Recent reviews by Raederle

This is an adorable little game. I love how there is no tutorial, no goal. Just discovery and creation and beauty.

I played something like a hundred hours in the beta. I wrote around thirty pages of detailed feedback, and included screenshots. I'm a professional editor and game designer, and my feedback was utterly ignored. I didn't even receive a thank you for my efforts. What was the point of the beta? On top of that, they didn't improve anything from the beta as far as I can tell.

I love 4X games! They're my favorite genre since I was a little kid. I grew up with Civ I, Civ II, Test of Time, Call to Power, Civ III, Civ IV (including Fall from Heaven and Wild Mana mods), Warlock 1 & 2, Endless Legend, Civ V, Civ IV, Enchantress, Old World, and Revival Recolonization. I'd literally rather play *any* of those more than Humankind. I don't understand how they could have possibly made a more ugly, mishmashed, confusing user interface. I was doing better design when I was an intern in my teens.

I love *many* of the ideas from humankind: designing a unique civilization, mammoths on the map, a nomadic tribe before settlement . . . That's nice. So the idea team was great, but execution was painful.

There are also issues with conflicting "taste." Some people say this game is beautiful. Perhaps if you want everything to look so washed out, bland, and dull that it's hard to tell anything apart from anything else. This game had me feeling nostalgic for Test of Time and other games from the nineties.

For reference, my all time favorites are Endless Legend, Old World, Wild Mana, and Test of Time, more or less in that order. I tend to generally enjoy a more colorful experience as I find it more immersive. I lose interest when guns enter the scene, which is part of why I love Old World so much.

I had high hopes for Humankind as a game, but I wasted a lot of money and effort here . . . I tried finding redeeming features to the game, but from a wonky combat system to a soundtrack I didn't enjoy either, it's simply a failure of a 4X game.

This is an amazingly unique city-building game! As a life-long fan of city-building games (going back to Caesar I and II as a young child, and the Egyptian version, Pharaoh), I have to say this is among the best I've ever played (my favorites including Aven Colony and Pharaoh). But it's also completely unlike the others I've played because the entire nature of a city-builder has been turned on its head! Let me explain:

In every other city-builder, you're trying to create stability: you're trying to ensure that you always have a pretty close match between employees and jobs, most notably. You want people you arrive and stay employed, be happy, and generate tax income. But Wandering Village has no taxes and no money. You're a village on the back of a moving creature, and you literally all need to stick together, so money and taxes wouldn't even make a lot of sense.

The challenge isn't about building up an economy with exports or taxes, or even about keeping order or chasing fires like many city builders. Instead of all that, it's about dealing with a constantly changing climate as your city literally moves, including moving through biomes with contaminated air which can poison your people and your Onbu (the big guy your city is built upon). Instead of trying to find everyone permanent employment, this game involves moving around the villagers that you have as needed. Poison spores in the air? Maybe it's time to convert some of those builders and harvesters to doctors. Moving through the ocean? Okay, now we need to get some people on fishing. Moving through the dessert? Let's convert some farms to cactus-growing for our water supply!

Instead of building a city that gets ever-larger (and often falls apart as city-builders have notoriously fragile balances which can spin out of control rapidly), you instead have a city that is ever-adaptable. Instead of building more and more and more farms, you work on upgrading just a few and managing them well.

And, of course, to make things really interesting, you also have to feed, heal, and even pet your Onbu to build up a good relationship. He even graciously allows you to collect his poop to fertilize your fields (which you'll really want to do to make your few farms as efficient as possible).

The game is visually beautiful and has a good balance between restful and stressful. Overall, this is a five-star game and I'm so glad they're continuing to work on it. This latest release made a great game even better and I'm looking forward to more. The team is responsive in Discord, as well as the player base, so you can share your experience and ask for help along the way.

Get this game right now. Enjoy. Thank me later.

TLDR: If you like the board game, then you'll most likely like the video game. I'd recommend it.

The translation from board game to video game is pretty good, but there is nothing to compare to "house rules."

We like to play with a lot more level one advancements, for example. It's pretty dumb that several of the level two advancements specifically have abilities that refer to level one advancements, but they usually come out after all the level one advancements are gone anyway. That's annoying.

Another house rule we use that improves the game a lot is for a player to discard one card from those available to purchase if it is a duplicate and immediately get a replacement option. This is great for getting some card-turnover when there are not-so-great cards out. Playing with a not-very-bright AI in the game can help as the AI is likely to buy some of the less desirable duplicates, but this isn't really a "fix."

Yet a third house rule we enjoy is being able to pick from a larger selection of leaders. Having only two options for leaders can feel really cramped. What if you really hate both options?

You may put a timer on turns, but thus far I've found this to be a bad idea. Early in the game it is easy to work with a time limit, but as your field and options become more complex, a time limit becomes unreasonable.

For some reason I have experienced being unable to evoke my amulet after making one purchase and wanting to evoke it before making a second. I can't imagine any good reason for this limitation. Also, I've had times when the "undo" option wasn't there and it was very unclear why that would/could be the case when I had not bought something with an immediate effect.

I really love that there is an option to play with an above-normal amount of VP chits in the pool. We often play to 30 VPs with two players instead of 23 when playing the board game. However, the extended pool in the video game is an obnoxious amount. It's fun to do that on rare occasion, but some middle-ground would be nice. I'm not sure why we can't just manually type in the amount of victory point tokens we'd like to play to.

One last very special sort of "house rule" thing that is possible with the board game but not with the video game is this: we created a "play in parallel" way to enjoy Mystic Vale where each player has their own area to buy from that is not shared with other players, and each grouping of advancements and vales are *meant* to combine nicely with each other, meaning each player gets to enjoy more strong combinations – which are what I find most satisfying anyhow. There is, obviously, no way to do anything remotely like this in the digital version. You can select and unselect expansions, but that's it. You can't even remove a card you find annoying from play.

*Detailed, immersive events
*Specialized "production" mechanisms (growth produces workers, training produces units, civics produce projects and specialists)
*Brilliant Orders mechanism (perhaps borrowed from board games where it is a common mechanic) where you have a given number of total orders to make per turn
*Workers construct buildings directly on the map independent from city production making them a more crucial, integral part of the overall game
*Direct relationship to resources (gain units of stone, wood, etc, and expend these units on roads, buildings, etc)
*Play a character who ages and dies and then become the heir
*Family tree screen shows you all of your relatives and the line of descent through characters you've played
*Navigate both international politics and internal politics through individual characters, families, and religions
*Cities, units, and characters belong to one of three noble families of your nation, each family having different benefits (for example, the workers of one of the families can build multiple roads per turn), and also having benefits for units/cities of matching families
*Gain and lose legitimacy for your choices and achievements which impacts how many Orders you earn each turn
*Unusually diverse soundtrack and the ability to disable individual tracks
*Ability to harvest resources directly from the map with units of all kinds (spawning various events)
*Training units is not bounded by gaining experience in battle; units can be trained by spending training or by leaving them at a barracks/range to acquire skill
*Anchor boats at coasts in order to allow any units to convoy
*The game doesn't go up to modern times

*Old World gives you a lot of leeway to make any particular thing happen in a turn through the Orders mechanism; Instead of units being capped arbitrarily low in their movement speed (and other similar caps), your overall turn is capped by Orders to spend, meaning that you can combine an expenditure of Orders and Training to bring a single unit across the map in a single turn (potentially at the expense of being able to do much else that turn). This gives you incredible rulership flexibility!
*Characters can become governors or generals, or your ambassador, chancellor, leader, or spymaster, giving their attributes, history, opinion of you, and so forth, different implications depending on their role
*Unusually customizable options for AI difficulty at game start
*Many aspects of 4X games which feel mechanical have been converted into themed events in Old World, including winning the game
*Watch a replay of your game and export the .gif to share with friends
*Highly detailed end-game reports
*By halting prior to modern times, the game stays beautiful throughout. No ugly cars, no concrete buildings, no obnoxious jets, etc. I've always become incredibly sick of Civ games due to the late-game sound effects alone, but Old World takes the gold of playing Civ and cuts out the rest.
*Because Old World is focused on a particular area and time period, the history of this time is much more deeply explored with less-known military concepts and other themes of the time.
*Highly responsive developers who are actually listening to real-time feedback in Discord

*Events become more routine and less immersive after 30-45 hours of game play. While Old World boasts over 10,000 events, you're not likely to see 90% of them unless you break out of your preferred play-style and take weird risks.
*Many of the events come in a strange order (like getting a burial/death event/announcement after already getting all the notifications about the ramifications of said death).
*Further event streamlining is required to give the game a longer-lasting immersive feeling; for example, after being married to a husband who was very much 'in love with' me for fifty or more years, nothing at all special happened when he died. As a player essentially role-playing a character, that felt wrong.
*While I love the portraits of all the characters, this area needs work. The backgrounds are repetitive/identical which seems weird. Some of the same portraits come up in the same game. Worse, I once had two children side-by-side with identical portraits. Furthermore, I found it very odd when two obviously white-looking parents gave birth to a nappy-haired (and very beautiful) daughter. I would have been happy to have this daughter if I'd married a matching father, but as it was it made me look like I was unfaithful!
*Soundtrack may actually be too diverse to sound cohesive to most listeners.
*The tutorial manages to be confusing, too informative, and not informative enough all at once; I would have been happier if I'd skipped most of the tutorial instead of sticking with it all the way to the end.
*The in-game encyclopedia generally doesn't offer you any useful information beyond pop-ups and hover-over information, making it seem generally useless whenever I've tried to seek information from it.
*There isn't any way to customize your units (the way there is in Beyond Earth, Alpha Centari, and Endless Legend).
*Like all 4X games, the end game moves gradually into the territory of tedious and feels anti-climatic.

*I usually find all story-based RPG games and in-game events tiresome and boring. I click through them. If I wanted a novel, I'd be in my cozy reading place reading a novel (which I do for over an hour every day). When I play a game, I want action. But Old World changed that for me. I've been a serious gamer since I was a child, and I'm a board game creator and publisher in real life, and 4X games are my favorite kind of game. So believe me when I say this is a big deal for me that Old World is the very first game where I have actually read the events! I was actually so captivated by the events in my first play-through that I was brought to tears twice! (This was, of course, during the honeymoon phase.)
*Playing this game feels like the developers were reading my thoughts over the past twenty-seven years of playing Civilization games (going all the way back to Civ I). Ideas I've had, complaints I've had – they've been taken into account, and I'm impressed. I'm a tough critic, but Old World is really, really good!

*While Old World doesn't rate higher than Endless Legend in my book thus far, it has the potential to with further refinement and expansions. After all, Endless Legend wasn't nearly as awesome prior to the expansions that added water dynamics, winter, and dust eclipses. That said, Old World is really up there, above Beyond Earth in my book, as well as all the other 4X games currently available. I enjoyed Thea, Civilization I-VI, Test of Time, Warlock, Humankind, and others, but Old World really takes the cake right now for it's level of innovation and beauty. (Test of Time, in its day, was perhaps more innovative relative to anything available at the time and I loved the heck out of that game in my early teens.) (Humankind has thus far actually been a disappointment.) More simply put, Old World is currently my second-favorite 4X game of all time, and has the potential to become my favorite with deepening expansions.
*I will likely continue playing this game for years to come. I'm at around 60 hours of gameplay as I write this and nearing the end of my second game. With each game taking 20 to 45 hours (depending on settings and approach), I foresee me getting around 100 hours of game play out of this game per year for the next three years. (After that, who knows?)
*If Old World releases expansions and/or DLC I will absolutely buy them.

This is one of the best city-builders I've played. It reminds me a lot of my favorite, the old-school Phoaroh game. I also love Aven Colony, which goes in a different direction from Kubifaktorium.

The biggest downside is that some aspects of the game are fairly unclear and I had to go onto the forums to look up how to do a couple things. Also, I don't care about the storyline and just click through it (which doesn't say anything about the storyline; I have not read it). The mechanics of the game are quite fascinating and fun though.

One annoying issue is that the automated buildings that produce multiple different outputs can't sort into different warehouses in the beginning. But since that's the only part of game functionality I can actually complain about after 40+ hours of gameplay, that's pretty amazing.

The block graphics are weird and take getting used to, but they're not bad. I can still tell what everything is. I wish I could set the game to a slightly faster setting than max sometimes, but its neat that I can walk away from the game and everything will be fine.

This has some of the issues typical of a city-builder game. As a long-time city builder player (20+ years), I see the brilliance and the flaws in this design readily. I can imagine getting a good 40 to 60 hours of gameplay out of this, for sure. The tutorial needs work, the displays badly could use a redesign, could use more sophisticated audio settings, but overall concept/graphics/execution is great. The game plays like a dynamic puzzle, as it should, and I'm thoroughly engrossed by it. My husband is also loving it and he isn't even usually that into city-builder games.

This is the best new game I've tried in years! I love that this game is more expansive than any previous city builder, and also less 'fragile.' (Your people don't riot and burn it all to the ground at the drop of a hat like they do in many old school city builders.) This game is like crossing Imagine Earth with Aven Colony, in a very good way. If you enjoy resource management, this is a great game for you!

I'm a long-time player of city builders. What I enjoy in a city builder is city planning, city building, and city management. My first dive into this game gave me lengthy story line stuff that was annoying. I feel like the game is trying to appeal to an extrovert, which I'm not. I don't want a bunch of animated heads talking at me; I want an interesting challenge in terms of city building, which is what I love about the old Caesar games, Pharaoh, and Aven Colony.

Mostly, I love this game.

This game is incredible exercise. First I had to move past my simulator sickness (which is less in VR than it is in first-person games through the monitor). I could only play two or three songs at first before the headache would start coming on. So I played three songs a day for a week, then I was up to four songs for another week, and then the simulator sickness was gone. That's much faster than how long it takes me to adjust to a first-person MMO on my usual desktop, so I was pleased and amazed at the short adjustment period. Then, from there, I started playing until I was sweating and exhausted, and my arms are sore the next day after playing. Amazing! It's usually hard to motivate me to exercise, so I'm impressed.

My primary complaints with the game are honestly just issues with VR technology itself. My sabers glitch often, and I've had to keep my humidity lower than is optimal for my lung health. Low humidity improves the issues, but doesn't eliminate them. The headset seems sensitive to where it is plugged in. So I factor in about three misses due to glitching with each song.

One actual complaint with the game is that there is obviously no way to switch between steamaccounts every time you want to swap headsets with a friend or husband who wants to play, so our scores are all mixed together. For a single day there was this weird change where you put in your name after every song and I kinda liked that, but it went away again just as mysteriously as it showed up.

I have DDR/StepMania too, and I have to say that BeatSaber feels much more natural. (Also, the jumps in StepMania are killer on the knees -- so unnatural and strange.) Also, I tried SnythRiders briefly, but it didn't have *any* music I could even tolerate. Whereas I love the music in BeatSaber (for the most part), especially the original few songs it came with. Slashing cubes goes really well with angry music, so some of the DLC Linkin Park songs are a perfect fit. But it also goes amazingly with empowering music, so I love the Unlimited Power track for that.