The series died after this game. The game finishes on a cliffhanger (like Soul Reaver 1 and 2, by the way) and you're really left curious as to what was going to happen next. Well, business happened. While any fan will praise the series for the story and especially the voice acting, the game proper is bland, there's no way around that. The puzzles can get really boring and combat's there just to slow you down. At least it's fluid enough. You're probably better off watching it as a "movie" off youtube.
If there's one thing every fan of the series will talk about is how great the story is. Because it really is. All the characters are memorable and the voice acting is absolutely superb. Frankly, going to YT and simply watching a compilation of all the cutscenes works great. I say that because the game certainly shows its age. I've first played it back in 2004 or so and while certainly better than the first Soul Reaver, the game could drag on in certain parts. Also, while the cutscenes are memorable, they are also unskippable. So, after going through one, you'll definitely want to save, otherwise you'll have to sit through it again next time you play. If you never played any of the Legacy of Kain/Soul Reaver games, it's tough to sell it to you because, as I said above, the selling point is the plot + voice acting, which you can watch online.
Gotta say it straight: this is less a game and more an interactive story. There's a LOT of text to read, in the form of chatter between characters, there's no failure and you can't see everything in one playthrough. And this is fine. The characters are really well done and there is enough change in some events to want to experiment trying things differently, like speaking for the first time with a character on a different day. At the very least, you'll want to check what Bea and Greg do in different days, It's not a perfect game, all the dream sequences with the 4 musicians feel like they serve zero purpose overall, maybe only to add a few extra minutes of gameplay. Can't remap controls, but you only 2 buttons beside the arrow keys, C and Spacebar (or Z), so it's no biggie. Also, it's only available in english, which certainly limits its reach, though I guess translators would need significant liberty, given the slangs and especially the poetry part. Highly recommended!
I've played a lot of HoMM back in ye olde days and bought this one during one of the sales. Installed and started playing again, and it's still a decent, if rather awkward looking game. The first problem most people might encounter is screen resolution. For some reason, it only stays windowed if you play under 800x600 or 1024x768. The largest available resolution forces fullscreen, possibly due to the engine. I saw a post elsewhere stating that you can make a shortcut and add "xres=1920 yres=1080" as parameters to alter the size of window. As for the game proper, the biggest difference between other heroes games is that the heroes actually fight and can be killed in combat. Personally, I really enjoy this as it gives a bigger RPG feel. Something of a cheat, if you walk around with an "army" of heroes, you can always retreat (white flag) without penalties. Your heroes will be teleported to the nearest town and any that was dead will be revived. Now, one of the changes that I didn't like is that there are no upgraded units. So no peasant-conscript, no squire-knight, no elf-high elf, etc. Another thing that wasn't well designed is the new combat map. The grid is a very large collection of little squares and every unit occupies between 4 to 20 of them. This creates a very large and, frankly, unnecessary angles that you can attack an enemy. It's very difficult to tell whether a unit can get past some parts of the map, since you can't tell from a glance how the obstacles are really laid out. I can't really talk much about balance as I've only finished the Haven scenario thus far and am still on mission 2 of Might. Enemies showing up out of nowhere with way more units than you could have hired is a real pain and seems frequent at Advanced (3/5) difficulty.
TLDR - Exploration game where you can fly in space and build bases with bits of "trading" included. Everyone knows about how Hello Games botched the launch, but they came around, they did not abandon the game nor the playerbase, the game received a large update just a few days ago from the writing of this review. If you haven't yet, go see the Internet Historian's "Engoodening of No Man's Sky", it's excellent stuff. On the game proper -> The game is all about exploration and, to a lesser degree, building a base. Exploring got a lot more interesting with the latest update, as it added significant and much needed variety to planets and their flora and fauna. Lots of them don't make much evolutionary sense, but others are really interesting. My main complaints are regarding combat and trading. For combat, there are 3 ground enemy types and that's it. They're like a "police" of the worlds and will leave you alone if you can evade them. They are only dangerous if you don't have a Scatter Blaster (shotgun) or Plasma Launcher. In space, there is zero variety in ship to ship combat. Every ship you fight is exactly the same. Shoot it head on and it'll stop attacking you, barreling to "avoid" fire. No differences in maneuverability, speed, size, weakness or shield strength. Trading as a whole doesn't make any sense because you can carry more stuff on your backpack than a class B ship and freighter combined. Also, the teleport network means that great profits are a loading screen away from you. Each system is fully devoted to one type of thing (energy, mining, trade goods, etc) so every planet on that system will sell the same stuff and those things are used for nothing but profits outside the system. No hints of cities or anything remotely similar to them anywhere. Where is stuff produced? Where do the aliens live? Despite all this, I'm enjoying the game because I understand that exploration is the focus here and exploring can be satisfying.
First, a useful link that has all the stuff that was once hosted on Beyond Unreal. You're welcome. http://ut.rushbase.net/beyondunreal/skincity/ut2k4 I should really feel dumb for having paid for this game on Steam already (bought it on a Unreal bundle, BRL $17 all 5 games). Yet, now I really feel like I own the damn game. I pay slightly more due to currency differences, but not having to deal with Steam is a plus. Now, for the actual review. This game is my go-to first person shooter. The original Unreal Tournament is slightly slower and more tactic. This one is frantic, has some classic maps updated and A LOT more stuff. Now you have vehicles, an expanded Assault mode, Onslaught, a horde mode where your team has to hold against waves of monsters. I prefer this one over UT99, but that doesn't mean that one isn't great. One of the best things of this game is the difficulty. It goes all the way from "C'mon, you ain't even trying, Mr. Bot!" to instant rage-quit. Seriously, Insane (max difficulty) bots made me rage-quit more than once, though putting two teams of 32 and spectating an Onslaught match is something incredible.
