The game itself is fairly good despite the fact that it tries to force you to make a Eugen account every time you start up. You can skip it, but you can't turn off the prompt because data farmers gonna data farm, I guess. The reason for the one star rating is actually for something that might seem trivial but basically makes the game unplayable for me. The default camera movement and controls are terrible, and there is no option to change them. You can use WASD to move the camera, but to rotate it you have to either press CTRL-A and CTRL-D, which is annoying and causing strain with how frequently you need to rotate the camera. There's also a freelook camera mode where you have to hold down the middle mouse button, which is also annoying. The middle mouse button is a scroll wheel, it should NEVER be the default control for something you're using every two seconds because it rotates. You got to hit it in a tense moment, your finger slips off, camera goes flying. I'm sure plently of people would tell me to just get used to it, and that's no reason to give up on a good game, but honestly for me it is. I've put a LOT of hours into this trying to ignore these relatively minor annoyances but eventually it just made me not want to play any more. There are key rebinding options, but baffling none for camera rotation. Q and E are right there and unused! A quick check of forums is full of people begging them since at least 2019 to include basic functionality like this and there's been nothing but an endless stream of paid DLC instead. So buy the game if you have no issue with this control method. For me I have some issues with my hands that make it painful and untenable to play, and there's literally NO reason to not let us change it except the whole team is probably too busy working on yet another $10 reskin pack of some obscure division to work on basic features.
It's a great game, one that I'd never even heard of back in the day, but it holds up incredibly well. The story is jingostic Red Dawn stuff, but it's done really well. The writing and presentation are top notch, and it knows exactly what it is and what it wants to do. It's an action movie RTS, and it's really good at it. That's not to say no tactics are required. You still have a lot of deployment options and airstrikes, artillery and so on to call in. It's extremely linear, but that's not a bad thing, it helps with the cinematic presentation and the cut scenes are pretty engaging, but not so long as to feel like a chore to watch between battles. It also does a good job of telling the story through radio comms as the battle is raging. The only problems I had getting it to run was that I had to use the large memory allocation exe to stop it from crashing fairly frequently. That's easy enough to do, but it really should be included in the installer. Perhaps it will be at some point with the Good Old Games certification program. In the meantime, it's not difficult to implement yourself if you end up having similar crashes, and I've had zero technical issues outside that.
I read the reviews before installing, but then managed to play through the entire prologue without getting any of the crashes that people were complaining about. It ran perfectly for the first hour until I took the train ride. Then it immediately crashed. Reloaded the game, and took the train again, this time it didn't crash and I was able to continue. Met up with a gang, got my first proper quest and... crashed again. I started to mess around with the game and lowered all the graphics settings to significantly less than I normally play Fallout 4 on. Crashes. Tried a lot of different configurations, but it basically crashes no matter what I'm doing within ten minutes or less now. I had a fresh GOG install of Fallout 4 and Fallout London, no other mods. The game seems really good. There's a lot of care, voice acting and music is pretty good, the atmosphere and world building likewise. Unfortunately, like so many total conversion mods, it's simply not stable enough to actually play the game. It's too frustrating, which is a pity, because I really do like what I've seen so far, but I'm not prepared to play in ten minute chunks and constantly lose progress. Hopefully the team manages to fix this stuff, but I'm not holding my breath. It's free and very easy to install, so try it and maybe your random configuration of PC components won't cause the game to constantly CTD. There's a minority of people who seem to have no issues, but clearly there's a lot more who do. Maybe I'll check back in a year or two if they stick with it. Probably not worth the hassle just yet.
The game itself is fairly good. It's reminiscent of a Warhammer version of Myth The Fallen Lords in a few ways, although not as good as that game. The gameplay itself is not the problem, however, it's the other aspects. I had no problems getting it running on windows 10 like some others did here, as that appears to be an issue with intergrated graphics cards rather than the OS itself. It also has key rebinding on the options menu, but it doesn't really work. Trying to set up WASD camera control doesn't work at all, and I set Q and E to rotate the camera, but that just results in some conflict with the former use of Q that sets the camera permanently rotating until you hit the Delete key (which was the previous keybind for that function even if you've removed or changed it). So basically, don't expect to rebind your keys in any useful or consistent way, and unfortuantely it has a fairly archaic system involving page up, end and so on for camera controls which really doesn't suit a lot of modern laptop keyboards. It may seem like a minor thing, but it actually seriously hampers my ability to enjoy the game, constantly having to fight muscle memory and use illogical keys to see what's going on. Still, I reccomend it overall, especially for anyone with fond memories of Myth and the more linear, non base-building types of tactics games.
The game itself is fine, although I preferred the more focused missions of Blood Money, but they've gone down an even more sandbox route this time, where you are supposed to replay the missions using different starting points and unlockable items. Which you can't actually unlock because the game refuses to save any of your progress without a constant internet connection. GOG can claim that this isn't 'technically' DRM as much as they want, but what we've got without online authentification is a glorified demo version of the game where most of the content is missing. It's worse than most, because it doens't just check your internet connection once on startup, it requires a constant connection or it boots you out of your own single player game. It also stores offline and online saves separately, and although you can access already unlocked items offline in a new game, you have to be online to unlock them in the first place. It was bad enough when IOI pulled this ridiculous crap on other platforms, but it's a step too far to put this on GOG. It's not DRM free, it's the WORST kind of DRM there is. Don't buy it, don't support this developer and their terrible decisions, and don't reward GOG for degrading the one thing that made them preferable to Steam. If GOG is going to gradually sneak DRM and online requirements in single player games onto their platform, then why should I buy from them rather than Steam? I liked GOG because I thought I could buy games, confident that this sort of stuff wouldn't be there. Now I have to research everything and check all the forums just to make sure, because GOG can no longer be trusted. It's kind of amazing how determined CD Projekt is to tear down their own reputation in such a short amount of time...
