Recent reviews by Tactical Democracy

Performance is surprisingly good on a modern PC though fps in one of the big cities drops to 45-50ish for everyone. dlc is entirely ignorable and only gives items you can readily find in-game anyway. The game itself is pretty good, it's not a major evolution of the first game but it's more Dragon's Dogma. There are no other games like it.

It's a good game

Best CRPG of 2023

Dark Souls with a gun and an escort quest

turn-based co-op Hades

Performance is great (guess I'm lucky) and many of the improvements over CS1 are good, but a lot of the changes feel like added complexity for no real benefit, it just makes things kind of tedious. Still giving it a thumbs up because it's solid, it's just not what I want out of a city builder.

Sim City 4 still the best city builder of all time though.

It's Dungeon of the Endless but with direct control of your party. As someone who loved DotE I don't necessarily think this is an improvement on the formula and it adds some tedium to the process - for example, you have to physically run to the opposite side of the dungeon to place or upgrade a tower there. But the core gameplay loop hooked me the same way it did in DotE.

Good game, but the worst Dark Souls game

Best AoW yet, by a mile. Competitor for best game in the genre.

The inclusion of gameplay is an interesting departure from genre conventions.