Europa Universalis IV: Domination Review (LS)
Domination clocks in as quite possibly the dumbest and one of the worst DLCs ever made by Paradox. This DLC should have been a free update even more than the rest. You are paying $20 to add additional content to nations that already have DLCs related to them England (Rule Britannia), France (Emperor), Spain (Golden Century), Ming (Mandate of Heaven) all while making the game more bloated and irritating to play. Almost none of the new content is interesting and most of it is something some crappy mod would add in as filler content. All of the missions are completely outclassed by the most basic of mission tree mods and it shows while you play, as I quickly found myself not giving a shit about them as I continued playing. Some missions just have cancerous pre-reqs and were an absolute chore to complete. The weird time jumps from mission to mission were not fixed and continue to have you waiting upwards of 100 years just to be able to even complete a mission. The "special units" that Paradox is obsessed with adding are way overstaying their welcome and at this point are just a tedious addition to the game. Having each major nation get a special unit is straight up braindead and ruins the uniqueness of the aspect. I might as well play a total war game instead if I was so worried about what my unit rosters consist of. This DLC reeks of laziness and a huge lack of innovation. There is nothing new here and it isn't worth $5, much less the $20 Paradox wants for it.
The biggest flaw of this DLC and the reason it flopped so bad is just due to what they focused on. They focused on nations that the vast majority of the player-base has already played HUNDREDS of times. This game is 10+ years old. You aren't going to be getting any new players and if you want to retain the playerbase you have, you have to add content to stuff that hasn't been played to death. Everybody and their mother has played England and the Ottomans, so why are you still focusing whole DLCs on them? Why not just make it a free update if all ur doing is just adding missions? Let's face reality here. Paradox realizes this game is slowly dying, which is being reflected by the player numbers, and is just looking to sleaze the last few dollars out of their playerbase. If Paradox continues down this path, it might be time for me to finally be done with this game. Such a waste.
Also Paradox, stop making so many achievements a total cancer to get.
Final Grade - 2/10 - Is this worse than Leviathan?