Review anarchistica 2/5 · Jan 27, 2022
Shallow and clunky
Playtime: 2h27m (first part of the campaign)
Intro
Patrician IV is a trading game. A substantial amount of the gameplay consists of moving your ship somewhere, comparing at the prices of goods and selling/buying them. By levelling your wealth and local reputation you open up more options like building houses and factories.
The Good
- It's very simple and casual.
The …
Playtime: 2h27m (first part of the campaign)
Intro
Patrician IV is a trading game. A substantial amount of the gameplay consists of moving your ship somewhere, comparing at the prices of goods and selling/buying them. By levelling your wealth and local reputation you open up more options like building houses and factories.
The Good
- It's very simple and casual.
The Bad
- Missions aren't explained. "Deliver x goods quests" simple don't seem to work.
- Missions are rare and uninteresting.
- Reputation is extremely fickle and nonsensical.
- No "auto pause in city" option, which should have been a default setting/option.
- The mouse is extremely sensitive with no option to reduce this ingame - while all trading is done by dragging the mouse.
- No option to automatically buy/sell all up to a certain price.
- It's rather ugly, even for an older game by a small studio.
- There's just not a lot to the game and the more interesting aspects take too long to get to.
The Ugly
- They force you to use the Kalypso launcher, which requires you to make a Kalypso account.
- The launcher doesn't work automatically, you have to click to log in and then to launch the game every time.
Conclusion
Patrician IV is a shallow and clunky game that's basically X3 or Mount & Blade without proper combat. Most of the gameplay consists of clumsily dragging trading bars with the mouse and waiting for ships to arrive. It's all rather dull. The €15-20 price tag is a joke but i wouldn't even recommend it if it was free.