Recent reviews by Isildur

Alright game, but mods are practically a must otherwise it gets stale after a while.

Here at Paradox, we don't pay the playtesters, the playtesters pay us

They can take our money but they can't take our Deus Vult!

Honest Hearts is in my opinion the most underwhelming expansion of the bunch. The worst thing about it is not that you have to limit your inventory to 75 pounds (or 100 if you have the right perks) to even access the DLC. It's the shallow story in comparison to the other DLCs.

There are 3 main tribal factions, which could have allowed for some interesting decisions and replayability, but no matter what you do you are accepted by the same two factions and hostile to the third one. There's only really one pivotal choice you have to make, which is either to evacuate Zion or fight off the hostile faction. Either way, you still have to fight them and the endings aren't that varied as a result.

The DLC itself is short compared to others, with main quests that are mostly either scavenger hunts or marathons. Also, you can inadvertently lock yourself out of the main storyline by accidentally shooting a main character that appears near a bunch of hostile ones at the very beginning. So don't try that unless you have a backup save handy.

On the surface, you can play this game like any normal action game and be done with it in a couple days. But that's not how Hitman 2 is meant to be played, and it shows. There are so many nuances and hidden details within the game, and secrets in every map to discover, that there's easily dozens of hours of content, even more if you purchase the GOTY Expansion Pass that unlocks all the remastered content of the original Hitman.

For example, the sniper levels may seem bland on the surface, only requiring you to take out a few targets and ten or so bodyguards, but try shooting things in the environment to take out your enemies and the reward is much greater than just taking the brute force approach. And that goes for everything else in the game as well; you're actively encouraged to try new methods and find creative solutions.

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For the moment, my review won't be recommending this game, but this is only due to the multiple issues currently plaguing the game at launch, many of which I hope will be fixed.

I really like the overall premise of this game so far, and I was hyped for it from the moment of it being announced. It shows plenty of promise in areas where EU4, CK2 and the like were lacking, offering much more ways to engage in internally managing your country from setting up trade routes to appointing actual characters with ambitions to positions in government, with inspiration taken from previous PDS games. Even your country no matter how large has its limitations and challenges you need to overcome, E.g Rome's Senate, countries with low religious unity etc. And don't get me started on the amazing job they did with the map, being easily Paradox's most detailed map for a strategy game yet, giving unparalleled tactical depth.

But in the current state of things upon launch, the game still suffers from the same problems their previous games did. Certain aspects (ESPECIALLY naval warfare) feel barebones and combat and sieging seem hardly changed from EU4. There's also a surprising lack of flexibility and polished UI compared to what I was expecting, with no music player (That feature was in EU4 AND HOI4!), and hardly any options to customize the multiplayer experience with no co-op feature; instead we get a "gender equality" button. It also lacks many QoL changes present in previous games such as the ability to go straight to the peace tab in one click. Additionally but not surprisingly there are some major bugs present such as the loading screen being completely black.

The result of this has historically been that many DLC and patches have been needed over a long period of time to make these aspects feel more meaningful and/or polished. And until then, I regrettably can't give a positive review for this game.

1449 in real life:

Mongol army of 20,000 despite being outnumbered 25:1 capture the Ming Emperor and almost destroy half their army

1449 with Mandate of Heaven:

Ming takes out the Mongols and makes everyone around them their b*tches, all the while reaping the bonuses to stay ahead of everyone around them in tech and never go below 50 mandate.

"Tags: Simulation, Historical"

Paradox, I love your games, but god... WHY? The new Leviathan DLC launch was so monumentally bad, it's now the first ever product on Steam to reach a single digit rating. It made the game close to Cyberpunk levels of unplayable. Broken, unfinished or comically unbalanced features, bugs everywhere, unstable performance and even crashes. Then the day 1 patch introduced a bug that corrupts save games erasing all your progress. The worst part is, even if like me you didn't pay £15.49 for the DLC, the free update screwed over the game anyway. After this whole fiasco the dev studio manager made an apology that was so disingenuous, he had to remove it. I had to post this because it's sad to watch one of my favourite games sink to this level due to incompetent management, or whoever else you want to blame.

Written 03/03/19

So I didn't realize I was still praising this dead shell of a game until now with my old review. But if you don't know what I'm talking about here's the deal.

I invested a lot of time and money into this game after I first got it and back in 2014-15 the game was brilliant even though it was ageing. Valve kept releasing new updates to keep the game fresh like Love and War (which was what got me into the game), End of the Line, Gun Mettle and Invasion. TF2 felt like a solid arena class based shooter experience, the one where you could pick a server to go into and start having fun in less than 2 minutes. The customization was the best aspect; you could outfit your class with cosmetics or give them items that can combo to counter their weaknesses.

Although the customization aspect has thankfully remained largely unchanged, in mid 2016 Valve decided they wanted TF2 to be more of a competitive shooter. Their decision to overhaul the matchmaking system and add a competitive mode was clearly driven by needing to compete with Overwatch, and to bring the game more in line with the more profitable CSGO. And this is where I had to draw the line. The "Meat Your Match" update seemed fine on paper but had terrible execution. You had to wait at least 15 minutes to get into a game and even then you had no control over what map you were put in, how stable the server was or even if you were put into the start of a round. You could wait 1 hour to get into a game that had just ended.

Thankfully a lot of the more broken aspects of the update were fixed but even still the damage was done. I was sticking out with TF2 initially when Overwatch came out but Valve's decision to release an update that made the game almost unplayable changed that. Many players including me have now left the game and moved onto others and I've rarely played this since then. And for those that did keep playing TF2 the lack of any kind of update for over a year until late 2017 made the game dull and uninteresting which also informed my decision to quit.

TL;DR: This 12 year old game has got to a point where it's no longer fun or rewarding due to Valve releasing subpar updates for it and throwing it in the trash to focus on its newer titles (DOTA 2 etc.) It's an astounding achievement for any game to be still relevant on the Steam charts for this long but as with Half-Life, at some point we have to accept that Valve isn't going to make a third instalment.

Edit for 2020: This game is seemingly in an even worse state now than when I wrote this with lag bots and crash bots nuking casual servers, and problems keeping even the source code of the game under wraps.