izigame.me

It's been 10 months since Prison Architect's 'Island Bound' DLC released. The introduction letter that explains all the new and exciting features still hasn't been formatted properly, and is still a jumbled mess of sentences. If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about this DLC, it should. This DLC is absolute dogshit, and $9.99 is taking the piss.
Firstly, the amount of typos is insane. For how little content is in the DLC, the fact that I found ~7 typos in my last 3 hour play session is pathetic. I normally wouldn't care, but these typos have been in game for months. This isn't a new DLC anymore. This isn't an abandoned game. This isn't run by a small company that doesn't speak English. So this is simply inexcusably shoddy.
The new warning system - where advisors call you and message you about issues in your prison - is fine on paper. Except, they don't explain anything that they say. My warden says that my prison has a fire risk. Cool, how do I fix it? What do I need to place down? Where is the risk? It doesn't explain at all. I'll get spammed with notifications like "The prison quality is too low!" and "Contraband is everywhere!" and have absolutely no idea what to do to fix it. This isn't like SimCity or Civilization where you get linked to the right menu or item you need to build. It's just a flavorless, one sentence long warning.
But the biggest flaw of all is that the content simply isn't fun. Island prisons play the exact same as normal prisons. You can build as much land as you want, and terraform everything, meaning you can just build an average prison. Being able to link stockpiles to workshops, and canteens to kitchens is fine but I've never wanted the ability to do that. The new 'checkpoint' items are incredibly buggy to use, and while useful I can almost never get my prisoners to go through them and be searched. And that's it. No I'm not kidding, that's it. $9.99 for different map gen, reskinned entrance animations, minor life improvements, and more bugs.
Speaking of the bugs, they're still everywhere. Pathing issues, items teleporting across walls, glitchy needs that the game now yells about. It's all here. And while they must have put someone on bug fixing (The game-breaking event of an insane female prisoner with a baby hasn't happened to me yet) it's not enough.
I write this review not out of hate, but love for the game. I have 250+ hours in it, and it's my 7th most played game on my entire account. I loved this game back before it was purchased by Paradox Interactive, and I'd probably still love it if it wasn't bogged down with terrible ideas, terrible gimmicks, and terrible design decisions. Don't waste your time buying this. Don't waste your money. Don't give a dime more to Paradox Interactive if you can avoid it, and don't support their strategy of buying popular indie games and spamming shovelware-level DLC for them.