Recent reviews by KeiwaM

I just finished my first campaign - while it no doubt drags out for a while by the last stretch of the journey (with no real challenge if you have played well early-game and stocked up) I thoroughly enjoyed the entire experience.

Combat reminds me a lot of Company of Heroes, but with the ability to pause. I think I described it as the Company of Heroes 3 that we wanted but didn't get. The only slightly odd system is the stealth, but honestly it's not a big issue for me. It was more fun going in guns blazing instead. Very few missions actually require you to stealth at all. Cover makes sense and it is almost always possible to find cover for your soldiers quickly, with the exceptions of being caught in an open area - which should spell doom for you either way.

The train management part is unique. I've seen comparisons to xcom's spaceship, which I just don't find accurate at all. You set out on your journey eastwards on the train, and as you go along, you can visit Points of Interest (PoI) along the tracks. This will be your primary source of resource gathering early-game, and each soldier has specific traits that might yield more resources if you send that specific soldier to that point of interest. Although sometimes, this can go horribly wrong, and your soldiers might get mauled, fall in to a frozen lake or get mentally scarred from the brutal atrocities committed to innocent villages - it is a unique experience that I have yet to see a comparison to, and it was a fun experience to manage.
My only critique is the game kind of "overloads" you with resources by the end. It's supposed to get harder and harder, and you're meant to scavenge and really struggle for resources - but that was never really the case. I finished my journey with well over 2k fuel left and almost 700 food, because I expected the game to actually ramp up the difficulty. Instead, I arrived at the final destination with a ton of unusable resources. The storyline kind of hints at your "struggling soldiers" that are underfed because they're being rationed, have low morale and are all fatigued - when in reality, after the first few chapters, neither food nor morale nor exhaustion is really an issue anymore. The consumables don't really have a "negative" to them (some have % chances of overdose or addiction, but they are so low that they are irrelevant most of the time) and consumables just removes part of the fun - which is why I decided to not use any consumables for the entire rest of the game from Chapter 4. And I still managed it.

The last part is the story. There will be a few spoilers in this paragraph, so if you want to avoid spoilers, skip to the last paragraph. Still with me? Okay, you were warned. The story mostly makes sense, although I did wish the story would have given an explanation as to why you are travelling to Vladivostok rather than going west and just fighting through to your home country. They might have mentioned it in the beginning, but I did not catch it, and even if said reason was "there are enemies", your squad of 10 units will beat far worse odds than that. The final battle left me feeling very disappointed though. You're instructed to go through the city, perform a few side missions, then take the fort and hold it down. Awesome, the defense missions are fun. Only this mission proved more annoying than fun to me. First of all, you need to run to save a delegation of the White Army that will help you in your assault of the fort. They are being attacked by a tank, and so you have to run to their aid. But then, the entire AI delegation rushes forward in to a no-mans-land with no cover and gets obliterated by the tank, instead of waiting for my Field Gun to be in range. This failed the side mission. I didn't want to restart to get 100% so I just went on with it. Later in the mission, you're instructed to hold down the citadel of the fort with the heavy weapons you have - only after the first assault, your positions are continuously battered by enemy artillery, destroying all your heavy weapons and constantly making you have to pause to move your troops. I feel like this final battle could be made better by removing artillery from both sides. If you completed an earlier mission, a plane will destroy their pieces, but not before all your own pieces are destroyed, making you rely on raw infantry power against large blobs of enemies, vehicles and even a tank. After the timer runs out, the combat scene ends quite abruptly. No celebrating, no cheers, no fanfare or anything. It just ends and goes in to the finale cutscene. This left me very disappointed. It was meant to be this big epic battle, and it just ends like that? No pushing the reds out? No using the big naval guns on the fort wall that was teased in the beginning of the mission? Oh... Well that was disappointing..

The game is by no means hard. I do have quite a few hours in other RTS games, but I feel like this is a game that can be enjoyed by a large audience. For hardcore RTS fans, this will not really pose a challenge, and it can become a bit repetitive. But it has a great narrative and great mechanics. A must-try for RTS and management gamers.

It's a solid game, but it still has bugs and a distinct lack of content and replayability. It definitely feels unfinished.

I've been waiting for this game for 3 ish years, and I was so excited for it to be released. Slavic Magic has really created something unique that feels different from all other city builders. It has potential, however it has flaws.

Let me start off by saying I am a City Builder person. This genre is my favorite on the market, and I've played a lot of other Medieval City Builders, such as Farthest Frontiers and Foundation, as well as other time-period city builders like Cities Skylines and Dawn of Man.

Lets start off with the graphics. The game looks stunning. I struggle to find a city builder that is as immersive as this one. Walking around in view mode, it truly feels as though you are walking through an authentic village. Villagers will be moving resources around, markets are bustling with stands and the amount of details on everything is just breathtaking.

The gameplay elements are good, but this is where we encounter one minor issue: it is repetitive and quickly becomes dull. It is fun for the first few hours, then after that it becomes a grind once you have all the required buildings. There's not a whole lot of industry buildings to place (I believe there is 8) and once you have a single one of each down, that's it. There's no upgrading them, there's no expanding them, you don't even need to put more families in them. I find myself with one of each industry building and my village works flawlessly with 300+ inhabitants. I'm not saying it's a bad aspect of the game by any means, but it does become a bit dull. That is, until the next point comes in to play;

One of my biggest issues is with resource management. This whole feature could have used more refining before the game was released. I find myself constantly micromanaging each and every shop, because you cannot impose any cap on resources. This might not sound bad until you realise that they will work, work, work until all your resources are depleted. Left unchecked, your firewood cutters and Logging camps will cut down entire forests and deforest your berry deposits. Your Joiner's Shop will continuously make shields until they run out of planks. You can disable these workshops by pausing them, but the micromanagement of resources is intensive. Now it's a constant balancing act of you having to go around and switch between the different resources each shop can make, enabling and disabling it manually instead of having a "Produce until X amount is in stock". This feature exists in almost every other city builder, and it's a huge oversight that this game doesn't have it.

In the beginning, I also found myself very confused about some of the workshops. Such as Cobblers. I know they make shoes, but what do they make them out of? The game doesn't tell you. Even after building it, there is no crafting screen for workshops with only one items, such as Fletchers and Cobblers. Other shops will have a crafting UI where you can swap between the produced goods, like the Blacksmith. Here, it tells you excatly what resources is needed to craft. But the workshops with just one item doesn't have any indication. It took me ages to figure out why my planks were disappearing in to a void, only to realise the Fletcher has made 200 bows out of all my planks. This was frustrating and nearly grounds for me to restart the game.

Farming is also kind of unintuitive? The free-form Farm tools are kind of cool, but why can I only use 4 connection points? Why doesn't this game allow me to freeform fields with 7 or 8 points? You have this cool system, and with farms and pastures especially, there's no front or back. I understand why this wouldn't work with Burgage Plots, but for farms and Pastures, I feel like the free-form tool could be expanded to have at least 8 connection points for more interesting shapes.
The farming itself is confusing at first. It took me ages to realise that your primary food source won't be your huge grain farms - it will be backyard vegetable gardens and (if you unlock it) orchards. My citizens are currently living on a diet of Carrots and Apples cause farming just isn't sufficient to sustain them. I have 4 Farmhouses with max families (8 families in each * 4 Farmhouses = 32 Families for farming) and 4 Oxen reserved for farming, and I still find my farms aren't getting completely plowed or sown. Half the time, half of the fields are left unplowed and unsown, effectively limiting my yield to half.
Fertility was a major point of confusion for me. On the overlay, you can see 4 types of Fertility: Emmer, Flax, Barley and Rye. My fields produced Wheat. I am not a native english speaker, so I didn't realise that the fertility that applies to Wheat is Emmer, because the game doesn't tell you. It uses two different words for the same thing. If there were multiple types of Emmer grain, I could understand, but there isn't. It just Wheat. Just call it Wheat Fertility then. This had me stumped to the point where my first village starved.
Threshing doesn't make any sense either. Threshing is done by the farmers in Farmhouses, fair enough. But after harvesting, they plow, and after plowing they sow. You can set threshing to High priority, but it doesn't matter, they don't prioritise it. This means your Mill can't produce flour and you can't get food until your entire farm is done plowing and sowing for next year. It feels awful. I have 8 families and 1 Oxen for a farm, why can't some of them be threshing while the rest prepare the farms?

Trading between your owned villages is odd. You can't send over resources without taking something in return, which kind of ruins the flow of making small self-sustainable outposts with small outputs back to your main village. Animal trading is also completely unintuitive, with Sheep going in to random pastures in your Animal Trading Post instead of going to the open pasture where they should be. There's no way for you to manually move them, so I just have 3 sheep stuck in my Trading Post pasture. The game also differentiates between Lamb and Sheep, but the ingame images for Lambs are missing? It's just a blue box. I also have no clue what lambs are doing in the game, as I've never seen my sheep breed and make lambs. They always just spawn a new sheep.
Stable Space for animals is bugged. I have 4 stables with 2 spaces for animals, as well as my Animal Trader which has 2 spaces, for a total of 10 spaces for large animals, usually Oxen. I have 7 Oxen, but still the game tells me I don't have enough hitching posts. It even says in the UI that i have 7 Oxen and 10 available hitching spots. But the alert doesn't go away.
I bought a horse. It never appeared and showed up. It's been like 3 hours in real life and the horse never showed up.

Lastly, the Battle mechanics. It feels underwhelming and almost disappointing.
Archers are next to useless. They slow the enemy down, but I had a group of 18 (relatively) unarmored Bandits attack my village. As a response, I had about 60 archers just loading arrows in to them. Once they hit my infantry, they were still 18 men strong? 50 archers shooting what felt like rubber arrows at them for a mild inconvenience. I just stopped using archers, cause they do no damage. I understand each arrow shouldn't be a one-hit kill, as Archer units would be ridiculous, but come on. 50 Archers in about 4 or 5 volleys (200+ arrows) didn't kill a SINGLE bandit? Even when they WERE getting hit? That just feels weak.
Effectiveness is a mystery to me. I don't understand how it works. I can have 2 units of 36 militia men charge downhill in to a favored battle against 2 bandit units and still have an effectiveness of 10% - 20%, causing my militia to lose a lot of men.

I'm not done but I hit the character limit. Game is okay, has bugs, €40 is a lot for now.

I'd get Farthest Frontiers over this to be honest.

Send help, I bought the game 2 days ago and I can't stop terraforming every single map. It's so damn satisfying.

Don't miss out on this gem.

I got in. Put my settings to medium to hopefully have my hardware follow along. I load in and get roughly 25-30 fps. Not that bad I thought. Sure, it's not smooth but I can live with 30 fps.

I do some tutorials and realise my game is paused so no zones are moving in. I unpause and that's where it hit me...

I am getting 10 FPS. On Medium settings. On a computer that really has no problem in any other games on medium settings. Cyberpunk 2077 ran better on launch than this does.

And if you are curious why I don't just "lower the settings" and play, I have to lower them to "Very Low" to get a playable FPS whilst game is not paused. "What's the deal, graphics aren't everything", no, but please do tell me how you wanna spend $50 on a game that looks like This[imgur.com]. Yes, that is an actual picture I took in game just 5 minutes ago.

I loved Cities: Skylines and I love Colossal Order for their dedication to this. But this game is just unenjoyable and unplayable with these performance issues. If this is how the game handles at no pop, I dread the players who actually get to start a city.

I hope and pray that Colossal Order will fix these performance issues in the near future. My best to the whole team!

As of now though, this cannot be recommended to anyone... and that is a jab in my city-builder heart. I eagerly await the day I can change this to a big thumbs up, but that demands that I can actually play the game.

EDIT: It was pointed out to me that there is an optimization guide here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/tips-our-guide-to-optimize-performance.1603423/

And whilst I appreciate this and I will be continuing to play with this, it is a major issue with a title this big that users has to scout through their advanced video settings just to get a stable performing game - and one that doesn't look great at that.

Why does this game have an autosave feature that doesn't work? I just lost 5 hours worth of repetitive building.

By far the most stable Early Access game I have ever played. I've yet to find any game breaking bugs, game runs really well on 5-6 year old hardware and the game itself is just... fun.

I don't know what it is about it. It's just so addictive to grind out and watch your business grow, slowly upgrading your wares and getting more revenue. I can't wait to see what gets added in the future.

Big up to the devs.

EDIT: I wrote this review after a single day of playing. I have now returned to the game and passed 100 hours. My opinion of this game has not changed at all, this game still runs incredibly well, is insanely fun and has barely any glitches (the Rivals update did introduce one glitch that causes your rivals to hire the wrong kind of employee, but it's not that big of a deal and it doesn't impact your businesses).

This just does not make sense.

Patient has collapsed, Respiratory and Circulatory systems have both failed. Yet they cure the flu, gets it over the recovery limit and patient is fine..

Nope nope nope.

This must be one of the worst balanced campaigns in the Company of Heroes franchise.

Unless you play pitch perfect, you will be ambushed by a tiger in your base before you even have a lieutenant out. And don't even get me started on the virtually invisible buffs they get on harder difficulties. I like playing the game on hard mode, but 2 squads of Riflemen lost to 1 squad of pioneers. Come on.

PLEASE JUST LET ME SKIP THE TUTORIAL GOT DAMNIT

It has been in early access for a long time, I feel like the game should have more content by now.. There's a distinct lack of weapons in my honest opinion, and no option to mod new weapons yet. You also have to choose between a full military squad with loud weapons, or choose the CIA with only 4 agents, only 2 of which, have access to suppressed rifles. Coming from the first game where you could build a 10 man team in any way you wanted, this game leaves you very unsatisfied. In the first game, I could have all 10 as silent stealth-ops or have them all be breachers with shotguns if I wanted to. It's just not even an option in this game. And with a current lack of modding options for weapons, it becomes boring.

The game currently does not live up to the standards of Door Kickers 1. Still, it's a fun game. One of the most innovative tactic games and it has significant improvements over Door Kickers 1 in terms of movement and options when moving around. It also has 3d ish graphics, which you can choose for yourself, is good or bad. Personally, I find it hard to stack up on corners, as I sometimes end up moving them too far forward because the 3d looks are weird. I have also been shot through corners on a few occasions, although this does seem pretty rare. The Doctrines still haven't been added to the game, which is a set of skills for your squad. Kind of odd imo.

If this is your first Door Kickers game, It is a great game. If you come from Door Kickers 1, it will leave something to be desired.