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10 Hours Later - Nefarious

2/6/2017

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INTRODUCTION AND DISCLAIMERS
Relevant information to note before reading this early impressions / review:
  • I was not given a review copy.
  • I have no affiliation with anyone at Starblade.
  • Specifications of the system used for this first impressions article can be found here.
  • At the time of writing this article, I had played the game for ten hours.

Nefarious caught my attention when I first heard about it a couple of weeks ago. It's a game where, for once, you play the princess-kidnapping bad-guy rather than the hero.​

Created by two-man team Starblade, it's a decent first attempt at an action platformer - it does have its issues, though.

Punchin' Bees and Stealin' Princesses
Crow, your character, has a plan to kidnap five princesses from different lands. Apparently they make for a great energy source. Each one is defended by a native hero, all of whom play the role of the traditional end-of-level boss. You, on the other hand, use various nefarious (sorry) machines to take them on.
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Some of these heroes are righteous, some of them are arrogant - one of them is so much of a douche that he simply leaves the princess in your grasp. Humour is certainly one of Nefarious' strong points, crammed as it is into every pore of the game. The developers seem to have a deeply personal grudge against oft-used tropes and they pick fun at them mercilessly.

The levels, which all have their own distinct theme and are inspired by a range of influences from fantasy to zoology, do tend to follow a recurring pattern. There's often a section where you're temporarily trapped and have to fight off a few waves of enemies. I understand that this is done to break up the monotony of constant platforming, however, it does become a little predictable. These parts of the levels are often the least fun.

You'll also find various collectables. Coins are your currency, used to buy upgrades from the store back on your mothership. Three crowns are spread around each level, often in slightly obscure places that will require a dash of exploration to find. Finally, there's also a record. These are more hidden and may require certain upgrades in order to reach. They unlock tracks in your jukebox.

Both the store and your jukebox are on Sovereign (yes, a Mass Effect reference), which can be accessed between levels. The store doesn't offer anything truly innovative in its upgrades - there's extra health, quicker ammo regeneration and modifications to the mechanics of your Inspector Gadget-like (good luck getting that tune out of your head) arm.

Combat is handled in two ways. For close range, you're relying on your arm and oversized fist. Longer range encounters are handled by throwing grenades, which can either be lobbed, arcing and short distance, or with a more direct and longer trajectory.

Grenade ammo isn't the usual deal in Nefarious. Your power suit can generate them and tokens dropped from your enemies will speed up the process. The regeneration is pretty quick even without any upgrades, although it doesn’t allow you to spam them continuously.

You can damage yourself with grenades, so using them at close range is not recommended. Sadly, given that they're bound to the left mouse button, this is something that you'll do by accident quite often - if you're anything like me, that is.

Interestingly, though, they can also be used to perform super jumps, which adds an extra layer of complexity to the game, gently nudging Nefarious toward speedrunner appeal.

Difficulty ramps up with each level. By the third you're dealing with near-unavoidable attacks that have a range the width of the screen. The combat system allows for high-skill gameplay, making this a tad more complex than similar games (very much how Rise and Shine, also recently released, approaches combat)
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Bringing the Clunk
There's clearly a solid idea here - but Nefarious is held back by its technical execution - particularly when it comes to the controls.


If you're playing with a controller, you'll notice that both analogue sticks control the crosshair, rather than one. Removing your thumb from either will cause the crosshair, and therefore also the camera, to snap back to centre. This goes past the point of being obnoxious and makes the game uncomfortable to play, especially if you're changing direction frequently and quickly during a platforming section. This is avoidable if you play using mouse and keyboard, where you can keep the crosshair to one side of your character.

The button mapping is strange, too. It feels like the developers felt they had to assign an action to every controller button, even if it meant duplicating some actions and not others. Perhaps they wanted to add a way for people to have a choice of more than one layout but didn't know how to implement it properly.

The issue is present on the keyboard, too, although the bigger sin is the lack of rebindable keys. I would much prefer to have grenades assigned to the right mouse button rather than the left, for instance. This small change along would greatly alleviate some of the frustration I've experienced. 

Saturday Morning Comic-Based Cartoon Style
If anyone knows a technical term for that, I'd love to know what it is.


Anyway, that's the art style that Nefarious is presented in - pulled off with a considerable level of verve and polish. A welcome relief in the continuing trend of 8-bit and pixel art indie scene.

The animations are crafted with care and attention to detail. Some of the enemy animations are brilliantly expressive. The young policemen in the first level are a perfect example - their eyebrows near fly off their faces at the sight of you.

I still feel, though, even after these ten hours, that Crow's animations are looser than they should be. My measure for this with platformers is whether I can get used to how character movement and animation jive together, and whether I can become comfortable and precise the more I play it. I don't have that feeling with Nefarious - especially when it comes to jumping.

Nefarious is a Unity game. While Unity does provide some capability to handle semi-advanced options, they're sadly all missing here. Along with a lack of key rebinding options, there are no graphical settings at all - and there's no Unity launcher, either. You can't even change the game's resolution. You can force it into a window by pressing Alt+Enter - unfortunately it takes the resolution of your display and can't be moved nor resized.

There's also an issue with collision detection, or the lack of it when it comes to Crow and enemies. You can both occupy the same space, which leads to some frustrating situations where an enemy, stood behind your character, can hit you but you can't hit them. This happened to me annoyingly often, as melee enemies will keep advancing toward you past the point of being able to hit you. There have even been a couple of times where I've died because of an enemy being hidden behind Crow that I couldn't see.

One final little niggle is that the crosshair can be easy to lose on certain backgrounds, especially at 4K.
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Wrapping Up
For a two-man team, Nefarious is undoubtedly an impressive debut, with expertise in humour and animation at the fore.


It's currently available for $14.99/€14.99/£10.99. At that price, my general recommendation would be to wait for a sale. The game is a tad on the short side and isn't mechanically sound enough for my liking. If, on the other hand, you go mad for platformers, it's possibly worth a buy. 
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25 Hours Later - Long War 2 for X-Com 2

1/23/2017

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​INTRODUCTION AND DISCLAIMERS
Relevant information to note before reading this early impressions / review:
  • I was not given a review copy.
  • I have no affiliation with anyone at Firaxis or Pavonis Interactive.
  • Specifications of the system used for this first impressions article can be found here.
  • At the time of writing this article, I had played the game for twenty-five hours.
  • I've played every release of X-Com going way back to the 1990s, some more than others. 

It's rare that a free mod generates months of pre-release hype and is looked forward to almost as much the release of a full game. That, though, is exactly the situation surrounding Long War 2, a mod developed by Pavonis Interactive for the Firaxis-developed X-Com 2.

Long War, Long List of Changes
Long War 2 is a complete overhaul mod. As that classification suggests, it makes sweeping changes to the entire game experience. There are mechanic tweaks, bug fixes, new perks, classes and features (for most people, more on that later). This mod aims to keep players entertained for up to 200 hours. Yikes!

The changes become obvious right from the start. Squad deployment has been completely redone. You now have to select a squad of soldiers (squad management has been introduced and it's the best thing since Storm guns) to infiltrate the target area. The Sky Ranger will drop them off, and they'll be left for several days to infiltrate. This means you'll have to wait several in-game days after deployment before the actual mission starts, while the squad works to reduce the amount of enemies they'll encounter.

As you get a couple of missions in, you'll find yourself having to make compromises. Do you go for large squads (you can deploy up to ten soldiers in some missions), who infiltrate slower but have more fire-power and flexibility in combat, or do you go for a small squad, which will infiltrate quicker but will be out-gunned occasionally regardless?

One positive change is that there's a real element of being able to pick and choose your battles, enhanced from the vanilla version of X-Com 2. There's no punishment for choosing to abort a mission if your squad hasn't achieved 50% infiltration (or higher, if you're more Custer than Wellington) other than the loss of potential rewards from the mission.
X-Com 2: X-Panded

It's clear that the folks over at Pavonis Interactive have been paying attention to AAA gaming trends, as a garrison system has been included in Long War 2. Initially, I was less than pleased at this idea, as I've yet to find one that I actually like. In Long War 2, my early impressions were almost positive, given that it appeared I could just set outposts to their tasks and then forget about them. These impressions were given a boost when I had to carry out a spy-catching mission with the resistance stationed at one of the outposts.

My enthusiasm dipped tragically when this small band of poorly armed, badly armoured civilians, plus one overwhelmed squaddie and a bugged-out recovered mec came up against two Faceless and seven or eight Advent troops. It dropped further when the third mission was exactly the same as the first two, even taking place in the same landscape. So this part of the mod, for me, is a miss. Garrisons are a mechanic used to fill in playing time in games that otherwise don't have a lot going on. X-Com 2 already has a lot going on, so this kind of busywork is just unnecessary at best, downright irritating at worst.

Some of the best changes, however, are mechanical - with one caveat. If you've been playing the game solidly since release, you may already have them installed as standalone mods.

My favourite change that’s bundled in is 'red fog'. This is a setting that makes troops, aliens, or both, less effective the more damage they take. This is the type of granular difficulty setting that I really enjoy, as it makes me feel like I have comprehensive control over how easy or hard I want my experience to be. Even better, I can change it from session to session, depending on whether I'm in the mood for something more relaxed or challenging.

If you're the type that really enjoys RNG on top of RNG (what's wrong with you?) and feel that X-Com 2 is just too predictable (presumably you also like making breakfast by letting someone else organise your cupboards and picking items out at random with your eyes closed), there are several options that will interest you.

'Hidden potential' gives soldiers random stat increases on promotion, while 'not created equal' instantly randomises stats above and below the baseline.

'Damage roulette', for the truly sadist among you, randomises weapon damage further around the baseline, with an accompanying setting to increase this effect. I cannot say how much I appreciate these being optional rather than enforced changes to the game.

The final option of note is 'default squad size', which technically allows you to attempt the early missions with up to ten soldiers. Again, for those who enjoy being miserable, it will also let you attempt later missions with as few as four. I do not recommend starting off with ten soldiers, as it slows the gameplay down massively.

Slow gameplay is one of my biggest issues with Long War 2. You'll find yourself tippy-tapping around far more than in the vanilla game, especially as you get to grips with new enemies, which so far have been constantly drip-fed into the missions. Yes, there are still timers to limit this behaviour - they no longer really work properly. They're too strict. In the base game, if you had a short timer, you could take managed risks to push progress along a bit. In Long War 2, especially with the poorly equipped troops you have at the start, all this does is result in guaranteed failure.

The timers also don't jive with infiltration. There have been a couple of missions where I've gotten above 150% infiltration - and yet my squad starts off miles away from the objective with two full squads of Advent between them and the objective. Either the timers need to be lengthened in general, or infiltration needs to put you reliably closer to the objective.

What Could be Better
Onto my two biggest issues with Long War 2. The first of these isn't really Pavonis Interactive's fault, although it is something that will happen to a few players, so it's worth mentioning. Most of the best mechanical changes have already been available to players for over six months as standalone mods. The Long War Toolbox adds the game options changes, including 'red fog' which I talked about earlier. The new soldier perks have been around since summer 2016, as have the new laser weapons.

This meant, for me, that much of the 'new' experience of Long War 2 was absent, and the game quickly felt like more of what I'd already essentially finished with last year.

The game's performance is still poor. (As always, specs of the rig I played on can be found here). Now yes, it's a turn-based strategy game and therefore performance isn't as big of a concern as with a FPS or third-person action game. That being said, it's still not nice when a high-end rig is struggling with low settings, even if it is at 4K (something that this setup rarely struggles with even on near-highest settings). The suppression animation and fires are the biggest offenders here, especially on maps where you have ten soldiers deployed, and I've frequently had to just put up with not just dips, but solid chunks of time below 30FPS. When you go into a mission with four troops on a new map and get back to 60, the wave of relief is palpable.

Wrapping Up
There's no denying that Long War 2 is an awesome undertaking. It offers a staggering amount of new gameplay to an already solid game for no extra cost. It puts most paid expansion packs to shame (that's expansion, too, not overpriced and meaningless DLC). If you dipped out of X-Com 2 after a couple of playthroughs, or never finished it, I strongly suggest giving it a look. If you're a die-hard who's a bit bored of the vanilla game, this gives you more to get your teeth into.

However, if you've already been playing with the separate mods mentioned earlier, or the thought of dedicating another 140 plus hours to a single game puts you off, you might be less enthused.

Either way, Pavonis Interactive deserve to be commended for a stellar piece of work.


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Diablo 3 is in a rut

1/6/2017

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Rose-Tinted, Pixelated Spectacles
I’ve just finished Diablo 3’s 20th anniversary content. I’ll give a very brief summary of it before getting into what I really want to talk about.

The new content is basically a greater rift with a unique pixelated filter applied. Everything looks like it came from the early 90s, the sound quality and animations included. That’s cool. For a couple of minutes, then you realise why you don’t go back and play ancient games on your high-resolution display all that often.

It took me just under two hours to get through. If you go into it not expecting a great deal, you’ll probably enjoy it – until the ending, that is.

Diablo is just a normal fight. An easy one at that, too. The rewards you get are bafflingly bad. Killing Diablo gives you a legendary gem, for your helm, that stuns you – at random, combat or no combat – and casts his multi-directional fireball spell for an OK-ish amount of damage. 

I’m having a hard time coming up with a way to convey just how frustrating it is. It’s at the same level of getting to the bottom of a really nice meal and then finding a long, greasy hair in it. The stun lasts about two to three seconds and it triggers infuriatingly often when you’re trying to get from one part of a level to another. I had it equipped for fifteen minutes before I’d had enough.

The Bigger Picture
Back to the bigger picture. Back at Blizzcon last year, the hype going into the event was that there would be big news for the Diablo franchise. A new expansion - or perhaps even Diablo 4. the people hoping for that were left sorely disappointed. What we got instead was the announcement of this anniversary content (this taking up a big part of Diablo’s time at Blizzcon shows that the game is really not currently a priority) and the announcement of the Necromancer class.

One could be forgiven (well, I'll forgive you, at least) for assuming it would be coming either with this update or very close to it. No - sadly even that small hope is dashed - as it now seems that the Necromancer won’t be added to the game until the second half of 2017, per senior game designer Wyatt Chang.

What Now?
Now that I’m on the other side of the anniversary content, I’m left to reflect on the state of Diablo in 2017. I can’t help but think this content would have been a great way to introduce the Necromancer, in the form of a pseudo-tutorial. New Necromancer players fighting through the retro-styled content before bursting out into the new age of Diablo 3 makes a much better story than randomly hopping about on an existing character to a new icon on the map.

I hadn’t played Diablo 3 since the start of the season – even that brief fling didn’t last long. Am I supposed to just wonder off and ignore the game again until the Necromancer drops? Or was this content somehow supposed to rekindle my and others’ love for the game? If it was, it’s done the opposite.

It feels like the team currently working on Diablo 3 is tiny. As if the game has been repurposed to allow for a series of automatic or set-and-forget mechanics to keep the hardcore players happy while the developers are off working on something else.

If we assume that they are working on major new content in the Diablo franchise, then the timing of the Necromancer doesn’t make sense to me. If something of substance is coming reasonably soon, why release the Necromancer separately as DLC for Reaper of Souls? It makes me think the worst – that nothing is coming soon.

It makes me think the worst — that nothing is coming soon. The Necromancer is Blizzard trying to mop up a leak with toilet paper; desperately trying to keep players around while they try to get the Diablo team out of the malaise they find themselves in.


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5 Things I want from Valve in 2017

1/5/2017

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Hello there! Welcome to 2017! Aren't we all glad that 2016 is behind us? How are you exploiting your yearly dose of irrational optimism? I decided to waste mine and project it at Valve. 

I'm going to try and stick to eventualities that are at least vaguely possible, even if I would love for them to kill the harmful and exploitative economy that's growing around trading cards. Let's get into it.

1 - Make the curator system useful
"Maintaining that curator page is incredibly difficult and the feature set has not been properly updated since its inception almost three years ago."

Those are the recent words of John "TotalBiscuit" Bain, owner and operator of the largest curator group on Steam.


Like so many initiatives that Valve drop on us with little warning, the curator system is another in a line of good ideas crippled by either laziness or a lack of caring. Despite being given a small update a few months ago (which Bain states did nothing to actually help manage his curator group), the system is languishing and slowly slipping into a puddle of uselessness, with major curators abandoning it altogether. 

He went on to say: "It seems that nobody at Valve really cares about the curator system and can't be bothered to make it as powerful as it needs to be."

2 - Get a grip on Greenlight, Early Access and your store in general
I could write thousands upon thousands of words about the unethical practices that go on in what have quickly become Steam's Wild West of asset flipping, customer abusing, false advertising and bribing. 

The two platforms, which were both introduced to help aspiring developers get their projects to market in an industry where they traditionally wouldn't have a chance, both saw their fair share of controversy in 2016.

Let's start with Greenlight. Steam have a set of rules for developers who want to enter a project into the voting process. You can see them here.  The two that I'd like to bring particular attention to are the very first one, which states that you must have a functioning core of a game that you can show off with a video trailer, and the very last one, which prohibits a bunch of stuff - including racism, soliciting and begging. 

I mention these two rules in particular, because if, like me, you follow Jim Sterling's YouTube series, "Best of Steam Greenlight Trailers" you'll have noticed that these rules aren't exactly strictly enforced. What this means, then, is that "developers" (yes, the quotes are necessary) will often launch "games" (again, necessary) cobbled together in MS Paint promising free keys in exchange for Greenlight votes. They do this openly, and Valve do nothing about it, even when it's been brought to light by one of the biggest critics in the gaming industry. This is also despite them coming out and publicly telling them to knock it off in February 2015.

Here's an idea - that one-time fee that allows for an unlimited number of submissions - make it per submission. Or per three submissions, if that's too harsh.

Early Access has its own problems. Some games are abandoned with little warning and no way for customers to get their money back, as happened with Starbase DF-9. Other developers think it's perfectly fine to launch an Early Access expansion for their game, which is also in Early Access. Valve give them free reign to do so. It's a service that allows unscrupulous developers to take advantage of naïve consumers. Now yes, consumers should be more careful. However, they should also still be protected from predatory business practices.

Valve need quality control. They used to be very strict about it, arguably too strict. It's as if they were so badly stung by criticism they received from not letting certain games on Steam that they got into a massive sulk, said: "Sod it, we'll let everything on" and proceeded to sit in a dark corner glowering at us ever since.

Here's a sobering statistic: Steam has been in operation since September 2003. The releases in 2016 account for 40% of its entire library.

How many of those were utter dross that aren't fit for sale? How many were decade-old titles that nobody missed, dumped onto the store in great batches to take up the entirety of the new release front page? And how many that fall into those two categories stopped genuinely good games from getting the release spotlight that could have made the difference between a developer giving up on their dreams or realising them?

3 - Put an end to the Half-Life 3 misery, one way or another
Here's something that's been dragging on for over a decade. Half-Life 3. Does it exist, or does it not exist? Did it ever exist, or was it quietly cancelled several years ago? This is the gaming equivalent of Area 51, with reported sightings and slips cropping up from time to time in unexpected places.

Half-Life 3, at this point, has become a chain around Valve's neck. Every time they announce something new, even if it's something completely unrelated, like hardware, they're asked: "What about Half-Life 3??"

Just get it over with. Either tell us it's in development or, and this is far more likely, just come out and admit that you canned it years ago. There's no need for it to drag on any longer.

Please.

4 - Get your customer support sorted outThe recent kerfuffle that Valve had with the Australian government, where they were fined for not adhering to the country’s laws on customer refunds, brought to light some interesting details (thanks, /u/Donners22).
​Valve are a $4 billion-plus (at least) business. They have just 325 staff. There are regional businesses that have more. Further, they actually do have their own support staff — 50 of them. This was news to me, as I assumed they exclusively farmed support out to the cheapest company they could find.
Steam processes a massive number of transactions with what is one of the largest game libraries in the world. For that, they have fifty people plus two-hundred-ish dealing with every possible complaint (aside from refunds, which are now automated).
​Wait times on Steam are still too long. That article was published a year ago, with vague promises that things will get better for end users — albeit with a worrying disdain toward actually hiring people to handle it — I certainly didn’t see much sign of that happening up until now.

5 - Make Sales Great Again
Easy puns aside, the Steam sales are not what they once were. There are a couple of reasons for that. When they first started in earnest, it was the first time that major titles were going on deep discounts reasonably shortly after launch. It was also a time where most of this current "generation" of PC gamers had a lot of games to catch up on. The pool of great games that could go on sale for the first time was dramatically bigger.

Fast forward to 2017, and the marketplace has changed. It's been a long time since I've bought a game from Steam during a Steam sale. Mostly that's because they haven't been offering titles I didn't already have.

Steam are no longer the only digital retailer in town. They're no longer the cheapest, either. In fact, they're often among the most expensive - especially in my region of the world. 

Here's an anecdotal statistic that I feel isn't an unusual case (do feel free to agree or disagree in the comments). During the just-ended Steam Winter Sale, I bought five games. However, I bought none of them from Steam. I found them all through Steam (well, through /r/gamedeals' summary of the Steam sale on Reddit). I then went to isthereanydeal.com (great site) to see if there were better offers. The answer was yes. For every single one of those five games. 

Steam is no longer the underdog. It is now the monolith. Smaller digital retailers are stealing Valve's thunder. Good old Games have a far better approach to refunds and customer service, as well as regional pricing. Their take on Early Access is controlled tightly. WinGameStore has a fantastically simple layout with extremely competitive discounts on recently released titles. Even Origin, much maligned in its early life, has a better store and customer service than Steam. They even have live chat support. Actually, a lot of the tiny (not referring to Origin, obviously) digital retailers have at least live chat support. Ubisoft's uPlay is... still awful. Small mercies aside, it feels like Valve are resting on their laurels.

What would you like to see from Valve in the coming year? Am I talking a load of old rubbish? Let me know in the comments below.

​Note: I completely missed the bullet about third party support. Updated relevant section.
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48 Hours Later - Civilization VI

10/26/2016

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INTRODUCTION AND DISCLAIMERS
Relevant information to note before reading this early impressions / review:
  • I was not given a review copy.
  • I have no affiliation with anyone at Firaxis or 2K Games.
  • Specifications of the system used for this first impressions article can be found here.
  • At the time of writing this article, I had played the game for forty-eight hours and have managed to get to the fourth floor once. Woo! Go me.
  • I've played every Civilization game on PC or other computer, going all the way back to the very first game, where I sat swapping disks constantly on an Amiga 500. 

WHAT'S NEW
There are a swath of changes that I want to look at in a bit of detail, hopefully without boring you to death. Let's get right into it.

DISTRICTS
Districts are the clear headlining change in Civilization VI, as they introduce gameplay that hasn't been seen in the franchise before. Rather than everything being built in your city with the surrounding tiles being used solely for improvements and resource exploitation, you now need to plan ahead and plop districts down in suitable places around your territory. This idea is something that I first saw in Endless Legend, another 4x game. The same mechanic has also been added to wonders, which now need their own tile and often come with some locational restrictions of their own, too.

There are a total of eleven districts that can be built, not including the city centre and spaceport, which is only required for scientific victories. Some civs receive a replacement for one of the districts as a unique trait.

Getting a grip on the new system can be a little challenging, especially as the game isn't exactly forthcoming with information surrounding adjacency bonuses (for instance, building a scientific campus in the middle of a rainforest gives a massive boost to scientific output), nor with how the cost of districts scales the further you get into the game. What has become apparent is that the building time for districts increases the further you are into the tech and social trees - suggesting that the best tactic is to build cities early and often before you get too advanced, as new cities struggle to get going.

Districts allow your cities to specialise. You're not going to be able to build them all in each city, nor should you want to. If you have a city surrounded by rainforest, that'd be a great candidate for a campus and commercial hub. If you have a city within range of the coast with plenty of water resources available, that's a great place for a harbour. Speaking of which, harbours can be built within the territory of any city, whether they're on the coast or not. You can now have cities that produce naval units set inland. That's a massive change.

Some districts are restricted by placement requirements. Encampments (military district), for example, cannot be placed adjacent to your city centre. For the first few games, you're going to mess your districts up. They introduce an extra layer of two of forward planning and thinking that's new to Civilization. This is especially true of industrial districts, whose late-game buildings can share their output boosts with cities that are within a six tile radius.

Districts and their buildings aren't all one-trick ponies, so you'll find some overlap between them. For instance, some holy buildings can also give extra production, science or culture. Encampment buildings boost production as well as housing (more on this later), whereas harbours are a bit of a jack-of-all-trades.

I love this new twist on the Civilization series. It makes the entire game a more strategic experience than ever before.


BYE-BYE WORKERS, SO-LONG HAPPINESS
Workers are gone. In their stead, we now have 'Builders'. Rather than constantly having to manage dozens of these guys and getting rather bored doing so (or worse, automating them and watching as they screw everything up), these new Builders only have three charges. That's three charges to either build an improvement, clear away a feature (such as woods, rainforests or marshes) or harvest a resource (like wheat, rice, bananas). Builders can be buffed by a couple of policies and wonders to increase their charges.

This is another change that I like. Gone are the tedious days of spending ten minutes per turn just shuffling Workers around the map - and it's another change that promotes strategy. Prioritising the exploitation of resources and deciding which square you should clear to make room for a district or wonder are now frequent considerations. There's room for a tip here, too. When you're building districts or wonders, you will often have to sacrifice a tile with a feature or resource. You should always remove the feature or harvest the resource with a builder to ensure that your city gets a yield. Sometimes you can pay for over half of the building that's going down on the tile this way. If you simply overwrite it with a district, you do not get the yield.

Happiness has also been removed from the game. This is a massive change, as long-time players of the franchise will realise almost immediately. This means that Civilization VI doesn't really have any explicit penalties to over expanding and spamming cities. However, the new housing and amenities systems do force you to think carefully about expanding.

Amenities are the new happiness. If your city doesn't have access to enough amenities, yields will drop. The more displeased with the lack of creature comforts available, the worse things get. Eventually, your citizens will start to revolt, spawning as barbarians just outside your city. At this point, you could be in a whole heap of trouble. Ensuring you have enough amenities is no problem if you keep control on how quickly your city population grows or if you carefully plan city placements. Amenities are gained by exploiting luxury resources (only one of each type, mind), filling out your entertainment districts and through some social research and policies.

Housing is the second part of the happiness replacement experiment. It's related to the population of your cities. In order for your city to continue to grow, there needs to be enough housing. If there isn't, growth will slow down and eventually come to a complete halt. Housing can be increased either by building certain districts, improvements or buildings.

CULTURE AND GOVERNMENTS
As well as the traditional science tree, Civilization VI brings us a social 'tech' tree, too. It works in much the same way. Each advance gives you a choice of policies that you can swap in and out of your government. They give a range of bonuses, including anything from increased production speed toward units or wonders to buffing international or domestic trade routes. Interestingly, some of them also have wider-reaching advantages. Getting to the Feudalism social tech will increase the output of farms that are adjacent to one another. Others will give access to special units or buildings, while both the entertainment and theatre districts can only be obtained by going through the social tech tree.

It is, however, a little flat. Somehow, the pacing seems off. By the mid game, you'll be going through a procession of turns where you'll learn a new social tech every turn or two - and this happens because as you approach the mid game, the social tree splits into only two branches. Annoyingly, because district production cost scales with how many social and regular techs you've researched, you'll often be in a position where you're learning social techs that aren't useful to you that also slow down your district building. I'd love for there to be a way to slow down culture production temporarily without having to sell buildings or sacrifice amenities.

Governments have also been given a bit of a do-over. They are researched through the social tech tree (more on that below), for starters, rather than the science tree. Each government comes with a flat bonus, such as improved combat strength for your units, and a number of slots that you can fill with policies (also from the social tree). This gives you a great deal of flexibility as you can now combine a fascist government with policies based around faith or trade.

Adopting a new government will grant you a legacy bonus that's defined by your previous regimes. The type and number of slots you get are built into the government - fascism, for instance, comes with four military, three economic, one diplomatic and two wildcard policy slots. It's the wildcard ones that are key, as they allow you to place any policy module you like into them - so you can put a military policy there when you have a classical republic regime, even though it doesn't have any military slots by default.
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ARMIES AND AESTHETICS
Since Civilization V did away with unit stacking (thanks so much for getting rid of the dreaded stacks of doom), Firaxis have been looking for a way to tweak the combat as you get further into the game. In Civilization VI, not only does the unit variety increase by an order of magnitude the later you get into the game, you can now, from mid-game or later, combine two of the same types of unit into a corps, and three of the same type into an army.

Following the common theme of the changes implemented for Civilization VI, this is again a strategic choice. Do you want to keep your three units? Or do you want to merge them into one super-powerful unit? There are pros and cons to both. If you're having a hard time with production times, merging might not be the best idea. If you're in an era of peace and have time to build up an army, then it might be a good thing to do.


The art style deserves a bit of a mention seeing as there was a bit of controversy over it when the first screenshots emerged. Personally, I like it. It brings Civilization back to looking more like a board game, and gives it a comfier, warmer feeling. Some people have said that the units look like they came from Age of Empires Online - I can't disagree, they do. The animations are much improved (although some seem to be stuck at 30FPS which is a very minor annoyance) while the city and tile rendering is fantastic. You can see every little improvement that gets added to your city in far more detail than before. You can see also see your wonders in minute detail. It's pretty enough to take a screenshot of and make your desktop background.


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NOT A UI DESIGNER'S FINEST HOUR
There are a number of little quirks and regressions from Civilization V, some of which are pretty hard to understand. There's a ton to get through so I'll start from the beginning. I'd also like to preface this section by saying that it's been a heck of a long time since I played Civilization V without any expansions or mods at all, and while I have done my best to accurately recall what was available in Civilization V on launch, there may be a minor error somewhere.


When you start a new game in Civilization VI, there are precious few options to choose from. I remember being able to tweak all sorts of stuff in Civilization V - random leader personalities, raging barbarians, turning off war, disallowing certain diplomatic relations. I also remember being able to choose from maps and actually see what they'd look like before the game got started. Not so in Civilization VI, as many of the options I took for granted are now MiA. You can make basic changes to map type, size and properties such as world age, resource distribution and so on - but the only other tweaks available are turning off barbarians and goodie villages. That's it.

When you get into a game, you see for the first time how much of a rework the UI has gone through. The plan appears to have been leaving as much screen real estate to the game world as possible. The result is hit and miss. Perhaps my biggest bone of contention at the moment is that the mechanics of Civilization VI are several times more obfuscated than Civilization V was - or indeed just about any of the Civilization games that came before it.

Even some basic notifications appear to be missing. For some reason, the pop-up telling you what you've found in a goodie village doesn't always trigger. You get a little icon above your unit's head showing what they found, or a unit will be dumped in your nearest city - and that's it. Additionally, sometimes the camera will pan away too quickly, leaving you to guess what was discovered.


This isn't all the game fails to tell you, either. Players who have hit the mid game have been finding their production slowed to a crawl for no discernible reason. This is something that baffled me for the first five or six games, too. It wasn't until I took to Reddit and started discussing possible reasons with other Civvers that the reason was discovered - the social and tech discoveries you've made, the more production costs go up. The game makes no mention of this, anywhere.

Going back to things that are missing - there's no build queue. That's a pretty painful omission. That gets its own paragraph. I don't have much to say about that other than this - ouch.

The minimap is far too small, especially at 4K. If you want it bigger you either have to hack the game's configuration files or turn on UI scaling (which, from asking around, only seems to be available to people running native 4K resolution). The problem with UI scaling is that it's too heavy handed. Instead of boosting the size of UI elements by 20-30%, it instead seems to double the size. This obscures vital visual cues in the game world and makes assessing information at a glance almost impossible, especially as the game world gets cluttered with units and cities.

The returning strategy view looks absolutely gorgeous. I actually use it this time, especially when I'm looking for resources that need to be exploited or want to quickly check on what's happening within the fog of war.

Speaking of the fog of war, Civilization VI's implementation of it is something that seems to be splitting people right down the middle. Unexplored areas look like a pirate's map, with little illustrations and a very arty texture. Areas immediately around your units and cities are completely uncovered. Areas outside of your current range of vision turn into a hand-drawn map - the same colour as the unexplored areas but with hand-drawn details.

You can see resources, city borders and barbarian encampments and it does update without you having to visit the area again, which is something that didn't happen in Civilization V - however, I've seen a lot of complaints that it looks too much like unexplored areas. I can see their point of view - it certainly took some getting used to, and there are still times where I have to look twice to take in the information, which suggests to me that its design needs tweaking a little. This, to me, is a case of form over function - and that's a criticism that I can level at quite a few areas of the UI.


BALANCE
There are a couple of pretty major balance issues in the launch version. First and foremost, selling units. You get a large amount of gold for selling a unit. Combine this with a policy that gives you a production boost to certain types of units, and you can actually spam-buy buildings and units. There's no restriction on the amount of units you sell per turn, where you can sell them or the amount of gold purchases you can make.

This has a knock-on effect for builders, too. It is far more efficient to sell a builder that has one charge left than to use them all up. If you sell two in one turn, you've lost two charges, but gained enough gold to buy three more. The more builders you sell, the better your return.

There's another smaller issue with builders at the moment, too. They can remove woods and rainforest from tiles. This has been a feature of Civilization games going back a few versions now. This time, there's no penalty for doing it outside of your borders. So you can happily send a team of builders to cut down trees anywhere on the map, and production will be sent to either your closest city. This production carries over from one building to another, too.

If that sounds bad, things get even worse when Scythia is involved. This civ is currently completely broken. They have a unique trait which gives them a second light cavalry unit whenever they train one. Combine this with a policy that doubles cavalry production and some encampment district boosts, and you can pump out 2 cavalry units per two or three turns (on standard game speed). If you sell all of these units, you can make upwards of a thousand gold per turn, even in the early game. You're then free to spend that on units and buildings. If you want an easy way to get the achievements for beating deity, it's not going to get any easier than this.

Religion is in a bad place at the moment as well. Playing for a religious victory is an absolute mess. It's far too easy to spam units (again, because you're not limited on how many faith purchases you can make per turn). You'll almost inevitably be invaded by literally dozens of AI religious units at some point in the game. When these get around your cities, they block all movement of your units. You either have to declare war or wait for them all to clear away - which tends not to happen. God forbid two religious armies meet. Turns will take minutes to get through and the battles can span twenty turns easily if reinforcements arrive on the scene.

QUIRKS
Other items that'll be on the Firaxis to-do list will mostly revolve around how AI opponents interact with both each other and human players. If you're one a map where there's a lot of border friction, everyone gets a little war-happy. I'm not saying this is intrinsically unrealistic - but it does make for some rather confusing gameplay.

It's in these tense situations that the AI seem most prone to losing their minds. First and foremost, AI allies that you have a Joint War agreement with will often denounce you - for declaring war on someone they've just declared war on themselves. There are also some weird scenarios where this treaty will end up with you declaring war on yourself. I'm not sure that's a hallmark of a capable leader!

The AI also appears to have some problems with army management. There have been a number of games where the AI has backed itself into a corner - training dozens of early game units that they never upgrade, presumably due to astronomical maintenance costs, which ends up completely hamstringing them. I've found civs two hundred turns into a game that only have two cities, twenty-odd spearmen and nothing else. I'm guessing the AI isn't allowed to sell units - presumably because of how broken it is - and so they end up stuck if they get too aggressive with army expansion.

AI civs also seem to be able to declare surprise wars without any warmongering penalty, whereas players declaring even justified wars can be denounced literally for ever, even if they declare war on a single AI. Even if it's just a tiny, small war, or more of a skirmish.

PERFORMANCE
Notoriously, Civilization games can be a bit of a hot mess on launch. Civilization V certainly was, with memory leaks and crashes galore that took a fair amount of time to patch out. Thankfully, Civilization VI is a completely different beast. It looks like Firaxis went all out on making sure the game was stable for release. I have not had a single crash or game-stopping issue in my 48 hours of play so far. While there have been one or two fairly widespread issues, particularly relating to Windows Defender (which I don't use), there hasn't been anything that can't be quickly fixed, even by a very average user.

Something related to performance that's a little aggravating is that you still cannot make changes to graphical options without restarting the game. Clearly a hard limit of the engine they've used for the last two Civilization games, it does feel a bit 1999. This is most annoying for people trying to find a balance between performance and looks on laptops or lower-end hardware.

It runs much better than Civilization V did, too. Running Civilization V and Civilization VI on this machine, the difference is clear. Civilization VI is faster and it's particularly noticeable when playing on larger maps.


FINAL  THOUGHTS
Forty-eight hours later, I feel like Civilization VI is the best launch state that a Civilization game has ever been released in.

However, because of the niggling issues that I've spent a fair amount of time thinking and writing about, my recommendation is split. So here it is. If you're a Civilization fanatic that's burnt out on Civilization V, it's worth a buy. Use isthereanydeal to find the best price, as the game has been on offer consistently.

If, on the other hand, you're still enjoying Civilization V or you're a more casual fan of the series who doesn't typically sink thousands of hours into them, I'd suggest waiting for a sale, or possibly the first expansion, as we all know that Civilization games don't really hit their peak until one or two expansions have been released.

Now if you don't mind, I have a nuke with Gandhi's name on it.

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