Soldier of fortune is dumb (and kind of offencive, especially if your black and arab like me. It gets a little uh, “ignorant” at certain parts) fun. The actual gun play is nothing special and kind of floaty, but how enemy react to getting shot is oh, so-satisfying. Heads, guts, and limbs exploding from everything to pistols to rocket launchers. The best part of this game is that if you continue to shoot dying enemies they stand and flail around while being pelted with lead (like how murphy died in robocop). The one downside is that there is a limit to the amount of civilian/ allies you can kill/can get killed before getting a game over, it’s so much fun committing war crimes that it s@#ks that the game stops you from commiting to many. There might be a way to mod/cheat code the war crime limite out, but I don’t actually know. It also does not control the best (the game assumes you want to aim with the keyboard for example) and you will probably want to mess around with the controles to get them to your liking. Even then if you can’t stand the control of the game I would not blame you and would suggest getting a refund, otherwise solid buy!
Fallout 2 is a buggy and dated game, but it does have personality (unlike fallout 1). Combat is still obtuse and simultaneously overly simple, but is much smoother looking then fallout 1 (UI is still terrible tho). The dialog can be fun at times but the writing in general is filled with dated pop culture references and is rather shallow, but has some quirkiness to it. The main reason to play fallout 2 is to mess around with the world, plant explosives in peoples pants, murd- befriend children, harass two headed cows, etc. That being said, Fallout 3, 4, New Vegas are just better games with better writing, have more to mess with, and more depth to the combat. I would get it on sale if you curious, if not then don’t bother.
I was very surprised with how dry fallout 1 was (pun intended), the story and world is very dry with little personality. Most of the world is a grey blur, it really just exists to give the player a (at the time) unique setting for the combat system. The combat is obtuse yet overly simple; you have to constantly switch between movement and attacking instead of both of those being on a single button all just to walk up and punch something while controling only one character. The actual attacks are just percentile rng, you click on something to attack and you have a chance to hit and crit (at most complex you set traps down, stealth attack, shoot while your companion acts as a meat shield, repeat). You companions also have a random chance to hit you and the game is quite buggy. Not really worth your time unless you have nostalgia for the old fallout games.
Pillars of eternity is a commendable attempt at a revival of old cRPG’s, But quite frankly suffers a lot of the same issues as those old games. For example, real time with pause strategy causes a lot more issues than one would initially assume; issuing commands and having your party disregard them, numerous pathing issues, actions not being done as soon as they are issued. Having it be real time with pause instead of turn-based combat turns the game into a fight against your party members to do what you tell them instead of the actual enemies in the game. Gameplay aside, the writing and the world is incredibly dry and generic, serving only to move the player along through the game. The most interesting part of the game is to player keep aspect, which is by far the most fun I had with the game, but it still mired by having to constantly repair things, hire people to work for it, and still having to deal with the game’s poor combat. Probably the best writing in the game is the character “Grieving Mother” especially in comparison to all the boring old human man you get as party members. In general I feel the combat is not responsive (which is really saying something in a strategy game) while the perspective and mechanics cause more problems on a design level than it should. The story is just dry and uninteresting like alot of old crpgs. I would get it on sale or just not bother.
