Recent reviews by 59

Good

I will not soon forget this game.

I'd recommend making the following key bind changes if you're on keyboard.
Make melee "V", leave switch weapon empty and make aiming down sights "right mouse button.

The badassery on the screen very much feels like a result of your input.

Also, no grinding, no currencies, no skill trees, no bugs. You end the game with the same max health / armor as you started with. No sitting in menues trying to minmax numbers to ruin the immersion.

Very balanced. Nothing felt out of place. Everything felt right.

It's really good. It's obviously EARLY ACCESS, so thing will be added / fixed. Certain skills are a little overpowered. For example, I always go down trade in my first region. Being able to fill supply holes and sell surplus at reasonable prices is a lot more important than increasing production.

It takes a little time to get into. But once you get the hang of it, the difficulty becomes more reasonable.

For example, I didn't fully understand the uses of warehouses and granaries at first. I thought it was just logistics, but the workers at these places actually also take the products to markets. So if you are having issues getting goods to your citizens, just increase the amount of workers in the warehouses. Trade posts work the same, warehouse workers will transfer goods from trade post to the warehouse, but the workers in the trade post will take trade post stock directly to market if it's available.

You should also keep an eye on your oxen. If they are not assigned to specific buildings, the game does not guarantee that the oxen will be available for said building. For example, I could have oxen transfer logs to the sawmill, but if I decide to build a bunch of houses, the sawmill will run out of supply and go dormant until the building is done, UNLESS i specifically assign the sawmill an ox. But oxen are cheap, if you have regional wealth influx, you can usually just buy another oxen when you see supply issues like this.

Game good.

Game sounds and looks amazing.

The AI of the individual soldier is horrible. You ask a squad to move to a location and the second they come under fire they start running back and forth, in an out of formation and such. They barely fight back at this stage. So you have to manually force them to run into position so that they'll fight back.

Move soldiers towards a more complicated area and they'll just stand around or run directly into fire doing nothing. It's really frustrating to see your soldiers run straight towards a machine gun. Sometimes tho, they do react to enemies, this usually leads a couple of seconds of thinking on their part, usually ending with them getting shot down before they can do anything.

This makes moving into CQC environments mean certain death for all of your troops. This was better before, maybe they broke the AI or smth during one of the updates.

Basically, it's extremely micro heavy, have fun individually managing 20+ soldiers in a CQC environment whilst avoiding artillery/granades. This is not intentional from what I can tell. You can tell that there is behaviour in place for AI to run from grenades and such but it's not really working.

Another thing, if you tell a squad to attack move to a position, it's a coin toss. They'll either just run straight into fire and die, or fight back. Sometimes certain soldiers will run and kill themselves via enemy fire whilst others engage the enemy.

GOod, I playet it like 2 times in a row. Gameplay is amazing, story is amazing. All around great game. Well worht the mon.

This is the best game. I haven't even played every single game, but I already know this is the best one.

My first few starts were pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥. I had no goals and I got a bit frustrated at how there was no direction given. Which I think is a result of how many games today pretty much just give you an arrow to follow.

And then, once I actually sat down, came up with a bit of a backstory for my start "Two hive princes, exiled from their hive. Head out to create a hive of their own, a place for hivers that have lost their way 'The lost Hive'", and decided what I would do based on what little I had seen on Youtube. The enjoyment really kicked off.

I got a base going which was a challenge on it's own, people died, animals starved, and the mercenaries put a strain on my pockets. I started training a small army, once I had an army (equipped with weapons and armor crafted by my master smiths) I then went to war with both The Holy Nation, and the United Cities. The Holy Nation are super religious Nazis, and the United Cities have an economy based on slavery. Where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

I remember taking out a slave market run by the Traders Guild (which are protected by the United Cities). I freed the slaves and I kidnapped the nobleman running the market, I took him back to base and crucified him (The mods for this game are great).

I later realized that one of the cities in the general area had changed. It now had broken buildings, and everyone in the city was hungry. I went on the wiki and it said that the city in question was heavily dependent on the trade from the slave market I had just ransacked.

I started a famine...

I have spent more than a hundred hours on my current save, and there is so much left to do and explore.

I keep finding cool stuff. Even though I have had a lot of it "spoiled" by Youtube. I keep finding cool things, things that change the course of how I play, and what my goals are.

I have spent over a hundred hours on this save and I have completed maybe one or two of the things that could be considered "end game" challenges. And I have plenty more to go.

I like turteling in games. And I turtle in this game too (build up strength steadily over time with low risk) but this game made me give that up. I have risked (and lost) life and limb trying to get research artifacts and ancient weapons to help improve my base/capabilities. And due to the rarity of these items, you'll quickly end up at least passing through each zone in the game.

How much you stop and explore is up to you. But be careful, that thing in the distance might just be waiting for an excuse to bash your head in, enslave or eat you.

I'm still a new player with only about 200 hrs in the game. But I think I might be starting to get a hang of it. Pretty cool game.

9/10 kinda sucks that a lot of features are hidden behind DLC. But otherwise, great game.

30 hours into my first play-through and I think this is the best game I've ever played. This game has so many amazing features. And I love how you're told almost nothing. You get the controls and the rest is up to you.

At first I hated the losing of progress every time you died and I didn't really like the adrenaline you get as you're getting further and further away from your bonfire, sparking a desperate search for the next one. But after a while I realized how amazing it is. It makes the game so much more fun. Your actions actually have consequences and you feel accomplished when you reach the next bonfire or when you defeat a boss you've been stuck on for a while.

I personally don't like invasions which can happen randomly if you're embered(I've actually only been invaded once in my 30 hours of playing). But I love how they've implemented most online features, like the messages players can leave on the ground to warn, joke with, or deceive other players by selecting sentence templates and inserting words picked by the developer, which works great. Or how you can see how other players died by interacting with pools of blood on the ground. Bringing some great non-invasive multiplayer aspects into a single-player game.(no pun intended)

I cannot remember the last time I enjoyed a single-player game this much.

Also, the keyboard controls work almost perfectly except for kicking which is done by tapping W and left-click at the exact same time which is hard to time, and all button prompts are for XBOX. But you can find the controls in the settings but some combos cannot be seen in the settings so you'll have to google them (I'd recommend "darksouls (dot) fandom (dot) com / wiki / Controls")

10/10 would "try finger... but hole" again.

One of the more brain dead total war games out there. You're just painting a map. There is no strategy to it. You're rarely given the ability to respond to enemy movements, and the enemy is rarely give the ability to respond to yours.

You can have 3 full armies in the surrounding one of your cities, and the enemy can just roll up and burn it to the ground and run away in one turn. You're not even given the opportunity to respond.

And you'll never find yourself having to take risks, you wont find yourself in difficult situations in this game.

Walls mean nothing, because everyone has ladders. And the positioning of armies or fleets mean nothing. Your geography means nothing because armies can literally walk on water. There are so many things that you don't have to worry about. Which is kinda ruining the fun.

The fun of a game like this is to plan and see your plans succeed or fail. Here, your plan is probably gonna be something similar to this. 1: build some stuff, 2: build an army, 3: win some wars, 4: conquer the world.

This plan rarely fails in this game and mostly just consists of you randomly clicking on things.