I am not usually the biggest fan of adventure games mainly because of the often ridiculous trial and error puzzles which to me just get old really fast. Luckily this game focuses more on the story and the characters and the puzzles are usually fairly easy or can be solved with actual logic instead of making the solution trial and error or something completely absurd for the sake of cheap laughs. The pixel art is also beautiful and does an excellent job of conveing the athmosphere and the same goes for the soundtrack. However imo opinion the main selling point is the story and the characters. While the premise is not terribly original the story is told in a very engaging manner, especially for a point and click andventure, the characters are all likeable and believable as well and made me really care about this world, the voice acting is also really solid. Overall the way the story is told make the game quite the unique experience and I can't really think of any other game that provide something similar. All in all highly recommended for anyone who wants a unique mystery/fantasy noir story, wrapped in an accessible point and click adventure.
This has to be one of the worst shooters I have ever played. There seems to be little rhyme or reason to how much damage your character can take, sometimes you can walk right into enemy fire and calmly kill them while taking next to no damage and the next second you die without even knowing that there was an enemy in the area. This especially true for explosives which seem to have no consistency whatsoever to the damage they cause and the range of the explosion and they sometimes outright ignore cover. Also especially on higher difficulty levels enemies seems appear out of nowhere, shooting you in the back from an area that you just cleared. The game seems to have massive issues with colliders as your character gets stuck on pretty much everything which makes the movement even more awkward than it already is. However my biggest issues are the extremely sluggish movement and the gunplay itself. Walking feels like a you're moving at slow motion and Sprinting feels like a carefree saunter, that makes modern shooter feel like Quake by comparison. The gunplay is also absolutely horrendous, even semi automatic weapons have a ridiculous amount of random bullet spread, pretty much completely taking player skill out of the equation. Especially at longer ranges you're basically just pointing the weapon in a general direction and hope that you hit someone before you run out of ammo or get one hitted by someone who miraculously appeared behind you. This further adds to the chaos and randomness and also makes this probably by far the most difficult shooter I've ever played, as it is probably the only shooter that I couldn't get through on the highest or even second to highes difficulty level. This wouldn't necesarrily be a bad thing, however you never feel like you died because you screwed up but rather because somethin randomly murdered you, making the game extremely frustrating, the limited amount of saves further aggrevates this, making the gaem pretty much unplayable.
Maybe I am just spoilt because I recently played the amazing Project Warlock and Ion Maiden, but for an oldschool shooter the weapons feel, well suprisingly modern and unfortunately not in a good way. Most weapons I've come across feel extremely sluggish and no matter how powerful they might be they rarely ever feel actually powerful, I can't really put my finger on it, it might be the lackluster sound effects, or the weapon damage but they feel more like toys than anything else. This becomes especially apparent compared to the fast paced movement that is every bit as good and fluent, or even better than in most of the games contemporaries. It is also not helped by the fact that most enemies can take quite a lot of damage. Because of all this it often feels like you're not actively killing enemies but rather simply waiting for them to die while you run around and dodge their attacks. Unfortunately this type of shooter lives and dies by how its weapons and movement feel and interact with each other, and this particlaur one is no exception offering very little redeeming qualities beyond maybe the music and the art style. Also this is by no means a big issue but poor UI design is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. The font they used, while aesthetically pleasing, is pretty much impossible to read on the fly and really should never have been used for anything in the menu beyond the title perhabs, let alone conveying important information in the midst of battle. Now don't get me wrong, the gunplay is still somwhat fun and entertaining for a while and if this game was the only old school shooter out there I might find it to be rather refreshing, however looking at the plethora of other games in this style that have been released recently, I unfortunately can't really think of a reason to recommend this over any of them.
Playing this now I utterly fail to understand how this was ever considered a mastpiece by me or anyone else. Oddly enough the story, which is the one aspect of the game that people still trip over themselves to praise. It features some of the worst pacing, ridiculous writing and most laughable dialog in CRPG history, all topped of by the most unlikeable and annoying cast of party members I've ever seen. The clunky UI and the bland combat don't help much either. It doesn't even make sense to me how it was so well received in the 90s since we already had games like Fallout 2 or the brilliant Planescape: Torment. In conclusion, if you ever wanted to know what it would feel like to play D&D with a bunch unhinged 9-year-olds (who also probably provided the voice acting for this), with a DM who thinks he is way better than he actually is, look no further.
