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I'll admit I was driven away from this game because of the bad reviews at the time, but they were unjust. It's rough around the edges but nothing damaging here, in fact the ambition shines through the limitations admirably! A day-night cycle that changes the lighting and effects NPC behavior, fully voiced characters and cutscenes, lush and picturesque locales in an unusual Italian meets fantasy style, responsive and challenging but flashy combat, enjoyable characters...it's all here. The actors/writing is clearly at times the product of a shaky translation but again nothing detrimental: just amusing like actors struggling with a few awkward lines. It feels a lot like Fable, but I like this more than Fable because of a focus on a handful of sweeping detailed vistas and places to explore as opposed to a gigantic empty world of copy and pasted encounters. The story an it's many offshoots are fun to follow up. I haven't been frustrated with the controls, and if you suck at combat just finish some other quests and gather the money to improve your skills and equipment. It's not as punishing as Gothic (although I LOVE Gothic) and not as rudimentary as Fable. It set's an intriguing halfway point between action and roleplaying: an unjustly besmirched and equally unjustly forgotten gem.
I didn't play this game for the longest time because I had no idea it would work. You're commanding entire fleets? How would that be fun? But this game manages it. You're not so much micromanaging as designating AI groups to full-fill tasks, and making sure they stay bolstered. You're under attack? Better get the right collection of attack ships together in a decent formation. Guard you resource collection vessels as they scavenge asteroids for materials to build and research. And the adorable salvage corvettes actually pick up and carry things you send them to find. I never get tired of them finding objects, latching on, and carrying them home. This is all done on a MASSIVE scale. You will have hundreds of ships zipping around almost out of your control, but that's why you assign groups to numbers and there's plenty of hotkeys and quick dropdown menus. Takes some getting used to flying around in multiple dimensions but luckily you can zoom all the way out and select your targets, and your units are smart enough to adjust altitude. You might feel out of the loop as fights carry on largely independent of you, but behind the scenes you're sending out repair ships, assigning new fleets, researching upgrades, keeping tabs on your other ships and accomplishing missions and sub-missions. It's an interesting balance of slow and spacey one minute, and the next a bee hive of laser beams. The story is intriguing and the voice acting sounds naturalistic, if a bit deadpan. The music is sweeping and strange and accompanies the surprisingly colorful void of deep space. If you prefer to feel like the fleet commander instead of a general deep in the field, this game gives you that experience of designating flight patterns, commanding squadrons by class and speed, defending objectives and always feeling like you squeaked out a victory by ingenuity, not just brute force. Quite a unique experience I'm ashamed to admit I didn't try earlier.
I love Total Annihilation and Starcraft and Earth 2150 and games like that, but this one is easily the most immersive and fun sci-fi real time strategy games I've played! The atmosphere, the story, the attention to detail: this is probably the closest gaming as gotten to recreating the experience of Dune. The endless desert and dry valleys might seem they'd become dull, but there's a ton of variations in height (which has tactical advantages) resources and wreckage to look at while you're rumble your Mad Max crew of vehicles to battle and exploration. What feels the best is the radio chatter. There must be hundreds of dialogue samples and mid-battle it really does feel like presiding over organized chaos as troops call out maneuvers, remark on their conditions, and have a dozen statements simply to make if you send them to go somewhere. Refreshing. You can hit Spacebar to zoom out completely from the gigantic maps to see everything you need to know quickly (resources locations, enemy movement, your troops...etc) and creating a number group is as easy as double clicking a unit type then holding a key and tapping a number. I never feel overwhelmed and battles do feel like a matter of positioning, unit type, using special abilities, upgrading...it all feels dynamic. The voice actors are VERY dry (no pun intended) but realistic. It feels like classic Star Trek: science officers with heavy weapons trying to outmaneuver a more powerful warlike empire. Sometimes I don't attack-click but instead select one enemy for attack...and after than unit dies all of my units just stop dead in their tracks without a command. It pays to just generally target an area instead of make specific attack commands, although the advantage of this single-mindedness is that you can target one boss enemy or choice target and your units will attack it until they die even if they're getting shot to pieces. Loyal to the end. Beautiful, tactical, comprehensive. I need to check out the original!
I LOVE the characters, the world, the story, the voice acting the animation, the music, the art style...it's all fantastic! But this game is not without it's issues which to be fair I probably wouldn't notice or care about if I didn't love the rest of it so much. The Detective mini-game doesn't make a lot of sense. Lines of questioning seem almost random and although there's a big to-do about different characters having weaknesses or you're told to press certain issues I didn't see a big correlation between these suggestions and success. Some scenes have mismatched dialogue and voice acting. Not a big issue, just one I noticed. One scene talking to Natasha had no dialogue at all: just text. I think that was an oversight. Besides these little tiny problems I had no technical issues and I'm enjoying my time! I just want to remind the developers maybe to take another look at their work. It's too good in so many ways to have these little problems mar it.
I'm continually amused just by the amount of detail the creators put into these Bounty games. You can see squirrels jumping between the trees, find automated saw-mills that aren't part of a quest they're just fun to watch in operation, and of course all the little animations for the many creatures in battle. It's an open world that's enjoyable to just explore, and thankfully there's a lot of buried treasures and hidden resources to find if you do. This game is like Heroes of Might and Magic only instead of base-building you have a single hero riding around collecting allies to join your army against the scattered enemies roaming the map. You undertake quests (there's no voice acting but lots of amusing dialogue to read anyway) and ride around finding objects to boost your stats, gold to buy units, leadership to increase your army capacity, spells to give you an edge. There are TONS of people to talk to and stuff to do and even if a majority of these are fetch quests or 'kill this and come back' missions there's a surprise variety in even these, such as enemies giving you alternate quests or people asking for certain rare creatures to join their own armies. There's just lots of things to do: your character to customize with items and upgrades on a skill tree, there's three different kinds of characters to choose from to begin with their own specific way of tackling the campaign (personal strength, armies, spell caster) and you will end up with a notebook of stuff to do before you even leave the main hub area. If you like turn-based combat, army management, RPG character development, and vikings, this is a fine time.
I keep coming back to the adventures of snarky Zak the chosen one because of how much of a one-of-a-kind game Evil Islands is. You gather materials, sneak to backstab, cast spells, command allies, go on quests...but you do all of this from the perspective of a singular character. The graphics are chunky, but pleasingly so and I dare you to name a game that lets you change your attitude and your movement with the click of a button. The sense of progression is very satisfying. You begin with a dagger and clothes and work your way up to suit of armor and powerful weapons, but it will take time, some patience, and even strategy. Zak, although the fabled chosen one, is not invincible. Some enemies you should sneak past, steal quest items from instead of attacking, shoot from a distance...etc. And it's all incredibly immersive. Collect skins from kills. Look at foot prints to determine where enemies are going before you see them. The voice acting is a little bizarre but still very enduring. Zak himself is a force of personality who likes making declarative statements so I was never bored with the character. This game takes some dedication and indeed patience (a lot of sneaking around at first) but it's rewarding, it's original, and it's a solid package of atmospheric RPG meat.
This is the game Syphon Filter wanted to be, Turning Point wanted to be, and The Saboteur almost was. I've never had gun battles quite this satisfying, such as firing as fast as you can pull the trigger with a shotgun and spray-and-pray scatter on guns making fights feel semi-realistic but with a Hollywood sheen. Voice acting is fine and the music is Jesper Kyd so it is moody, exciting, and very creative. Mission briefing is straight forward but you fight at your own pace, traveling through manholes between locations whenever you want to and you can return to your underground base at any time. The game doesn't penalize you for sounding alarms, you can just get overwhelmed and run out of resources if you're too careless, so you can have fun firefights without getting slapped on the wrist. Basically the point here is gathering weapons, completing tasks, blasting soldiers and doing it all however you'd like in pretty large open areas. It really does feel like a classic 80s action film with flying bullets, explosions, tough talk and no ambiguity. Rescue the hostages, fight the bad guys, save the city!
The only major issue I found with this game was the pathfinding. You will get stuck and blocked on the extravagant decorations, swooping landscapes, and GIGANTIC enemies. Luckily you can save often and move the camera wherever you'd like. This is a classic action roleplaying game with the wiggle-room of Diablo that doesn't have classes so much as choices (use what abilities you want, improve what you want, pick up and specialize in what you'd like). The graphics are crisp and charming and you can turn off the distracting black borders they tried to use for a cartoon effect if you'd like. Lots of loot, very pretty animations, fun characters (I like the troll yawning when at rest) lots of voice acting, lots of enemy variety. The entire world is basically open from the beginning so you can overload yourself with quests, wander too far into high level territory, or just ignore your stats and skills and get trounced fairly easily, but the game is yours to explore and tackle at your leisure. You even see the enemies on the map before they appear so you can prepare and even avoid them. A nice solid if a little dated hack slash game I actually find is more fun with a mage because of ranged attacks being quite useful when the enemies are numerous and able to be approached from a distance and the mages have the ability to stand still and heal. Nothing too original here, but it's got lots of content and if you don't mind a lot of direction of the game being up to you this is quite fun.
Play this game on easy and you are in for a unique, complex, beautiful roleplaying experience! Spiders excels at this kind of full immersion worlds I crave where 'roleplaying' is more than just boosting your ability to deal damage. There's plenty of that here but there's also negotiation, trying (and often failing) to reconcile different perspectives, following up clues and interrogating characters to learn more about the way this fantasy universe works. The combat is admirable in its ambition with a system for balance to separate it from previous games but it is a little clunky. It's flashy anyway so you can as I say set the difficult to easy, breeze through the fights, and focus on what clearly got the lion's share of attention her: top notch voice acting and well written dialogue, gorgeous locations, lots of exploration, and a real attempt at a living world of people going about their lives all around you. Don't forgo a rare turn-of-the-century RPG just because the combat is a bit stiff.
Nice sense of progression, gigantic map, tons of quests and equipment and dungeons to explore! The graphics are charming and the combat is fast, fluid, and fair...and lethal. This is NOT a walk in the part power trip. Every scrap of armor and slightly sharper sword you covet. Each enemy you fell feels like an accomplishment. It's a bit like a less reflex based version of Gothic at best. At worst I ran into a few quests that didn't register, it has crashed from startup a few times in windowed mode (but when it runs it hasn't crashed) and if you think you can grind levels by just killing random enemies you are in for a slog. This is the kind of RPG where finishing quests give you tons of loot and experience, but killing a dire wolf even if it leaves you half dead yields a handful of gold and a little blip of EXP. This does encourage you to look for rumors, quests, talk to people and poke around in caves and towers. So it's a rough diamond, but it's quite fun for what it is! If you like the World of Warcraft style loop, this is a fine lite example of that.