Recent reviews by Questionable

choo choo im ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dead

the funny fish kissed now im ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dead

but its okay because this bunker is very safe :)

nvm everyone has slime stds and i'm ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dead x10

got it for 30 bucks pretty good

Unplugged my brain in the first couple hours and got an ending type 10/10

Review is subject to change as development progresses.

First off the good:
The vibes of this game are impeccable, never have I felt so claustrophobic in a wide open space, I've never played a game like escape from tarkov but the constant feeling of fear and dread from being a tiny little bug of a man skittering about between swarms of cyborg zombies, tweaking trigger happy soldiers and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ blood-feuled murder-mechs stomping around where the only saving grace is that all these hazards aren't solely on the hunt for you and will prioritize fighting each other over squashing your little bug-man ass. The tone, the aesthetics, the setting, absolute peak.

Then we get to the reasons this is a no.
#1 reason that will apply to pretty much everyone is the water system, almost every review mentions this, basically its some AAA brainrot meant to incentivize you to log on X number of days or lose all your ♥♥♥♥. Its bogus and needs to change and most likely will.

#2 reason that applies more strongly to me and probably many other people is the simple matter of hardware requirements. This game is super demanding, like most of the new fancy groundbreaking games (a similar issue I had with Space Marine 2), as much as the devs pride themselves for taking the game's design and aesthetics in a direction antithetical to standard triple A designs they still have fallen face-first into the other bog-hole of triple A design which is designing their game for a theoretical future where everyone's playing games on super-computers, ala the Crysis mentality, whether they did it consciously or not.

The fact of the matter is that the majority of people aren't playing on renderbeast 5000 computers, game devs and streamers are very much an exception, especially in this economy the average person can't afford a giga computer and in my case even though I set all graphics to their lowest point I consistently get 40-ish FPS at most. Luckily the raw design of the game means I don't mind the slide-show effect that much but its still something that needs to be accounted for. Even when graphics are set real low, the game is very demanding of CPU resources, especially when you boot it up the first couple times.

Changed to a yes after the release of Grand Archives but still a bit tentative for anyone who isn't a big Stellaris head.


Machine age was an absolute smash hit massively overhauling core systems and expanding heavily on ideas put in fairly early in Stellaris's life.

Cosmic Storms is a considerable plop as of right now, barely noticeable and quite disappointing as a dlc of its own. Its like the the Espionage system had been its own DLC and not a subfeature of the Nemesis dlc, really undercooked. Still waiting on a revisit to the espionage system to make it usable btw... Have to click through 3-4 menus just to get to a screen where I can even see any of the espionage info let alone actually do any espionage...

Grand Archive has quite a smorgasbord of content, new space fauna, new ways to interact with them and a collectathon megastructure mechanic that lets you grab souvenirs from the plethora of events and activities littered throughout the game. Its a more-of-the-same DLC but in a way that's a good DLC if you already like and wanted more of that same.
At the moment the new space fauna are pretty disappointing, in my games they kind of just get eradicated by midgame and the new tradition trees are really underwhelming especially since the devs continue to refuse to expand the maximum number of tradition trees you can pick, not really a problem if you play with mods but I still like the vanilla game to be a good, strong foundation rather than leaning on modders to "fix" content.

If you're a Stellaris old-head who's thousands of hours deep and just buying everything like me you already bought this and this review isn't for you.

For people just picking through the DLCs for whatever has actual content in it this one's near the bottom with things like the species packs, its just pure flavour and you kinda barely notice this dlc. The storms are at best an early game speedbump at worst completely irrelevant and that's just deeply disappointing.

i want a bird sanctuary building

This game is like queuing for an hour to get on a rollercoaster. Its all about whether or not the rollercoaster is fun enough to justify the busywork to get to it.

An SSD is mandatory for this game, attempting to run it installed on an HDD causes seriously bloated load times and performance issues as the game loads assets on the fly (the most immediate issue being the intro cinematic to the campaign stuttering, crashing and desyncing audio when attempting to load while playing it, even with an SSD it still stutters and freezes unless you pause it and wait a minute).

Other than the requirement of being installed on an SSD performance is surprisingly good once you get into the game however when attempting to play with the heavily promoed coop and operations game mode you quickly run into serious bugs that hamper this, the worst being the "thunderhawk bug" where entering the operation start area causes you to be dumped back on to the battlebarge with most assets unloaded and no menus working, while I figured out how to solve this it isn't obvious and is a massive frustration for players.

The tutorial is also incredibly lacking and does a horrendous job of teaching you the core mechanics of the game which can lead to immense frustration, only the operations trials which are practically hidden unless you know where to look give you a proper practice tool to familiarize with the games core mechanics.

While this is in many ways is an incredible game it runs up tot he simple fact that this is a heavily marketed AAA product with a colossal budget and big corporations behind it and releasing a heavily unpolished and outright incomplete product like this for 70 USD (100 NZD for me) is frankly appalling.

Edit: Playing more with the DLC it isn't *entirely* a flash in the pan on the timeline as the megafauna setting basically creates a second version of barbarian camps in megafauna dens which are like a combo between barb camps and tribal villages and they can stick around pretty long especially on higher difficulties and give you a nice boost with 0 upkeep megafauna units you can acquire (they fall off quick but are nice early game) and various exp rewards which come in real handy.

The new Messengers National Spirit is also fairly strong in its niche, not outshining any of the others unilaterally but allowing you to acquire a massive population boost to your homeland and acquire a LOT of outposts/pioneers which are very valuable (you just gotta protect them) if there's even a few nearby neutral minor nations.

Original Review:
This is definitely a maybe, see if you like the base game before considering this as its kind of just fluff on top of what the main game has to offer.

The upsides is, its more millennia, you get a new national spirit and a new government type for the early game, pretty cool.

The downside is, the new mini-era at the start of the game where you're crawling out of the ice-age barely lasts a few turns, along with the megafauna present, its really a blink-and-you-miss-it thing with all of the features being bundled up in the early game.

Its flavorful and cool but it really is just fluff at the end of the day unfortunately. The only thing that actually persists into the later portions of the game is the Messengers national spirit, since all the unlocked bonuses persist the whole game unlike the government bonuses.