Posted on: June 8, 2022
shatto
Verified ownerGames: 171 Reviews: 9
A great game that doesnt work
I've been playing this game for 25 years, a quarter of a century, ever since I got the demo on a CD along with "The Space Bar" back in the Windows 95/98 days. I requested this game a LONG time ago through the community Wishlist, though, I only just now realized they actually fulfilled it. I love this game. It's buggy. The AI can be super dumb. There are some really cheesy and easy paths to victory, but I still love it. I have the full CD, and I've been playing it in a Windows XP VM since the original game broke back in Windows Vista. Unfortunately, my original CD has deteriorated to the point that the music no longer plays. When I saw it was FINALLY available on GoG, I was so excited I bought it without question. Better yet, it says it runs in Windows 10! But, it wasn't meant to be. On my first attempt at launch, it crashed on the intro movie. My second attempt crashed less than 30 seconds into the game. My third attempt, an independent install from Galaxy, crashed again within 30 seconds. I succeeded in playing a fourth attempt for several minutes, but it crashed when I tried to scroll the screen. The crashing aside, the game isn't complete. All of the animations are missing. Units don't slide from hex to hex, they just snap from one space to the next with no animation. Bombardment animations and sounds don't play, attack animations don't play. There's no life in this version of the game, even if you can somehow keep it from crashing. I really want to play this game on a modern OS, but this isn't the way to do it. As it stands, this is something you can try if you didn't love the original, but, if you didn't love the original, you'll probably hate this GoG version, and that's not fair because EOFS is a decent 4X game when it actually works. I've requested a refund because it's just not reasonably playable natively in Windows 10. I've also tried to install it on a Windows XP VM and it just doesn't play at all. I really want this game to work, because it's a lot of fun when it does. But, as it stands now, my 20-plus-years-old CD on a VM in Windows XP through VMPlayer works on Windows 10, this doesn't. I will pay for this game in a heartbeat if it's made to work through modern Windows operating systems, or, at least, with hacks through a hypervisor. As it stands, this version just doesn't work at all and I can't see any reason anybody should buy it.
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