Recent reviews by The Jiggle Pickle

ROCK AND STONE!

Plays more like Democracy 3 than a survival sim--spend more time micromanaging BS citizen stats than actually building a functional settlement. Big shocker, people are sad in the ice apocalypse and if you cant make them happy by an arbitrary deadline (which you cant because of other arbitrary timers), whoops you've been banished. Did you want to keep building your city? ♥♥♥♥ you, buy the expansions. Would be nice to get mods for this game instead of paid DLC that was not supposed to exist. Would not recommend.

What can I say, its an early access game.

There are bugs.

The combat system has a ton of potential but the unit AI can be...special.

But...

The tech tree's are awesome, the game is beautiful, and as it sits right now it is more complete than any Civ game that has launched (you know, release 1/4 of the game and then publish the rest in 3 "expansions" that are just features that the core game should have had from the beginning)

If the devs don't fix the bugs (specifically the game breakingly derpy combat AI) by release i will regret paying $24 for it and would recommend it for $10ish instead and i will change my review appropriately.

EDIT: Not sure how I missed this from the devs--Why Early Access?

“Oriental Empires is almost complete, lacking only the multiplayer feature. Since many players will only be interested in single player, we are making it available early for them. The early access period will also serve as a final shakedown period for the game, to help uncover any remaining significant bugs or balance issues that still remain, and allow to us make final tweaks based on feedback from a larger group of players than the beta team.”

This game is nowhere near complete. I have yet to be able to finish a game without it randomly hanging between moves. The City combat is nonsensical--a single broken unit can take your fully garrisoned city for some reason? Do not buy.

Not really sure when a survival genre game became Call of Duty, but this game can take all of the silly perks and level stats and keep them. I'll stick to Damned, where the killer/monster can actually be scary and the "average" survivors arent as tough as Space Marines.

You cant even revert a save and try again. This ♥♥♥♥♥♥ game mechanic went out with the SNES for a reason.