Games Discussion Thread

Small review because I may as well share my experiences on it
Instead of writing a whole analysis, I'll just go through the feature list and comment on it. I know this will be unpopular among the hype, but I'm still going to say it-
It's not that good

"Megastructures"
It's a shame they come too late to be of any real use in single player, by the time you get to unlock these through researching several rare technologies(So it's possible you won't ever get to anyway even if you made it your goal for the game) you'll be able to steamroll the galaxy with minimal effort.
They're shiny, but aside from the sensor array they don't actually do anything that you could actually reliably want at that stage of the game without being able to already get it elsewhere.

"Habitat Stations"
Actually works somewhat decently, though with how more planets increases the cost of research and the unity needed for the civ 5 tradition copy. You may want to make a few because they're roughly equal to a decently managed planet per tile, but since they are small and have some very strong drawbacks they will never be amazing. You will not 'go tall' with these as the feature blurb says, If you're in a confined empire you won't have the resources for them. And if you're not confined, you're going to still want them anyway because they're decent to have. They're just something everyone is going to end up getting. Costs one of the ascension perks, but it's not like those perk slots have any serious competition going for them.

"Ascension Perks"
This is the main thing for this DLC and it's actually pretty good. The sad thing is that there is a clear "Good" and "Awful" collection of perks for this that makes it clear that you will likely pick the exact same thing every game with the exception of the actual ascension path. You're going to just get the same things because the alternatives are just not useful.

"Indoctrination"
Curious to see this listed as a feature, since it's just a single button for something that is a very minor part of the game. You can take a planet with people who don't have space tech and indoctrinate them into your ethics.
I'm having trouble figuring out any point at which this may matter, so I'll just move on.

"Advanced Slavery"
In this paid DLC, we get tools for things that really should be in the base game. I'd like to ask Paradox for other useful DLC next, perhaps a management window for a planet's build-queue, a functional military that isn't just throwing everything at the enemy stack, different FTL methods that aren't just limiting yourself for the sake of it, or making it so slavery is actually useful for something other than encouraging rebellion on your own planets.

"Advanced Governments"
Support for the things people were doing already, now with small bonuses and made official. Most of it is of questionable use, but there is no denying that hive minds are pretty nice to have and a few of the things are nice and flavourful.

In the end, is it worth 20€?
I highly doubt it. You're going to have to get it eventually because it's essentially content missing from the base game and some small flavour things. But when you do, make sure it's on sale

Stellaris is an early alpha game that is to be finished in DLC. If you buy it now, you get to enjoy all the placeholder mechanics that they will ask you money for to replace with something resembling an actually thought out game. And even then it will be half-assed and with minimum effort because you're already invested (See also the Sunk Cost Fallacy). You'll have to buy it or be stuck with an unfinished version that isn't really good at anything.

And it's that version I will review here. Stellaris attempts to merge Grand Strategy games and 4X games, managing to take only the worst of both worlds in a nice looking jacket to hide the lack of things to do. To begin, the early game plays much like a 4X game. You explore, you look for places to expand and colonize, and you work on your planets. After everything is mostly claimed and you've met a fair amount of alien empires the grand strategy game is supposed to take over, but it never does. This leaves you with a rather poorly done 4X game that has no real mid or late game. Once you've finished exploring, you build up a military until it's bigger than your neighbour and throw it at them until you have no more neighbours.

To begin with the good things about it, it looks pretty decent, as screenshots will show you. And the events have decent flavour to them, and a few stories that actually made me want to follow up on them only to be disappointed when it results in an anticlimactic "+500 energy credits" for finishing the entire storyline. Many events and anomalies imply you'll be able to do great things once you end up with highly advanced technology, but you never do, and the simple events and anomalies start repeating before you're even done with one game. Most of these storylines and events do not seem to matter whatsoever, with all of them being self-contained minor effects that do not interact with anything outside of them.

Nearly everything in the game is, I would hope, a placeholder mechanic- Technology ends in the mid game and you research repeatable technologies that give you a slight numbers bonus, military matters are simple with no debt to them whatsoever, species are all interchangeable except for a few fringe cases, diplomacy doesn't really exist, just like many options to control your empire don't seem to exist and there is no real grand strategy part of this. It offers you three ways to travel the stars with FTL technology, yet two of these are completely useless.

The AI, in all ways, is completely incapable. Diplomatically it doesn't do anything of real note, often remaining passive until a certain value just happens to rise by coincidence and triggers it to do something. Militarily it doesn't do anything- It makes ships that are poorly planned and optimized by just putting on whatever seems like the latest technology, even if it's terrible. It develops its lands randomly, completely ignoring any sort of planning or goals it may be able to do, and in general feels much less like it's trying to emulate an opponent and more like they just hooked up an RNG to the controls.

The military and combat stuff is, in one word, bad. While there is a minimum of customization to try to counter your opponent, in the end everything comes down to who just has the bigger stack. The entire military game is essentially a dick measuring content. If yours is bigger then you win, take your opponent's stuff and move on to measure against the next guy. There is no strategy, no tactics, and no maneuvering. You do not even get to control what your ships do and do not engage. Planetary invasions are a joke- You leave some ships above the place and then bring in a big stack of armies to wipe out the defenders. It's more of a formality at that point, because you have the bigger naval dick from the earlier measuring contest so it's not like you can't just wait a few years to bring in more armies

As mentioned earlier, technology is a joke past the early game, but even at the early game you will find a large amount of completely useless technologies that will never be even a little bit useful. You get a choice of a few randomly selected technologies to research, and while I like the idea of it, all it really means is that you're going to just research the cheapest technology of the set until something actually useful comes up.

Most of Stellaris is set up to be pretty and to pretend it has depth, but if you look even a little bit at it you will find that most of it is empty and flat. Past the initial experience of the early game and expanding there is nothing to do except waiting or continued dick measuring competition with your neighbours, and then moving on to measure against the next guy.

Is it worth getting? Maybe if you can get it really cheap on sale. Maybe in a few years when they've finished it.
At release, I'd have called Stellaris a technically playable tech demo. At the least with the latest DLC(Utopia) it is now a barely playable early alpha game. So hey, there's some progress here.
Shame it's going to take another 200€ of DLC and several years for it to be finished

GTA V is two games in one- A single player game with a storyline and GTA online, named so for reasons one may assume to be obvious. As such, this review will mainly focus on the online, as that is what I have mostly played, and why I purchased it. With that said, there are obvious similarities in it, and many of the things I will mention apply to both.

In Grand Theft Auto you mainly start the game small- Whether homeless or with just a small house, there is very little you can lose. And from there you begin your adventure in crime and moneymaking. With what appears to be an anarchocapitalist society filled with well-made backstory and world complete with multiple full series of cartoons, mock TV channels(Better than real TV!) and radio stations. There is an internet ingame with plenty of often humour-filled websites, along with useful ones that you will find to be genuinely interesting on their own.
In short- The worldbuilding is top quality, there is a lot of effort and attention in it and it shows that it was a great priority when it was made

In contrast, the controls are not very well thought through. Aside from the car and boat controls they are very clunky and questionable, with movement being difficult to get right and taking cover means you will stick to the wall too long when you want to get going to other cover, and you will not stick to cover when you actually want to stay in it. I've found the movement and cover to be questionable at best. Switching weapon is a massive pain and will generally not be viable unless you are not actively in combat. For airplanes and helicopters there is no joystick support at all.

Following what they did right with vehicles is the damage model for cars. As may be expected from a GTA game, the cars can be damaged, destroyed, and otherwise have their function impeded. Though it isn't massively realistic, it is good enough to give you natural damage effects such as veering to the left or right or the engine beginning to break and give less power. It is then a shame that this will almost never show up in multiplayer unless you are a terrible driver, because a thing that they clearly did not think about for the multiplayer

Namely, the balance. Everyone gets a homing rocket launcher, no matter their level. This rocket launcher will destroy most cars in one hit and blows anything flying out of the air with a little aim and luck. This means that while you can put armour on your car to protect it from bullets, your vehicle's function is more along the lines of "Has it exploded? Yes or no" than anything else. Similar for non-vehicle pvp. You will be either dead in seconds or your enemy is dead, no long firefights with players here. Pvp modes are a bit better, but still often feel unfair.

Much like this, the rest of the online balance is out the window- with many things costing a large amount of money and income being generally very low even for things with several millions of input needed to set them up. If you want anything more than just a gun and a random car you can still from the street, you are going to have to actively grind for money, or play for a very long time without spending on anything.

The loading, and in general connecting to the online servers for a first time in a session(Or when switching session) takes a truly massive amount of time, though I have been told it is much less in single player, I will still say it is unreasonably long- You can go do the dishes and return in time to catch the end of the loading screen. Something I know because I've done that. I have no idea how they thought this was acceptable.

With that said, the rest of it is mostly good- Sound and looks are pretty decent, the map seems very nicely made with lots of interesting details and plenty of hidden spots. Someone seems to have thought about everything on the map

In the end, what really sells GTA isn't the pvp and fighting other people online. What is good about it is the single player, the missions, and the world. For online the one thing that is much more interesting than any of the official selling points is the fact that it is a world you can hop into with your friends and drive around together, do a few missions, or just decide to take everyone on a race, go parachuting, or even just play a round of golf. There may not be a real grouping up mechanic and there are a large amount of flaws in multiplayer, but as just a world for you and your friends to hang out in and do whatever you want to do it does incredibly well.

Worth full price? It's a rare moment when I say it is for something this expensive. But I certainly got my money worth and do not regret it. It has a fair amount of technical issues with it, but the design is great for many things and there is almost always something to do- So I would say it is.