Recent reviews by The Amazing Mr. NF

Awful experience all around. Australian trees are bug ridden and prone to locking out their own progress, the fascist paths have broken decisions, the communist path has crashed my game twice.
Siam gets limited wars against Vichy France, which is a feature the community has requested be added to the game for all nations for a decade now.
Military designer got a UI update, but still no infantry equipment designer feature. Army HQs give overpowered bonuses to units within reach that allow them to dominate any even the toughest of metal units.

Overall hollow and and totally half baked. No inclusion of focuses for French Indochina, New Zealand and Malaysia is asinine, given the DLC is advertised as encompassing the whole Asia-Pacific theatre.

Quite literally an unfinished mod that you have to pay $6 for. The Democratic branch of the focus tree is a confusing mess and let's you totally break the game in both SP and MP by early 1937, forming an unstoppable European bloc that totally surrounds the Axis before Germany can even begin their snowball for anschluss, using France and Austria as corridors to wipe out Italy before they join with Germany, then just walking in to Berlin while steamrolling the wholly underequipped Wehrmacht as Germany attempts to deal with Poland or declares on you outright after you break their focus tree.

Historical Sudentenland Crisis while playing SP and attempting to hold out in Bohemia/Moravia is completely broken and no longer functions as it should historically or as a game mechanic, Germany can freely declare war on you without even challenging for the Sudentenland and roll you over by early 38 thanks to the Democratic focus tree being poorly thought out and setup.

Fascist branch is basically an MP exclusive "junior partner tutorial" mode for new players to provide materiel to the German player.

Communist Branch is a total ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that sees you going to war against the USSR in late 37 as a pathetically underpowered nation with no land borders against your opponent. Or alternatively, you form a regional powderkeg that consumes the Balkans, waiting to get sandwiched by the Great Powers once Molotov-Ribbentrop breaks.

Monarchist branch is just restoring Austria-Hungary, AGAIN. Only this time you don't get diplomatic focus goals or war goals, you have to manually do everything and risk total war against the Allies/Axis/Comintern just to change your country tag.

Achievements generally suck and lack flavor.

So far ExpansionPass2 is chalking up to be the worst DLC promotion Paradox has ever released.

AI generated trash

The greatest political statement on Steam. Should leaned way harder in to the edge and gone whole hog with kids, pregnant women, places of worship, schools etc.

I'm just here to give it a downvote and laugh at the developers. Shoulda made a game that wasn't slop with progressive politik injected! Womp womp! Lots of rumors and signs pointing to this game being a sort of stealth tax writeoff for TenCent.

♥♥♥♥♥♥ devs losing their jobs makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

Really fun, chaotic corpse grinder respawn simulator. Filled with bugs and definitely needed an early access launch or another few months in the oven for polish. The lack of iron sights and a toggle/aim option really suck, please get those added! The ability to manually dig out trenches anywhere on the map is great and leads to lots of fun encounters.
Be warned as optimization is also atrocious, with regular dips on my gaming rig down to 40< FPS.

Loads of fun though I enjoy it. The swamps of bodies and constant explosions and tracers flying about really brings me back to the feeling of playing MAG back in the day.


EDIT: there are literal unpaid transgender jannies in the official servers that are global banning people from chat and the game for using gamer words. Speech policers can eff off.

Gameplay wise, you have your directions for movement, a jump button, a context sensitive button that lets you either grab the artifact and start the timer or scan extra artifacts for bonus completion points and a "speed up" button you can press for a tiny speed boost when vaulting an object. You can also zoom out and view entire stages with mousewheel. Every stage is essentially a basic, self-contained puzzle involving blocked passages after capturing the level's macguffen, which initiates a speedrun to the finish at the end of the level after you grab it, a la Pizza Tower/Wario World.
Also like those 2 games, you cannot actually "fail" a level besides running out of time during the sprint to the end after setting up your route during the puzzle stage. The sole enemy types are guards which automatically end your run and reset you to the start and 'guard bots' which tail you at the end chase and fire small electric pellets which momentarily slow you down if you are hit. Besides totally optional dialog segments in 2 small hubs, that's it, that is the extent of the gameplay. It feels like an upscaled casual mobile smartphone title rather than a "full" game.

Performance wise, I was struggling to maintain 60fps, even 30fps in spots, with 128gb of DDR5 RAM, a i9-14900k and rtx 3080. Completely unacceptable for how barren and basic the game is.

Animations are HORRENDUS, with all characters sharing the same 2 looping talking animations through the entire game, with their models NEVER blinking. Your animations in gameplay are also extremely stiff and stockfeeling, with the only exception to this rule being that some cutscenes have motion capture (the characters still do not blink, though their eyes do change as they emote).

Dialog is clumsy and sloppily written. I picked up multiple times that words were being repeated in the same sentence or sentence immediately after, when the script really should have had a second going over by a proofreader who's first language is English (armed with a thesaurus), rather than the primarily Francophone studio.

Visuals are extremely basic and look like any other generic Fortnite/Overwatch clone, though the clothing designs for characters are very colorful and eyecatching. Everything feels soulless and generic with a plastic-action-figure feel to it, bathed in soft 2010s lighting with rounded edges. The AfroFuturism theme is essentially absent in the visual design outside of clothing style choices for the main group, though the designs for the characters themselves feels by very "by committee" and like they were leftover first drafts passed over for something better in a forgotten PS2 game.

Audio is genuinely the highpoint, as the game features some really good tracks here and there. Shame they couldn't have been featured in a better product.


Anyway now for the meat.

You play as a strong girlboss lesbian who is constantly berating her younger brother (who tries and fails to get women constantly), tagging alongside a black ninja with a Spanish accent, a grandma who was voiced by an actual grandma who half the time cannot find the microphone and trails off her sentences in the recording booth, a giant muscle man and a FtM transgender who has even bigger muscles than muscleman. You also have an Indian twink as your "info guy". Every character has either Killmonger hair, an afro, a wavy wisp, flat coconut helmet hair or a shaved head. No inbetween. Also the first 2 NPCs you meet and are forced to talk to in the hub area are a Chinese man with a gay rainbow pride pin prominently on his smock and a Muslim woman in a hijab. So subtle. The one white character I ran into in the first 4 chapters was an overweight ginger with nearly bleach white skin talking about turning down the brother character, to whom your player responds is a "retro sexist".

As it stands, this game is nothing more than thinly veiled, poorly produced anti-white/anti-European, anti-capitalist propaganda, with it's funding coming entirely from the French and South African governments tax coffers. The messaging the funders demanded is blatant and incredibly heavy handed with no room for subtly or artistic merit from the development team themselves. Also Sweet Baby Inc. is directly involved in the games design. As a game it is squarely a 3/10, there's a lot to be desired here that you can find done better in indie titles with 1/100 the budget afforded to them (such as the previously namedropped Pizza Tower). As sloppy, poorly produced state-funded propaganda, on principle, I must refund it and give it a -10/10.

As of this writing and update to the review, the leeches at Sweet Baby Inc have been trashing Steam users for not buying the game and anyone giving it a negative review, calling us all "disgusting rightoids" on Bluesky. They're also angry at Valve for refusing to censor negative reviews. Too bad!

I had to wait 72 hours to update this review as I was temp-banned from the community page for my review for "racist conspiracies".

Unfortunately in it's current state you may as well just play the tech demo. Every stage except the cellar suffers from abysmal performance drops even on high end hardware like mine, on multiple machines. Was expecting the game to be more of an ARPG or something akin to Mount and Blade, instead all we have is more endless tourneys setup as a rougelike.
Reviving is an awful experience that may as well not even exist. After death if you want to keep your rank progression and items, you must play through a gauntlet in the original demo arena of every single enemy you have killed with that character so far. Except now they're zombies who can lunge at you and 1tap you with an unblockable bite attack.

This is one of my favorite eras of Chinese/Japanese history, was super stoked to see it get added. Of course, there's no actual gameplay beyond the bog standard snails pace expansionism and clicking on event chains every 45 seconds.

Coming from HOI Darkest Hour/4, this is just a boring as sin event clicker simulator. DLC pricing is outrageous as it typical of Paradox. Largely a passive roleplaying experience where everything takes ingame years to occur as you stare at the screen, waiting for the game to autopause so you can click on an event chain. Warfare is a straight copy/paste from Imperator Rome, which is at least better than the dumpsterfire that is Viccy 3.