Recente recensies door Off-Suit Nines

Welcome to Craft the World: a game that has dozens and dozens of reasons to play it, and one painfully glaring reason to never buy it anyway. It looks good, it runs smooth, it doesn't crash, and it's a charming combination of Motherload and Dwarf Fortress. If you haven't played those games, think of it as a Minecraft RTS. If you don't know what that is... I can't help you.

The monsters are cool, the object interactions are neat, the tech-tree is a bit obnoxious but at least it takes you in the right direction without overwhelming you all at once. That said, I could not recommend this game under any circumstances because the AI is flat broken. Your dwarves are beyond mentally handicapped. Orders given are sometimes ignored, or handed off to the dwarf who is farthest from whatever it is that you're trying to do. Occasionally your dwarves will just wander off or stand stock still and almost nothing you can do will make them budge. They'll walk off cliffs given the slightest opportunity, if there's a group of enemies they can wander into 1v7 then they'll find it, and they'll only rarely do the jobs suited to the skills they've got.

Trying to get these little hairballs on legs to mount anything resembling an organized defense is utterly hopeless. Often they'll ignore the first five enemies, run into the middle of them so they can attack that one zombie at the back, and then pretty much die instantly. The only way to work around the horrible, horrible AI is to exploit the equally horrible AI of the monsters and use terrain to contain them until day break. Or play on one of the easier modes. Both options suck, don't do it, don't buy it, turn and run in the other direction.

4.5/10

For those of you who don't know, Civ 5 was famous for being simple, easy, slow, boring, poorly optimized, and almost completely broken. It took two expansions and more patches than can readily be counted to fix it, and it's still only really worth it for the immersion it grants you in the history of our world. For the first year it was out almost the entire multiplayer community snubbed it completely in favor of its predecessor, Civ 4.

This is mechanically and spiritually the same game. The story, the flavor text, the setting, and the appearance of the game are all new(ish). However, almost everything else in the game is a gussied up version of Civ 5. Same culture, same resources, same resource management, same global resources, same complete failure to understand the game's mechanics in a balanced and sane manner.

The game is still poorly optimised and will try to crash your computer on every load even if you meet the recommended system requirements. Load times are long and waits at the end of turn can be excruciating. Oh, and the AI is flat out dumber than a bag of rocks. First time I played I set the AI to cheat slightly and still easily doubled the next highest score in the first hundred turns. Two of them declared war on me at the same time and not only did I defeat them, I slapped them down so hard that they gave me some of their cities for free within ten turns of their invasion beginning.

In short, everything that was wrong with the coding of Civ 5 is wrong in this game too. Every. Single. Thing.

However, now that I'm finished tearing this game a new one for being a blatant cash grab and barely a better mod than some of the user made mods out there, let me say that there are some definite improvements in a few areas for this game.

1. Your Faction: Instead of picking from a shortlist of decent civs, you now get to customize your own. Some options are still blatantly better than others, but it's still worthwhile to experiment.

2. Aliens: Much more interactive than barbs, but still very simplistic. The uncertainty adds tension, but makes for a random element that will detract from balance in multiplayer games. Nonetheless, a solid improvement over barbarian mechanics.

3. Quests and Tech: These allow for a customization of your civ, allowing two different players to enjoy very different styles of game unlike the single path that Civ 5 restricts you to.

What I'm saying is basically this: it's a fun game. It's interesting, it's enjoyable, and it's ultimately probably worth a $25 expansion cost. What it isn't is a different game from Civ 5. Seriously, if you own Civ 5, keep playing that. If you don't, buy whichever fits your prefered genre.

Do you like composing your own unique race, building vast empires, playing the complex game of politics, and waging war with obscenely customizable fleets of ships? I know I do, and Endless Space pushes all those buttons just right.

There are so many options that the game can seem intimidating at first, but the UI is incredibly user-friendly and easy to navigate while the game comes in varied difficulty from granny mode to juggernaut levels of play. You're not going to understand the whole game at a glance, so if you're looking for something no more mentally challenging than an FPS, this is not the game for you. However, once you do grasp it, it provides you with the tools to play the game in new and creative ways every single time.

Since its original creation this game has been updated and expanded(mostly free of charge) into something far superior to the original product. Critics rightly pointed out the flawed combat, semi-bland universe, and wildly unbalanced starting situations in multiplayer. However, every single one of these problems has been thoroughly handled by the devs at Amplitude. The universe is still not top of the line in terms of interesting story-telling, but the combat has been fleshed out to an absurd level and the unfair luck of the early game has been almost entirely eliminated.

In short, if you like 4X strategy games, get this one. It's currently the most solid one on the market due to the horribly botched coding of Civ 5. If you don't like them, don't bother, this game is 4X to the core with nothing particularly unusual to offer a player who doesn't care for the genre.