Recent reviews by Shian Kiri

Civilization VII needs some more time in the oven to say the least. While each iteration has its own charm and quirks, this one is no different. It might be a bit weird to just outright undesirable, the problem isn't necessarily the changes themselves but how incomplete the game feels.

Culture Victory is near impossible against the AI unless you play in a hyper specific way and it's mostly only like this because of the fact that the game essentially does a hard reset per Age that you go through. You can't get enough of a lead to pull away from the AI which will result in you getting locked out of being able to win in this way. The Legacy Path for Culture in general also feels extremely underwhelming and needs the most fixing compared to the other Victory types.

There are also a lot of Quality of Life changes they need to make for the game. The UI is sometimes not informative enough. It took me several games to realize that there is a hidden menu with options to Sleep and Disband your units so in one of my games when my Units had nothing left to do, I essentially hit Skip Turn on 30+ units since it wasn't immediately obvious I had any other option but to Skip Turn.

When assigning Resources to Towns and Factories, sometimes it's unclear why you can or cannot assign particular Resource types. On top of that, there are buildings that can or cannot be built unless they are on the same tile or unless you have a previous building unlocked. The requirements don't always show up so you have to know that's what you want. Some buildings also have combinations so if you build them on a tile with another building without the option to replace them, you just get locked out of building that combination type in general.

There are just too many problems with the game for me to really say that this is a game worth spending $70+ on. The game feels so simple that it's not that much more complex than Civilization I. I feel that you can pick any other Civilization game and get a whole lot more enjoyment out of them than this one.

With time and a few more updates, Civilization VII can be a great game, but in its current form, it needs a lot of help.

I lied multiple times and got my friends killed.

10/10 will kill my friends again.

I'm giving Sons of the Forest a negative review not because the game is bad, but because the game should be further progressed than where it is now based on the development history of the game. If this game was meant to be released a year ago as a full game, one would think it should be much more fleshed out than where it is now. It's hard for me to recommend Sons of the Forest for anyone right now in its current state. The game's scope was either too large for the team to deliver based on the timeline they were looking to hit or it was released about 2 to 3 years too early.

While the building and survival aspects of the game is very functional and playable, it does have a lot of problems that needs work. Things like desyncing and duping is a huge problem that can make the game really unplayable.

The exploration and story of the game needs to be either expanded upon much more thoroughly or redone entirely. Essentially, exploration in Sons of the Forest is an illusion. It does NOT exist in the way it does in The Forest in that you have a linear path. If you had a map to draw out what is available for you to explore, it would look like a map right out of Final Fantasy X or XIII. You also cannot access the next progression point without a previous key item and you get stopped quite literally at the entrance of any interest point. This is unlike The Forest where you can go into certain cave systems and get locked out of progression deep in that exploration.

If you take out all of the walking on the surface of the game and only include the exploration portion of the game involving these caves, there is only about 30 minutes to an hour of content. When I say that this aspect of the game is undercooked, it is extremely undercooked and I feel the team really either needs to redesign what they currently have or rework it in a way to better match what they had in The Forest. As of now, what is available to you should not be released as a final product, it is a massive step backwards.

If all you want to do is build a base, you can spend hours on that easily and be quite happy but the game is lacking many of the same building options you had in the original game. Sons of the Forest also has kind of a pseudo grid system that I wish was in the original game, but at the same time, I don't. The game is kind of in a weird in-between state between having a lot of strictness so you can better align your structures, but it also doesn't have enough fluidity to build what you want. You can easily hit the limitations of the building system in both ways and I almost much rather have them go extremely hard in one direction over the other.

An example: if you wanted to build a wall flush against mountain side with a weird cliff or slope, the game kinda stops you when it breaks the grids if it clips into the wall. Whereas in The Forest, you had a much more fluid system and you could kind of clip building items into the walls of the game so you can make a much more interesting base without having the game tell you no. I think I would be more okay if the game allowed you to clip an item into an existing surface if there was a connection point for that item to connect to. As of now, if there is any clipping at all, you'll be restricted from placing an item. But I digress.

Overall, Sons of the Forest can be enjoyable. But unfortunately, I was more disappointed than not. I'm sure that with time, the game will be great. But compared to The Forest and even Valheim, what's here is really underwhelming.

Spent hours learning how to play the game. It took several fortresses for me to understand how to Fish with my Fisherdwarf. On my latest Fortress, I made a Fishery. My Fisherdwarf went to the river and was immediately attacked by an Otter. He was so injured, he lost the use of his legs and fell into a river and drowned. Several in game years later, he started to haunt my Fortress, particularly my new Fisherdwarf migrant. He eventually went insane, stripped off all of his clothes and then proceeded drowned himself in the river as well.

10 out of 10. Highly recommend.