Recent reviews by Vauxie

This is an incredible city building made by very few people, it's a highly complex simulation and the lore and aesthetics are beautiful.

Millennia presents itself as an ambitious title, yet falls disappointingly short of expectations at launch. Marketed at £34.99, it implies a level of completeness and polish one would expect from a full game. However, the reality is a stark contrast, revealing a game that feels unfinished and lacking depth.

The strategy behind Millennia's release appears to mirror a troubling trend observed with Paradox Interactive's recent launches, including Cities Skylines 2 and Star Trek Infinite. While Paradox has a history of producing esteemed titles like Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis 4, and Victoria, Millennia, unfortunately, does not follow in these illustrious footsteps.

The game suffers from a significant lack of customization options and missing settings, which strips it of the personality and depth that define a genuinely engaging title. Moreover, the gameplay features feel unpolished, contributing to a sense that this game was rushed to market without sufficient attention to what makes a game feel complete.

The announcement of two planned DLCs, seemingly containing content that should have been included at launch, is particularly egregious. This practice suggests a strategy of withholding complete game features to later sell them as additional content. Such tactics are disheartening for players and represent a departure from consumer-friendly practices.

It is disheartening to witness Paradox Interactive, a company with such a celebrated legacy, adopting a business model that seems driven more by marketing and shareholder pressures than by a commitment to quality and player satisfaction. The development teams behind Millennia, as well as other recent titles, deserved the opportunity to fully realize their visions without being compromised by premature release schedules.

For fans of Paradox Interactive and strategic gaming, Millennia's current state is a letdown. It might be wise to hold off on purchasing until the game has matured through updates and the inclusion of essential features currently missing. This moment serves as a sober reminder of the importance of supporting game development that prioritizes quality and complete experiences over rushed releases and fragmented content strategies.

#ConsiderWaiting

Another unfortunate misstep for Colossal Order likely as a result of caving to pressure from the greedy Paradox Interactive shareholders and marketing team.

Once again an incomplete product at launch, compounding the issues of the base game. My game crashed several times after updating. After completely reinstalling the game I was looking forward to the new modding store that has been branded as a significant improvement over CS1's. Unfortunately the mods don't load, some of which are necessary at this point to expend any extended amount of time or effort on a city (Anarchy, Move It, Landscaping tools) furthermore the mod loader does not always reflect what you've currently got installed.

I've spent 30 or so minutes reinstalling and uninstalling mods when I finally got it to work, unfortunately 10 minutes into a game the UI disappeared including the exit menu resulting in the loss of my city.

I'm one of the unfortunate individuals who bought the deluxe addition, it's time for some more investment CO, Paradox.

What a shambles.

This game is a long way off from being a finished project. Which would be fine for a Paradox title as they normally fill in the gaps with DLC later on (which is in my opinion rather unethical anyway).

That aside, the games producer recently changed direction from fixing the outstanding issues to a more profit focused approach instead of addressing the myriad of concerns the community has about the current state of the game. Now I purchased the ultimate addition. While I expect my DLC as I'm sure a lot of people that purchased the ultimate addition do; I'm expecting the existing at launch issues to be addressed.

Initially I was concerned with optimisation I'm on a 13th gen i9-13900KS 4090 system and after you reach around 100k pop the game grinds and slows. Occasionally crashes as well.

Now having played the game for over 70 hours there are glaring issues with the simulation. land prices, road and traffic behaviour. All these issues affect fundamental features the game should have shipped with at launch.

I'm not sure who to blame here, the community is toxic yes. But let that toxicity flow to the marketing and shady consumer exploitative practices within CO/Paradox that pushed the devs to take these shortcuts instead.

I'm very disappointed in the Paradox/CO for this, they have grown and their stakeholders have become greedy and it's disingenuous to all the paradox fans out there that actively support the publisher to let this game launch without due diligence.

At the very least refund the people who purchased the ultimate addition the excess for the missing DLC and features.

Save some face at least. Otherwise I'm sure the number of people requesting refunds will swell and the franchise will die.

I doubt that will happen though.. Wait for the next paid for DLC to drop.. Inevitably..

I honestly feel mislead, and betrayed by Bethesda on this title. All the hype, all the buzz-words, next gen, our most ambitious game yet.

What is this game? Loading screens and a glorified walking simulator. Poor player choices, little to no actual role playing, sanitised NPC's.

This is a game that is downright hard to love. Modders will fix it, which Is what Bethesda was probably betting on. "It's a bethesda title" trope is getting old.

I could write a full, detailed review, but it's honestly not worth the time. Finish the campaign, endure the loading screens, move onto the next game and come back in 5 years once the modding community fixes the damn game into a state that looks like the designers gave a ♥♥♥♥ about user experience.

Terrible, and an embarrassing demonstration of the Creation Engine 2. Lets all hope and pray that the next Elder Scrolls game isn't running on this engine and the directors have the sense to postpone until the engine is actually capable of delivering a 'next gen' experience.

Prepare for disappointment, and not just with the shocking lack of KSP 1 features and functionality.

I've been playing Kerbal Space Program (KSP) for a very long time, since very early access of KSP 1, with all the notorious bugs and challenges the community and the developers found workarounds to. I started off my first session with my expectations managed, I knew this was not going to be a polished product by any means, nor did I expect it to contain even 1/8th the features of the enhanced KSP 1 we've all come to love.

That said, within 2 minutes of loading into the game and setting it to my native resolution 3440x1440p the bugs started to emerge almost instantaneously, and not minor ones either.

Screen tearing and upscaled graphics make the opening experience navigating menus a blurry mess, not to mention the overlapping menus in VAB, the options menu and selectors sticking or being unusable.

Setting the game to 1080p vastly improved the graphical quality of the game, but performance did not improve, even marginally which is strange.

The modular UI is designed nicely, the UX features and sounds are a huge improvement when they work, which unfortunately they do not when completing what would be repetitive actions that any user would follow. The part designer windows overlap frequently with procedural wings, control surfaces and various other component options with undo not correctly replacing moved modules this has prevented me from being able to build lager craft.

There are so many bugs, and feeling deflated after my first two hours in the game I can't sum up the energy to list them all. What I can say however is fan excitement has been extremely high for this release; it feels like a slight injustice to release the game in this state.

I hate to speculate but based on the interviews and various other influencial fans comments the game was launched far earlier then it should have been, at an exceedingly steep price for what's on offer.

Save your money, if you have a limited gaming budget, spend it on something more polished and come back 1 or even two years later if you want your monies worth.

Brilliant game, sucked me in immediately with a very unique story building experience, I hope that there are DLC's on the way!

For a game I've waited for since Warband this has been an absolute pleasure to get my hands on, however after 7 years of development I would have expected a less buggy product. I believe your producers said numerous times the reasons for the delay is due to the additional attention to detail and features being implemented however on my first few hours in the game I've found at least 13 game breaking bugs to top it all off the latest update has left me unable to open my save..

It has loads of potential but to the people expecting a somewhat polished product prepare to be disapointed. The combat mechanics are great, the character creation is excellent however be warned that a lot of the quests you pick up you will be unable to complete, a lot of the in village/town events are broken and there are graphical glitches that cause immersion breaking clipping.

I'll be honest and say that I was expecting more quality control from you TaleWorlds after 7 years however I'm very happy to see the immediate patches even if they are save breaking, I hope that momentum doesn't stop.

Keep safe and well,
Vauxie

I have over 100 hours in this game so far and I've put over £50 into this game.

Boy am I disapointed, faster more intuitive UI? Please.. It's an awful clunky mess honestly the clean feel of the client on mobile devices has been torn apart at the seams. one of the most redeeming fetures was it's cross console compatability well over 40 hours have past since the update and we're left with a graphically downgraded mess..

To be a little pragmatic though congratulations to @SparkyPants on their new contract (I'm not sure of the worth but I'm guessing it's in the millions) for ruining a beloved CCG. I would rollback all the graphical changes for just some loading improvements honestly.