I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
This isn’t a “lot” of time, but I spent 19 ish hours to complete Under the Island. I don’t want to be harsh on an Indie game, but the game let me down so badly. I wanted a Zelda-like and this had some really interesting ideas. It was just that everything between the ideas was terrible. The plot was predictable and boring. Characters weren’t. The mini games were some of the worst I have ever seen. Navigation was obnoxious and often relied on the top down perspective hiding the REQUIRED path with little to no indication that you could walk “through” an obstacle. I could go on.
Why did I play it through? I just kept hoping that everything would live up to the interesting ideas. It did not.