With so much potential to follow on the heels of SR2010, improved, on release it falls short of it's potential.
It is improved alright, but in a move toward mainstream sort of way. It now has music. It has better sound in general, even if there are bugs on release that just make them annoying as all snot because it's just a NOISY game most of the time, but that is supposed to be fixed in the first serious patch.
It is also definitely improved on the scale. It encompasses the whole world in one game which was the #1 wish that most of us hardcore , epic scale strategy gamers expressed - One, persistent world map. On this point they did indeed suceed... It has scale.
It is also improved on graphics, as it should be, considering the genre it is competing in, but honestly, I'd have played it with the same graphics SR2010 had, had they gotten the rest of the game right. This is part of the bells and whistles catagory and not the meat I crave in a game.
The final place I'd admit serious improvement is in the user interface in general... Though I am such an old school gamer, going back to the text only days, so had no problems navigating SR2010, I would consider SR2020 much easier to play. And in that lies part of the problem... The ease. So, we get to why I only think this deserving of a barely passing score in my book and fails my recommendations to anyone but the collector niche. I'd demand my money back if I could get it.
First, the AI is too good.. This is part of the general gripe that Battlegoat admit to right out. They have made the AI so good that though they claim some personality differences between them, with priority settings to tell them what you want done in place, they all basically play the same. This is so much so that they have decided to dumb down the whole ministers part of the game and remove the options to replace ministers from the game altogether... It would be purely cosmetic at this point, anyway, and some of the things that made ministers unique in the first game appearantly just confused the normal gamer... Too high a learning curve... Strike! Excuse me, but the personality the different ministers had and need to find the right ones for the jobs is part of what I liked best about the first game. May be more mainstream to Keep It Simple, Stupid, but I'm not mainstream, nor is the concept or genre of the game.
Another aspect of the AI being too good is that part of it's too good aspect is that they are so streamlined for what they do - Balance budgets, and run in a world trade economy - that they don't know how to do much of anything else.
Their wars are mostly a bumb rush with all forces which if that fails leaves behind either dead countries that get steamrolled by their enemies, or a pair of nations that are now totally disfunctional, locked in a war neither can win and stuck in a position that without an admited bug they are trying to fix would leave them unable to die without someone else coming along to give them the coup de gras.
In the design of the game, in all their wisdom and to make it easy to get around universal arms broker scenario they had in SR2010, they just removed equipment trade from the game altogether. Can trade resources, but not territory or weapons.... No arms trade in a game that is supposed to simulate a world at war , or at least on the brink of war scenario... You can trade designs to equipment but all countries have to build their own. I'd call that taking a chunk of the meat out of the content and even more of the realism.
Another aspect of the AI being too streamlined is that the AI is way too easy to cheat in trades. That is a complaint showing up regularly in the battlegoat's own forums, where I posted a rant of my own earlier tonight before pondering how to more pleasently word this review. I expect this is part of a requirement the AI's have when dealing with each other because they all MUCH be able to support each other in a world economy because of the problem I will next describe...
None of the computer controled countries can ever build new structures. No new facilities, roads, rails, military bases, stationary weapons system, and so on... Appearantly it was counter the world trade scenario that the game was supposed to have and if countries could build the infrustructure to support themselves and fill their own needs, the whole world trade system might break down... That is the way I interpreted the excuse, and that is definitely what it is - And excuse for a major shortcoming in challenge and again a blow to realism.
They forgot to make rails and roads the exist destructible and with the strange rules they have for how many can be placed where and how rails and roads can interact with each other, mistakes will sometimes happen and once made, they cannot ever be fixed... Oh, you can always add to your logistics infrastructure, but you can't ever redesign or fix it if you end up with some strange connections and unwanted half-connected deadends.
The world doesn't really grow at all... Other than what players do to change add to the landscape, it is a pretty stagnant, pretty simple, and very bland, easily spankable world. This is a good move toward making the game more playable but beyond the bells and whistles, and the smoke and mirrors this game is infact less than it's predecessor.