Recent reviews by KeiwaM

I spent 5 hours and 200 million dollars in the campaign, trying to work on the road and traffic in a city that doesn't even belong to me instead of just doing what the game tells me to do.

10/10 (although Cities: Skylines is preferable if you are in the same mindset as me)

how do I change the language from chinese

UPDATE as of 26. December, 2021

Recently ACE dropped a huge release to it's update, including very important and much-needed performance and optimization fixes. Messing with water systems will no longer cause your entire game to freeze and in general, the game runs much better. Therefore, as of today, I will change this game to a YES for recommended - GIVEN that you play with ACE. If you play without ACE, the entire review still stands at a NO. But ACE is the best we got after the developers abandoned it - although ACE devs have basically made the game in to what it is now.


Stonehearth is an amazing game with amazing potential - troubled with very frustrating issues.

Before I get in to the actual review, I should note that all this is experienced with a fairly good PC (Intel Core i7-9700k, GTX1070 Ti, 16Gb of RAM)
The game itself, the mechanics, the way it has been done is great. The game is nice and with a few mods, it feels like a completely finished game (I'll return to this). But the game just has such severe issues that I cannot recommend it. I often have to spend on the good side of 5 minutes just trying to open the game because it closes on startup. Other times, it might crash out of nowhere from ingame (thank god for autosave) and while I appreciate the bar where you can see what is the issue, the game is very VERY poorly optimized. You'll often experience large lag spikes and huge memory leaks from the AI pathfinding, when you reach a certain amount of hearthlings. Don't get me wrong, the game is still enjoyable with few hearthlings, but for people like myself that wants to build large settlements, it just becomes such a big issue for me. ACE helps a little bit on optimization but sadly not enough to smooth the game out completely. My policy is no more than 25 hearthlings, which is a bummer, given that the game allows for more.

Content-wise, the base game is VERY lacking in content, but luckily, ACE helps out with that. The first thing I would recommend to ANYONE who buys this game is ACE. This mod makes the game feel complete. Without it, I really dislike how simple it is, but with this mod, it actually becomes a butt ton of fun to play. Even pair it with other mods for more enjoyment, conflicting mods are rare(ish?) so you can feel free to combine as many as you want - within reasonable limits of your PC of course. But I do feel sad that the developers have decided to abandon the game - or rather whoever bought the company has decided that. Stonehearth had so much potential and if I'm honest, I would want the game to be given to the ACE developers. They have added more to the game than the actual developers have.

Recap: If you want a small settlement builder with a unique charm to it, this is the game for you. If you expect to build a large map with loads of people everywhere, you WILL struggle to run this game, no matter your PC. The game is poorly optimized and it can really ruin your fun - I definitely advise you to have autosave on at all times. TL;DR - Fun game, Better with ACE, but troubled with performance issues due to poor optimization.

In a nutshell, this is how my last game played out;

Me and another Marshal was struggling to keep the people in line. One of the guys were trying to constantly steal guns. We went inside the Armory and guarded the safe until we realised that the guy had welded the door shut in to our armory. Around this time, we got attacked by aliens and most of the submarine started flooding. When we finally got out of the armory with our weapons to kill the enemies, one of our Engineers had died and when we finally killed the aliens, 90% of the submarine was flooded. Through sheer panic, we managed to repair the holes and pump out the water, although we were stuck between 2 cliffs.

Now comes the time for revenge.

This guy that had locked us in the Armory had been a nuisance for far too long, it was all about to come to an end. We found him, bashed him down and handcuffed him, then proceede to throw him in to the ballast tank. At this point, the Captain was getting pretty annoyed that we were being so aggressive, so he set him free, and chaos once again erupted. We managed to bash another guy down, handcuff him, down the ballast tank, you know the drill by now. At which point I hear the other marshal shout: "LETS TAKE CONTROL OF THE BOAT"... Why not, went in and bashed down the helmsman, took the medic hostage, all while the captain had lost his ID card and couldn't get in to save his helmsman. We ended up killing everyone except our 2 marshals, at which point my fellow marshal beat me down, put me in handcuffs and left me to bleed to death.

10/10 would play again.

Seems like most reviews are from people that previously played the Souls series or the likes, so I will offer a perspective from a person who has never played these types of games. And man, how I was disappointed..

The Story
I went in to the game without watching gameplay as I was counting on getting a story-rich game to experience, and while it probably is a very good story, I couldn't tell you cause I can't finish it. The game just beats me down over and over again, and with no real tutorial or any way to really know what you are supposed to be doing (apart from the combat trainer, who btw is useless).

The Combat
Coming from For Honor, I know how to react quickly. But having to both react and make a decision on what to do in a split second is just too much for me personally. Having to make the decision to either Jump, Dodge or Parry, where the wrong choice can literally instakill you, just makes it not fun. The damage is insane, and often if you take damage in a boss fight, it is almost all of your health in a single hit. Say what you want, but this doesn't make for an enjoyable experience. The fight mechanics itself are really damn cool, and I love the posture system that gives you a way to kill enemies without having to wear down their health completely. It is unique and I really found the combat itself enjoyable, except for one part; there's no indicators on when to deflect or block an attack. Fighting the Blazing Bull, I wasn't sure if it was just an idle animation of it shaking it's head or if it was an attack. There is absolutely no way to tell except... die? Learn from your mistakes as people say, but if you are like me and never have played a game like these before, be prepared to die. A LOT. If the concept of dying and trying over and over for (possibly) hours is appealing to you, then go ahead. I suppose it's rewarding for some people to finally get past it, but if you (like me) enjoy a good fight that doesn't just kill you instantly, then I can't recommend the game? Simple as that, you're gonna die. And you're gonna die a lot. There are so many different enemies with different timings and if you aren't prepared to die to each enemy a load of times to learn their timings, you won't have a good time.
I guess this is partly because a boss is meant to be so much stronger than you, and while some people enjoy having to wittle down an enemy over several minutes, it's just not fun for me when a single mistake spread over all that time can cost you the victory and start you all over. There's little to no margin for error and if you make an error, you can be sure that you will be punished. If you are not full health, that error will most likely kill you.

Appearance
The visuals are stunning and the sound design is amazing. The animations and the sounds during a sword fight makes it really intense and it is a throughough enjoyable experience when the fight is fair. Even fighting Samurai minibosses is fun, with the constant clangs from the swords clashing. It really makes for an epic feeling when you fight a fair opponent.

Conclusion (TL;DR)
It is a beautiful game with what I'm sure has a great story and good combat mechanics, but the game is ruined for me because I can't get past the bosses. I gave this game two chances; First time I spent 5 hours and only just managed to kill gyoubu oniwa. Second time I played for about 1½ hours, running through a castle part where I constantly had to kill lesser enemies, fight the blazing bull, die to the blazing bull, have to repeat the ENTIRE castle gate part again and repeat.

Do I recommend it if you have played previous titles like this? Yes.
Do I recommend it if you have never played DS or Bloodborne like me? No. It's not enjoyable.

So many years of waiting, and boy has it been worth it.

Let me start out by saying the game is not flawless, but what can you expect form an early access. The developers has worked hard on correcting bugs and they've done a great job so far, and I'm sure the remaining bugs will be fixed very soon.

The Multiplayer in this game is immensely fun. Sure there are few annoying aspects such as server crashes but overall it is really enjoyable. There is definetly a viability gap between factions, but this acts sort of like a game of rock-paper-scissors. Some factions are more reliant on Infanatry and some factions are very heavy on cavalry, making for interesting matchups. The melee in this game is more enjoyable than Native Warband, since in this game it is a bit more difficult to successfully block. Directional Shield blocking is a great addition and while you can still more or less secure yourself by blocking down or up, there is scenarios where you need to direct the shield in the right direction. This makes for much more entertaining melee fights than just block hit block hit like Warband was.

The Singleplayer is kind of barebone but I still find myself playing hours upon hours of it. It works more or less like it did in Warband: You on a campaign map, completing quests and recruiting members until you are eventually strong enough to either join an existing faction or create your own kingdom. This is immensely fun and I always find myself with tasks to complete. If it's not upgrading troops, then I have to help in a war or help villages with some tasks. The game is very enjoyable through the entire campaign. One minor annoyance that I have is, when you have your own kingdom, you cannot declare war as of yet. This is because the developers has yet to complete the diplomacy system, but you can get around this by raiding opposing faction's caravans. This will often make them declare war.

Lastly, the visuals and performance is amazing. You need a decent PC to run it, but my god is this game beautiful. It has absolutely stunning graphics and while it doesn't look realistic, it manages to keep the Warband-charm that makes me nostalgic.

Overall this is a great game for Early Access. Please remember that this is Early Access, not the full game.

its okay

Very cool DLC but is it worth €9,99? Absolutely not. For this price you get access to One tank, one Armored vehicle and 2 launchers. The tank is not even NATO but OPFOR and the Armored vehicle is Independent.

One tank, One AFV and 2 Launchers for €9,99. Really? There's better FREE tanks and vehicles in the workshop. Do yourself a favor and just download some instead of buying this.

With 270 hours at writing time, I think I have a fair say in this game.

Cities skylines has alot of positive things. It's kinda like what simcity 5 should have been. It's mechanics and variety is great and the modding community for this game is absolutely amazing. The map designer and asset editor is fairly simple to use and allows almost anyone to make their own map.

Now there's also alot of stuff that I find annoying about this game. The main point being the Traffic AI. All problems with this game evolve around this one thing that Paradox didn't take their time with. It seems as to they only missed the traffic bit adn thought "well, lets just take a cheap AI and tweak it a bit" and added it. The AI is absolutely horrible. Why? Merging. Merging lanes in this game is made in the stupid way that instead of keeping the speed of the cars steady and THEN merging in to another lane to not slow down traffic, they brake until almost a full stop, sometimes TO a full stop. This causes traffic behind to stop for the car and make a huge traffic jam that completely messes up the entire thing. Even with mods like Traffic Manager this is inevitable to happen.

Another thing that is really annoying is junctions. Even a simple T-Junction is a pain in the ass with the amount of traffic this games gives you. The problem here is not that there's alot of traffic, the problem is that if you want ANY chance of solving it, you need to be a master traffic technician and have the mod Traffic Manager. Without this mod, it's impossible. And even WITH this mod, it seems impossible at times.

Another thing that I can find annoying at times is there's no "auto complete public transport". Any public transport line has to be made manually which is something I miss. I really can't be bothered sitting for 30 minutes, clicking on every place I want a stop just for the busses to block the road. Ofcourse it's good that you can make it yourself but it CAN be really annoying. It should be optional.

Overall I enjoy this game but sitting for hours and hours trying to solve traffic is a pain in the ass.

Pros:
- Great variation in content
- Good mechanics (roads, zoning and emergencies)
- Amazing modding community
- Manual Public Transport Lines

Cons:
- Terrible Traffic/Driving AI
- No automatic public transport

Overall opinion: Good game with some flaws that really can ruin your day occationally but most of the time can be solved with mods.

Very funny sandbox game. I Really like it and it's really well optimized. I Get high FPS even in the 10k battles. Only cons I've found is the frequesnt crashes (Expected of a beta ofcourse) and the missing sound adjuster ingame. Other than that, it's really great.

(Please add a Sound Adjuster, your intro really hurt my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ears)