I’ve played pretty much all of Maxis’ games back in the day but one game I missed out on was SimTower and I never forgot that. I guess it was because I was busy with the school when it came out and it was actually made by a Japanese developer and not a Will Wright design. So when I saw this pop up on Steam I was immediately intrigued. Since I never played SimTower I had to look up information on it but I believe that while the games are visually and thematically similar, they are rather different in substance.
So I said that I’d play through Fallout 4 all over again with mods and so I did, but it turned out that all I needed was the comprehensive Horizon overhaul mod. For a while I did have Survival Options because I can’t live without save-anywhere but Horizon has this covered as well. I won’t list everything this mod does because it’s too huge and I feel like I’ve barely touched the settlement management bits but I will go into what I liked about it and what I think could be improved.
So I’ve been playing Fallout 4 for a while now. I got way more engaged in it than I thought I would considering that my initial impression of it is that its production values are barely any better than the previous game and there are all kinds of annoying bugs and glitches. But the sheer size of the game and the variety of the environments you can explore really won me over. The settlement construction portion of the game is both frustrating and time consuming but I have to admit that it’s pretty addictive.
So I’ve just gotten around to starting Fallout 4. Since this looks like it’s going to take a long time to play, I thought I’d also check out its free to play companion game which was good enough to get some praise on Broken Forum. It plays a lot like those free games on Facebook or whatever, though it’s not too annoying and is charming enough. You can indeed spend real money to speed things but as far as I can tell, everything that you can buy can indeed be obtained in-game so it’s honest in that regard.
This was very popular for a while on Broken Forum and I was very interested in it but waited until it went on discount before buying it. I was also apprehensive about it being too difficult and in particular I have a hard time getting too far into rogue-like games. As it turned out, I found the difficulty level to be high but manageable. What got me down however is how grindy reaching the end of the game is.
I was interested in this series long, long ago, beginning with the second one if I recall correctly because of what I heard about the quality of the AI players. For various reasons I never got around to playing it and recently Stardock’s position on the Gamergate affair soured me on all of their products. I didn’t buy this copy of the game either. It was a gift from a Broken Forum member so I felt that I had to at least give it a decent shake.
Illwinter is a game company composed of a Swedish duo that has only ever made multiple iterations of two titles: the more famous Dominions series and the Conquest of Elysium series. As you can tell from these screenshots, their games have only very basic graphics and user interfaces that absolutely require reading the manual to make sense of. Still they have managed to garner quite a fanbase for themselves and in fact it was by playing Dominions 2 that I joined the forum of their then publisher Shrapnel and from there to the Quarter to Three and later Broken Forum discussion boards.
