Gorky 17

worth a 4 stars

I LIKED the game, BUT the reason for the low rating was the resolution. The hardware rendering would not work, so I had to use the software rendering provided, I have a 27" lcd monitor running at 1920x1200(native). I forget the resolution I had to run at ,but it was low and really became an eye strain. If I had a smaller screen or a CRT it might have been OK. That said I LIKED playing the game , although I had to limit myself to about 1 hour sessions to avoid eye strain and that limit really breaks the gaming flow.

I played this when it launched and I played it in 2012 and still loved it.

This game was pretty much one of the first RPG games that I've played from Russian producers. Really cool TBS RPG game with fun strategy. But I just wish you guys could ma ke a Cider of this game for Mac nowadays.

I gave this game a try on a whim, and I wasn't really all that impressed. The first issue I had with it was that it was pretty glitchy; for a little while I couldn't get the game to run at all, and then I found out I had to ensure ffdshow didn't run with it. Then, once I got into it, it crashed during the opening movie every single time. Okay, I can skip that; but then the game starts, and every bit of dialogue is played back multiple times, making the fairly frequent speech incredibly irritating. Turns out you have to disable hardware audio acceleration to fix this. Luckily, the community on here rocks. Anyway, the actual game wasn't that much better. Complaints about the ridiculous scarcity of ammo relative to the number/difficulty of monsters are well-founded; I understand that conservation of supplies has become an integral part of all modern horror games, but this was just ridiculous. The voice acting was also more than just irritating--even after fixing the triple-sound-playback problem--with special emphasis placed on the main character, who unfortunately has a lot to say. Now, the combat . . . Generally, I enjoy tactical-type games, turn-based or not. I just couldn't get into this one; it felt sluggish, a combination of a rather clunky HUD and poor animations. I liked some of the systems, like how different weapons have different firing lines and the importance of position--back and side attacks deal extra damage--and even the myriad status effects. I went into the game with the understanding that weapon skill has to be gradually built up with each character and that ammo was going to be scarce, so I figured that the melee weapons would deal decent damage but require no ammo, while the guns themselves would be significantly more powerful but be somewhat limited. This, however, is not really the case; some firearms are certainly powerful, but others are just as ineffective as the melee weapons at killing the various monsters. Obviously, building skill helps to solve this problem, but this means expending ammunition, and you don't have much of that. This game certainly sounded cool, but I was sorely disappointed. It's not a terrible game by any means, but I just couldn't overlook the rather terrible combat system, which is sort of a large part of the game.