Recent reviews by MikeHoncho

Super chill to the max.

It's early access, so definitely rough around the edges and missing a good bit of content but it already feels like a significant improvement over Cold Waters even at this point (EA release day). Buy if you are coming from Cold Waters and love the subject, and want to support the developers. Hold off if you're expecting a more polished release ready-type game, but definitely keep an eye on the update cadence and overall dev roadmap. For me? I can live with the bugs and lack of content because I want to support the game and have confidence in the direction.

Coming from someone who always wanted to own a game shop, I love it.

Love my managed democracy.

One of the most relaxing and chill gaming experiences I've found, and one so engaging and straightforward that my littlest one begs to play it, too! Far from being frustrating on any level, it feels like you're empowered to create your own little landscape the way you want even if you don't always care about maximizing your score. At full price it's worth it, so if you catch it on sale it should be an instabuy.

While from a narrative perspective it might not be the Dune some are looking for, Spice Wars manages really well from an overall flavor perspective. It really captures the Dune universe and immerses you, and the devs have been great about adding new features and listening to community feedback along the way.

We don't have all the features of KSP on day one, but KSP2 is a fundamental improvement in many ways. The one core thing that's a problem right now is performance. Any time Kerbin is in view, the game just gets super laggy.

On a positive note, load times are drastically reduced, the UI got a huge boost all the way around, procedural aircraft wings, live swap to the tracking station, and huge improvements to craft switching, just to name a few. But the overall performance is what kills it at the moment, even if your specs far exceed what's recommended.

If you're expecting all KSP features on day one here, you'll be disappointed. If you're expecting decent frame rates on a decent PC, you'll be disappointed. But what you are getting is a fundamentally improved experience in many key ways that will only get better over time. Just not sure it justifies the high cost right now during EA.

Just played a game as Russia against UK and Germany. 10/10 for realism.

Aside from that, the choice to use artwork by well-known military artists like Robert Taylor for some card art makes for great looking cards and really fits the overall look well.

Super fun game that doesn't feel like you need money invested to have fun.

This was a really hard one to call, especially since I loved the first game for its originality and emphasis on political leaning and social aspects. While Citystate II definitely seems more polished all the way around, it seems to have lost the charm of the first game and instead created what feels like a tedious and repetitive chore a couple hours in.

While I love the regional aspect, it really seems to serve no purpose and unlike the much older SimCity games, doing things like building road and rail connections to the edge of the map does absolutely nothing. At all. And once your first city is cash positive and large enough to support a decent income (which is disappointingly easy to achieve), all subsequent cities are super easy and boring to set up because you have so much money to work with.

While the game does look a LOT better than its predecessor, it's no Cities Skylines, and so there's little mechanic depth under the hood or design/visual appeal on the surface to make you want to take time laying things out. It's just a repetitive game of lay roads, plop down zones and services, scout out and exploit resource patches, repeat.

And my biggest complaint of all, why is my city at 100k pop and still I can only build the basic elementary school?? At this point in my game, it feels more like "Elementary School Regional Planning and Zoning Commission Simulator" than anything else.

My degree background is in history, but I work in the software industry. I mention this only because history is about piecing together and preserving stories that, taken together, make up our collective human experience, and well designed games are a tiny piece of that shared experience. Dwarf Fortress truly captures this thought and distills it down into a package that is equal parts simulation, builder, and story generator where the output is a vibrant and evolving history with every new world generated.

The point of the game, ultimately, is a fantasy sandbox for creating rich stories through your benevolent guidance of the eager and industrious dwarves under your watchful eye. There is no winning, final bosses, or narratives on rails here. When you understand this, it becomes clear that Zach and Tarn Adams have created something insanely wonderful in DF that will surely be played, talked about, analyzed, and remembered for decades to come. Yes, there are very popular games that offer somewhat similar experiences or aspects of them, but none come close to the level of planning, the thoughtful execution of design, or the sheer detail that have gone into making DF what it is today (and continues to evolve towards).

The absolute definition of both masterpiece and labor of love, and well deserving of your time and money if you're yet to experience it or have (like many of us) grown with the original ASCII version through the years and want to support Zach and Tarn's work.