Recent reviews by Freakonomicon

This game won't get a positive review from me until they remove the ability to lean while walking sideways and shooting in an open field. I understand the feature as a means to peak around corners, but not to screw up your hitbox while using a sniper from the top of a rock. This is literally my only complaint about this game, but it's responsible for losing 50% of my kills

Started out on a swedish Island.
Annoyed all my neighbors and seduced their women.
Made my way west and annoyed the English.
Became a pirate king.
Made my pirate kingdom into a pirate empire.
Subjugated all of Skandinavia just by being awesome.
Took the Mediterranian islands and locked everything down.
Annoyed the Byzantine Empire until it broke apart.
Reformed the faith so I could marry my own daughters. to become the leader and make witchcraft legal.
Conquered Rome in 5 months and stole the Pope's hat.
Melted 40.000 Catholics at the coast of Wessex when the pope launched a crusade to take back his hat England.
Skipped all research by creating an Anglo-Nordic hybrid culture.
Got annoyed at all the people trying to join my overpowered space pirate empire.

10/10, incest space pirate simulator

So, I've spent 5 hours playing road construction simulator and here's my take:

>> EDIT: BECAUSE THIS IS IMPORTANT
>> With the hotfix patch, the performance considerably improved and it's now running on
>> 60fps with very rare stutter, as long as the camera angle is not too flat

Overall, Not great, not terrible.
The game runs, had no major issues so far. Some design choices are a little bit questionable, for example that I can design a detailed road grid, but not control which lane should be allowed to go which direction, like we can in Infraspace.
Otherwise the road snapping and autocurving is a little weird, but I can live with that, even though I wished that the prefab intersection were a little smaller.

Mainboard: Asus ROG Strix Z790-E
CPU: Intel i7-13700k x16 + Fractal Design Kelvin S24 Water Cooler
RAM: G.skill Trident Z5 DDR5 2x16gb
GPU: Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 8G (Upgrade pending)

I own two 1080p screens, since 4k is more or less obsolete for most games, especially when you're upscaling and not actually playing native 4k. There, I said it, come at me

Yes, performance is lacking
No, the game is by no means unplayable
I can't tell you what my framerate is while playing, because the game doesn't tell you, but from experience it must be around 50 (amended to 60), with (rare) microstutter. Turning off Depth of Field helped greatly and effecively doubled the framerate. I turned down a few other things that, if I'm being perfectly honest, I don't need in a city builder simulation where 90% of the time I'm invested in some sort of informational overlay, grid-building roads and have neither the time nor the capacity to fawn over unnecessary eye candy. That's what photo mode is for.
After having been invested into my road works for like 15 minutes I didn't even really notice the stutters anymore and they're certainly not a valid reason for the game getting review bombed by people who don't know how to build a proper PC
That said, playing games consistently on 1080p60 is definitely a mid 2010s luxury. High end gaming has only really gotten this accessible in the recent years and it turns out that this was enough to turn us into a bunch of spoiled brats that can't stop demanding more.

Other people have commented that the framerate gets worse with larger cities/more citizens, which is exactly true to the genre. The same thing happens in Timberborn when your world reaches around 300 beavers on a beefy pc like mine.
This IS indeed an optimization problem but C:S2 and Timberborn handle this issue a lot better than for example Castle Story, where the number of characters is very limited because the game becomes actually unplayable if you go over that number. THAT is bad optimization.

Edit: What I also realized, because I haven't encountered literally ANY of the gameplay bugs that other people have, is that these bugs could very well be caused by the lacking performance, or rather by the machine "dropping decimals", aka losing accuracy, because something is bottlenecking. I can't really tell, because I haven't encountered these bugs, but that's my take. Also, the game DOES actually look better than C:S1, at least according to my gf, who owns it

Started out as an unforgiving pvp survival game, turned into an fps with the poorest optimization ever.
Latest version added a memory leak that uses up all of your RAM, until everything crashes.
Used to be able to host a local server on my machine to play on without all that pvp ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
No I have double the RAM, and a brand new CPU, but the game just crashes anyway

This game went the same way that many early access went after they sold too well. I followed it since the beginning and I've tried again and again to play it, but it's just broken and they pushed for release in this broken state. The AI is useless, the camera control is atrocious, just like the stockpiling.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the concept, I'm always on the look for games like this, the style is cute and the optics are really pleasing, especially the lighting at night, but nice graphics don't make up for broken mechanics.
And there's already such a huge amount of shovelware in this particular genre, it's just sad. It's a thing that people want to make, but they always get in over their heads and end up with way too much money way too early, because everyone and their mother wants games like these and buys them too early and too expensive

Dev Cycle of this game: "The controls and camera are clunky and unintuitive, let's make a new interface!" "The AI is broken and useless, let's make a new interface!" "The players get lag spikes every few seconds even on fast computers, let's make a new interface!" "Look, I know all these things are still broken, but at least the interface looks nice now" (spoiler alert, it doesn't)

Seriously, Bricktrons overproduce and leave stuff on the ground when there's not enough storage. Three bricktrons take out three wood each for a job that only needs one, then drop the surplus on the ground and fill up the storage with new wood instead of putting it back. Also Stockpiles start off accepting everything and you have to immediately set them to empty or the bricktrons will fill them up with ♥♥♥♥ and destroy all of your stockpiling systems
The camera can't move freely, it's bound to a vertical rotation axis, a height and a distance parameter and the controls are completely unintuitive and annoying.
The enemies are neither thoughtfull nor original, just a pain in the ass (especially if they decide to tunnel up to your elevated base, instead of taking the walk around the map like they're supposed to)
Building works pretty well with the exception that you can't build architecturally soundly, because there's basically only 1x1 and 1x2 building blocks.
The fact that your initial spawn is randomized and you can't chose it, breaks the defense and conquest modes even more

This game started out with promise and a huge budget and ended up as an overprized, broken and unforgiving tower defense game

tl/dr: Was good, turned to ♥♥♥♥, can't recommend for newcomers or casual gamers, might aswell just play CoD at this point. There's load's of BR games to play instead (Fortnight and Apex not included)

I have a love-hate relationship with this game

Well, at least, I used to. The game also used to be fun.
After frags were nerfed and the the gun options overall were imroved was the best time for this game, then it went for the "sell pointless merch" and "appeal to kiddies" route and now the game is full of kids bunny hopping around like they're on crack and spraying everyone down with automatic fire while barely aiming. Essentially pubg turned into CoD.
The only other kind of player you meet because they already killed everyone else are the lvl500 pros with 2000+ hours, complaining about how they're constantly getting reported for cheating without even realizing, that they're not only ruining the game for everyone else and the players that are actually trying, like me, are sick and tired of getting harrassed by players whose killcams look like they have no recoil and deal heatshots from 20m without actually aiming even though the bullets should go absolutely EVERYWHERE and not conviently grouped onto the target, especially WHILE moving around like you're walking on hot coals.
And before you accuse me of "just being bad", I've been consistently able to get back into the game after weeks, score around 5 kills per round and make it into the top 10 (with a few chicken dinners even), until the last few changes where you can't even chose a map anymore so you have to constantly change your tactics and suddenly you only play against people who can win the game with eyes closed. I'm beginning to think that all the casual players like me just stopped playing because of this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. At least that would explain why there's random maps only.

Developers killed the game. Used to be quite good with the right robot on the right map. Now, with the rng drops, I can't even get anything I need anymore. I don't know if there are so few players left, but the matchmaking is all kinds of ♥♥♥♥♥♥. Constantly get teamed up against teams with 4 times the cpu rating and robots that pretty much tear me apart in 3 seconds with their mega weapons, while my standard weapons don't even make a scratch. Meanwhile the devs just cash in on premium players and don't give a ♥♥♥♥.
This game was fun, I loved it, but by ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up the matchmaking and adding the mega weapons, that only premium players can afford, they pretty much ruined it

Solved 15 Puzzles, but...I just can't even anymore, because this is so frustrating.
This Game cracked my head open like a squirrel would crack a walnut.
Did someone actually solve more than 20 of the Puzzles? You know and I thought I'd already think abstract.

11/10 makes me feel stupid