The "difference" is that it's playable up until Scenario "Krugh". Pretty much after that, it's beyond suck. Work and frustration do not equal fun. The reason this game is obscure and unloved is not the strange theme and mechanics, it's because the designers were too
arrogant to make the "Easy " setting ACTUALLY EASY. You can do everything correctly, with glacial progress, inching along with agonizing boring slowness, and in the blink of an eye, your energy level skyrockets downhill to "2" and you're dead.

Thousands of players who passed on this game missed out, for sure. They missed out on being ripped off by a difficulty and speed scale that is BROKEN.

I would disagree with that. The game is actually different to others in the RTS genre and not in a bad way.

The easy setting IS actually easy, but there are some missions where you will be hard-pressed even with that, e.g. the ZABRICK mission where that stupid face reappears every minute and destroys your energy core. [spoiler[Thankfully you only need it only for a few seconds to start building the portal.[/spoiler]

The game does have a couple of flaws though:

1. The storyline: man, I'm so confused right now having played about 12 missions. There are three factions and you are serving one in one mission, the other in the next with no transition to separate that. The storywriter seems to have wanted to create a story twist like in Starcraft, but failed in the attempt. The result is simply confusing.

2. Mission design: Until you know how to play all the strategies, you have serious trouble completing some missions, like the infamous KRUGH mission. Unfortunately the game does not introduce these strategies. To top it off, a particular mission is designed so tense that the one strategy seems like the only way to go. I'm sure there are masters out there who can use pretty much any strategy completing such missions, but for us less capable people, such strategies simply can't work.

3. Resolution support: it's a directx game, why the heck did they have to limit resolutions ?!?


All in all still an interesting game, especially for the price I got on GOG :D

This is one of my all time favourite RTS games, I bought it on here because the original game appears to me missing from it's case, I'm sure it'll turn up. The story is vague, very vague, but it has depth and richness and ambiguity that you just wont find in the modern equivalent. I don't remember the particularly difficult missions mentioned, been a long while since I played this to completion, but I know I have completed it at least twice, so they can't be that bad. I've played a few missions so far on this playthrough and am loving it, shame about the lack of widescreen support though, guess that's a limitation of the engine :(

not only does the game not introduce strategies (then again, why should it? the task of the player is to work them out!), it does not explain new units and technologies. they just get gradually enabled and before you realize what they do, you have already lost.

i get the feeling that you have to complete the game (with lots and lots of restarts and trial and error) before you really know how to play it. that is not really fun.