This game treats GOG customers like second-class citizens by removing the Achievements feature from the GOG version, even though the Steam version gives Achievements to Steam customers for these exact same games. There is no excuse for this crap! GOG customers are not worth less than Steam customers, and GOG customers' money is just as valid as is Steam customers' money. So then, why do GOG customers "deserve" to have features removed from the GOG version? The only reasonable answer is: we don't, and there is no excuse for this second-class citizen treatment! No one should buy these games until and unless the devs fix this lack of feature parity (but they probably never will!). Otherwise, if you buy these game anyway, then you are sending devs and publishers the message that treating GOG customers like second-class citizens with missing features is fine and dandy, and they will just keep doing it more often in the future.
The Steam store page for Shing! lists a main feature as being: "Play solo or with friends: 4 player local and online co-op." Contrast this with the GOG store page, which instead says: "Play solo or with friends: 4 player local co-op." Notice how they completely removed the "online co-op" feature from the GOG version. They didn't bother to implement GOG to Steam Crossplay, and they also didn't bother to give the game Galaxy-only multiplayer either. Instead, they hoped nobody would notice the missing feature. But I noticed, and now you have too. The consequence of this decision to remove a major feature from the GOG version is that the experience of playing this game singleplayer is horrible, because it is not designed for singleplayer. Let me give you an example of exactly what I mean: at the second level, you have to fight a gimmick boss. The gimmick boss fight goes like this: The boss is a giant ogre monster who charges at you and hits you with melee, and who also casts an AOE spell to hit you from great range. At the same time, infinitely-respawning imps are constantly attacking you. There is no possible way to damage this boss unless you first engage in the gimmick mechanics that the game forces you into: you need to hold the block button and then walk around to cause your sword to aim the light into the ogre's face, to make him vulnerable to your attacks briefly. But the mechanics for doing this are horribly imprecise and clunky, meaning you will be getting owned through no fault of your own. While you are busy with this gimmick mechanic, it is impossible for you to dodge the attacks of the imps, or the boss, or to slay any of the imps. This gimmick boss was clearly designed to be fought by multiple players at once: one to aim the light, as another slays the imps, as another distracts the boss, etc. But since GOG has no online co-op, the game forces you to lose because you cannot possibly do all those things at once, as just one player.
This game has an unpatched game-breaking bug in its second scenario. If it occurs, then your saved game has become corrupted, all of your progress will be lost and you will have to restart the whole game again and hope the bug doesn't occur for you the next time. When the bug occurs, you get a black screen instead of having the final mission of the second scenario load like it is supposed to do. In 2018 on their Steam forum, the devs were quoted talking about this issue. They acknowledged that the bug exists, and said they weren't going to fix it while working on their next game, Phantom Doctrine. They also promised to fix it *after* they finished Phantom Doctrine. Phantom Doctrine was released in August 2018, and I am writing this review in April 2023, after I have experienced this game-breaking bug; because contrary to their promise, the devs *never* came back to Hard West 1 in order to fix the bug. It's still present. Another major issue with this game: it made my 2080 GPU's fans spin so fast that they sound as loud as a vacuum. But the graphics for this game are not that great, and the characters are not very detailed from a visual perspective, so there is no good reason for why it should be heating up my GPU to toaster-like levels, even though it does. If you can get past all the issues I just mentioned, then Hard West 1 is a decent Xcom imitator. It's not as deep as Xcom, and it lacks the variety of weapons and enemies and tools that Xcom has, but it can still be fun. One thing Hard West 1 does very well is to have a devil character provide voice-over narration frequently as you are in the middle of playing through missions. This voice actor does a perfect job of playing a calm, cool, collected devil. I don't know how to rate this game, because if you experience the game-breaking bug, it's a 0/5. But if you don't experience the bug, or if you replay the game after you experience it and then it doesn't occur, then the game is perhaps a 3.5/5.
I beat this entire DLC and I believe it is worse than the main game. Here are the reasons why, which I have divided into numbered points: 1. The devil narrator character from the main game, the one who is constantly providing voice-over narration, and who did an excellent job at that, he is totally absent from this DLC. 2. Instead, voice-over narration is now provided by two new voice actors: one for the main character you play as in the DLC, a slave woman named Libertee, and the other by a character named Dr. Gorman. Although the Dr. Gorman voice actor did a great job, I felt the Libertee voice actress did a horrible job. To me, her performance comes across like an amateur voice actress trying to imitate an American Southern accent, but not having the skill to do so authentically. Therefore, the Libertee voice actress destroyed my immersion in the game because her voice performance is not believable. 3. In the main game, you have a Fate Trader shop, which allows you to buy the good unique weapons and talismans that you unlocked by accomplishing tasks within the main game's scenarios. However, in this DLC, the Fate Trader shop is totally absent. Therefore, you have no ability to buy any of the good - and fun - unique weapons that are present in the main game. This means that while playing the DLC, your characters are mostly stuck using crappy standard weapons, like the normal shotgun, which makes them weak and also not-fun to use. Likewise, you also can't buy the great talismans from the main game, like the candle of the dead which greatly improves your characters' aim. 4. This DLC has you alternate between two different posses at various points, with many characters in each one, but it doesn't have enough missions for you to unlock all the cards. So, your characters in the DLC will also be gimpy because you will only have a few cards unlocked, but you have to spread them around to many different characters, with not enough cards to go around.
This GOG version of Skyrim is incompatible with massive amounts of mods, definitely thousands, and maybe even tens of thousands. I know from experience. I bought from GOG due to the trailer on the GOG store page which - very misleadingly - claims: "Experience a decade's worth of content." By that statement, they are clearly asserting that most or all of the decade's worth of mods that were made for Skyrim will work with the GOG version. Except in reality, they do not! Likewise, I was also misled by the original post of the GOG Skyrim announcement thread, which incorrectly states: "The GOG version is compatible out of the box with most modifications mods via Nexus Mods Vortex v1.6.12 and newer. " That quoted statement is simply not true. I used that exact version of Vortex, and I was very excited to download the most popular, most downloaded, most endorsed mod collection of Skyrim that is hosted anywhere on the Nexus, which features 450 mods that massively improve all aspects of the game. Then I learned a horrible truth: that mod collection does not actually work with the GOG version. The manager of that collection has stated that the GOG version definitely will not be compatible any time in the foreseeable future, if ever (maybe it never will). Many other huge mod collections also do not work with the GOG version, and neither do many essential mods, like RaceMenu. People who know more about the technical aspects of this subject than me have said that the mod authors would have to make GOG-specific variants for some of these mods before they would work with the GOG version. Realistically, that is *never* going to happen for most of the mods out there. The *ONLY* real way to make Skyrim be worth it on GOG would be for GOG and Bethesda to use the same build as the other PC platform does, so that all mods made for that version will also work with the GOG version automatically. Until if and when that happens, this GOG version is not worth buying.
This GOG version of this Shadow of War game is missing the Achievements feature that is available for this game on the platforms where it originally released (including both PC and console versions). The game developers, and also GOG itself, *should be* giving GOG customers fairness and equality and feature parity in exchange for their money. Yet here, they are not doing so, and instead they expect GOG customers to be happy with a feature-removed, inferior product. This problem could easily be solved by either GOG insisting that the developers add Achievements or else they will delist the game off of GOG, and/or by the developers just deciding of their own volition to give GOG customers feature parity simply because it's the right thing to do. Unfortunately, based on the history of other games that also treat GOG customers like second-class citizens via removing features from the GOG version, both of those solutions are very unlikely ever to happen in reality. Instead, the most likely outcome will be that the developers and GOG will both completely ignore this problem, and therefore leave the GOG version of Shadow of War forever missing a feature that easily could & should be added, if only the developers put in a tiny amount of work in order finally to give GOG customers equal treatment to their customers on other platforms. I therefore recommend that no one buys this Shadow of War game, as buying it just emboldens & encourages GOG and game developers to continue allowing second-class treatment of GOG customers to occur.
