One of the few games I've bought on here that I never played back in the day. It does work on windows ten for me, with only a few freezes, but your milage may vary, from the looks of it. The basic core of the game is pretty much the same as that of the Panzer General series - you are dropped into a tactical map, where you take turns duking it out with the AI. Each unit has unique stats and weapons, as well as armour, movement, fire rates, and so on. If you like Warhammer, and you like Panzer General, you will probably get at least a few hours out of this. There are some relative improvements over SSI's other strategy titles. While Panzer General lets you gradually build up and customize your force, it's played over a series of sequencial maps. This one, however, allows you to select where your forces will attack next, on a strategic overview map, and gives you a little more leeway in how you build your force up. The cutscenes and such aren't half bad, especially considering the age. The sound effects are actually pretty solid. You can speed up the animations a bit to make the turns go quicker. That said, there are some flaws. A lot of the units are, more or less, just useless fluff. You can win most encounters without a scratch by simply using the same few units. The armour/weapon penetration system is a little wonky, though that does accurately reflect the tabletop rules it's based on. It's not pretty. The morale system is a little unintuitive. Above all, it's just not super challenging unless you choose to play in a specifically challenging way. All in all, it's not a particularly polished game - it's an old game, and not a bad one, but not something everyone will fall in love with.
A quirk of the serious wargame genre is that, regardless of the era it was built in, a decent wargame won't really ever become completely obsolete. While it can be incredibly annoying to go spend $100 on a brand new sim, only to find out that it's not very different from the sim that cost you $100 a couple years earlier, it can also be really nice to bump into $8 games like Combat Mission that still hold up very nicely. At it's core, CM is almost arcade-like in how it presents - the interface and controls are VERY simple, especially relative to it's contemporaries. This is a big part of why it's aged so well - what was a sort of sparse interface back in the day comes across as relatively streamlined to modern sensibilities. The gameplay itself is pretty deep, despite that presentation. As is to be expected, morale, ammo, visibility, experience, everything factors in to a unit's performance, and it plays like a wargame, not like an RTS. Likely the most noticable failing of the game is in the campaign layout. Unlike other titles available at the time, there isn't really actually much of a real linked campaign. This isn't really a pro or a con, because at it's heart CM is all about quality scenario play. While I do miss the added strategic element of having to carry (and thus preserve) a force across a long campaign, it's not a deal breaker. The other really notable sign of it's age are, of course, the graphics. While the game does a weirdly amazing job with weapon effects (the sounds are great, the explosions feel really, really legit, and the chaos of a serious gunfight is conveyed pretty well), it's hard to ignore that the scenery is ugly as hell, and, describing them generously, the unit depictions look like characters from Goldeneye on the N64. For $8 bucks though, if you can ignore that, you essentially have a more or less modern, softcore wargame that, provided it runs for you, competes on a gameplay level with any similar newer offering.
*This is more of a copy/paste disclaimer than a gameplay review* First off, the Close Combat series in general is tremendous. While often flawed, it offers a pretty unique RTS type experience that requires a bit more planning and thought than your average RTS, I grew up on A Bridge Too Far and The Russian Front. I can't tell you how many hours I've spent crawling guys through smoke and mortar fire towards bridges and hedgelines, or how many millions of rounds my dudes have expended suppressing machine guns. I am a fan, through and through. And honestly? I'm going to tell you straight up not to buy this. Close Combat of this era is *fun*, but mostly, it's nostalgic. When you really start looking at it, the old games, while unique and "good", aren't actually all that well made - the AI is awful (which shows very quickly if you play the intended-to-be-mostly-static-defense germans and expect the AI to figure out how to assault you as the allies), the pathfind is mediocre, and, while the rest of the game is still pretty playable, the UI hasn't survived well, as may be evident from the map scroll speed. So, my advice? Go buy one of the modern remakes of the old games - they've all been redone at this point, are the same price here on GoG, and just work better. You'll note that a lot of self-proclaimed fanboys hate the newer games and remakes - this is because they've committed the cardinal sin of not reading the manual and learning the hotkeys - a lot of people complain about the "lacking" UI, for example, without ever realizing it's clearly stated in the instructions how to customize it and make it identical to the UI from the 1990s games. There's no reason to get this except for nostalgia, and even then, I found the remakes fit the bill. The remake of this specific one is called Close Combat: Last Stand Arnhem. All the great bits of CC2 are still there, but a ton of good new updates are too!
Ok, so, for $6, this is certainly a yes. As other, very detailed reviews have mentioned, Soldiers offers a sort of unique experience. I say "sort of", because it's actually an entry in the expansive Men of War series, which features a ton of similar to identical games. The experience they offer is certainly pretty unique, however. The problem is that the coolest parts of the game are also often it's biggest downfalls, something shared across the entire series. Because you can engage in so much micro, you HAVE to engage in a great deal of mirco to really do well. It makes the RTS aspect sort of weak, because you generally will get the best results using one very closely managed guy at a time rather than actual squad tactics. Similarly, the sort of RPG aspects become kind of irrelevant - you don't need to worry about arming the squad, all that's important is that whichever guy you're using at the time has the proper gun and enough ammo. You *can* play the games as intended, but for most of them, particularly once automatic weapons become involved, it makes them just about impossibly difficult or tedious. There are enough people who absolutely love these games out there that I'm confident not everyone shares that issue. The only other potential troubles would be the occasional bug. As with most 1C games, there are a couple, though I don't recall anything super game breaking anywhere in the series. So yeah, for $6, if you want to play a real-time squad based tactics game that will play like a very novel isometric/third-person-ish shooter, it's hard not to recommend this (or any title in the series). That's a great deal. If you want an actual squad based tactic game, there's better ones out there - 1C has a few in their catalog themselves (though I'm not sure their on GoG). If you want a decent turn based game (more my thing, personally) in a similar style and from the same era, the Silent Storm series is worth looking at and around the same price.
Y'know, I remember all the critics saying what a pile of crap this was back when it first came out, but for some reason my friends and I were all super insistent this was great and they just didn't know what they were on about. It's a Warhammer FPS! What a wonderous thing! Who cares about some polish, we can play as... oh. A Tau. It was easy to overlook such things, let alone actual gameplay flaws. As it turns out, the professional video game critics were absolutely right, and us 13 year old kids were not actually experts on game design. It's just a really bland, crappy game, and that's at best. It doesn't even follow 40k lore all that closely. Probably the best thing you can say about it is that it's technically aged fantastically - it's exactly as mediocre as it was 20 years ago, and accordingly isn't really actually that dissapointing to come back to in the era of modern FPS'. Literally the only reason to buy it is because you're also going to buy Star Trek: Elite Force in order to play them side by side and marvel at how Star Trek, generally one of the most hippy-dippy sci-fi franchises in the world, somehow manages to make a violent shooter that is orders of magnitude better than this one, which comes from arguably the most ridiculously militaristic and violent sci-fi universe out thre.
It's a great game. Back in the day, it was the pinnacle of this sort of RPG, and a shining example of a great AAA game. It's hard to say anything particularly negative about it, at least in the context of the 2000s. 20 years doesn't somehow detract from it being an objectively awesome acomplishment, or how enjoyable it was to play back then. That said, it seems fantastically disingenuine to say that most people will find this accessable or playable enough to be worth $20, the price of a *current* great, AAA RPG on sale. Especially not when other games you could say similar things about are available here for $8. I have a little trouble believing anyone could really argue that the game has aged well enough to some how be that much more exceptional than other exceptional games from the same era. I know it comes with the first two TES games as well, but it's worth pointing out that so do other old games that Bethesda now owns the rights to. Most of them are not pegged at $20 either. Anyway, I'm prepared for the downvotes, but I just don't think it's worth it for someone who's never played the game before and is genuinely looking for a fantastic, revolutionary experience in 2020. It might have been that for me, two decades ago, but it's a true classic now - more for retrospective appreciation than regular use.
I'm very glad to find this here. Cyberstorm, for me the stand-out part of the "other" 90s-00s mech franchise (Earthsiege, far better known for the Tribes games than the actual mech ones), and possibly the first turn based tactical game I ever played. I was incredibly worried as to how it would hold up, I was not too disappointed. The most interesting thing for me was that I found I remembered the sound effects exactly, despite not having really paid much attention to them back in the day or them being all that remarkable, honestly. Anyway, nostalgia aside, it's a pretty decent, if not incredibly deep turn based mech game. It's got a great atmosphere (it's actually quite sparse, just very effective), graphics that hold up alright within the genre context (though some of the pre-rendered walking animations in cutscences are pretty terrible), a decent sort of story, (apparently) good sound design, and generally enjoyable gameplay. The AI is pretty decent, especially for the age, and it's very rare you feel that it's cheating to compete with you. The biggest complaints - some things just don't seem to work. A few tutorial videos are missing (not that it's a complicated game to figure out), a few of the lore-related features seem gone as well. It's nothing game breaking, and if you hadn't played this 20 years ago, you'd likely not notice this. Biggest flaw besides that - as with many games of the era, you can remove much of the challenge by grinding hard right off the hop. Games like this aren't supposed to have long playthroughs, they're sort of fragile like that. All in all, it's a good old game. While there's nothing super special about it relative to similar games out there now-a-days, it's still fun to play, cheap compared to newer offerings, and holds up well enough to maybe be a good way to get into turn based tactical games in general. Best of all, it has hotseat multiplayer (as well as email MP), something utterly lacking in most modern turn based games.
Hugo is one of those games that's apparently aged a lot better than it had any right to. Back when these first came out, they weren't generally quite as loved - I remember everyone playing them and talking about them, probably because you couldn't open a gaming magazine without a shareware hugo disk falling out of it, but no one would ever actually *enjoy* playing them. While I'm sure there was a sizable cult following back in the day (much like awful games have them now), it wasn't actually popular - just omnipresent. In terms of the problem - it's hard to know where to start. While the current versions have point and click support, and that might work great, the originals had nothing but arguably the most mentally deficient parser ever concieved. Bad parsers are a reality of these types of games, but all three in the series presented multiple moments that required the use of a *specific*, usually grammatically incorrect or contextually nonsensical word. Much of the game is spent trying to guess these words The actual puzzles also literally defined "illogical adventure puzzle". Some aren't even puzzles. Here's one for you: "What's the name of Roy Roger's dog?" That's it. The entire puzzle. No answer in game, no clues, no hints, no internet to look it up on because it's 19-fricken-90 and relatively few of us were lucky enough to have easy access to such a thing. They were ugly, even for the time. They'd kill you randomly and unfairly, even for the time. They'd dead end you after hours of play, without warning because you missed a timed event in the first three minutes of the game that had zero indicators. It's tempting to read this and go "oooh, dark souls 1990" or something, but no. These weren't "fun hard", they were just crappy games that started as a knockoff of a better game, and hid their poor quality behind punishing the player for buying them. After one play through (i.e. you can deal with the bad design), you can finish them in less than an hour each.
PG 2 is, honestly, a great game and a classic. I pumped about a trillion hours into it once upon a time. If this were 1997 and it was brand new, I wouldn't hesitate to tell you to get it. Even today, it's such a solid, challenging, enjoyable turn based tactical that I can't genuinely tell you *not* to get it Personally, though, I now find it lacks a lot of the charm of PG 1 for some reason - I may be the only one, but I genuinely miss the little attack animations from the first game and some of the more simplistic systems. Subjectively speaking, if I was going to spend $13 on one or the other, and take a slight risk it might not work at all, I would 100% pick the first. More objectively speaking, though, I'm just not sure why you'd buy this. OpenGeneral is a free, open source remake of PG 2 that does all the same things, a little bit more, and is free. It also allows for fairly easy modding, and tons of different eras, equipment sets, and scenarios are out there for downloading. While I actually like PG 2's older-style UI and graphics more, it's hard to say there's a lot to recommend it to most people over the more modern, less expensive alternative. Personally, I hope GoG gets PG1 or one of the related games set in the Pacific theater on here instead - OpenGeneral doesn't emulate them quite as well and I'd have a much easier time recommending them as unique experiences for $10-$15. That said, if you don't really care about the extras of OpenGeneral, don't like the presentation of it, or simply want to play a really, really good old game, I will, again, not ever tell you this isn't actually WORTH the small price tag.
Despite it's age, Beneath A Steel Sky is still one of the better point and clicks out there, even compared to modern offerings. There's nothing particularly amazing about it these days, but it's still a well designed, enjoyable game. I didn't find the story super appealing, but it's well enough written and that's mostly a matter of taste. The characters are, at the very worst, still quite memorable, and some of the interactions (such as with your robot companion) were pretty novel back when the game was new. The writing is good, the voices are decent (great by the standards of 20 years ago), the puzzles are *generally* pretty logical ( and I'm not sure why some people think "contemporary" audiences would have any particular problem with them, to be sure), but there is a bit of pixel hunting and walking-related time filler, something pretty standard back in the day and not particularly unusual now. As the game runs off the ScummVM interpreter, it works quite well, and should in theory run on literally just about anything with an input device and display screen. Think that sums up the pros pretty well. Some cons: Like pretty much every adventure game ever, you'll often do things because you know you're playing a game. Someone used the example of cutting an anchor of a statue, not because anything indicates you should, but just because you can, so you probably should. The music was good for the 90s, and is good at first. At first. Some of the accents are frankly goofy (why does Reich sound like a 1930s mobster when the game is set in Australia and everyone else sounds... not like that, anyway), and the spoken dialog doesn't match the written dialog exactly (it's much more "American" in terminology). You can die, though it's mostly kinda hard to do accidentally. Some people hate this in these games. All that said, it's free, so it's sort of hard to really have much complaint. Give it a go if you like point and clicks.
