TLDR: Unless you're planning on doing some video content with these games, avoid them. These games aged terribly, and I doubt they were considered good back in the day (1988-1991). * The first, Heroes of the Lance, is a side scroller with unresponsive controls and an obscure method of combat: you have to hold Enter, then press a direction to attack. This only works if "Combat" is shown on the bottom left of the screen. Running is done by holding up together with the intended direction. During a run, pressing Enter will make you jump - Raistlin is the only character that doesn't run, but he kinda levitates when you try to jump, which is crucial for jumping over one specific gap, so you need him alive at least until that part. I don't know which configuration could make the game run faster, as simply increasing the CPU Cycles (CTRL + F12) in DOSBox makes no difference. The game can also crash if there's too much stuff on the screen. * Dragons of Flame builds on HotL's questionable foundations, but with a manual that DOES NOT LIST THE CONTROLS. Combat still maintains the Hold Enter + arrow to attack, only working when enemies are nearby. It also has a more menu options, opened with Space, but most keyboard keys will instantly open one of the listed options, such as [U]se, [T]ake, [G]ive, [D]rop, [H]ero. One important key that isn't listed anywhere is numpad 0, which is used to go back from the side scroller to the overworld map view. I had to search around the internet to discover that. You also can't get back to the overworld if there are enemies nearby, like 5 squares away, you'll be put back into the side scroll view. I didn't take much time with the other two games, but, from roughly 10 minutes with Shadow Sorcerer, the last in the series, it still fails hard at having controls that make any sense, plus the mouse cursor movement isn't exactly precise. Not that I'd have enough room to go into detail here, due to character limitation of reviews.
TLDR - Buggy space sim game that has decent space combat, lots of focus on getting money, managing fleets and buildings and buying huge fleets. X4 follows on what X3 did, which is allow you to fly around with a variety of ships of the many factions, doing some missions to get money so you can spend it on bigger ships. Ships are much faster than on X3, there's a good deal of customization options for them, too. Timelines, which is included in the base game, works fine as a proper introduction to the gameplay elements, with some of the missions apparently giving free ships in the open universe - i haven't found any yet. The fact that you only see the stuff that rates you AFTER failing or finishing, and even then it doesn't specify what you might need for maximum score, indicate that Egosoft still has much to learn on User Experience. Be aware that, although this is version 7.50, this game is still buggy. Your pilots might run into asteroids or somehow clip inside stations, you might get a "Your game is modified" warning out of nowhere in the middle of gameplay, the game will crash if you're running low on RAM - so don't keep a browser open unless you're sporting over 20GB. The interface is clunky and takes some time to get used to, Right now, I've a bit over 100 hours but still haven't made my first billion. Been building a bunch of stations, but they take forever, even after you get SETA (the time speedup thingy from X3). I have tried attacking one of the Xenon sectors with 3 destroyers and 1 carrier, got beaten up by neverending spam of fighters
TLDR - More of a 3.5 than 4. This is a simplified space sim, the kind of game to ease people into the genre. Great music, little depth ------ I don't remember when I bought it, but I know I must've paid around 17 BRL (~4 USD). After sitting on my list for ages, I've finally gave this game a shot. * I cannot stress how GOOD the soundtrack is - Western Rock through and through; * Navigation is 2D. You can't go "up" or "down", only enemy fighters do that; * Combat is "naval", it's just about turning your ship around to get broadside shots and distributing damage to your shields. Turrets auto fire while in broadside; * Cargo space is super limited, as are commodities for sale - at least judging from the ships available in the first sector, max cargo space you'll have is 47; * Commodities' prices fluctuate, as several events might happen in the system, some of which you can interfere, like a war between 2 stations. I like this, as it makes the universe feel alive. Also, days pass while you're flying, though there doesn't seem to be any way to keep track of that; * Most missions are "go there, kill pirates" with a different reason to do so; * Default keybinds make little sense. "E" is a key that does almost everything: increase engine power, activate warp drive, grab cargo, receive incoming calls. Why? The game was probably made with the PS4 in mind first, but even there it'd be horrible to press "X" to do all those things * UI in general leaves a lot to be desired. There's no speedometer while flying. Can't go to options from inside a space station, you have to exit it to open the menu. The only way to see your standing with the local factions is by opening the command wheel while in flight I'm 6 hours in and haven't jumped out of the first system yet, so I can't really comment on the story.
Most you'll see here is tits, so keep that in mind. There are a few digitized photos of what I assume are erotic models and porn starts of the mid 90s, but you'll be looking at cartoons pretty much all the time. The game proper is divided in 3 parts. You automatically advance from the first when you reach 50k dollars, and from the second when you reach 2 million (not counting anything on the bank). The third part, the sex shop chain, is, by far, the most boring, because now you have to wait A MONTH for most things to happen. This game is full of bad design decisions, though I'm not entirely sure what I can blame on being an old game and what on bad execution. For instance, to open the options menu, you have to interact with a certain item in a certain room. At a new game's beginning, that's on a room you CANNOT access outright and you can lose access to later on during this 1st part. This bit about having to be in a specific room to change options is extra annoying due to the game speed slider being there. * The amount of guessing you have to do to find out what and where you can interact with things is very annoying. Rooms don't have any kind of indication of what things can be interacted with and where are possible exits. You have to find and memorize those. * The keyboard is pretty much useless. Other than F1 for a help page about the room you're in and Enter when you can input text or number, you don't use the keyboard. Oh, in some rooms, F1 brings up a help video with no subtitles instead of any text * The help text in most rooms overflows * Regarding game speed, there are 7, with the fastest being something like 1 in game hour every 6 seconds. During the last phase, this is too slow. * Loading a game might randomly break something, like thinking you don't have an equipment, despite having it. * During the movie studio, you can give plastic surgery to your actors, but there's nothing anywhere stating what difference it makes, if there's any
The game feels a lot like Diablo 1. There's 3 classes to choose from, 1 town and 1 dungeon you delve deeper and deeper into, all while fighting loads of enemies, grabbing items to sell and hoping one of the drops is a better item to equip. It plays fine and is a fine game, which by now should run decently on any computer. The controls are good and the powers that each class has brings enough variety to experiment with them. However, I don't see much reason to play this instead of Torchlight 2. The second game does everything better and also has multiplayer support
