Neue Rezensionen von MaxVexis

This game is immense fun when you're playing with friends, but struggles if you're on your own. The default Battalion multiplayer is made around playing different types of battalions that require planning and teamwork to cover each other's weaknesses. This does make the solo experience feel bad, because you're thrown into matchmaking with random strangers with seemingly random decks. The game doesn't feel fun or fair that way. But if you get a couple of friends together on voice-chat and play as a team, the whole experience suddenly changes into an immensely fun and engaging game. It's a unique mix of casual and realistic elements.

This game is very different from the previous Men of War Assault Squad games. This drastic change has upset some of its long-time fans, which probably explains some of the negative reviews. If you're looking for a game like Gates of Hell, this isn't quite it. It has a classic mode that plays like that, but the game as a whole is very much not 'Men of War Assault Squad 3'. It is a new and different game.

Victoria 3 is the long-awaited sequel to Victoria 2, a 12 year old cult classic. Although it was a buggy, janky, fundamentally broken mess, the economy of Victoria 2 was unique among games. It featured a closed loop economy, where every good bought or pound spent by one entity is a good produced or a pound earned by a different entity. The entire thing operated and changed by itself. You could not control it, only influence it. It had many bugs and design flaws, but it was a truly unique economic system for a videogame. The surrounding systems like diplomacy and war were simple and lazy, in the old Paradox style, but just functional enough.

In comes Victoria 3. Looking at it as a sequel to Victoria 2, it disappoints in most ways. The unique economic system is gone, and the economy more closely resembles Anno. Your goal is to grow your economy using your construction sector, and your main activity is fixing the economic impacts of the last thing you did. Supply, demand, and prices change instantly. Nothing in your country happens without your input, and you have absolute control over every production building in your country. Making new buildings and changing how they operate is your primary gameplay loop, making you feel more like a middle manager than a country. While balancing production methods in every backyard moonshine-still is fun once as a small country, it devolves into tedious micromanagement quickly when playing anything larger than Liechtenstein.

The only thing that happens without your input is other countries setting up trade routes, but this is mostly just infuriating. Because everything is in short supply and the AI is incompetent at growing their own economy, these trade routes mostly just steal your resources and rarely if ever sell you anything of substance. Protecting particular goods could have been an interesting gameplay mechanic, but it isn’t. You can’t stop a good from being exported. You can only embargo entire countries. So trade boils down to you trying to steal resources you’re short on, the AI doing the same, and you embargoing the AI if it starts stealing too many of yours. Devolving into isolationism becomes an appealing prospect, if only to remove the micromanagement and instability.

Speaking of the AI: In typical Paradox fashion, it's terrible. As a result, singleplayer is a bland, sterile experience. You are playing in a sandbox with other kids, but the other kids are just balloons with faces drawn on them. It would be nice to believe that the AI will get better with some patches, but this is unlikely given the reputation of Paradox and Victoria 3’s game director. The AI nations in Victoria 3 are slow to grow, constantly in turmoil due to mismanagement, and regularly destroy themselves over the tiniest diplomatic disputes.

Those diplomatic disputes are probably the one aspect where Victoria 3 actually has some interesting innovation. Most hostile interactions are no longer just a button, but executed through a ‘Diplomatic play’ mechanic involving all major powers with an interest in the region. Diplomatic plays are a neat concept, but they are sadly underdeveloped, and let down further by the bad AI. There is no real distinction between a small colonial engagement and major war in Europe. Both become plays potentially involving every country with an interest committing their entire army. It’s impossible to ensure a nation’s neutrality beforehand. If you plan to simply befriend the other powers, or convince them to stay out once it’s started, good luck. Friendly nations will turn on you in a heartbeat during a play, and major AI powers will join a diplomatic play for the most insane reasons. The US will fight to the death to defend Danish Holstein in exchange for an IOU. China will sacrifice millions to keep an Indonesian province out of Dutch hands because they were promised war reparations. The East India Company will happily fight a war against its overlord over some border dispute between Indian nations, before magically returning to being an obedient dominion once the war ends.

This entire experience is wrapped up in a UI more hostile to the end-user than a suicide vest. Tooltips can be helpful, but the endless recursion of tooltips on your tooltips on your tooltips, ad infinitum, invokes an Escherian feeling of endlessness that makes you feel more lost than before you started. This wouldn’t be as bad if these tooltips did not contain important information that can’t be found elsewhere. The game will only tell you the most important information at a glance, such as the number of radicals in your country, but make it impossibly difficult to find out exactly who is radical and what caused it.

Critics have said the game looks like a mobile game, and while this is unfair to the gameplay, the UI does lean heavily towards modern mobile-friendly UI trends. Lists and tables are frowned upon, while grid layouts are preferred whenever possible. The amount of information allowed on the screen at any one point is extremely limited, forcing you to constantly swap between windows. Multiple lists simply can’t be sorted at all, and no list ever takes up more than a third of your screen width. A full screen table with all the information you could want is anathema. Buttons are large, and the UI scaling is very high by default, unless you have a widescreen monitor, in which case it defaults to unreadably tiny. The game defaults to tree maps instead of pie charts, suggesting that the UI designer had some very strong personal convictions about design without necessarily having the understanding of visual data comprehension to back them up.

I have yet to mention the political system, because it hardly matters. Unless you are trying to change a particular law that’s affecting your gameplay, like isolationism, it’s possible to forget it exists entirely. The interest groups controlling your government do nothing to stop you from changing the economy and eroding their power, so the power of interest groups is just a result of what buildings you build rather than an interesting mechanic.

Ultimately, the game is an exercise in making a line go up for the sake of the line going up. Every country plays exactly the same, and there is no real payoff at the end. Warfare could theoretically provide something to work towards, but the war system is so barebones, clunky, and dysfunctional that warfare is more frustrating than fun. There is no micromanagement of units, as that system has been replaced with automatic AI fronts, but fronts split, merge, and disappear so much that the micromanagement is somehow just as annoying. Since the fighting happens automatically, wars are heavily affected by arcane mechanics behind the scene that the player can’t see or interact with, such as the number of troops that participate in a battle, or the direction a general advances. The reward for dealing with this system is often lackluster, since wargoals are decided during the diplomatic play phase and cannot be altered during the war.

Victoria 3 isn’t a terrible game per se. It is simply mediocre as a game, and bad as a Victoria sequel. If it had been an early-access indie game for 30 euros with a different name, it would have been received very well, with praise for some of its innovative ideas and its potential. As a released full-price sequel to a cult classic developed by a major studio, it is disappointing. The arguments about its potential ring hollow in the context of a studio known for selling buggy, half-baked products that had potential but failed to deliver.

If you are looking for a complex economic simulator, this isn’t it. If you are looking for a game focused on diplomacy and war, this also isn’t it. If you are looking for a cute Anno-style economy game that you can play with friends so you can bicker over who ate all the tools in the market, this is actually alright, though buggy and overpriced.