Recent reviews by TiredDaemon

I completed the first age, so I am still fairly early in, but overall I find it to be a better and more engaging base game than civ 6, with one truly painful flaw (UI has serious challenges), and a handful minor but annoying issues.

The good:
The core game loop is great. It feels like civ but less bound to the historical legacy of how civ has always worked. It reminds me of the change from Civ 4 to Civ 5 with the shift from square spaces on a map to hexagons and how that changed gameplay. I didnt mean to play for over 4 hours last night, I just accidentally did and realized I had to go to sleep.

The graphical fidelity and overall clean feel of the game is great. They have a ton of small touches that make the world feel more alive and less static.

The changes and addition to Army commanders, separating out ages, civs from leaders, all feel positive with and add more depth to the gameplay. I expect some people will hate not being tied to a single civ all game, but I view it as crafting your own civilization, which it does quite well.

I don't know how crises play out in late game, but the early game ones were a blast. I loved the anti snowball mechanic as it let me still feel powerful and mostly in control, but balanced things out between myself and the AI more.

Which brings me to the AI, it seems smarter than the prior games without the blatant cheating Civ always defaulted to. I still expect cheating at Deity, but I appreciate an AI that seems to make real decisions and plans.

The minor annoyances:
Some things are just flat out missing like the ability to queue up tech or civs so you have to go in every time and select a new one. It seems unnecessarily burdensome and is a glaring absence from prior games. Also building queues and how you shift between what you are building is missing the shuffling functionality of prior games. You can still move buildings around in queue, but its now inconvenient to do so.

The big problem:
The UI is great at a top level simple read for normal gameplay. When you know what you want to do and how things work you can do it fairly easily. However it is missing a ton of detailed information. Want to know how much health a city has left versus units when in combat? Good luck figuring it out.

How about which tiles you are using in a city, and how to optimize yields in different ways? Can't view it or figure it out.

What about digging into how cities interact with roads and how trade routes work? Oops, the civpedia entries seem to either be incomplete or flat out missing.


So to summarize, the core game is fun, I'd argue the best for a vanilla civ game probably ever, but the difficulty or inability to find granular information when you want it makes me feel less in control of my decisions than I should be, and it is problematic to the point it does distract from the gameplay.

Valheim is uniquely compelling in the survival genre due to his sense of exploration, genuine enjoyment in doing tasks related to base management and base building, and the harsh but mostly fair punishment system upon character death.

Its most significant weakness is its sense of progression being extremely linear and tied to unlocking specific materials one biome at a time. There is no flexibility in approach, and you are gated from skipping steps.

It's a very strong blend of simplicity and complexity of choices when building out characters. The story is slightly weak, but the gameplay mechanics both for characters and for enemy types are varied and consistently feel meaningful. There are a variety of strong late game choices and you don't feel hemmed into doing a single specific action over and over again.

The 1.0 launch is rocky from a server stability standpoint, but that isn't surprising given the massive CCU they now have to contend with,

It's a well done crpg, with overall compelling story, combat, and varied experiences throughout it's worldbuilding. The character customization is significant and let's you build in whatever way you want. The drawbacks are it's bugginess and balance. There are some surprisingly high number of alignment based problems, and it seems every other combat something goes wrong due to a bug. The game is still very compelling throughout, but it seems many systems are more fragile than they should be.

VR experience is fairly poor unfortunately.

It's a better version of mount and blade warbands. It isn't really innovative in any meaningful way, but an overall refresh with better graphics, slightly better AI, and more nuanced actions are now possible.

A combination of the best of guitar hero, virtual reality, and a fitness game, all rolled into one.

The game and music are very bad. The control scheme is incoherent, and the spelling and grammar are unfortunately nonsensical. Would recommend to my friends!