Recent reviews by Cornelius Crispus

I've seen some ciriticism of the game stating that it's very different from Frostpunk 1 and I just want to inform people who are expecting Frostpunk 1's mechanics of the following:

It's a different game from Frostpunk 1, but that's not a bad thing. It leans more into the morality and politics than the first but it makes sense considering that you're working on a bigger scale. Your settlement has become a city. Now the city can become a city-state/small nation. You are thinking not in terms of buildings, but in terms of districts and on macro-scale industry to support those districts.

Frostpunk 2 should be seen first and foremost of a continuation of the story and setting of Frostpunk 1, but with new challenges to overcome and the gameplay reflects that well: in Frostpunk 1 you built and micromanaged everything in order to survive: you scraped by on details to make it past the whiteout, the end boss that mother nature sent at you. You had to decide what you would sacrifice to defeat the final whiteout.

In Frostpunk 2, your endboss is no longer the whiteout. That's a regular occurence. Survival is secondary to deciding what comes after you've succeeded at survival. What civilisation will you and your people strive to become? And what will you sacrifice to make it a reality? Find solutions that emphasize different approaches to the same problem, rather than just finding a solution at all. Who do you compromise with to achieve your goals? Who do you ostracise? Will you risk failing at survival again in order to achieve civiliation? That's what Frostpunk 2 is about.

Game has been advertised in the past as strategy, but that's not the creator's intention. It is mostly a worldbuilding game with a light amount of combat and resource mining, some RPG elements and quests and exploration and mostly just enjoying the joy of building.

If you are a fan of games like Foundation and Dorfromantik, you will probably like this game. It's a relaxed game about painting the rocks with your own vision for a city, and figuring out how to make ever prettier constructions.

Big note: The lack of Early Access tag isn't a scam as some people might think, just a genuine mistake because the Developer frequently communicated on discord that it is meant to be in Early Access for a few months, before going into full release. The Dev's working on getting it flagged properly as EA on steam atm. Edit: Fixed now by the dev, as expected

Been playing this game since the demo came out, I helped out with some testing on private builds after joining the discord (for which I was graciously gifted a game code). The (single!) Developer is a very nice person and very open in his communication towards the community. When playing private builds, there were new versions daily, and a lot of performance fixes have happened since then, which I imagine will continue in the future.

EA has some bugs still to fix at this point in time, but nothing really gamebreaking. The game is a lot of fun, especially if you're a fan of games like Dungeon Keeper and like dwarves. You basically balance mining out the mountain versus building a trap and defence network to keep the hordes of greenskins at bay.

The core gameplay loop is fun and the Artstyle has a lot of warm and gold tones which contrast well against the darkness of the mountain. Be prepared to build a lot of lanterns to light up corners of the world; Light is as important a resource as gold is. If you get worried about the cost of lanterns, there's also a rune (talent tree) to make lantern posts free and instantly placeable.

Update: As of time of writing, the Developer's been publishing new playtest builds almost daily, and regular updates to the game almost weekly to fix performance, bugs and add content in form of new buildings and talents. Developer has at this moment multiple neat cosmetic buildings teased, alongside plans for extra units and buildings. He's been working at basically the same speed in Early Access as he was before EA, so I'd say that's a very positive sign.

To shed some more light on what I believe to be a neat game mechanic: there's research upgrades in true RTS style in most buildings that allow progression, but the developer has also included a Runesmithing system which functions like a Talent tree and allows you to personalise your playthrough each time by selecting certain runes. These runes then grant new abilities or buffs not found in the normal research tree, such as allowing the player to run a stack of massively buffed berserkers, or having might fighting miners with bombs. Runes also exist for economy and traps which influence where you get your main money from or what traps you really like. This system promotes replayability (alongside the randomised map), since each playthrough you can try out a new combination of runes and see how that goes.

Tldr: Fun game, one active and friendly dev, give a shot if you like dungeon keeper and dwarves; has some interesting ideas for replayability

If you've played 1 and 2, you know what you're here for.

If you haven't: It's time to go on an adventure.

Asides some very minor glitches/bugs (which I find can be worked around by saving often and restarting), this piece of software has been flawless. The amount of content on the workshop, combined with the ease of drawing and creating maps (I built 3 30x 30 maps in just 4 hours), really make it one of my all-time best investments

For those DM's tired of having to wrangle with free maps to make them fit your own vision, look no further because this is really an easy program to get into and pump out those maps you're imagining and use them for your weekly/monthly games!

Disclaimer: I use this program for Warhammer and DnD so far, so don't know if the Sci-fi section is as complete.

Seen it getting a lot of hate for simplistic combat. Combat is simple, indeed, so if you want that, go look for another game.

City of Gangsters is a maffia game made by a small team about management, and feels quite realistic in that respect. People didn't sell booze in order to get money to kill people. They occasionally killed/roughed up people in order to sell more booze. You're here to get rich, not to have a bodycount.

Devs are active on discord, and have said they have plans to expand the types of illegal rackets you can run and to work on mod support. Base game is good. The replayability is nice, and with modding support i can see this game having a long shelf life yet.

Played this in beta. Came for the pain and great atmosphere. Stayed for the pain and great atmosphere. Became a better person for it. Go try it!

Currently at 20 Hours and enjoying myself. Going to include some tips because I think a lot of negative remarks in other reviews are due to not catching up on some gameplay mechanics. I will add a barebones tutorial as one of the games' faults though. Here goes:

The Good:
- Humour gets progressively better as you get further in campaign.
- The gameplay Loop of building your lair feels good. It has that "one more thing to do" vibe from early on.
- Experimenting with lair building is fun.
- Niche genre, but scratches that evil guy itch quite well.

The Bad:
- Barebones tutorial which teaches you very few tricks to handle the mid to late game.
- Bugs. Especially with henchman abilities can make your game frequently crash if for instance your henchman is on fire and you wish them to activate ability. Other Bugs happen.
- Early game grind is very similar for all geniuses.

Neutral:
- Barebones tutorial leads to you needing to experiment and often restart. This is a hit or miss: learning from mistakes is good (there's even achievement for dying), but the early game grind is a bit tedious. But you learn to streamline it rather quickly.

Tips based on Negative remarks in other reviews:
- World map being tedious/unreadable: You get a notification if one of your networks isn't doing a scheme. On the world map, you will see the radio mist pinging with waves if the region is idle. If it is scheming, the radio-waves disappear.
- World map scheme spam: research Criminal network lvl 2 ASAP and you can easily get schemes that last 1 hour and solve all gold problems. Less spam for you that way.
- Enemy Agent spam + no notifications for this: You need to lay-out your lair access better: making a small S form can already do wonders to keep agents of your back. Put traps in there, and your AI will call out traps being triggered, letting you know there's agents entering your base.
- Guards not noticing agents: Security cameras are your friend. Put a guard room near your entrance along with cams in corridors (use extra block to make the camera survey the length of the room if need be.). In my above S form, I let agents trigger traps first, then tag 'em for capturing once they pass the trap corridor. Guards will only get enemy agents that 1. are tagged. 2. are in visible range of camera. Once You understand this, game will make more sense.
- Teleporting enemies: these are only super agents or special encounters. Both aren't random. Special encounters are triggered by story missions (throwing a curve ball, ergo save often), while super agents only come if you do a scheme in the world region they are patrolling. don't scheme there and you wn't get them. If you do, you gotta deal with it.
- Put your suspicious stuff (vaults, sanctum, research...) away from your entrance. Do not trust the tutorial on this. Prison next to your trap hallways isn't bad, so long there's guard room nearby. Your call.
-Last tip; Most enemies come from either your landing pad, or your casino. Plan your defences accordingly.
-Extralast tip: You can combine theBarracks, Mess Hall, staff room and archive rooms easily for saving space.
-Final pro tip: plan lots of space for Energy rooms and your Broadcast rooms.

A bold new entry in the warhammer 40k games series that breathes passion and dedication. Definate recommend to anyone who loves warhammer or is trying to get into the universe. Looking forward to the next entry by this studio!

First time I ever write a review for a game, but I felt this one deserves a recommendation, because i feel like some sites belittle the game as a "4X-lite" in a warhammer 40k jacket and a suboptimal use of the licence like many other warhammer games in recent history.

Summarised review:
"Gladius: relics of war is in my opinion Dawn of War, translated to the 4x genre. If you were a big fan of the original dawn of war and like 4X games too, definately have a look at this one. Varied races, lore flavour galore and eternal war are what you'll find here."

The good:

-Starts out with 4 varied races: i've seen people say that 4 races isn't that much, but i'd say it's enough, considering both DOW 1 and DOW 2 originally started out with 4 races each (We won't mention DOW 3). There's room for expansion on which Slitherine is planning to capitalise, so I'm expecting Chaos/tyranids/Tau to be added. The Four races that are in the game though (Astra Militarum, Space Marines, Orks and Necrons) are each varied and unique in their own ways. They even have different resources and resource gathering methods based on their lore: Influence, for instance, which is used to use your racial special abilities/heroes is gathered rather traditionally by all factions by building shrine-like buildings, but the Space Marines have an early hero who has a skill that nets you influence everytime he gains experience from battle. The Orks net extra influence per time they hit something, giving them massive potential to gain the resource, but unlike other races, their units also costs influence, to represent the WAAGH! drive of the race. All the Race rosters are expansive and covers most of their units from the lore, with only a few exceptions (Slitherine confirmed they might add in those missing units yet).

-Base-building: Copied, or at least very similar to endless Legend, base-building requires your city to expand physically tile per tile and has you build appropirate buildings to maximise the bonuses per individual tile. It all feels very smooth and organic and you can have each city produce multiple things: your Labour corps buildings can construct other buildings, whilst your barracks/factories simultaneously produce units. These buildings can be produced multiple times, speeding up your recruitment times and giving you the chance to specialise your cities. You'll soon feel like's youre creating massive Manufactorums churning out massive engines of war, or Infantry academies in a jungle.

-Lore and quests: definately a plus with a deep codex to look up everything you encounter via pop-ups or by clicking on it manually. The flavour text is very abundant and very well-written and really evokes the unique feel per race really well in my opinion. There's also a questline per faction, whose completion is a potential road to victory next to wiping out all your competitors. Like the flavour text, it is well-written, and explains the backstory per faction (and also why both human factions would kill each other).

-Combat: Combat is easy to learn, and harder to master. You'll need to pore over each unit's outfit and weaponry in order to maximise its potential, aswell as learn to work with terrain (forests, slopes) and unit firing range in order to master the field of battle. There's also a lot of wildlife (from Kroot Hounds to Haywire Kastellan Robots) to contend with on Gladius Prime, and it will not give you your precious resource tiles without a good fight.


The Neutral:

- Lack of Diplomacy: often cited as a negative point: in my opinion the diplomacy isn't crucial during the game itself. The only diplomacy to be done is acutally done before launching your game session, where you can set teams. Those whom don't like the space marines and imperial guard killing each other can set them on the same team, much like in Dawn of War or other RTS skirmish games.

- Animations: rather basic but not annoyingly so

The Negative:

-Customisation: I'll start with what they did get right: you can rename your units and these names will float above them, setting them apart from the rest of the army. They can also randomly acquire regimental names like "eyes of the deciever" for necrons, or "Men of Tourmarinth" for the Astra Miliatarum which adds flavour nicely. That said, there's no army painter/customiser or Changing of your hero characters, despite the light RPG aspects being present. Slitherine's announced they're considering adding the Army painter, but for now one has to content themselves with simply changing the overall color of your faction, and imagining playing Dark Green space marines is the same as playing the Dark Angels chapter. That said, the community's brought this up a few times and I'd be surprised if an army painter wouldn't be introduced.

Conclusion:

"If you like Dawn of War, Warhammer 40k and like 4X combat systems, buy this. You won't be disappointed."