Recent reviews by DrNiggle

tl;dr The soundtrack is amazing, the graphics are great, the mechanics make you think, the DOLOS guy needs to stop taking so much f*cking Lithium, there's no endless mode, don't touch the shiny balls.

If you're new to base builder survival games, this will be a challenge for you. It's completely doable, but you have to think.

This is not a "sit back and watch and react" type game. When others compare this to Frost Punk, I get it; you have to have a plan and you have to be best friends with the pause button. You have to be decisive and sometimes dispassionate about your citizens requests. You need to plan out your base as far in advance as you can. You have to deal with resource limitations (specifically people, early game) and plan for dry spells. This game can be hard.

If you're a veteran city/base builder, give this a go. Instead of falling back on my experience with other games all the time, this game handed me plenty of new mechanics and features that got me back into the "How can I exploit this?" mentality. Some things seemed dumb at first, but once I learned how to work them, the game got much more interesting.

I love this game. I own the DRM-free version (Dawn of Discovery, Venice). I stopped playing that one for good in 2015 because of the well documented crashing to desktop memory related problem blah blah.

That problem is now gone. I have loaded my old profile, I have loaded my old game, I have played for 8 hours straight without so much as an FPS drop on ultra settings. Nothing in terms of gameplay has changed; this is still a well balanced economic city builder that I can lose hours in. If you're new to Anno 1404, I highly recommend this game for its resource management, quest system, endless game mode, and city building. If you're returning to Anno 1404, it's as glorious as ever.

So far, negative reviews are focusing on a few things:

1. Yes, you need uPlay to play an Ubisoft title. If you are protesting the existence of DRM, I won't argue. Otherwise this is a minor inconvenience at worst.
   
2. Yes, the textures and resolution options have been updated for 4K. No, that's not all that this version is.
   
3. Yes, your friends need to buy this edition to play multiplayer with you. However, they're not going to crash after an hour or so of playing and you'll never have to learn about the savegame editing trick for MP games. This used to be a colossal PITA and I am grateful that I will likely never have to do it again.

My only criticism so far is that this game runs DX9. Original Anno 1404 ran DX10. The noticeable differences are the lack of bloom and transparency, and Ubi left the transparency option in the menus (it's grey'd out because no DX10). The game still looks pretty, though.

This is one of the best economic city builders ever made. It was one of the Anno games that Luke Hodorowicz drew inspiration from when he made Banished. It's now stable on x64 systems and has updated graphics. Once again, I recommend this.

Edit: Patch 1.3 has corrected the DX9 issue; the game can now run DX10 and transparency effects are back.

50 million registered losers can't be wrong.

(Yes, Reb, we remember)

The graphics are beautiful, the gameplay ranges from casual to brutal, resource management is on point and I would play this game for the rest of my life, but:

Every single game I've started, without exception, I have had to abandon because the game crashes. Modded games, vanilla games, vanilla games started after unsubscribing from every mod in the workshop and manually deleting the local files and a clean game install. Every. Game. I'm a cuck so I'd probably be fine with this if the crashes were occasional. They're not.

Modded games crash with an exception usually mod related, even if the mod is current game version. Vanilla games crash with an unknown exception in pathfinder update. At least there's a log file and I can clearly read what happens. I've opened a support ticket that went nowhere ("We are working to address the issues...") spent time on google and even made the biggest mistake of all: asking for help on the steam forums. Every game still crashes, sometimes at the same spot each time, sometimes at random in the middle of building something.

I'm just gonna wait for Banished 2.

Edit: I disabled comments for this review because JohnNav, a well-known LiF fanboi, decided to bring his BS into what was supposed to be a simple, honest and concise explanation of why this game isn't playable for me.

An engaging, detailed, well scripted, deftly executed storyline inside a thoughtfully made UI.

This game would not be able to pull off its story as well as it has without good acting, and Viva Seifert seems to have been an excellent choice. Because progression is dependent on you knowing what terms to search the library for, it makes you focus on details and names and starts you imagining how characters, stories and locations coincide.

What I appreciated most is that if you are the sort of person who enjoys finding creative ways to get computers to do what you want them to (not necessarily what they were intended to do) –without spoilers—the UI is more capable than it may appear at first.

Well worth the buy.

TL;DR – As an early access game this has a lot going for it already. It needs to work on balancing resource development and technology progression, but the management systems at the core of the game are excellent and the devs are present in the steam/PA forums so the Q&A available makes getting a grasp on the mechanics more than doable.

This game takes the concepts behind the Anno series and games like Banished and then dives into the mechanics of colonist, resource and technology management and lets you micromanage the heck out of them. Progression is slow and every advance you make, be it adding a food item to the menu or unlocking a new tier of technology, must be meticulously calculated. That’s why I love it.

To give you an idea of resource management, one of the more simple things in the game are plastics: you will need 3 different types (alpha, beta, gamma) throughout the game and a plastic manufacturing chain will be the second or third thing every colony establishes. You need to:

• Build a hangar
  
• Buy an alpha ship
  
• Unfreeze a director, a pilot, and a technician and assign them to the hangar
  
• Buy an alpha ship mission and set it to collect plastic garbage
  
• Buy a maintenance blueprint
  
• Set start/repeat on the alpha ship mission and maintenance blueprints
  
• Build a recycling center
  
• Unfreeze a director, two recyclers, and a technician and assign them to the recycling center
  
• Buy a recycling blueprint and set it to recycle plastic garbage
  
• Buy a maintenance blueprint
  
• Set start/repeat on the recycling and maintenance blueprints
  
• Build a plastics sorting/melting/flaking facility
  
• Unfreeze the five colonists necessary to work there
  
• Buy or unlock the four blueprints for the facility
  
• Set the production chains for the last two blueprints to queue alpha, beta and gamma plastics
  
• Set start/repeat on the four blueprints
  
• Build a prefab facility
  
• Unfreeze the colonists necessary to work there
  
• Buy or unlock the blueprints for the facility
  
• Set the production chain to queue alpha, beta and gamma plastics
  
• Set start/repeat on the blueprints

If you don’t have a blueprint or one is not on the market and you don’t have a blueprint left to unlock, then you have a whole separate production chain to work on for researching them. This process isn’t nearly as tedious as it may sound at first and the experience makes getting a production chain up and running that much more rewarding. The game is full of logistical challenges, and as you progress, the systems can become more complicated and rely more on other systems, which speaks to the game balance.

The balance of resources produced to resources used is already great. The balance of technologies researched to technology cost needs some improvement. It can be difficult to expand at all once the technologies to unlock power upgrades (vital for expansion) start requiring core techs/documents, because these take considerable resources to develop, not to mention a lot of time. While completely possible, this does cause long spans in the game where it seems like you’re doing nothing but waiting.

As for foods, ship add-ons, automation stations and power modules, the game offers a myriad of evermore-complex upgrades that make noticeable improvements to every corner of your colony.

Where the game needs the most improvement right now (patch 2.96.2) is in the imparting of information. The game either needs at least a half dozen more tutorials, or a pure sandbox mode. This would go a long way towards teaching non-economic-worldbuilder-veterans how to get a good start, since the slightest mistake early in game could devastate your colony and make you just start over.

At the moment it’s also absolutely necessary to claim some bonus packages at the new colony screen, because without some free blueprints and power modules, you’re asking for a dead colony. It would be nice if there were either more tier-1 blueprints available on the market, or security boxes were easier to get in a level 1 colony.

The game also doesn’t have any resource graphs that I could find, so it’s difficult to track a decline in food or fertilizer or water over time. For that, you have to keep an eye on the numbers of resources in your inventory and try to remember values so you notice if you’re running out of something. Graphs would be a great addition.

There is also nowhere to see a summary of what level colonists you have and the available housing space for that tier. I currently have to manually add up the number of junior, senior and master colonists I have and then visually check to make sure I have enough residences to house them. A summary screen for this info would be a great addition.

It would also be nice if there were some more glitter; 1x1 and 1x2 parks, industrial gadgets, commercial outlets, something to fill in the extra space left over once you’ve completely filled a platform.

Overall I’m happy I bought it and 100 hours in I’m going to be playing it more, even though it’s not finished and things like drones and energy combos haven’t been implemented – I’m excited for when they are.

Edit: The game got an overhaul, and it's better than I hoped. Still no graphs, though <3

If you want a world builder where you can build new and exciting things, IN SPACE, then you're going to find all sorts of bugs and glitches that will agrivate you to the point of destroying your keyboard.

If you want a worldbuilder where you can build simple things, IN SPACE, and then blow them up or come up with new and exciting ways to break the game, Space Engineers is the most incredible thing ever.

I reccomend playing with pistons and rotors in multiplayer. At a distance.