Recent reviews by Drunk Man

It's back! A relic from ages past, Battle Nations has amazingly been resurrected.

It's kinda funny how this freemium Farmville-esque game from decade ago is almost a breath of fresh air in the modern gaming epoch, but here we are!

I could've sworn bringing this game back from the dead was impossible, but Madrona Games somehow managed it. Granted, the game isn't 100% functional right now; there's a few bugs, some old and some new, but also some features like socials, such as friends and guilds, haulers, and late-game content isn't available yet.

But again, the game just got dug out of the literal grave after over a decade, give it some time. I've got complete confidence that Madrona will do wonders with this game, nobody spends this much time and effort bringing a game back if they aren't genuinely dedicated. They even managed to get the old Steam page and Steam appid, which is why the reviews are "mixed"- that's actually from BEFORE the game shut down originally, in 2015. Check the graph, it's crazy.

As for the game, well, it's a relic from the 2010s. The gameplay revolves around turn-based combat, and resource management building out your Outpost, which is similar to Farmville. Buildings produce goods, resources, and units in real-time, which leads to a good deal of waiting around. That, and you have a premium currency, Nanopods, which are used for more advanced units and structures which help out massively. You earn a small amount for free, however. The game has a good sense of progression, and to help with that, the game has great writing and story telling.

You've been sent by the Empire to go look for uranium in the desert, and as the Captain of the 95th Rifle's Division, you're under-equipped and under-trained in a hostile wasteland. To help you out are your advisors; Lt. Morgan is your drunk, embezzling second-in-command schemer. Sgt. Ramsey is hard-headed, good-natured, and well-respected. Perkins is... Perkins. In other words, the rookie soldier that is the subject of every experiment in the Outpost. As for civilians, your liaison to them is civil engineer Floyd, who is a bleeding heart ecologist with no sense of respect for human decency. Finally, you have Zoey, your mechanic. She's talented enough to get nearly any machine working, if you count "explodes" or "catches fire everywhere" as "working."

These characters will be your guide and the driving force in the story, for as you build up your Outpost more threats will get wind of your presence and try to drive you out. All the characters are well written to the point where modern writing in most games pales in comparison, which is again kind of weird coming from a copy of a Facebook game.

Make no mistake, Madrona's got a lot of work to do before the game is restored to it's original state, let alone a *modern* state. You can't watch ads for Nanopods anymore (thank GOD) but that leaves no way for free players to get Nanos reliably. Madrona have said they are looking into ways to help balance the economy and eventually expand the game past where it was on shutdown, and I have good faith that they'll be able to do that.

If you feel like trying the game, give it a shot; there's good reasons why fans were so dedicated they resurrected the game 10 years after it died. Here's to a long, prosperous future for Battle Nations.

An absolutely amazing puzzle game. Hysterical writing, fantastic characters, great puzzle gameplay all wrapped up in a "mismatched rejects have to solve the mystery and save the world" plot in a half-magic/half-modern world. I love puzzles, and this is an all-time favorite game from me, no doubt about it.

I have complaints because I can criticize anything, but they are very minor and not really worth spoiling the game over. The biggest thing is that yes, this is a puzzle game, not a strategy game like XCOM. Of course, if you save-scum in XCOM like I do, there's not much difference there anyways.

I hope the devs consider more content in this universe for sure. This concept is ripe for good sequels and sidegames, I think.

More than anything else, this game makes me wish Steam had a Mixed rating for reviews.
On one hand, the game is unoptimized, buggy, sometimes downright unfair, lacking in content, missing basic QOL features, the whole works. Like, you can't ban people from lobbies, only repeatedly kick them until they get bored and don't join again. Sometimes text chat doesn't work, other times you or other important objects will get stuck in unexpected ways, etc etc. I could go on.

But on the other hand, when this game works, it is an absolute blast.

I think this game has a serious amount of potential, and I genuinely hope the devs manage to reach that potential.

Until then, be wary of the games problems. I recommend still treating it like an early access title despite it just coming out into 1.0. The amount of work the devs have done so far gives me hope that this game will eventually be a standout.

Well, Sony caved.

Hope it lasts.

I just can't recommend the game in the state it is in now. It's Early Access and it's frustrating.

It's got a lot of good ideas, but they are all undercooked and undermined by extremely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ design. Because it's always fun to have four monsters literally spawn on top of you and then destroy your entire save file, right? Or monsters spawning inside your ship and not leaving so you just fail automatically? Or walking into the building only to realize a little too late every entrance has turret guns?

It's all just so sloppy. The game encourages planning and teamwork, moving carefully to deal with threats, but then destroys that notion by giving you mere minutes to explore a randomly generated level before it becomes too hazardous to navigate. Once you cross that threshold, enemies will spawn out of thin air with no warning and in droves, in combinations that make them nigh impossible to deal with before they insta-kill you. More than once enemies have spawned directly on top or next to me and teammates causing a loss.

It's clear the developer is talented and has good ideas. The ambiance is phenomenal, the enemy designs are creative and unnerving. The idea as a whole is excellent, but the systems that drive it forward are not thought out. My three biggest gripes:

1. There needs to be more time. Every level is a sprint but the game design implies you should be taking it slower without giving you the chance.
2. Spawns need to be fixed. I should not be seeing enemies spawn in front of me, or enemies spawning on top of me. There's not even sound queues for most enemies.
3. Progression needs to be reworked. As of now, the game is a death march where you fight rising deadlines until eventually they get so high you physically cannot win, and then you lose literally everything. If I wanted that, I'd play Tetris. I'm not asking for an ending, just something that isn't inevitable failure and save-wipe.

This game has a lot of potential, and the developer seems to know. I hope they manage to realize it, and I wish them nothing but the best in achieving it. Until it gets closer to that, I can't recommend it. It's simply too frustrating with its systems.

Normally I'd write a glowing review for the game despite its problems. Now, avoid it like the plague.

Why? The devs are forcing all players to switch from EA accounts to Epic accounts. Yes, that Epic. Y'know, the one with puppet strings leading back to Tencent and the CCP?

Oh, and they'll DELETE YOUR ENTIRE ACCOUNT if you don't do this. Enjoy!

I can't do it. I can't recommend the game, not with all of the problems it STILL has in Season 7.

Let me be clear that I want to love this game, I really do. And I try so hard with it. But the game STILL has problems on problems that just never seem to be properly fixed or addressed.

Combat for one thing. I can sneak up on a guy, get five sword slashes on him, and he turns and gets me in two. There's no valid explanation. I can then drop four blunderbombs on him with two point-blank blunderbuss shots and he isn't even phased, but he hits me with one pistol shot? Instant KO. All of this while he's spawn-camping my boat. All of this just tonight, not even talking about all the nonsense like this that happens all the time in all my time playing.

How about your boat despawning with no warning because the game thinks you are "stuck?" This one isn't even hard to fix. If my boat was stuck, don't you think I would've scuttled it? The thing that has no other use unless you are being spawncamped because of the combat?

The cheaters that just fly in the air and nuke your boat with airstrikes?

Quests constantly breaking and screwing up your game?

Randomly dropping to 20 FPS for no decidable reason that has seemingly no fix?

Or what about the other myriad of things that just break for no reason? My friend wanted to use the new Captaincy feature, and it just wouldn't let him. He had to sit at the menu trying to buy a new ship for TWENTY minutes before it finally let him. No fault of his own, the game just didn't like his face that day.

Rare removing content that wasn't time-limited for... some reason?

Or how about being a 40$ game with microtransactions? Granted, you can earn the coins without spending money, but that is both slow and based mostly in randomness. Still an unforgivable sin. Not to mention the Battle Pass.

Content that forces you to work with other players that actively try and murder you?

Ship combat is pretty braindead for smaller ships. Just try and outlast the other. Fights with Galleons is awesome, and there is a good amount of strategy. But mostly it's small ships being destroyed by bigger ships instantly, or smaller ships plinking away at smaller ships until one of them makes too many mistakes or runs out of supplies. Or getting spawncamped until scuttling. None of these are particularly fun.

The list goes on ad nauseam.

I've had some great moments in this game, and I wish I could say they outnumbered all the bad ones. But they don't.

The game just has too many flaws that have gone unaddressed for too long. Want to go on a high-seas adventure with your pals? Too bad, you'll get destroyed by sweats that exist to eat the happiness of others. Want to go kill people and be sweaty? The game doesn't let you because of the atrocious mechanics and bugs. It's a lose-lose.

I wish I could recommend this, but not until at the very least SOME of this is fixed.

First game I've ever issued a refund request on Steam for.

Keep in mind, I played 30 minutes of this thing, and I hated it so viscerally that I decided to refund it in that time. So why? Well, for starters I own a first generation Vive and a beefy rig, so VR is no issue for me, usually. While my Vive does have it's tangly cable and low-res panel and maybe less than ideal controllers, so far just about every VR experience I've had has been enjoyable. Not this.

Note, this review isn't negative because of multiplayer. I didn't have terrible teammates because I queued with two of my buds who had experience with the game, and I wasn't BM'd or experienced anything negative with the community, although I could totally see that happening. No, this review is negative because the devs, while their idea is ambitious, know nothing of basic game design.

The first problem was me using a gen 1 vive, and for some reason the game puts it's HUD at the very BOTTOM of the display panel. I didn't even know it was there, I thought you had to just guess how much health you have. No, the notifications and your health/shields are just at the *very* bottom, so low that I could never see it without stopping and physically pushing my HMD upwards. Also, the game makes everything seem really, REALLY close. I have no idea what in this game is causing it, but I have had nothing like this in any other VR game. A height reset didn't fix anything either, and I had no tracking issues. So that's fantastic already. This was apparent in the tutorial, which helpfully the game forces you into, but unhelpfully was designed by morons.

You are given no chance to acquaint yourself to the controls before a way-too-loud voice starts constantly barking at you to move into a wall. It will constantly repeat itself most of the time about every ten seconds, but othertimes, such as when it comes to instructions on how firearms work, then suddenly it doesn't say a word, which is nice. Can't even be consistently annoying. And note, this is a battle-royale. The tutorial explains the basics of movement, firearms, healing, and building (which are cans of worms I'll dig into in a moment,) but does not explain how the royale itself functions. Considering this is the only VR BR I know of, that would be pretty important, right? Especially everyone has different controllers and setups, right? And you need unique mechanics to accomplish the same thing a button would outside of VR?

So I'll save you the trouble. You know how all other BR games have you in a plane or a dropship of some kind flying over the map when you start? Not this one. In this, you start on a tower, have to race to rocket pods, interact with them before someone steals them from you, and then you start flying over the map. Then, you have to bring up the map using your left hand (Which the tutorial tells you nothing of), pick where you want to go, and then whenever you are ready find and pull the handle on the ceiling which is the exact SAME COLOR as the inside of the pod, and then you rocket straight down. I've been told by my friends that there is a way to leave the pod early, but that was never explained to me like the rest of this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game.

And all of this in a squad based game! Great figuring this ♥♥♥♥ out on the fly trying to coordinate with teammates. Either they'll be more experienced than you and just rocket off, or not having any idea either and be just as confused. The tutorial couldn't be bothered to explain any of this, but it does have the time to tell you about 3 separate times about the building mechanic they stole from Fortnite, and serves even less of a purpose here. Nobody uses the building. It's garbage. It's pointless. It's fiddly and imprecise. There's no point to it.

All of the guns handle differently and reload differently, which if you know nothing about guns will be a complete shock picking one up and discovering it has nothing in common with the two guns you get in the tutorial. Recoil, even when shouldering weapons and using grips seems unreasonably high, so I've got no idea. It's nothing like the trailers. Probably me being cursed with the gen 1 vive, because guess what! I CAN'T REVIVE PROPERLY USING VIVE WANDS. Yes. The only way to revive with the defibrillators is to rub them together, but you have to be so close to do it, you smack your controllers together. Hooray! Additionally, before we leave guns, there is an incredibly low amount of them, and the skins for them are both lackluster and inconsistent. I know the game just dropped, but seriously? You get a common skin at level 3, and you get the exact same common skin for a different gun at one of the last levels, while you already have gotten rare and epic skins for that same gun at that point. Come on guys, this is basic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ "use your brain" territory.

Audio is completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥. Why is it sitting down does all of a sudden make voice chat come from the right ear? It's not my headset, I checked. Why are some sounds, like building and shield charging, ear-shatteringly loud, but gunfire, footsteps, and just a whole bunch of other stuff completely way too quiet? Oh, except for that one time I heard all of the enemy team's footsteps across the map.

There is honestly probably more stuff that I hated while playing that I forgot (like how the graphics settings I'm fairly certain are a placebo), because they are all eclipsed by one other issue: THE CONTROLS. They are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ atrocious! They make no sense on the Vive, and going back to the tutorial, half of them aren't explained to you. You use the grip buttons for almost everything. Not the triggers. "Which is totally comfortable and not a terrible design decision at all," he said completely lying through his teeth. Your only movement option is sliding locomotion with no speed control. It's just clunky and awkward. And I wouldn't complain except you can't change them. You can't alter them in any way ingame. At all. You can't even see bindings in game, you have to use SteamVR for that, and that would be the only way to alter the controls. I didn't enjoy the game enough to try that, but the fact you can't change like "grip buttons vs triggers" is infuriating. I understand you can't have things like teleport locomotion because BR, but you can't have slide-to-point, or armswinger? Just touchpad sliding? Not even directional controller sliding? Nothing? WHY?

Maybe Quest users, like my friends, get a better experience because the game is sponsored by Occulus. I wouldn't be surprised.

Tl;dr: Game design's ♥♥♥♥, tutorial's ♥♥♥♥, controls are ♥♥♥♥, doesn't play nicely with gen 1 vive.

Was going to recommend this originally.

It's got great gameplay, and despite the physics engine working small miracles, there's only a few minor quirks. The story, although nothing supreme, is good and does work pretty well for the gameplay. Really, pretty outstanding. I wanted to play for a few hours but then ended up playing for 14 hours straight.

Unfortunately, I have to not recommend this due to an error that makes the game practically unplayable. I upgraded my monitor halfway into my playthough. Unfortunately, I don't have that powerful of a setup right now, having only one GTX 970, so I can't run everything at the monitor's 4k resolution. No big deal, I can just scale back to 1920 until I can upgrade later this year by Christmas time.

Teardown was not having it. All of the other games I've tested work great, and even look better scaled back than they did on my old crusty monitor. Not Teardown.

It DEMANDS that I run the game in windowed now. No matter what resolution I'm at, I can't run this game fullscreen anymore. Not at a stable framerate, anyways. I've already got the render settings to low, which makes the shadows drive me crazy, but that I can ignore, the game looks good enough already. Now? Running the game at fullscreen at any resolution causes it to drop to 30 FPS maximum, and maybe 5 FPS on a bad day. Additionally, the game also at a low resolution in full screen makes everything very ugly and hard to read.

Borderless windowed is locked at the monitor's native resolution, so that doesn't work. I can ONLY run the game now in windowed at a resolution comparable to my original monitor, but when you are looking at 1920x1080 windowed on a 4k monitor with no scaling change, it's like playing the game through a bathroom window.

I can only finish this game now by playing it windowed, or until I get better graphics hardware. This is new to me, and no game I've run so far I've had to deal with this. I could try to externally scale the window, but that would screw up my desktop and all the windows I have open. That means restarting Steam, Origin, GOG Galaxy, Discord, and Google every time I start or close the game. No.

I don't blame the devs for this. They've already done wonders with this physics engine, and the game is Early Access and came out only last week at the time of writing, but I can't play the game now. So unfortunately, to my dismay, I can't recommend the game right now. If this gets fixed, I'll recommend the game in a heart beat. I even paid the full price on release day and I don't regret it a bit. Or I didn't until I swapped my monitor.

*sigh* So close. So close!

Yes, the game is nice. Probably the best modern city builder out there. So why the negativity?
For starters, the DLC. I went and got all the DLC and the game on sale over Christmas and it was still over a hundred bucks. Not even ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Payday 2 or 100% OJ is that much.
But Ok, I can appreciate expensive things if they are worth the cost. Is Cities worth all that money? Yes and no. The game at its core has inexcusable flaws such as with traffic and citizen deaths. Sure, you can mod them out, but come on!

Admittedly, those are small things compared to the REAL reason why I'm making this review negative; the launcher. Recently, Paradox connected this game and all the others they own to their ♥♥♥♥♥♥ in-house launcher that bombards you with ads and sells your data.

♥♥♥♥. That. Hard.

Now sure, I can disable it with a few workarounds, but they break my mods. And I have to go out of my way to make a batch file to disable the damn thing; there's no other way.

Paradox burns their launcher in a trash can, I'll change my review. For now, it stays.