Bio
strong, online, intellectual, attractive, genius. addicted to success

he/him
jobosno on discord
Personal Ratings
1★
5★

Badges


GOTY '23

Participated in the 2023 Game of the Year Event

Organized

Created a list folder with 5+ lists

Pinged

Mentioned by another user

Early Access

Submitted feedback for a beta feature

Epic Gamer

Played 1000+ games

Famous

Gained 100+ followers

Treasured

Gained 750+ total review likes

GOTY '22

Participated in the 2022 Game of the Year Event

Listed

Created 10+ public lists

Gone Gold

Received 5+ likes on a review while featured on the front page

Best Friends

Become mutual friends with at least 3 others

Busy Day

Journaled 5+ games in a single day

Shreked

Found the secret ogre page

Adored

Gained 300+ total review likes

Roadtrip

Voted for at least 3 features on the roadmap

Donor

Liked 50+ reviews / lists

3 Years of Service

Being part of the Backloggd community for 3 years

GOTY '21

Participated in the 2021 Game of the Year Event

Trend Setter

Gained 50+ followers

Well Written

Gained 10+ likes on a single review

Loved

Gained 100+ total review likes

Popular

Gained 15+ followers

GOTY '20

Participated in the 2020 Game of the Year Event

Elite Gamer

Played 500+ games

Gamer

Played 250+ games

N00b

Played 100+ games

Noticed

Gained 3+ followers

Liked

Gained 10+ total review likes

Favorite Games

Dwarf Fortress
Dwarf Fortress
The friends of Ringo Ishikawa
The friends of Ringo Ishikawa
The House in Fata Morgana
The House in Fata Morgana
Receiver 2
Receiver 2
Katamari Damacy Reroll
Katamari Damacy Reroll

1441

Total Games Played

002

Played in 2024

072

Games Backloggd


Recently Played See More

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Jan 31

The Surge
The Surge

Jan 22

Ratopia
Ratopia

Dec 30

Class of '09: The Re-Up
Class of '09: The Re-Up

Dec 27

Roboquest
Roboquest

Dec 19

Recently Reviewed See More

Paradox is especially interesting as a developer because they essentially make the same game over and over, adjusting mechanics to suit the setting, and it means that playing these games in release order you'll see more and more cross-pollination as systems and mechanics that work well in one series are placed into a new game from a sister series. Probably the best example of this is the "pops" system that is best known as being part of the Victoria series, initially designed to help simulate both economic and cultural changes that occurred during the Second Industrial Revolution by bundling people with the same culture, religion, and job into a single demographic block. Paradox seems to think this was a hit, because they're putting it in everything now - they kept it for the release of Victoria 3 in 2022, they're putting them into their currently under-development "Definitely Not Europa Universalis 5", and they exist here in Imperator as well.

Imperator is most fascinating as a mishmash of interesting systems from Paradox's other series - after 2 years of tweaks turning this into a completely different game, it's fascinating to look at the final product and see what systems remained part of the developers' core vision for this game. It uses Victoria's pop system to represent the tendencies of the masses, it uses a stripped-back form of Crusader Kings' characters to represent the most influential nobles, its statecraft and military options are a mixture of so many other Paradox games that it'd be painful for both of us if I spelled it out. The result is a game that - for returning players - has a ton of familiar, easy-to-grasp elements that affect a truly absurd number of statistics and variables for states, provinces, and individual actors, some of which are more opaque than others.

It's not helped by Imperator's map, which is more granular than ever. Victoria 3's map divides territory into "states" and that's effectively all you have to worry about unless a state is split between two or more countries - even then, most modifers will only apply to the portion of the state that's under your control. States are large, they are chunky, and while the populations in them might be diverse, you almost never have to worry about fractions of a state. Imperator's map is broken into Territories (individual settlements), Provinces/Areas (collections of 10-15 territories), and Regions (groups of provinces that are generally of a similar cultural background). Buildings are built in a territory, provinces have loyalty separate from that of the person governing them, and when you unlock the ability to maintain a standing army then you typically are limited to one per region - so claiming a single village from a new region will be far less useful than consolidating your power within an area.

Provinces have local trade, loyalty, unrest, food, "civilization", infrastructure, taxes, and separate happiness values per population. Influential characters belong to families (with relationships and family trees) and have character traits, jobs, dynamic party affiliations, statesmanship, loyalty, popularity, prominence, corruption, personal income, and a powerbase that includes soldiers that may have loyalty to them over the state. The state has at least 9 core stats that can change or disappear entirely based on your forms of government. There's more I could mention, but I think I've driven the point home.

The point is that there's a LOT of moving parts and it can be tough to grasp even for longtime Paradox players. If you make someone play this as their first grand strategy game they will likely swear off the genre entirely. The reward for learning it, though, is a simulation that really nails the experience of holding together a vast, ancient empire with hope and duct tape, forced to use the stability of the entire country as a resource to keep the richest man in the empire from getting too ambitious. All of these mechanics let you roleplay through a vast variety of actions that few games would support: you can view the accomplishments of individual legions in a historical log, you can build up a tiny border town into a metropolis, you can award different cultural groups with increased status or expanded rights, you can play favorites among the influential families and use your leader's status to accrue as much personal wealth as possible. This game only received 2 years of post-launch support but it has depth comparable to Paradox's other games that have been in development for over a decade. The systems take time to learn but they weave together naturally, where the decision to remove a provincial governor involves smaller decisions on the relative value of his talents vs. his corruption and provincial loyalty, the happiness of his family vs. the happiness of the people in the province, and the relative costs of each approach you could use to solve the problem.

There are some valid criticisms, though, going beyond just the complexity. First is that the game's quite easy once you wrap your head around the systems - there are a lot of ways for factions of moderate starting power to get ahead and the game heavily rewards you for keeping your foot on the gas, so it's entirely possible (especially if you're playing Rome) that you crush a couple early factions and never look back. The game also has some obvious seams as a result of its reinvention over 2 years: it does a decent job of explaining most of its mechanics, but there will be a handful of times where you have to resort to googling something that doesn't have a tooltip, because the game has a lot of icons and not all of them are explained well. What are the effects of "prominence"? Where is this "divine sacrifice" button that I keep getting modifiers for? The law system also feels abnormally weak when compared to all the other systems, since changing a law typically means swapping one minor buff for another in a game where you're constantly racking up stat increases via research (Rome's military tech tree alone has 84 techs that all provide meaningful buffs).

All that being said, I'm pleasantly surprised with how much I like this game - I picked it up on release and played 15 hours or so before dropping it like a hot brick and refusing to touch it until this year. Even ignoring the complaints above it's hard to recommend, because I think it's a lot easier for players to hop into a game as "France" and pass "Agrarianism" than it is to play as Scordiscia and learn what it means to click "lex Caecilia de vectigalibus" but I think those who are passionate about the era or the genre could find this really rewarding. There's a surprising amount of room to "play tall" despite naming this game after a famously expansionist empire and it does a good job of making you think about the people and places you conquer, even after the deed is done. Far from perfect, but it's deeply interesting and I'm super interested to see what mechanics and systems they're going to use in their future games - they're already using a similarly granular map in EU5, and I think a lot of what's present here could be polished to a mirror shine in future games.

The joy of hectic co-op missions - where you're just as likely to die to a friendly mortar as an enemy rocket - is only stifled by a progression model that becomes punitive in the late game and the ludicrous frequency of glitches, the latter of which is mostly confined to the downtime between games. You are just as likely to run into an enormous bug in the missions as you are in the menus. With no glitches, though, it's a great game. The developers deserve a ton of praise for nailing the actual experience of playing at any given moment. Guns and explosions sound great, and all the things that could be a real nuisance in a game like this are balanced so well that they're never a concern - guns have just enough recoil to make it worth some attention, ammo and stamina feel plentiful as long as you're being somewhat mindful, you get the idea. When combined with the number of stratagems (providing airstrikes, additional equipment, and turrets from the sky) and equipment options, you can easily drop into a mission with a loadout that ensures you will never ever have to think about ammo, or about watching your back, or about dealing with heavily-armored enemies.

The difficulty, though, ramps up pretty steadily until you're constantly bottoming out on your "plentiful" ammo and stamina, with the cooldowns on those airstrikes becoming excruciatingly long despite the fact that they never actually changed. In terms of the actual effect this has on team strategy and camaraderie, it's up there with the best - it's hard to mind that your pal's airstrike nearly killed you when it saved you from five other things competing for the honor. A teammate finding the time to call in a much-needed resupply as everything is going to shit will make them your real-life hero.

Comparing this to similar shooters will undoubtedly let some folks down as the smaller (but still important) differences in strategic flavor between games can be a turn-off. For one thing, the game is very quick to throw out the periodic lulls in the action that are common in games like L4D, PD2, and DRG - unlock the first of 6 new difficulty levels and you'll find that lingering slightly too long in a level can put you in a situation where enemies are permanently spawning faster than you can kill them as your team starts hemorrhaging their limited revives. Helldivers is also rather generous in that all of your stratagems are very good as long as you actually tailor them to the situation, but part of the cost is that you have to immobilize yourself and enter between 3 and 9 directional inputs without making a mistake, and then throw a beacon that actually places the thing. This is how you call in the extraction shuttle, this is how you summon more ammo, this is how your friends are telling you to revive them as you dive into a crater with rockets flying past your head. Some people are going to hate this more than their actual job, I think it's fantastic. Part of the fantasy is becoming so good at entering these codes that you barely have to stop moving at all to get the entire team back in action, and finding these small windows to call in support contributes strongly to the impression of constant enemy pressure, but also to the satisfaction of actually pulling it off once the mission's over.

With a full squad, there are 4 different perspectives on a mission that all share the broad strokes but each of which has different details. A teammate's attempt to save one of your comrades from being maimed by a building-sized bug may not notice that they just gave you a haircut with a ricocheted autocannon projectile. A dead teammate who checks their phone for texts likely didn't see that the effort to bring them back involved a creatively used stim, a head-first dive off a cliff, and a respawn beacon tossed over a crowd of enemies as you draw the horde away from them. The team chuckles at the idea of throwing down a minefield behind you to cover your tracks, but only the player who deploys it will notice that they've killed an entire enemy dropship without firing a shot. A teammate operating the terminal at one of the objectives can't tell that your efforts to cover them involve frantically switching guns as you mag-dump at a horde of silhouettes through thick, black smoke. Everyone completed the same mission, but there's still plenty of clever and hilarious details to discuss once you arrive back at the destroyer. Including the other consequences of that minefield.

Does a couple things particularly well, but I think it's more of a base hit than a home run.

There's a lot that's worth praising - the animation, the attention to the environments, translating the core gameplay fantasy of champions between two different games, creating a Demacia where regular people can live their lives. Perhaps most praiseworthy through - since Riot themselves fuck this up constantly - is recognizing that Demacia is only capable of being an interesting setting if you dig into its fundamental contradictions as a genocidal anti-magic state whose most iconic symbols and heroes have their roots in that magic. My great fear upon first learning that this game was in development was that they would spend too much time on League's most popular boring-ass white bread champions but they've actually done a great job of drawing in characters who haven't traditionally been used to their fullest potential - Sylas is the primary beneficiary, of course (he's the main character after all), but tapping Morgana to play a big role in this story is a great choice as well.

The most important criticism I've got is that the game really assumes you're familiar with the setting. I am, because I'm a sick little freak who plays League of Legends and enjoys it, but I think most League players start and finish engaging with the lore by laughing at the loading screen tips. The Mageseeker kinda introduces its key figures and topics, but if you're coming into this because you watched Arcane (and don't want to pick up LoR or watch 200 Necrit videos) then you have some homework to do if you want the full experience. If you meet those requirements though, the game gives you a lot to chew on with tons of lore tidbits, a decent cast of side characters (despite some painfully on-the-nose dialogue on occasion), and champion cameos that feel consistent with their established histories and personalities.

The good news is failing to "do your homework" with the lore cannot stop you from enjoying the combat, which does a pretty good job of porting Sylas over into a different game - he still likes to linger at medium-ish range before flinging himself at enemies to begin brawling, and having a bunch of enemies to steal spells from allows you to feel like a genius during the fights even if it's a bit silly that they keep sending in enemies who have contradictory elements at the same time. The only thing that gets in the way of the gameplay mid-fight is the wonky lock-on for your chains, which is actually more important when you're not stealing spells. Flinging yourself towards an enemy is your most versatile tool and the game seems to get confused from time to time about which enemy you're actually trying to target (or if you're trying to target anyone at all) and it'll lead to a handful of moments across your time with the game that break your flow. The combat is still well-designed and is by far the best part of the game, but the fact that it feels so basic even at its best meant that I was never seeking out the side missions to extend my time with the game - by the time the game was done, so was I.

I suppose for a bottom line, I should make things clear: I think this is hard to recommend for the vast majority of people out there unless you already have a better than average understanding of League's lore, or if you're willing to donate some extra time so the game can educate you. The combat is good but this really is "a League of Legends story" with the emphasis on "story". Ultimately I'm happy with this, but I'm mostly happy because it means we have an official Riot-approved story that actually cares about giving Sylas the screentime he needs to be an actual character. I've heard dreadful things about some of the other Riot Forge titles and have been apprehensive about even the most well-regarded media set in Runeterra, but I had a decent time with this title and I think it's convinced me to relax and be a little less wary.