Recent reviews by dannyman

I approached this as "it is kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure story." Great. Make choices, build your character over time, influencing what choices can be made ...

About halfway through I turned off the default "cheat mode" where every choice you make spells out the consequences ahead of time. As I ground my way to an increasingly mediocre outcome, the critical reviews about the game really being a game of going back and forth to round up your stats started to echo in my head. That criticism amounted to "if you don't want to have a crappy game, then early on you have to buff your stats to ensure you'll have options later in the game." This seems true of my play-through.

It feels like it could have used a little more thought. My favorite "bug" is that even though another character and I hated each other, we nevertheless on time had to have a romance under the sacred tree: there were no options around this event nor its aftermath because the other character and I hated each other. Whatever.

Near the end at my Last Death the Twins were like "well, you wanna go back and modify your thing?" I wasn't sure if this was an invitation to go back a chapter or reincarnate or whatever but honestly once you die four times it is time to call it over.

This game is unpolished and moves at a pace like drying paint.

I recently played Aviary Attorney, which is a breezy fun absurdist murder mystery. Let's try another? Disco Elysium looks fairly bonkers.

So, the first trick is the fonts are tiny. There is a slider to adjust the font size, but it is not labeled which way the slider should go to make the font larger or smaller. I got the dialog text readable, but everything else is tiny.

The next unsolved mystery is there is a tutorial mode that appears to be unchecked by default, has an explanatory text that makes you wonder whether checking the tutorial mode disables the tutorial, and well, I've never been tutored.

On my first game, my guy died two hours in from hurt feelings. Okay ... try again ... this time I figured out that when your guy starts to die because, for example, he jumped half a foot in the air to catch a tie off a ceiling fan, this causes him to have a heart attack ... anyway, your guy starts to die and you gotta click the health button so he can do his asthma inhaler or whatever. This you have to do several times a day or the game will end. Good to know.

Then you wander around. While the game is mostly staring at a static image, the computer fan goes bonkers. There are mysteries like how do I get on the balcony? Why is the balcony a different scene from the mezzanine?

Anyway ... yeah I made it through "Day One" after a mere week (eight hours) of gameplay then I went camping in the real world, under some nice redwood trees, and when I got back I figured I'd try to stick with the game up and after an hour the game crashed and my evening's efforts at clicking on dialogs that go nowhere fast were all lost.

Something I do like is the game makes notes along the way, a to-do list of stuff, to help you figure out "wait now what" which could be helpful especially if you can only play an hour or two at a time.

I almost like this game but it is too confusing to follow. I played as a Swedish lord and quickly things were going really well and I had Sweden itself formed and leading it. There are obvious bits missing from the UI. For example. "Raiding! you could totally raid Bliskbankjull!" Where the eff is that place? Scroll scroll scroll scroll maybe you'll find Bliskbankjull or another place to raid. Lotsa clicky clicky. Why not, oh say a RAID MAP MODE? Or even just let me click on Bliskbankjull and then scroll the map over to it?

Then it's like "There are thirty wars you can declare. Most of these places you've never heard of. Click on one to find out more." And you click on and get an idea, then you gotta go pull up the menu that says there are thirty wars you could declare, and look at another ...

It explains over and over that a Duchy is part of a Kingsmanship which is a sub-county of a yard-long half-farrow. Okay. I could use a white board for that stuff. Could the game maybe sketch out the org chart for me? "you're this guy and this dude is your king and these dudes are your vassals and these guys are more powerful, &c." That would be sooo effing helpful!

Likewise it would be neat to have ways, maybe like they do in detective movies, to see lines drawn between the people in the game and explore their relationships. Maybe a "family map mode" that shows lines on the map to what relatives I have and where. Likewise maybe some kind of a "people radar" screen that shows who is close/important and what they think of the person in the middle, maybe the lines between those people. It might be nice to be able to explore "who do I have in common with this person" &c.

My first player character got well and old and finally died, then everyone was declaring war on his heir. This was very confusing to sort out. I had an ally but sometimes he was my enemy because he was a vassal and that whole situation was really opaque looking at the map. I'd like to know who I could reach out to for other allies. I tried to just surrender some wars I really didn't care about, but then accidentally surrendered Sweden to a new Queen. That was maybe the one war I really might have wanted to focus on.

There was another part of the game that was like "hey dude you wanna reassign this county to this duchy to fix the title?" And I'm like "boy I'd like to know a bit more" like is the one dude gonna be happy I assigned more land and the other dude get pissy I took his land away or is that even happening? I don't know. The game seems to think it is a good idea. Will it make certain vassals more or less powerful? Will it create a different Cassus Belli?

This game might be fun in a few years if they release UI updates to make it easier to understand. I really want to play it some more but the current iteration is just too painful.

It took a few minutes running on Linux to get the graphics downgraded correctly so that the user interface was adequately responsive.

Playing the game is frustrating because I don't understand the controls. The tutorial walks you through a few hotkeys, then mentions "alternate mode" ... like you're always in "build track" mode so trying to click on things in the game world you end up building tracks somewhere ... I have played a lot of train games and this "low stress" game is the most frustrating to try and work with. :(

There isn't much game. Five "levels" and the first few are completely blank with no objectives. If you want to try a basic game challenge you're asked to master the controls for up/down (extremely confusing) and build enough track was too quickly in order to transport passengers.

This is not fun.

I love City Building and Civilization type games but as a parent I have neither the time nor the focus to really enjoy such games these days. Poly Bridge is like a good, hard puzzle that maybe I'll solve in an hour or I can try again another time. A casual game for someone who loves a puzzle.

And now I certainly notice the structure of bridges in the real world. Maybe I have learned a little engineering. :)

I've been playing computer games for decades and this is among the worst experiences I have had. Learning to play the game is frustrating and not worth the effort.

First off, there is a "Tutorial" tab with no content. So, you go to the "Academy" tab and you click through really really really basic scenarios, which often take longer to load than to view. There are classics like "how to turn on the train" and "green signal means go." Then you can try the "loading and unloading cargo" scenario which would also be dead easy except I have no clue as to the combination of throttle + two sets of brakes it takes to make the diesel engine in the scenario move forward.

So, I try some Quick Drive and career scenarios. I had previously played the freeware game, OpenBVE. The premise is fairly simple: man the throttle, pull up to the station platform, open and close the doors, obey signals and speed limits. Okay. OpenBVE nags you every step of the way: you're driving too fast, you need to pull up further on the platform, &c. At the end, OpenBVE gives a detailed score of what you did right and wrong. Train Simulator? You start out smacking the AWS repeatedly and trying to figure out what is causing the AWS to buzz continuously as you open the doors. The AWS eventually quiets down: now you are behind schedule! You drive 20 minutes to the other station and open the doors there. You are then informed that you failed the scenario. THAT'S IT.

How does the game work? What should I do? No clue. No clue at all.

A guy on Twitter suggested I read the manual. I did that. It helpfully explained that the "bulls eye" thing indicates what is happening to the passengers. That could have been covered with a tooltip on mouseover, but I'm glad I read the manual. I still have no clue how to complete the most basic scenarios.

I applied for a refund but Steam won't refund my $40 because I made a good faith investment of 6 hours of my time trying to figure this thing out.

User Interface does not work. Apparently you steer by cardinal directions in a first person world ... all I ever get is 30 seconds of a screen telling me space and jump, then eventually the wolves eat me.

Trams are nice, but disappointing that it doesn't actually snow when it gets cold: either you play an "always snow" map or the most weather you get is rain.

Bought the game a year and a half ago. Today I happen to be on a Windows computer to try it out. Been "setting up" for the past 20 minutes. I wonder if I'll ever play the game.

Gigantic, impersonal cities in a uniform shade of grey. No sense of history or being somewhere. I liked the original better because you got to inteact with the cities through time, and participate in their stories. This sequel has no soul.