Recent reviews by Wonton

Conceptually the game is captivating so I bought it on impulse. In practice, the game has serious feature bloat. There are a lot of ideas which could be really fun, but right now it tries to do everything and fails at everything.

This review is coming from someone who played a lot of Wargame from EE to RD.

I was a little skeptical at first, I mean "Steel Division: Normandy 44"? They couldn't have come up with a longer lamer name. I don't think it would be hard to come up with a better alterative, like say "Wargame: Normandy"?

The gameplay itself is actually a lot different from Wargame, to name a few:

• Vehicles don't have fuel anymore and can't drive through tree lines
  
• Focus is on suppression, morale, surrendering
  
• Units are harder to kill
  
• Infantry can't regain squad members
  
• Air combat is totally different

I like the game. I'm pleasantly surprised myself, I expected to say "oh this game has less depth I'm going back to Wargame," but Eugen has done a great job so far with the open beta. I don't have too many complaints, I'm looking forward to more maps and battlegroups. I think my ultimate opinion of the game depends on having a large array of unique units and lots of different terrain to fight on.

I hear a lot of complaints from people who expect the game to be just like Wargame, especially complaints about AAA being worthless. While I think AAA could use a tiny buff on suppression, I think the new mechanics are a fun change.

Great game, excellent balance of simulation and fun. Not hard to get into and may seem uninteresting at first until you get into the depth of combined arms (unit composition), positioning, and overall strategy.

First off, I didn't buy the game until steam release (which I was really psyched about) but I've been following it and watching gameplay for a long time. I personally don't recommend it but here are some things to consider.

• There is no mode for you to try all the various ships. You start in a tiny cutter and work your way up.
  
• XP gain is atrociously slow. It takes 1000XP to get out of the starting level. I get around 20-50XP per match. Matches last 10-30 minutes so if you do the math that's going to be at least 3 hrs just to get to the second level.
  
• There doesn't appear to be an easy way to navigate in the game. There's a map but you can't deterimine your position. You can't even draw on the map to plot your course (no one back then would sail without plotting on a map so this is a huge oversight).

The obvious pluses are

• Beautiful graphics
  
• Intense realism
  
• Functioning open world

All in all I was sad and disappointed that I won't get to enjoy the game due to my time constraints.

I really wanted to like this game but I can't.

It has way too many bugs, it was heartbreaking to see my astronauts die when they had all the resources to save themselves but the game pathing didn't let that happen.

So I dumped 6 hours into the game, crashed and burned several times, and now ended up with a $550M in cash and $1B in stocks.

The early parts of the game are very well developed with a good balance of macro/micromanagement. I think the game just needs more polish since many of the interfaces are extremely clunky. I despise those silly radial menues that are so hard to control. They remind me too much of Castle Story.

I also think there is serious feature creep. If I was making this game in the game, it would be a medium scope game with recommended 5 developers being written by a single dev. Stuff like distribution and project/hr management are really good ideas but the amount of code required to make them functional/useful/interesting would far exceed the scope of this game.

Here's some more of my opinions/advice for the developer

-I don't think a UML minigame is medium priority, more low priority.
-Need way better server management system, I mean come on you can't be seriously asking me to manually place 200 servers
-Need better furniture management system, I mean come on you can't be seriously asking me to manually move 200 servers
-IT requirements are too low. I have a ton of servers all managed by one IT guy who works only 4 hours a day.
-AI companies are really weak, by year 4 I was worth double any other company in the game
-There's an opportunity to develop a really cool financial system - play Railroad Tycoon II to get a feel of what I'm talking about. The current system is a bit lacking.
-I don't think loans scale up. The max I could ever borrow is 100K.
-Salary management is a massive hassle. I find myself just hitting accept & close every time because manually going through 50 employees is not worth the 5K/month.

There's a lot of other stuff but the main point is that the game is already pretty fun, don't ruin it with features you can't implement right that will crash/bug out the game.

Congrats on going full time, I envy you.

Unfair matchmaking makes this game frustrating for new players. It's quite stupid when an enemy can simply stun you and casually float up to eat you while you have nothing to counter with.

As a software developer I couldn't help but see how people have tried to gamify my job. Helping the creators of World of Goo was another incentive to give this game a shot.

My verdict is if you can solve all of the problems in the game efficiently and quickly then you pretty much have a good grasp of very low level programming. Real world programming is not nearly as tedious or disorganized (well, not all the time) but I found the game quite enjoyable and worth my money.

If you know how to code then the game is super easy but for everyone else, this game is a great glimpse into an entire industry. This game should DEFINITELY be put into grade schools everywhere. DO IT NOW for the greater good of humanity. If I played this rather than Oregan Trail as a kid, I'd probably be a god at programming now instead of an amateur historian.

I want to see all high schools deploy this game as a part of their curriculum.

Many of us have seen those "coding games" where you type code into a web interface and it basically checks if you did the code right. To put it bluntly, this medium is not very engaging. I don't see too many people having the motivation to slug through soul crushingly irritating syntax errors or logic errors. There is simply no way to actually visualize what is going on. I mean come on! It's like teaching someone English by forcing them to memorize words. The letters of the alphabet and other fundamentals go right over their head.

Then comes Human Resource Machine. It is quite minimalistic and is basically rudimentary assembly programming with only registers and pre generated values (I believe it's still Turing complete). The value of this game is that you can actually see what is going on "inside the computer". There is no computer in the game. All operations are done by you, a lowly mailroom working sorting through some paper, and that is the genius of the game - it goes straight to the core of programming and right away users can get a feel for what the field is about, they are learning the alphabet.

The game is an exercise in logic and process reasoning. It can be a springboard for full on programming, but it has practical applications in many professional jobs. That is why I think high schools should seriously consider implementing this game into the curriculum. It has tangible benefits to mental acumen and could change many people's lives.

I've been playing this game since near the beginning and my, it sure has transformed into something exceedingly fun. The team behind this game is very professional and consistently releases monthly updates that address bugs and add new features. This game will not disappoint.

I regret buying this. I thought my money would help them make updates but it's been over a year and there has literally been no major changes. The current game IS NOT A QUALITY PRODUCT. DO NOT BUY.