Recent reviews by Johnny Stokino

I got this at 80% off. It is barely worth it with the discount.

Be careful of the setting screen where you set the brightness and the one where you set display options. If you change the defaults, there is a bug that will result in weird colors/contrast. It has been there for more than 9 months. If you set both screens to default it should be ok.

Unlike Fifa23, the anticheat is slightly improved this year in that the game actually starts. (OMG EA is overachieving). Albeit the first startup will be slow as it installs scripts and said anticheat.

You still can"t do career mode with a female player. Why is it so hard?

The anticheat is mainly why the review is negative. I am ok with anticheat protecting multiplayer, but I don"t do multi-player or online competition. So I don"t appreciate that an invasive anticheat is interfering with what programs I run outside the game.

If you must make things so difficult EA, you can easily add an option to permanently disable FC24 online competition on my license and keep the anticheat disabled while I play the single player mode. Right now if it decides it doesn"t like the programs I"m running on my machine it crashes the game (without save). Why is it other games can do anti-cheat without affecting single player modes? Maybe they just hire better people eh?

I have watched every star trek series/movie ever and played every trek game game in the past 45 years. This is an excellent one. It gets what star trek is all about. That is to say the storyline, game design and writing are top notch. Sadly where the game fails is that it is what I call (console snobbery). When it is showing you controls on the screen, it will often be the console controller button it shows even if you don"t have one hooked up. The keyboard controls are not customizable. If you press Esc to open the menu it works but if you press escape again to return to the game, it asks if you really want to quite! *facepalm* The movement mini-games were clearly intended for a controller. This is really lazy work for an otherwise excellent game. I have seen 1 man show games that allow customizing the keys. The team lead should have had higher standards. I also hold it against them that they went for a 1 year epic exclusivity deal depriving us steamers of the chance to play. That"s just excessive. 1 month would be reasonable from a business perspective. Despite all that I still recommend it to any Star Trek fan.

This is a worthy replacement for SR2020 with the performance issues resolved and a few features added. They plan to add the WW2 dlc soon. Although instead of cold war they seem to be doing an unrealistic covid/Zombies inspired dlc (yuck).

I rate it for what it is. This is primarily a global military simulation. It does this very well, and the type of weapons included are more realistic than any other game of this type. You will find it very limited in all other aspects (economy, country management, diplomacy etc...). The ideal game would be the military system and general stability and quality control in SR2030 married to the more comprehensive politics, country management, graphics in (power and revolution) which is ridiculously buggy in comparison, but it is unlikely we will ever see anything like that.

The only major SR2030 issue to me that ruins all the fun is the trade system which is very poorly designed. Basically whenever you initiate a trade the answer will come back later within 0.5 - 2.5 game days. That delay would be ok (realism as the game dev said when I asked), but the major problem is with how they implemented it.

- It is extremely unlikely a purchase of more than a couple of units to buy from a major power will succeed. They will have one of the items unavailable by the time the answer comes a couple of days later, and the whole trade will be canceled not just the unavailable part. (they lacked one or more of the items you wanted to purchase)
- It is virtually impossible to buy any military units with any country at war, they will be damaged by the time the response to the trade comes a couple of days later and the whole trade will be canceled, not just the unavailable part.
- Buying designs off another country is a nightmare. You pick the designs you want to buy, then a couple of days later you get the answer and the whole trade will fail because (you lack the prerequisites for 1 or more of the traded designs). You won"t know what you lacked, and they cancel the whole thing not just the ones you lack the prerequisites for.
- The global market is almost always empty (no units for sale) eventhough countries seem to have loads of units available that they are willing to sell

So when I contacted them about this the only excuse for lack of instant diplomacy response was performance in that doing the deal right away would take too long because they have to go through the whole database to filter the items that will (not could) cause most trades to fail.

There are many ways to handle this. Personally I can"t believe they spent so much time and effort working on a new sanction system before fixing this major trade system flaw.

For example they can:
- make the trade succeed with the remaining items that don"t have an issue (payment adjusted proportionally). Making the trade fail is like a punishment and negative feedback when the player did nothing wrong to deserve it.
- prefilter the list in the background before the trade is even requested so that technologies the player doesn"t have the prerequisites for are not available to trade. They only need to do this calculation for the player"s country. Once initially done (start of game filter would be prestored in the database for each playable country), this only needs to be updated when the player completes research which is already very limited (by the number of research buildings and research duration).
- lock the units that the player requested to trade until the response is returned that way there won"t be 1 item missing that ruins the whole trade
- Fix the database issue that is making filtering a performance issue (change db type, hire a consultant to optimize the query, create database indexes etc....)

Basically this means you are discouraged from playing a small or medium country and building it up since inevitably no matter how well you fixed your economy, you can"t defend yourself since you can"t possibly build the necessary units or have the necessary tech to build decent units before you get picked on. Yes it"s still a decent game for this genre despite all that.

Other nice to haves besides fixing the above show-stopper would be:
- add a slider in settings to adjust research speed
- add a slider in settings to adjust building speed
- add a slider in settings to adjust unit build speed
- add an option in settings to adjust building maintenance cost (starting at 0 eliminating maintenance)
- Make all settings adjustable while playing (ctrl-alt-shift-s), currently only some of them are there
- In the resources screen (agri, ore, oil, etc...) have an option to auto reject all trade requests for that item. What happens is I want to buy electricity and if I enable that option, I get none stop trade requests for me to sell electricity which I am not interested in. Also why am I getting them even if I lock the minister from that tab, and set the sales tab to sell (0 items), (0 excess) and the maximum price. That seems to be a bug. A substitute would be if the enable electricity trade was added to the CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-S screen since strangely this issue doesn"t happen with other comodities.
- country themed music, or customizable music (i.e. I put my mp3s in a folder and when I enable the option the game plays them)
- let me change leader name/picture, and upload my own flag
- Some notification when I achieve space race milestones (whether someone else got them or not) would be nice. Ideally this is a small animation with voice and music!
- The notification for achieving the research breakthrough should include all the info that appears when you hover over the item in the research screen (i.e. impact on stats, what units, building and research options it opens or improves, the popularity impact on local and international population etc...), and hopefully a picture! You can use AI to generate all those pictures easily and cheaply now.

I had refunded the game when it first came out because it was pretty much identical to democracy 3. In fact they had actually removed D3 features and policies no doubt to resell them as future DLCs. So why did I buy it again? and why am I recommending it. Well despite the vendor trying their best to rip everyone off. The modders fixed it for them and made it worth playing. I highly recommend the D4 overhaul and expansion mod. Zero credit to Positech Games who are hopeless...

It"s a single player game. Yet, it installs an invasive Niknuvo DRM which aggressively monitors which apps you run and interferes then freezes the game. This is unacceptable. BlackMark is happy to offend their paying customers just to try to stop the unscrupulous elements and should reconsider their priorities.

Utterly useless. The audio cuts out and then the game is unplayable. Don"t bother. Another outdated product.

A lot of love went into this game. The voice acting is great. Combined with the story, you actually care for the character. Although there is no time travel here, it reminded me of Life is Strange. Also they didn"t forget to include lots of humor which is essential!

The puzzles are just the right difficulty to be challenging without frustration or grinding. Although there is some timed actions required occasionally which I"m not fond of. that"s probably the only thing I didn"t like.

The robots are cute and original in their sounds and reactions.

Even the controls are so well thought out. There was a scene where you launch a shuttle for example and there"s a zillion controls in front of you. They put you on the spot to do a certain launch task and you have to figure out which control to use and how. It was exciting.

I mean I saw some games that want you to click and hold the mouse while performing complex circular motions or quickly press keys to increase immersion and make you feel like you"re part of it but that"s amateur hour compared to this especially since the control scheme is keyboard friendly.

Apparently this follows another game in the same universe, possibly why there is a museum scene at the beginning where you catch up on the history/lore but I didn"t feel like I am missing anything to enjoy this story.

Think of it as (The Talos principal) with a more conventional sci fi plot and an engaging storyline.

I have never heard of the developer but will definitely follow them from now on!

Boring. There is very little incentive to keep exploring and discovering. It feels dead/soul-less and that applies to the music and graphics. Even the dogs that pull the sled don"t seem real or worth caring about. You take the sled around the map and yaaaaaay you found a new object now you can build a couch, or a light or if you"re lucky something useful. If you like this genre, play a real game like (Don"t starve) instead.

Released 4 years ago, already 2 years past the planned early access date, practically unplayable. Yet very suspiciously the reviews past and present are positive.

In some cases they decide to be a technical simulation so you can"t do anything in a city remotely until you travel there and buy an office but if you buy a stock and do nothing else, you get emails that you incurred enmity and a threat to leave the state.

A politician isn"t loyal to you until you fulfilled their ambition 6 or 7 times, you could buy them a yacht or free shares but no they won"t vote for you until you did it 7 times.

There is no delete all button on mail for the hundreds of enmity messages you get which don"t even explain the reason and to make sure it is extra annoying, you can"t delete an enmity email until you confirm a second time as if it is something important.

You get enemies for states you never traveled to and don"t have an office in.

The UI design is awkward especially the company controls, auctions and voting.

I only needed to buy 1 official to allow women to vote in Texas in 1870. If only the suffragettes knew it was that easy.

Overall there there is no sense of purpose, you run the clock to get some income all the while getting mail because someone decided to increase the pay rate at a company you have shares in but there is no flavor.

The only sense of achievement is that wohooo you got an experience star and you can spend it on new skills.

Buying a luxury item which is pointless because everyone knows what you bought and the first official you try to bribe will ask for it. Why do they decide how I can bribe them? and why would they want shares in a specific company as opposed to any shares of a certain value or the cash equivalent?

Instead of increasing the politicians loyalty for a bribe, you can substitute it for a 1 time use of a fixer but no, the fixer doesn"t become available to you for a cash payment, you have to do another bribe to use them again. So they don"t like money regardless if it is an assassin or a courtesan, they only work if you get reintroduced to them every time. Ridiculous. The introduction should be a 1 time thing.

I don"t know if it is true, but it seems like the game was conceived and designed by an accountant :D

This game is so well done. It is excellent Sci Fi (cyberpunk flavor). It"s kind of like living in the world of WestWorld (if you"ve seen the movies or series).

The graphics are phenomenal. I was worried when it spent a long time optimizing shaders the first time I started it, but it was worth it. I have seen games with a 10th of the graphic quality but this runs smooth as silk.

The story-line is very interesting, with writing and voice acting to match. More than any game from a relatively unknown developer.

It"s also more relevant than ever in 2023 with the AI chat bots and the Turing test within reach. There are actually factories mass manufacturing humanoid robots which when connected online can mimic scifi android level intelligence.

All that and it"s a fun game too. At the end of the first episode (one of many), there is a moment where you will gasp and so it begins!