Recent reviews by STLshuttle

Story is meh, cringy and forced drama. Everyone acting like B tier soap opera on TV.

Gameplay is fun at first when you build your first pack of buildings. After that you just do it again and again and devs dont even give you proper tools to manage a big base with large amount of buildings. Basically just plant enough buildings down to get to the next part of the story. And because they made a whole planet for you so they put the next part of the story is really far away from your base. So you only have 2 choice: 1. Building a completely new seperate base with no resources from the main base ( Slow and tedious ) or 2. Connect the new base with the main base so they can share power and resources but you need to build a lot of buildings to connect them ( also Slow and tedious ).

Worker AI is bad. They dont share the work and for some reason they auto split into district and hub. So only the closest worker get chosen to do all the work. You can easily find case when closest worker get over 100 pending load and the one next to it get 1 pending.

Optimization is bad. All the pointless building you build will make 1 of your CPU core go 100% utilization. The end game base will cut you fps in half or even worse.

Base game is enjoyable and relaxing. DLCs are a bit disappointing but its acceptable when you buy them on sales.

Relaxing and beautiful art. But the basic story makes you like the protagonist less. Gameplay is boring and too simple.

I played Tropico 4 5 6 and this game is the weakest. Feels very weird and different from the other 2 games.
The research feature locks you into a 1 way monorail, you cant even choose what you want to research first.
Lots of visibility issues. Cant find tiny floating quest marker above building. Cant find the mines. Cant find oil and fish in the sea. UI is less clean and clear than tropico 4 and 6. Buildings are boring to look at but also no distinct looks makes it hard to recognize or find the one you are looking for. Trees blocking so much vision when you want to build road correctly. Farm efficiency grid has moving wave of colors make it hard to see. Weather and daytime filter only makes the visibility worse.
Tutorial and Campaign are bad as well.
Rebels running wild.
Radio and voice acting is disappointing.
Just get 6 if you are into tropico, a much more refined and polished tropico game. No reason to play 5 at all.

Even with removed MTX feature, this game still has grindy remnants in it.
Story is somewhat okay but too little and far apart.
Combat gets boring fast. There nothing new after the first quarter of the game and you feel like you just spam hit orc to get to next part of the story.
Nemesis system is cool the first time you build your dream fortress with all your handpicked orcs. After that you dont even care about them and just want to skip their self intro.
Controls are weird, outdated and clunky.
Low effort DLCs. Boring and grindy. Only Blade of Galadriel dlc has story in it. You can watch that on youtube, dont really need to play a more boring version of main game Talion to get the story cutscene.
=> Buy it on heavy sales if you like LOTR, All DLCs are skippable.

This game is a mess. Story as everyone knows at this point, Its a badly written B-movie that you maybe watch it once or just straight up skip it.
Game play is not fun. Unpolished game, multiple bugs and some questionable design choices keep wearing your enjoyment for the game the longer you play.

When i first started the game, it bugged and throw me into the Engel head chopping cut scene hence i never played the wheel chair part. You can even check my achievement to see that I finished the game but never unlocked the fergus vs wyatt decision in first chapter.

Lighting in this game is atrocious. Either you barely see anything in the darkness or you get blinded by any light source: 1 simple light, your own muzzle flash, etc. Hell there are some level the devs think its not enough an they make the enemy use spotlight directly to shine your face.

The game is a wolfenstein game with dual wield mechanic, you would think dev designed this game for you to run and gun blasting nazi. Your ms is fast. Enemy is quiet spongy. HP/armor/ammo scattering around the map.
However, they also made the enemy to be some kind of sharpshooter division in nazi army. They have deadly accuracy and the reaction time that makes you feel like you are playing PvP fps CSGO, Cod, Battlefield. The best way for you to survive is to hide and peek out to shoot enemy. But then your weapons have really bad spread at distance. Best you can do is tapping or burst with your assault rifle.
And because of that, its so hard to use any other fun guns because you will die so quickly. Heavy guns are also out of the question because you are slowed when you use it. and the 1s or 1.5s spin up time to shoot is enough for enemy to burst you down.

Damage indicator is really badly designed. No low hp indicator.
No actual boss fight. The so called last boss fight of the game is stupid. They just put tough enemy into the closed area, double it so you fight 2 of them at the same time. Add more common soldier to sneak around and flank you to make it hard.
Why is it hard? because while you using heavy gun to fight the boss, common soldier just sneak around and burst you twice to kill you. Shoot them with the heavy gun? You are at disadvantaged because heavy gun are slow and not too accurate for that, or its explosive and you also blast yourself. Switch to another gun? The switching speed is slow af and the weapon switching system is horrible in the first place.
The "boss" itself, you fight by hitting it until you break the first layer of armor. Then you keep shooting until it dies. The same way you fight a MMO boss with health bar. Hit it till it dies. Very cool.

Maze liked levels with no minimap, no clear indicator of objective. Lots of time spending on finding the right way or the prompt to advance the story.

First part of the game sucks hard. It is stupidly hard because you are handicapped with 50 HP only. Also your main character, BJ is now a depressing, whining guy in grief. Levels are so uninspired. You run a maze, find the prompt to go to cut scene and then get thrown into another corridor to find your way.
The game only get better at 2nd half when you get more tools to play with. Sometimes it reminds you of Dishonored franchise when you get to pick the upgrade and have multiple ways to approach the level ( Dishonored dev is Arkane studio also worked on Wolf 2). But then its just half ass and never get fleshed out. They mostly just replace a corridor with new way for you to use upgrade. It doesnt really change the game much.

Very disappointing game. Worse than TNO for sure.

Worse than TNO in every way except rail arcade shooting. Much more boring and empty.

Controls, movements feel so slow and horrible clunky. Even opening the menu for settings feels delayed. Tried this game on free weekend and noped it out of my wishlist.

Cool city builder game with Mars theme, thoroughly enjoyable but with UI and stats menus are the weakest points.

This game has nice new idea but you should watch this game on youtube/ twitch where theres commentary to fill in all the long and boring part of waiting and slow walking. Also you can avoid the bad control of the game if you choose to watch instead.