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This game reminds me of the kind of lore and writing BioWare used to be known for, only with a severely diminished budget. That budget has not diminished ambition though. Controls feel floaty, graphics are a little behind the curve, and there's some balancing and technical issues...but good lord did someone pour time and attention into tight dialogue, characterization, reams of world building descriptions, details galore in the environments. This is the kind of game the central concept is let down by limitations, but it doesn't quite dim out how fascinating this unique setting and storyline is. No wonder the series continued: this has cult classic written all over it. It's a bit janky, but the team was clearly invested as much as they could be. For primitive graphics there's little touches that bring things to life: a sheen on eyes, patches on clothing...etc. And it IS fun. Combat is shaky but not unsatisfying, it's usually clear what you have to do and where to go, and voice acting is WAY better than it really should be. Play for the story and the world.
I've always felt a weird nostalgia for this game. Something about the haunting music, the apocalyptic setting always set it apart from its closest cousin X-Com which looks aesthetically like a Saturday Morning cartoon in comparison. The opening cinematic of this game shows an obvious homage to Independence Day playing in a theater...only to reveal the audience watching it is dead. It's that kind of atmosphere. In X-Com you feel like you're getting more and more powerful and if you failed it was RNG. In UFO it feels like a desperate struggle against the odds with more of an emphasis on rushing enemies than hiding behind walls, realistic guns, and lasting consequences to taking damage. You can specialize your units, there's more control over time and can give multiple orders to your units to execute. The voice acting is a little wonky, you need to be VERY specific with your order of operations (unless you wait until an order is accomplished the unit will not do the order, even if that means picking something up or changing weapons) and this game is NOT easy. But there's something here X-Com lacks. The dour destroyed locations, the enemies that were once human mutated into monsters, conventional fire arms in the hands of rag-tag resistance fighters, a helicopter instead of a hover craft. Maybe X-Com has more polish, but UFO has much more atmosphere and options I think.
I didn't know how good a game this early could be. I've played some janky classics which were fine but difficult to love. But someone put a LOT of work into this, especially for the time, and this is about as polished as a 90s FPS gets without having the name Doom. The graphics are charmingly retro, but there is a surprising amount of content here. Lots of weapons, tools, things to see. The animated cutscenes have top notch voice acting. The music is Spaghetti Western bliss! It boils down to a key hunt but there's boss battles too and loads of enemies that are fun to chase and shoot and dodge. There's some niceties you won't get (no FOV, no graphics adjustment, no mouse wheel weapons swap) but there's other things I wish more games had. You can by default reload as fast as you can click with the right button! Feel very authentically Western to me. You can jump, you can crouch, you can climb. It's all a satisfying if primitive 3D with a painterly/comic book style. Great fun, great classic story, great action! Happy customer.
The sale is amazing since I'd easily pay that much to play the original Dungeon Siege which is a beefy and fun ARPG by itself, but to throw in the second one is VERY generous! I've wanted to play the second since I played a demo of it way back when and I wanted to get it on Steam but it had horrible reviews complaining about bugs and crashes. I've played the second game now for an hour and it hasn't crashed and seems fully optimized. Also it's just as addicting as the original and I like the more gothic tone. I've heard terrible things about the third game, but hey, tossed in with the other two I'll happily give it a shot. The first game is just pure hack-slash exploration mass mob slaying bliss. Kit up your forces, trade in your sticks for larger sticks, designate party roles and you can set the team on auto fight to blaze through dungeons like a machine. Tons of loot to collect, hundreds of enemies, not terrible graphics, memorable music! The second game has brought down the scale a bit but with this comes an emphasis on story the original didn't have, and thankfully that means lots of enjoyable voice acting. The graphics have had a teeny overhaul and there's new things like faster progression of leveling, more specific class-based ability sets, and special abilities that will gib giant monsters. Still great fun. Haven't played the third but even if it's a dud I have two great games for a pittance. Thank you again Gog for making my childhood live again :D
For the longest time I avoided this game because the premise seemed dull and the graphics were so ridiculously high class my junky machine from the time couldn't hope to render one frame. Now years later it looks AND plays better than Far Cry 3 in my opinion. It's not the most interesting story but it does have a lot of personality and many many options. You can make adjustments to weapons you find, you can adjust how your nano-suit uses it's power for various abilities, you have a zoomable map you can call up whenever you want, you can drive vehicles...it's all standard by now but at the time it was revolutionary. And it all looks VERY pretty. The sound scape immerses you in the tropical waters and jungles and everywhere there's wildlife from fish to turtles to crabs. This is the kind of effortless tech demo where an attack boat will blast a palm tree to splinters, a fallen enemy will be swarmed by crabs, an enemy noticing you will fire a flare to mark your last position but none of this is 'scripted' it just happens as the game progresses and didn't happen the same way in every play through. The main issue with this game I found was that enemies are psychic. If you don't take them down in one perfect silenced shot they will know where you are immediately and stealth is pointless. They do maneuver intelligently, flanking your position an hiding behind cover, but because of this you will feel surprisingly in peril with just a couple of soldiers as they will pour automatic fire onto you and destroy any cover you're hiding behind. But this is almost a Zen game. You play to see what happens next, what new trick the developers tossed in to impress. It does seem to run very well on my machine which chugs trying to get Far Cry 3 to run on lower specs and outright refuses to play F.E.A.R. Crysis is worth revisiting if you like a sandbox approach that's more hands-off and less about finding towers and more about admiring sunsets.
It's a budget title, but it's not a bad one. Actually I liked it a lot better than recent Call of Duty games because although there is a story there's fewer cutscenes without your ability to interact with the environment. When your spotter says 'Don't shoot that guy!' you can anyway...and end up in the middle of an firefight. The game will not end immediately unless a major objective is botched (a hostage or important guy is killed or the player) but you can just blast your way through a base like a madman if you don't mind the shame of a poor score. I quite liked the roleplaying of a sniper, following directions but improvising on the fly. The graphics are dated but nice enough and a step up from the previous game. Voice acting isn't cringeworthy and suitably gruff. I like the addition of night missions and ensuring a fireteam gets protected from on high. I didn't have nearly as many instances of broken clipping as the original game. Music is nice if a little generic. It's not a terrible experience if you like the notion of playing through, fairly consistently on your terms, the life of a military sniper. Imagine Call of Duty with downgraded graphics but considerably less (and shorter) sequences in which you are not moving or shooting.
The graphics are a bit dated, but that never stopped me from enjoying a game if I could figure out how to play it! Sniper is basically a microcosm of the way I usually play games anyway: find a high vantage, pick targets, and take out priorities without alerting everyone else. This one adds some little elements to make this a bit deeper of an experience than when I play the sniper in Far Cry, Hitman, or Call of Duty: hiding in foliage, bullet drop, a min-map but no x-ray vision, A.I allies who are also snipers, one specific target to dispatch but also other enemies to throw grenades at or take down with silenced pistols. I liked it! It's clearly budget (some generic sound effects and iffy shadows) but it didn't crash, I didn't find any bugs, and there's an admirable amount of detail and effort here from the lush environments to the scenarios. Even voice acting wasn't bad.
The Bad: Some annoying glitches (floating/disappearing characters/objects) The Good: Everything else The atmosphere, the music, the story, the gameplay...it's all tight and beautiful and compelling stuff! I used to think Stalker was the best open world FPS game I've played by Far Cry 2 is like someone played Stalker and said 'What can we do to improve this'? Guns actually hit what you're aiming at. Characters interact with each other in realistic ways (a lot of towns will have NPCs going on extended conversations and animations completely by themselves and enemies will do things like rescue downed allies and even carry their wounded away). Cars are fun to drive and just walking through the enormous and detailed jungles and deserts I found extremely moody and intriguing. I didn't feel this game was artificially difficult, in fact you have a LOT of advantages if you know where to look for them. You start off with a rocket launcher, you can get 'buddies' who will rescue you from death, you can stabilize yourself if you're almost dead (with wonderfully gruesome animations). Tons of guns, upgrades, voice acting throughout, great landscapes. The missions are simple and do repeat but this is the kind of game you can play either at a stretch or just pick it up and play for a couple minutes of mayhem. Intrusive cutscenes are few, you're not locked off to locations, and everywhere the jungle/desert feels like as much an enemy as the mercenaries shooting at you. GREAT experience, improved everything about one of my earliest favorite games!