Recent reviews by UtterBob

Adding paid DLC in an incomplete early access game.

So, I have to buy the SAME game all over again, at full price, if I want to play the upcoming DLC's? Way to f**k over your most loyal and long standing customers.

I can only think of a couple of scams more morally bankrupt than this, but it's fighting for top spot.

Doesn't deserve the positive rating imho. It's so incredibly simplistic that it's barely a demo.

Start off with 1 city, build a few routes. Hire a manager, set them to expand city, feed cash. Repeat as your 'trust' builds up with more cities.

There are 6 tiers of vehicles... OK, great, but you don't even interact with them. The depot managers do all the vehicle purchasing. There are some reasonable mechanics (though VERY obfuscated) about building sensible roads and rails. Never mind, the depot managers build those.

You start off in 1 city, maybe 2 or 3, manually build up enough cash to have the depots managed, then the whole game is your company being controlled by AI, while you try to keep up with buying new depots. That's it. That's 100% of the game...

This is quite literally the whole game loop... Click new city, check if you have the 'trust' to expand, if so, build depot, click into depot, hire manager, spam the button to feed them some seed cash, click next city.

TLDR: Launched way too early, but now that it's had more time, it's where you would expect an EA game to be. Based on EA, it's great as-is with amazing potential.

More info:
This launched way too early, even for an EA. It was barely functional, minimal content, bugs and crashes, etc. Even with a bug/crash-free experience, the content was SO low it was less than any demo would provide. I've seen more complete tech demos than this game at launch.

My first review was based on that.

BUT... Now that it's had some time in the oven, I feel the review is no longer relevant and that I actually feel ok recommending the game at this stage. It's still EA but rather than run-breaking inability to load save games, or progression locking bugs, you are more likely to find balance issues or references to things not yet in the game. It's not bug-free, like most EA but they are now uncommon. More importantly, the content is actually worth considering the game now, and as long as they keep to their road map and a similar pace of development as we've seen so far, I'll be happy with this EA purchase.

First review:
Can't even load save games. The EA build was worse than most demos.

It's a great little DLC. Maybe a bit overpriced for the amount of content but good overall.

The negative review is for the massive amount of bugs I keep finding. Not one mission has gone smoothly so far, and it's clearly bugged, not design/difficulty choices (like un-choppable trees or a building not being placable in a certain spot unless you save and reload your game).

One of the best RPG &/or D&D adaptations you will find.

Not finished. I've seen a great deal of game vastly more fleshed out and polished that are still in EA. The massive crash in the recent reviews is completely justified. This was a promising game ruined by selfish devs that got bored and wanted to move onto another game. Borderline scam.

Straight up scam. That simple. Avoid at all costs.

If I could review the 'new' game I would call them out there too but there is no way I am paying for something twice. The only thing unresolved here is Steam offering all owners of this game a refund.

UPDATE: Then someone, who looks to be quite obviously connected with the company, goes around spamming responses on all negative reviews. Shame they can't actually argue the points being addressed in the reviews, they can just spam links and quote stats (that often aren’t relevant to the content of the reviews) to try and promote the game. Oh and don't delete them, you get spammed (I mean INSTANT replacement of deleted comments).

Thing is, that just makes them look worse. If the company had acted ethically, they wouldn't need to have someone spamming defensive statements on all negative reviews.

Such a bad example of early access that it's a strong argument for boycotting the developers. Horrid outcome for a promising game.

They spent a stupid amount of time perfecting non-critical things (like reflections quality on your helmet visor) to the complete exclusion of content. By the time they got around to content they had lost most of the player base so there was nobody left to play the content with. The update cycle is far, far too slow anyway but the strategy behind it was, to be brutally honest, moronic. It shows, since one of the best engines I've seen for a long time has awful reviews, no players and a solid number of players who won't touch the company again.

If it weren’t for the volumes of incompetence surrounding the development, I'd be thinking scam.

Unlike most of the people who negatively review this for the co-op removal (justifiably), I bought this on release and I'm about 80% sure it was an early access. I stopped playing because it kept bugging out and preventing the main story progressing, I withheld a review because it was Early Access. Not only was there a insultingly minimal patch after an equally insulting year-long delay but they are now calling it released. As far as I'm concerned, the game never left early access.