Recent reviews by Robinson Drake

Soft no.

Classic "we did stuff with psychological disturbances and this gave us a tale with meaning and social importance", which has long been a cheap path to critical acclaim and narrative drive; thanks Hollywood.

It's a beautiful enough title for its time, but it's mainly just a tech demo with Hollywood-tier treatment of mental problems as narrative garnish. You might as well watch someone else play this and save your money; nothing here worth your time is worth your money.

Well, that happened.

As someone who paid up early, being refunded is pretty cool, not gonna lie.

Hard yes.

One of the best of its kind of the market.

EDIT: Hard yes for fans of the series.

Soft yes for newcomers.

Hard pass for Pete. ;)

Launch is a bit rough, but it's built so much like how I play "MW5: Mercs", it's not funny.

Waiting on Patch #2 to get back to serious co-op.

EDIT 2: The game has been given some good love with the most recent updates, and while most of the bugs are squashed and the game itself has released DLC that complements the campaign (in theory), I still have yet to rally a 5 man star for co-op to experience the game that way, and I feel that it would seriously change my opinion to experience that, instead of just one or two people.

EDIT: Soft no.

Feature sets the game should have been developed with were shoehorned in after the fact, fundamentally changing mechanics I didn't ask to be changed and didn't want to be changed.

I liked building my character my way, not down a skill tree.

I don't mind that developers CAN make changes like this, but they changed so much that it doesn't resemble the game I want to play anymore. I don't have a passion to play it, as I now feel like I will never play the version I want and will always have this notion of it in the back of my mind, that somehow it's just not the dev's vision and when I get to liking it, it'll change again.

TL:DR I've lost faith in picking up any of this developer's titles early in cycle, as clearly they no longer have finished gestating their ideas before they release, they've become the next Stellaris where the game is a 'living update' system, and I hate it. Save these changes for AoW5, you guys have been great at ITERATIVE changes between series, but now the series design ethos is changing inside the release itself.

I won't be playing this anymore, as I cannot be certain I will be interested in where the devs are taking it.

ORIGINAL:

This would be a hard yes but there's a number of teething issues.

By and large, this is a bold and streamlined improvement of AoW 3: Planetfall's features, playing more like that title than AoW3 itself. However, there's small features that irritate the experience and make it feel like five steps forward with three steps backwards.

A lot of the micromanagement that bogged down prior entries is much easier to handle, but other issues arise from these.

The automatic movement system for heroes makes them attempt to go to their previous destination, you know... where they DIED. There's no reason for this, as they will not have any units backing them up most of the time if you make this mistake.

World map spell preparation regularly pauses other spells and won't prompt you to unpause them.

Units told to guard an area double up with healing them, and as a result, some guard units just sit there, so you must make sure they don't just sit pretty endlessly.

Some elements in the UI are a matter as well, a lot of wasted space and UI funk makes things harder than they have to be to quickly and easily understand the situations you find yourself in. Decision processes prolonged by three-flimsy tooltip chains that might disappear if you're not pixel perfect? Fantastic, very stupid, thanks.

When playing online, you only get a very brief indicator that you have to wait for a player decision; instead, once that disappears, your only indicator is if you try to do something, because, who wants a non-persistent notification whereby they have to keep hoping soon they can act? Horrible.

The lack of control that the user gets to experience over the game is also a massive indication of where Paradox is taking their studios, which is a massive concern for the future playability of this title, as it appears that almost anything you want to do in multiplayer is 'done for you'; you can't make your own saves, you can't save a 'state' of a run as a scenario you want to return to and try different angles of attack... A lot of agency has been removed from the player 'for their benefit'... Whether this is true or not remains to be seen in the longterm but i have significant doubts that it will be better for players to have this much agency removed.

All in all, I am only this critical because the game is so close to be a "hard yes" recommendation, but too many teething issues hold it back from genuine all-time greatness.

Soft pass.

I hate constant maintenance gameplay loops, where your gear breaks so you gotta go get more mats for more gear to get more mats to get more gear to get more mats to get BETTER stuff to make BETTER gear to prevent the castle from breaking down. I prefer other kinds of harassment, thank you, and since this is what the game presented itself as in the introductory section, I just can't give it a longer try.

Soft yes.

It can be fun, but it clearly designs itself to be played by serious groups of likeminded friends. Quite moddable and despite its rather cruel design decisions, like no swimming underwater means any gear lost in water is just gone, it's fun to try to engage the challenges it offers.

Its a survivicraft that doesn't demand so much on your upkeep, but it does fall prey to many tropes. You also can't really 'dig under the earth', so no hobbit holes for you; you edit terrain up or down, no in-between.

Soft no.

I tried. I hate the general experience; it feels like it's trying to remind me of games I enjoyed far more, and that's a terrible recipe.

I'd rather go play Card Hunter again.

EDIT: Soft yes.

Finally got patched, signs that the thing isn't going to be left in the lurch are now here.

[OLD REVIEW]
Appears abandoned since mid-2022 and fundamentally, steam cloud-support has stopped working today. Without much notice or sense of a fix in sight.

Soft yes.

Too much churn for a hard yes.