Fantasy General

Got this one for free during a GoG sale at the same time I purchased HOMM3 and didn't think much of it as I got right to work liberating Erathia. Well, today I needed something to do while I had my morning coffee on my day of and so I decided to liberate Aer (the world in this game). I have to say I'm impressed. All the story is voice acted, it's got great art and visuals and really harkens back to a time when game designers gave their all to give games a feel and make them believable. For anyone who's played a hex-based TBS before, this'll be a breeze to pick up, and yet somehow still manage to be challenging even if it seems "primitive." There's no resource management in terms of collecting gems, wood or taxes or any of the like in other games such as HOMM. You find gold as you go by liberating towns, caves, dungeons, etc. and use that coupled with the spoils you get from your defeated enemies to replenish your troops, research upgrades and new ones. Then deck out your armies with items you find and go crush your enemies (if you're lucky!). If you don't go into it expecting too much, I think this one will end up on your favorites list for sure. And it works flawlessly on Windows 10 with the Anniversary Update (just in case you were wondering). But DOSbox pretty much works flawlessly on everything, to be fair.

Fantasy General used to be a great game, and one that I was really looking forward to showing up on GOG. And to be fair, there's still a really good core mechanic in here, even if the best strategy requires only two types of units (Light Cavs and Sky Hunters) to win. The thing is, Fantasy General is really difficult to play. Twenty years of UI improvements are painfully missing here. There are no hotkeys, and the menu layout is just strange and counterintuitive. Plus, the clicks you have to make are usually on different sides of the screen -- there's a lot of unnecessary mouse movement. But the real killer is that there's no way to adjust the mouse scrolling speed, which is virtually instantaneous, given a CPU that's 20 years better than what this was designed for. And there's no way to scroll the map view manually because no hotkeys, so looking at anything besides the four corners of the map becomes a chore of clicking through several screens. I wanted to give this game a perfectly positive review. I really did. I loved it when it came out, but it desperately needs some mods to make it playable. In short, if you can handle a terrible UI, it's a truly a good old game. If you can't, give it a miss.

Just Wow. Never heard of it. Love tactical games. The graphics are damn nice (for those who don't mind pixel arts). This game is a delight. It has its faults: it a DOS game, interface is quite bad, it seems that there aren't any keyboard shortcut, everything is done by the mouse, the scroll speed can get annoying (too fast). So, mostly, it's about controls. And to be clear: this is a game about skirmish, skirmish, skirmish. Not so much RPG in it. Choose among 4 different heroes with their own perks and unit affinities, hire fresh troops with gold, take care of the volunteer you might cross during missions. Good stuff. GOG thank you for this one.

One of the first games I owned, I still have the original CD, ripped years ago in CUE/BIN format to preserve the soundtrack in DOSbox. Easy to play, deep in strategy, the kind of game it is makes the graphics not look as outdated as it would otherwise be. It is also one of the few games I play over and over, with different generals and strategies. I never played the Panzer General series, but Fantasy General is a very good game even in 2015.

Great game and alterantive to Panzer General if you're not into WW2 . Superb design, multiple strategies,units can get experience , heroes, upgrades, research, everything what turn based strategy should have . Campaign is challenging and you neeed to carry on with units that survived previous missions, very tough game to beat which makes it super fun to play . I rememeber having this on CD-ROM and it was my first strategy of this type . Maybe nostalgia is speaking but to me this is 5 stars game in this genre and i got it for free from GOG <3 :)