Fantasy General

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.

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.

I was sceptical about a fantasy-themed Five Star game, as it's not really playing to the strengths of the genres. The joy of fantasy is in exploring a new world and immersing yourself in its lore, while in this game a "Shadowlord" and his faceless mooks have somehow conquered a world consisting of five islands and an equally faceless band of heroes is off to stop them, somehow. That said, initially I was pleasantly surprised. The base mechanics are solid. You have a wide range of units to choose from, which gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your army. The details you won't figure out without consulting a manual or the internet, but you don't really need to because everything works more or less as you expect. Over the course of the campaign you can allocate excess gold to research better types of units, gather experience, and pick up heroes and items along the way. But the game kept going. And going. And going. Every new mission was more or less like the last, except occasionally the units got new art and better stats. Not only was this extremely dull, but protracted campaign length lays bare the weaknesses of the Five Star system -- experience is king, and the AI gets it for free while you have to train it up from scratch. As a consequence you have to be constantly on top of your game. It's not enough to win a stage, you have to win it with minimal losses to avoid setting yourself up for failure in the future. The game stops feeling like a game and starts feeling like work. To make it worse, Fantasy General doesn't share the campaign branching system of the other games in the series -- you have to win every single of the fifty or so repetitive, unmemorable stages in a row, or it's game over. The last straw was when I realised that the majority of the stages are not merely uninspired, but are in fact randomly generated. If the designers couldn't be bothered making the levels, you shouldn't bother playing them.

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.