Recent reviews by Alien Mole

Came out of the gate in a rough state, but after a great deal of community backlash CA has increased patching frequency and pledged more content to balance its inflated DLC prices. Call me cautiously optimistic.

Original review below.

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I enjoy the game - enough to have pre-ordered every previous DLC announced. I just uninstalled it, and I don't know when I'll be reinstalling.

This game has massive, massive potential. I've played about 1000 hours across the trilogy, and where 3 should have been a culmination of everything it was building up to, it has so far become a case of 'what could have been' rather than the inevitable triumph the trilogy's progression suggested.

The game launched in what felt like an early beta state at best, with severe enough signs of undercooking that many of the newly introduced hero units didn't have a large enough skill tree for the player to be able to spend all of their skill points at max level. Many tech tree options were bizarre, useless or nonfunctional.

18 months on, the tech trees have seen no meaningful change, but at least CA are disabling the 'unspent skill points' popup from showing when characters no longer have unlearned skills available. Huzzah.

Pair that with resources clearly being underallocated in terms of patching frequency (three months of the Nakai the Kroxigor Lord - a paid DLC leader - not being able to recruit Kroxigors, which mods fixed with a single line of code) and 18 months after release, the game is now in a state that feels like... late beta.

Devs: thank you for everything you have been able to do on whatever meagre budget management makes available.
Management: do better. -Be- better. And if all else fails, just hire the Community Bug Fix modding team, as they clearly care about WH3 infinitely more than you do.

Feels like there's a potentially very solid game at its core - and I've definitely had a few genuine laugh-out-loud chuckles in the first three missions, but the game has a glaring issue that makes it impossible for me to enjoy the way I want to enjoy builders/colony management sims for any length of time.

There is no pause button. It certainly looks like there's a built-in pause functionality as the engine keeps running but the simulation pauses when you pull up the Steam overlay, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to actually pause the game so I can tweak my rooms and builds without feeling rushed.

I play this type of game to relax, and the lack of a transparent pausing functionality currently makes me unable to do that because any time spent tweaking rooms is time that my station might fall into shambles.

Can't be hard to implement, but I will be waiting until that feature is added.

Very, very excellent. Equal to or better than Theme Hospital in essentially any way I can think of.