Recent reviews by Sgt.Rock

Great MMO, sadly the devs decided to focus on multiple bad games instead of putting all their efforts on this gem. The servers are STILL UP, and a fair amount of us still play on occasion.

Here is the link to our discord if you need technical help or want to find people to play with :)
discord.me/globalagenda

With the disappointing lack of historical total wars and very low quality titles recently, It really is a breath of fresh air to finally see a remaster for the arguably second best/best Total War game ever made. I would mostly consider this remaster to be faithful to the original in generally all aspects, I am only dissapointed in the "update" of the UI, menus and loading screens. Fortunately the devs opened up full modding tools (something not done in newer titles) so there are already a large quantity of mods that revert most of these faults back to how it was in the original game. There is also already massive realism overhauls like Rome Total Realism and such that improve combat, formations, and the appearance of troops and factions (making egypt greek for example).AI of course is still lacking on occasion too, but there is only so much that can be done here unfortunately. The engine has been fixed so thousands of troops no longer destroy beefy modern PCs, and there are still graphical mods to improve (and maybe to break your beefy pc if you wish :p) even more upon what improvements have already been made. There is backwards compatibility with campaigns running on the ORIGINAL game (check out a few guides on how to move your saves to the remaster!), as well as toggle options in the menu to switch between all the new remastered settings and the original Rome settings. Lastly, they recently allowed achievements with mods now, and there is this interesting little mechanic where the ethnicity of your troops will depend on where they were recruited from (for example Romans recruited in northern Italy will be pasty white, but Romans recruited in north africa will be much uh darker).

TLDR, I rate this as excellent because it still bears the soul of all the older total wars where the campaign wasn't utterly ruined, each faction was a paid DLC, and battles turned into 5 minute arcade games, and it is able to also fix many of the issues that plagued the older titles (namely engine, faction limit, and graphics). The biggest flaws are: much worse UI, lack of coop campaign, and AI acting up on occasion.

A great take on the MOW type gameplay with very pleasant looking graphics and insane effects. It offers an insane amount of fun and challenge if you're into more slow placed RTS games, with nearly everything being optional COOP, probably the best feature. The main problems are the numerous occasional bugs, how stale the AI can play most of the time, a lack of destructibility for some objects, and in my opinion, focusing only on the east front. I most certainly have gotten my moneys worth and have been having a blast playing coop conquest with my friends (which is easily the best gamemode, akin to a persistent campaign with resources and research). There is still a lot of room to improve, and has the potential to be the best game of this genre, which hopefully will come in time, but for now we still at least have the steam workshop.

DLC policy is absolutely ♥♥♥♥, but if you have all of them, the game is pretty addicting and insanely fun to play and remove the turks for the glory of the Eastern Roman Empire!

Decent RTS, CoH1 is better however. My main trifles with this game is the lack of balance, especially in the Theater of Wars. Some battles no effort is needed to win on the hardest difficulty, whereas others are nearly impossible. For example, "Faceoff at Rostov, if you own 2/3 of the objectives, the AI cheats in around 10 squads every 2 minutes and steamrolls you off the map. Whereas another mission, "Encirclement at Stalingrad" Pits you in a 3v4 against the Germans, but even on the Hardest difficulty you don't have to try for the AI to win it for you and it seems to be the easiest mission in the game. Rest TOW is a mess you have to pay for, along with only one "okay" campaign for the entire game. Ranked multiplayer can be extremely cancerous because of the community, but casual AI skirmishes can be very enjoyable. I do think this game improves on CoH1 in some aspects, but overall is a step backwards with a few paywalls.

This is a beautiful game, i love it, though the campaign isn't good.

This is an extremely fun original 4 Player co-op Zombie Shooter. With L4D2 You don't have to buy the 1st one! It literally gives you everything (except the Colt M1911, but there are mods for it) from the 1st l4d2, including the campaigns. This game is all about sticking together, go off on your own and even 1 special zombie could be your end.

This game was done in an arcadey sort of way, as such, weapons do not have realistic magazines (M16 with 50 rounds a mag, AK with 40, ETC) However the normal zombies take realistic damage and can be dismembered in a ton of ways, so enjoy, gore lovers!

It includes many unique missions and gamemodes, for example the most insanely fun gamemode is Versus, playing as a zombie never felt so good! However the Community is slightly toxic so I would recommend bringing 7 friends, or atleast having a 3 friend team and fighting 4 randoms, and if you don't have any friends, this isn't the game for you. There are also tons of maps and mods ready to be downloaded including the famous Helms Deep map from 2009! This game can be difficult especially on the hardest difficulty and realism mode:

No glowing outlines or names of friends through walls, zombies take less body damage, a certain special infected now Insta kills, and if a mate has died you can't randomly find them in a closet.

I think this is a great game with fantastic replayability and has aged well especially with how good it's "AI director" is, however the community leaves much to be desired, but overall this is an amazing game. I love it.

To remaster a game that looked fine in the first place, wasn't that old, and had hundreds of FREE mods that could easily be downloaded and look better than this, it's a bit dissapointing. If anything, remaster Oblivion or Morrowind, games that actually need it. Plus this barely has 1/5 of the mods that base Skyrim has, so picking this up instead of vanilla is a bad decision. Of course, they've hidden the base version and it can now only be accessed through direct links that should be easy to find throughout all of these reviews. For the love of mods, just get the base version.

**MASSIVE EDIT**

So, after a while of this year old review sitting here, I've decided to completely redo my review on Hearts of Iron IV. With Waking the Tiger being released recently, many of the game aspects have changed in both good and bad ways. Most notably the entire rework with China and the rework for the Generals. In my opinion, the changes for the Generals were great and the HOI4 is slowly climbing out of pit in terms of quality. However there are still a great many bugs and overall issues with the new updates. One of which is Naval Combat is still broken, ex: extremely small ships and navies can sometimes massively wipe out huge navies just with luck, or that protected convoys and troops are destroyed too easily and can almost never escape from a naval battle even with a 100 ships protecting them. Land Combat also seems to have more bugs, like some AI divisions being unkillable even if they are plainly worse and outnumbered and outskilled by your divisions. I am unsure of the cause of this but it can cause a standstill to an entire war where neither sides can push. Even after over two years, there is still no way to white peace, or even have a diplomatic peace without absolute capitulation of all major factions in a war, and after 1946 there is almost nothing to research and do. However even though there are still so many negative things about this game, I have high hopes that Paradox will slowly fix them so that the game can live up to the large potential it has. (after all they finally added the ability to kick members from your faction atleast :P)

*Bonus Communist kills screenshot*

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1270086947

**

This game gets so much hate which I feel is massively unjustified. Yes it was not expertly crafted, and did fall short of the hype, so lets talk about the game as it is now, and not what it "should've" been.

Ever since they combined all the DLC into one easy to buy package, I have been replaying this game quite occasionally, but only two of my friends ever bought it since everyone was brainwashed by the reviews, so I've only been doing coop campaign and Bug Hunt.

The Campaign was OK, being an Aliens fan, I enjoyed following through the footsteps of the characters in the movie Aliens, and being able to retrieve their dog tags and weapons for later use. I just felt that some of the in game cut scenes/chatting were overdone, and there was a bit too much PMC combat. I thoroughly enjoyed the Stasis Interrupted campaign, especially since near the start there was more of a horror vibe, like there should be, and how it corrected the wrongs of the horrible Alien 3 movie. The AI was not as bad as everyone says, they still get behind us and can boof us in certain situations. In some areas they can become predictable however. If the AI is not good enough, you can of course install mods, or edit the file yourself. I have replayed both campaigns multiple times and seem to only get bored during PMC fights. Alien fights are always new and refreshing, especially on Ultimate Badass.

Whenever this game tried to achieve a decent horror experience in the few missions it did, it did so quite well, I just wished they focused more on the horror.

With the recent two sales on this game, I persuaded about 9 of my friends to pick the game up, and only one of them left disapointed and refunded the game after only an hour of campaign playing, which I say was very unjustified, but oh well.

Since my friends have been picking up the game, we've been playing Versus multiplayer quite extensively, and loving every second of it. Probably one of the most fun MP experiences of any game ever. Our only complaints were every match felt too short, and we're unsure if we can change this, as well as experience players with more stuff easily have an advantage over newbies, though I think as long as a newbie always plays smart they can still kill a few kills.

Overall, I have a really positive experience with this game, and feel the majority of the hate is just hype bashing, or claiming it's "boring". I would recommend it to any lover of the Aliens series, or those looking for a good and unique horror/shooter mix.