Report #54

GalCiv II is a turn based 4X game. Besides the base game (The Dread Lords) it has two expansions (Dark Avatar & Twilight of the Arnor), which are all included in the Ultimate Edition. It plays very similar to the first GalCiv, but has quite some improvements in UI and gameplay.

Unfortunately these improvements are not sufficient to make me enjoy the game. My main problem was the following: While most of the time I managed to beat my enemies somewhat quickly in space it took me forever to invade their planets. This is because you need to research a pretty expensive technology for planetary invasion. A lot of my games ended up to be proper snoozefests waiting long enough to research said technology while there wasn't much else to do.

The game is not utterly awful, though. There are fun things in the game and I can at least see why some people enjoy it. But for me the verdict's clear: Rather play something else.

Beyond Divinity (BD) is the successor to Divine Divinity (DD), a game I played almost immediately before this and quite enjoyed. It slightly modernizes some aspects of DD, but gameplay wise still plays very similar to it.

Some of the improvements were good. Trading becomes much easier and you get a companion instead of fighting alone. Some I did not really like, e.g. the revamped skill system (you now have to learn skills at trainers instead of being able to freely choose them on levelup). That's something to be expected, so no hassle here.

However, in my opinion they also took away what made DD great for me: The lovely atmosphere, the beautiful environment, the people, the living world, the cRPG feeling. Instead you end up in a hellish parallel dimension called Nemesis with burned landscapes and much less inhabitants. But this goes beyond the visual aspects: DD was not great on the story, but it had a story with quite a few turns and side quests which supported the main story. BD has much less to offer in that regard. There are many dungeons (so called Battlefields) which are explicitly only there to level up your character, with no connection to the other parts of the game. You also get a companion in this game, but unfortunately he is absolutely unbearable. And he is ALWAYS there. Awful. I could go on, but the main point is: Instead of an cRPG which leans in the direction of a hack'n'slash like Diablo, they decided to make BD almost purely hack'n'slash.

I don't think BD is as bad as the steam reviews make it sound. As a standalone game it might be worthwhile. It's rather about failing my expectations. I went into the game with lowered expectations because of the bad reviews and was still let down.

Rise of Nations (RoN) is a RTS very much like Age of Empires or Empire Earth. In addition it offers campaigns, which feature a strategical map where you and your enemies try to conquer each other's territories in a historical setting.

RoN has a lot of unique concepts and good ideas incoporated into the game. While you guide your people from Stone Age to Space Age, you cannot simply build anywhere on the map, but you have to found cities, which give you a certain area of influence. Ressources are infininte, but you are limited by the rate at which you can collect them. This rate can slowly be improved over the course of a game. Together with the campaign mode, this really changes things up a bit compared to AoE.

Those aspects were fun to play around, but I wasn't always enjoying the battles in the game. I feel like the dragged on too much. You have to fight too hard for each small piece of land and it became a game of outproducing your enemy instead of countering his unit composition or outmaneuvering him in some way. Granted I only played against the AI. The games take a bit too long in my opinion or at least, they offer not enough diversity.

The achievements in the game are not too hard to get, but some of them (e.g. "build 1,000,000 infantry units") are extremly grindy and almost impossible to get by playing normally. I ended up using specifically created scenarios to earn a few of them.