The review of an angry gamer caused a stir in the community. A construction game on Steam made him so angry that he had to write down his feelings. However, the number of his play hours above the review gives his opinion a special nuance.
What frustrates the gamer? The Reddit user Kerrah2323 posted a screenshot of a Steam review for the game Cities: Skylines. The author of this review, who was anonymized by the poster, gave the construction game a thumbs down and complained about the following: The updates in Cities: Skylines make the game unplayable when using mods. However, they are essential since the unmodded version is “unbearable” due to the design of the buildings.
“The constant issues caused by updates have made this game the most frustrating game of my entire life,” writes the player at the end of his review. Since this is an opinion, his statement is valid for him. However, the displayed 29,908 play hours make the community have to chuckle at this feedback.
Almost 30,000 play hours of unbearable gaming experience … really?
What do the nearly 30,000 play hours mean? The re-poster of the review on Reddit calculated the following based on the play hours and the release date of Cities: Skylines: If he started playing since the release, he would have spent around 7.38 hours on the game daily over the nearly 11 years. And yet, he decided to write a negative review.
“That’s the typical Paradox gamer,” writes OwlJames under the Reddit post, “complains that the game is crap, and then plays it for thousands of hours along with all the DLCs (just like I do).”
Other users, however, also write that the 29,908 hours in Cities: Skylines are unlikely to be pure playtime. It could also be AFK hours (“Away From Keyboard”) or time when the launcher was left open.
“It’s very easy to accumulate play hours in Paradox games,” writes The_wulfy, “they all have launchers that also count as playtime, and most of these games can be minimized without significantly straining the system. I had Crusader Kings III open for about a week and didn’t even notice it.”
While some users wonder what is so bad about the unmodded standard version of Cities: Skylines, there are a handful of players who agree with the Steam review despite the inappropriate play hours.
In what way do other players agree? Even though the review, along with the accumulated play hours, has a slight ironic aftertaste, there are some users on Reddit who still agree with its content:
“The review is legitimate,” finds WhatANoob2025, “mods and assets make the fun of this game, and the more you have, the longer the game takes to load. If something breaks, you have to reconfigure everything down to the smallest detail. […] You spend a lot of time activating and deactivating mods until the game runs again.”
Others see this explanation as a possible reason for how the player’s 29,908 hours could actually have come about, like Taowulf: “29,000 hours is completely normal if you are trying to determine the right launch order for over 100 mods.”
If you have invested thousands of hours in real-time strategy games yourself and are looking for something new, we have put together some inspirations for you here on MeinMMO. Perhaps there is a candidate among them that will soon reward your enthusiasm: 6 real-time strategy games on Steam that you can easily spend 1,000 hours on
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