious adventure has one of the best gameplays ever. The rough-tough yet artistic graphics add a lot of magic and oldschooly-vibe to it. Brings back memories of countless hours spent on legendary titles like diablo or gta 2, where you would just hop in to the world and it's magic, even if reward is only in a matter of making those lovely digital characters' lives better, or getting generally grinding them to next levels and unlocking skills.
I don't think I played a game that chilling and wanna-to-come-back-to-it in a looong time.

note: this review has been written based on the core version of the game, without any content addons. Might update it as I go.

== UPDATE ==

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Putin's Russia

== END OF UPDATE ==

I took me 3 or so years to finally complete the game, aka survive until war ended, on one scenario. And not because I was trying to beat it 24/7, but due to a simple fact that you get attached to the story-telling and characters you're playing as so close it leaves a mark with each and every failure you get to be part of. To the point a pause and a step-back is needed every time it happens.

There's pure magic in how the game handles you as a player: doesn't action-pause, hint-spam or hand-hold before something happens. It's up to you to make the right call, or not at all. In either case it's you who has to cope with consequences.
Reminds me of the greatest gaming classics, that once completed, actually granted you with a feeling of accomplishment.

The developer is known for adding great atmosphere to their titles. This one's no exception.
Highly recommended if you want to feel something more than numbness during playtime.

Well if not for the fact I never got this game going on neither windows (where it wouldn't start) nor on linux (where I would wait forever for CPU move) it might had beed nice. I guess.
Too bogus, too little attention from devs to waste any time on it

As with every Civ game so far, this one wants you to click the One More Turn button all the same, and is really good at it.
There is nothing I can complain about the game itself, except for marketing and monetization scheme it follows. As the base-version player I'm extremelly disappointed that I would have to keep paying the same value in money, as the initial version had upon release, to keep getting something that, in my opinion, should happily land at the release day and be game's core, not an extra.
It's an nwelcome concept, but of course not uncommon to the games' world, to juggle with game features in a way that gets it through pipeline initially, and then start adding missing content in a form of extremelly highly priced addons.

I won't be willing to put any more money in this franchise, since it doesn't feel like money well spend in the end; when you don't get to experience what game has to offer eventually when all the missing bits are in place.
World Congress ? C'mon we already had that in previous versions, along with a dozen of immersion improving bits that now randomly landed as extras upon creator's convenience and marketing plans. So very not cool.

=== UPDATE ===

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Putin's Russia

=== END UPDATE ===

Valve, what the heck ? I had 5 cheaters in the last 15 games, according to gosu.ai (out of which I'm sure 3 were absolutely correct).
Is this the new theme, or your VAC ban is on holiday already ? How is it tha at 3rd party app can happily detect those, and you can't do a thing in the real-time.
Not only do you need to ban given person, but also make sure any match played with/against people abusing hacks, is reconcilled.
I'm so absolutelly pissed of with how miserable you are in this department.

Edit 04-11-2019:
There has been observable change in numbers of abuses across the board with this game recently. Currently I barely ever see people cheating or scripting in an extreme and obvious fashion.
Latest matchmaking mods are not groundbreaking, and matches still tend to be one sided sometimes, but at least it's fairly quick to get a game around the Legend mark with people who aren't toxic (that much, relatively to some 3-6 months back).
In the current state what the game would use the most, is steady rate of patches flowing in so we don't see the same bunch of heroes every single game, and meta game frozen (at least on the average pub level that I'm in).

Will keep editing the review as time passes, to hopefully reflect on the most dragging bit as I see them.

Edit 29-11-2019:
After the very last "Outlanders" update, my approach to the game rotated and bursted in the direction of "nah-a, I ain't touch this s... anymore". As much as I don't praise moaning about games' patches in general, this one is truly one of the worst updates to a game in history.
To the point it changes the core concept of what used to be a highly skill-capped Moba, to random number generator.
Not cool and I'm taking a proper break from the game until it gets back on track, or forever. Whichever comes first.