Recent reviews by Sun

TL;DR: Wait a couple more years before buying or get it on sale. It's a tough bargain given how this game plays and it is not friendly to new players in any way. It feels like it hates you and you need to work with it when it's fighting you

This game has a level depth that is unmatched by any other city builder I've ever played but has the highest learning curve that there could possibly be in any game. However this plays with the fundamental issue I've always had with this styles of game: Countries are built by people with a unified goal, but this is asking one man to do it all and understand every piece of it. Is it possible? Maybe, but it does not feel like it is possible for me

Every time you play, you are in a race against the starting cash to set up a functioning economy, but the chances of breaking even are slim to none. You will always end up in a death spiral. If you play the campaign like I did, then you know the first mission is easy. You can just barely finish it, but the second level's ask is enough to put you in the spiral before getting through the first set of objectives. They throw every single little element that the game has, minus a couple of the nuanced mechanics, at you and tells you to figure it out. There is no hand-holding. I both respect and hate it for that, but it leads to the death spiral. To put it into perspective, I've played the second level 8 times. Over the course of 110 hours of game play, I have failed every single one of those. It is crushing to have thrown away that much time for nothing.

The biggest problems are construction and man power: Construction, in theory, is a brilliant mechanic. You supply all the resources yourself to build buildings. If you do not use this, you are going to be paying through the nose for every little piece of construction. However, you need an immense amount of resources and more importantly time for even the tiniest things. Not to mention, useful construction materials are usually not primary products. They are far down the chain, or stuck behind research and then far down the chain. I have no doubt that this could be a skill issue, but it has been consistently happening and directly ties in with the following fault, manpower. Soviet societies are built off the people and the game takes this to heart. The issue is that you will never have enough to fully saturate your workforce. Early game, this is a slight problem, but when you have a full city taking up a not insignificant portion of the map and still struggle to fuel all your industries it becomes ridiculous. Not to mention, research is directly tied to the number of educated people which makes it an exponential growth as research is done in universities (As an aside, you have to split between research and educating people which is almost realistic but directs you to having two universities of the same kind, one to do each efficiently. You also cannot have two separate universities studying the same thing). The issue that this all culminates to is time.

As stated, you are in a race against time. You will always find yourself losing it. No matter how much you push or how much you export. You cannot produce enough to be safe until the end game. My definition of that, it is when you can turn a profit. It comes from a sense of entitlement and apallment that I am sad to say I have never seen that. Again, could it be a skill issue? Certainly, but never even getting a hint of that makes me wonder why I spent my time playing this game.

I should've spent more time writing the positives of this game, but there are fewer than I would like to admit. Everything about this game is unintuitive at best and disrespectful to the player at worst. The UI is egregious. It is impossible to find anything and the tutorials on them are helpful to understand basics, but actual gameplay demands more than they give. The pathing of vehicles (which is one of two fundamental elements of this game) leaves much to be desired. The amount of trucks that will randomly stop midway through an intersection, or trains deciding to loop around the map until they run out of fuel are more innumerable than one can believe. Worse than that is the way that road segments are decided because they are easily the most annoying part of the game. I do not want to give examples because it's a little hard to describe but know that making buildings and roads fit together is an endeavor that makes me want to kill myself. That's not being dramatic, if anything it's generous. Worse still is semaphores and the way they split railways at intersections which can only be described with guttural noises of agony and a primal rage I have not experienced since playing.

I so desperately want this game to do well and play well. It is exactly what I am looking for in a game, but just is not quite there. Everything is lacking, or hurting in some way. It is all a point of grief. The developers can make things better, but I feel as though they do not, or cannot, fix these issues which make the game frustrating. It is brilliant, but it just is not there. If I knew what I knew now, I would not buy this game. Give it more time to polish up before you buy.

hehehe hohohoho monke

Some occasional visual bug, but gameplay and graphics are stunning.