Another Halloween Special: a very scary Resident Evil 4 Remake review

 It's the spooky month again. And you know what that means! Trick-or-Treating, costume parties, candy and me writing a review of a horror game. And today we are reviewing Resident Evil 4. Specifically the remake version that was released on PS5, Xbox Series X and Steam, because that's the only version of the game that I have played for myself. A quick content warning before we continue. Resident Evil is a horror franchise and as such every game in the series is rated M for Mature by the ESRB. Because of violence, swearing, disturbingly detailed zombies, body horror and cheesy one liners. Reader discretion is advised.

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But what exactly is Resident Evil 4? Released back in 2005 by Capcom as a Nintendo GameCube exclusive, Resident Evil 4 (often shortened to RE4 for the sake of brevity) is the fourth main title in the Resident Evil franchise. Resident Evil is, along side its rival series Silent Hill, the grandfather of the horror game genre. Without Resident Evil and Silent Hill, there most likely wouldn't be horror games at all. Or at least, the genre would look very different without their influences. RE4 won the Game of the Year award in that same year and to this day is considered a beloved classic that anyone with even a passing interest in horror should play. What's more interesting is the fact that the game's director, Shinji Mikami, had the video game equivalent of writer's block while working on RE4. So he and his crew made four different video game demos, labeled them all RE4, released them to the public as part of a limited time event and whichever demo was most popular would become the basis for the "real" RE4. Capcom didn't want to waste the other demos, so after they figured out which demo to turn into a full Resident Evil game, the others were renamed and reused for other projects. And that's how we got Devil May Cry.

Resident Evil 4 Remake is well, a remake of the original RE4. Released in 2023, the remake was made because Capcom's current big project is to bring Resident Evil 1-6 up to the graphical standards established by Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, as well as to expand on the story and gameplay. They've already released remakes for the first three games, and while longtime fans may have their gripes with the third remake, the general consensus is that they are at least as good as their original counterparts. While Shinji Mikami did not work on RE4 Remake (the role of director instead went to Yasuhiro Anpo and Kazunori Kaboi), he did state on his personal Twitter/X account that he "enjoyed it very much." An important disclaimer for this review. I never played the original RE4 myself. My only personal experience is with the remake. That being said, I did some research beforehand and will mention any major differences between the original and the remake when necessary.

In Resident Evil 4, you play as Leon S. Kennedy. Leon was one of the main protagonists of RE2 and RE4 serves as a direct continuation of Leon's story. While you don't need to play RE1 or RE3 to understand this game's story, doing a little research on the events of RE2 would help. Anyway, Leon was a police officer stationed in a fictional USA town called Raccoon City. In 1998, Raccoon City had the bad luck of being infected with the T-Virus, a rabies-like affliction that basically turns people into zombies. This virus was created by the Umbrella Corporation, who released it deliberately along with a bunch of other bio-weapons as part of an eugenics experiment. The CEO of Umbrella, Albert Wesker, believes it is his destiny to breed a generation of perfect superhumans that can survive in a post-zombified world, and is more than happy to throw away the lives of millions of people in the name of that destiny. Because of the T-Virus, 90% of Raccoon City's population was transformed into hideous monsters and the remaining 10% were forced to fight for their lives. Leon was one of the few survivors of the T-Virus incident. And the worst part about all of this is that everything I just described happened on Leon's first day in the service. That has to be like, the worst luck ever. Imagine getting a job and showing up to your first day of work only for your city to get overrun with zombies. Anyway, Leon managed to escape Raccoon City, which was then blasted with hydrogen bombs to keep the Virus from spreading to the rest of the country.

Fast forward 6 years later, and Leon Kennedy is now a secret agent working directly for the US President himself. During those 6 years Leon received training in marksmanship and hand-to-hand combat from a military veteran known as Major Krauser. Despite his newfound skills, Leon is still haunted by the events of his previous adventure. But Leon doesn't mope around and whine about his trauma, he just pours himself even deeper into his work as a coping mechanism. Speaking of Leon's new job, The President's daughter, Ashley Graham, is kidnapped by a Spanish cult called Los Illuminados. This cult somehow found a bunch of parasites that let's them make monsters of their own, and they plan to put a parasite in Ashley's body. It's up to Leon to track down the cult, stop their schemes and save Ashley. Complicating this mission is a run in with Ada Wong and Luis Serra. Ada is a femme fatale spy who Leon once had feelings for. They kind of have a Batman/Catwoman thing going on. But why is Ada in Spain? For reasons I won't spoil. Luis meanwhile is a former Umbrella employee who was studying the parasites that Los Illuminados use. That said, Luis seems to regret his involvement with Umbrella and promises to assist Leon on his mission as a means of atonement.

Resident Evil 4's story campaign takes place in three main locations; the Village, the Castle and the Island. Leon always starts in the Village and cannot access the other two locations until he makes significant progress in the story. But in the meantime, Leon has to deal with all sorts of monsters and villains. RE4 is heavily combat focused. And this is an important distinction because how much combat a horror game even has tends to vary on a case-by-case basis. Generally speaking, horror games can fit on a sliding scale of combat focus. Games like Resident Evil and Dead Space are the extreme end of extensive combat in a horror setting. Games like Five Nights at Freddy's and Outlast are at the extreme end of no combat at all in a horror setting. Every other horror game exists between those two extremes. Which style is better is a matter of opinion. Combat-heavy horror games can have enjoyment outside of the scares, and allowing the player to defend themselves against weaker monsters makes the *main* monsters scarier by comparison when their weapons suddenly stop working on the main threat. That being said, letting the player fight back might reduce the tension that the horror game is trying to build up. Combat-less horror is scarier on a first impression, since not being able to defend yourself at all is inherently scary. However, once the player knows where all the scares are the game becomes a glorified haunted house. It might be spooky, but predictable.

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Leon starts the game armed with a custom handgun called the SG-09 R and a combat knife, but he can find more exotic weapons throughout his adventure. These can include shotguns, sniper rifles, grenades, SMGs, and even a rocket launcher. In fact, there are so many different weapons to use that you could play the game three different times, each time using different guns, and have a wildly different experience each time. Because of the weapon variety, RE4 has a lot more replay value than other horror games. Heck, you could do a playthrough with just the SG-09 R and have a great time, because unlike every other video game in existence, the starter pistol is a genuinely good weapon that will serve you well from the start of the game all the way to the end of it. But every gun has some kind of unique benefit to it. The Punisher handgun does less damage than the SG-09 R but its bullets can pierce through shields and damage multiple enemies with one shot, provide they are standing in a row. The Red 9 handgun is basically a pistol sized shotgun, with tremendous firepower at close range but horrific recoil and below-average accuracy. But some guns, like the Red 9, can be enhanced by attaching additional parts to them. In the case of the Red 9, you can attach a stock to it to reduce the recoil.

Another important aspect of RE4's combat is knowing where to shoot enemies specifically. Headshots do more damage than body shots, obviously. But shooting an enemy in the knees will immobilize them, allowing you to finish them off with a melee attack. This attack will be either a roundhouse kick if performed in front of the immobilized enemy, or a literal suplex when performed from behind. This is actually the most cost effective method of fighting enemies. Ammo is limited, and the less ammo you waste the better. In my experience, shooting the knees and following up with a melee attack is the method that uses the least amount of ammo. It's also debatably the most stylish method of combat. Of course, this does not apply to bosses, or four-legged enemies, or to Regeneradors (more on them later.) Also, the knee shot method works best with handguns and SMGs. Shotguns and (most) rifles are so powerful that they can blow limbs completely off an enemy's body, which the game counts as an outright kill.

New to the remake is Leon's combat knife. Well, sort of. He had a knife in the original, but it was reworked to make melee combat more engaging. The knife gives Leon two different melee attacks, a sweeping slash and forward lunge. But more importantly, it allows Leon to parry enemy attacks and break free from enemy grapples. Some enemies like to grab Leon in an attempt to strangle him. Under normal circumstances, the player would need to mash the X button (or the equivalent thereof) to break free. But if Leon has a knife, he can skip this whole process and get a free stab on whoever just grabbed him. The reworked knife is the biggest difference between the original game and the remake. In fact, the knife is so important that there is literally an entire boss battle dedicated to knife-fighting. The only downside of the knife is that it has limited durability and will break if used too frequently. However, if Leon is carrying an extra knife, he will automatically switch to that knife when his main one breaks. Additionally, Leon's main knife can be repaired by a mysterious stranger called the Merchant in exchange for Pesetas, the main currency of this game. 

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The Merchant can be found in (almost) every safe room. Think of safe rooms as checkpoints. You can save your progress in them, and most enemies cannot enter them. They are the only places that are truly safe. The Merchant will sell you all sorts of items. From crafting materials to new weapons. The Merchant can also upgrade the weapons you already have by improving the power of each shot, the ammo capacity, the reload speed or the rate of fire. Obviously some guns are going to be better at different things, but the upgrades can really close the distance in effectiveness. For example, the Blacktail handgun normally does a lot less damage than the Red 9. But fully upgraded in power, it becomes the second most powerful handgun in the game in addition to having superior accuracy, fire rate and reload speed. At that point the only advantage the Red 9 has over the Blacktail is that it can kill enemies using one less bullet.

The most important thing you need to remember is that Leon's inventory is limited. He has an attaché case that he can store everything in. Guns, ammo, healing items, crafting ingredients, even those additional weapon parts. Because of this, weapons with additional parts might be more powerful than average, but are balanced by taking up a lot more space in the case, thus preventing you from carrying additional items. You can rearrange the positioning of these items to make room for more in a process similar to playing Tetris. But if you can't make room for an item in the attaché case, you cannot carry it at all. You can combine two or more items together to make new items entirely, which also has the side effect of taking up less space than the sum of the item's parts. This is actually how you get most of your ammo. While you can find ammo lying around in barrels and crates, most of the time the only bullets you have are the ones you craft yourself. Each weapon also only takes ammo for its associated category. Handguns can only use handgun ammo, shotguns can only use shotgun shells, rifles can only use rifle ammo, et cetera. The one exception to this rule is the rocket launcher, on account that it's a one use only weapon. The rocket launcher is the strongest weapon in the game and can kill anything with one shot, up to and including the final boss. The downside is that not only does the rocket launcher take up more than half of Leon's inventory, it only has one shot. Once you fire the rocket launcher, that's it. You're not getting another shot with it for the rest of the game.

Resident Evil 4 sports a nice variety in enemy monster designs. You start off with basic villagers armed with torches and pitchforks, and then the monsters get gradually crazier as you progress. Just to give a few examples, Leon can encounter rabid dogs with tentacles erupting from their backs, chainsaw-wielding maniacs, cultists with man-eating worms for heads, literal zombified giants and the Regeneradors. The Regeneradors are my "favorite" enemy because their design is incredibly nightmarish and watching them slither around like a demented snake makes my skin crawl. Also, they can rapidly heal from any injury up to and including decapitation, with the only way to kill them being to destroy 3-5 hidden parasites in their torso. Regeneradors are scary because not only do they fall in the uncanny valley (looking almost human but not quite perfect), they are by far the most dangerous standard enemy type. Be thankful that game waits until you reach the Island before throwing these blubbery menaces at you.

You know how I said that Leon's main goal is to rescue Ashley? Well, he accomplishes that goal. Surprisingly early. So early in fact that this plot point isn't even considered a spoiler. But there's just one problem. Leaving the territory of Los Illuminados is far, far more difficult than entering it. Which means that until Leon and Ashley can find an escape route, you the player have to make sure both of them stay alive. Ashley is sometimes playable for brief solo adventures, but most of the time she is a non-playable companion who will follow Leon automatically. She has no weapons or combat skills to speak of. If she gets hit by any enemy, she will be incapacitated until Leon helps her back on her feet. If she gets hit while incapacitated, she will die and you will get a Game Over. Additionally, some enemies will try and grab Ashley to carry her away. If she gets carried too far away from Leon, she will be recaptured and you will get another Game Over. The other biggest change from original to remake is that Ashley has also been reworked. In the original game, she had a limited health pool that could only be refilled by "sacrificing" some of your own healing items to her. Now, her health refills by itself as long as she isn't incapacitated or being carried away. This change was made with the intention of making the "escort Ashley" sections easier. After all, the less healing items you use on Ashley, the more you have to heal up Leon.

In both the original and the remake, you can give Ashley simple commands. Things like "Stay Here" "Hide" or "Run Away." In the remake specifically, you can tell Ashley to follow Leon in either a "tight" formation or a "loose" formation. The former makes so that Ashley will try her best to stay right behind Leon's back at all times. The latter makes her keep her distance from Leon, but she will still stay close enough to have a line of sight to him. The tight formation is good for running through dangerous areas or through enemy hordes you don't have the resources to fight properly. The loose formation is good for giving Leon the breathing room he needs to actually fight off said enemies. You can also give Ashley context-sensitive commands like "hold this button down" or "hide in this specific locker." Every time the game lets you put Ashley in a locker (which is a wild thing to say without context) it usually means  there's about to be a fight against a strong enemy, like one of the aforementioned chainsaw maniacs, or even worse, a Regenerador.

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But now I want to talk about Leon Kennedy himself, because he is very much the star of the show. In the original game, Leon became infamous for spouting cheesy, 80's action hero style one liners like "No thanks, BRO!" and "Where's everybody going? Bingo?" Most of said one-liners have since become memes in the Resident Evil fan community.  And to be fair, the original Resident Evil were meant to be campy, since the franchise started out as a love letter to 70's and 80's era horror movies. The remakes take themselves more seriously in comparison. Don't get me wrong, though. Leon still says funny one-liners and does outrageous action hero stunts like back flips and suplexes on literal zombies. But in the remake, his cheesy action hero vibes are contrasted against the nightmarish horrors he encounters. And you know what? It works. Especially if you buy in to the idea that Leon's antics are a coping mechanism for all the stuff he went through back in Resident Evil 2. But one thing I adore about Remake-Leon's personality is that he acts more annoyed than scared by the aforementioned monstrosities. He does react with disgust at things like occult shrines and new enemy types, but every time after that initial surprise he's like "Oh great, it's these guys again." Which is honestly just as funny as the original's one liners.

Ashley on the other hand is scared out of her mind and reacts with appropriate levels of terror at every other monster. Which makes sense for her situation. She's been kidnapped by a cult, is trapped in a foreign country, has a dormant parasite in her body and her dad thought that sending only one guy to rescue her was enough. She is very lucky that the one guy that the President sent was Leon Kennedy. One of the few gripes I heard other people having with the original game was that Ashley's voice was annoying. Though perhaps it wasn't necessarily the voice and more the fact that in the original game she screams "LEON HELP!!!" every time an enemy so much as looks in her general direction. She still screams a lot (as a civilian in a horror franchise is wont to do) but I never found her to be annoying. This may be a Remake thing making the character more likable or it may be me not having any biases from experiencing the original game. I don't know.

One quick note before we continue talking about the story. Resident Evil 4 Remake has DLC. One DLC pack is free, the other is a paid expansion. The free DLC is titled The Mercenaries and is a non-canon minigame where you try to kill as many enemies as possible within a time limit. The game actually gives you a spoiler warning the first time you boot up the minigame, both because it features end-game locations as arenas and because it spoils the identity of one of the main villains. But this game mode is neat because it lets you play as other characters besides Leon such as Ada, Major Krauser, Luis and even Albert Wesker. There's also HUNK, a masked soldier that is not encountered in the main story in any capacity, but he's the closest thing the RE franchise has to a mascot, which is why he's here. Each character comes with a different set of weapons meant to encourage a specific fighting style. For example, Leon and Ada are both generalists who don't excel in anything but aren't particularly bad at anything either. They both have a pistol and a shotgun. Leon gets a semi automatic rifle unique to him in this game mode, while Ada gets a crossbow and a grappling hook, the latter of which lets her perform long range melee attacks by pulling herself towards stunned enemies. Major Krauser goes all in on melee combat, sporting a custom knife that's pretty much unbreakable as well as explosive arrows and an SMG to deal with big groups. Luis meanwhile is meant to be a sniper, with a bolt-action rifle and a Red 9 handgun giving him very good damage per shot at the expense of speed and mobility. HUNK gets an SMG and a pocket knife as his only weapons, but he can perform a neck snap on any stunned or immobilized enemy to kill them instantly. Albert Wesker is a master of parries. In fact, he's so good at parrying enemy attacks that he doesn't need a knife to do so, and every time he does parry an enemy attack he automatically performs a one-hit kill move. He has both a pistol and a magnum to deal with the few threats can can't be parried. 

The last main mechanic of The Mercenaries is Mayhem Mode. This is a temporary super move that is unique to each character. Leon and Ada's Mayhem Mode just improves their damage and movement speed. Luis' lets him plant dynamite to blow up a large group of enemies at once. Krauser's is a spoiler-filled transformation that supercharges his already impressive melee attacks. HUNK's Mayhem Mode gives his SMG infinite ammo, thus letting him literally melt anyone standing in his way. And finally, Albert Wesker gains the ability to literally teleport right to any enemy in his field of vision and unleash a barrage of punches and kicks. It looks like something pulled straight out of an anime. While there is a time limit in The Mercenaries, you can extend it by either collecting green orbs hidden in each arena, killing enemies with headshots or with melee attacks. However, the game mode is NOT endless. After 150 kills, the game ends automatically and you are given the highest score possible for your troubles.

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The second DLC, Separate Ways, is a (probably) canon side story where you get to play as Ada Wong, with her adventure happening alongside Leon's. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to play Separate Ways yet, so I cannot speak of its quality in good faith. I might write a mini-review for Separate Ways in the future. But here's as good a place as any to reveal why Ada is in the Los Illuminados compound. Ada is working for Albert Wesker. Yes, the same guy who doomed Raccoon City. Wesker wants an item called the Amber, which contains the dormant egg of one of the cult's parasites. He wants to combine the parasite with his zombie viruses to create undead superhumans. But Ada does eventually change her mind about working for a man who casually brags about how his plan will cause the deaths of not just millions of people, but billions. So she does agree to help Leon stop the cult and eventually disposes of the Amber so that it will never be used for evil ever again.

Okay, now we get into the realm of spoilers, because I want to talk about the villains. Los Illuminados is led by a cult leader named Osmund Saddler. Saddler was infected with the original parasite, and with it he can effectively mind control anyone who has another parasite in their body. There doesn't seem to be a limit to the range of his possession, in fact the entire cult is infected with parasites, implying that every enemy you face is being mind controlled all at the same time. His entire evil plan is to infect Ashley, use her as a sleeper agent to infect the President with another parasite, and then rule the United States from the shadows by mind-controlling the U.S. leadership. Funnily enough, in the original game, Saddler himself explains his plan in a stereotypical villainous monologue. In the remake, It's Luis who tells Leon why Saddler wants to put parasites in people.

Speaking of Luis, I like him. He's this smooth talking, kind of sleazy but still charming scoundrel who despite being "just" an Umbrella researcher, can keep up with Leon. In fact, there's a boss battle against two zombified giants (called El Gigante) where Leon and Luis have to work together to bring the giants down. He reminds me of Han Solo from Star Wars, just with a Spanish accent. Luis is a scoundrel who provides much of the humor and comic relief for the game. But honestly speaking, Luis is the true unsung hero of RE4. He alone was able to figure out how to remove the parasites without killing the victim. Meaning that without Luis' help, even if Leon and Ashley escaped Los Illuminados, Ashley would be doomed to mutate into some kind of freaky monster and bring about the apocalypse. Unfortunately, spoilers for this next section, but Luis does not live to see the fruits of his labor. He is sadly killed off by one of the main villains, though with his dying breath he gives Leon the key to his lab so he can remove the parasite inside Ashley safely. How Luis dies changes depending on whether it's the original or the remake. In the original game, Luis is killed by Saddler. In the remake, Luis is killed by Major Krauser. It's a minor change in the grand scheme of things, but the main reason the change was made was to introduce Krauser as a villain a lot earlier than the original did.

What's the deal with Major Krauser, you ask? The answer is that he was a double agent working for Los Illuminados the whole time, and that he was the one who kidnapped Ashley in the first place. Krauser did all of this because several years ago, Krauser and his men were sent to South America for a top secret mission called Operation Javier. What Operation Javier was is never explained, outside the fact that it was a complete disaster and the US Military left Krauser's squad to die. Krauser was really mad about how the government treated his crew, and while it's possible that he sought out Los Illuminados because he wanted revenge for his fallen comrades, he currently only cares about power. And he has the exact same skills that Leon has, because he was the one who taught Leon how to fight in the first place. And if I had a nickel for every time a Capcom game had a rival character with the same skillset as the protagonist who forsakes their humanity in the name of getting more powerful, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's still weird that both Resident Evil 4 and Devil May Cry had this exact character archetype. But then again, if Devil May Cry started life as a RE4 demo, I'd suppose you would see similarities between the two.

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The game has a few bosses to fight, and here I need to mention a "quirk" of the Resident Evil franchise. The bosses have what Capcom calls Adaptive Difficulty, where the amount of health a boss has is proportionate to the amount of ammo and healing items you have in your inventory at the start of the battle. Regular enemies have the same amount of health no matter what. Adaptive Difficulty also effects how much ammo and money you can find in barrels and crates, with ammo appearing more frequently if you're running low and money appearing more frequently when you have a surplus. The purpose of this system is meant to encourage a "use it or lose it" mentality in the player, where you gain ammo just as quickly as you use it up. Because of this, it can take anywhere between 5-6 shots to kill a boss, or up to 50-60. Overall, I like the bosses. Major Krauser is my personal favorite. You fight him three separate times, with the first time being a standard knife fight with no guns from neither Krauser nor Leon. The second time is a gun fight where Leon is forced to navigate a booby-trapped maze while Krauser harasses him with SMG fire and explosive arrows. The third time, Krauser uses a parasite to mutate his arms into a sword and shield made of bones and meat for one last duel. And the whole time they're fighting, Leon and Krauser engage in gloriously cheesy trash talk. But no matter which version of Krauser you're fighting, you have to learn how to do the parry correctly. That's just non-negotiable. Unless you use your one and only rocket launcher shot on Krauser.

On the subject of the final boss, Osmund Saddler himself, I did not do the fight legitimately. I used my one and only rocket launcher shot on Saddler, completely skipping the final battle entirely. His monster form looks cool though. Like a giant demonic crab covered in eyeballs. One boss I do enjoy is Ramon Salazar. Salazar is an arrogant noblemen who is a fanatic follower of Saddler's cult. He mutates into what can best be described as a cross between a rose and an octopus. Salazar acts as the main villain of the Castle area, and he spends the whole time being an over-dramatic nerd. The funniest thing about Salazar is that you can completely trivialize his boss fight by throwing a golden chicken egg (an item that normally is only good for selling to the Merchant) at him. This somehow removes 75% of his health and stuns him instantly. Meaning if you're quick enough, you can just blitz Salazar with shotgun blasts and rifle shots before he can even finish his villainous monologue at the start of the fight. Which is both hilarious and good for speed running!

Speaking of speed running, Resident Evil 4 gives the player a rank at the end of each playthrough based on how well they did. This considers things like number of enemies defeated, number of Game Overs, and how quickly it took the beat the game. When I first finished the game, it took me around 33 hours to complete it. But you can very easily beat this game in 8 hours or less. The current record (at the time of writing) is roughly 1 hour and 35 minutes on Standard difficulty. Oh yeah, I should mention the different difficulty settings. In addition to Adaptive Difficulty, RE4 has four traditional difficulty options. Assisted, Standard, Hardcore and Professional. Assisted is the easiest and recommended for people unfamiliar with horror games. Standard mode is intermediate and recommended for horror game fans who have not played the original game from 2005 (aka people like me). Hardcore mode is well, hard, and is recommended for people who have already played the original game. Professional mode is the same as Hardcore but with stricter parry timings and no autosaving your progress at all. It's also unavailable at first. You need to beat the game on one of the other difficulty options before it will let you even attempt Professional mode. What the difficulty options do is adjust the amount of health that regular enemies have (bosses are unaffected because of Adaptive Difficulty). It also affects how much damage they do per attack and how quickly they move around. The higher the difficulty, the faster and deadlier enemies become. Finally, the difficulty options change how much ammo you can craft and how expensive the Merchant's wares are. 

The last thing I want to mention before talking about the presentation is the extra content. By completing certain "challenges" within the game, you can unlock a special currency called Challenge Points. These can be exchanged for nice cosmetic things like concept art, 3D models of all the different characters and weapons, and even fun little costumes for Leon and Ashley. Some of the costumes have additional effects, but most are just for fun. Like there's a pair of cat ears you can put on Leon that gives all of his weapons infinite ammo. Said cat ears are unlocked by getting an S+ Rank (the highest rank possible) on Professional Mode. By that point you've perfected the art of playing this silly horror game, so I don't think you need infinite ammo that badly. There's also a Pinstripe Suit for Leon that makes him look like a 1940's era gangster. Ashley gets (among other things) a suit of medieval armor that makes her too heavy for most enemies to pick up. There are some unique weapons that can only be unlocked with Challenge Points, like the Hand Cannon and the Chicago Sweeper. Of course, those weapons can only be accessed by playing New Game Plus mode. New Game Plus allows Leon to start the game with all of his weapons and upgrades from a previous playthrough. Which means you can hypothetically blitz through the game with an overpowered Leon and enjoy some sweet catharsis on any part of the game that gave you trouble the first time around.

In terms of presentation, Resident Evil 4 is a very nice looking game. Like, the original game looks shockingly good despite being almost 20 years old (which in the video game industry might as well be 200 years), and the remake manages to be debatably better. It's objectively better in terms of facial expressions and texture quality, but then again, the entire reason the remake was made was to bring this game up to a new graphical standard. In that regard, the remake succeeded. There's also a ton of little details that most people probably won't notice, but the fact they were put in the game at all makes me appreciate the effort. Just to give a few examples, Ashley tip-toes around the bodies of dead enemies instead of stepping on them. Leon starts limping if his health gets too low. Leon occasionally checks the chamber of his currently equipped gun to make sure it's loaded. Leon practices exceptional trigger discipline, never putting his finger on the trigger until the player pushes the "shoot" button. Ashley covers her ears when Leon starts shooting at something. The only thing I could say bad about RE4 Remake is that it isn't as campy and over-the-top as the original game. Which isn't even that much of a bad thing because this game is still campy. Just a different flavor of camp.   

In terms of sound design and voice acting, both are good. The music consists mostly of ambient droning meant to put the player on edge (because this is still a horror game). That said, there is some peaceful music in the safe rooms meant to serve as a break from the harrowing nightmares outside. The sound of the guns firing is crisp. Leon still has his cheesy one-liners, which are delivered in the most deadpan way imaginable. And enemies bark out Spanish phrases while fighting you. I don't speak Spanish, and the subtitles don't translate the Spanish, but I have heard from Spanish speaking corners of the Internet that the Spanish voice acting is an improvement over the original. You know what's not an improvement over the original? Ada Wong's voice. I do not know why Ada Wong's voice in the remake bothers me. Like, it's not as good as the voice acting for everyone else but it's also not bad enough to where I can call it bad acting in good faith. I think the problem is that she sounds oddly stiff. I'm not sure if it's the actor herself, or if the problem lies with the voice direction, or if the game just used a bad take. I remember seeing some people on the Internet say that her voice acting sounds better in Separate Ways, but again, I haven't played that DLC yet. It's unfortunate, because the rest of the game's audio presentation is so good that this one thing sticks out even more.

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Overall, I'd say that Resident Evil 4 is a splendid horror game. Both the 2005 original and 2023 remake. But which is better? As cliché as it sounds, both are good. The original is a classic for a reason. But the remake is a great game in and of itself. Personally, it comes down to preference. The original is campier and places a greater emphasis on spectacle. The remake, while still campy, takes itself more seriously and puts greater focus on the horror elements. But like I said at the start of the post, if you have any passing interest in the horror genre, this is a great place to start. I give Resident Evil 4 Remake 5 stars out of five.

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Frostpunk, survive the apocalypse with the power of steam. A very frosty review

Have you ever wondered what it would take to survive a post-apocalyptic world? Pretty sure anyone who has heard the words "post" and "apocalyptic" in the same sentence had that thought. And one video game in particular asks a much more interesting question. "Can you survive a second Ice Age while still preserving your moral integrity?" That is the question posed by the game we are reviewing today, Frostpunk. A quick content warning before we begin. Frostpunk is rated M for Mature by the ESRB. Because of foul language and the aftermath of violence. And because this game's protagonist can potentially become a tyrannical dictator based on the player's decisions.

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But what exactly is Frostpunk? Developed and published by indie team 11 bit Studios back in 2018, Frostpunk is a city-building survival strategy game where you are in charge of the construction and maintenance of a steampunk city. What's steampunk, you ask? It's a subgenre of science fiction in which you take a civilization from the past (most commonly 19th century England) and give it access to technology far better than whatever they had in real life, with the goal of a steampunk story being to show how technology can change societies either for the better or for the worse. I have a soft spot for steampunk, as it's my personal favorite style of sci fi. Anyway, the aforementioned steampunk city is tasked with surviving the most brutal winter in human history, with the temperature starting at -4 degrees Fahrenheit (-20 degrees Celsius) and only getting worse from there. The game released to a generally positive reception, developing a passionate fan community online. More importantly, 11 bit Studios released a sequel to this game simply titled Frostpunk 2, which is supposed to be much larger in scale than this game. That being said, I'm only reviewing the first game for the simple reason that I have not played Frostpunk 2 yet. 

So imagine. The year is 1886, and things played out mostly the same as they did in real life. America gets colonized only for the colonists to rebel and build a new country from scratch, the Industrial Revolution led to the rabid development of technology, Krakatoa erupted, et cetera. But there's one big difference between real life history and the world of Frostpunk. Instead of global warming, the Frostpunk universe got hit with global cooling. Things cooled down so much that it caused a new Ice Age, which a bunch of scientists named "The Great Frost". The only reason anyone survived the initial blizzards this Great Frost brought forth was because that same bunch of scientists predicted something like this would happen. They created in secret a set of giant heat-producing towers known as the Generators, which provide just enough warmth to create little "safe zones" for the coming winter. As such, the entire population of the British Empire (and presumably the rest of the world) marched up North for months on end to reach these Generators and rebuild society from scratch. Why up North you ask? The in-universe explanation is that the global cooling originated from the South Pole and slowly spread up northward to the rest of the world. So I guess the Generators were placed in the places furthest away from the South Pole in the hope that the Great Frost wouldn't affect those communities as badly, or maybe it was done to give the construction crews more time to finish the project. 

You, the player, are the Captain, the leader of a group of survivors that managed to reach one of these Generators. As such, you decide what gets built and where, what jobs people are allowed to work, and what laws are legalized. Ironically enough, the Captain has more in common with a mayor or a baron than an actual ship captain. The only reason your character is even called a Captain is because they used to command a carrier ship prior to the Great Frost happening, so the title is a holdover from the "good old days." Frostpunk has four main story campaigns (called "Scenarios"), each with a different goal to work towards as well as different starting conditions. Another two were added in a DLC expansion, but thankfully, Frostpunk is actually a solid enough product on its own that it frankly doesn't need DLC to function. So my advice is to only get the DLC if you are absolutely starving for more Frostpunk. But in addition to the main Scenarios, there is also an Endless Mode where you are free to keep playing for as long as you want, or at least until your City gets destroyed. Anyway, the only scenario available right at the start is A New Home.  Surviving past Day 10 of A New Home unlocks the Arks Scenario. Surviving past Day 20 in A New Home unlocks both The Refugees and The Fall of Winterhome. Before I continue describing the Scenarios themselves, let's talk gameplay, because most of what I say is applicable to all playable Scenarios.

In order to accomplish literally anything in this game, you need to assign jobs to your citizens. Each building in your City comes with an associated job, and each building can employ up to 10 citizens at once. They will carry out their jobs automatically during work hours (8:00 to 18:00), but once the work shift has ended, they will go enjoy Free Time. If there are unfinished construction projects during Free Time, the citizens will help out and speed up the process. If not, they go back home to rest up for the night. If the citizen in question is unemployed, he/she will work on construction during both work hours and free time. But a very important thing to remember is that people are not mindless robots. They got needs that must be fulfilled if you want your City to survive. And Frostpunk's gameplay loop is like walking a tightrope. You can fall at any moment unless you maintain a near-perfect balance of all the main resources. 

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Let me tell you what the average Frostpunk playthrough looks like. You start off with needing to build tents in your City so that your people can sleep comfortably at night, and housing needs wood. So you send some guys to go gather wood from some nearby debris piles. But because this process involves marching through waist-deep snow, some of your workers will get sick from the cold. And sick workers can't work, obviously. So you need to build a medical post to heal your people when they inevitably get frostbite or hypothermia. But people can't work on an empty stomach, so you also need to build a Hunter's Hut so you can hire some hunters to go outside the City and gather food. The only problem with that is that your workers can't eat raw food, it needs to be cooked into something actually edible. So now you need to build a Cookhouse and hire some chefs. And you need roads connecting all of these buildings to the Generator so that your people can actually walk to work without marching through snow, which costs more wood. Only by now, you ran out of salvageable debris, so you need to build a sawmill to chop down some trees. And don't forget, you must find a way to produce enough coal to keep the Generator active at all times, because if the Generator powers down for too long your City will freeze to death. Which means building coal mines, which costs steel, which means you need to build a steelworks to make enough steel to build the coal mines. And steelworks require even more wood. By this point the temperature of the outside world is dropping, so now you have to improve heating and insulation by either upgrading the Generator or replacing all the tents with proper bunkhouses (which costs wood and steel). While everything I just described is going on, you can send Scout Teams to explore the world, and the scouts will come back anything ranging from extra supplies, to more survivors to expand the City's population or Steam Cores. Steam Cores can be used to build the most powerful machines in the game, such as Hothouses that grow edible plants (thus producing twice as much food as a Hunter's Hut), and Automatons, which are giant steam powered robots.

But the most important building that you absolutely must have in your City is the humble Workshop. The Workshop is a place where your smartest citizens get together and do some research. Research projects lead to the invention of new technology that can improve the City in some way. These upgrades can range from making the Generator produce more heat than before, to unlocking newer and better buildings that can produce more resources than their weaker counterparts, or simple passive bonuses that make preexisting structures more efficient. The Workshop is absolutely essential to Frostpunk's gameplay and it is literally impossible to beat any of the Scenarios without building at least one Workshop. My general advice is that unless you're playing the Fall of Winterhome Scenario, your first priority should be building a Workshop at the start of every playthrough. If you are playing Fall of Winterhome, let the Workshop be the second structure you build.

On top of all that, you also have to deal with Hope and Discontent. Think of these two as like health bars for your city. If the City runs out of Hope, your citizens will declare the City a lost cause and will leave, either to die in the frosty wilderness or to (hopefully) join someone else's City. If the City's Discontent gets too high, the people will declare you a tyrant and overthrow you in a violent revolution. Either way, you will lose the game and have to start all over from the beginning. There are ways to raise Hope and lower Dissent, such as building churches and fighting arenas respectively, or promising your people to do a task like collecting enough food to feed the city for a week, or promising to keep the City above a specific temperature for three whole days. Is it stressful keeping track of all this? Yes. But that's like the fun of Frostpunk. It really sells the fantasy of establishing a community that just barely, by the skin of its teeth, manages to survive the impossible. 

Back on the subject of citizens, the last main thing to know about them is that all citizens are divided into four types; Workers, Engineers, Automatons and Children. Workers are the most common and can work almost any job. The only jobs they that can't work are those that require advanced education, like medical treatment and running the Workshop. Engineers on the other hand, can work in medical posts and Workshops. They can also perform simple labor, but are forbidden from hunting, which Workers can handle just fine. Automatons are giant steam-powered robots that don't need to sleep or eat, can work 24 hours a day without pausing, and are immune to the ever-decreasing cold. They do need to recharge every now and again, but these things are very powerful. Think of Automatons as Workers on steroids. Automatons can work almost any job, and the Workshop can research ways to make Automatons even better. Automatons are also the rarest citizen type in the game. You won't get a lot of these guys, unless you're playing The Arks Scenario. And finally, Children cannot work any jobs at all under normal circumstances, but they still need to be cared for like any other citizen. But notice my choice of words there. They cannot work under "normal" circumstances. And now we get to talk about my favorite thing about Frostpunk, which is how it handles morality.

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As the Captain, you have the authority needed to pass laws. You can pick which laws to pass from a branching list, structured like a skill tree from a normal roleplaying game. Not all the laws are particularly nice. In fact, the further down the list of laws you go, the more tyrannical you become. The laws start off sensible enough. Legalizing experimental treatment to save frostbitten citizens is a no brainer. Replacing solid meals with soup because its cheaper to create makes sense when you need make every ration worthwhile. And while it seems harsh at first, extending the work shift from 10 hours a day to 14 hours a day is essential to producing enough resources to finish major construction projects. But as the winter worsens and the needs of your people become more demanding, you will be pushed to pass laws that are dubious at best, and straight up evil at worst. For example, if you are really desperate for more Workers, you can legalize Child Labor, which turns all Children in the City into Workers. Running low on food? You can legalize cannibalism and start turning the deceased into rations. You don't have to pass the unethical laws if you don't want to, in fact there's a secret golden ending that's acquired if you beat any of the main scenarios while practicing only "humane" laws. It's just a lot harder to do a "good guy run" because the evil laws offer some kind of practical benefit at the cost of one's own moral integrity.

And this leads into the biggest aspect of the law system; The Purposes. Without spoiling the story too much, eventually you will have to pick a Purpose for your City, which is some kind of ideology to really bring people together and form a longer-lasting community. Your options are either Order, which rules with militaristic strength and discipline, or Faith, which rules with spirituality and religious devotion. Both of these options unlock a set of unique laws and buildings to match their respective themes. Both of these start off fairly benign. And both of them get really scary when you push them too far. Order seems like the obvious bad guy option at first, since the Order-only laws and Order-only buildings are eerily reminiscent of Big Brother from 1984. I'm talking things like Propaganda Centers and armed guardsmen publicly beating disobedient citizens to the brink of death just to keep the rest of the City in line. But Faith is arguably just as amoral. In fact, for everything Order does, Faith has something that accomplishes the same effect, just with a vaguely religious coat of paint over it. Instead of propaganda, Faith has sermons. Instead of public beatings Faith has "mandatory penance" (which still involves dissenters getting publicly beaten). Order and Faith are ultimately two sides of the same coin.

But the thing you need to remember is that neither Order nor Faith start off evil right away. They always start benevolent, Like Order starts with just a neighborhood watch to keep people safe, watchtowers that lower discontent for anyone living near them and the ability to hire foremen to oversee a building's production (thus making any jobs in that building produce more resources). Faith starts with churches that give Hope to anyone living nearby, field kitchens that raise the temperature of any adjacent building while also providing rations for the area, and houses of healing which work as a decent alternative to traditional infirmaries. Order and Faith only become evil when pushed too far. In fact, the final Purpose law, called New Order or New Faith, is by far the most extreme law in the game and is the only law that will actively cause the deaths of a few citizens. If you legalize New Order, the Captain crowns themselves Supreme Leader of the City and establishes a totalitarian regime, and anyone who opposes the regime (between 12 and 30, depending on the City's total population) will be executed. If you legalize New Faith, the Captain declares themselves to be the second coming of the Messiah and converts the City into a cult with a zero-tolerance policy on any faith that is not the state religion. And just like with New Order, anyone who opposes the cult (again, 12-30 people) will be executed. But hey! At least Hope will be permanently maxed out for the rest of the game! …And it will also be renamed to "Obedience" (for Order) or "Devotion" (for Faith). Because at that point, the people have given up hope for a free society, but are now either too loyal or too scared to leave the City.

But why would you go so far with these Purposes? Because as the situation grows more dire, those "evil" laws might be the one thing allowing you to repair the damage done to your City. Remember, the ultimate goal of Frostpunk is to make sure the City survives the Winter. As long as you have just enough citizens to keep the City operational, you can and will push your people to their absolute limits. Mild spoilers for the A New Home Scenario, but halfway through the story you learn that the closest neighboring City, Winterhome, has been destroyed. This causes an existential crisis in your citizens, since the plan prior to this point was to contact the other Cities and establish trade routes and supply lines so that the Generator communities could survive long term. Because of this, a  group of rebels will start making plans to leave for London. You have 14 days to convince them to stay. And every day that passes, if you don't raise Hope high enough or get Dissent low enough, the rebels will convince another citizen to leave. But those harsher Purpose laws that allow your guards/witch hunters to beat criminals in public or spy on them in their own homes? Those laws let you get the rebels under control. If the rebels get really out of hand, these evil laws might be the ONLY way to get the rebels under control.

Okay, that should cover the "universal" parts of Frostpunk. Let's talk about specific Scenarios.

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A New Home. The main Scenario, serving both as a tutorial for the game as a whole and setting the standard for which all other Scenarios are to be judged by. You start in a spacious crater with plenty of building room, 80 citizens and enough supplies to get your first set of buildings established. The win condition here is to simply survive for more than 48 days. Once you make it past day 48, your City is deemed stable enough to not only survive the whole winter, but even beyond it. The final week of this Scenario is positively brutal, as a violent blizzard tears through your City. This Storm will disable Hunter's Huts and Hothouses, meaning that the only source of food your City will have will be whatever rations you stockpiled ahead of time. Additionally, the Storm will force the temperature to start dropping rapidly. Nothing short of a fully upgraded Generator can produce enough heat to survive this. The Storm is the closest thing Frostpunk gets to a boss battle, though you cannot defeat the Storm in any meaningful way. All you can do is prepare, stock up on rations and coal, and pray that your City survives long enough to make it to Day 48. This is also the Scenario with the Londoner rebels, and how you deal with that will also effect the ending.

The Arks. In this Scenario you start in a narrow ravine with significantly less building room and only 45 citizens. All of these citizens are Engineers however, and to make up for their lack of numbers, they also start with an Automaton. The goal of this Scenario is to protect the Seedling Arks, special greenhouses preserving the seeds of every plant in the world. The plan here was to breed some plant life that could survive in a post-Great Frost world. Unlike the other Scenarios, this one has a secret alternative win condition. A neighboring City called New Manchester is falling apart and needs a bulk order of supplies from your City to survive. You can choose to either ignore New Manchester and focusing only on your own City, abandon the Arks to save New Manchester, or try and save both New Manchester and the Arks at the same time. The biggest challenge this mode presents is the fact that your City's population never increases, so the only way to get more workers is to build Automatons. In fact, this game mode can best be described as "Oops! All Automatons!" But this mode is uniquely challenging in its own right. Because depending on how quickly you find New Manchester, you might not have enough time to send them any supplies at all. When I found them there were only three days left before the Storm came. And even if you do find them in time, you still need to have a good enough industry to fund basically two whole Cities at the same time.

The Refugees. In this game mode, you start with only 43 citizens in a star-shaped canyon, making construction somewhat awkward. But true to its name, in this Scenario dozens of refugees will flock to your City in groups of 15, rapidly expanding your population up to 270. The win condition here changes throughout the Scenario. At first, it's to make sure that at least 250 of those 270 refugees survive for a whole week. When that week is over and you succeed, the game keeps going. Then a second wave of refugees comes to your City in groups of 100 people each. Now that doesn't sound too bad at first. There's just one problem. The second wave of refugees are all rich, upper class nobility while the first wave were all peasants and farmers. Also, the working class straight up stole this Generator site, because this specific Generator was meant for only the upper class elites of the British Empire. So there's a lot of bad blood between the two groups and its up to you to decide what to do with the second wave of refugees. Personally, I found this Scenario to be the easiest of the main four. The weather is at its absolute calmest here with not a single Storm in sight, and the only real challenge is making sure you have enough food and housing for all the refugees. And while I like the story here, a classic struggle between the ruling elite and the working class, the ending is oddly anticlimactic. 

The Fall of Winterhome. This Scenario is by far the most challenging and the most complex out of the main four. Winterhome, canonically, was destroyed before A New Home even began. And in this game mode, you start with a fully constructed City in a crater not unlike the A New Home City, with a population of over 600 citizens. But there's just one problem. The previous Captain of Winterhome was a moronic tyrant whose incompetence nearly destroyed the City before the Scenario even began. You want to know how bad the previous Captain was? He built the City with the most awful layout imaginable, with lots of wasted space and redundant roads. He legalized Child Labor for all jobs despite having a large enough adult population to fill out every job opening available. His tyranny and incompetence got so bad that the people of Winterhome overthrew him, but in a final act of spitefulness, the previous Captain torched over half the City, rendering most of the buildings unusable.

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In Fall of Winterhome. you play as the replacement Captain, who was chosen to lead by the rebels who overthrew your predecessor. And Fall of Winterhome gives you quite possibly the worst start imaginable. Over half the buildings and roads need to be torn down and replaced, over a third of your 600+ citizens are gravely ill and need medical care immediately, and you have no choice but to enforce some of the laws that the previous Captain passed because there's no way to repeal a law once it is in effect. Which means you get Child Labor whether you want it or not. The win condition is to stabilize the City by removing at least 30 ruined buildings, raising Hope to 50% or better, and lowering Discontent to 25% or less. You have one week to accomplish these three tasks. Once you do, the win condition changes once again. As it turns out, the Winterhome Generator is malfunctioning and your Engineers have no way to repair it. It could have been fixed if the problem was handled earlier, but the previous Captain deliberately ignored the problem until it was too severe to solve. In other words, the previous Captain was so incompetent that he turned Winterhome into a ticking time bomb. So now you have to construct the Dreadnought, a giant armored tank which is effectively a City on wheels, and use it to evacuate Winterhome. This process involves producing a metric boat load of steel, coal and rations. And there's also one last issue to worry about. The Dreadnought, once fully constructed, only has room onboard for exactly 500 people. You have more than 600. While the other Scenarios can, hypothetically speaking, be completed without suffering a single casualty, Fall of Winterhome is the only Scenario where people will die no matter what. Even if you stabilize Winterhome, cure the gravely ill of their sicknesses and construct the Dreadnought in time for the evacuation, at least 100 of your citizens will be left behind so the rest can live.

On the Edge. This is one of the two DLC Scenarios, and serves as a direct sequel to A New Home. In this game mode, you don't have a Generator at all. Instead, you control an outpost being funded by the City from A New Home, with your heat coming from a set of Steam Hubs. And because your heat comes from another City entirely, you are the mercy of their Captain's laws. As such, you have to donate a portion of your supplies every day to keep your outpost running. You can also form political alliances with other outposts, which is the only way to get resources that your outpost doesn't have access to. And because your outpost can only produce steel and steam cores, that means making trade deals with a lot of people if you want to survive here. Also, you have the least amount of building room out of all the Scenarios. True to its name, you are building on the edge of a literal cliff. What makes this DLC amusing in hindsight is that it seems to be a proof-of-concept for Frostpunk 2. Both On the Edge and Frostpunk 2 take place multiple years after A New Home, both On the Edge and Frostpunk 2 focus heavily on political alliances, and both On the Edge and Frostpunk 2 feature the establishment of outpost colonies that donate a portion of their own resources to fund the construction of the main City.

The Last Autumn. This DLC is a prequel Scenario to all the others. Taking place before the Great Frost arrives in the Northern Hemisphere, you are tasked with building one of the Generators that became vital to the success of the other Cities. This Scenario radically overhauls the Purpose laws. Instead of Order vs Faith, it's now Engineers vs Workers. Because this is still the 18th-19th century, worker's rights aren't really a thing. So the Generator project is a massive OSHA violation, and you need to choose between legalizing worker rights to make the project safer, or giving more power to the Engineers so the project can be finished in time. And just like with Order and Faith, the further you go into your Purpose, the more amoral and sinister you become. Just for example, the Workers will literally start a communist rebellion if you give them too much power, and the Engineers will gleefully send dozens, possibly hundreds of people to their deaths just to keep the construction project on schedule. Neither side are saints, but they are canonically the only reason the Cities in the other Scenarios can survive at all, since these guys built the Generators in the first place. This is the only game mode where you don't have to worry about temperature, because the Great Frost isn't here yet. As such, coal isn't as important here as it is in the other Scenarios. The win condition here is to finish construction of the Generator, which is done in stages, and make sure that each stage of the project meets a specific deadline. Failure to keep the project on schedule results in you getting fired.

And finally, Endless Mode. Endless Mode has three different campaign options, two in the base game and one in the DLC. These campaigns are called Serenity, Endurance and Builders. In all three campaigns, you can pick the starting location, which not only includes all of the locations from the main six Scenarios, but even three brand new locations not available anywhere else. Those exclusive options are the Flats, which is an open field with tons of building room, in fact this is the single largest location in the game. But resources are further away than normal in the Flats, so building roads is even more important here. Then there's the Rifts, which splits the available space up with bottomless pits that you have to build bridges over. And finally, there's the Crags, which is a somewhat large field with giant rock formations peppering the landscape, and you have to build your City around those rocks. Additionally, you can enable Hazard Events, which cause randomized problems to occur in your City, such as forcing you to spend twice as much steel to build something or temporarily disabling your hothouses. Personally, I'm not a fan of the Hazard Events, and now whenever I play Endless Mode I turn them off. The most interesting thing about Endless Mode is that it gives you an optional quest to collect relics, which are items that were made before the Great Frost came. These relics provide some nice lore that isn't accessible anywhere else in the game.

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Anyway, in Serenity mode,  you start with 105 citizens, most research projects already completed and the weather is significantly calmer than normal. Temperature drops are rarer and the Storm (which happens once every 14 days in Endless) now only lasts a single day instead of a whole week like in A New Home. This mode exists for those that don't care about the "survival" part of the survival strategy game and just want to build an aesthetically pleasing steampunk city in peace. In Endurance mode, you start with 80 citizens, the Storm will last for 2-3 days and will gradually become more frequent each time it arrives, and you have just enough supplies to get your first set of buildings up and running. Basically, if you want to do A New Home again but in a different location and with a hypothetically infinite campaign, Endurance mode is for you. Builders mode gives you 125 citizens and works the same way that The Last Autumn does. You don't have a working Generator in this mode yet, and you have to get the Generator operational before the cold becomes too much to handle. 

The only problem with Endless mode (all three versions) is that it almost all of its challenge comes in the first few weeks, and once you get past those first two or three Storms your City is more or less good to go for the rest of time. Now, all the Scenarios are generally pretty short experiences. It only took me 13 hours to complete A New Home, and another six hours to complete both The Arks and The Refugees. I don't remember how long it took Fall of Winterhome but it couldn't have been longer than ten hours at the most. And that sort of length is perfect for what Frostpunk is trying to do. But the problem with Endless mode is once your City survives long enough to be self-sustaining (producing more coal and rations than the City can use up), there's not much that the game can do to put your City in danger. Sure the Storm will come back, but if you can survive it the first time, you can survive it again. And it would even easier to survive it the second time round because you would have access to better technology by then. There's no traditional enemies to fight against in Frostpunk, the only other people you meet are survivors who are more than happy to join your City. And even then, the game has a hard cap of 790 citizens on Serenity mode or 695 on Endurance and Builders mode. Once your City's population reaches those numbers, other survivors will never appear ever again unless you suffer severe casualties in the near future.  There's no political alliances to be made with other Cities, in fact you just straight up don't find any other Cities in Endless mode. You don't even get a rebellion you have to deal with like in A New Home. And once you run out of research projects, laws to pass or room for construction, there's not much left to do. There's an achievement/trophy you can get if your City manages to survive past Day 100 of Endless mode, and I'd say that's a good stopping point for this game mode because you WILL run out of things to do by then.

In terms of presentation, Frostpunk is one of the best examples of the steampunk aesthetic and is just a very pleasing visual and audio experience in general. The whole game carries itself with a somber, melancholic vibe that wants you to reflect on the nature of the human experience. And I'm a sucker for somber, melancholic worlds in fiction. Anyway, every building has a rustic, vaguely Victorian vibe, but with steam pipes pumping heat in and out everywhere. Even the most advanced machines in the game, like the Automaton or the Hothouse, look gritty and weathered. After all, it's kind of hard to keep your tech clean in the middle of an apocalypse. While the 3D models of the citizens look fairly simple, there's more detailed artwork of said citizens that appears during the story events in any given Scenario. One detail I really like is that if you have multiple buildings of the same type right next to each other, their model is changed to look interconnected with branching hallway extensions. This is most obvious on Workshops and bunkhouses. But it makes those buildings feel more complete in a way. Also, the execution animation that plays if you legalize New Order or New Faith is one of the most creatively cruel methods to kill something I've seen in a video game. Said animation involves the victim being chained up, placed on top of the Generator's exhaust vent, and forced to stand there until the next time the Generator releases steam. The sheer force and heat of the vents basically cooks the victim alive. Positively brutal stuff. And if you max out Discontent while New Order/Faith is in effect, then instead of the usual banishment scene, the Captain is given a taste of their own medicine and executed with this exact method. "Reap what you sow" and all that.

The music and sound effects in Frostpunk are exquisite. The way the ice cracks and reforms as the temperature rises and lowers is crisp. The annual barks of the town crier announcing the start and end of every work shift help set the vibe. And said annual barks change depending on which Purpose you chose, with the Faith version of the town crier sounding like a priest and the Order version sounding like a drill sergeant. If you zoom in on specific structures, you can hear some ambient sounds associated with that structure like church bells or the drunken laughter of the local bar patrons. And of course, we got to talk about The City Must Survive, the closest thing the Frostpunk universe has to a theme song. So imagine. Your City is doing well. You got a surplus of coal and rations, sickness is at an all time low, and the overwhelming majority of your citizens have access to proper heating. Then you see the mother of all blizzards approaching on the horizon. You have seven days to prepare for the Great Storm, and as you rescue the last of the survivors from the frozen wilderness, a chilling realization hits you. Your City is not ready. People will die, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. 

And nothing fills you more desperation and dread than hearing The City Must Survive. That one orchestral song is desperation incarnate. When I think of Frostpunk my first thought is that final week of A New Home with the Great Storm battering down on my City. The buildings shutting down from sheer coldness one by one until only the coal mines and infirmaries remained. The people of my City being sent straight to said infirmaries by the dozens due to rapidly spreading frostbite. Forty Workers sacrificing their lives to keep the coal mines operational in such horrid weather. Families perishing in their own homes as the last of the rations run out. And this song, with violins shrieking like it's the end of the World as my City is crushed beneath -230 degree winds. No other event in any video game, movie or book managed to instill in me such despair. And somehow, my City survived. I fully expected to be wiped out completely by the Storm, but against all odds, 492 of my citizens (out of 603) survived. They were beaten, frostbitten and starving, but they survived. And the violins go silent. There is no triumphant chorus of horns to celebrate your victory. Just a peaceful quiet as the surviving citizens reflect on everything they sacrificed to make it this far. This moment right here is now one of my favorite moments in any video game ever. And The City Must Survive is a key factor in making this finale so memorable.

One last thing about the presentation I want to say. At the end of every Scenario, the game will provide some narration recapping all the major decisions you made. While this narration is on screen, you can see a time lapse of your City being built from the ground up. It's a cool way to show how far your citizens have come since the day they arrived at the Generator site. Even if the ending narration taunts you for every evil law you passed and every amoral decision you made. The only criticism I have of Frostpunk's presentation is that I ran into a minor glitch that caused the screen to be covered in a blank white texture, thus preventing me from being able to actually see anything. Reloading to an earlier save was enough to fix the problem, but be aware that such a glitch could happen in your game.

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Overall, Frostpunk is a somber survival strategy game that succeeds in showing just how soul-crushingly brutal a post apocalyptic setting can be. This game is one of my favorite video games now, and definitely my favorite strategy game. Even if you aren't the biggest fan of strategy games or games along those lines, Frostpunk is an easy game to recommend because it's just a generally high-quality experience. And if you have any interest in steampunk, this is one of the better examples of steampunk in action. So I'd say that Frostpunk gets 5 stars out of 5.

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Stellaris, the strategic space opera simulator. A very complex review

Space. The Final Frontier. In a Galaxy Far, Far Away. Where in the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, the Spice must Flow. You get the idea. Science fiction is a staple of modern entertainment, because there's something fun about speculating how a spacefaring society with technology so advanced it might as well be magic would function, with or without alien life forms. But have you ever thought to yourself, "Gee, I sure would love a needlessly complex strategy game about creating my own sci fi civilization and exploring the cosmos while reenacting my favorite sci fi stories!" Well do I have the game for you.

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Enter Stellaris. Released in 2016, this sci-fi strategy game was developed and published by Paradox Interactive, with the console port being made by Tantalus Media. This is one of the many Grand Strategy games that Paradox specializes in, though the concept of this game is in my opinion an easier sell. Most of Paradox's games are historical fiction, taking place in alternate versions of the distant past. Crusader Kings, for example, is set in Medieval Times, while Hearts of Iron takes place during the World Wars. Stellaris is the odd duck out, taking place in a completely fictional time period, starting roughly 200 years into the future. As such, there's a lot more room for creativity, at least in theory, since you are not bound by historical accuracy. Instead, the goal of Stellaris was to be a love letter to all things science fiction and as such, there are plenty of references to other sci-fi stories sprinkled in all throughout the game.

To be a man in a 2200+ year old society is to live among untold trillions. It is a time to seek out new civilizations and boldly go where no one has gone before. But most importantly, it's the perfect setup for a space opera. And that's basically the entire story of Stellaris. Well, sort of. A big part of this game's appeal is that it features an Emergent Narrative. What that means is that after creating your own civilization (which I will call Empires for the sake of brevity) the story is dictated almost entirely by randomized events and how you choose to deal with them. As well as how you choose to deal with any over Empire that you encounter on your travels. It's a very free-form approach to storytelling, and the result is that it's rare for two or more playthroughs to play out the same way. Though there are a few standard beats. Every civilization starts off isolated and alone in the galaxy, slowly expanding until they contact alien life. Intergalactic superpowers fight, trade and form alliances as the number of unclaimed star systems begins to dwindle and borders begin to take shape. And all civilizations have to deal with a universal threat towards the end that puts the whole galaxy in danger. What happens in between these points is more or less randomized.

But where do you begin with this game? You start at Empire Creation. While you can play as about 20 or so premade Empires, the real core of this game comes from designing your own aliens. Or your own version of Humanity's Future, if you like that sort of thing. And I am letting you know now that this game is DENSE. Paradox games are infamous for their steep learning curves and numerous complexities. And Stellaris is no different. While the tutorial that starts once the campaign begins does help with teaching the player the bare minimum, this is a game that will take more than a little while to get used to. Especially if you prefer more fast-paced, action focused games. This doesn't make Stellaris a bad game, not in the slightest. But its gameplay is meant for a very specific audience, the kind that enjoys solving problems with brains rather than brawn. And the kind of audience that doesn't mind looking up guides on the Internet just to make sense of the convoluted information this game can sometimes throw at you. While I do like games that require you to think and plan ahead like Fire Emblem and X-COM, nothing I have played or reviewed here before has quite as many moving parts as Stellaris. And from what I hear, the rest of Paradox's catalogue boasts a similar level of complexity.

Okay, let's breakdown Empire Creation, since all the important choices start here. Your Empire can be customized in a multitude of ways. Most of it is cosmetic stuff like picking an animated portrait that will represent your aliens/future-humans in some menu screens, or what biome your home planet is, or even designing your own flag. But there are mechanical decisions to be made here, like choosing Authorities and Origins. Authorities are the type of government your civilization uses, whether that be an Imperial Dynasty where the role of leadership is passed down from parent to child in a single family across the generations, or a Democracy where the the leaders are chosen by popularity votes at regular intervals. Origins are basically your Empire's backstory, giving you some nice lore and roleplay potential while also simultaneously changing how the game starts. Some Origins offer really strong bonuses, others exist to add an extra challenge to the campaign to push your management and strategy skills to their limits. For example, the Mechanist Origin allows your Empire to start the game with eight fully operational robots as well as a factory to build even more. The Doomsday Origin will make your home planet explode after 35 (in-game) years, so you have to find a new planet for your people to live on before then or risk your species going completely extinct. But most importantly, there's an option to write/type out a custom biography. This has no effect on gameplay but as an aspiring writer, being able to write custom biographies for fictional civilizations is something that makes me very, very happy.

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But the three most important things to worry about are Traits, Ethics, and Civics. Traits are biological strengths and weaknesses your aliens/future-humans have that make them better or worse at certain tasks. Things like enhanced upper body strength, fast learning minds that can invent new tech sooner than everyone else, or extended lifespans to live longer. However, not all Traits are beneficial. Some might make your citizens have a hard time reproducing, others might make them prone to riots. So I know what you're thinking. "Why would I ever pick Negative Traits!?" Well, you see, every Trait is assigned a point value. Positive Traits cost points while Negative Traits give more points to work with. The idea is that you're supposed to pick one or two weaknesses that you think you can live with so you have enough points to unlock the Positive Traits that you actually want. If you are smart about it, you can turn your weaknesses into a net positive.

Ethics are the next main decision and this will greatly determine the "vibe" of your Empire. Ethics are the moral and societal values that your Empire respects and practices. Ethics come in two variants, Moderate and Fanatic. Much like Traits, they will grant bonuses like increased fire rate for weapons or being able to hire extra diplomats, but they also come with downsides like restricting who or what you can wage war with or restricting your ability to build robots. Normally, you can pick any three Ethics of your choosing so long as they do not contradict each other. For example, your Empire can be Militaristic, Spiritual, and Egalitarian because those Ethics do not contradict each other. But your Empire cannot be both Militaristic and Pacifistic since those two Ethics are opposite to each other. Fanatic Ethics are even stronger than their Moderate counterparts, but you can only pick one Fanatic Ethic and one Moderate Ethic at a time. Fanatic Ethics are basically exaggerated versions of their Moderate counterparts, with everything that Ethic represents being cranked up to eleven. For example, a moderately Pacifist Empire will only fight in war to overthrow tyrannical regimes and replace them with something more humane and ethical. A Fanatically Pacifist Empire won't fight in wars at all. The other Fanatic Ethics follow this pattern of being a more exaggerated version of the Moderate counterpart. But again, the benefits of being Fanatic makes the Empire far stronger at whatever they are Fanatic about. Fanatic Militarist Empires have a whopping 30% fire rate upgrade compared to the Moderate version's 10% as an example. Basically, by making a Fanatic Empire, you are sacrificing the versatility of a third Ethic in exchange for greater specialization. Both are valid ways to play. But I do prefer making Fanatic Empires, but that's because I like seeing big numbers get even bigger.

Finally, Civics. Civics are more specialized bonuses that become available based on which Ethics you chose. These also help form the "vibe" of your Empire. While there are some Civics are available to all Empire types, all of the fun Civics are locked behind certain Ethic combos. For example, the Citizen Service Civic requires your Empire to be both Militaristic and Egalitarian, and it allows you to (potentially) build up a bigger navy than everyone else. The Inward Perfection Civic meanwhile requires you to be both Xenophobic and Pacifistic, and it basically cuts you off from the rest of the galaxy while GREATLY boosting the growth of your Empire's economy and population. The other Civics have similar restrictions and similar benefits. You can pick any combination of two Civics that you want as long as you meet the requirements for both. And finally, you can mix and match Traits, Ethics, and Civics for some very powerful or very wacky combos. Like a democratic society of future-human monks with the Inward Perfection and Agrarian Idle Civics, who are so obsessed with preserving the environment that they developed Traits like Communal and Conservationist that allow them to use even less resources for their day-to-day lives. Or a society of hyper-intelligent but physically weak Fanatically Materialist space rats who use the Technocracy and Meritocratic Civics to not only build robots to do all the hard work for them, but structure their entire society around science and knowledge. Or a group of strong and industrial but unruly and stubborn space dragons who are so Fanatically Militarist they took the Citizen Service Civic and Distinguished Admiralty Civic specifically to make the most dangerous navy the galaxy has ever seen. These three are but a taste of the kind of spacefaring civilization that you can make once you learn how everything works.

Okay, so you got your Empire ready and raring to go. Now we can get to the actual gameplay. Stellaris is a fairly hands-off game. You interact with your Empire mostly through a variety of menus. Because unlike every other game, you are controlling AN ENTIRE CIVILIZATION, not just one character. Because of that, you see everything happen at the macro scale. Time is measured in days, months, and years while mere minutes pass in real life. You spend a good chunk of your time just checking an intergalactic map and watching out for meaningful changes like expanding borders or reports of hostile activity. You can zoom in to individual star systems to see your ships and planets in more detail, but you can't get any closer to the action than that. You can give orders to your fleets and ships, and order construction of various facilities on any planets you own. Planets are quite possibly the most valuable resource in the game. Without a planet to build on, you have nothing to work with. The main challenge of Stellaris revolves are the classic Four Ex's of Paradox games. Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate. If you are not doing any of those four things you are, to be blunt, playing the game wrong. You must send out Science Ships to Explore uncharted star systems and survey desirable planets before building on them. You must use your resources to Expand your reach and grow your power. You must Exploit any natural resources you find so you can continue Exploring and Expanding. And if anything gets in your way, you must Exterminate the threat before it can cause any lasting damage to your Empire. All Paradox games, regardless of setting or time period, live and die by the Four Ex's.

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Like I said earlier, there are random events that will change the history of your Empire. Maybe your citizens will track down a temple idolizing a long-forgotten god which causes a spiritual awakening among the people. Maybe your science team discovers an ancient, hyper-advanced ancestor and they invent new technology by reverse-engineering the relics left by their forebears. Maybe your king/queen/president got in contact with a Lovecraftian monstrosity that promises unfathomable power in exchange for servitude. All these are a few examples of the random events that can occur in your playthrough. But because of this, how enjoyable your playthrough's story will be is a coin flip. Either you get just the right combination of random events to make a space opera so epic it would get George Lucas and Gene Rodenberry themselves to nod in approval, or you might get eaten by a Devouring Swarm before your Empire has a chance to do anything cool. It depends both on luck and what difficulty you are playing on. And credit where credit's due, Stellaris has dozens of ways of customizing the game in its options, including no less than seven main difficulty options. That said, the difficulty does not dictate where rival Empires start on the intergalactic map, nor does it dictate how aggressive they are. Instead, all difficulty does is determine what kind of economic bonuses an enemy Empire gets at the start of a campaign. An NPC Empire will never attack or antagonize you if your military is equal to or stronger than theirs. Because of this, even Pacifistic Empires still benefit from having a a well-built navy even if they don't plan on using it. The mere presence of a navy will deter would be enemies from attacking. Additionally, you can negotiate with other Empires and form alliances and peace treaties with them.

But rival Empires are not the only dangers in the galaxy. So let's talk about the Crisis Events. Crisis Events are special events that only happen once the campaign reaches certain years. You can change which years it happens in the options menu, but once a campaign starts, the Crisis Years are locked in and cannot be changed unless you start a new campaign from scratch. Anyway, when a Crisis Event occurs, a violently hostile alien will appear somewhere in the galaxy and attack all Empires indiscriminately. What kind of alien is random by default, though again, you can pick something specific from the options menu. These range from space pirate clans banding together to tear down galactic society at large, to living bioweapons that devour all who stand in their path, to a classic Terminator style AI uprising. Crisis Events are incredibly strong, and they exist as a "stress test" for your Empire. If your Empire can survive the Crisis Events, your Empire can survive anything. In fact, there's an entire difficulty slider that exists for no reason than to increase or decrease the power of the Crisis Events. At max strength, Crisis Events can become over 25 times more powerful than normal. If you wish to defeat a 25x Crisis Event, you need nothing short of a perfectly optimized Empire and a foolproof plan that you spent the whole campaign carefully laying out. Anything less will result in failure. Of course, you could turn the Crisis strength down to give your less-than-perfect Empire a fighting chance.

There are also Fallen Empires. Fallen Empires are special Empires that start the game in control of a small area in the galaxy, usually about only five or six star systems. But they also start the campaign with a comically overpowered navy that will curb stomp anyone who angers the Fallen. The Fallen themselves are all themed around the main Ethics. Unlike Crisis Events, who only appear later on in a campaign, the Fallen are present from day one. The only reason the Fallen don't immediately wipe out the other Empires is because they literally cannot expand their borders outside their starting zone. Nor can they replace any casualties should they encounter the rare opponent that can wound them. At least, not until the Fallen Awaken. When a Fallen Empire Awakens, they will start rapidly expanding their borders in all directions and reinforcing their already fearsome fleets. Depending on their Ethics, the Awakened will either give a chance to join them as a vassal state willingly or wipe your Empire off the star charts. The good news is that a Fallen Empire can only Awaken in very rare circumstances. Like if a Crisis Event happens and the Fallen haven't Awakened already, they will Awaken to go fight the Crisis. If there are multiple Fallen Empires in the same galaxy with opposing Ethics, a special event called the War In Heaven will occur where both Empires Awaken at the same time and all the "normal" Empires have to either pick a side in the War or risk getting caught in the cross fire. While it is possible to fight off both sides of the War In Heaven as a neutral party, it is a difficult undertaking, perhaps even more so than fending off a Crisis Event. Again, good planning and optimization is required to survive the War In Heaven.

But how does one defeat such powerful foes? Well you need a strong navy. While ground battles exist in Stellaris, they don't happen anywhere nearly as often as space battles do. And to be honest, the ground battles are probably the weakest part of the game, since it's a fairly barebones system (at the time of writing) that can be easily avoided. And going back to the Four Ex's, you use the resources you Exploited to build warships so you can Exterminate your enemies so you can continue to Explore and Expand in peace. At the start of the campaign the only combat-capable ship type you can build is the humble Corvette. All ships can be outfitted with various weapons such as plasma cannons, railguns, flamethrowers and even deployable drone fighters. But you have to invent that technology before you can use it, so initially your Empire's Corvettes are all armed with nothing more than dinky little lasers. You invent new tech by having a named Scientist lead a research project, with the research options being randomized (noticing a trend?). Research progresses automatically unless the Scientist leading the research project dies, in which case you need to hire a new Scientist to continue the research. 

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Once research is finished, your Empire can now use the newly invented tech to give your warships a much needed power boost, and that Scientist can be given a new project to work on in the meantime. While all the different weapons provide unique strategies and fighting styles, generally speaking, you can win most battles by having either bigger guns or more ships than your opponent. This ties in to Fleet Power, a little number that conveniently shows at a glance the combined power of every warship in that fleet. Unless the enemy has built a fleet designed entirely to counter yours, if your Fleet Power is a bigger number you will win the battle. It's probably the simplest thing in this very complicated game. And while it is true that your Fleet Power will gradually lower as your ships take damage and suffer casualties, you can easily repair and replace damaged and destroyed ships so long as you are not in combat. And while it might be tempting to pour all of your resources into your naval fleets the first chance you get, this is actually a bad idea because you have to balance your economy and not drive yourself bankrupt by overinvesting. Instead, you want to build your navy up over time. Like, once every in-game year (roughly equal to ten real life minutes) you can get away with adding three or four ships to your navy. Three or four dozen ships a year is an unrealistic goal, at least with how the in-game economy works.

But you cannot just attack any other Empire without some kind of cause. This is the Casus Belli system. Basically, if you want to go to war with another Empire, you need to give a reason why. The reason also changes the win condition and end result. For example, Liberation Wars are fought to change a rival Empire's Ethics to match the winner's, thus turning them into a potential ally, while Domination Wars are fought to expand the winner's borders by forcibly taking control of the losing Empire's star systems.  The only time you don't need a Casus Belli to wage war is if you have a Civic that lets you ignore the whole system like Devouring Swarm or Fanatical Purifiers. Or if the opponent in question is a Crisis Event or the War In Heaven. Or if your opponent has one of the aforementioned Civics that ignore Casus Bellis. But anyway, once the war starts, you are free to invade your enemies' territory and attack their ships and stations. There is a timer system called War Exhaustion that mostly exists so you can't keep the war going forever. Basically, as both you and the rival Empire take casualties, War Exhaustion for both sides builds up. Once it reaches a certain threshold, you can either settle for a truce or claim absolute victory, based on how well you did in the war. The only criticism I have of the War Exhaustion system is that makes evasive, hit-and-run style navies far more powerful than defensive "stand your ground!" style navies. Because War Exhaustion doesn't build up when you or your enemies retreat from battle, only when your ships and stations are completely destroyed. 

But speaking of planets and economy, let's talk resources. Resources come in five basic varieties. Food, Minerals, Energy, Alloys and Consumer Goods. Food is self-explanatory. It's the stuff to keep your Empire from starving. Energy is both electricity and money. Everything has a monthly upkeep cost of at least one point of Energy, so you need to keep this somewhat high so you don't go bankrupt. Minerals are raw materials for construction. Minerals can be converted into any other resource, and most early construction projects require a few hundred of them on hand. This is probably the most common resource in the game. Alloys are refined metals, needed to build space ships, space stations and (eventually) robots. This is the rarest and most valuable resource. Consumer Goods are luxury products for civilians. Things like books, movies, video games, sports cars, and cell phones. Things that they technically don't need but provide entertainment. This is probably the least useful resource unless you explicitly plan on playing a merchant style Empire that resolves everything with trade deals as opposed to violence (which is a valid way to play the game). Because Consumer Goods only really exists to keep your citizens happy. And happy citizens won't want to start a rebellion to overthrow you. So even though they aren't as important as the other four, it's still worth investing into Consumer Goods. But no matter what, you need to find a habitable planet to build facilities to produce these resources. Farms for Food, Power Plants for Energy, Mines for Minerals, etc. Once you decide what to build, it is again, automatic. Only this time you don't need to have a named character lead the project. You can hire a Governor to watch over that planet (or several planets at once), and while they might speed up the process, they aren't required. Governors mostly exist to provide boosts for the entire planet so long as they remain in office. These boosts are themed around the Governor's personality. Like a Governor with a strong sense of justice will reduce crime on any planet under his jurisdiction while a Governor with a love for agriculture will increase Food production for any Farms on that planet.

There are also advanced resources like Dark Matter and Exotic Gases that are so volatile that your Empire needs to invent new tech just to be able to collect or produce them in the first place. These advanced resources aren't as essential to your Empire's development, but they do let you build bigger and more dangerous weapons, which makes your warships better combatants, which lets you Exterminate your enemies and so and so forth. You should understand how everything comes back to the Four Ex's by now. Anyway, one last important resource are Pops. Pops is the catch all term for any citizen living in your Empire, although I heard somewhere that one Pop is supposed to represent hundreds of people as one unit, because you know, macro scale space game. Pops are needed to work all the jobs to produce every resource mentioned earlier. Pops also have their own needs. They need Food to not starve, they are paid in Energy, and they indulge in Consumer Goods. They also need Housing to rest at night and Amenities to keep them happy. If their needs are not met they might start a rebellion. Which means setting some resources aside to tend to your people's needs, which is yet another reason why overinvesting in your navy is a bad idea. Because if you pour all of your resources into the navy, you won't have anything left to tend to your people. It's all about finding that economic balance.

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The final two "resources" we need to talk about are Influence and Unity. Which are more like concepts that build up over time than something physical but that's neither here nor there. Influence is a measure of your political sway. You can spend Influence to Expand your borders by claiming to be the legal owner of a star system. You can spend Influence to give your entire Empire temporary power boosts called Edicts (which do things like boost resource production or shorten construction time). And you can spend Influence doing manipulative, politician type shenanigans. But how do you get Influence? Much like in real life, sci-fi civilizations are not one dimensional clichés, at least when written well. There will almost always be smaller political Factions within your Empire who embody the main Ethics. While the first Factions to appear in your Empire will be the ones whose Ethics are already supported, if the campaign goes on long enough you'll have at least one Faction per Ethic. Making the Factions happy by legalizing their desired policies will earn you Influence. Displeasing the Factions by outlawing their desired policies will halt your Influence gain, though to my knowledge they can't take it away forcibly. At least, I've never seen Influence go into the negatives before, and I put well over 100 hours into this game across four different campaigns. But no matter what, as long as you have more satisfied Factions than displeased Factions, you can still get Influence.

Unity represents your Empire's cultural development and how, well, united your people are. This resource builds up automatically at all times, never going down under any circumstances. Once it reaches a threshold, you will be allowed to unlock a Tradition, which are basically the Influence Edicts but substantially stronger and once chosen, a Tradition will work for the entire rest of the campaign. The Traditions are divided into sets of five all built around a theme. Domination, Expansion, Harmony, Diplomacy, Supremacy and Discovery. If you unlock every Tradition in a set you unlock an Ascension. Ascensions are upgrades that are even stronger than Traditions, though you can only have up to eight per campaign. And when I say that Ascensions are strong, I mean they are ABSURD. These include things like becoming so advanced at robotics your Empire's species uploads their souls into robotic shells so they can live forever, meaning your Scientists and Governors will never die again. Or your Empire's leaders declaring themselves to be the Guardians of the Galaxy, thus making all of your Empire's weaponry deal double damage against Crisis Events. But this brings us to my biggest complaint with Stellaris, and it's something that Paradox and Tantalus have acknowledged themselves, so this is a pretty big deal.

There are two words that will strike fear into the hearts of any seasoned Stellaris fan; Xeno Compatibility. This Ascension right here is responsible for a lot of behind the scenes technical difficulties. What Xeno Compatibility does is it allows your Empire's species to become able to mate and reproduce with any other alien species, thus creating hybrid citizens. Which at first glance doesn't sound that bad, especially for the Mass Effect crowd. The problem here is that the game doesn't put a hard "stop" on how far Xeno Compatibility goes, so it can very easily create hybrids of hybrids, and then make hybrids out of those hybrids, ad infinitum. The result is that the game literally cannot keep up with the infinite hybrids being created by a Xeno Compatible Empire, resulting in frame rate drops or even crashes. This got so bad that in a free update, Paradox added a feature to the options menu that straight up disables Xeno Compatibility and prevents it from even showing up in the Ascension list. Honestly, what I would have done, speaking as someone who never made a video game before but knows how challenging the experience can be, is simply make Xeno Compatibility a massive permanent boost to Pop reproduction speed. Like 50% or even 100%. Just have the hybrid stuff be flavor text. I feel like that one change would make Xeno Compatibility actually usable while still allowing for "hybrids" in your Empire.

And now that I got my gripes with Xeno Compatibility out of the way, let's talk DLC. The other thing Paradox games are known is a ludicrous amount of post-launch support. For better and for worse, most of the post-launch support tends to be in the form of paid expansions that cost additional money (between $5 to $20). And again, Stellaris is no different. At the time of writing there are 12 main expansions that radically alter the game by adding new Civics, new Origins, new structures and ship types, new space creature bosses called Leviathans that your navy can fight, and a bunch of other things you would expect from you average space opera. And also a ton of cosmetic DLC adding new portraits to customize the appearance of your aliens. Is the DLC worth buying? Maybe. I'm not in charge of how you spend your money. But me personally, cosmetic DLC doesn't excite me personally, since I would rather have an expansion that completely transforms the experience than a new look that feels the same to play. That being said, the only DLC that I going to tell you to pick up, if you choose to get this game, is Utopia (which allows you to build giant space stations called Megastructures as well as the option to make your Empire's species a Tyranid/Zerg style hive mind) and Leviathans (which adds the aforementioned bosses). Without those two DLC packs, playing Stellaris feels like playing the demo of a game and not the full experience. Keep in mind that the version I played was just the Deluxe Edition, which comes with Utopia, Leviathans and the Plantoids portrait pack for no extra cost. I don't have any of the other expansions. 

But trust me, Stellaris with the DLC packs is a completely different beast from the vanilla experience. The Apocalypse pack adds the ability to build the Colossus, which is literally just your Empire's own version of the Death Star from Star Wars. Federations has an overhauled diplomacy system that lets you rule the galaxy with the power of friendship and Jolly Cooperation, and allows you do a lot more with peaceful alliances. Nemesis lets you choose to literally Become the Crisis and become a threat to the galaxy so dangerous all of the Empires in the galaxy (including the actual Crisis Events) will team up to stop your evil plans. Synthetic Dawn adds in a metric boat load of content for robot lovers, including the option to make your Empire start as a species of completely mechanical androids. Toxoids is a nice middle ground between a cosmetic pack (adding some poison and pollution themed portraits) while also adding thematically appropriate game content like two new Origins and a ton of toxin-themed Civics and Traits. Megacorps allows you to turn your Empire into what can best be described as Space Amazon and lets you build major businesses on any planet in the galaxy, if it belongs to another Empire entirely. This is both the best and worst thing about Stellaris. The fact that the game is still receiving post-launch support eight years later is impressive. But at the same time, buying absolutely every DLC available is akin to buying a whole new game entirely. So if you are gaming on a budget, only buy the DLC if it has something that you genuinely feel would make the whole game better. I personally consider the portrait packs to be fairly anticlimactic, since most of the changes are mostly cosmetic. The more recent portrait packs have made an effort to include more mechanical changes like new Traits, Origins and Civics, so there's that.

The final gameplay thing that is important to note is that Stellaris does have an optional multiplayer mode, with up to 32 players can each take control of an Empire and meddle in strategies and alliances far more nuanced than what can be done in single-player. In this game mode, real people effectively replace all the NPC Empires. And very generously, only the host of the server needs to own a DLC pack for it to function. As long as the host owns something like Utopia or Federations or Apocalypse or any of the other DLC packs, any other player on that server can access the content those expansions have for free. This is, in a way, the closest thing Stellaris has to a "Try Before you Buy" system. So once again, the power of friendship and Jolly Cooperation can save the day. Or at least, a few dollars from your wallet. I haven't messed with multiplayer that much myself.

In terms of presentation, Stellaris is good for what it's trying to do. This game is, as stated many times, played on a macro scale. You will never get a close look at your cities or citizens. Your named leaders are portrayed by 2D portraits with one or two simple looping animations. But the stars and planets themselves look good. Every time you get a report of a random event, you also get some nice artwork that provides a visual aid, and the artwork is generally pretty good. The different alien portraits are all divided into different taxonomies, like Mammals and Avians. Most of the portraits generally have a good variety to them. There are some portraits that are literally just anthropomorphic animals like foxes or geckos, or humans with a weird thing on their head. But then you have some that look truly alien, like an Avian that looks more like a feathered Christmas tree than an actual bird, or a Fungoid "parasite" that has attached itself to a different alien entirely. Even with just the base game, there's a lot of options for making almost any kind of alien you can imagine. Keep in mind, however, that most of the game is spent looking at the galactic map. And depending on how each Empire turns out in 

In terms of sound, again, the game is good for what it's trying to do. The music is good background noise, but I never felt like listening to the music by itself. The sound effects are better, with a set of recognizable beeps and tunes notifying of of anything noteworthy. There is almost no voice acting whatsoever, with the only voiced dialogue coming from the Advisor, a character that teaches you the basics during the tutorial, while also informing you of import events like war declarations or the completion of research projects. The default Advisor voice is basically a stereotypical British butler voice, with a robotic filter on top of it. The other Advisor voices are locked behind the Synthetic Dawn expansion as well as a few portrait packs such as Necroids and Toxoids. All of these voices are based on the main Ethics and Civics, with a few outliers like the Diplomat and Soldier voices not being based anything in particular. A few favorites of mine are the Cyberpunk, the Necroid, the Xenophile and the Technocrat. The Cyberpunk voice is a walking (or rather, talking) reference to Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk series, complete with using fictional slang words like "Preem" and "Frag." The Necroid voice sounds ethereal, sinister and oddly seductive. Which works well for Empires that are trying to be aesthetically creepy or menacing. The Xenophile voice sounds like she's just happy to be of service and is by far the friendliest voice available. The Technocrat voice sounds like a cold and pragmatic scientist willing to do anything he can to unlock the secrets of the universe, consequences be damned. Which works very well for a more morally questionable Empire that focuses primarily on technology. Also, the Technocrat has by far one of the coolest one-liners when you declare war on an opposing Empire. "We shall cure them of their ignorance." The delivery is, as the saying goes, peak cinema. 

So overall, Stellaris is a lot of fun once you learn how to play it properly. The hardest part is sticking with the game long enough to get to that point. Again, there's no shame in looking up guides and walkthroughs just to understand the many moving parts of a Paradox game. That being said, this game is heavily reliant on DLC expansion for most of its features. Stellaris by itself feels like a demo for another, better game without DLC. So if you want to get this game, do yourself a favor and get at least Utopia and Leviathans. Those two expansions add enough content to make the game worth playing at least once. The other DLCs add to the experience, yes, but they don't feel as important as those first two. So this game gets an unusual rating. Stellaris with no DLC gets a 3 out of 5 stars. It's competent, but rather bland due to a lack of actual content to engage with. But with DLC, Stellaris goes up to a 4 stars out of 5. It would be 5 stars if it weren't for the fact that buying every single DLC ever released would cost just as much money, possibly even more so than the game itself.  The good news is that Paradox often puts discounts and sales on some of the more popular expansions, such as Federations and Nemesis. But this is definitely one of those games where you need to spend more than the initial fee to get the full experience, and that can and will be a turn off for anyone trying to enjoy the video gaming hobby while on a budget. 

Stellaris is owned by Paradox Interactive. I have not created any of the images used in this review. Please support the original creators.