Recent reviews by Smurfosaurus-Rekt

A fun game, but considering I completed it in 3.5 hours, ~£17 is too much for it. Buy on sale

Great game, ♥♥♥♥ publisher

Update 26/05/24:
Just saw that they're blocking the game sales to countries with PSN only. The further Sony stays away, the better this game will do

Update 08/05/24:
Sony reversed their decision to force this. Behold the power of steam reviews!

Old review:
Why do I now need a PSN account to play a game I own on PC?
No thanks Sony

Otherwise, fantastic game that I'd wholeheartedly recommend. Seems that the publishers fingers are getting a little to meddlesome.

The detail and authenticity are great and there's the foundation of a solid game here, but its buried behind awful UI and the menus are an absolute maze.

Better RPG than Starfield

Shoutout to the guy at TI who, when asked for their reaction to the new hero (Ring master), said:
"What? oh sorry I wasn't paying attention.... " because he was playing Dota underlords.
He then shouted
"update Dota underlords!" into the mic

A true hero

As large as space, as deep as the Moons atmosphere

All in all / TLDR: Its a fun game if your PC can run it. If you enjoyed CS1 then you'll enjoy this one. Hopefully its a new foundation for a load more mods which just keep adding to what there is on offer.

I'll start by addressing optimisation then say about gameplay. I have a pretty new high-spec PC (because BG3 melted my old one) and I haven't had any issues with FPS. I've got a 4070RTX, 64gb of RAM and the processor is a decent one. But I appreciate that the older computers will probably struggle with the amount of entities being loaded in by the game all at the same time.

Now to review the gamplay:
I really like it, there's a lot which is identical to CS1 and some of it is improved and some is made worse.
Examples; the good:
The power distribution and plumbing is transported via the road rather than only via pipes + building proximity. Sure, you can put down piping it if you want, but it will come with the road anyway. This means you can just lay down new roadworks and, if the road you're connecting it to is already hooked up, you don't have to worry about cabling and pipes. This is very nice and saves a lot of tedious work.
The bad:
Road laying now has quite a lot of unnecessary minutia which often results in unevenly spaced roads. There's a grid setting, which is great, but doesn't play nice with existing roads as the intersections don't match up. Another would be the demand for high density residential (nothing wrong with that) before its been unlocked, causing loads of messages/radio pieces complaining about the lack of housing when its not even been unlocked yet.

There's also new stuff as well, which I think make a great addition. Things like the progression system (rather than just expanding the city with different town levels, you unlock points which you can then use to unlock buildings - you don't get too many points, so you have to choose what you invest in). This is actually really fun and I think it does well to make the player actually think about what they want in their city. I didn't care about having highways, but I instead wanted to have some good energy options. So I invested in those instead.



If any devs read this:
- Please address the road snapping so its less janky
- Please remove the demand for high density housing before the unlock!

This game melted my 9 year old PC when I got to act 3. So I had to buy a new setup that would last me another 9 years. The new setup arrived and immediately reinstalled and started playing BG3 again. One of the best games I've ever played

10/10 worth the ~£1700 I spent on it

New review as of 29th of April 2024:
TL;DR You're now purchasing a game, not some random software

Ok, so this game has sat in my library for ~a year now. I saw the "For science" patch which added a load of content and have been playing it a bit more, and I can happily say that its now worth your money. Its still got its issues, sure, but where before you were playing for a graphics benchmarking program, you're now paying for a game where you actually explore rocketry which is fun, informative and beautiful to boot. I sat through all the tutorials and they're expertly done, where KSP1 had checkbox tutorials which were difficult to get through, this has well broken up and expertly explained information about how to be a rocket scientist (on Kerbin). That said, it would be good to have some tutorials on orbital transfers (and how to properly calculate them) and orbital rendezvous. The additional content they're adding is ambitious, but they've been delivering on what they promised so far, despite the backlash, so I'm confident they'll deliver (unlike most devs in recent years). Some have complained about the speed of these updates, but I'd much rather have quality updates that are semi-regular rather than weekly updates which feel like they have to push something out. In short - let them cook, support the game and you'll be rewarded with quality content.


Old review as of 19th of June 2023
The "About this game" section says it all with 80% of it being "key features to come during EA" - you're not buying a game, you're investing in something that is still being worked on. A lot of the core mechanics (even parts) are still not in the game and all patches since EA launch (4 months ago) have been bug fixes and they've only just made a dent.

I love KSP and would actually be ok to do this for KSP2, but the amount of missed deadlines and over-hyped content strongly suggests a disconnect between the devs and the marketing department, something which, historically in game dev, doesn't bode well.

I really hope I'm wrong and that KSP2 turns out great, but I'm not going to throw away £45 just in hopes of that. Hold off is my suggestion but keep an ear out on YouTube or similar to see the rate of progress.

EDIT: Since Relic has become its own entity again, they've been doing lots of updates on CoH3. Its changed quite a lot, and mostly for the better!




I really hate to downvote this, but its a solid 'meh' that is getting worse . I really liked CoH2 and I think this one improves on a lot of the grievances of that (e.g. over-arty shelling making infantry obsolete). I like the campaign and, while its not going to win any awards for its story, its a refreshing way to add some continuity to a skirmish manager. I only play single-player and there's a couple of which are great for adding the entire roster to each faction for all units (means you don't get shoe-horned into only a couple of 'key' units), so my review won't talk about the multiplayer aspects.

The pros:
- I like the unit balancing, the need for infantry even in the late game is pretty nice, and you need to keep up your mobile HQ to ensure you're not losing your best units
- Animations and tank engagements are good, I've found myself a couple of times just watching 2 evenly matched tanks duke it out to see which one is the lucky one (hoping its mine). I feel like that's a difficult thing to get right, but they've done well there. Also, if a 2nd tank comes along, it will shift the balance quite realistically.
- I like the variation of units for each faction. There's a good variety of tanks, infantry and support units that allow for a well complimented army.
- I love the ability to tow heavy weapons.

The cons:
- Pathing is awful and is somehow getting worse with each update. The final straw for me writing this review was watching my tank get stuck against another friendly tank in a field (no obstacles) that was trying to retreat - they just stared at each other and didn't move. Generally the pathing in CoH games has been lackluster, but it seems they set themselves a personal challenge to make it the worst yet before firing all the devs for this one. It is genuinely the worst pathing I've ever experienced in any game.
- The vanilla roster for each faction is lacking. It's pretty much a race to get to the big tanks and steamroll through with them. Mods help with this, but shouldn't be relying on mods to make the game fun.
- The campaign mechanics are pretty bad. Lots of unexplained options or annoying forced actions (e.g. you can auto resolve this big battle, but you MUST play this little skirmish that makes no difference). Lots of extra actions like shelling with your arty brigade... but they don't really do anything.
- And finally, the main reason you shouldn't buy this game: the updates are making the game worse, not better. I think this game has a good amount of potential, but only if the devs know what they're doing/actually improve the game. Recently Relic fired most of the devs (I don't know if they're being replaced or just downsizing, but the core dev squad is gone) and whether its new and incompetent devs or big-wig execs pushing the devs to peddle pure ♥♥♥♥ , I don't know - but the final result of their input adds a minor amount but breaks a major amount. Let me give you an example. The latest patch added a new map (isn't that what the workshop is for?), not particularly something that players were desperate for, but it also tried to fix a whole bunch with planes. Instead, planes now 'die' but then fly around a bit more and crash in a random spot. On top of that, there's also a couple of bugs where pointers are gone or the map gets warped (because of destruction) beyond its bounds, so you click somewhere and it doesn't register because the mesh is warped. And this was a minor patch . I'm convinced that pathing is worse too, but 'awful' and 'abysmal' are quite difficult to distinguish, i guess...

TL;DR:
Game had potential upon release, but poor management has meant that this is already worse and doesn't show much promise of getting better

TL;DR even that last bit:
"It's dead, Jim"

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk