As mentioned last week, Railway Empire is a pretty fun business management game. It’s not perfect, but I found it to be enjoyable. I also mentioned that there is a lot of Railway Empire DLC. So many pieces of DLC in fact, that if you own them all (like me) then you end up with a hefty amount of content. As each DLC adds 1 to 3 scenarios, alongside some achievements and new trains, wrapping the game takes a long time. I’ve put more than 150 hours into the game, and I still haven’t managed to get all the achievements for example. Part of this is because the scenarios can be challenging, especially when aiming for a President rating. Another part is that each DLC requires you to complete a 100 year sandbox game. Which takes a while.

With that out of the way, let’s begin looking at the various DLCs. The first DLC released was the Mexico DLC, which adds 1 scenario and 2 trains. It’s a very modest scenario in terms of content, although it does have two different “paths” that can be completed. Once you’ve done the first few tasks, you can side with one of two quest givers, and that then impacts the rest of the scenario. Generally it’s not too difficult and is moderately entertaining. This DLC also includes a new sandbox map, and the ability to play maps in night mode.

Following the Mexico DLC, we head to the other part of North America that has hitherto been missing. Namely Canada, with “The Great Lakes” DLC. Unfortunately this one kind of sucks, with just 1 scenario that’s a bit of a chore to play. It did add Warehouses to the game via a free update, which are useful and let you store excess goods. Aside from that though, if you pay for the scenario then you’ll encounter the new weather system. Which basically means that in the winter months, your trains move extremely slowly. It’s aboot as fun as it sounds. You do also get a new sandbox map and two new trains.

Almost as a form of making up for the Canada DLC, we have the “Crossing the Andes” pack next. Which contains three scenarios. It also has 2 new trains, a night-mode and a new sandbox map. The scenarios themselves are decent I would say, essentially it’s the same map every time with 3 players. Each scenario has you playing as one of these players, while the other 2 are competitors. The map is cordoned off for a while, so that you can build up your railway. Although you’ll need to complete various objectives of course. These scenarios have a nice build up of challenge, and I found the overall map to be decent.

After mucking around the America’s, the next Railway Empire DLC was for Great Britain and Ireland. This one is pretty good (hence the slightly raised price). Although I found the scenario to be extremely long. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but after Mexico and the Crossing the Andes DLCs I’d rather have more shorter scenarios. Than an extremely long one. As for the rest of the content, there’s a new sandbox map of course, alongside 10 whole trains. I think the sandbox map and fiddling with the trains is arguably where the meat of this one lies.

Following the UK DLC, we got the Germany DLC. This one isn’t bad, with one scenario that re-uses an idea from the Mexico DLC. Namely that the scenario splits into two paths, after a certain point, adding replayability. Unfortunately it adds a new feature, that sucks. This new feature is that the map is split into regions. That need to be unlocked, with fat stacks of Deutschmarks. The mission is both quite easy because your competitors are stuck in one region. Whilst also being a bit sluggish as expansion requires large upfront investments. Alongside the new scenario and sandbox map, there are also 10 new trains.

The next Railway Empire DLC was for France. The France DLC is basically a repeat of the German DLC, with two paths through the scenario. Alongside the same lousy region locking system. Although unlocking regions requires a bit less money. The mission is therefore another fairly easy one, with some replayability. You also get 10 new trains, the new sandbox map and a new piece of music. Which I haven’t mentioned for the others, but every DLC comes with a new menu screen and a new piece of music.

After the France DLC, we got the Northern Europe DLC. This one has a single scenario, that kind of sucks. Much like Canada you have the thrilling weather system that just makes the trains go slow in winter. As a bonus, the scenario also starts to veer into the tediously long area. The thrilling regions system also returns again. Oh and you only get 3 new trains this time. In conclusion then, the scenario isn’t good and it combines two of the worst DLC mechanics.

We then suddenly got sent to Australia for the Down Under DLC. This one doesn’t have the same lousy mechanics. Yet it adds a new mechanic that I personally don’t care for. So it’s swings and roundabouts. Essentially you can “choose” what settlements to grow. To do this, you need to ship a certain amount of basic materials to each settlement. These settlements then become normal towns. Various resources are only unlocked if there’s a town nearby though. In theory this lets you “grow” your rail network, as your needs change. The reality is that everything just takes a long time, in an already long scenario. With the cherry on top being a busted rating system for this mission. If you want the best rating, you need to disable the pause mode otherwise it’s literally impossible. Finally there’s a new sandbox map and 3 new trains.

Rounding out the Railway Empire DLC is the Japan DLC pack. This one has two scenarios, and is actually fun. The gimmick this time is that you can adjust passenger routes. Essentially each route gets a passenger satisfaction score. You can tweak this score by changing the train, staff, ticket price and building some new buildings in each town. Such as hotels that increase passenger satisfaction for trains stopping in that town. The scenarios themselves are decently enjoyable, if a bit easy. Even though the region locking mechanic returns. You also get 8 new trains and 3 maps (one is just a combination of the other two).

In conclusion then, most of the Railway Empire DLC is decent. I’d say the Great Lakes and Northern Europe packs are the weakest of the two. Most of the rest are pretty fun, with the Japan and Crossing the Andes packs offering the most content. The rest are somewhere in the middle, I think Mexico and France are stronger than Germany. With Germany being better than the UK and both being less tedious than the Australian one. Ultimately most of them are fairly basic with a scenario, new map and offer a couple hours of content. With 9 different packs though there’s a lot of combined content. Especially for the completionists. None of them are as good as the base game, but if you enjoyed the base game then this is a nice way to get something new to do.

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Railway Empire has ended up as one of my most played games on Steam, largely due to it’s prolific amount of DLC. Yet in spite of the excessive amount of playtime the DLC has added, the base game itself is certainly no slouch. Not only is there a full campaign with multiple missions that serves as a glorified tutorial of the game’s systems, but there are also more than a dozen scenarios. These scenarios are quite similar to the campaign missions. While they have a bit less polish, they add a good bit of extra challenge.

As for the game itself, Railway Empire is a fun little railroad management business simulator. Par for the course, it revolves around connecting cities and businesses. You take the goods that towns and factories need, then ship them into towns. Once the towns are stocked, they’ll gradually grow and develop businesses. These businesses then produce products that other towns will need. At the same time, you’re connecting the cities up and so you can start to transport larger and larger amounts of goods. Of course as you make a profit on every train-car of cargo (or passengers) shipped, your business grows. Which funds the placement of new tracks, the purchasing of new trains and thus the creation of new routes.

The twist with the gameplay mentioned above, is that you’ll need to achieve certain objectives. So you might need to grow a city to a certain size, by a certain date. Or ship so many of a certain good, to a certain destination. This sounds straightforward, but because you’ll have multiple goals at the same time, budget limitations play a role. As such you can often find yourself struggling to achieve these objectives. Especially as the game punishes you, if you aren’t able to achieve them in half the time. This punishment occurs through a reduction of the final score.

Once you’ve got through all of those objectives across the campaign and scenarios, you can enjoy the sandbox mode. Which lets you play through any of the maps from the previous modes, during any time period from 1830 through to 1930 that you choose. Each time period has it’s own trains and some technologies, although these technologies are largely the same. This is because the technologies add +5% engine power, or +8% more passengers waiting in stations and so on.

As for the other aspects of Railway Empire, they’re also pretty good. You can ride along any train in “real-time”, and even blow the horn. The graphics are pretty good, although I’d recommend limiting the frame-rate in the options. Otherwise my PC tended to try and throttle itself aiming for hundreds of frames per second. The music is also period appropriate and fine, although it does repeat itself a bit much. Finally there are some other things to manage. You can buy businesses, construct factories and hire staff. These are good ways to make a bit of extra money once you know what you’re doing.

With all that being said, there are some quirks and niggles in Railway Empire. Firstly, the AI opponents are extremely annoying. You can’t share tracks unlike some other games, so you’ll need to construct tunnels and bridges galore to compete with them. They field an insane number of trains, while also obnoxiously over-bidding. They’re bad at growing towns, and irritating to deal with at the higher levels as they cheat. As for the trains, mass upgrades are tedious to perform especially as you keep researching new trains. The track-laying tool is good, although it can be unforgiving with angles. Plus it loves to create expensive routes, that with a modicum of tweaking become much cheaper. Finally I found that too many of the scenarios ended with me sitting on the bonds screen, trying to buyout my competitors. A lengthy process, even if your business is clearly more successful than theirs.

In conclusion then, Railroad Empire is a pretty fun little railroad management game that has a lot of content. It’s not perfect, but with good visuals and lots of tweaks to make it is an engrossing game. The rating system also gives it so much needed challenge, while aiming for the achievements will take you a while. Ultimately I’d consider it a solid game, even if I think that some maps can just take a bit too long. As such I’d recommend it to any fans of this mini-genre, although I think Sid Meier’s Railroads is a better starting point for those who are unsure.

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Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a game by a different developer, that manages to feel exactly the same as Borderlands 2. There are some differences like new characters and so new skill trees. Generally speaking though this game hasn’t innovated, which is fine if you liked Borderlands 2. If you thought Borderlands 2 was pretty boring, then you are in trouble. Which means that I am in trouble. Of course there’s the entirely fair question, as to why I bought this game. The honest answer to that question is that my friend has a lousy PC. So in the search for co-op games we ended up on this one. Is it fun? Nope.

I’ll skim through the rationale for why I didn’t care for the game. Which should be fairly obvious between my last reviews and the TL;DR at the top. Essentially Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a looter shooter with bad loot and bad shooting. The cherries on top are of course; the weird vehicle controls, the annoying dialogue, the poor quest design and the generally tedious nature of the game’s level scaling system. There are some bright spots, like decent variety and the fact that the whole thing works in co-op, but generally speaking this game is a game for idiots. Combat is basic, the jokes fall flat, the game manages to feel extremely repetitive, most of the content is bland, it’s just a mess. Why this series became the series for co-op players is beyond me.

As for what this game adds to the series, well it has some background for the perennial favourite character of Handsome Jack. Who isn’t particularly interesting here, and is basically trying to be a hero but becomes a villain. The way this happens occurs slowly across missions, but essentially he goes from normal person to paranoid dictator in a gradual fashion. Yet it’s not handled very well, and it’s hard not to get the impression that our characters shouldn’t have sided with him once he started randomly executing civilians for the lols. The story also involves the vault hunters from previous games spoiling his plans to take control of the world, but they don’t do much. Honestly if you were a big Borderlands fan then I imagine you’ll find this game to be lacklustre in terms of exploring the characters.

Especially as the game otherwise doesn’t add that much. There are one or two new vehicles you get to use a handful of times. Plus the O2 mechanic, wherein you need oxygen to breathe but can also use this oxygen as a impromptu jetpack. Otherwise I can’t really think of anything outside of the new character classes. These are fine but I’m not playing through the game to max level 6 times. So the only thing I really noticed is that you can play as Claptrap. Which is about as much as fun as you’d expect.

With those new additions out of the way, I’ll just reiterate that Borderlands: The Pre-sequel really is more of the same. Just with Australian accents. The combat is the same, the weapon looting system is the same, the UI is the same, most of the enemies are the same, the mission is the same, the dialogue is of the same quality and so on. There really isn’t a lot that’s new. To the point that the O2 system which is arguably one of the biggest additions doesn’t do much. It gives you a new character item slot and it introduces some risk/reward to the game. As you need to breathe (albeit not if you play as Claptrap), you need O2. You can spend it to jump slightly further or revive your companions faster however. Outside of this though, it just makes the outdoor areas a bit tedious. As you need to camp near the O2 stations every now and then. The game does at least still have an appealing art-style. Outside of that though I can’t think of anything it does particularly well.

I mean for goodness sake, this game has missions where you need to hunt for audio logs that are hidden in an office, and then have to listen to them. There are missions where you need to guard a box as it slowly trundles along a conveyor belt while it’s under attack. Even finding these stupid missions can be a pest as they’re scattered around the world, and once you are a few levels above them they give you no XP. So if you need to keep up with the game’s level curve (lest you be punished by health sponge enemies), then you’ll need to quick travel to an area. Then possibly go to a new area from there. Then run to a bulletin board. So that you can pick up a quest that sucks. It’s just not a very well paced game, and even for a mindless shooter there’s so much downtime.

There are some design decisions that are questionable, like co-op making the game harder but these can be hand-waved away or at least justified. Yet the moment to moment gameplay feels at odds with itself. You want to shoot the dudes, but then you need to loot the dudes. So you need to open the inventory screen and faff around there. Then you need to slowly trundle towards the next objective. So that the game can give you another objective. Then another one. So that you can complete a quest that doesn’t give you enough XP. Meaning you need to run to a fast travel station and then fast travel to somewhere near another quest. That will involve shooting dudes, and looting the dudes, and looking at your inventory… and so on. It’s just a tedious game and I have to give credit to Borderlands 3 for improving on it.

In conclusion, I’ve run out of things to say and ways to re-iterate the main point. Namely the Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a pretty boring game. It doesn’t change much, and essentially feels like Borderlands 2 again. Which will be great for some people. I shudder to imagine who those people are, but they must exist. As for everyone else, if you want a co-op game look elsewhere. At the very least grab Borderlands 3 or Tiny Tina’s D&D styled mini-campaign before picking up Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.

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Contra: Rogue Corps is a game that’s extremely rough around the edges, yet I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think it was exactly what I was looking for. Not so much in terms of the game itself, but more in what the game represents. For me, gaming is about heading into town with £10 and emerging a few hours later with lunch and a game of questionable pedigree. Sometimes this game will be a “hidden gem”, sometimes it’s just mediocre and sometimes it’s actively terrible. Yet this ordeal in and of itself is why I enjoy buying games. I could pirate everything, but there’s no cardio involved nor is there any skin in the game. As a consequence the bargain bin is what holds the most appeal for me, and Contra: Rogue Corps is definitely a bargain bin game these days. Between middling reviews, a piss-poor PC port and modest sales this is a game that’s easy to overlook. Yet in the finest traditions of the bargain bin haul, I actually thought it was fun – even if it was quite janky at points and had some questionable design decisions. If you can endure the occasional bout of frustration, I can safely say that Contra Rogue Corps is one of the better twin-stick shooters for the 8th console generation.

Which is my seamless segue into discussing what Contra: Rogue Corps actually is. First and foremost it’s barely a Contra game in any sense of the word, and most likely wasn’t one until Konami realised they were in trouble if they didn’t staple a brand to this game. Outside of a handful of modest references, there’s really nothing related to Contra here – especially not the gameplay. Contra: Rogue Corps is not a 2D or overhead shooter, but is instead a 3D twin-stick shooter with a few… additions that arguably suit the game but would alienate any actual Contra fans who bought it. For example, I doubt that Contra fans would enjoy the concepts of their weapons overheating after a few seconds of shooting. Nor would they enjoy a quasi-RPG drop system wherein they can equip 4 augmentations to their characters and multiple augmentations to each weapon. So you’ll end up finishing a mission, getting 20 pieces of loot and then checking if any of them offer something good. Most of the time, you just get thrilling bonuses like “-7.4% damage from Enemy Type D” or “+2metre dodge roll” although equipping all this nonsense does eventually make a difference. Then you’ve got the enemy types which get a bit repetitive and gain more health/attack with each tier of missions, of which there are 7. Finally while the game does have a co-op mode, it’s entirely separate from the campaign and will require decently levelled characters to be beatable.

So on the face of it, Contra: Rogue Corps sounds a bit hopeless. It’s not anything like Contra, and the additions sound pretty boring. Why then am I, your humble bargain bin scout, recommending it? Well for the simple reason that if you aren’t hung up about what a Contra game should be, then you will probably be able to have some fun with this one. While the enemies are a bit repetitive, the game loves to throw them at you in hordes which actually results in some pretty frantic and enjoyable gameplay. There are a few missions later on in the game that are basically horde defence missions, and I had a great time playing them because they really encouraged you to learn the game. You had to know what enemies to prioritise, you had to know the enemy patterns and if you did know these things then they were a tight, punishing but fun experience. After having played so many tedious, sluggish and whiny games over the past few years it was nice to have something that was just an honest-to-God arcade experience. It reminded a bit of Mothergunship, in the sense that this was a high-octane game that no one seems to have cared about (sadly). As for the character customisation and stat systems, while the game does a terrible job of explaining how they actually work – these systems do help a bit. There are a lot of different weapons to develop for starters, which helps the variety up. Then by giving better gear on higher levels and for higher mission completion ranks Contra: Rogue Corps does a good job of encouraging you to just keep trying the higher levels and to reward you (somewhat) for going back to earlier levels and crushing them with ease. Of course as the game is admittedly a bit challenging, there’s some risk reward going on here and sometimes the scale tips a bit too much towards risk as you get nothing except weapon XP should you fail a mission.

With that being said, I actually found the game to be finely balanced most of the time. Some other reviews have cried many tears over how hard the freaking is man :'(( but I’m not sure what they were doing. You need to learn the enemy patterns, dodge attacks A LOT and then you should be fine. There are a few really annoying enemy types, like the turrets that lock-on to you and one of the bosses – but most enemies are if anything a bit easy. Plus you don’t need to complete all the levels to progress, so you can leave some for later if you are getting filtered. Generally the game is fun and lets you progress to the disappointing final boss without too much trouble. There are a few things I wanted to mention though, because as mentioned at the start of this review Contra: Rogue Corps is a bargain bin game. Which is to say, that it’s a diamond in the rough at best. So you should be aware that you can’t pause, even when playing in Single Player… for some reason. You should be aware that the graphics aren’t amazing and neither is the soundtrack. You should be aware that while you do get some invincibility frames after getting hit, these won’t save you from any other damage that happens before you hit the ground. There are just a few niggles like this that make the game feel a bit janky. Especially when we consider how many stages just repeat the same bosses (but now as mini-bosses yay) or how often you’ll go from full health to no health on some of the later campaign stages. As I said, it’s finely balanced most of the time but is sometimes a pain in the backside.

At this stage I should probably mention that there is a multiplayer mode, and some people have said it’s fun. You’ll need to faff around with it for all the CHEEVOS as well. Unfortunately for me and by extension you dear reader, I don’t have an Xbox Live Gold subscription so… I can’t tell you what it’s like. I can tell you that Contra: Rogue Corps has plenty of single player content though, including 41 campaign missions and a further 9 missions split between co-op and the HARDCORE mode. So there’s plenty of content for what is a fairly cheap game, just be aware that I would recommend the console version (hence my purchase of it on the Mighty Xbone due to the PC Port being hopeless). One last thing to mention, finding information about this game online is a nightmare so… I hope you speak Spanish, to access the one comprehensive guide that some kind soul has uploaded via Google Sheets.

In conclusion then, Contra: Rogue Corps is barely a Contra game. It’s also an exceedingly rough around the edges game, with poor reviews and a terrible PC port. Yet if you can deal with some weird quirks, it’s actually a pretty fun arcade twin-stick shooter extravaganza and one that I would actually recommend… to the right sort of person. Ask yourself whether you want a fast paced if slightly janky twin-stick shooter, because you are oh-so-tired of lousy modern FPS/Action-Adventure bollocks. If the answer is Yes then go grab the game for cheap. If the answer is No, because you love games like Uncharted 3 and whatever the latest flavour of the month game with crafting in it is, then you’ll probably be repelled by Contra: Rogue Corps. For me, it’s what gaming is all about. For you, it’s either a fun little throwaway purchase or a nightmare.

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Oh Evil Genius 2, you had such high hopes before your release but seem to be yet another middling Rebellion brand release. I’m not sure how they do it, I mean the concept’s are always solid and the games are never bad but they always manage to feel a tad… tedious. Unfortunately Evil Genius 2 is no exception, whether it be the inclusion of Denuvo (for some reason) or the weird battle-pass monetisation attempt. Even the core gameplay while perfectly serviceable can’t compete with Evil Genius 1, which while occasionally frustrating was a really enjoyable and unique experience. Of course a sequel would struggle to be as unique, but it could at least be more enjoyable. Alas Evil Genius 2 is not better to play than it’s predecessor, and while is visually more impressive contains a laundry list of caveats.

So I better get right into it. On the one hand, you have more Evil Geniuses and Henchmen to choose from – which is good. But at the same time, the process of taking over the world is less engaging – which is bad. There are more maps to choose from – which is good. But these newer, larger maps with multiple stories are hamstrung by a tight 300 minion limit that can’t removed – which is bad. There are some nice Quality of Life improvements, like guards automatically carrying their weapons around without the base being on high alert – which is good. At the same time the technology unlock system feels excruciating slow at times and often bottlenecks progression – which is bad. The world map where you conduct your schemes is easier to manage and far less prone to randomly killing a team of your minions – which is good. But this also means that you can basically negate any risk of base invasion with relative ease and thus make the game incredibly easy – which is bad. The graphics are prettier – which is good. But the general tone and visual design has taken a bit of knock in my opinion – which is bad. The soundtrack is still good – yes, that’s good. While the narrative railroading of the game with relatively low effort quasi-cutscenes makes the whole thing cheap – which is bad. Overall Evil Genius 2 is really a mixed bag and while it’s certainly not a bad game, this feels like a case of one step forward one step back. Maybe I’m just biased because the first game came almost out of nowhere and was excellent, but this feels like a wasted opportunity on Rebellion’s behalf.

At this stage in the review, I really ought to have explained what the game is actually about for those who haven’t played either of the Evil Genius games. Essentially Evil Genius is a base management simulator loosely inspired by the Dungeon Keeper series, which plays a bit like the various real-time tycoon games that are out there. You’ve got a variety of rooms you can build, items to place within them and then minions that you’ll need to keep everything running. The whole thing functions as a feedback loop of sorts, as you’ll need more rooms and items to get new types of minions that let you run new schemes and research new tech, so that you can unlock new rooms and items. In terms of the gameplay itself, it’s mainly managing and optimising your base to ensure that you have the right amount of minions and access to everything you’ll need to progress the narrative. Alongside some very light “strategy” sections on the world map, where you can send minions off to conduct various schemes. You’ll also need to queue up research, manually set how many of each minion type you want and place those rooms/items. The main threats to your steady growth are waves of hostile NPCs that will occasionally spawn in. Those schemes on the world map generate heat, and the more heat that’s been generated the more likely that enemies will spawn in. Higher amounts of heat correlated to stronger waves of enemies. You can build various traps in the corridors of your base to deal with them, but you’ll want to have a decent amount of security minions that can engage them in combat. Finally you can unlock up to 5 henchmen at a time, that are all strong in combat and have a handful of abilities each. To unlock them you’ll need to finish side missions, which will involve sending various minions to various schemes on the world map.

So with all that being said, Evil Genius 2 is a quasi-business tycoon game that is a mixed bag compared to it’s predecessor. As mentioned the gameplay can be simultaneously too easy and yet too slow, which means that I spent a decent amount of time waiting for research to complete so I could reach the next stage of the game’s main quest-line. It’s fun enough to micromanage your base and the world map schemes have moderately amusing descriptions, but the actual moment-to-moment gameplay can feel a bit one note and monotonous. There are a few twists to keep the pace up like a designated end of game boss fight (of sorts) alongside Super Agents that are powerful versions of the normal agents (one per geographic region). While the boss fight is cool, it’s at it’s best when you ignore the various Super Agent neutralisation missions as otherwise it’s pretty easy much the rest of the game. As for the Super Agents themselves, they’re actually not too much trouble to avoid (as they only activate if they spot you starting a scheme where they are on the world map) and aren’t even too much of an issue to deal with most of the time. As for replayability, it’s fairly minimal. Despite having 5 different Evil Geniuses to choose from, they all play pretty much the same and have the same minions/rooms/items to deploy. It’s also worth noting that these geniuses you choose, all control the same. While they have some different abilities, they’re essentially the same as your henchmen in terms of combat ability. So they’re strong, but you’ll generally not put them on the frontlines once you hit the mid-game as if they die 3 times it’s game over.

Not that you’ll ever encounter a game over unless you are quite frankly angling for it. Instead money is likely to be the only limiting factor to your playthrough, outside of the time it takes to research things. Money is a bit strange, because it’s not hard to earn but at the same time you’re often fairly limited as to how much you can store up. Items to better store your gold are of course, unlocked through the lengthy and time intensive research system. So for most of the early game, you’re kind of just treading water until you can really start stacking up the cash. At this point though I feel like I’ve harangued the game enough for you get the idea. It’s a bit sluggish, it’s a mixed bag, but it’s still enjoyable enough. The soundtrack is good and feels appropriate for the era. If you’re a completionist, then there are tons of side objectives to grind through. The base management aspect is enjoyable enough and rewards the efficient use of space. The visuals are impressive and the traps are varied enough to be enjoyable to use, even if most of them aren’t particularly great.

In conclusion then, Evil Genius 2 is a solid if slightly disappointing game. I don’t regret playing it by any means and have actually played through it twice (once with the post-launch DLC character) and had a decent time with both my playthroughs. At the end of the day, in spite of the good graphics, Quality of Life improvements, pleasant soundtrack and so on it’s just not as easy to recommend as the much cheaper Evil Genius 1. As such I would recommend the first game, over Evil Genius 2 to anyone who is interested. For those who have played the first game, I would say that the second will be bittersweet at best. It’s more of the same, but a bit more lame.

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Railroad Corporation is another one of those games that I don’t remember buying, and can only assume that I got it included as some sort of bundle. Unlike most games with that earn that dubious epithet however, I actually thought Railroad Corporation looked interesting and wasn’t that bad to play. I’d even go so far as to say that I had fun with Railroad Corporation and found it to be a bit addicting. With that being said, it’s a pretty standard railroad business simulation game. You control a railway company, you need to build the tracks between various settlements and then run trains between them. The idea being that you’ll transport various resources between towns, farms and mines to earn a profit and to grow those settlements. As the settlements grow, they demand a broader range of products and these “higher level” products provide higher profits. There are the standard additional add-ons, like the ability to buy businesses, research new types of trains, hire staff for modest bonuses (e.g. cheaper bridges or more profit for transporting grain) and so on. As for the setting, it’s America during the 19th century which is par for the course. Most games in this sub-genre use this setting, down to the time-period and what trains you can research and eventually buy. In terms of the content you get, there are 12 campaign scenarios where you race to achieve various tasks (e.g. deliver 20 shipments of cloth to settlement X) and the ability to play these maps in scenario mode. Honestly so far it’s pretty standard stuff, nothing particularly exciting in terms of the setting, narrative, gameplay mechanics or amount of content.

In fact one of the biggest things to note about Railroad Corporation is not what it adds, but what it takes away. Unlike basically every other railway management game, in Railroad Corporation you can’t set signals or otherwise decide what routes your trains will take. Instead everything is managed by the game, on your behalf. You still decide which trains to run, where they go and what items they load or unload, but that’s about it. This makes it both very approachable, and also a tad bizarre. From my own experience, the AI is actually good at managing these train routes. Yet the omission of the ability to customise routes is definitely something that felt surreal even if I actually didn’t miss it too much. Aside from this aspect of the railway management being culled, my only other issue with something lacking was how the game managements owned businesses. As mentioned, you can buy any business in the game via an auction between yourself and all other players (including the AI competitors). The catch is while in other games you would still receive money as per usual for delivering to your own businesses, in Railroad Corporation you… don’t. So if you buy a wheat farm, you don’t have to pay for grain. On the flip-side, if you buy a farm that takes grain to produce meat, then you don’t get paid for delivering grain to a farm you own. Which is fine, but if you own all the stages of a production chain then you end up with multiple trains that are seemingly in the red. Often to staggering sums. You’ll still make a profit overall once the end product is delivered to a city, but when checking whether each train is profitable these trains really stand out for the wrong reasons. Oh and before you ask, no you can’t sort your list of trains by the type of train, profitability etc. Which is another weirdly missing feature, albeit a more minor one.

The real issue I had with the game though, is that the campaign is quite often a bit annoying. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly halfway through the campaign it goes “oopsie woopsie, we’ve reset all your research :3” so you are dumped back on the most basic of trains which is a bit of a kicker. In Railroad Corporation the various research projects are expensive and often take a lot of time, so having them reset halfway through the game is a pain. Fortunately the fact they take a lot of time isn’t an issue in reality, because so do most of the later scenarios. I would spend around 3 hours on a lot of the Act 2 missions and apparently I was about 10 hours ahead of the times on the HowLongToBeat website. This is partly due to them being a staggered series of objectives, most of which are somewhat convoluted (e.g. transport 20 high-tier products to this one place on the opposite side of the map). It’s mainly due to the AI players being a total pain in the backside to deal with. They’re not hugely difficult to overcome, but they are really annoying to deal with. Not only does the game often give them advantages in the form of better resource supplies and thus the potential for better railway connections, but they’re also exempt from various requirements. In addition they operate fairly quickly, don’t need to dabble with research and love to start auctioning off various industries as soon as they are able to. On the other hand, they generally aren’t that difficult to overcome because they are stupid. They’ll always get stuck at a certain point, and while they do grow at a constant rate they seem reluctant to share railway tracks and as such tend to avoid anywhere you’ve already expanded to.

Yet while the AI is easy to overcome in the long-run, the missions are often structured in such a way so that they’re most difficult from the very beginning. I wouldn’t say that the campaign of Railroad Corporation is particularly hard, but the Act 2 missions really stack the cards against you at the start of each one. You’ll often barely have time to complete the first objective or two, and constantly be struggling to balance your overdraft with the hard-coded requirements. Making a single rail-line can often make or break the early stages of a scenario in the later missions. Once you’ve overcome these exceedingly tight requirements though, the missions become much, much easier. To the point that you’ll always have plenty of time to start maxing out your research tree because you’re just waiting for the last objective or two to get wrapped up. It’s a weird issue that hinders the overall enjoyment of the campaign somewhat, because you’ll end up getting stuck in a mission for a few attempts due to one or two early objectives then breeze through the rest of the mission for a couple of hours. As such it can feel pretty inconsistent, and the only time events spiralled out of my control was due to the AI cheating. Well, maybe it’s more fair to say that the scenario cheated on the AI’s behalf, but it was much easier for the AI to reach a certain company valuation before me because it had a much better layout of various resources and towns. Otherwise the missions are either easy (like the first 6 in Act 1) or front-loaded in terms of challenge.

With all that being said, I still that Railroad Corporation is a decent enough game in spite of it’s wonky balancing and missing features. As stated at the top of this review, I had a fun time playing through it despite the occasional set-backs and was able to power it through it without too much trouble. The scenarios themselves provide a pretty solid introduction to the game’s mechanics, and while there isn’t much additional content once you’ve blitzed through them the game does have a bunch of DLC and even some free post-launch scenarios to work through. As for the actual gameplay itself, Railroad Corporation is fairly competent and handles well (albeit with some significant slowdown during track-laying) while still offering some depth. Between the ability to build new businesses, upgrade stations, research new trains and hire staff there’s plenty to do to optimise your company. The basics are all there and work fine, while the additional tweaking and twiddling does let you gain an edge over the AI.

As for the rest of the package, well it’s fine. You’ve got some period appropriate music that’s nice enough even if I felt like the OST is a bit too limited for it’s own good. While the music isn’t bad, most scenarios take a few hours and as such the music tends to loop a bit much. As for the visuals, I think they’re pleasant to look at although you can’t zoom in too much unlike some other games in the genre. Everything looks pretty good and as mentioned outside of track-laying the game performs well on high settings, at least on my current laptop (with a Nvidia 4060 and 12th gen intel i7 12700). There’s therefore not that much to complain about, aside from grousing over one or two missing features and the weird difficulty curve that this game has. Otherwise it’s a good looking, well playing and fairly optimised game albeit nothing particularly special.

In summary then, Railroad Corporation is a perfectly acceptable game in the railway tycoon sub-genre. Nothing about it really stands out as being great, but it doesn’t really have any significant negatives either. Sure there are a few things I could quibble about like occasional performance dips, the way that the game autosaves over it’s last autosave when you’ve loaded it, some wonky balance and a fairly bland setting but there’s nothing major to whine about. It’s just a decent little railroad game, that will take you around 25ish hours to get through. There’s enough content to justify the price, even if it’s hard to recommend this game over it’s competition. After all, this is a space with some stand out games like the Railroad Tycoon series and even for my money Sid Meier’s Railroads. As such I’d say that if you’ve played the rest, then you’ll probably enjoy this one. For everyone else, I wouldn’t recommend Railroad Corporation as your starting point. Not because it’s bad, but just because it’s not the best either.

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Postal 2: Paradise Lost is a DLC I bought by accident, when I wanted to have Steam copies of both Postal 1 and Postal 2. While I wasn’t a huge fan of Postal 2 due to it’s lame combat, weak humour, weird pacing and frequent fannying around in lieu of gameplay, it’s a game that has it’s own surprisingly passionate fanbase. I guess being able to start urinating at any time is a big draw for those who think the game’s childish sense of humour is endearing. Unfortunately the FPS combat that makes up most of the game is pretty lousy, so you really have to gel with the tone to overlook the fact that most gunfights are underwhelming at best. As for why I wanted to re-buy Postal 2, well to be honest it was included with Postal 1 and I’ve heard good things about that one. Which I wanted to own on Steam for the princely sum of $1. Then when I bought this Postal pack from Fanatical, I found out that I had bought Postal 2: Paradise Lost. This meant I was somewhat obligated to give it a fair chance. Which I have done, playing through the whole thing on the normal difficulty over the past two days.

Which leads to the million dollar question, is Postal 2: Paradise Lost better than Postal 2? I would personally say yes, because it’s slightly more amusing and has better boss fights. This means that if I had to recommend one of them, I’d go with Paradise Lost. The problem is that, well, Postal 2 is in the bargain bin for me alongside such fine games as Legendary. So a better question might be, would I recommend Postal 2: Paradise Lost? Well my honest answer would be “No“. Why? Because it’s not a very fun experience and I say this with love for the small developer studio that made it. Yet after having played through it for around 7 hours, I can say that I enjoyed maybe… 2 of them? Postal 2: Paradise Lost has it’s moments but they are unfortunately few and far between. At this point I think it’s prudent to mention the bad, before we get onto the good.

And believe me, as much as I can respect small development studios this game has a lot of dumb decisions. Not even just the dumb writing, which can occasionally be amusing. Admittedly it’s rarely amusing and most of the time is just obstinately stupid and lazy. To give an example, in the first part of the day you go to get some food from an Asian restaurant. Now if you had to write a lazy joke about a Chinese restaurant, what might it be? Be honest. Did you think “haha the food is made from dogs lmao”? Well then you’d be right, and I assume you wouldn’t labour the point with 5 different puns about it being doggone good and then have the restaurant get attacked by dogs and then the dogs kill the restaurant workers and then you have to escape this whacky escapade. There’s a lot of dumb humour like this, and most of the time it just feels overly dragged out. Brevity is the soul of wit, and generally Postal 2: Paradise Lost is witless. Which is a problem for a humour based FPS. Remember Eat Lead: Matt Hazard and how it’s mediocrity was not improved by it’s inability to land jokes? Well Postal 2 was it’s predecessor, in all it’s glory. For me personally, I’d say Postal 2: Paradise Lost manages to be funny around 1% of the time. Considering that the game is throwing out jokes, there are still a few amusing moments. But I’d be lying if I said the game’s wicked sense of humour was a selling point.

Similarly the combat is pretty bad, with enemy AI being so basic that it occasionally wraps around to being challenging again. They will bum rush you en masse, but sometimes they’ll get stuck on terrain or keep respawning or just otherwise cause trouble. To the game’s credit, it is aware of this and explicitly tells you to stand around corners and wait for the enemy to filter in one-by-one towards you. To the game’s discredit, there are some truly weird design choices. For example the zombies have been given a weirdly accurate projectile attack that they just love to spam. While some enemy animals have been given ridiculously large health pools. One last pet peeve is that some enemies get a homing rocket launcher. Which is always utterly tedious to deal with due to their ability to just spam rockets at you from far away with little in the way of repercussions or recourse. At least Postal 2: Paradise Lost has a lot of enemy variety and weapon variety. Yet most combat encounters are rubbish even excluding the weird way that damage scaling has been implemented. You see, some of the dozen different melee weapons are actually pretty good. While guns on the other hand, are often weak and inaccurate with one or two exceptions.

Then you’ve got the general pacing of Postal 2: Paradise Lost, which could be generously described as a mess. At the start of each day, you’re given a list of tasks and the freedom to do them in any order. Yet these tasks almost always boil down to: go to X, grab Y (or pay for Y), CHAOS ENSUES BIG FIGHT PEWPEPEPWPEWPEPWEPEWPEWP until you can escape. There are one or two exceptions, but this is basically how the entire game is structured. You wander around between locations, enter a building, go to the back of the building, something CRAZY happens and then you fight your way back out onto the streets. It’s not the worst way to handle things, but it does extremely repetitive and boring after a while. Especially when the combat isn’t great. The game also has a weird checkpoint system that often overwrites itself between attempts, alongside unskippable cutscenes. If you can get past all of these issues, then I do have some good news. Which is that Postal 2: Paradise Lost does have some good things to say about it.

First and foremost, while the general combat frankly sucks there are some boss fights that are actually enjoyable. They aren’t terribly common, but when they do happen they’re generally and make for a nice change of pace. These bosses have plenty of health and some unique attacks, which makes defeating them a fun challenge that requires a bit of improvisation. Due to these boss fights being some of the highlights of the game, Postal 2: Paradise Lost manages a rare trick. Namely that the tail-end of the game, manages to be a nice culmination of the players skills and lets them try out some of the better guns they’ve accumulated. Too many big budget have final boss fights that are just glorified Quick Time Events, whereas Running with Scissors have managed to implement them correctly. Ultimately I’d much rather have a boss fight than more of the fairly brain dead combat that exists in the rest of the game.

Alongside the boss fights, Postal 2: Paradise Lost tries to keep the pace up with a few dumb, if memorable set-pieces. They’re hit or miss, with sections featuring abrupt platforming challenges and out-running a mining drill being off-set with weaker sections featuring out-running zombies and a mining cart roller-coaster ride. In spite of the hit-or miss nature, these sections are at least proof that the developers were trying. As for the moment-to-moment gameplay, there is a somewhat decent risk/reward mechanic that rears it’s head. For context, you’ll always be short of money in Postal 2: Paradise Lost. Yet if you have enough money through selling cats of all things, then you’re able to complete quests “properly” and avoid combat. For example, instead of stealing a quest item you can pay for it and avoid a combat encounter. This is more useful as the game goes on, because when you fail to pay for quest items, you’ll often antagonise certain groups. Which means that from that point onwards, they’ll be hostile whenever you encounter them in the overworld. As such you often have to consider whether you have enough health and ammo for large fights, or whether it’s worth playing things through in the law-abiding manner. This is one of the game’s most successful unique selling points, even if doing things the legal way is often incredibly boring.

In conclusion Postal 2: Paradise Lost is a game with a few good ideas that are let down by two significant issues. Namely that it’s a humour focused FPS game with poor FPS combat and generally unfunny humour. Fortunately it’s a game that still has some merits, including a good variety of enemies and weapons alongside fun boss fights and a unique quasi-morality system. Yet in spite of the good parts, I feel that the bad outweighs the good with this game. As a consequence I struggle to recommend it to anyone, although I will give the small developer studio credit for making a product that’s better than Postal 2. Especially one that manages to be so madcap and varied, even if I found it to be ultimately as dull as many of the more bland games that have come out.

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Quick Note: My screenshots didn’t save for some reason, but that’s OK because this is a very short review.

Alright so I recently played through the BF3 campaign and found it to be pretty underwhelming and an FPS experience I couldn’t really recommend. As this blog is about me and my one-man-mission to rise up clear my games backlog, I also remembered I had Battlefield 4. So I decided to play through it while my memory of BF3 was still fresh. To my surprise, the Battlefield 4 campaign is actually decently entertaining and while it still can’t really compete with the better Call of Duty campaigns, it’s better than some of them! This might not sound like praise, but considering how much BF3 and especially Battlefield 4 have been trying to emulate the success of those CoD campaigns, it’s nice to see that DICE finally managed to make something that succeeds in this regard.

I’ll try to keep it concise, much like the campaign. Because Battlefield 4 has a grand total of 7 campaign missions – that’s it. In them we play as a silent protagonist muhreen who is fighting to save the world from a coup in China. The levels are fairly linear although you can sometimes find an empty vehicle or turret to use. The enemy variety is minimal, as you only fight enemy soldiers and the occasional enemy vehicle. There are a lot of bombastic quasi-cutscenes where things explode/collapse near/onto our protagonist. As for the gameplay it’s what you’d expect. You can carry two weapons (and two pieces of gear like mines or grenade launchers). Your health regenerates. The enemy is all over your ass 24/7 and there are a handful of opportunities to use vehicles and turrets. You always have a squadmate or squadmates with you, but generally they are absolutely useless unlike in BF3. I’m not sure why your squad is so useless now, but sadly they really are hopeless. It’s no wonder that you get chosen to be the new squad commander/overall badass. The enemy AI isn’t great, although they are freakishly good at using grenades. There are a couple of positive changes that Battlefield 4 has made to the single player formula though. So I’ll give them credit for the following.

First things first, there are now collectibles in each level and they are exceedingly well hidden. Nothing fancy, I think every CoD has done this since the Xbox 360 came out. Yet it’s something “new” that wasn’t in the previous game. More importantly, you now gain score just like in multiplayer for killing various enemies and the multiplayer score-streaks carry over. So multi-kills, headshots, “adrenaline kills” (ones that occur when you are near death) etc now give you bonus points. These points then unlock 3-tiers of medal for each mission. Each medal gains you access to new weapon unlocks, in the myriad gun-cases scattered around every single player level. This is another new idea and one I actually quite liked. Basically the way it works is that you can take any unlocked gun out of these gun cases. This lets you swap your load-out frequently, and lets you experiment with every gun in the game. They also reload your ammo, and as you can’t carry much at a time they are very useful. There are also equipment cases which do the same thing except for your gear. Unfortunately these always have an arbitrary restriction on what gear you can use. You can’t unlock the RPG by being swagtastic on the 3rd mission for example. You can also spot enemies with some cool binoculars, which lets you tell your squad to ENGAGE certain enemies. This is the big new gimmick, as it lets you tell your squad which enemies to focus on. In theory this would be pretty useful. In practice your squad sucks and they will barely even ENGAGE enemies you haven’t told them to. Seriously if I had a single great British pound for every time my squad failed to deal with the one enemy who flanked me – despite that enemy being right in front of them – I’d be able to buy every battlefield game.

Other than these new additions and tweaks, the campaign hasn’t changed too much. Fortunately the Quick-Time-Events are now totally gone (thank God). Plus as mentioned the visuals have been improved at least for the Xbone/PS4/PC versions of the game. The story is a bit weaker almost as if to compensate, with more of a focus on your squad’s characters. By which I mean, the character called Irish. Seriously he could be mistaken for the protagonist if he wasn’t absolutely useless at shooting people. Fortunately I don’t think anyone was too enraptured with the BF3 campaign narrative. Especially as this game basically shares nothing in common with the previous one. Well except for a single returning character who you only see for a total of one mission. In terms of smaller gameplay changes, your character does feel like they have more health so you can actually run-and-gun as the game expects you too, which is a welcome change. As for the soundtrack, it’s still fine if nothing particularly special. That’s about it honestly, as there isn’t much incentive to replay missions. While I could make snide comparisons between the prison level in Battlefield 4 and the gulag level in CoD: Black Ops I won’t bother.

In conclusion then, the Battlefield 4 campaign is better than the BF3 one. It’s nothing amazing, but there are some solid gunfights if you can look past the Michael Bay explosions. The narrative has some weirdly dark moments for a game that generally doesn’t take itself that seriously, but other than that it’s a standard 7th generation console shooter. You run around, you regenerate health, the AI is dumb, your squad is dumb and the action is constant. It’s not a bad experience by any means and the smaller tweaks add up to make a campaign that’s much better than the one in BF3.

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Quick Note: It shouldn’t matter, but I’m reviewing the Xbox One version of this game – just in case it’s AMAZING on PS4 or something.

Oh Jagged Alliance: Rage, the critics and fans of the series have not been kind to you. You were to be a spirited spin-off of a venerable classic PC series, revitalised for a new age and of course a new customer base. Yet it’s hard to find anyone who has anything nice to say about this game. Even I can’t be too nice to a game that has so many issues, that it’s honestly concerning. I try to keep my reviews relatively short, but to describe all of the flaws in Jagged Alliance: Rage would take up basically my normal quota of 5ish paragraphs (plus 5ish lovely pictures). So I’ll just rattle them off in quick succession during this deftly written opener. The game looks mediocre, runs badly, crashes every few hours, has incredibly basic writing and characterisation, wastes a ton of time on inventory management, has limited enemy variety, inconsistent mechanics, a wonky difficulty curve, weird allocation of resources, some baffling design decisions and limited enemy AI. If (and it’s a big if) you can overlook all of that then you’ll find a decent turn based strategy experience. Now I know what you’re thinking “Big Boaby how am I meant to overlook the fact that apparently everything in this game is rubbish?”

Well I’ll tell you! You see, Jagged Alliance: Rage is an incredibly rough game that desperately needed a bit more time in development. I can easily envisage a version of the game that doesn’t run bad, doesn’t crash, has a bit more tweaking with regards to the inventory, item drops and enemy AI and would therefore be pretty solid. Unfortunately in spite of my sagely wisdom, I have to acknowledge the reality which is that this is the game we got, not necessarily the game we wanted. Despite this seemingly rushed (or underfunded?) development, the game still has a solid core where you are juggling stealth and normal combat in each level. Stealth is slightly overpowered, to the point that you’ll want to use it as often as possible as it grants instant killed at no cost. However, stealth also requires you to be out of position and understand the enemy patrol routes, which often requires an odd mix of haste and patience. You need to close the gap, while remaining undetected because sneaking is an alternative form of movement which eats up action points like nobody’s business. Before continuing I should explain that Jagged Alliance: Rage is a turn based game, where you move all of your guys and then the enemy gets to move all of theirs. Each character gets around 12ish action points per turn, with movement, shooting and using items all sharing this action point pool. You’ll therefore only be able to move a maximum of 12 spaces per turn (the map is split into grids of squares) or shoot around 4 times at the absolute maximum (many weapons require 5+ AP per shot). Enemies are relatively blind, but they can react to nearby gunfire, spot bodies and of course radio in your position which triggers an alarm which causes every enemy on the map to bum-rush your last recorded position. Stealth is therefore a great way to get kills without taking damage, but it involves a great deal of risk. Now you might be tempted to skip the stealthy route, but frankly because all of the enemies share vision and some of them are snipers and they all bum-rush you – things generally don’t go well. That’s not to say your necessarily stuffed, as you can make use of sight lines or bait them by having one guy distract them while the rest of your team sneaks around to deal with the enemy commander who summons reinforcements like an absolute jerk. But with that being said, stealth is generally the best option even if the intense gunfights can be quite fun to try and figure out. Yes the odds are against you, but if you can stop the enemy from getting vision (by shooting all the guys near you) then their comrades will keep running towards you like lemmings and you’ll be able to create effective killzones.

At least until you get unlucky with the hit%, or deal with a gun jamming. Which happens all the time to a ridiculous degree. Seriously you’d think that the guns were made out of unrealised aspirations and butter for how often they suddenly melt and fall apart in the middle of combat, to the point that I’d say a gun jams every… 5ish times it’s used if fires in bursts? You barely even have to reload in this game, because when your gun jams (and it will) unjamming it also counts as reloading. Don’t worry though, as your enemies guns will jam too if they live long enough. Then again, worry some more because unjamming a gun takes a lot of AP, which means you can shoot less, which means you’ll probably get shot more. Which is bad. I suppose you can just keep looting new guns and indeed you will throughout most of the game because guns continually get better while the enemies keep getting better armour, but once you’ve got a good gun with some weapon attachments it’s a real pain in the backside. To the game’s credit, Jagged Alliance: Rage has a weirdly comprehensive variety of guns and ammunition. To it’s disservice, you’ll spend way too much time looting every single enemy to see if they have the one ammo type you need because you can’t buy, sell or otherwise trade equipment. The game was smart enough to let you loot everyone remotely once a map has been fully cleared of hostiles, but it still takes a lot of time to optimise everyone’s inventory especially in the late game when you can have 4 mercenaries at a time.

Now you might be thinking something along the lines of “well managing 4 guns doesn’t sound too bad hrurhrdudhdurr” but I’ve got news for you PAL. Because Jagged Alliance: Rage also features a bunch of quasi-survival mechanics, which require items that also take up inventory space. You need to stay hydrated (but not fed), think about bandages to heal the bleeding debuffs, have medkits and revival syringes for when you mess up a combat encounter mid-level, have weapon repair kits and armour repair kits and grenades and antibiotics if you drink the dirty water. Then there’s the fact that I picked Ivan who is cool as a character, but is an alcoholic so I also always had to have beer on hand otherwise he would be bad at shooting people. So there’s a lot of faffing around, as you’ll probably want a gun that’s decent at ranged and a gun that’s OK close up for each character, both of which probably use different ammo types, then some healing supplies and some survival supplies, before we even consider stuff like carrying grenades or whatever. Fortunately Jagged Alliance: Rage is happy to just let you focus on the combat and the inventory stuff, as the plot is very basic and consists of a series of pre-baked levels that you can do at any time – so long you’re on the right Act (of which there are 3). To access these maps the game has an overview map, which you can move across with one space taking one hour. As it takes time, you need to bring water/booze or suffer debuffs from your team being dehydrated or in withdrawal. This brings us to the day night cycle. The way it works is pretty simple, each map can be played during the day or at night. If you play at night, enemies have reduced vision and everyone except for one or two out of the 7 potentially playable characters suffers a debuff to their aiming unless they’ve got night vision goggles equipped. You might therefore be tempted to wait for night to fall upon the map, so you can sneak around better (and have the sheer thrill of shooting out the lights) but good luck. There just isn’t enough non-dirty water in the game to wait for multiple turns. Plus the game sends out patrols from enemy bases that force you into semi-randomly generated battles.

Should you stumble upon one of these patrols, you enter one small map from a pre-baked selection that will feature a bunch of enemies on two sides. You’re able to sneak behind these guys, but generally these maps are fairly easy so I often didn’t really bother and only used stealth to wrap them up. As mentioned, enemies share vision so once most of the enemy squads are dead the few remaining enemies will often have lost sight of your squad. Letting you switch back to stealth for those 1-hit instant stealth melee kills. This happens more often than you’d think, because the AI loves having one or two squad members hang back and sit in overwatch constantly. Overwatch is actually one of very few abilities that the enemy uses, although the squad leaders and commanders have an annoying rally ability which gives everyone standing near them some extra AP. So you’ll quite often have some enemies rush towards you, run out of AP, then a squad leader appears seemingly out of nowhere and lets them all shoot your exposed team member. To compensate, each of your mercenaries get some unique “rage” abilities (hence why it’s Jagged Alliance: Rage) that range from great to OK. Ivan can taunt enemies and gets passive damage resistance, Fidel can suppress enemies in an area, Dr Q has some light healing abilities and can convert rage points into extra AP and so on. To get rage you need to get adrenalin, which comes from dealing and taking damage alongside some other effects (like having the shrapnel or infection debuff or drinking alcohol). Aside from the rage abilities, basically every action is determined by what equipment you have equipped and there aren’t skill trees or anything like that.

In conclusion then, Jagged Alliance: Rage is a game with plenty of issues but a nice balance of risk reward through the effectiveness of stealth, ability of enemies to rack up the damage through large numbers and extra AP abilities and the introduction of rage abilities which require you to take and deal damage or suffer from debuffs. This keeps the game fun and frantic, aside from the admittedly large amount of time you need to spend dealing with the inventory system and survival elements. The enemy variety is fine, but by tying abilities and damage to equipment Jagged Alliance: Rage is able to scale the difficulty with each batch of maps. As for variety and the other elements of the game like the OST, visuals and so on they’re pretty lacking. The music is fine and the maps are generally varied albeit fixed, so replayability isn’t the best. It’s a shame the performance isn’t great and that the characters are so bland, but you can’t have it all. I’d therefore say that Jagged Alliance: Rage is an OK/10 game. TBS fans might have a good time if they are patient, but for genre newcomers I would recommend another game like Wargroove or XCOM: Chimera Squad.

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Quick Note: Firstly Zoo Tycoon 3 is just called Zoo Tycoon because historical revisionism is BASED. Secondly there are two versions available, the “Ultimate Animal Collection” and the base game. The base game, despite it’s name is actually cringe and you shouldn’t buy it. The ultimate animal collection adds a decent amount of content, has no build limitations on each map (i.e. you can build as much as you want) and once you’ve bought either version, you’re locked in so the marginally cheaper base game is a trap.

Zoo Tycoon 3 is another one of those Xbox One “exclusives” that are also available on PC, but which I’ve picked up for the glorious epoch defining Xbone because used copies are cheap and I like having physical discs. This initially made me uninterested in the game, because it had a bunch of DLC and I didn’t want to have to spend a lot of money on extra content that Microsoft will inevitably nuke at some indeterminable point in the future. Luckily for me and my fellow eccentrics, Microsoft decided to re-release the game with all of it’s extra content as “Zoo Tycoon: Ultimate Animal Collection”. This is version I’m looking at today and frankly thank God I waited because that build limit sounds like an absolute nightmare.

As for the game itself, it’s fun. Not ground breaking and arguably not even a good sequel, but considering the relatively niche that the game represents (or at least did before Zoo Tycoon imitators became a sub-genre of their own again) I was happy to blitz through the campaign missions over the span of a couple of days. These missions are generally pretty fun and have some unique twists, although I must confess that they do get a bit repetitive towards the end – especially with the DLC missions which don’t add anything new to the mix. The way these missions work are simple, you are given a small zoo that invariably sucks. It doesn’t have zoo keepers to keep the animals happy, it doesn’t have janitors to keep the feckless hairless apes from littering everywhere and often it doesn’t have animals in the right exhibits or toilets or something like that. So you start by zooming around, fixing all of the amateur mistakes and then need to start cracking on the mission objectives themselves. These often take the form of “raise zoo fame to X level” “keep the animals happy” “keep the guests happy” and sometimes interact with the new gimmick features this game has (more on that later). The gist for basically all of them is to stabilise the park, get profit rolling in and then purchase the right animals or just keep building up the zoo to tick the various mission checklists. It’s more fun than it sounds, but as mentioned the game isn’t ground breaking or revolutionary. Essentially you’re just playing a series of sandboxes, but with a somewhat strict timer attached to force you to spend money on the right things in generally the right order. Towards the end of the campaign, the game loves to hoist objectives on you that just take a lot of time so there’s some waiting involved which can be a tedious to be honest.

The other thing that’s tedious about this mode is the way that building things works in Zoo Tycoon 3. You see everything outside of a handful of basic structures – and I do mean basically everything – requires it to have been researched. You research it by trying to build the item and then being told you have to wait between 10 and 150 seconds for it to research (which costs money by the way) before you can build it. No, you can’t queue research so you need to say “I’d like to build a janitors office” and then wait a minute doing something else before you can build one – then realise you can’t build something else, so you need to wait for that to be researched. By the time you’re on mission 26 of 30, this starts to feel like padding because you’re researching the same things again and again and again like a medium Grasslands exhibit so you can have more than 3 antelopes. Why have more than 3? Because if there is less than 4, they get lonely and aren’t happy which means you are losing value from them. It also means they’re not happy, but they’re not real so moral qualms are an irrelevance. This might not sound like the spirit of the game, but you’re running a zoo for animals too dumb to survive so don’t blame the player blame the game. In this case the game is Zoo Tycoon 3 and it’s fun, but repetitive.

To alleviate the tedium, the game has a bunch of mechanics that are largely gimmicks but do make it great for kids and the young at heart. There’s a scrapbook (or was it snapshot album? Something like that) feature which encourages you to take cute pictures of every animal in the game. Then there’s the ability to make interactive exhibits for each animal enclosure, so that you can feed the elephants bananas or make silly faces with the chimpanzees or blast water at the rhinos. These are cute if insubstantial and I fear that a decent chunk of the development budget went towards these. The issue isn’t even that they’re not entertaining, but all animals act the same and the interactive mini-games are exceedingly shallow so if you’ve blasted a hippo with water blasting a rhino is the same experience. One last thing that’s slightly more worthwhile is the fact that you can breed your animals, which gives you a chance of getting an albino variant. This doesn’t do anything, but because Microsoft hates the achievement hunters it has spawned like poachers in the Serengeti you need every albino animal to get 100%. Oh and to have taken a picture of them too. There’s also the ability to release your animals to the the wild, which gives you some occasional notifications about how they’re doing great but otherwise doesn’t really do anything. I mean you get a slight boost to your Zoo’s fame, which is the main metric by which you unlock things (after researching them of course) but it’s barely a mechanic. You’re basically just selling them but instead of getting cash you get fame aka XP. The big fat main gimmick though is that you can switch from the overview mode, to a 3rd person mode and wander around your own Zoo. You can even drive a buggy around! No, you can’t run people over though.

Which brings to mind all the other little restricts that the game has undertaken to make everything appropriate for the kids. Even then, considering how morbid most fairy tales are (let alone the AI generated YouTube nightmares investing the platform) I can’t help but feel this is a little misguided. You can’t release the hungry hungry hippos by demolishing the fence for instance. In fact there’s no way to be anything but a benevolent zoo keeper, the game won’t let the animals hurt each other and you can’t starve them because they get swiped confiscated by less evil zookeepers. The whole thing is exceedingly twee and you’re never going to see a notification about how your released animal got killed by a fat dentist on safari. It’s not a big issue, but it also accompanies a big restriction in how much freedom you have. Because every exhibit has been pre-created, you can’t actually create a custom area for your animals – instead there are a selection of pre-made ones you are given the privilege of building. So if you want to make a sick custom lion exhibit then you can get the heck outta here. This means the game does feel kinda shallow, because you’re just slapping together various pre-made assets and outside of deciding where to place them you don’t get much say. To compound this issue, one of the main requirements guests have is that you have a good variety of animals. Which is understandable. But there are only just over a dozen species that can get in the main exhibits, with most animals being reskins of those (for example there are quite a few bears that uh… all have the same animations and needs and wants and dreams and aspirations). Most animals get shafted and are put in “mini-exhibits” which only allow between 2 and 3 (rarely 4) of them to be in a little fountain or patch of rock at a time. Can you customise these? Hahahaha NO!

So the meat of the game is less about running the Zoo you envisaged and more about the simulation of running a zoo. Or alternatively, of bumbling around your zoo like a dorky guest. Speaking of which, if you wander around for a bit you’ll notice that the various NPCs that are generated all have a handful of animations at most. Plus the skyboxes aren’t great. Which are small problems I admit and fully understand, but considering how neutered the zoo building is I think it’s a fair point to mention. I can only assume that you can’t build your own exhibits, or have a ton of different animals (like dinosaurs or aquatic life as per previous games in the series) because Zoo Tycoon 3 lets you bumble around the park in full 3D including Kinect support (WOW) with interactions instead of relying on one camera angle and sprite work. Which means that once the novelty of the gimmicks wear off, you’re relying on the core simulation aspect of Zoo Tycoon 3 to carry the experience. Alas the simulation is honestly pretty basic.

You see the way that Zoo Tycoon 3 tracks everything is basically just a simple balancing act. You have a “Zoo Fame” level (think of it like XP) which determines the variety of stuff you can buy. To get more XP, you build more things. These things cost money, but fortunately your XP increases the amount of guests visiting which generates more money. Therefore the more things you build, the more money you get to the point that you’d have to start seriously screwing around to actually lose money over time. The catch is that money trickles in, and I do mean trickles in. This is actually how the campaign missions provide their challenge, because the time limit only gives you so much time and therefore income to do everything that’s required of you. For more casual players though, this is an irrelevance. In fact it’s a total irrelevance because sandbox has no money worries at all. You just have infinite money. So the simulation is a total gongshow in the sandbox mode that most people actually care about. As for the campaign, well the money worries are only a factor because of the time limit. As for the rest of the simulation, you’ve got guest happiness and animal happiness. Guest happiness is a global value, represented as the accumulation of multiple factors such as entertainment, animal variety, bathroom availability, tidiness and so on. The problem with this though, is that it’s a global value. So if you have low bathroom happiness, you can build some bathrooms in the middle of nowhere and so long as they’re connected it doesn’t matter. Sure you’ll probably place them around the zoo in an attempt at roleplaying, but it doesn’t matter. Similarly if the tidiness if low, you just hire more janitors. Entertainment low? Build more entertainment buildings. So guest happiness is really just about keeping an eye on some meters that you can see at any time by holding down a trigger, and building whatever is needed. Keep the happiness high and people will keep coming, so you get money to buy things, to get more XP to unlock things, so you can build new things, to get more XP and then get more guests, who will want more bathrooms and so on. As for animal happiness, it’s global within the exhibit. So as long as you have a feeding machine, one interactive entertainment, one animal washer and the right habitat type plus the minimum number of animals to fulfil the social stat you’re all good. Now you do have to repair and restore the feeders and washers… unless you hire zoo keepers which you will, because otherwise it gets pretty tedious.

There are some other things you can faff around with, like advertising (which just increases the maximum amount of guest you can have over your XP allowance) and park research (which uses the same research timers so I never bothered with it) or you can optimise the prices of various things (which again I never bothered with because the defaults are fine and in sandbox you have infinite money anyway). Yet ultimately these can’t cover the cracks at the heart of the game’s simplistic simulation. So the sandbox is restricted, if appreciably good looking in 3rd person and the economy side is basically a sideshow. How can I then say I had fun? Well, the campaign missions are basically a series of light puzzles that encourage you to do all the various faffing. You’ll need to have X number of different animals, to interactive with the elephants and the chimps, to breed kangaroos and then take a picture of the baby, to do these while not letting any guest satisfaction bar drop below green and so on. It’s not an onerous challenge, but it’s still a satisfying one and trying to lay out my zoo with a tight budget and a tight deadline was often fun. Sure the sandbox mode is a let-down and everything else is a bit janky, but the campaign is still enjoyable at least as someone who only played the originals a little bit (I was too busy with Simcity 3000 and Warcraft 3).

So in conclusion, Zoo Tycoon 3 is a flawed game that struggles to compete with it’s predecessors which were made for far simpler hardware. Yet if you can overlook the game’s simplistic simulation and/or haven’t played the previous games much, it’s an enjoyable if shallow little tycoon game. Sure the sandbox is limited by having no economy, but to unlock things in the sandbox you need to play the campaign and challenge mode as otherwise your sandbox will be stuck at a low level forever. As such you need to play the other modes to get to relax in the sandbox, and these other modes provide a modest challenge and some variety. Plus the gimmicks are kind of nice, I mean the animals do look good and the photo mode and interactions are cute… at least for a while. As such I’d recommend Zoo Tycoon with two caveats. The first is that fans of the previous games will be disappointed. The second is that those who missed out on those games, will probably prefer them unless they are literally children. For those willing to give the shot on it’s own merits however, I can’t imagine that they won’t get a solid dozens out of the campaign and close to double that if they care about the challenge mode and want to play around with the sandbox side. Considering that the game is available on Gamepass or for a low price of around a tenner on disc (or Steam sale) it’s hard to recommend people avoid the game entirely. Just be aware that this is another example of a franchise who’s best days are far behind it.

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