Overall it's a pretty fun game for the few hours that it lasts. I started and finished the game in two nights on hard. Set-up is a bit console-like as you can only carry two guns, one of which is always the Lawgiver pistol. It has multiple firing types (6 or so) which are varied but I ended up only using a few myself. As for problems with the game. 1. The boss battles are pretty uninspiring and forgettable. Sometimes they're finished before you know they've really started. 2. Enemy variety is lacking, you end up fighting the same enemies near the end as you did in nearly the beginning. 3. Some of the later levels have balancing issues particularly in respect to how much ammunition they give you. I was so low on ammo I had to fire incendaries and watch the enemy burn for 30 seconds before I could continue. It really ruined the pace. With that being said the shooting is pretty satisfying and fun. Arresting people and saving civilians can vary up the gameplay and make it a bit more enjoyable. Maybe wait for a sale to pick this up.
Though the plot is a bit cliche and it's over-shadowed by its sequel, Freespace is a VERY good game. Interesting ships, cool weapons, atmospheric music, varied gameplay (mission objectives) and a satisfying climax. One thing I will say. Some people have said in their reviews that you should skip this and just buy FS2 and get the "FSPort" along with FSOpen from hard-light.net. . . I disagree with this personally. I've never been one to care for flashy graphics, and personally if I play FS1 again I play the original game not the port. There's just something about having the original graphics, interface, music and so forth that is just a bit more special than simply playing a port later on. Also I'm not convinced that the gameplay between FS1 and FSPort is the same. FS2 is a very missile-centric game. Whereas in FS1 you rely more on your fighter's laser cannons because the missiles aren't that reliable. This makes it much more of a dog-fight orientated game. Also I'm not convinced the AI behaviour and some of the other code is the same between the two games. So in summary, if you love space flight sims. Pick this bad boy up. Then pick up FS2 afterwards and play the multitude of user-made campaigns for both settings.
I was going to give this game 3 stars, and then: "Your system has recovered from a serious error" This, along with about 2 dozen other crash to desktops really set me off. Advent Rising is no 5 star game. It was panned by critics for a reason. People didn't buy it for a reason, and if you buy it you'll see why. Now don't get me wrong, it's not a total piece of crap, in fact it has a lot of good things going for it. Namely: 1. Music - the music is suitably epic, and some of the better music I've heard in a video game. 2. Graphics - even today, the graphics are pretty good. Mind you the game isn't all that old, but it is a few years. Still the explosions, tanks and so forth are all pretty and blow up pretty good. 3. Story - the story itself isn't that bad. Some reviewers here are complaining its too anime or too lofty, well, to each their own. But the story has potential. This is more of a "high brow" sci-fi with human transcendence and that sort of thing. As for the graphics, well as I've said they're good and having a style does not make it a bad game. If the characters are all designed with a certain aesthetic in mind that's fine, not every game has to be hyper-realistic. Now the problems: The story of the game itself is crap. Now, this seems to contradict what I said just above, but it doesn't, not entirely. As reviewers said when the game first game out, the story is poorly told. My point is that the story, or what they're going for is okay, but the story as its presented in the game itself is garbage. There are huge plotholes. For example your character seemingly gains these super powers simply because some guy thinks its a good idea. There's no real initiation, it doesn't even show the guy helping your character learn them. He just starts doing it. None of the characters are all that likeable either. On the one hand, the game wants you to care about the characters, on the other hand, it gives you no reason to. In fact the game itself doesn't even seem to care. Potentially major spoiler alert here, but for example, the main character at one point loses someone very close to him, a love interest. Five minutes later he's practically in the arms of another woman. If he cares so much about the first girl why does he forget about her 5 seconds after she's gone? There's no real depth to the characters. And then even with this "huge epic story" going on, the gamplay itself is boring. Really there's very little connection between the story and the gameplay, sometimes to the point of absurdity. The gameplay is basically the character shooting bad guys. He shoots bad guys on a ship, then shoots them somewhere else, and shoots them again in some other place. Theoretically he's going somewhere, to do something, but he rarely does anything, he mostly just shoots people. For example at one point your on an enemy ship, then you fight your way to the bridge, then what do you at the bridge? Absolutely Nothing! You turn around and leave the way you came and then go off in some other direction. The whole game is basically the character vs 3-10 bad guys, broken up with the occasional very easy vehicle section. Occasionally the character has some allies helping him who range from useful to useless, all of which are invulnerable at least to the player's fire anyway. They'll disappear and re-appear at random. Basically long story short, the music is epic and you play the game and you want to get into this epic battle but there is no epic battle. There's just repetitive shooting with no real purpose. I mean your character interacts with elevators, he even interacts occasionally with devices to DO something story wise, but this is extremely rare. In fact I think he does it all of one time. The rest of the time he's not doing anything other than moving from room to room or street to street shooting things. Apparently he's going somewhere most of the time, but for what purpose and to what end I don't know. It gets a little better near the end, but also near the end is where stability issues start coming up big time. Oh and what else, some of the boss battles are annoying. Advent Rising takes the route of "your weapons are useless, you have to do something special" in boss battles. This is fine, in theory, you have to find the kink in the boss's pattern right? But sometimes your waiting for like 5 minutes to even get a shot at it. Seriously. At one point you fight this big monkey thing, and like many bosses you have to wait til it attacks to do something, but sometimes the boss does this attack 3 or 4 times in a row. Other times he's chasing you around for four freaking minutes and all you're doing is trying not to die while the completely random AI does its thing. Basically if you're going to have a pattern make it a pattern, don't make me waste my time WAITING for this stupid thing to happen. So in summary, it's a game that has potential. It has a good story IDEA behind it, with a very impressive musical score and some good visuals BUT the gameplay falls short, the story is very poorly told and sometimes doesn't make any sense in relation to the gameplay, and its just repetitive and not all that fun. Oh, and stability issues. 2/5!
This is an interesting game which I don't think I've seen repeated anywhere else. Basically a game wherein you play either as a foot soldier, or as a pilot of several stories-tall mecha. As a mecha you'll fight other mecha as well as enemy soldiers while out of your mech you'll fight other soldiers, but sometimes mecha as well. And the combat is pretty unforgiving. You can be at full health, and die in an instant because some of the guns are that powerful. So is it a good game? I enjoyed it. The combat is varied with the two modes. They're both point and shoot but the soldier and mecha weapons are quite distinct. The graphics are a little dated of course, the story is a bit hammy, and the action is a little unrealistic style wise but as a whole it works. It's basically an anime game, as much as Oni was from Bungie, and like Oni this game is fairly good. My only real problem with the game is some parts were ridiculously difficult. There's one part where you have to fight some rogue pilot on top of a platform near a helijet and the enemy guy has some ridiculously proportioned gun that can blow you apart in two shots. I tried about a dozen times but couldn't even get close to the guy. Eventually, he either got stuck on terrain or died somehow that wasn't by doing. Basically the game screwed up and I benefitted from it. Later on you fight a mecha while on foot. Man vs Mecha is a bad idea, for the man that is. Like any mecha you really need a platoon of guys to take it down, one on one is more like suicide and the game reflects this as the battle is quite difficult. As is the entire final arc. Though like most games, the final boss battle is ridiculously easy compared to what you have to do to get there. So all in all. Some balance issues I would say. But still a fun game and worth a go. It's not perfect, but for anime-mecha combat there's not much else on the market and it's unique from my experience.
The best part of this game is drawing the runes on the screen to cast magic. That's so cool, feels like I'm actually casting spells instead of just hitting a button. Overall I got a lot of enjoyment from this game, I'm not one for RPGs, but I enjoyed this and played it through to the end. I've played, or at least started Morrowind, another popular RPG but frankly I didn't much care for it. The problem with Morrowind for me is that there's too much info. You can ask everyone like 20 different questions and they all have some cookie-cutter response. They're not really characters in my opinion, they're just objects to interact with that dispense data. Not so with Arx Fatalis. Many of the characters have individual, spoken dialogue. The story isn't as deep, but I find the world itself more believable, it has more character because the people in that world are more individual. Some of the NPCs are useless, no mistake, maybe they say the same 5-6 lines of dialogue, but its THEIR dialogue, and few if any other characters say the same thing. I would've liked a little more to the story though in terms of length. Perhaps a little more opportunity for exploration. But the developers obviously chose to tell a tight, fairly-linear story and they achieved that. Overall. I enjoyed the game and recommend that anyone who has an interest in FP-RPGs to give it a go. For the price it's well worth it. And like I say, the spell-casting is so cool.
I'd heard good things about this game, first notably from a rather crude and popular interview review guy. But the game lives up to the hype. Interesting story, good characters and character animation, often catchy music (the music from the HQ area has been stuck in my head for days), and fairly good although sometimes frustrating game play. My one complaint, if it can be made is that the intro arc is too short. The time BEFORE the main action gets started is all too brief, I would've liked to have known the characters a bit more before the crap hits the fan. And don't get me wrong, I talked to everyone, but I would've liked a little more talking, especially with the kids. Also it was never clear to me what the Janitor character was for, he didn't do much of anything. This is well worth the price, and anyone even remotely interested should give it a go. You won't be dissapointed. I would probably give it a 4.5 stars, but as there are no half-stars a 5 will have to do.
Blood Rayne 1's a pretty good game. This one is okay, up until the point I'm at now. Basically the first half is fairly easy with some difficult spots. Then the "crap hits the fan" in the story line, and the player has to fight boss after boss after boss. Rayne lives by feeding on people, she also gets her powers by feeding on people. Then from the point I'm at now you basically fight enemy after enemy that can't be fed upon because they have weapons and can't be disarmed. They also all have ranged attacks. It's honestly getting very old very fast. It's mixed up with the very token lower-enemies that can actually be used to heal, but these are few, far and inbetween. When I have to re-do every section 5 times each minimum it gets a little tedious.
Picked this up during the Majesco sale. In the past I've never been into 3rd person action games, then I played Prince of Persia. Since then I've played a number of them, most recent among them Blood Rayne. As a game, it's pretty fun. Yeah the story is very generic, paranormal-division of the nazis. We've seen it before in all types of movies and other games. So don't expect anything fantastic in that regard. Some of the dialogue is a bit cheesy, but a lot of it is quite humorous. Gameplay wise, some of the animations are a little bit artificial at times, mostly when she's running around, would be nice to see the characters better planted in the environment. But a lot of the fighting animations are pretty good. The combat itself is fairly entertaining, though I find it to be a little easy myself. The whole "grab the guy and suck his blood to heal yourself" move is very powerful and can take down a wide variety of foes with little trouble. Against melee enemies you rarely even take damage while you're doing this. Also the game has a sort of "bullet time" like you might see in FEAR. The problem in the game however is that this bullet time is unlimited. You can play the whole game that way if you really wanted to. For some of the bosses, it is necessary, but it can make other parts of the game uneccesarily easy. The only really challenging guys are the panzerschrek and faust guys (german bazooka or rocket launcher). That being said, it's still prety fun. Overall, for the price and if you have the time it's worth a go, but it won't be the best game you ever play. Though for me, I'd play almost any game for 5 or 10 bucks. The price is right :D
