Recent reviews by Kobel

Aside from the interface which I find to not be intuitive, this is a decent Rimworld-like builder.

Except I tried, but simply can't find any reason to play it over Rimworld.

Cool little game. Economy progress is very intuitive, Crusader Kings-like features are fun, and while battle system isn't very expanded it serves its purpose. Curiously, most of the challenge seems to come from trying to stop your family from murdering each other instead of keeping economy afloat or fighting external enemies.

While the game seems to have some balancing issues, it has a pretty well working anti-snowball mechanic in... Church. Sure, you can try expanding your empire militarily, but at the same time keep an eye on the relations with The Matriarch and help your neighbours with bandits to keep her content, as the lower the relation is the more severe punishment comes, from limiting resources available for trade, to straight up military intervention.


One small con is that while during later stages you can pretty much automate your economy save for occasional new buildings and upgrades, before that there's a lot of micromanagement. While it's fun in the earliest stages, in that weird part of midgame where you have things running but can't really take your eye off it yet it becomes tedious, which hurts the prospect of replayability in my view.

Was kind of fun at first, but became increadibly repetetive quickly. You keep doing the same thing over and over again, whether it's a side quest or main mission, but the worst part are underwhelming boss fights. Enjoyed maybe one of, six, seven(?).

You can't unlock all gameplay features within your first playthrough but have to go through New Game+
Also RNG loot works 'great', played it with a friend on co-op and there were moments during the game when I was doing 90% of damage and moments when he was doing 90% of damage because of what mods and gear we got at the moment. lmao

FOR MANAGED DEMOCRACY

Ta gra się po prostu nie starzeje

I put about 50h in it so far, finished two campaigns on vanilla and enjoyed it. It lacks in content so far though, and in many aspects is unpolished - I've already seen many good mods mentioned so I'll take a break and probably will go back with them on.

If you're an achievement hunter, what's worth mentioning is that in Vic3, contrary to other Paradox games, using mods doesn't disable them. I wouldn't say it's a big deal overall, but with the current state of the game, many fan-made patches do the justice to balance and fixing some more annoying issues

Overall, I don't regret buying it, so I'm leaving a positive review, but I'd recommend waiting until the first DLC is released before buying the game

idc about the PVP part so I won't comment on it but the PVE part, especially in coop is very enjoyable and progress pace seems reasonable

Textures load before your own eyes, most mid-match cutscenes are locked at 30fps for some reason, gameplay is just slow, feels unresponsive (especially off-ball, for some reason). Main referee's animations are bugged, side refs' - janky. The crowd looks awful and welp, the game just isn't pleasant to play - also there's pretty much no game mods just yet besides exhibition match + online event match. AI is weird, mostly dumb, acts like a toddler was playing the whole game and then pulls the most pro play ever on you. Also - players can't receive passes longer than 5 metres most of the time - they either run along the ball not wanting to touch it, or just fail to take it. Especially in the last 3rd.

Upsides? Set piece transitions are smooth, I guess - but still managed to get one corner kick bugged out and couldn't see sh*t.

Pluses: Satisfying gameplay, Master League is pretty fun, licenses aren't an issue since it's very easy to just install Option File fixing the fake teams. MyClub is fun as card-collecting mode. Game runs smoothly during gameplay* in 60FPS on a far from top PC (i-3 4160, R9 270, 8GB RAM DDR3) on medium settings. (Drops to 50-55 on high)

*excluding cutscenes/celebration close-ups, it's not a big issue since you don't control anything at those moments

Minuses: Online. Haven't found a match earlier than 10 minutes in yet. Connection tends to worsen A LOT during the match itself (and no, it's not an issue with my internet). MyClub has way less functions than FUT; and there aren't any special modes offline - player career, manager career, quickplay, that's about it.

$25 vs $70 is a good argument though



Summary: if you want to hop in once in a while, play a few games, maybe lead a club for a few seasons, make a nice squad in online card-collecting mode without the need for spending hundreds of bucks - take PES.

If you just want to grind/spend some money instead in an online mode, or have a wider choice of gamemodes - think you'd be better off getting FIFA.

It's just a great strategy.