Gamespot review is up

[I_pity_the_fool]

How high is it compared to that of Warlords?

http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages2/932340.asp?q=warlords

According to this, 8.6

 

[HiroHito]

The -24 thing is just a bug, . .. .. .. . happens. Guess people will just have to try a game on normal speed until the patch is out (even if it means they'll have to go down a difficulty level ). This doesn't break the game, the default speed setting is not named "normal" for no reason.

I must be anormal to prefer anormal speeds then. I for one dont like playing the game on FastForward speed.

edit: and I should add that I play monarch on marathon and emperor on "normal" speed, maybe its just me but the "anormal" speeds are a bit more difficult, and yeah I know all of the theory on how distances are the same although building times are not bla bla, means nothing in practice.

 

[Swein Forkbeard]

8.5 is very high for an expansion for a two (or three?) year old game.

Agreed. As you will notice, Gamespot almost always rates a game's first expansion pack higher than its second one unless the first one was truly horrible. Most likely when Warlords was released Gamespot still played CivIV a lot and they must have thought "yay, one of our favorite games just got more content!", whereas for BtS they thought "oh, we've moved on to other things by now; this exp pack doesn't do much." Here are some good reasons why Gamespot rated it worse than Warlords.

1. They've probably moved on to other games by now.

2. The scenarios, while better gameplay-wise, have generally crappy ideas, weren't what most fans were hoping for, and worse still, some went, uhm, OFF-TOPIC. Seriously, isn't one of the main rules for video games to "stay on topic?"

3. It feels much less like Civ.

4. You're now pretty much forced to wage warfare in the modern age because the space race VC takes much longer now, and, worse still, there's no backdoor domination victory (in patch 3.13). This makes games slow down to a crawl and doesn't make it fun anymore.

5. The UB feature offered in Warlords added way more to the Civ experience than anything in BtS.

At least IGN rated BtS higher than Age of Empires II.

 

[PimpyMicPimp]

What do you plan to do with your evil army of undead, Mr. Necromancer?

 

[King of Town]

I didn't realize how old of a thread this was. I was like what is gamespot just now getting around to reviewing this, and do you people ever download patches to fix things?

 

[Methos]

I didn't realize how old of a thread this was. I was like what is gamespot just now getting around to reviewing this, and do you people ever download patches to fix things?

Yeah, he had me rather confused as well.