Stellaris

data harvesting company that uses ai to generate assets for their games. requires you to download their own unintuitive browser where they shove 350$ worth of dlc in your face

As of patch 4.4, when I am currently writing this review I can objectively say the game is in the best and worst state at the same time. It has its flaws, but not what everyone giving a negative review is saying. Multiplayer is the most stable since patch 3.6, people saying it's unplayable are complaining about a single instance of desync which can happen but not consistently anymore. The game performance is way better too, with further optimization in patch 4.5 Beta. The reduction to ship count has been the best rework. People forget that 1.0 stellaris still had less ships than you can have now. no longer do you have 500 meaningless battleships, and battles look like spagetti. You can now see what is going on in battles. So what's actually bad with the game? Bugs. Balancing. Some horrendous game design choices (Cetana end game crisis, is a perfect example.) these things aren't being prioritized. There's bugs that have been in the game for several patches (like Cetana being untargetable, making her invincible, and she has a doomsday timer so it's not like you can just ignore her). Some things are so overpowered that it breaks the game, and to be fair most of those are eventually fixed, but what is never fixed are uselessly underpowered things, like espionage, several civics, some ascension paths like nanite and mutation. The UI is also very cluttered with abandoned and poorly implemented systems like the focus system, or sector manager. The devs should take their time and clean up the amount of systems they have, trim the fat and maker it less overwhelming. So yeah, the game is in a very good state overall, but it has persistent problems the devs ignore.