Recent reviews by Yuri Sniper Uni 13

TL;DR:
Kingdoms Reborn is still in need of a lot of polish, the AI is still primitive and poses no actual challenge as of this review, so don't expect anything more than a city management game. A questionably balanced one at that. Also the citizen AI is terrible, and the unique card system stops being relevant midway through the game.

I've personally played two singleplayer games, one on Normal with +30% consumption increase, then straight to Deity which 10x'd that to +300% consumption. Even on Normal difficulty it felt like a constant battle against my citizens desire to kill themselves mostly in how much food they ended up needing, let alone the other three consumables--Medicine, Tools, and Coal/Wood (for heat in the Winter).

Now, onto one of my biggest gripes with the game: The Citizen AI.

To give some context, if a citizen is missing Medicine or Tools, their work efficiency will suffer (50% for Medicine, 75% for Tools), causing a cascade of logistical failure as your citizens are unable to produce your consumables fast enough to meet demand and you're looking down a death spiral that doesn't stop until you've lost half your colony. So the game boils down to constantly trying to keep your production in line with your consumption, seems simple enough.

The issue lies in how the AI handles logistics and priorities. If a citizen is hungry, they'll stop whatever task they'll doing and try to find food. Same goes for any other consumable need they have that needs to be filled. This quickly causes certain time sensitive tasks, like say, planting crops during harvest season or actually reaping the harvest before Winter comes around and instantly destroys all your crops. It was so rampant that my citizens would plant either half a field or the entire field's worth then leave it all to wither and die come Winter because they were too busy fetching more medicine to plant the food the city needed to not die. It's why I personally gave up ever trying to make citizens farm.

There are of course ways to make this work, if you plan around how backwards citizen AI is and ensure that there's available resources nearby every single work station you have, but on higher difficulties this can be nearly impossible, as you'd borderline have to have the resource produced on the spot or else it's simply eaten in transit to whatever logistical hub you've setup to store resources for workers in the area---and if you're producing so much that it's not a problem you've likely won the game already.

Aside from farm's being nearly useless, one of my biggest gripes is how the AI handled distributing resources to my power plants in the end game. Once you've committed a building to the final era of upgrades, you need electricity for it to function. If the electricity stops, your entire economy stops and your citizens are as good as dead. Yet despite this you could have oil/coal being produced literally next to these power plants and your workers would rather go try to fetch some bread that got produced halfway across the world rather than wait for some to get to where their market, tying up the citizen responsible for fueling the power plant and subsequently damning your entire city unless you have far more power plants functioning than you actually need.

In the end, I was only really able to see my Deity game to completion because of how overpowered trading is. Since I simply could not afford to produce everything locally due to how resource-inefficient my citizens were until close to the very end of the run, nearly every luxury and a lot of food was simply bought out of thin air. Prices never went down enough to matter despite how much of a good I sold nor rose much if at all for the resources I was buying en masse. I couldn't relax until the run was almost over since my food rarely if ever hit above 3-4,000~ in reserve, consumption was nearly always the exact same as my production even with sub 1k population. By the end of the game I was producing over 30,000 bread per year and it still wasn't enough to feed just 1,000 people consistently without sporadic group starvation.

I'll just list out the other cons I noticed.

The early game bonus card choices you get may as well not exist. Only one card (Investment) is ever worth getting. Both Wheat and Trading Post are early game techs, Investment can carry your income in the early game provided you keep enough (2,000 gold) to max out its income bonus (+100 per turn).

Some methods of food gathering are straight up food-negative. A citizen tasked to fish will eat more food than they produce without insane amounts of investment and an abundance of water, and only at a stage of the game where better options are available.

Immigration Offices produce people out of thin air. This is what carried me in my early game on Diety as I'd simply send in armies of people to starve death whilst tricking other hapless citizens into coming to my death factory. It'd serve as a lifeline for if I faced a mass starvation and keep my game going perpetually while I got citizens back on the jobs needed to keep everyone alive. While happiness can make the process faster, there isn't really any penalty for getting people to come to a city that's actively dying.

Food. Your enemy for almost the entire game will be food. Once you've started to produce more food than you consume you've won the game. This can be seen as a good or a bad thing, but it makes me wonder how much is actually enough with the insane numbers I see people ending up consuming even on lower difficulties.

Logistics. As stated before, the citizens will do everything in their power to bring your economy to a screeching halt if their bread, medicine, and tools aren't all literally right next to them the very moment they need it. I've watched a citizen who worked on a sheep farm proceed to slaughter 1 of the 8 sheep they were meant to kill before walking off to go grab meat from another farm that was sitting on the ground, as opposed to doing their job, gathering the meat, then eating.

And lastly, the optimization. Get close to 1k pop and you'll barely be able to play on normal speed, making the game drag on even longer as it struggles to process so many individual citizens even with fairly up to date rigs.

Oh right, the card system. That barely matters pretty quickly once you start getting Wild Cards, then it turns into just a regular city builder. The first few turns you might need to fork over a little bit of gold to get your starting setup right, otherwise there simply aren't enough viable strategies in higher difficulties to be able to just roll with whatever hand you're dealt, so you're going to be fishing for similar cards every playthrough, and by mid-game you've already overcome being at the mercy of RNG for cards.

I think Kingdoms has promise, especially with the upcoming update that will make Trading Posts less of a hassle to use, but right now I cannot recommend it as it is.

Did you like Re;Birth 1? You'll probably like Re;Birth 2. Have you not played Re;Birth 1 or ANY of the Neptunia series games? Probably don't want to jump right in with this one, it's better to know the cast beforehand, gameplay wise they're fairly identical, too.

If you're at all interested in the game, and you HAVEN'T played it, for whatever reason, it is a nice sequel to Re;Birth 1 in a sense (despite not being a canonical sequel). Similar gameplay, except from this point, the main series remains canonical with each release. I only suggest Re;Birth 1 on the account that it introduces you to all the characters first, while Re;Birth 2 introduces characters -related- to them (but the previous one isn't canon). Oh, yeah, and (most of) the characters in Re;Birth 1 show up here, too.

It's okay as a game, but if you don't enjoy the story or the characters, it's probably not for you. If you like kawaii anime girls and tongue in cheek fanservice, there's plenty of that. Some of it's just fanservice.

One last major point is the multitude of endings to Re;Birth 2, and as people love pointing out, Conquest is probably the most provoking one. If you care about spoilers and/or want to feel the feels as you go, it's best to just look up one of the guides on steam for help unlocking it, it's got a handful of requirements that aren't obvious at all.

While I think it's great, opinions are fairly polarized about it. If you like really sad stuff, then you'll probably like it. Some people say 'do it first, so you feel better when you get the endings that aren't depressing'.

TL;DR RB2 is good, especially if you played and liked RB1; conquest ending, cute girls.
(for the record, I played the Vita version, thus my low hours. I Platted it on VITA.)

Great game, and it's free.

At least, if you're into sad stories with the odd feel or two.

Oh, yeah, the game. It's pretty self-explanatory once you figure out how to bump into stuff. If you take your time to find everything, or as much as you can, it won't give you a hard time at all.

I'd say the strength of the game is more in the story, but, the actual game is okay, too. The bosses are the only challenging part of the game sans maybe a few sections of later areas.

It is slightly grindy, but, as my time probably indicates, it doesn't take that long to get literally everything in the game, even if you don't just look it up.

Spreadsheets in space.