Europa Universalis IV: Golden Century. Full of pirates and a bit of the ol' Spanish action. What's in the box?
https://www.strategygamer.com/reviews/europa-universalis-4-golden-century/
Honestly, this is a bit of a weird review because the immersion pack is so specific and has such a particular set of features, it was difficult to sink my teeth into exactly doing what it wanted during my play of it before the article was released.
Sure, there's plenty of Spanish and Iberian stuff, decisions, some map detail issues with provinces that I never spend enough time in Western Europe to pay attention to (being far more interested in playing with North and South America or Southeast Asia), but that's not really my space in the game.
Now, Pirate Republics – despite the fact that suggesting that they're more than a tiny blip on the radar of history is probably giving them too much credence, but I can definitely see the appeal. In practice, I'm not sure that the actual immersion pack manages to make them truly playable, because somehow along the way in the prerelease version that I had in my pocket, they broke privateering.
Yes, the primary mechanic of piracy had some issues in the actual immersion pack of which one of the major features was pirate republics.
Annoying, but not unthinkable.
It's a reminder that not everything that you get your hands on as a journalist in order to review before release is going to be the code that's going to see release. In fact, it's almost never the code that people will actually get in their hands on release day. That's good in some ways because you're not seeing complete lockdown even up to a few hours before everyone's going to have the game in their hands, as opposed to the days when games were distributed on CDs and DVDs and code lock for bugs was a month out or longer.
On the negative side, it means that your reviewers for day one are going to be playing on code that the people who pay for the game are not.
The take away for me in this article is twofold. Firstly, figure out how to talk about issues that I don't think will make a difference to the customer while still communicating that it creates a sense of unease in me as a reviewer. Secondly, I really need to work on better choices of illustrative art, which you wouldn't think would be a problem in video games, which are made entirely of illustrative art, but the goal is to illustrate and demonstrate while simultaneously falling into the visual rhythm and design of somebody else's website.
Everything you do is educational because everything you do fails in some aspect. You only learn by failing. The best you can do is fail upwards.