Recent reviews by Bigchicken

An interesting game held back by the free to play model.

I was completely overwhelmed and confused by the insane number of micro-management features to try and get you to buy stuff. Squads and individual soldiers can all be adjusted and leveled. Weapons, vehicles, other equipment can be researched and purchased. Its nothing short of a confusing mess. Initially these systems lead me to believe that certain unit types like the machine gunners were locked behind a paywall. However, after a few hours of grinding, I was able to figure out enough, and it seems that everything can be unlocked for free with enough time spent.

To me that time investment is far too much. It took me a few hours to get a the basic machine gun, which for my faction is a 30 round clip fed Italian hunk of trash. I can't imagine the time you would need to spend to even unlock the first semi auto rifle. And the whole time you'd need to interact with the incredibly counter intuitive and painful levelling systems.

And its a shame because otherwise its a good and very fun game. I like the bot system, it makes the battles feel large and keeps everything casual. The maps and movement are overall good, its incredible the things it lets you climb on. One of my first really positive experiences was falling off a building and being able to catch the ledge and pull myself back up. The one thing that's really off with the gameplay is the pacing. The game is way too fast. You have to focus 100% on the objectives because you'll lose very quickly otherwise. Trying to do interesting things with the engineers equipment, for example, instead of just building a rally point and jumping into the objective will mean your team will lose the objective and you'll be stuck in enemy territory. For the scale of the game, this pacing just isn't right.

Serious let down from insurgency

I died 42 times trying to get to the first checkpoint without grinding for levels. I then died a dozen more times trying to get to the first checkpoint with level 2 strength.

The second checkpoint is OP for leveling tho

Its alright, clearly already a very good game.

Runs poorly, UI is a confusing mess. Its nice to see a game of this scale and depth but in its current state is not great. Wish they would've put out another Ultimate General Civil War style game instead of this.

Probably the best total war

More enjoyable than the remaster in my opinion, although it struggles to run on modern machines.

Combat is really nice

Its just very repetitive, which is a shame because the framework for a great game is there.

The persistent battlefield is currently a total joke, because unless you take all of the objectives in a map, the next time you attack you have to start from scratch all over again. This is compounded by the fact that to take over a hex you have to attack and take all of the points at least twice, with most regions needing 3 successful attacks and some historical regions like Verdun 4 or 5! Anything less than taking all the points only has an effect on national will, a game mechanic that lets you win without taking over the capitals. The idea of paying a heavy toll to take a single point and progress from there, fighting a battle in inches like the game promotes all the time is non existent in-game.

Something important to mention is most units in this game cannot be created or destroyed. Infantry and Artillery losses cost money to replenish at the end of every battle, but are done so instantly. Wipe out a massive army in one battle but it will still be there at full strength afterwards even on the same turn! This isn't really bad though because it encourages you to throw away men for any possible gain without fear, and makes up for any lack in enemy AI.

Which brings up the difficulty, within a few hours you should be able to figure out how to win with all points every time, which is an incredibly repetitive task, doubled by the amount of times you need to do it to progress, tripled by the lack of maps. Push one objective to the very back of the map, flank the other positions, win. The enemy defending AI doesn't reposition its units, however it will sometimes call in units to counter attack, which is totally ineffective with how little artillery the defending AI has. The attacking AI is decent in that at great cost it will push past your defences, however either it doesn't have the fortitude to take all of the points or its expended too much of its supply to continue to take all of the points to even start taking over regions. The Campaign AI is good in that it positions its men to counter your attacks and pressure weaker areas, but this means very little when the battle AI can't seem to do anything with this. The auto resolve is useless because it will never achieve a "great victory" which is how you take over regions and it almost always costs national will to both sides, while in reality its very easy in most battles to gain national will playing them out yourself.

To sum my first and perhaps only campaign, which I did enjoy of a lot:

Central Powers 1914 start, on soldier difficulty which has no buffs or debuffs . Focused on cutting off Calais, by 1916 had figured out the ropes and took Calais, then cut off and took Verdun. The AI made a few attacks east of Verdun every couple of turns for the whole campaign, maybe 6 attacks in total. By the time I had taken Calais and Verdun I had 1000 National Will to the Allies 300. I was too tired of the game at this point to play any more battles and auto resolved random attacks, lower both sides National Will until the allies lost. I found the trench upgrades to be completely worthless like most of the machine gun nests and mortar pits, they cost too much and have too little an effect.

Its so easy to see how the simple change of real battlefield persistence and more maps could change this into an amazing game. If it was harder to take points, but managing to take even a single one would let you continue from that point then then the grind of the game would no longer be repetitive. Likewise, the AI would have an advantage in that its bloody assaults could have an impact. I really can't overstate how stupid it is currently to have a massive and bloody battle mean absolutely nothing because one point was still standing in the end. Additionally the game desperately needs more maps. In the beginning there were some very interesting ones, but later on it felt not matter where I was attacking from it was the exact same battle over and over.

Honestly this game kinda blows. I remember playing it as a flash game, which I very much enjoyed. However as full game that costs money (I swear I paid for this, at the very least I bought the sequel) and it still feels like a flash game.

Awful mechanics get written off as a purposeful part of the vibe. From things like everything being completely vague (which I understand) to things like not being able to delete accidental buildings which will completely destroy your defensive lines and lose your game. The maps are huge but even with the teleportation its incredibly slow to move around. A loss will quickly snowball because the ratios between the units, the only bit of strategy in the game, will fall out of wack as you have no control over which units you'll get. Oh all your archers died? looks like you are stuck with useless farmers because that trader dropped off nothing but scythes and the scythe store is before the archer store!

The game-play loop exists of running from one side of the map to drop off coins to then run to the other side to do the same, all while waiting for the right time of day to drop them. You are expected to mess things up because nothing was explained, so when that happens you have to start from the beginning and repeat the process.

Although honestly I have been coming back to play this game every once in a blue moon for a literal decade now. Something about mystery to it all, trying to figure out what the random statues do. I think I finally killed that part of me off though because I read the wiki after losing and its all rather lame.