Recent reviews by atlas

It's really good.

I thought the edginess would turn me off, but the game carries itself with the right amount of lightheartedness.

I love the art, meaning both the drawing style as well as the dark but strangely homely setting. The world feels oddly charming and lived in.

The relationship between the two main characters flows really well; the dialogue and chemistry feel natural, and their dynamic being so bittersweet makes it interesting. The often present subtle comedy fits well and doesn't distract.

The gameplay and puzzle aspects aren't remotely challenging, but in a sense they feel more like an opportunity to explore ideas in the way you interact with items and environments, as opposed being puzzles for the sake of being puzzles. I can imagine some people find them a rather boring form of story engagement, but I liked the process of slowly unlocking the scene.

This is one of those games where the vision as a whole is very cohesive and the developer succeeds in showing you a part of their mind, letting you explore it. It feels primarily like someone's emotions, their daydream, and in any case their personal vision, more than it feels like a video game. For that alone, it succeeds as a piece of art, and it being fun is really just a big bonus.

I really recommend it :)

Excellent example of what the game can be. The visuals are realistic and detailed, and SCS have improved since the last released DLC. It seems they've learned we want to drive or more than just highways, and don't want to have to travel 200+ KM to find a place to sleep.

There is a large, diverse set of landscapes, climates, cities and roads. Driving hour after hour through the DLC area, I was continuously being pleasantly surprised by new and interesting environments. Cruising through the countries, there is a healthy mix of highways and country roads, and cities are even more diverse; plenty of wide, multiple lane roads, small town streets, industrial areas, narrow alleys, not to mention the detail in the urban areas.

I love the way you can see far distant roads with vehicles moving on them on the other side of valleys and wide open landscapes, giving the world so much more realism and depth. Being able to actually see way down the road adds so much realism and depth to a game where you often can't see any road except the few meters in front of your tires. One of my biggest problems with this DLC is been how often I get distracted from driving by unstoppable urge to take a screenshot of whatever beautiful place I'm passing through.

I still dislike how some cities are designed. It makes no sense that I make a delivery to the centre of Belgrade, then look for a new delivery from the city, only to find the job I want is almost 300KM away, apparently also "in Belgrade". SCS like to try to artificially increase how large the game world feels with these stupid tricks, but it just annoys me to have to drive around what seem to be giant loops made for no other reason than artificially creating the feeling of a larger map.
Others have complained about toll booths and border crossings, but I think it's handled well and their presence is unavoidable with so many small countries packed so close together.

All in all I think this is a sure step forward for SCS map development, which I couldn't say for Iberia.

It is genuinely absurd to me that this DLC is still something SCS demands you pay for. It's an absolutely essential part of the map, offering the only realistic routes to SEVERAL other DLCs. The worst part is just how low quality this area is; being more than 10 years old, it just looks low quality and outdated, especially when contrasted with the newer areas around it. I actively avoid this area of the map because it's so ugly - it totally breaks my immersion. The textures, scaling, roads, map design, city design etc are a real eyesore and don't fit being physically next to areas created 10 years later.

Why should people be asked to pay for something that is simply bad by SCS's own standards? Why are they still selling in instead of adding it to the base game? Especially when it's essential to other DLCs?

Note: For those wondering about my hour count, about half of my playtime was offline.

I absolutely do not recommend this game to anyone. I thought the story was cute, fun and engaging, but (and it isn't really a spoiler to say) this game has a very sad ending. I took the Nagisa route by accident, which I thought was the only or "main" route due to lack of experience with VNs, but I found her most interesting anyway. I felt genuinely crushed and empty at the end. Perhaps it says something about my life, or even my capacity for empathy towards certain things, but I have never felt a sadness like I felt at the end of the story, a crushing sorrow and despair at not being able to change something so deeply awful. It felt like I cried for the first time in a good few years and I could hardly stop thinking about the story for days.

I don't wish these feelings on anyone. It isn't a bad game, but I just don't see a reason to cause yourself extremely unpleasant emotions.

This is the best DLC for ETS2 to date. Even a year and a half after release, I'm still blown away by how pretty this area of the game is. And it's not just beautiful, SCS managed to really capture the realistic scale of the environment, meaning that despite relatively dated graphics when compared to the rest of the video game market, driving here actually feels like the real place.

More than anything, this DLC just feels "alive". It's not just some highway with some scenery on the sides. It's a whole network of highways, country roads and more, some going through little villages, some cities, ports, industrial areas and more. The urban areas feel like people really live there, and the nature just looks gorgeous, and yet also varied. There are so many unique looking landscape features, and lots of other interesting man made features distributed throughout too, like seeing a big power plant in the distance. This DLC feels like someone actually sat down and tried to understand the areas they wanted to create in game, which makes the DLC feel vibrant and interesting, instead of just a series of roads you can drive a truck on.

10/10 as far as I'm concerned. They really set the bar high here.

TLDR: SCS absolutely nailed it with this DLC, creating a beautiful and realistic environment with genuine depth. The areas in this DLC are much more than just a place to drive, just some highways through some fields, like the base game areas.

- Game crashes regularly and breaks my whole computer
- I don't even get 60FPS despite having an RX 5600XT
- Very little content in the base game, most of it can be found in the more than €2000 of DLC
- Graphics are terrible, which I wouldn't mind, were it not for the terrible performance, and the fact that the game changes its name to contain the current year every year, despite being from 2009
- UI is ugly and clunky

After driving for roughly 15-20 hours in Iberia, I've gotten to see most of the peninsula. I have mixed feelings towards the area, and as many others have said, I wish I could give a "mixed" rating instead of a negative rating.

Iberia is a step forward and a step backward for SCS. In many ways, it's an improvement on previous DLC releases, with much more realistic-feeling map scaling (especially compared to base game areas), and much more variety in scenery, landscapes and textures. Despite this however, pretty much the entire area just feels like one big highway loop. There are almost no non-highway roads, which doesn't even make sense considering the giant gaps between the highways, the likes of which can't be found anywhere else on the map. If you compare it to France, with a plethora of B roads all over the country, not only providing alternative routes but also displaying tranquil little French towns and villages, full of character, then you can tell something is lacking. They are completely absent from Iberia, which feels more like a single highway with gradually changing scenery on the sides.

Even besides the highways, the in-game cities are also a step backwards, quite a big one at that. Gone are the easily traversible grid-like road networks from the base game, and now you have companies in the same city 100-200km away from each other, which can be a real pain, is unrealistic, and feels pointless and forced. I don't want to take a 300km trip from one city to the next, only to deliver the cargo, and then have to drive another 150km to another company in the same city to get more - it's just a huge inconvenience, and it has become a source of genuine frustration that I have only ever felt in this part of the map.

The design of the cities is also lacking, since almost all of them just feel like a giant industrial complex. The cities barely have any character besides a few sightseeing attractions - the rest is just typical industrial square, grey blocks. The opportunity to showcase beautiful Spanish and Portuguese architecture was missed.

I have enjoyed my time driving here and that's why it's difficult for me to give a negative review. The map does feel much more high quality and has much more diverse scenery than earlier DLCs, particularly the ones before Vive Le France. It adds variety to the game just by giving you more space to drive in. However, I think SCS have made a mistake in two major areas: making a "Iberian highway simulator" DLC instead of offering a more varied view of the country, and in also by making cities much more difficult and inconvenient to navigate.

TLDR: good graphics, bad gameplay!