Recent reviews by ZetaHorzion

Beat you back to Age of Empires!
Not much to say besides I still like Rise of Nations more. But this game is also good, and probably has a bigger fan base to play with.

Experimental, unique, fanteastic.

I gotta be honest, originally I was opposed to the game, as it does a lot of things differently compared to the original installment. But my, idk love is still to great a word, but friendship, grew with the time playing the game. The story is on par if not better than the original. The car acquiring system is several times better than the one in the original, while the driving is a lot worse imo. Police is both, more and less forgiving, depending what action. I feel that they are too quick to start shooting even for just speeding. On the other hand they do not care if you break half the traffic laws. The worst about the game is how finicky, pedantic and arbitrary it is about what it counts as crash. In the original game and partially even here you need to push cars out of your way because the AI has a dead brain moment and if you happen to have bad luck, the game thinks that you just caused a mayor crash and will alert the police. Additionally, while you can count on it, it's still very startling that the AI decides to continue driving/walking if it sees you driving towards it and just right before it would pass by without you hitting it, it decides to stop and you end up crashing into it. The car crash hell is only getting bigger by the cars being an uncontrollable mess that end up not gripping the ground if you are only thinking about taking a turn. While I hear that this seems to be somewhat realistic, I cant imagine to that degree. If the game had something like freeride as the original game did, I would probably play it a lot more than I use to, as many of the mechanics scream for such a system, the car acquiring, the police heat reduction, the shops. For the normal playthrough, there is almost no reason to do any of this, especially the shops, as you almost always have enough ammo. Its usually the times during the mission when you are nowhere near a shop that you need it the most, but then those shops are useless to begin with. Yes I guess the Jimmy DLC is making use of it, but who honestly plays those missions, as they are mostly just score and time based objectives, which are even imo too tightly designed. Oh, speaking of missions, some missions that take place in a separate part of the map or are at least unconnected to the city for the time of the mission, are usually way too big for the content that is in it, like the harbor having a large area, which only 1/10 has actual stuff you can interact with or can collect. And while I could complain a lot more about similar stuff, the game ends up still being not too shabby, though you can feel that it was released at a time when big studios started to give less crap about the people playing the game, and more that people buy em. And while its definetly not as bad as current big studio games, you can see the early symptoms.

The best worst zombie multiplayer game you can play. The gameplay is repetetive and the selection of maps small. But it's the community (you probably know everyone at some point :P), the quirkyness of the game makes it unique. You always know what you are up to and is great if you wanna just turn your brain off and fire. I come back every few months to progress my level, see how the game has been up to and enjoy not thinking too deep about gameplay.

Ok, here we go. Once you have finally set it up for linux, there are two mayor issues which I have yet to find a solution for. The first one is that saves that saved later might still appear below/between earlier saves, which is annoying in the case you need to reload. The other issue is the lighting. I think i fixed it to the degree that anyone is able to, but the transition from light to dark is very poor and the dark in this game is in many cases too dark and is only fixed with the flashlight augmentation. Besides that, the non lethal stealth options are poorly made. As many will have written before, the tranquilizer darts are basically useless. If you happen to come across the baton, its great if you happen to hit the sweet spot, the aiming for that sweetspot is partially so bad though, that you either need to uncrouch or reload saves often. The game would profit from a stealth indicator as Thief The Dark Project/Gold has, as you would know how likely you are to be seen. Otherwise the weapon options are great, depending on how you skill. I personally think the sniper rifle is a bit too overpowered even if you do not skill for rifle. Melee weapons ended up being my favourite weapon, you might know which one specifically if you play the game. It's also nice that a lot of locked/secured paths that you can take to an objective can be unlocked either by lockpicking and circumventing them or using computers to breach security. On the matter of computers. There are a lot of them, security terminal included, with many having unique login details. It's annoying that the ones you hack you dont get to save the emails to notes, which makes rememering even short credentials very tedious and if you cant remember them in one go, needs several rounds of hacking the same machine to get them. Additonally, if you login, you also need to remember the logins from your notes, as you cant have the login window open while looking at notes. Otherwise it's very rewarding if you find them and saves time hacking them. It's also advisable to have patience and wait for certain scenes to play out and also to speak with people again. So yeah. Good game!

Overall a very enjoyable stealth game. The gameplay while wonky at times, is overall very good and allows for much abuse of gamplay mechanics. The dark techno soundtrack alongside is suprisingly very fitting and makes the game unique. The story told is coherent and fits very well. The two things that I am mostly mad about in the game is one of the missions added in gold, people who played the game will know it. It's unecessarily long and complicated. I think I stayed around 2 hours in the level because the hints were a lackluster. Additionally, in the final mission there is a mechanic used that is known. How do I put it without spoilering it? I guess you could say you only find half of the final mechanic in the prior levels. A minor issue for me is that sometimes hiding in the dark with an unaware enemy passing besides you causes them to see you and sometimes not. I wish that were more consistent. Otherwise great game. Please play it.

Never has a game destroyed me mentally in this way. One of the best narrative games I have ever played.

*Lights cigarette* "That's one tough case"
I can really recommend this game. The gameplay is a lot of fun and you learn new stuff with almost every case. Works on Linux via Proton, even on the potato like my machine (though I would recommend something along the lines the game recommends). Has some nice customization options. While bugs do occur, you can usually somehow get around them, but be sure to save often enough so one bug doesn't set you back a whole game session.

Uh, empire big!

I've played several City Builders before, but none made me such invested in my citizens. As is, it's already a very enjoyable game and very stable. I personally play it via Proton on Linux, and it works perfectly. If you enjoyed Banished, you will enjoy this even more. The customizable plots and seasonal hiring, are great. Please support this game, to make it even better.