Citadel Remonstered

i really liked the design of the main character, the gameplay is preety good, i thought the art style to be really charming, one thing i really like is the game over screen, the music is pretty mysterious and you can see the character in full scale wich is a nice detail, the levels are prety cool, my favorite was the center because the enemies remind of the stormtroopers, the game is free wich is pretty nice :D thank you gog and all envolved for bringing cool games like this :D

I spent countless hours playing Cytadela on the Amiga back in the day drawing maps on paper, getting lost in those maze-like corridors and fighting through that raw nightmare. The Remonstered edition doesnt just bring back memories but it finally delivers the experience the game always deserved, with smoother performance and noticeable improvements. It still feels rough and old-school (limited map visibility, scarce ammo etc) but thats exactly its charm.

The game has a very strong nostalgic feel and vibes, but that is about all there is to it. The gameplay itself provides a very flawed experience, which no self-respecting gamer should put himself through. Let me provide some examples of the suckage: Music - There is none. Controls - I played the game on keyboard and mouse. Moving the mouse up and down moves the character forward and backward, which is already quite bad, but there is also some kind of a technical issue that makes you turn at sharp angles on random times and disorienting you. Other people have had this issue as well. Weapons - The weapons in this game have no sprites and most do not have a downtime to reload, so you can for example fire overlapping bursts from a machine gun as fast as you can click fire. The hard difficulty is not even hard at all due to how the weapons are designed like this. Also, this makes the early hitscan weapons already strong enough for the endgame and the later projectile based weapons much inferior. I ended up not even using those at all, because I felt that firing a flamethrower makes the shot flame sprite cover the entire screen for a while and make me not see anything. Level design - Easily some of the worst you can find in a game like this. Most of the levels are made out of purely optional rooms that can be skipped and are not rewarding to explore. The keycards needed to progress are sometimes in quite seemingly nonsensical locations. One zone called prison even has nigh endless hallways of identical small rooms with nothing inside. Missables - The game has 6 zones. In each of them, you have to pick up a bomb piece and exit. It is mostly standing in your way, but sometimes not and you can go around it if you do not know it is important. If you do, you later have to replay all three levels of that episode, or it will not let you into the final zone. If you did not pay attention and do not know which zone it was, where you missed it, you are screwed. Softlocks - In the first level of the final zone, there is a room that has a locked door after a one-way door. If you do not have the key when you enter the room, you are stuck. If you make a quick-save before you notice, you have to restart the level. When this happened to me, I did not even bother to finish the rest of the game and just uninstalled it. I rather went to play something that respects my time. The game can be completed in about 4-5 hours, even faster if you do not explore everything to 100%, but trust me, none of that is worthy of your time. I put myself through it, so that you do not have to.

It’s a real pleasure to be able to play this classic Amiga on Linux, directly from GOG, I played on Linux Mint with a Logitech F310 controller. A special thanks to Virtual Design for the remake of Citadel Remonstered, which developed the Linux version. And a big thank you to GOG for thinking about the Linux community, it’s a very appreciated gesture!  Citadel Remonstered is old and it’s getting older, so it will appeal to the video game archaeologist. I didn’t know her in 1995 but I appreciate the discovery and it seems that the remake has many fixes and improvements that make it better than at the time. The game isn’t easy, but I had a good time, which I also hope you get to know. Overall, it’s a good experience that deserves five stars, even if it remains far from the current standard.