Recent reviews by owtfox

How to destroy a franchise

Ada Lovelace is NOT a Leader, she is a Great Engineer. Shame on you for serving Great Britain to us in this way and at such an abhorrent price. You guys really should be ashamed at these disgusting corporate practices.

By far the worst state I have ever seen a Civ game on release. It’s insulting to me that Firaxis put out 'Thank You' videos and have their execs stating in interviews that ‘it'll be fine’, when basic features aren't even complete (or have been removed from the franchise entirely). There is a woefully long list of issues with this game that would have me not even recommending it to die hard fans:

• The most incomplete Civilopedia on launch of a Civ game, full-stop. There weren't even entries for all of the playable civs on release. There are no intuitive reference links between pages. There's not even a list of the cost of various techs and civics in-game, be it in the bloody wiki or on their respective trees. What even?

• The UI was 100% built with console in mind and then ported to PC without any user experience testing. That is the type of mistake I would expect from a one-man indie dev and NOT a successful AAA studio. It's a work of pure ugly that doesn't give all of the information players would need to make in any long-term strategic thinking.

• Why do you need to refresh every notification sound I've received in a turn because I moved from one menu to the other?

• Why is it that enabling the scores of other players in the interface doesn't actually keep the scores there and are infact regularly re-hidden?

• Who in their right mind felt that releasing without Huge maps was something that the player base wanted?

•I'm not even going to mention the trade system (how can you want to reduce micro, yet make us walk our traders to the very gates of the other city!?); settlement connection jank; complete mess of pacing across ages; ridiculous, pokemon-style Culture victory; impossibilty of visual clarity in respect of building types placed, or the return of the AI crazy forward-settling. The latter point again destroys immersion.

• They broke their ‘third’ rule and are clearly suffering for it. In an attempt to get players to finish games, they ended up with situations where Ben Franklin is ruling ancient Greece. That's even more jarring than the fact that many of these so-called ‘Leaders’ DID NOT LEAD A CIVILISATION AT ANY POINT IN THEIR LIVES.

• Final point on leaders. If you think the majority of British players are going to leave a positive review of the game, after you elected to gate my nation behind DLC for the first time ever (yet including nearly all other G7 countries, bar the one who's language you speak) is a joke. To salt the wound, you give basically all of those countries actual historical leaders like Ben Franklin, Napoleon, Isabella, Friedrich, etc… England gets Ada Lovelace. Who in their woke mind ever felt that was a good bloody idea? I'll never forgive you for that and for that reason alone, even if the devs fixed the above points, I will never update my review to positive.

• Props to the narrator, art team and sound designers for some fantastic work. The music is sublime. Despite my disappointment and fury, these guys did an absolutely amazing job and deserve the highest praise. However, it is a crime that we go from Sean Bean narrating the whole piece of text to Gwendoline narrating merely the first sentence or two. Why do you deny my ears this joy? You need to get her back in and to read the rest of it. While you're at it, get her to narrate the tutorial. It's so lifeless compared to the Civ 6 tutorial. She might even tell you where all of your spelling errors are.

If you regularly play Civ 6, just keep playing it. They took away so much of what was good in that game. Wait for a steep sale. Show these developers that it is not okay to serve cake mixture to it's loyal fanbase and claim it to be some sort of heavenly bake, not when it tastes as if it barely touched the oven.

I'll allow comments but if you came to disagree, don't. Write your own review.

I fear we'll never have all of the features we know and love back in this series ever again.

CA Sofia are incompetent idiots. All of their good devs went to work on KoH 2 long before Sega ate them.

~sigh~

I cannot recommend a game that has an AAA price, yet releases with no achievements. I hate feeling like I'm not working toward anything. Personally, a hard no, for now at least.

Also, horrible UI; diplomacy is a gimmick and the economical aspect of the game is shallow. Plz fix.

Economy 2.0: Updated Review

I'm glad the devs have buckled to the anti-free-money movement and have removed gov't subsidies by default Tiling economy changes are also good, even if they come with their own challenges. Toggle fees for importing services are a nice addition. The new production, consumption and demand calculations - across the board - seem to be more representative of a real life environment. These are all great steps forward.

However, there is still no agency for the player to truly control what commercial/industry/office buildings will spawn without the use of mods. There's still no way of taxing by district in order to gain some level of control. It still feels like elements of the simulation are not transparent and that economical infographs are too vague.

Just let me tax by district and/or have the option to choose what will spawn. I don't want to have to keep bulldozing and to pray to the RNG gods... Let me promote specific areas of economical activity by industry/chain.

I can't recommend what is still what feels like an early access release, despite acknowledging the performance increases and steps made above. This patch felt like more of a difficulty reset patch as opposed to an Economy 2.0 patch. The needle barely moved on the player's actual engagement with the economy.

I really hope we'll get there, one day!

AoW3 is a lot better than this.

I cannot recommend a botch-job, lazy-ass port of a timeless classic. How can you do MGS dirty like this, Konami? Hideo wouldn't abide this sacrilege!

In 2023, I expect a game to be perfectly readable/playable in 4K. It isn't, no matter how much tinkering you do.

If you're a Stellaris fan that's interested in this game, wait for them to fix it. Even then, if you're into the whole 'Grand' element of Stellaris, I'd seriously do extra research before buying. There are easily less than half of the policies and traditions available, which makes the game feel really stale. Right now this game is a buggy mess. Romulan ships beyond 'corvette' size don't even allocate power correctly, destroying anything beyond the early game.

This game was clearly not ready.

My disappointment is immeasurable, and my weekend is ruined.