Recent reviews by Vercinger

Dont let them rope you in with gifts, the game is complete garbage.

You might be tempted to get this when it's at a huge discount, but dont repeat my mistake, the game is absolute garbage.

It's overflowing with all the mobile game addiction crap - loot boxes, endless "special limited time offer" spam, season passes that you have to buy AND play for ages to unlock everything, daily missions, daily free loot boxes, weekly missions, season missions, limited time events with their own missions and currencies, the works. Even literal gambling minigames for the whales.

On top of being blatantly pay-to-win, of course.

The only reason I keep playing is that it itches that tank battle itch and the gameplay is less garbage than the full WoT.

Still super garbage though. It's especially infuriating that the devs cant be bothered to make the hitboxes match the visual models, so you'll frequently be shooting through the enemy tank and hitting the wall behind it, or shooting repeatedly at a fully green surface (maximum penetration chance) and having all your shots bounce.

Quite a cute and sweet little story. Some very sexy stuff despite the lack of sex scenes. Love all 3 girls, in art and story. Adore the sexy flirty principal. I'd crossdress for someone like her in real life and I'm a cis man with no crossdressing fetish.

I only have 2 complaints - one is that the player character looks awful in most expression images but keeps getting complimented on his looks. The other is that the story's set up so that the player is one of the girls' only friend, and has to abandon her to pursue either of the others. Makes me feel guilty when I play the other routes.

Still, I frequently found myself with a big dumb smile on my face while playing, so I can overlook the faults and heartily give it a recommendation.

Also, it's my headcanon that the player character ends up in a poly relationship with all 3 girls, because there ain't no picking between them.

Still my favourite city builder as of 2020, if not by much.

The modding is by far the biggest advantage. There's both tons of existing content and plenty of ways to modify the game to one's own liking.

And while Skylines has that too, what keeps me coming back to this game more often is how easy and rewarding it is to jump in and start building. It loads almost immediately and growth is fast and visually impressive. So I keep coming back to try out new strategies and layouts.

There's also the fact that this game has the second best soundtrack ever, after SimCity 3000.

The game's main downside is the notorious infinite commuter bug, which severely hampers regional play - one of the core features of the game and what would have been its main draw otherwise.

The other major disadvantage is the lack of resources beyond power/water/garbage. All industry is essentially generic and always exports. Nobody consumes anything and there are no imports or internal freight traffic. This aspect is what makes Cities XL one of my other contenders for favourite city builder.

Possibly the best game development game out there. Designed for people who are into management games.


Pros and cons:


+ Freely pausable

+ The game rating system makes sense (I'm looking at you, Game Dev Tycoon)

+ Plenty of variety and freedom in combining genres/subgenres/topics/subtopics

+ Quality assurance and patches and updates

+ Well-developed engine making and buying and selling

+ In-house manufacturing and storage

+ Platform development

+ Various dealings with other companies including full game contracts

+ Functional staff rooms


- Copy protection seems to actually boost sales

- Need guide for optimal priority settings for game development

Good enough to be my "Labor of Love" nomination for the 2019 Steam Awards.

Buggy, broken gameplay. Barely playable. Random events are overly devastating and make the game no fun to play even when it works.

I have no idea why people like this so much. It's a highly tedious experience, completely lacking in quality of life features, as if it was made in 1995, not 2015.

The basic concept is this - you have a base in a 2D world with evil portals on each side, you have a wall and archers defending each side, you get a wave of enemies from the portals every night, you go outside the base during the day to recruit new soldiers. You need coins to attract new recruits and arm them with bows, you get some coins from your archers hunting outside the walls during the day and more coins from farmers working land inside the walls. Your goal is to either destroy all the portals or survive 100 days.

And that's it. It's a very basic survival game.

There's very little to build. You get a few upgrades for your base camp, the last one letting you recruit 2 knights on each side that don't really add much to the game. You get 3 shops where you can recruit archers, builders and farmers. You get to build 1 catapult for each side, but you probably shouldn't, because it tends to hit your own archers. You can build farms at a few random locations throughout the map. And you can build walls and fairly useless towers at various random and usually inconvenient locations.

That's it. You don't set up production chains, you don't manufacture weapons, you don't even have to supply your people with food or regular pay. You just collect coins from your hunters and farmers and buy weapons and tools from the shops.

Now, all this just makes the game simple. And simple doesn't mean bad. But what makes the game flat out terrible is the complete lack of information provided to the player.

Starting with the most obvious thing - the tutorial is extremely limited and there is no further ingame help. So you'll have to use a guide to get anywhere, despite the game's simplicity.

But even that is forgivable. What I can't forgive is just how reluctant the game is to tell you what's going on with your base. Want to know how many archers you have stacked on each side? Tough. Want to know if your knights are fully buffed with coins? Don't count on it. Want to know how many casualties you took during the last wave? Ha-ha. Want to know if the defenses on one side have failed? You won't know unless you're physically present there.

And if going around manually inspecting the defenses all the time wasn't tedious enough, replacing any significant casualties later in the game is a chore. You can only have 4 bows purchased in the shop at a time, so you have to wait and wait and wait as the soldiers that got knocked down and lost their weapons walk the long long way back to the base. And you can only buy 1 bow at a time, in a dull process that takes a few seconds. And you have to take breaks to visit your farmers for extra coins because your coin purse is too tiny.

So you basically want to keep your base as small as possible to limit the travel time to the walls. So you don't even get the enjoyment of gradually creeping your walls forward as you take over more of the map. All that's left is doing the same routine of wait out the enemies at night, go out and recruit new guys during the day. So, so boring.

Overall, this is a disappointing game through and through.

The original Tropico is still good, but not quite as good as the later ones. Tropico 2, on the other hand, is still the only game that lets you run a pirate island and is very much worth playing.

Tropico 1 is still quite enjoyable, but if you've played 3 and onwards you'll miss the cars as it takes Tropicans forever to get anywhere on foot. This tends to cause food supply problems on large islands even with plenty of farms and wharves and markets. There's also the same problem that's been present in every game until Tropico 4's Modern Times expansion of any housing with decent quality taking enormous amounts of real estate for the tiny number of people it houses. On the bright side, the excessively goofy style of the later games is absent here.

Tropico 2 is a game I'd love to see remade, it's a concept that hasn't been tried since. The basic gameplay is the same as the other Tropicos - you order things built and have to manage your finances, population, the food supply and ensure your people's needs are met. Where it differs is that instead of producing goods for export or servicing tourists, your economy is based on sending pirate ships out to raid. As pirate king, you get a cut of the booty. In turn, you have to provide the pirates with various kinds of entertainment when they're on shore leave. You also have to build and arm the ships and replace any that are lost.

Instead of different education classes, you now have pirates and captives. The captives being slave laborers who do most of the work on the island. Meanwhile the pirates either go out on raids or oversee the captives.

The game's problems are remarkably similar to those of Tropico 1. It takes forever to get anywhere on foot, so you'll often be tempted to drop the final crew member or two from a ship that's waiting for departure if they're half the island away. Because while you wait for them the rest of the crew just sits idle on the ship with their stats gradually decreasing. And again, housing takes way too much space. This is exacerbated by the slow movement problem as while you can stack the pirate entertainment buildings near the docks to ensure short travel times, you'll invariably have at least some of the housing half the island away from the docks as they take up much of the island's real estate.

Also, the game is a bit too micromanagey with the raiding and ship management and captains, I wish it was at a larger scale, with more ships going out on raids and setting off automatically when they're ready, and the raiders coming back with captured ships that the player can buy and rent out or sell to up-and-coming captains, and unaffiliated pirate ships coming by to drop off their loot and rest or even changing their base of operations permanently as the island's reputation grows.

Still, Tropico 2 will remain worth playing until someone finally comes back to this concept and makes a better game with it.