The colony ship, Maximus, was on a routine voyage filled to the brim with colonist. This quickly changed when an unexpected gravitational entity appeared. The field quickly swallowed the Maximus. Invaders poured into the Maximus, feeding on the helpless colonists. Hope is not lost though, as there i...
The colony ship, Maximus, was on a routine voyage filled to the brim with colonist. This quickly changed when an unexpected gravitational entity appeared. The field quickly swallowed the Maximus. Invaders poured into the Maximus, feeding on the helpless colonists. Hope is not lost though, as there is one soldier on board that is about to take the fight to the invaders.
Grab your energy drinks because this will take some time, like 50 plus hours as you hack-and-slash your way through 45 diverse levels to the escape pods, saving as many colonists along the way.
So it is finally here on GOG! Yes, it is like Diablo 1 in space! But very difficult, because you can collect cells from aliens, and these cells are your ammunition and also your money! And simply not enough both for ammo and for health packs!
The GOG version (as well as Steam version) will not show you the Intro and Outro, unless you set the game's .exe file (main.exe) to Windows XP Service Pack 3 Compatible!
I read Excolion writing "torture" and now I know what he meant.
This game is hell! Backtracking, backtracking, more backtracking. In 1 hour of playing you spend 50 minutes running between places.
Kill a handful enemies and your health is depleted, so you run back to base to heal. Then run back to the "action". Rinse and repeat. Health items you can carry are too rare and health regeneration too slow to allow any fluid gameflow.
This is not Diablo 1. Controls are painful, enemies boring, progress punishingly slow and unrewarding, fighting (the core of the game) is a chore, environment unimaginative and unappealing, enemy types are few and even then all look similar. No characters to care about no story beyond "kill the enemy", nothing to make you want continue playing.
Yes, the intro and outro doesn't work, but that can be fixed, as leifina described. But, to name one positive: The music is unobtrusive and well done.
Resource management is not enjoyable, however. Every shot you fire costs money. The melee weapons don't, but they degrade with each attack, and repairing them cost money. In the end, you lack the funds for repairs, so you just wear them down and discard them, hoping to find a suitable replacement soon. Your electronic items need recharging, which costs more money. And only every fifth enemy or so even drops a handful of change. Never was being frugal so little fun.
And yes, just like Excolion, I was so bored by the game, I almost fell asleep playing.
I honestly cannot recommend this mess, not even at 90% discount.
I had mixed feelings for this game.
Back in my childhood, its name was "Maximus XV Abraham Strong Space Mercenary". I endured to the end, and finished it. The gameplay was fun on occasion but generally too repetitive, the ending was so unsatisfactory.
Fast forward to 2019, I dug up this game and tried to play it on my modern machine just for nostalgia's sake. There was a dreadful framerate issue which I had to spend many hours to fix via a DgVoodoo workaround. Then there was the intro and outro video issues as leifina wrote in their review. I just had to watch them manually by going to \data\local\video folder. Seeing from the review, it is still not fixed. I personally have not tried the GOG version but this game is not something I'd put my money on "again". Because I remember that after fixing the framerate issue and finally being able to play the game, I just fell asleep while playing. I'm not joking!
For those who wish to do a playthrough, I had played a ranged weapons build and it was not bad. Maybe you'd go for that. But iirc melee builds were more fun. Except when you meet the types of monsters that make you wish you'd gone for a ranged build :)
This game is so bad that back when it came out, I jumped through some hoops to get a refund on it when I bought it from the now-closed franchise Hastings back in the 2000s. They didn't like you to return software, as opened CD-ROMs could be copied and the CD Key was in the box and you might just write it down... But I begged them, and the manager relented and gave a teenager his money back (and spending it on literally anything else, even one of those weird Creatures games they sold back then or a Mahjong CD-ROM would have been a better investment in fun!)
Man, this game sucked! It's so unenthusiastically put together and so unenjoyable, learning nothing from its inspirations. It is one of the worst hack and slash ARPGs I ever played. Poorly balanced, next to no characterization or story that matters, absolutely bland environments and yawn-inducing gameplay. All the things you want an ARPG game to be, this isn't. To say it's "Diablo 1 in space" would be severely insulting Diablo 1, because Diablo 1 was fun the whole time you played it and this never manages anything like that. Bad old game, avoid it unless you're eager to experience a total misstep of the past.
Imagine releasing an ARPG, which has less mechanics than Diablo 1, but in 2005. What you get is Space Hack. The only choice of what to do with your character is where you dump the attribute points you get per level up. The only real choice is whether you want to go melee, ranged or "spells". Spells in quotations, because they are provided by a separate item type, gated by the attribute that is equivalent to Intelligence. Going melee will make the early stages of the game literal torture as you will have to wait for your health to regen after every few enemies because you have no other option but to tank hits.
As for "itemization", there are only 2 rarities. White and Blue equivalent from Diablo. Again, nothing else, making the game wholly uninteresting to play, as you've seen literally everything the moment a first blue item drops. Combine that with absolutely repetitive, stretched out maps which take forever to clear, basically no story to speak of and gameplay that does not change in the slightest from start to finish and you got a stinker. There are no skills or anything engaging at all in the entire game.
You will only derive some enjoyment out it if you want to mindlessly click with your brain off for several hours. I finished it for the sake of it, but the game is most likely not worth anyone's time.
3/10.
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