Recent reviews by Mr. Snook

Great game, very challenging. You have total freedom over changing every lever in the design process and seeing how it impacts all variables at play. You can totally focus on making 'the best' car for one demographic or trying to capture as many as possible. I highly recommend starting off small and learning the game through trial and error, there are also some great videos on YouTube that can help learn how each variable influences the final car as a product. For me, the emissions standards are the most difficult, but once you understand how it will 'guide' you in regards to engine development, and by extension car/model development, you begin to understand the challenge between making an emissions compliant vehicle which also appeals to the market. Every decision you make is a matter of resources and how to allocate them, thinking of the current market as well as the long term and how best to balance those objectives and priorities. This game has a huge amount of replay value, do you want to perfect a certain demographic or step outside of your comfort zone and try making a company with a whole other target demographic or style?

Fun game to play with friends. Scary, but not necessarily stressful, nice game that you don't have to take too seriously because part of the fun is the randomness and replay of each run.

Buy the boombox.

I really enjoy CS2. Yes there are performance issues, however I turned down the settings (taking advice from the day 1 email/guide to optimise performance) and it performs reasonably well. I am running an i9-9900K, RTX3080, 32GB Ram, and CS2 is on the M.2 drive. With this setup do I want to run on higher settings? Yes, very much so, but the game is playable. If there were stutters it would drive me crazy, I would rather lower until the game is better optimized or I have a more powerful computer (yes, I do expect to keep coming back to this game). In my opinion its important to keep in mind what CS2 is currently: it is what I would have wanted after CS1 saved the city building genre. I loved SimCity games, but they had to hand over the right to be the flagship series to CS after Maxis failed to innovate and released SimCity (2013) which was a horrible disappointment and truly showed that Maxis was not in touch with what people want in a city builder. Lets face it, CS2 is a big jump forward even with performance issues. We have a lot of features and improvements, not just in terms of baking into the game a lot of expansions that modders paved the way with, but a serious improvement to the core simulation of the game. I think Colossal Order is on the right track with this series. This is a big ambitious jump forward, such jumps dont always go smoothly! The level of detail and complexity in the simulation is incredible, so is the price-point for such a project. I know that I will pay for in the long run with the Paradox DLC machine, but I will probably do so gladly (as I do with other Paradox games). Looking forward to playing this as the game expands over the years to come!

Love the game

This game is highly addictive. I would say that it takes time to learn & master similar to Paradox grand strategy games, learn from mistakes and failures. The game has so many options and factors going on that it definitely doesn't feel linear in any way, forcing you to set long term goals and then having to understand when to change your short term goals and priorities as the situation dictates.

I recommend watching YouTube tutorial videos to get a better feel as to how it plays out. If you get the game, then it may be easier to play three factions instead of the full set. Only because it allows you to understand how the AI (Human faction and Alien faction) act. Just makes it a little easier to keep track of the factions and learn how to counter factions and focus a bit more in my opinion.

Dont get the game if you dont enjoy pulling up game guides of looking up concepts. This game has so much more content than the vast majority of early access games, but for that trial and error learning you will need to google a few things (e.g. how to federate countries, how to diplomatically annex other countries, how to form the EU, etc....). Overtime you will actually need to learn where a lot of the pertinent information is for influencing nation state politics, but then you will learn from experience. In my case those lessons where #1 learnt to form the EU too late, which makes it easier to defend a huge economy, and that making the EU declare war on Russia will just result in Paris getting nuked. In the process doing a lot of damage to the EU at large, and causing two of my operatives to die in the nuclear attack. Lesson #2, if you want to lock down Europe ASAP (which really isnt hard) and then you start wondering why you cant unify EU nations even after you have developed executive control and consolidated power in EU nations, its because there is a cool-down timer at the start of the game, similar to the one which occurs after you federate two nations before you can unify them. Lesson #3, operatives can be assigned organisations which either boost the operatives stats, your faction wide stats, or both. The cost of them vary, but playing with combining different orgs to different operatives lets you minmax them to your play style. If you are like me and enjoy assassinating any enemy operative of organisations which go against your vision then this is how you can make one super assassin by stacking an operative with the correct background to boost his/her stats in espionage (and intelligence). Anytime I see an unknown enemy operative in the game, I know that they wont last long.

As long as you don't mind (or in my case enjoy) playing very intelligently made games that force you to ask why and then find out for yourself (there isnt any hand holding, which to me is a positive) then this game is for you. The options and freedom to execute your main objectives makes me think that this one will definitely rack up playtime in the hundreds of hours in no time. Excited to see how the devs support this game until full release.

10/10, highly additive games that will make you keep thinking "one more turn before I stop" until you realise you just dumped 3+ hours in one sitting without realising it...

The formula works well, well paced game which is much more forgiving than Two Point Hospital (which is great in its own way). A nice relaxing management sim that blends the silly approach of the series well. Its fun to spend time tweaking the campus for the first half of the semester, while then spending the rest of the semester planning for the next cohort.

Great game, even on day one. Cant wait to see how this evolves over time since we all know it will only get better and better.

Can form Canadian Confederation 10/10

The game-play and immersion is amazing. I have spent hours enjoying the game, not focusing on the main story, but immersing myself in the world and taking in what it has to offer. I'm not even close to bored or loosing interest, it still feels fresh and gives me the feeling that it has even more to offer.

People can complain about the lack of detail on some background characters or the AI, but lets face it, the Devs clearly put a lot of hard-work and soul into this game. The game isn't perfect, I don't know if any game has been perfect upon release. They are limited by the technology of the times. I'm happy with the performance I'm getting, and hope that I get to see a few more frames as it is optimised with future patches. 60-90fps at 2K on an RTX3080, i9-9900K, 32GB ram, and installed on an SSD. Settings are not fully maxed out, but close, with RTX on. It runs better and looks way better than other games, so CDPR have clearly done a very good job with the game performance wise. I'm thankful to have a computer that I can fully appreciate this game with, but best of all I feel as if I am getting the performance I deserve and should be getting. Its not as if I get below expected frames or stutters playing the game, which I sometimes get on other games, which leave me feeling as if it is undeserved low performance considering the specifications of my computer.

I highly recommend this game, especially for those who can afford an RTX30 series. To me this game is the defining example of current generation graphics capabilities. The story and characters are also well written so the game is not only well rounded but also excels in many defining categories, making it well worth the time.

10/10, would ♥♥♥♥ bricks again.

In all seriousness this is a lot of fun. I am not typically a fan of scary games but this game is a very entertaining group experience. Best played with other friends, really takes co-op to another level. Game play does not get old, yes the ghost can sometimes generate in the same part of the map, and it could use a few more map options, but spending time trying to guess which type of ghost it is really does keep you on your feet and it makes the game feel challenging even after hours of play. Just dont die, the 'after death' portion is something that the dev is working on making engaging, but it does not yet allow you to add much besides waiting for your team mates to finish or end the map.

Excellent game