Recent reviews by Downtown1

The game mechanics have not changed for the better.

The way the food works is now you end up barely being able to field 1 army even with 10+ settlements, and once that happens your armies stop replenishing. But because you recruit units at about 1/3rd strength you can barely even go into negative food because all new armies will be at 1/3 strength until you take over enemy farms.

The new family tree is also poorly done, your generals/governors go into low loyalty constantly or gain negative traits even when your food is positive. So you end up having to assassinate everyone if you don't want a full stack army to spawn in your homelands. Even Rome 2's half-baked family tree was better than this.

About the only positive change about this game is that they added a Short Victory condition so you don't have to keep grinding the campaign forever after you become the strongest country in the game. I hope they keep doing this for newer games.

This is a fairly fun game if you like space adventure games. There's a lot of quests to do and the story does a decent job of presenting the universe.

In a market saturated with space sandbox games, having a proper campaign that you take at your own pace is very refreshing.

Fun little sniper/stealth game. Nothing too serious and only 8 missions.

Great remake that sets a high standard for all other remakes, the new UI makes it a lot easier to tell the overall state of your economy. The new graphics are very crisp and beautiful in 4K. This is a must have if you played AoE back in the day.

Only negative I've seen so far is in campaign the population is 50, but in multiplayer its 300.

A fun little mod that lasts about half an hour.

Why is this whole game such a repetitive grind? They could remove all scrap pickups and this would instantly make the game 20% more fun.

How is this a game? Full of empty buildings with no purpose. Even using Google Earth is more exciting than this.

Ok game, worth a few dollars if on sale. Very heavy on cutscenes. Typical action combat (block, attack, dodge, stun, chain combos).

Gameplay and levels itself is extremely linear.

I thought having stomped all the Total War games on anywhere from VH to Legendary I was prepared.. I was wrong.

Great game, after re-reading the manual to understand game mechanics, I barely won both campaigns. Unfortunately I got the message that my side took too many casualties to win the overall war afterwards.

Won on my first game.

The vision system is great, you can only see in a cone in front of you. There's also buildings you can hide in that you can see out of, but people can't see into. There's probably some other vision mechanics I haven't figured out yet.

Weapons feel like they actually connect and do appropriate damage. Which seems rare these days.

But all in all that makes it a fresh take on BR, coupled with small player size making the games very short and more fun. Great for jumping on just a few mins.