izigame.me

Please do note that I have played the game up until version 1.30 (Austria). I have played it with all DLCs up to Emperor on multiplayer, and with AoW, CS, RoM, MoH, ED, and RP on single player. This obviously impacts my experience with the game, and thus the perspective this review is written from. Also do note that, despite the voluminous size of this review and the relatively deep argumentation, I am in no way trained or experienced in video game critique, and am simply putting forward and exploring my personal experiences with the game.
I initially struggled a bit on whether to mark this review as positive or negative. In the end, I decided to mark it as positive, and, despite initial considerations, it was not that heavy of a decision. Whilst I am going to make some serious criticisms of EU4 in this review, ultimately, it would be hard to deny that I like the game a lot. It provides a historical strategy experience impressive in scope and detail - allowing the player to lead anything from a tribal confederacy in 15th century North America to an industrializing colonial empire. It can be a real lot of fun if you like large-scale, multi-faceted strategy.
On account of its mechanical complexity, EU4 is well-known for having a high entry point. You might at some point find yourself 1500 hours in and still not knowing exactly how combat works. However, this example also speaks to the fact that you do not have to know all the mechanics meticulously to actually play the game meaningfully. You will still need a lot, mind you, and knowing more typically allows you to strategize more skilfully, but you do not *have* to know quite so much to play decently. This, however, is a double-edged sword. It means that a lot of the game's mechanics can feel somewhat redundant to the regular player, and thus not having their true potential utilized. This, in itself, is still not neccesarily a big problem for the usual player's experience, but it segways into a rather more noticeable problem with EU4's mechanical complexity.
A lot of the mechanics do not have a very real impact on the gameplay - they are not utilized to their full potential. There is a joke in the EU4 community that the game is pretty much just a map colouring simulator - and this comment is not unfounded. Despite the plethora of mechanics at the player's disposal, by far most EU4 games will follow the very same pattern, at least until mid to late game - build a spy network to justify war, declare war, take land gains, integrate conquered land into your country, crush rebels who do not like it, rinse and repeat. Of course, your game will be somewhat different whether you play a merchant republic or a feudal monarchy, whether you play an island nation or a landlocked one, etc. But some patterns are painfully repetitive. The game has virtually no support for "tall" play - developing a small, well-developed state, and protecting oneself using diplomacy, rather than preventive war and vast swaths of territory. Such a playstyle makes for both a boring experience and a vastly more difficult time being a power that actually matters than just expanding ceaselessly. Even as a merchant republic, which should by all accounts bloom as a small nation surrounded by trade partners, you will probably end up expanding to support your nation's development and protect yourself from invasion either way. This can make replayability and diversity of player experiences not that amazing, surprisingly, considering the theoretical scope and diversity of the game.
Another problem with making the experiences feel diversified is the way EU4 handles flavour, or rather the way it is diminished by other factors. The game clearly has a lot of work put into establishing flavour - from unique country ideas, to a plethora of localized events, to even individual unit types featuring in-depth descriptions of their historical background, that most players have probably never noticed. However, that last part is the problem - all the flavour will probably be hard for most players to notice and appreciate. I feel like that stems not from issues with the flavour itself, but the way the game handles UI. EU4 embraces a philosophy of laying all the modifiers and consequences of the player's actions out clearly right in front of them. This might be good for letting the player know what they are doing, allowing them to plan out their actions and predict the consequences in a system as mechanically complex as EU4's. However, you will quickly notice that all those modifiers seriously distract from flavour. Personally, even though I think I would genuinely appreciate flavour as one of the most important aspects of the game otherwise, I never read the actual content of events that pop up. I only found out about the meticulous unit descriptions when I started modding units. Because of all the modifiers you can see laid out in front of you, EU4 becomes almost solely a game of optimizing the numbers. When an event about a conspiracy pops up, you do not bother to appreciate that there is a story going on in the shadow of your throne - you start worrying about the number of admin power points it is going to take to prop your country's stability level back up. When a rebellion erupts in one of your provinces, you do not think about the societal factors behind the growing unrest - you mechanically send in an army to quash it. Even though the flavour technically provides a lot of opportunities for political roleplay - will your ruler flee the capital which is experiencing an epidemy of plague to preserve their life, or will they stay to inspire the inhabitants - when they actually come up, you worry more about whether you can handle the loss of a ruler or a growing unrest modifier in the capital better. Instead of varied political roleplay, of telling an interesting story spanning centuries of history, the game becomes strict realpolitik. And you do this absent-mindedly, even if you would rather roleplay a sociopolitical story than mundanely optimize your empire.
There is, however, a silver lining to all of this. Some aspects of the game are big and flavourful enough decisions that they do not suffer from this problem, and I have always had the most fun with EU4 when those things are allowed to shine. There is simply nothing more entertaining than, say, converting Kamchatka to Hussitism as a federal empire you built from a city-state in the HRE. When you play around with such things as nations, cultures, religions, government types, or bizarre borders to create unholy alternate historical scenarios, the potential of the game's flavour really shines - typically in very hilarious ways. Although this also makes it somewhat more clear what all the small-scale flavour could have been had it been given the chance to stand out.
No review of a Paradox game can go without mentioning the heinous DLC policy. As with most Paradox games, base EU4 can be gotten at a reasonable price on sale, but without DLCs, the game is incredibly basic and underdeveloped - meaning you are effectively forced to spend really large amounts of money on a heap of DLCs if you want anything more than that. There is, however, a caveat. The game only requires the host to have a given DLC in multiplayer, so if you have friends who are willing to play, you only need one set of DLCs between you. I think multiplayer also really enhances the best parts of the game mentioned above.
The game is also incredibly easy to mod, as long as you are not looking into changing fundamental mechanics. The code built on top of the engine itself is easy to edit and (mostly) very clear, even to someone with zero coding experience (like me), meaning after a few short and easily available tutorials you can add nations, events, religions, units, governments etc. without much issue, although do be prepared for a lot of mundane work, changing little things in up to thousands of files, depending on the mod's scale.