Monster Hunter: Legends of the Guild

I love the Monster hunter game series.  For those who have no idea what that is, it's a game where you hunt monsters in a low magic fantasy setting, originally on the Play station series of consoles, and then Nintendo consoles, and now PC, finally.  It is mainly a Japanese game series, but they release some across the world as well, now much more frequently then in the past.

I will go on about Monster Hunter games once I review an actual game of the series, for now, this is Monster Hunter: Legends of the guild, a Netflix movie.

Hold up.  Why does that girl have butterfly wings.

This movie relies heavily on the fact that you've played Monster Hunter 4, and Monster hunter World.  Or at least a Monster Hunter game recently.  I made my mother watched this film with me I was so excited.  She was just left confused.

This movie also moves fast, both because it's only 60 minutes long, and the 'camera' moves too fast in fight scenes.  This is a problem even for me, who is young and used to fast moving cameras.  The fact that they're trying to cram and entire 2 hour movie into an hour is also a problem.  As you can see from the poster, there's six main characters in the movie.  All of them have a past and backstory.  All of them blurt it out in about a minute, because they don't have time to properly tell it.

If the film had been 30 minutes longer, it would've improved it greatly.  On the other hand, 60 minutes means I didn't have to stay long or suffer from Aidan, the main character with the weirdly floofy hair.  He is beyond annoying.  On top of that, he keeps making puns with monster names, that only Monster Hunter players would know, thus further isolating my poor mother into the confusion corner.

The plot involves Aidans village, who happens to be in the path of a migrating Elder Dragon on the mysterious Elder Crossing(A phenomenon that is investigated and solved in Monster Hunter World).  They of course refuse to flee, and he manages to convince the Ace Hunter, Julian, to help him and his village fight the elder dragon making a bee line for a land across the sea, no matter how many villages there are in its way.  The plot is basic, but it works for what this is and in the time frame.  For SOME reason, they also tell the story as a a story told by Aidan to the hunters on their way to the New World to investigate the Elder Crossing.  This adds more confusion to non-monster hunter gamers, and makes the movie ten minutes shorter to explain or develop characters.

For those of you who play monster hunter, the monster is a Lunastra, the female version of the elder dragon Teostra, who we just call Toaster for short.  While I'm on this, despite calling them dragons, they are not in fact, dragons.  Lunastra and Teostra are based more on lions then reptiles  So that further brought my mother to the confusion cliff.

But, the monsters and graphics and animations of the movie fit the Monster Hunter games -perfectly-.  Sure, it's cartoony, and humans can somehow jump twice their height and do incredible feats despite being human and not Olympic athletes.  They even included a Felyne from the games!  Who is the only 'good' character of the entire film, because he's actually funny.

While I was more disappointed of this film then the Live Action Monster Hunter film, I did enjoy it more.  I'd give it three stars as a Monster Hunter lover, maybe 3.5

Either way, I hope to review the live action  monster hunter film soon.  See you next time, peeps.

Last Chance To See

 Douglas Adams might very well have been the most amusing man in history.  I'm sure people who read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy would agree, but I never have.  Sure, I've seen the BBC TV series a decade or more ago, but I barely remember it.  I mostly read non-fiction nowadays, due to crippling anxiety that makes me reading fiction a nightmare of emotions(don't ask for reason or logic in this, anxiety answers to no one).  Luckily, I recently found out Douglas Adams wrote a book of non-fiction where he toured the world for the most endangered animals at the time, in 1985 and 1988, and wrote about his experiences.  This is Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine.

Here be Dragons...and flightless parrots, dolphins, and a penguin

It should be noted Mark Carwardine is the biologist who travels with Douglas Adams.  Adams job is, as he puts it, is to know as little as possible about zoology and animals, and then write about them, a job which he is well qualified for.  

It should also be noted that the book I got was from the library, and its cover looked nothing like the above.  It had a simple green background, Douglas Adams name at the top in huge golden letters, four pictures of animals in the middle, small picture s at then, and then the title, Last Chance to see in also golden letters.  It looks like an extremely cheap cover, unlike the one above which looks expensive.

The books back describes basically what I already said, with bits of other reviews saying how good it is.  

The book is wonderful, even if at times the subject matter gets depressing and serious, Adams never seems to, always with a quip or joke to say about it.  While most of the trips are detailed enough to my liking, the starting chapter, about Madagascar's aye aye lemur, is extremely short, but is mostly used as a jumping off point for why Adams is doing this.  While Adams was the one who had the idea for the trip, Marks knowledge of endangered wildlife and the original trip to Madagascar is what gave him the idea.  

It should be noted that I think the Madagascar trip was supposed to be a one off, I believe, though I have conflicting info on that thanks for the internet.  They saw the Aye-aye, the Komodo dragon, Mountain Gorillas, the northern white rhinos, the Kakapo of new Zealand, the blind river dolphins of china, and some of the worlds rarest birds on the planet in Mauritius, as well as the Rodriguez fruit bat.  While they also visited the Amazonian Manatee, and the Juan Fernandez Fur seal, Douglas did not write about them in his book, but he did talk about them on the BBC radio show of the same name, I beleive.

While I don't want to spoil the book by telling you everything that happened in it, I will list some of my favorite interactions and scenes from it.  The interaction with the so stereotypical it hurt German backpackers/tourists  had me laughing a lot.  The Land rover hi-jinks (read: Near death experiences) in Mauritius was also put in an extremely amusing way.  The driver would look directly at you and away from the road when asking questions, and would not look back until you answered.  It was certainly a way to get quick and snappy answers.

I loved the book deeply, and it's only 200 pages, so its a quick read for people without anxiety.  There is also a 2009 documentary TV show where a friend of Adams, Stephen Fry, and Mark go back to some of the species they visited to see how they're doing, and I plan to watch that.  Unfortunately, not all of the species in the book are alive anymore, or at least are widely considered extinct.

While depressing subject matter, Douglas Adams manages to keep a smile on the readers face while enjoying his book.  I also felt that Douglas Adams shared many of my views on life and society.  I felt we could've gotten along, and I am sad that he died at the age of under 50.

Either way, if you like animals, if you like humor, or even just Douglas Adams, definitely pick this up.

Wildermyth

I have never encountered a game like Wildermyth.  Sure, on the surface it doesn't seem unique.  It's a game that describes itself as a party based procedural storytelling RPG with turn based combat.   So, fantasy X Com in terms of gameplay in a choose your own adventure story.  That doesn't sound like something truly incredible.  Something I'd love and buy, but, not one that would quickly become my favorite game.

But the descriptions above do not do it justice.  Wildermyth is a character building and myth making game.  Each randomly made character feels, not like a random name or even just a bunch of numbered traits, but a real character of their own.  But enough about that, let's get into the details.

First off, the graphics while easy to run on my non-gaming laptop, are fantastic.  They look like paper cut outs, in a great way.  They really come to life in the comic panels that act as cut scenes, and when in the tabletop like battles, where they do look like paper cut outs, and they hop around the board like an invisible hand just picked them up.  It's fantastic.

Whoa, guy in the middle must be a red bull addict.

There's no voice acting in this game, but the music, while good, is not great.  I'll admit I played part of the game with music off, so, yeah.

Anyway, at launch and the time of this writing, Wildermyth has five story campaigns in it.  This does include the generic three and five chapter campaigns, and while I hate to call them story less, they don't have an over arching story.  Each of the main story campaigns is themed around a main faction of evil monsters, and dear god, let me talk about the monsters.

I won't spoil anything here, but there are no generic undead, dragons, elves or vampires here.  No, instead we have the Gorgons, both serpentine, tentacled undersea creatures and horrifying nature corruption, the Morthagi, ancient clockwork machines that use body parts to create more of themselves, the Deepists, a cult of humans and creatures from deep below ground, the Thrixl, strange dragon/insects from another realm, and the Drauven, a race of earth dragons, that are more like a cross between Dwarves and dragons then pure dragons.  

The enemy factions are at the very least different then most other fantasy, and it could've been so easy to just flow into the mold of most fantasy for Wildermyth.  I'm so glad they didn't, and each enemy unit is a joy to look at and fight.  

But I haven't even talked about the characters yet.  Mechanically, a character is just a made up name, a class, which sometimes/usually you get to choose, and a set of numbers ranging from 1 to 100 for a set of personality traits, like Greedy, Leader, Hothead, and Intellectual.  But the comic like cut scenes have some characters say things differently depending on the personality traits, and different roles in story and events.  

I could continue talking about the mechanics of this, but instead I'll introduce you to Zarnoc, my aloof hothead and my fourth hero I created, counting the first three you make in any adventure.  He's appeared in two campaigns, and was always the first to do what needed to be done.  In the campaign that focused on the Gorgons, this usually meant going around killing anything that even smelled like corruption.  When the other party members held him back from doing so, usually this ended in disaster, so after that they let him have his way.  In the second campaign, he was mortally wounded by a boss controlling a Morthagi factory, and instead of being a COWARD and sneaking away to fight another day, he ripped that boss a new one!  And, died in the process.  I cried a little, it's true, when this happened

This is an example of what kind of character and how attached you can get, in the game of Wildermyth.  Also, this is  a showcase of taking one character and putting them in another campaign, turning them into a legacy character.  Legacy characters are required for some campaigns, and you can recruit legacy characters in campaigns instead of random peasants.  Legacy characters are characters who've survived one campaign in the past, and you saved them to become a legacy character to appear as a playable character in another campaign, albeit a younger one so they don't instantly die or retire from old age.

I see paper doll people...and they are fantastic!

On top of this, characters get into relationships, either on ones you choose, or via the luck of Random Number Generators, or the RNG god.  There's rivalry, friendship, and of course, romance.  And yes, gay is an option for romance sometimes.

While the storytelling potential of Wildermyth is god damn fantastic, what makes it even better is that if you don't care about storytelling (Get out of my blog, damn you), everything gives a boost to combat in some way.  Rivalry, for example, gives a high chance to 'stunt' or critical hit an enemy if your rival critical hits before you do.  Pets, which are additions to characters and not separate entities, give some extra damage or defense, and some events can physically transform your character, and you can choose how far the transformation takes and what abilities they get.

While I only played two campaigns of Wildermyth, both story ones, I feel like I got a good handle on the systems and can review it.  I was expecting the stories to be bland and generic and just be 'you hero, monsters bad, you kill!' and while this is true of the first one, the second one I played is not that case at all.  I won't spoil it, but it actually made me think about a topic that most storytellers make you think is pure evil.

Wildermyth is amazing. I will continue playing it probably until I reach the last of the story campaigns, if not longer.  It definitely earned a 5/5 stars from me.  It feels less like a video game and more like an storyteller telling you a story, or a tabletop RPG Dungeon Master letting you play with them.  In fact, it feels more like a tabletop game to me then most tabletop games converted to video games do.

Anyway, finally finished a review, will have a few more possibly -book- related reviews in the future.  Hopefully.

Jurassic World: Evolution

I love dinosaurs.  I mean, doesn't every little kid like dinosaurs?  I just never stopped loving dinosaurs and really animals in general, and I'm here still loving them.  I bet there's one franchise that really put dinosaurs into peoples minds...Jurassic Park.

Ah yeah!  Dinosaurs, here we go!

Do I even need to say anything?  I mean, it's -Jurassic- -park-.  THE ultimate science gone wrong, dinosaurs on big screens, lawyers getting eaten movie.  But I'm not here to review Jurassic park the film.

No, I'm here to talk about the Jurassic WORLD franchise and movies.  Which is....uh...well...okay, I've never seen them.  I stopped watching the Jurassic park films after Jurassic park three, which I liked but I was only a teenager at the time, so my opinion now might be quite different.

But as far as I can tell from what little I've seen and know about them, they're basically the original Jurassic Park film done over again, but worse.  I mean, the movie Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, ends with several hundred dinosaurs escaping into the world, and Malcolm from the original Jurassic Park just...showing up at the US senate saying it's a 'Neo-Jurassic' period now as dinosaurs now live with man kind.

Do I really need to point out the flaws in that?  I do?  Do I have to?  Damn it...fine.  One, all dinosaurs were female in the original film, right?  Sure, they got around that, but in the book at least, the 'disaster' of Jurassic Park was caused because everything that could go wrong, even if it was a less then one percent change of going wrong, went wrong at precisely the right time to make the disaster work.    In Jurassic World did they just...let all the dinosaurs breed whatever?  That seems like an incredibly dumb thing to do.  Two: The dinosaurs were made up of all separate species, so, the chances of a dinosaur even finding fellow dino of the same species are low.  three: They're all in a very small area, just, I don't know, bomb the area if your panicking about dinosaurs surviving in modern day.  And don't get me started on diseases affecting them, along with the whole lack of wilderness to survive on!

...Anyway!  I think that says a lot about my opinion about later Jurassic Park films.  Despite this, way back in or after 2003 I played the game Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis, which is a park builder where you remake Jurassic park.  I loved it, and though I own the disc still, I am unsure if it will run on windows 10.  But in 2018, another game came out, Jurassic World: Evolution.  And you better believe I bought that up as soon as possible.

Not again!

Taking place after the Original Jurassic World, but before Fallen Kingdom, you are tasked with building dinosaur parks across the Five Deaths, a fictional island chain in Costa Rico, or, off the coast of the country, rather.  

There are three major DLCS that add new gameplay to the game, and more that just add new dinosaurs, but, I don't own any of the DLC, so I will just talk about the base game.  

The base campaign starts off with Ian Malcolm complaining about life, you, and dinosaurs.   I'm not sure why Jeff Goldblum is here, but the character of Malcolm seems to be here just to tell you this is an incredibly bad idea.  The campaign is divided into five or six island locations to build parks in.  The reason it's five or six is because one was originally the only sandbox island you could play without worrying about money, but a later update made it so once you reached 4 stars out of five with any island you unlocked sandbox mode for that island.

Frontier, the game developers behind this game, apparently had 100 or so developers working on this game.  That does not seem like much, but I fully admit to not knowing how many people normally work on video games.  They also released updates after the games release, adding the above mentioned sandbox modes, challenge modes to reach 5 stars in the shortest amount of time, and other features.

I won't hide the fact that I admire and like Frontier, they make good games that allow a lot of sandbox creativity and freedom.  Unfortunately this is not one of them.

let's talk about the dinosaurs first.  You start off with one viable genome of a dino, and can send expedition teams to fossil sites to get more fossils to get more DNA so that one that's at or above 50% genome can be made into a living creature.  Annoyingly, you don't know what the creatures habits are aside from meat or plant eating until you make the first dino, so it's entirely possible to put in a forest loving dino with one that hates forests.

The dinosaur stats are put into 2 categories, health and comfort.  Health is put into thirst and hunger, self explanatory.  Comfort is more complex, divided into wetlands, grasslands, forests, population, and social need.  Wetlands means how much water is in the exhibit, grasslands is how much space -total- is in the exhibit, forests is how many trees there are, and social is how many animals of the same kind there are, and population is how many animals there are total. 

While it sounds confusing, it's actually too simple.  There's no difference in most dinosaurs aside form some like forests, some like open fields, some need to have one or two others of its kind, and some need to be alone.  There's no enrichment options, and when the game was released, no option to manually place trees and rocks, though there is now.  I fully admit that calling the need for total space, 'grassland'  is annoying.  And none of this is explained in the games very meager, and split up, tutorial.

Now onto the second most important thing in the game, the guests which...don't technically exist.  See, instead of making each guest a entity in the game, with needs and desires and money to spend, instead they focus on each gust building, hotels or viewing stations, needing certain buildings near it, food places, gift shops, restrooms, stuff like that.  While I fully admit this is a novel and new way to model guests in park games, I don't like it.  So I'm old fashioned.

 Another important aspect of the game is the Divisions. They are Entertainment, Science, and Security, and all three want your attention and to be number one in your inbox.  For some reason, doing a quest for one Division, means the other two now hate you, and will actually sabotage your park because they're having a temper tantrum.  But, leveling up one divisions meter will unlock cool stuff for you, and a special mission that unlocks more cool stuff.  There is nothing stopping you from leveling up one Divisions respect in you, then ditching them to get the cool unlocks in another division. 

It doesn't make sense that, the Divisions who you write the paychecks for, will sabotage THERE OWN EMPLOYER because...I really have no idea.  because they don't feel special, I guess.  And this would be a really easy thing to fix, call the divisions investors instead.  Everything could work the same way gameplay wise, just change some dialogue.  I feel like this was a decision made by Universal rather then Frontier, but I could be very wrong too.

So that's the game.  Take care of all way too similar dinosaurs, take care of guests that technically don't exist as individuals, and try to tell the employees that you love them all.  Once you finish one island, you move onto the next, unlock more dinos to research and make, and...that's it.  One island is very much like the next, and I got bored enough that I stopped played after island number three in the base campaign.

I have to say this was my first Frontier game, and they really dropped the ball on it.  I'm not sure why exactly, but I think it was a combination of small team or time frame to make a game, and also Universal making demands on what the game should be like.  I hate to say it, but this gets a 1.5 out of 5 stars.  I hoped that the free updates would liven the game up for me, but I did not get past even island one when I replayed it recently.

Anyway, that's all for now.  See you all, next whenever.  

I seriously need to set this to a schedule some time.  Oh well, later.

Reassembly

I love Legos.  I love spaceships.  I love Lego spaceships a lot.  

Surprisingly, despite my love of blocks that click into other blocks that then make buildings or vehicles, I never really got into games that are literally all about that, like Terraria or Minecraft, where you can build huge fortress and craft almost everything you can imagine.  I'm just not really a creative building designer, and most games crafting is rather dull to me.

But then I found Reassembly.  and I love it so much.

Avengers Assemble!  Wait, wrong franchise.

Reassembly has no plot, no lore, no story, or even any voice acting. But none of that matters because you have blocks that attach to other blocks that can become a spaceship and then can blow up other space ships.  There's weapon blocks, power generator blocks to power said weapons, thruster blocks that make you move, shield blocks and other stranger blocks that do other useful things.

You collect resources that are mostly found by killing enemy faction ships, exchange them for Credits at ships or stations with a factory and use the Credits to upgrade the power limit of your ship and unlock new blocks.  There's seven playable factions each with different blocks and aesthetics and weapons and the like.  There's also 'Agents' which are NPC's using other players ships that go around causing chaos.  There's wormholes, self replicating Fly-bots, and for some reason the Borg show up here as well.

And, uh, that's the game.  just going around building your ship and blowing things up.  It's not exactly a deep game, but it allows tons of creativity for making space ships.  you can take ship desgins and add them to your inventory, so they will be made by NPC factory ships, as well as yourself when you get a factory module.

I enjoyed this game far more then I feel like I should have.  I have 15ish hours on it, and might add even more.  The only problems I've encountered are that in my games Agents don't appear.  and I can't upload my ship as an Agent in other peoples games.  The third problem is most damning, all the factions play similarly.  This could be my fault, however, as I tend to go slow moving but powerful sheilds and long ranged weapons, no matter what faction.  Along with tons of fighters/drones.  

Either way, Reassembly is well worth the 15 bucks if you like space games, or building spaceships.  I would give it 4/5 stars, if not 4.5 out of 5 stars. 

The Karate Kid (2010)

Look, the only reason I watched this is because Jackie Chan is in it and I like Jackie Chan.  I'm...not sure why I opened this review with a defending statement.  But I feel ever so slightly ashamed I watched this film.  I'm not sure why, but as usual here's the movie poster.

Wait, is that Will Smiths son?

...Ah, now I know why I feel slight shame.  Jaden Smith, we meet at last...sort of.  I don't hate Jaden Smith, but I feel....slightly annoyed that he pretty much got gifted an acting career as a birthday present.  I never got that pony I wanted on my birthday.

Anyway, I've never seen the original Karate Kid, so I can't say how well or badly it is in comparison with the original.  But I have browsed the Wikipedia and know of the major plot points, so I can compare those.  Hopefully.

The premise of both films is that a kid moves to another area, having a single mom, and learns a martial art from a wise old teacher who appears to just be a old man at first.  there's several differences, but we'll talk about two right now; the move is from the USA to china, and the kids instead of being teenagers, are all under 14.  

Most of the film takes place in china, and I like it.  It's pretty cool to see the real places they set the film in, and it gives the main character kid real reasons to be unhappy what with now living in an entirely different culture.

The fact all the kids are under 14...is not to my liking however.  I found zero enjoyment watching the kids interact, mainly because the main character was written like an selfish idiot, even for his age.  

The acting...well, Jaden smith isn't actually a bad actor, nor anyone else.  the problem seemed to me not the actors themselves, but the direction they either took or didn't take their acting prowess.   

The shots and cinematography, are good.  I really liked it.  Jackie Chan was a joy to watch, both in acting and in the fight scenes.

Honestly, the films reverence of the Karate Kid original movie, harms it more then helps.  It follows some beats too closely, that if let go would make the film better.  the girlfriend parts, was excruciating to watch, to the point that I fast forwarded through those parts.  Keeping the bullies and the bullies martial art teacher as psychopathic jerks hurt the film rather then helped. The more the film strayed from the original movie the more I enjoyed it.

Despite this, I find myself giving it 3 out of 5 stars.  Why?  Well, Jackie chan saved this film from its writing.   One thing I have yet to talk about is that in this one, while both mentors have a troubled and tragic past, Jackie Chans character is still troubled and tragic in the present, and not only does the mentorship help the young main character grow as a person, it helps Jackie Chans character grow as well.  

Unfortunately I also fully admit I fast forwarded through at least one third of the film.  So I have to downgrade it to at least 2.5 stars, if not simply 2 stars.  I enjoyed it, but I also skipped a lot of the content of the film. 

Anyway, if the film had taken more risks from the original, and instead of a remake was instead a inspired by, I would've liked this film a lot more.  

Today is a two review day!  Above is another review, but both are kinda short, so I made them both today.

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth.

I have always been in a weird place where I like 4X games...but don't like Civilization, the Sid Meier's Video game.  For those who don't know what 4X Means, it's a video game where you basically are contrlling a nation or empire, where you have to eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate.  ...could also be called 4E, but X sounds cooler.  Anyway, diplomacy, research, battle, and economy are all part of 4X games, along with several other features.

Anyway, nowaday disliking Civilization but liking 4X is easy. There's tons of different 4X games with different factions, stories, and most importantly, different gameplay mechanics.  

This was not the case before Endless Legend from Amplitude came out.  Before Amplitude, Civilization wasn't just considered the 'most popular' 4X game.  It was considered the be all and end all of 4X games.  Nothing could be better then Civilization, so everything was the same as Civilization, with just slight variations in gameplay, even if setting and factions were radically different.   I said this before in my Mandalorian TV show review, and I'll say it again: Don't think the current 'best' of something is the be all and end all, think of it as a starting point for something better. 

So I was an odd one.  I didn't like civilization but wanted to try 4X games and bought quite a few of them.  To be fair, it wasn't the gameplay that I hated about civilization, it was the setting and factions.  So I was easily pleased by just a change of scenery if not actual gameplay.

But then Endless Legend came out, and I realized how shamefully unfun Civilization had been.  I could go on all day and night about how much I love Endless Legend, but that's not what this review is about.

This is about Civilization.  IN SPACE.

Sid does seem to love his hex tiles...even the windows are shaped like one!

But any talk about civilization in space will have to start with Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the original civilization in space, made way back after Civilization 2.  For reference, Civilization 6 is its latest installement.  But I know very little about it, aside from the fact that it has some very die hard fans and was apparently very good.  So Beyond Earth was said to be a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri before Beyond Earth was released. 

Anyway, the premise of Beyond Earth is it's 2210, and earth is in bad shape.  So the current nations and corporations of the future-earth start building space ships to colonize different planets across the universe.  

You start the game by picking a sponsor, which include futuristic but familiar-ish names such as Polystralia, Peoples African Union, American Reclamation Corporation, and Brasilia.  That's only 4 out of 8 Sponsors in the base game, 12 total with the only expansion, Rising Tide.  

You might think picking a sponsor would completely change how you play the game, like Endless Legends did with its factions.  Nope.  instead you get a small  bonus to certain things, and that's it.  Really, the other options you pick before you start a game have just as much if not more impact, and none of them really change the game, only slightly change choices at the start.  As an aside, Sponsors also decide what leader you play as.  

Instead of  what you decide to be mattering, the idea is that what you do on the new planet matters more then what you were on earth.  While an idea I can get behind, they didn't go far enough with it.  While each building you build in a city get a permanent buff via a decision you make, the buff is small and only one option out of two.  What if it was three options?  What is, for example, you had the building the Rocket Battery be A: A orbital satellite slayer but weak against ground troops, B: An artillery platform that can decimate ground troops, or C: Somewhere in-between but not great at either.  

 Behold!  Beags Ville!

But I'm getting off track.  To bring home the idea of what you do ingame is more important then what sponsor you pick, there are quests that give you affinity levels in one of three groupings, Purity, Harmony, and Supremacy.   Purity ideology believes humanity was and is perfect, and anything alien should be rooted out.  Harmony believes to survive humanity must evolve with nature and become more alien like.  Supremacy is somewhat in between but believes that humanity can be perfected via machinery and that the new world must be dominated.  Different buildings require different levels of different Affinitys, and raising affinity levels are required to upgrade military units.  I will admit being able to pick different bonuses for military units is neat.

But this still isn't enough, it's not until late game that really differences in play happen, and even if Harmony, Purity, and Supremacy factions played completely differently,  that's still only 3 factions, a pitiful amount honestly.  

I do however, praise the tech tree, or rather, web, as it is a branching web instead of a linear tech tree.  The fact that two players can have completely different techs but still be the same 'power level' as it were is a nice addition, one I wish Civilization games had more like it.  

The base game of Beyond Earth is unfortunately, fairly bland and safe, even with the sci fi twist.  So I give it a 3/5 stars, at best.  Honestly 2.5/5 is more accurate.  But we haven't delved into Beyond Earth: Rising Tide.

Lady put your helmet back on!

Rising Tide is the only expansion to Beyond Earth, and as you might guess it revamped the games navy combat and water features, including the heavily touted floating aquatic cities.  But it also revamped diplomacy, added new sponsors, and added new 'artifact' system of gameplay.

Honestly Rising Tide's feature of upgrade water gameplay features was the least interesting and exciting upgrades to the game.  The diplomacy updates and introduction of a new currency used exclusivity in diplomatic international exchanges, were far more welcome, and in single player actually gives each NPC colony leader new life and lines and ways to react to what the player is doing.  

With Rising Tide, I give Beyond Earth either a 3 or 3.5 out of 5 stars.  It's a much better game, and a good intro to 4X games.  unfortunately, for a veteran at 4X games it's not that good.  I've heard it is a poor spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri, but having never played it, all I have is hearsay.

That's all for now, hopefully I'll put out some drafts soon that I've been (slowly) working on.  I'd say them here, but from those that remember my Evil Genius 2 review, I don't keep my word if I do.