EU4 is an okay game about conquering ridiculously large swathes of the world, but it's sorely lacking in the historical simulationist elements that I think make other Paradox games so compelling. There's precious little actually going on inside your country that's not just buttons you have to remember to press every once in a while, and events that could be really interesting to try and model, like the Protestant Reformation, tend to be flattened into really dull "define your playstyle for lategame" mechanisms that would be much more fitting in something like Civilization where distinct playstyles exist as a concept.

There's some ideas in there that are compelling, and in particular the (notoriously incomprehensible) trade system seems set up to organically encourage colonial competition along loosely historical lines, but most of the game isn't designed along that philosophy; a lot of things that seem like they should happen organically via game systems, like the 80 Years' War, just don't, and have to be forced out through scripted events. It comes away feeling weird and gamey as a result.

I have a lot of hours in this game--my "completed" status on this game is true, incidentally, I've played multiple full 1444-1821 campaigns (Netherlands and England, off the top of my head)--but it's ultimately just kind of thin and dissatisfying once the illusion falls away. Add to that the atrocious DLC structure, which is maybe Paradox's worst, and I'd point newcomers to basically any other title in the franchise.

Gonna need more time to organize my thoughts and come up with a real review, because there's so much to dig into in this game, but the long and short of it is that it's Disco Elysium (with a little Night in the Woods in there) for history nerds. It's an impeccably well-written and well-researched game that tells a moving and thoughtful story which absolutely nails the fine line of feeling topical and relevant while remaining firmly grounded in its historical setting. I cannot recommend it enough.

Pretty good. The new dungeons are fun, the building is janky but enjoyable, the new areas are cool. The greater enemy variety, the honest to god bosses, and the overall pretty well designed world map revamp make this game. It's basically a jankier weirder BotW.

I'm not super hot on the new powers--there was an elegance to Breath of the Wild that I appreciated a lot. Sequence breaks and shrine skips in that game feel cool and earned because you're working within boundaries definite enough that breaking them is an accomplishment, often requiring obscure knowledge like the shield surf double jump or the use of special weapons in combination with slate powers. Tears of the Kingdom sometimes had a really good puzzle, but I was able to cheat at a lot of them very easily--many minecart puzzles are weak to the minecart shield, many gap-crossing puzzles are weak to gluing everything in the vicinity together into a huge bridge. Overall it's fun and technically very impressive, but it loses something in its versatility. (As an aside, Ascend is such a half-baked idea for a mechanic in a game already basically centered around different ways of gaining and losing altitude. It comes in handy occasionally but 90% of spots designed to require it could have had a ladder or climbable wall available and functionally changed nothing.)

The plot is written terribly and is structured very badly. The characters are paper thin, the voice acting is generally wasted on pointless material, and if you do things remotely out of order things start falling apart--do the memories sidequest before beating the dungeons and you will tear your hair out over Link's inability to share critical plot details with everyone, ignore the game nudging you towards exploring certain areas first and you'll be locked out of game mechanics until you cave and do what they tell you.

The new enemies are genuinely very very cool. Gibdos rock and should have gotten more screentime. The final boss is my favorite fight in any Zelda game, I think, from a gameplay standpoint at least.

Also the game is broadly very pretty and I very much appreciate that exploring the map and completing segments of the game makes it prettier (removes environmental hazards, turns off big ugly map tower spotlights) whereas BotW rewarded you for completing parts of the game by permanently ruining the view with laser pointers.

It's a weird game. There are things in this that I really hate and things in it that I really like. The moment to moment gameplay is quite good, so I would recommend it overall, and I think in some ways it corrects problems I had with BotW and hits some of the 'classic Zelda' notes the last one was missing. But I also think that viewed as a whole it's a worse game than BotW that loses some of the charm by the very act of trying to recapture it.

I thought this seemed kind of interesting, and I really did want to like it. I went in assuming it was "Ace Attorney but you're the judge", an expectation which was quickly dashed. Initially I was receptive to the idea of a game with more open-ended mystery writing, where you have incentives to betray your own conscience, but after a while the game mostly being meter juggling reputation management started to get to me, but I was prepared to settle in for the long haul regardless.

At this point, I assumed the game was done introducing new mechanics wholesale, which set the stage for the revelation that on top of this already weirdly elaborate onion-layered premise, there is also a vaguely mobile game-style city-builder/territory management thing, which all your 20 different reputation meters feed into. I dropped it immediately at that point; maybe that part is actually good, but I felt kind of lied to about what sort of game this was going to be, and the game already felt like it was having enough of an identity crisis as it was. Maybe I'll take a second stab at it someday but I was mostly just tired by my initial experience with the game.

One of the coolest-feeling games I've ever played. Has many really interesting levels that are half puzzle and half execution. Well-paced, excellent visuals, tells a compelling story with a surprisingly robust dialogue system considering the genre. I'm eagerly looking forward to the DLC, both because I'd really like to see the full conclusion of the story (though I found the plot presented within the game itself quite satisfying in its own right), and because I'm really curious if they'll bring back some of the really cool underused mechanics from the main game.

Probably my favorite city builder game. Challenging without being soul-crushing; forces you to make actual hard decisions, often avoiding having options that can be immediately considered the obvious superior choice; makes you feel genuinely really good when you clear a scenario without resorting to fascism.

The game's setting and presentation are top notch as well. It's the sort of steampunk I like, where it remains true to the genre's origins and maintains grounding in its historical context, instead of mining the idea for an aesthetic. The soundtrack is top notch as well; Piotr Musiaɫ's score beautifully captures the game's depiction of the desperation and drive of the human spirit to survive in the face of impossible odds.