Yup, now it's finally possible to play online on Forged Alliance Forever with this version. The update was released in May 12 2022 on their github page. So, all those reviews complaining of "no FAF" need to be updated. As for the game itself, I'm one of the "heretics" that never played Total Annihilation (as of writing this review, I still haven't. Sue me). Personally, it's one of my all time favorite RTS games. There's no population cap, you just keep pumping units until you win or lose. The scale of things here is also amazing, your commander is huge and the initial T1 units are tiny, while most T3 are much bigger. This game taught me that I need to attack fast and hard if I want to win, turtling (making a well defended base) is hardly a good strategy in this game. You have to expand and attack on all fronts, if you're not attacking, you're going to be attacked and it won't be pretty. If you don't expand, the enemy will. Losses are inevitable. Send small armies to harass the enemy while you build up a huge one to really wipe 'em out, because the enemy sure as hell is making one while harassing you. Shift-clicking to queue orders is essential. Don't be afraid to leave a T1 builder creating huge walls of metal and/or energy storage. I don't consider myself "good" at the game, I am challenged by the normal difficulty AI on skirmish maps. I avoid playing online because holy hell I don't want to suffer a humiliating defeat! Also because I enjoy the biggest maps, where the game can last hours and hours, and that keeps my full attention while entertaining me.
The game shows its age, just like every other 3D game from the time, there's no way around that. As usual from Bethesda since Arena, Morrowind has bugs on top of bugs on top of glitches on top of exploits. OpenMW fixes a number of bugs and also lets you play on current OSes, including Linux distros, so you should DEFINITELY use it. While it's not yet a 1.0 release, it's been stable enough to experience the whole game since v0.37 or so. Morrowind also has a dice roll for its real time combat, which is an incredible turn off if you're used to pretty much any other game with real time combat: you click, you see the sword slashing, you see a message saying "you missed" or "enemy dodges". That is a strong "quit and uninstall" moment and one that almost led me to uninstall the game back when I first played it in 2006. Then I found out about mods, and boy did I mod the game a lot! Back then, the main source for these was Fileplanet. Nowadays, besides the Nexus, you should definitely check MW Modding History. If you can get past the dated graphics and animation and grit your teeth through dice rolling combat, OR mod those things into something decent, you'll find an amazing game that's full of stories that "we're not entirely sure if this is true", NPCs that have their own agendas and don't much care about who you are until you make a name for yourself. You can also simply go ahead and kill everybody. Yup, you can literally kill every single NPC in the game. You will be warned if an important one dies, that you messed up the thread of fate. But that thread is only the main quest as the devs intended it, you can still beat the final boss,
TL;DR; - this is what GTA would be like if the focus was on being fun Back when this game released, a lot of people bashed it for being too over the top and zany, especially compared to its main competitor, GTA 4. Perhaps ironically, being so over the top and balls to the wall made the game incredibly fun. How over the top? The starting mission is you and your gang robbing a bank while dressed up as the gang, while an actor tags along as "field research" for the upcoming movie about the Saints. The melee attack while holding a gun goes for the balls Character customization is great, you can make a man, woman, something in between, a zombie, or something more alien. I loved using a metallic skin, like an evil silver surfer. Unlike GTA, the whole city is open for exploration as soon as you finish the tutorial mission. Exploration is encouraged as you can buy places to use their services, like the car shop to tune your stuff and gun shops to upgrade your weapons and buy ammo. Also unlike GTA, any vehicles stored in your garage are "infinite", you can run around with it, explode it, forget it somewhere, and you can always grab it again at the garage. The game had such a big focus on fun that you unlocked cheats very early on. I personally avoided the "you no longer take damage", but I went all in on infinite ammo! Also, if you compare it with GTA 4, you'll notice how better car handling and on foot movement is in SR3. It's more responsive and if you go back to GTA 4, it'll feel hella sluggish.
I'm a longtime fan, but one thing that always annoyed me was the low resolution. Not in the sense of "the pixels are too big!", but "the screen is too small". Jazz runs fast, akin to Sonic the Hedgehog, so you'll often run straight into enemies, traps or walls because you had milliseconds to react to something that appeared on screen. Level design doesn't help much. While some levels are interesting and fun, a number of them are confusing and weird. One bit of info that I really wish I knew waaaay back is that this game is written in Turbo Pascal. You know, Pascal, that language "real programmers" scoff at. Is it worth playing today? If you enjoy 1990s platformers, then yes, this is well worth playing. It might not be too memorable nowadays, but when you compare to the options you had at the time, such as Duke Nukem 2 and Bio Menace, you realize why this game stood out in the genre and rightfully received a sequel.
That's the TLDR of pretty much every review of this game and with good reason. The storytelling here -IS- amazing, but the engine, the same that powered TES4 Oblivion and Fallout 3, was already well known for being buggy. I also remember that Obsidian didn't get any bonuses or royalties because the game didn't get a 85 metacritic score shortly after release. Yet here we are, over 10 years after release and people still look fondly at this game (minus the Old World Blues DLC, fck those bullet sponge enemies). Even unmodded, the game is good, but not without faults and facepalm worthy decisions, such as the numerous invisible walls you bump into when fooling around with the hills. Unlike Fallout 3, you can kill everyone you encounter. Important questgivers aren't safe, you can transform everyone into gory, bloody sausages, but even as a genocidal maniac, you can still complete the game and the DLCs. Killing everyone is always an option here, which is great for when you just want to cause trouble, then reload an earlier game and continue as if nothing happened.
I say the game has charm, but it could be my nostalgia talking, since my first experience with the game was only after the Oldblivion mod showed up, sometime in 2008, allowing graphic cards without Shader 2.0 (it's the lighting difference from PS2 era games and PS3/X360, lots of bloom) to run the game. And with graphics on medium, I rarely got framerates under 25 Is this game full of bugs, glitches and exploits? Yes, yes and yes. We're talking Bethesda, after all. Anyway, the game looks grandiose but as soon as the intro cutscene shows a guard walking within the walls of the imperial capital, you realize that it's not that big. Character creation also shows how UGLY the characters in general are. Seriously, they're ugly as sin. Animations are stiff as hell and playing in 3rd person is not ideal. Still, what set the game apart for me was how character progression works. You want to get better at using 2 handed weapons, you go out and fight with a 2 handed weapon. Same for several different schools of magic and armors. Similar to Morrowind, you'd level up after a number of skill ups and, depending on what skills you've leveled up, some stats (strength, constitution, agility, dexterity, etc) would receive a bigger bonus if you chose to. Pick 3 to increase and carry on with the next level. Another thing with the skill system that I enjoyed is what became the perks in Skyrim: at every 25 interval, you'd get a permanent bonus related to the skill, such as lower stamina drain while running with Athletics 25 (or 50) There is a lot to do in the game. Fighters, Mages and Thieves Guilds and their questlines are here, so's the Dark Brotherhood, the Assassins' Guild. Several other side quests, Side quests everywhere! And the main quest, that people often forget is even there. Still, it's worth at least checking out the vanilla version before you mod it out the wazoo. Seriously, this game is VERY different, in a good way, with the right mods
This is a great game to play for the story. The screenshots make it very obvious there's not much to look at, graphics wise. Personally, I think this kind of simple, kinda goofy pixel art really sets and suits the overall tone of the game. I think that's the main charm of the game, everything is simple but fits in: * The story is short and the hook is simple: monsters and humans used to be friends, but no more. You fell where monsters still live (or so the rumor goes). You want to get back. * Characters don't have huge backstories, just enough that you can easily understand why they're like that, and most of their development happens as you interact and/or fight them. * There's no real "power curve", as the game was designed to be beaten at LV 1. While you can pacify enemies and still earn money without any EXP, running away is just better and faster, especially since there's not much you'll want or need to buy, save the occasional healing item. The soundtrack really kicks up when you enter the boss fights, as each has their own theme. Each is going to be pacified in a different manner as well, which adds some variety to combat. Again, the game is lighthearted but it does have some stuff that can be unnerving, which happens at the end of either route (Normal, Pacifist or Genocide), as well as some NPCs that only show up with a very low random chance. You'll be better off watching youtube videos showing these parts, or reading the game's fan wiki if you're curious about those, because triggering them yourself is near impossible. (Fun side note: Toby Fox, the main person behind the game, left a message for disassemblers, asking them to avoid posting what they found by checking the game's files to avoid spoiling much of the game's story for those first buyers) This game is 100% worth a full playthrough.
