Second Sight is a third person shooter that tries to blend gunplay and psychic powers but does not do a particularly good job at either thanks to poor control implementation. Still, the concept is good and the overall easiness of the game prevents the handicaps with which it saddles you from becoming too much of a frustration. VISUALS: This is a reasonably attractive game, with decent polygon counts in the models and enough detail that the extensive face time works well (although it's far from gorgeous). Environments are somewhat varied, although there is an obviously small selection of cut-and-paste objects and architectural features. While textures are reasonably detailed, the lack of bump- and other surface mapping means that everything is a bit flat and curves on everything except the characters are clearly polygonized. Water is planar with a simple noise texture, but does reflect (as do some floors and mirrors), and various psi effects are nicely rendered (air lensing, shields, etc). AUDIO: The soundtrack is simple and mostly fine, although limited. Unfortunately, it is not well balanced (I needed to turn it down several times) and some pieces have percussion that can mask or be confused for footsteps or gunfire, which is pretty stupid in a game that values stealth. Enemies react audibly to seeing you or to noticing something odd; if you can kill, strangle, or otherwise silence a guard before he finishes radioing in where he found a body, you can prevent an alarm from going off, so keeping an ear peeled is useful. In the later game, the sound of firefights triggered by your possessed puppets will help you time abuse of your powers. Various guns are different but not very distinctive sounding; fortunately it doesn't matter much, since you can almost always scout at your leisure via projection. CONTROLS and GAMEPLAY: Everything that can be done wrong in a third person shooter is done wrong here. You can switch to first-person view, but you can't move beyond leaning, which is acceptable in a platformer and utterly ridiculous in a shooter, especially since it is the only way to effectively aim at close range (ie, the time you most need to be moving). You cannot fire unless in aiming mode, which will lock on to the general region of a target (and slow you down); unfortunately lock is sticky but you can still miss, and it is nearly impossible to switch between two nearby targets (and sometimes the game will keep snapping to one particular target even if you're aiming closer to a distant one). Also, you will notice in sniper sections that you sometimes lock onto empty areas (or enemies behind buildings), and occasionally when locked on to a real target the aim point is slightly offset and no amount of mouse movement will bring it over the target; in these cases you have to re-lock and possibly switch targets. Aiming is slightly freer in first person view unless there are multiple nearby targets, and of course you will be unable to maneuver. The only times that the shooting is at all decent are when you are crawling through low tunnels - in these cases you are forced into first-person view but can still move, so control is rather like an actual shooter. Aiming difficulties extend to powers as well, complicated by the abundance of power-targetable objects in the environment. If you enter first-person view to avoid camera issues and stop your body from occluding your target, you will discover that your hand extends and points significantly low and to the left of your actual target, adding significant and unnecessary confusion. Fortunately, once locked on you have no further aiming to do (except with the psi-blast, whose huge projectile is both difficult to aim and easily blocked by nearby corners and bits of scenery). If you are camped somewhere using powers, you would be well-advised to destroy or throw away all targetable objects to increase your chances of selecting an enemy when you need to. Unfortunately, any attempt to use targeted powers on groups of enemies is likely to fail, as the first enemy selected is likely to constantly grab you aim when trying to select someone else, even once he is knocked down. If it weren't for the fact that you can absorb enough lead to sink a destroyer, this would make groups quite lethal; as it is, you're still likely to be killed if pinned in a corner because you will be unable to effectively aim and fire either powers or guns. (How it is possible to miss while emptying an SMG clip at point blank range is completely beyond me . . . it is possible that the game fires from a point in front of you, behind the backs of sufficiently close enemies.) The game is obviously targeted at consoles, and this shows in the very small number of keys that are used to do everything (with context-sensitive actions being listed onscreen). If the game were harder or required fancy maneuvering in combat, this would be a problem, but as it is, it's only a minor irritation most of the time. It is fortunately difficult to accidentally enter sticky cover (hugging a wall), which is good because it is awful (as usual). The camera has all the standard third-person-action problems, with vibration from some angles, drift when in a corner (where you're probably camping for enemies and need a steady viewpoint), terribly chosen fixed-angle cameras [always optional, and never useful since they invariably point away from enemy approaches], and unpleasantly variable sensitivity (in part due to the stickiness of enemy lock in aim mode, particularly in first person). You move too quickly to accurately edge around corners unless you are both crouched and in aim mode, which is unwieldy but at least usually possible; unfortunately it can be hard to judge sightlines unless you pop in and out of the immobile first person view. Your movement speed combines with the game being picky about what counts as "behind" to make silent kills (via sneaking up on an enemy) harder than it should be; furthermore, I accidentally strangled two NPCs (one of which turned allies hostile and required a restart) because the same key is used for talking, depending on angle. STORY/ACTING: The story is actually somewhat interesting (although a bit cliched, and the twist is predictable), and the acting is fairly good. When working with a squad, various characters will react to what you do, from telling you to take cover (don't), to complimenting shots, to thanking you for heals [or in the case of the medic, complaining that you're doing his job . . . which is odd since he *never* healed anyone, including critical cases]. Enemies have a variety of taunts, and everyone has appropriate accents (although some of the Slavic ones seemed overdone to me). Only one character is actively irritating, and she has a reason to be, so it's not terrible. There are lots of story cutscenes (which can be skipped with the Space key), as well as specific death cutscenes for different stages of the game, including squad-member-specific ones for letting various allies die in team missions. The former are interesting enough, and I found the latter to be a nice little touch. DIFFICULTY: The game offers two difficulty levels, Normal and Challenging. I played on the latter and found it to be very easy, which ended up saving the game, since the controls are so bad. Once you gain the ability to possess opponents, you will rarely face more than one enemy at a time, and all control weaknesses can be laughed off as you take your time aiming your first shot and then laugh as your puppet is gunned down if you mess up. Your bullet-soaking abilities are key to playing through several sections before you get decent powers (when escorting Jayne, you can protect her by charging in Rambo-style and firing wildly with the SMG as you soak up bullets that would otherwise have found their way into her empty head), and will protect you if you accidentally let an enemy slip by to your body while having fun with possession. Integrating psychic powers with a shooter is probably very difficult in game-balance terms, and with headshots being instakills on almost all enemies, it is important to give you some handicaps in gun use. The drifting aim point is a typical way to do this, and it is implemented here - but when the targeting system also forcibly prevents you from aiming where you intend to, that leaves the realm of realistic lack of skill and becomes a frustrating design failure. Some of the limitations stem from the obvious console target of the game, but many are simply bad design choices. If just one of powers or guns sucked, I'd just have heavily used the other and said it pushed you that way; as both suck, it's painful and you have to abuse everything you can to make it bearable. Fortunately, there's plenty to abuse - so much so that from about the middle of the game onward, it is almost more of an interactive story than a game most of the time. While this means it will never earn high ranks from me, it also saves the game from really low ranking, since abusing powers is fun. Even with no actual risk, you can try to get as much use as possible out of each possessed enemy. You cannot save your game, but levels have periodic checkpoints (at every cutscene and often in between as well), and your most recent checkpoint is always kept. Checkpoints usually occur in the vicinity of first-aid kits (before you get healing), so you will generally not find yourself re-starting a level because you checkpointed with only a sliver of health. Although I restarted several sections mostly because I enjoy doing things the wrong way, there are a couple sections that can be hard, at least until you discover the most effective way of handling them; I'll go over those below. In general, no section requires a great deal of skill, even though some can try your patience. LEVELS, STRATEGY, and OTHER ELEMENTS: While levels are generally linear overall, a few have sections offering a variety of paths, ranging from a complete branch in the second level (there are two completely separate routes) to building clusters that can be explored in any order. The squad missions are the most linear; very combat-focused, they generally require you to fight (because your teammates are usually terrible shots) as well as advancing to trigger changes in enemy waves. If you hear your squad ordering you to move up, do so because there will be infinite enemies until you do, possibly several times! Keep your allies healed (once you can), because ally death means mission failure. Several sections in early missions are best classed as escort because your companion will walk into fields of fire without considering cover; thankfully these can be solved by playing Rambo. Two later missions are more traditional escort tasks, with all the babysitting that implies; to make matters worse, the escortee is whiny (excused by story), runs from combat and must be fetched (but fortunately stays out of fire), and spawns enemies if left alone for too long (ARGH!). As you might guess, this leads to time pressure when you are inevitably forced to abandon your less-mobile friend to unlock the path. Fortunately, the spawn timer is extended in both cases, and you get a checkpoint at the start. The checkpoint system encourages players to react to some survivable mistakes by reloading, and level design does little to change this; in the aforementioned escort mission I survived a bad drop and was ready to accept the challenge of getting back to my companion to reset the timer and try again, only to find that the one apparent path was unusable (a ledge that led back to the starting point was both too thin to stand on and refused to offer me the hanging-off action). After successfully fending off the third wave of time-triggered enemies while searching, I gave up and reloaded, abandoning what could have been a daring save with better level design. All but the last few solo levels can often be completed by stealth alone or some mix of stealth and combat. Going all-out with guns will usually result in continual alarms and infinite enemies, so some level of sneakiness is almost always required (although in the combat-heavy later missions, some alarms have little effect). If you do accidentally set off an alarm, most levels up to the late game have ample supplies of closets in which to hide and wait out the alarm (which also serve as recharge stations when charming your way past guards). The awful controls further encourage the use of stealth so that you have time to wrestle them into giving you a good shot, possibly followed by Rambo-like drives to silence anyone radioing in a location. Once you learn possession, most solo sections are a cakewalk: get close, possess, whittle down to last enemy, walk out, choke to death. The force-choke power makes you effectively invincible against any single enemy, including the extra-special super-soldiers (not just the first ones in black) near the end - if you choke them long enough to knock them down, you recharge more than you spent in the time it takes for them to get up. Furthermore, they can't call for help while being choked, and you can speed up the kill by smacking them into walls while holding them or just shooting them in the head when they're down (both of which may take a few tries thanks to the controls). This method breaks down against groups, and the aforementioned super-soldiers will pair up at one point (it would almost still work, but the inability to consistently pick targets means you will probably lose). Of course, you have a method of close-quarters crowd control in the late game, and spamming that will solve all problems, from super-soldiers to the final battle. (I almost never used it otherwise, so it was still amusing to watch 'em fly even if it was ridiculously easy and a bit anticlimactic.) It is usually clear where to go, but I found myself quite confused in a couple outdoor areas thanks to poor visual design; some but not all fences can be leapt over, and hanging from ledges is a contrivance used only 3 or 4 times. One of the later levels has multiple occasions where you climb *through* a fence to go up a ledge or hang from an edge; I only figured this out by walking up to various edges and looking for an action to present itself. Fortunately you never have to do this in combat, and you are not given the option to jump out of the map or otherwise trap yourself. THE VERDICT: Second Sight was headed for a 2 early on and was only saved by its neat concept and the fact that there are so many ways to abuse abilities in the late game that frustration is kept to a minimum. The controls are truly awful, but the powers are fun, and who cares if the Russian soldier you're puppeting keeps missing, you were planning to kill him later anyway! Once you get the crowd-control blast, problems break down into two categories: long-range enemies who can be ignored as you charge to whatever target area triggers the next game event or checkpoint, and enemies who chase you around corners and get blast-spammed to death (even the super soldiers). The key to enjoying the game is to give up any tactic that is becoming frustrating and try abusing a different power - there's always a pretty easy solution, and as your skills improve, you even get a bit of variety. It's sad that providing fun abilities and enough variety to stave off boredom when abusing them is only enough to earn a 3, but in addition to its flaws, this game lacks the genuine challenge and skill-reward that really mark a good game. Only buy this if you're willing to play strategically around mechanical limitations, won't be angered by all the cool tricks you could almost use if only the controls would let you, and can find the fun in abusing an overpowered character (but there is a good chunk of the latter to be had!).
Serious Sam is an old-school run-and-gun FPS, focused on constant, high-pressure action and an arcade-like feel. SS:The First Encounter had a number of weaknesses that prevented it from reaching its full potential, but The Second Encounter fixes almost everything I complained about and adds some delicious extras. It is a serious blast of non-stop fun. VISUALS: As with The First Encounter, this is a fairly simple, but attractive game. You can swap freely between first- and third-person perspective, the latter of which can be helpful when surrounded, particularly with one of the fun new weapons. There are a ton of options in the engine that a reasonably modern machine should be able to max out completely. The engine is mostly the same, but seems to have a few improvements, and the environments are far richer. As before, you won't see fancy water effects or gorgeous bump-mapped enemies, but you won't care as you're fighting the angry hordes. There is a lot of destroyable scenery, as well as nice touches like fields of high grass. One of my minor complaints about the first game was that the environments (particularly the architecture) lacked variety; this has been wonderfully addressed. There are three time periods, each with a distinct architectural style, as well as a plethora of special environments within each, from forests to lava caves to christmas villages and an ice lake. Atmospheric effects have been improved, and little touches like charring on burned enemies or vegetation provide further variety. Lovely reflective floors are featured multiple times. All in all, the game looks as good as can probably be managed in this engine. AUDIO: The soundtrack for The First Encounter was pretty good, but the soundtrack for The Second Encounter is great. The biggest improvement is in the battle music, which is now almost always a heavier variation on the area's base music, so that it blends in and out more smoothly and really enhances the feel of the game. Furthermore, there is greater variety, and the music matches the world well. (Just wait 'til you get to the Christmas Village and get attacked!) Most sound effects are the same as in The First Encounter, but everything sounds a bit better-mixed to me, and there are many more enemies to hear. As before, all monster types have an idle vocalization and alert sound, and anything that charges will cry out, yell madly, thunder on the ground, or otherwise let you know it's coming. The kamikaze yells seemed easier to localize and distance-estimate than before, and I didn't notice any odd audio behavior indoors. The sounds don't just help you when being charged from all directions - the game loves to make you jump with the sound of a chainsaw suddenly revving up behind you, or the scream of an arachnoid you didn't know was there. The developers clearly had fun with this, and there are several occasions where they'll probably get you to fire at a spawning powerup in a panic. [Look out though, on Serious some of those fakeouts become actual monsters!] CONTROLS and GAMEPLAY: You have the usual set of customizable FPS controls (still a fixed screenshot key though), with finer-grained control over the use/special function key than before. Unfortunately, there is still no "last-weapon" fast-switch key, which becomes more of a problem than it was before, thanks to the further doubling-up of weapons, in particular the flamethrower and sniper rifle. Every other number key selects between two related weapons (single/double shotgun, knife/chainsaw, machine gun/minigun, etc), while slot 6 (which was grenade launcher in the first game, leading to plenty of reflexive selection errors in this one) is now flamethrower/sniper rifle, ie the two most different weapons in the game, one of which is often an emergency weapon. Worse, the fact that the sniper rifle is second means that your sniper rifle reflex will be a double-tap, which fails when you're wielding the flamethrower. As before, weapon switching also feels just a bit too slow. Thanks to all this, at least a quarter of my deaths were due to weapon-switching issues. As I just mentioned, you get new weapons, and this addresses a bigger complaint I had about The First Encounter, that the weapons didn't feel varied enough. With the flamethrower, close-quarters fights are much more interesting, and it provides new tactical options in several situations. The sniper rifle adds not only ultra-long-distance stopping power, but also the possibility of effective, fast emergency snap-shooting. This allows the level designers to make far more interesting use of monsters like Arachnoids, and gives you more tactical choice in dealing with Werebulls. (Plus, sniper rifles are just plain fun.) Beyond these, you get a chainsaw (particularly useful with one of the new enemies) and a very limited supply of screen-clearing super bombs. To spice things up a bit further, timed powerups for speed, damage, and invulnerability have been thrown into the mix. These are critical to making some of the arenas more fun, and always provide interesting tactical decisions. A good selection of new monsters has been added, thoroughly addressing my major complaint about lack of combat variety. You will still encounter a lot of Kleer, but a new (tougher) fast melee attacker has been added to the mix, and there are two new common shooting monsters that significantly upgrade the eminently ignorable beheaded variety. Mixed forces are a lot more common, including kamikaze mixes; thanks to this and to improved level design, every major combat feels unique. As with The First Encounter, levels are primarily composed of sequential arenas in which you face several waves of enemies, but level design has been tremendously improved. Most closed arenas require you to be properly sealed inside before triggering, so you don't have the option of abusing the door for easy play and boredom. Easy rocket-jump exits are extremely rare, and many walls have teleport zones to send you back, just in case you manage a clever escape. This is entirely an improvement; thanks to the new weapons and better overall design, arena traps never feel cheap. There are a few completely open outdoor arenas, but more common are extremely large but enclosed areas in which wall-to-wall (or otherwise widely dispersed) enemies will charge you, handily avoiding the run-away-and-pick-them-off exploit so frequently possible in the previous installment. Long, turning 'canyon' type yards with many distinct, individually triggered waves also feature prominently, and these are a lot of fun, with later waves sure to push you back quite a way (and the occasional spawn behind you to keep you on your toes). Most notable, though, are the many trick rooms with altered gravity, bouncy floors, wind currents, jump strips, or other complications that (while sometimes frustrating) undeniably keep combat very interesting. STORY/ACTING: As with the first game, this is an old-school shooter - constant action with a bit of framing story to motivate the running and gunning. Acting comes down to the occasional one-liner from Sam, which are appropriately silly and macho, although Sam's a much more agreeable character than, say, Duke Nukem. This ain't Half-Life 2, but you're not going to care as you desperately pour lead into wall after wall of charging foes. This game has more funny moments than the last, with a lot of callbacks to the first game (or future ones!) or to other elements of gaming culture at the time (Duke Nukem Forever!). Your digital assistant gets more of a personality than before, but since it only shows up in your briefing screen, that doesn't add much (nor does it irritate much if you don't like her, though). DIFFICULTY: As before, the game offers 5 difficulty levels, ranging from "suitable for those with no FPS experience" Tourist level to "are you serious?" Serious level (and the initially-locked "you're not serious" Mental, which is Serious plus enemies fading in and out of invisibility). The lower levels increase starting, maximum, and pickup health, while the levels above normal mostly increase the number of enemies and the damage they do. Serious may increase the speed and leap-attack distance of some enemies as well. The vastly improved level design forces you to play through arenas properly, and it almost completely removes the boredom-vs-difficulty tradeoff option that was so prevalent in The First Encounter. The difficulty is therefore much more consistent, although some fights are naturally harder than others. My first thought was that the hardest fights in The First Encounter had been more challenging than those in The Second Encounter, but then I went back and replayed those; to my surprise, they were uniformly pretty easy. Only in The Second Encounter did I really learn to play properly, it seems. Still, many parts of The Second Encounter were possibly a bit too easy (although very fun), particularly the long yards - thanks to generous supplies of ammunition and the expanded set of effective weapons, even huge waves could usually be dealt with before being completely backed into a corner. On the other hand, the boss fights this time around were actually challenging, and each one had unique mechanics. Many of the crazy-mechanic rooms (particularly those with bouncy floors) turned out to be rather hard. I had been unused to taking advantage of respawning goodies in the thick of combat, and it took some time to learn to maneuver properly to take advantage of those present in most of the confined-space arenas. The game periodically reduces you to your starting weapons, allowing it to provide interesting challenges throughout the game without resorting to ever-increasing hordes of enemies. This is completely justified in the story, and it doesn't feel cheap; in fact, it is quite fun to learn to handle familiar enemies with different weapon selections each time. At the highest level, you will need to effectively use every weapon in your arsenal to handle the various tactical challenges thrown at you. In The First Encounter, ammo balance was the main reason to change weapons, but here you will find yourself situationally pulling out many different weapons, particularly the new toys. The flamethrower's ability to hit multiple massed enemies and the sniper's snap-shot elimination will put a smile on your face and let the level designers throw things at you that would have felt positively unfair in the first game. As before, you can quicksave anywhere (and the last 8 quicksaves are retained), which could further reduce the difficulty if you don't discipline yourself in using this feature. Fortunately (perhaps), the best battles will keep you under enough pressure to make abusing this feature non-trivial at least. Most players will likely find it particularly useful in combination with the Serious Bomb, which will give you a short but critical breather in any tough fight. Wave structure does take the existence of this weapon into account; the toughest fights use continuous spawning to ensure that you can only defeat a fraction of the overall forces with a single bomb - thus they are best used as emergency weapons when cornered, allowing you to recover from a small number of critical misjudgments over the course of the game (or simply to reach a critical health pack in one of those crowded indoor arenas). Happily, even if you expend all 3 of your bombs in a boss fight in order to focus on the primary opponent, you will not find yourself bored. LEVELS, STRATEGY, and OTHER ELEMENTS: I simply cannot mention enough the fantastic improvements in level design over the first game. Enemy pathfinding is still not great, but the environments have been designed to limit how often this becomes a problem. The existence of a better weapon selection allows the designers to spring much nastier traps on you, and getting out of them is quite satisfying (although some of the obstacles are a bit irritating). Secrets continue to be generously sprinkled throughout the game, mostly being simple tests of exploration or mild puzzles, but a couple really fun skill challenges have been added as well. One time-based secret (which announces itself when triggered, so you will know to try for it on a second run without looking for a guide) drives you to complete most of the level at a reckless pace, which I found tremendously fun. Secret levels have been replaced with large secret areas, ranging from side yards to entirely separate, often humorous mini-zones linked by teleporters; the designers had a lot of fun with the look and feel of many of these. As mentioned above, the levels are much more varied in design, and they are also much more detailed. The grass is pretty, but you may find youself cursing it in levels where it conceals approaching enemies. The abundant trees will often interfere with sightlines, and the trunks have an irritating habit of blocking shots when you think you're shooting around them (I have wasted tons of sniper bullets this way) thanks to much wider hitboxes than their display geometry [the same feature that lets you abuse corners against heavies]. Be aware that enemies can see and shoot through foliage (as you can, but the seeing bit is kinda hard . . . and the sniper rifle in zoom mode has no enemy indicator). Because of all this (and because explosives that you dodge might explode usefully against a tree just behind you), it can be wise to cut down trees in your vicinity before major battles. However, note that a lot of secrets rely on not cutting down plants near triggers - so always try to pick up all the items near something you intend to cut down first. The chainsaw finally provides a way to destroy most scenery without wasting valuable rockets (which are, however, plentiful) or chaingun ammo. It works on most statues as well. Enemy spawns (and secrets) triggered by destroying objects are less common, and since there are now dozens in every level, the new recommended course is to only bother with those that interfere with combat. A tip for completionists: There appear to be two unattainable secrets. You start out with a total count of 13, despite the existence of only 12 in the first level, and in Level 2 (Valley of the Jaguar), one item find that is almost certainly a secret does not register, leaving you with 7/8. [If you manage to find either of these, congratulations, you've beaten the Internet, please post in the forums!] THE VERDICT: This installment really achieves what Serious Sam was meant to be - a crazy, hectic run-and-gun extravaganza that won't let you bore yourself even if you try. It captures and expands upon some of the best moments in classics like Doom and Quake, and it looks good doing it. I was never bored; didn't take me long to finish, but darn was it fun the whole time. (And after going back, I found that nothing in FE was all that hard either.) That said, it isn't perfect; it has some remaining control issues, irritating hitboxes, and with all the difficulty options, I wish that Serious were a bit harder. Being released as a Good Old Game prompts an unfortunate and perhaps unfair comparison to Painkiller, which simply does everything a bit better. All this prevents it from earning that coveted 5 (with which I am very stingy), but it is a very solid 4, in good company with other games I have really loved. If you like FPS games at all, or even if you just want to try out the genre, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter is seriously worth your time. Check it out!
Serious Sam aims to be a spiritual successor to the run-and-gun FPS classics, with an arcade-like constant action feel. At its best moments, it is a serious blast and it captures that wild feel, but it doesn't take advantage of its core design as well as it could. (Fortunately, The Second Encounter does.) One bug warning to save some from wasted effort: at least some players (possibly all) have found that demo recording does not work - the recording message comes up, but nothing seems to result in actual demos being saved. VISUALS: While simple, this is an attractive game, and a reasonably modern machine should be able to max out all of the engine's many options. While models and environments don't have tremendously high poly-counts or rich atmospheric effects, everything looks clean, shadows are detailed, and the draw distance is impressive. The engine specializes in huge, open areas and equally huge enemy counts, both of which are used extensively in the game. You won't see fancy water or beautiful bump-mapped closeups, but you won't care as you're blasting your way through hordes of attackers or desperately firing into a foggy or dark-cloaked room. You can swap freely between first and third-person perspective, which can be particularly helpful when surrounded. Recently, 'HD' versions have been released on a more modern engine - if you have the hardware there could be some value there, but the original looks plenty good and won't tax your machine. Nothing looks blocky, the textures are more than good enough to keep your eyes happy, and the blood and exploding bits are plentiful. The only complaint I'd register in the visuals department is that there isn't a ton of variety to the architecture. AUDIO: The soundtrack is pretty good, and very appropriate; it is also helpful, since it changes to heavy, fast battle music any time an enemy notices you. Given the nature of the game, you will be listening to the hard stuff most of the time. Guns all have distinct sounds, and each enemy has an occasional idle noise, alert yell, and firing sound (unique to general type). Most have vocalizations for being injured and a death cry as well. Spawning enemies or goodies make a clear noise, although the game occasionally uses this to mess with your head. Charging kamikazes have a very helpful loud yell that changes volume with distance and is usually fairly easy to localize, and galloping kleer and werebulls are also audible, although harder to localize. Overall, the game sounds good, and gives all the audio cues you need, but be warned that it seems to occasionally mess up the balance and mislead the listener in close quarters. CONTROLS and GAMEPLAY: You have the standard set of FPS controls, with full customizability (except for the #$%^& screenshot button, as usual). You don't need to reload your weapons, except for the infinite-ammo starting pistol(s). This fits the high-speed, constant-pressure gameplay style, but contributes to the same-y feel of many weapons, particularly the 3 high-rate-of-fire guns. You basically have two kinds of chaingun, plus a variant that chews ammo less quickly, rockets (and grenades that mostly serve the same role when you're low on ammo), shotguns (you'll mostly use the double-barrel), and a ridiculously powerful cannon late in the game. When you're not under pressure, you can save valuable ammo and use the infinite pistols, but this is generally tedious due to their slow damage rate. All weapons except the shotguns have perfect accuracy, which combines with the color-coded (health indicating) reticle to encourage long-range cheap shots. Weapon switching feels just a touch too slow for a game of this type, making changing weapons in combat often risky, which is a real problem when your chaingun finishes demolishing its ammo supply. Furthermore, there is no "last-weapon" swap button, making changes much more difficult and mis-selection a frustratingly easy possibility. There aren't tremendously many enemy types either, and the way they're used in-game further reduces the felt variety; heavy units are frequently placed on pillar tops or otherwise out of reach and immobile, with no effect other than confining your movement to cover (chaingun-wielding arachnoids) or adding occasional extra targets to shoot (homing-missile-firing reptiloids) until you have time to pick them off. Biomechanoids are the only heavy units that usually move much, and they're fairly easy targets, only constituting a major threat when large groups of the strong, rocket-firing Majors are dropped in with hordes of other enemies, thanks to their attacks being easy to dodge at range. Those other enemies will usually be Kleer, the primary threat throughout the game, or Beheaded Kamikazes, the fast high-priority targets the game likes to spring on you. Before you get the cannon, the heavy, very fast Sirian Werebulls will dominate your attention combat, and after you get it you'll always want to use it on them. Levels consist of series of arenas in which you will be attacked by several waves of enemies. The biggest fights will provide new health, armor, and ammo drops between waves, or timed respawning goodies. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you're having trouble), many rooms have most enemies pre-spawned or triggerable near the door, allowing you to simply retreat before it closes, then bore yourself half to death opening the door, firing a few shots, taking cover, and repeating. This is particularly boring if you're an ammo miser and choose to abuse the weak infinite-ammo pistols for this purpose. With hitscan-weapon enemies (arachnoids), it feels rather silly to do anything else, since being out of cover for more than about half a second will result in a lot of unavoidable damage. Most heavy enemies can also be shot around corners without exposing yourself, which is even cheaper but at least saves time over taking 4-shot bursts during their spin-up delay. Outdoor areas are more interesting thanks to the absence of cheap cover, but tend to be too easy, thanks to the nigh-unbounded retreat distance available to you, and the fact that you can usually move out of the detection range of late-spawning enemies. STORY/ACTING: This is an old-school shooter - constant action with a bit of framing story to motivate the running and gunning. Acting comes down to occasional one-liners from Sam, which are appropriately silly and macho, although Sam's a much more agreeable character than, say, Duke Nukem. This ain't Half-Life 2, but you're not going to care as you desperately pour lead into wall after wall of charging foes. There's a bit of humor injected via the tactical descriptions provided by the cybernetic-assistant-in-your-head as well, but that's all in text. DIFFICULTY: The game offers 5 difficulty levels, ranging from "suitable for those with no FPS experience" Tourist level to "are you serious?" Serious level (and the initially-locked "you're not serious" Mental, which is Serious plus enemies fading in and out of invisibility). The lower levels increase starting, maximum, and pickup health, while the levels above normal mostly increase the number of enemies and the damage they do. Serious may increase the speed and leap-attack distance of some enemies as well. I played on Serious level [and collected all secrets], and difficulty was a seriously mixed bag. Unfortunately, the low tolerance for error it affords encouraged me to use cheesy tactics, since cover options often boil down to near-immunity using the door vs. complete exposure in the arena, with pointless-feeling unavoidable loss of health before you have time to eliminate all the chaingunners. The designers appear to have acknowledged the issue by giving most coverless arenas obvious rocket-jump-accessible walls, sometimes complete with jump pads in out-of-map areas to send you back if you don't land on top. This is a rather unfortunate method of balancing a game, since taking potshots from a position of near-invulnerability is pretty tedious, especially when you run out of ammo and must resort to the weak starter pistols. That said, after playing The Second Encounter, I went back to all the major arenas I had jumped out of and played through them properly; somewhat surprisingly, none took very long to beat, since all of them had adequate ammo spawns, and I was more inclined to use ammunition aggressively when in the thick of battle. Still, there are plenty of rooms that heavily encourage use of the door, and the lack of mobility for heavies (and bad pathfinding for all enemies) means that any time cover is present, it is easy to abuse (and boring if you save ammo). There are a few inescapable arenas and others that I stubbornly tried until I beat them fair-and-square, and I found a few of these pretty hard on the first play-through. This may have been due to the limited time I spent fighting properly and my tendency to over-conserve certain ammo types, since after playing The Second Encounter, all replay tests proved to be surprisingly easy. The tensest moments come when you run out of chaingun and laser ammunition and no longer have a way to keep back an advancing horde of kleer, resulting in a big turning battle as you slowly whittle them down with the shotgun, often complicated by the appearance of much-faster werebulls to mess up your timing and throw you around. Unfortunately, this gets a bit tedious after the umpteenth time it happens; it's a bad sign when the appearance of more-irritating enemies (harpies!) becomes a relief (sadly, once you learn to handle them, they're rarely much of a threat). You can quicksave anywhere, and the game keeps your last 8 quicksaves, so an accidental save right before a rocket nails you in the back is not a huge problem. I tried not to overly abuse this feature in combat, but I was quite glad it existed in some of the longer arenas. LEVELS, STRATEGY, and OTHER ELEMENTS: If you're having trouble with a firefight, see if you can trigger some of the enemies from the doorway, or look for somewhere to rocket-jump to. Avoid this as much as you can, since camping on a ledge taking potshots is a lot less fun (and results in enemy clusters that will keep you there until you're done), but it's possible in most of the hard areas. Feel free to use ammo aggressively; this will make the game go by more quickly and you will always be well-supplied right before a big battle (cannon ammo is particularly plentiful in the late game). The chaingun and laser gatling can cut down a lot of the projectiles thrown by Kleer, particularly if they're heavily bunched up, and the pistols can do so when kiting a big group at extreme range outdoors. When facing Common Reptiloids from medium+ range, the pistols have adequate speed to take it down while covering you from incoming projectiles, so long as you prioritize their missiles near the end of each clip. Thanks to the homing nature of the missiles, it is easier to take out single reptiloids by standing in the open than it is to dodge around cover, since you can keep all incoming missiles in view (of course, abusing a corner so no shots are fired at all is the easiest approach). In arenas with respawning goodies, pick up ammo early and often, and be aware that ammo packs can differ in which ammo they are most heavy on (in the late game one arena grants 20 cannonballs per pack, almost as fast as you can use them). There are a lot of secrets in almost every level, including special exits to two secret levels (out of only 15 total!), both of which are pretty extensive. Most of these are mildly hidden items, pickups that trigger surprise enemies, or Doom-style dark patches of wall to hit. Keeping an eye peeled for dark spots or initially unreachable items will cover a lot of them, and wanton destruction of prominent objects will get almost all of the rest, along with a hearty helping of extra enemies. There are very few secrets that require trick jumps or other skill challenges (although many secrets are optional triggers for challenging mini-fights). As mentioned above, the sequential-arena level design suffers from easy exploits, and it also gets pretty repetitive after a while, since you keep seeing the same enemies. Only a few of the boss fights offer much challenge, and some are recycled (the first "mob boss" is a good example, although it is pretty neat when you first encounter it). THE VERDICT: Rating this game is hard; there are a lot of fun elements and I want to give it a 4, but the level design weakness, the irritating control limitations (mainly the lack of a fast swap), the general samey-ness of the weapons, and the repetitive combat all eventually sap some of the fun. Were it not for quicksaves, several of the longer fights would have been quite aggravating; being ganked from behind by a surprise spawn is Not Cool if you lose ten minutes of hard-fought battle to it. Ultimately, the game just barely fails to earn a 4, mainly because it spends too much time failing to force the player into the all-out run-and-gun action around which it is designed (it is a bad sign when you view the presence of heavies as a tedious timesink rather than a threat), and because most of the challenge comes in the form of "yet another long turning battle with Kleer".
This compilation includes not only the three tightly related and similar Ishar games, but also the earlier "Crystals of Arborea", an entirely different beast that is much more of a mini-strategy game, related only in that it provides a tiny bit of the backstory. The rating is reserved for the Ishar games. Also, I experienced some intermittent crashing, but that really didn't factor into the score. VISUALS: Um, it's a 320x200, grid-based "first person" RPG. Don't expect miracles. That said, it looks good for what it is. The interface is well designed, clearly displays critical information, and has attractive, distinguishable graphics for items. The 256x113 view window always clearly shows what you're seeing, and enemies are instantly distinguishable even at maximum distance. Character portraits are actually fairly nice, and the enemies in 2&3 look pretty good. There are only a couple frames of sprite animation, but it's certainly clear who is attacking or casting spells. Dungeons, cities, forests, etc each have only a few different wall tiles, but forests and the like DO have transparency, meaning that you can tell if you're skirting a walled-off clearing, particularly helpful in the jungles mazes of Ishar 3. The visual quality does improve in each game, with environments, static scenes, and enemies all increasing in number, variation, and detail. The icy cliffs in Ishar 2 actually looked pretty decent, and Ishar 3 may be as good as you can get in this format, with textures, characters, and enemies that look photo-based. In Ishar 2 and 3, the textual spell lists are replaced with symbols, which is both prettier and more usable, but they seem to have left a key to spell symbols out of the Ishar 2 manual - fortunately the same spells are available in Ishar 3, so use that manual. CONTROLS and GAMEPLAY: Movement is standard grid-based "first-person" fare: 4 directions to step, and turning left or right. this can be done with the handy buttons on the screen, or with keyboard shortcuts. You arrange party members in a 5x5 grid, and those on the front line can melee attack - this can again be done by clicking (on buttons helpfully displaying the active weapon and darkening when cooling down between strikes) or with hotkeys. Changing the casting system in Ishar 2 allowed them to improve the hotkey layout by grouping the 5 attack keys. Nothing much to say, it's pretty straightforward. Missile weapons and targeted spells require clicking on a target; since there is no spell cooldown, this makes "target everything" spells even more powerful than they already are because you can spam about 7 in the time it takes to swing a sword once. You will like this feature, I guarantee it! Combat is realtime, with different weapons having different cooldown periods. Movement is as well, so in open spaces you can dodge past enemies. Ishar 2 introduces a day-night cycle whose main effect is the closure of shops, and there are a large number of time-dependent events and behaviors in Ishar 3. Sleeping is never required, but it replenishes mental energy, and a bit of physical energy and health. Eating replenishes physical energy, which determines the miss rate of attacks and spells. You can carry food, and once you acquire the flask or cauldron of alchemy, you can brew restorative potions for each. Movement is quite responsive: you can zip around the landscape in short order using the keyboard. Equipping characters is managed by dragging items to bodies in the small inventory screens, and you can move stacks by clicking on the number (I missed this tip at first!). Gold and other large-quantity items are transferred with counters which start flipping progressively higher digits as you hold them, so it won't take an hour to move 10,000 gold. Life readouts are always present, and a tactical readout with the two types of fatigue, XP, and gold can replace character portraits. You can also show the contents of each character's hands and any status effects currently active, which allows you to make a virtual item hotbar by having non-fighter characters carry keys or other items you expect to use. In Ishar 1, you have to buy spell training for each party member that can cast them; this is the primary money sink in that game. In 2 and 3, spells arrive automatically as characters level up, and a variety of new, improved equipment appears to provide a place to spend your hard-earned cash. Ishar 2 and 3 also involve a lot more mission-specific gear, including cold weather clothes, safety ropes, and the occasional disguise. Once you're geared up, money goes into building a stock of potion components. Ishar 1 has a lot of special-use potions, and Ishar 2 has a few, but in Ishar 3 you'll probably only need to worry about restoratives. A final thing worth noting is that Ishar 2 introduces a map of the major city, which is handy, but Ishar 3 expands this to not only show where you are, but also label all shops and inns you have found, as well as quest-important locations. This is a huge upgrade, and it makes the wide array of vendors a pleasant surprise rather than a pain. STORY/ACTING: There really isn't much story to speak of in the first two games; the worlds have backstories to explain how they ended up in their current state, who the bad guys are, and what needs to be done to stop them . . . but it's all just framing for a classic combat RPG. You don't really interact with NPCs - some give you hints, some give quests, and some ask to join you, but that is achieved in a few lines of non-interactive text. The world of Ishar 3 is much more active, and figuring out where to go and what to do requires a bit of attention to what is going on. You still don't do any actual conversing, but it feels like you're interacting with the characters more, and they have more to say and do. Your party composition does matter, and how characters relate to each other has a few important effects. A hated party member may leave in the night with all his or her gear (not really a problem in the late game, when you can simply replace sleep with potions as I did to retain the party I wanted), and party members who like each other will attack anyone else who kills them (of course, death in combat is always an option). Less subtly, PCs that really hate each other (eg due to racial or alignment mismatch) will vote against each other joining, which can make assembling a misfit party a bit of an ordering puzzle. Ishar 2 and 3 have a "team spirit" stat that tracks party discord and may have an impact on combat effectiveness, so it is worth paying more attention to it. Still, this is a mostly hidden mechanic that is more of a neat touch than a real role-playing element. All communication is text, so there isn't any acting, and NPCs are either static or have a couple frames of animation, so there's not much to say beyond noting that while you finally get some actual characterization in Ishar 3, it's often a bit silly. DIFFICULTY: As is often the case with older RPGs, most of the difficulty is in the early game, where you're weak enough to be vulnerable to a few bad-luck hits or misses, you're too short on cash to heal a lot, and you're undergeared. Fortunately, there's always a healer to recruit somewhere near the start, although in Ishar 3 you'll probably have one fight before you reach the first inn, which will hurt a single character quite a bit, although it's certainly survivable. In Ishar 2 and 3 you can start out with all the spellcasters you need if you choose to import a party from a previous game (they'll be stripped of equipment but keep their levels . . . without XP though). In Ishar 1, spell costs are likely to require a lot of grinding for cash, which will probably bring your party to level 30 (max) along the way; once you reach this point in the game, you're probably nigh-invincible, able to defeat enemies that drop more than enough cash to pay for the food and rest you need between strings of fights. Hanging out near city gates and repeatedly re-entering (which spawns all the city's patrols, as does loading a save in town) will let you grind to your heart's content. If you stock enough potion components, you can absolutely spam spells at any enemy that poses a real threat, and the only real threats are enemies with long-range area of attack spells that could take out your squishier casters faster than you can keep everyone healed. Enemies that charm are also an obvious issue if you have no way to reverse a corrupted fighter, but again, you'll have a deep tank of offensive spells and I think you can reverse charm by letting a character die and resurrecting them [not sure though]. The final string of bosses includes a couple who will probably hurt you pretty well, but mostly it's an endurance contest, and you have energy-restoring potions that you drink from the game-pausing inventory screen, so you're gonna win. The hardest part of Ishar 2 is probably the "rescue the princess" quest, at least if you do it fairly early (as I did because I switched my party afterward, so I wanted not to waste much leveling or spell buying), because you have to fight through a city full of enemies, and if you re-loaded at any point, you have to fight them again on the way out, only with one less party member and many of your consumables probably spent. (Common to all three games is the irritating theme of picking up temporary characters, which requires you to (permanently) dismiss or kill party members.) I ended up using a rather abusive tactic for that mission: all enemies have a limited range, and if you can go beyond that range and still see them, you can hit them with spells and arrows until you run out. Around corners this usually only exposes half of a group, but it's a rather powerful way to get past fixed guardians in particular. Ishar 2 has a few fairly tough fights on the first island, but you can recruit plenty of throw-away PCs if you're having trouble keeping everyone alive. When you first reach the big city, fighting robbers may be a near-break-even proposition in terms of cash earned and cahs required for recovery. You also won't be strong enough to venture too deep into the next dungeon, but some initial exploration will earn you some spending money to gear up. The automatic spells mechanic simplifies leveling up and really improves spellcasters, so you really just need to keep exploring and completing subquests, gearing up as you go. It will be a while before you get the alchemy cauldron, so you'll need to take short jaunts and retreat when your casters run low. Once your wizard reaches level 13, though, you acquire a game-breaking spell: "change of timescale" heals and restores physical and spell energy to the *whole party* including the caster. It is free energy, and it makes your spellcasting bottomless [so long as you save 3 points]. After that, combat is only as difficult as your self-restraint allows it to be! Of course, you're probably reasonably well-geared by then, so it has probably become mostly about exploration - but with an infinite healing supply, you can delve as deep as you wish in the longer dungeons, and there are only a few more fights that really take much effort. (If you don't abuse the time spell, there are a couple that may kill a PC, but that's where resurrect comes in :-).) Ishar 3 fixes the timescale spell so that it drains the caster, meaning that you can't just constantly cast it, and must still carry potion components. Even if you import a party, the level requirements for spells have been raised, so you won't be a powerhouse out of the gate, and the thieves around the city scale with your party's level, which makes them rather damaging before you buy gear. The party members you probably want are spread around the city, so building the party you want will take some time (and be warned, you're going to be fetching characters again!). Once you start questing, you'll earn cash quite quickly, thanks to the introduction of selling goods, including highly valuable goodies you can pick up in your quests. That plus the bank will have you able to buy pieces of the new top gear in fairly short order, and early acquisition of the alchemy flask means you can stay stocked with energy restorer, so your spellcasters will be at full use. After the initial exploration and cleaning of the city, this episode never felt terribly hard, because being prepared was pretty straightforward. There's not even much cause to grind, thanks to ample XP and money earned in the normal quests. I finished Ishar 3 in well under half the game days that Ishar 2 took, despite spending 4 times as much on gear. I'll mention Crystals of Arborea here: it's a much shorter game, with only a tiny bit of story content. Length is provided by randomized item locations and a maze in the underworld, and gameplay is largely strategic, since limited healing means that you can't afford to engage in much combat, no matter how well you manage it tactically. Speed is critical, but contrary to what you may find on the internet, being beaten to an objective by the enemy is not game-ending; you merely need to take a trip down to the underworld to recover anything you didn't get to first. Once you have the hang of effective searching and evasion, the primary challenge is that the boss is *tough*; even a well-designed party may well lose someone in the final fight. (And after beating the boss, don't hang around! He comes back if you wait too long!) LEVELS, STRATEGY, and OTHER ELEMENTS: Ishar 1 is mostly an open landscape, with a couple cities and a small and large dungeon. Being able to out-maneuver enemies in what is essentially a dungeon crawler is a neat touch, but there's not a ton to say about level design. Enemies move around looped paths quickly enough that twists and turns in cities and dungeons are not much more than mapping complications. There is a decent distribution of treasure to be discovered tucked in corners of the landscape and sprinkled around dungeons, but you'll want to grind for cash. Ishar 2 has a much better treasure distribution and several significant dungeons. The snowy island is confusing because the level is rotated relative to the map you have - clicking on a pier to land puts you in a different area. This isn't too bad, given that the levels are mostly linear with one internal passage, but it can get one a bit turned around. The undead-dungeon island is surprisingly deep, and has a small but decent maze in it; this game does allow you to load within a level without causing respawns, but changing levels does restore monsters, so beware of stairs when you are low on consumables! This is not a grinding tool, since money is usually needed more than XP and most monsters carry no cash. There are a few decent puzzles, but one involves finding 6 key items, several of which are in rooms behind illusory walls . . . so search thoroughly! Ishar 3 has the most extensive city by far, and the most extensive and varied other levels as well. The main timesink in this game is exploration, thanks to a big, mostly-open forest level with a few chokepoints and a target in the middle of one area (plus some goodies in a nook off to the side) and two large jungle mazes full of twists, turns, and clearings that look alike. You will probably need to map these levels, and not loosely either. The final boss is unfortunate; he is easy to beat if you stay out of his range and spam cold spells, but on every attempt to "fight fair" with actual weapons, I hardly scratched him even with buffs, while he tore through everyone's health with area attacks, even with lots of protection up. Playing that way would have required a lot of boring retreating or time abuse. [I have just learned that stun works, at least if you are high-level enough - still, there's no way to trade blows and live.] In all the games, you'll want at least one healer and one monk or wizard as soon as possible. In Ishar 1, Kiriela is a wizard-type caster with a healing spell, to help you out at the start. Early on, you'll probably want at least two healers to get more health out of each expensive night of sleep; a paladin like Karorn fits the bill nicely, since he's also a front-line fighter. You will eventually want a cleric to give you access to top-level cleric spells including resurrection, and if you were using a monk, replace him with a wizard (who in Ishar 1 gets the best healing spell too). Spells that hit all enemies are both extremely efficient and highly damaging even against single enemies, plus they can be spammed as fast as you can click the cast button. Plan on losing characters to plot necessity, and don't throw away developed spellcasters; fighters are far more replaceable! For fans of the classic dungeon-crawler, these games are pretty straightforward; the difficulty curve is pretty front-loaded because gear is all purchased, meaning that once you establish solid cash flow, you'll have good armor and weapons in addition to a supply of spellcaster-powering consumables. Still, exploring the remainder of the game, mopping up basic enemies and enjoying the occasional real fight in the endgame can be enjoyable enough. THE VERDICT: The games are basic, classic fare. The inevitable comparison is of course the Eye of the Beholder series, released at a similar time. The Ishar games are simpler, less maze-heavy, shorter, and much easier (by my recollection) than the EoB games, but they're a lot prettier, particularly Ishar 3. The comparison has plusses and minuses. The lack of mazes is a huge plus, because most mazes add frustration and time without adding actual challenge or fun. The length isn't really an issue, the Ishar games shouldn't be longer than then are. But while Ishar doesn't have any frustratingly hard sections, it has only a few that pose any challenge at all, and all the games suffer from becoming overpowered by the mid-game. (And really, they added mazes to the last game. Why can no one ever resist the mazes?) I think I have to rate these games at 3. They're enjoyable enough to play, but there isn't much substance (and they do sport some irritating habits, such as forcing you to drop party members). When it came out, Ishar 3 might have had more value because it is very pretty for the time and all three have some unusually open environments; unfortunately, neither of those aspects is exceptional now. The character recruitment model could have provided replay value, but the only way to really vary the game would be to play without any spellcasters, and in any case it doesn't hold any interest for me. Ishar is fine, but nothing special now. (Please note that this doesn't mean I think the EoB series is necessarily better; it has its share of flaws!)
A quick tip: head to the forums and pick up _Zenger_'s hi-res pack, along with Entropy and Muskie's .INI tweaks (I've listed both in Entropy's "List your .INI Tweaks" thread). The game can look really quite nice if you push it! [It will also fix an important and common bug you may encounter in one mission due to your computer being a lot faster than was possible in 1999.] VISUALS: This game is very unusual on the visual front. The landscapes are often gorgeously designed, the architecture is varied and attractive, and much of the texture work is excellent . . . but the innovative voxel rendering engine built to allow long draw distances and fast loading of complex terrain also results in huge blocky cells and unfortunate jagged edges in lots of places. The resolution and level of detail limits also conceal a lot of the underlying goodness. Fortunately, you can see everything in maximum glory by downloading _Zenger_'s hi-res pack from the forums and applying Muskie and Entropy's .INI tweaks, which will jack up the draw distance and level of detail to maximum, letting you see the best the game has to offer. It still isn't up to modern standards, but the character models look good, and the rough, varied terrain really does look nice and add to the game's feel. The low-res terrain textures and blockiness around edges are acceptable tradeoffs to get the organic terrain, and the water looks really nice. Character design is quite good, and while there are only a few basic character models for the various everyday inhabitants of major cities, there is still a solid feel of bustling city life full of distinct individuals. Good use of color helps here, as do the variety of buildings and the loose city layout. Overall, I wouldn't call Outcast a visually stunning experience, but it is certainly visually interesting and it sure has its moments. SOUND: I don't usually have a sound section, but it is worth noting that Outcast has excellent sound, especially for its time. Cities bustle, natural areas are populated with wildlife, everything you walk on sounds like it should, and the music is just right. The dynamic soundtrack appropriately fades combat and danger themes in and out as appropriate, which really adds to times when you take a few too many hits and desperately run and try to hide in back alleys and rooftops. Perhaps most importantly, every one of the huge cast of characters is voiced, and distinctively so. The actual voice acting is pretty good, despite the occasional silliness of the writing; everyone has a distinct personality and really sounds the part. STORY/ACTING: Outcast's greatest strength is the level of engagement with the world around you. All of the interlinked areas are populated by a surprising number of NPCs, and many missions you undertake are interlinked in a way that makes the world feel more alive and natural. Sure, underneath, the structure is often "solve A, B, and C's problems so they'll help D, enabling you to fix a conflict with E, which opens up a route to complete a mission objective" so common to adventure titles . . . but it doesn't *feel* that way. It helps that those and the many optional (but often profitable and always fun) sidequests offered by the many many other characters you meet are all unique, rather than a collection of fetch quests and monster hunts. You never think about formulas because they never rise to the surface; you just meet a lot of people with problems, and you help them. Furthermore, the problems are realistic - the autocrat you are trying to overthrow has imposed many restrictions that legitimately prevent citizens from attending to critical tasks that you can manage, thanks to the freedom of movement provided by your guns. Furthermore, the world feels even more alive when you notice that your actions have lasting effects - not only will people treat you differently depending on how you behave, but when you convince leaders to help the resistance, the enemy troops will be appropriately affected. On the note of guns and enemy troops, combat works into the story and gameplay more naturally than many "action-adventure" titles. You're participating in a resistance movement, so you'll encounter and have to deal with or evade patrols. Eventually you'll have the firepower to take on garrisons, after which you'll have a lot fewer local patrols to deal with. Wild animals roam the land, and you'll usually see or hear them in time to decide whether to take the long way or share some high-velocity presents. You can't just shoot everything though - your guns don't work in water, and there are nasties of various sorts that need to be avoided in various ways. (Or you can waste some dynamite. Outcast's openness usually provides multiple options, and blowing things up is always a fun one!!) It never feels like any enemy is artificial - you fight (or evade) when you need to do something that would naturally put you at odds with something dangerous . . . which may include walking about occupied territory, given that they *are* hunting for you! There are almost no limitations on your movement - even "blocked off" areas can sometimes be entered if you're clever about it, and you can roam all over the world and use any inter-area portal at any time. But as an early character warns you, you'd be wise to avoid, say, jumping into a soldier camp before you're a bit geared up. You can certainly sneak around dangerous areas in cities before you're ready to confront the guards, but you'd better keep on your toes when you do! All this freedom of movement again contributes to the feeling of a real, living world rather than a structured adventure game composed of a set of quests. You will spend a lot of time interacting with a huge cast, but the game helpfully keeps notes of who wants what done, hints you've received, things you've taken care of, helpful information about the different areas of the world, and a running glossary of alien terms. You can chat with nearly every passer-by, and they can be rather helpful when you're trying to locate someone. Amazingly, even with such a huge set of data, it never feels overdone or too much - it's just a world you're in, full of people worth meeting. Some are quite amusing; a particular interaction you might miss is talking to the music players in the bar-type buildings. Other characters with whom you have to work are jerks; I disliked a few enough to actually boycott them while they still had useful stuff! CONTROLS and GAMEPLAY: You have a pretty standard FPS-like control set, jump and prone/crawl controls, and a couple action buttons. Your inventory is accessed by a menu (that helpfully pauses the game), and you have weapon hotkeys. Actions are somewhat context-sensitive in a way that never caused any problems. You can smoothly flip between first and third person perspective in any situation (and first-person twon-ha riding looks just right!), and both work nicely. You'll probably want to be in first person most of the time in combat, although you can definitely aim reasonably in third person. As soon as you can afford it, buy a twon-ha: not only is it a much faster way to get around, but it also lets you dispense with stairs a lot of the time. Mounted combat is also a lot of fun. Unfortunately, it won't cross water, so unless you can find some way to obtain a local mount, you'll be without your trusty steed in some areas. A lot of time is spent talking, and you use a menu to select topics of conversation, as well as occasionally getting the chance to choose a response (usually yes/no to a request). There is one occasion where you get to sing along if you know the words . . . and it's rather funny when you don't (or when you do, actually). You can also shop, either purchasing supplies or getting some consumables made from raw materials you collect. Fortunately, there is no need to grind collecting, as you'll happen upon plenty of stuff as you explore; you do have to think about how to spend it on various types of ammo. On the note of ammo, you start with 1 gun and can eventually acquire a total of 6, with two upgrades for most. All guns and upgrades to all but one are purchased, so you'll need to do some questing to afford good gear. One set of upgrades comes from items that are acquired in one of the more amusing and enjoyable missions. Depending on how you like to play, you might favor any of the weapons, so give 'em all a spin. DIFFICULTY: Combat is not particularly hard, thanks to slow projectiles on all sides. That said, you can still be overwhelmed if you're not careful, and even if they don't initially spot you, enemies will return fire from most ranges, and will advance on your position once alerted. In fact, the AI is surprisingly good, occasionally employing flanking tactics and pincer maneuvers, as well as intelligently seeking cover and dodging fire. This makes combat reasonably fun even if it isn't usually all that challenging (at least once you gear up). If you want, you can tweak the .INI files to speed up enemy projectiles or increase the damage you take; there are ample health-boosting items to find, which I only used two or three times. There is a bug due to the vast speed increases in modern processors that will block you from completing one important mission [the last jump at the lighthouse becomes impossible to make]; as mentioned before, _Zenger_'s patch fixes this issue, or you can briefly enable a cheat via the hidden developer console, which has no in-game penalty. Other than that, none of the puzzles are terribly hard, although some of them take a bit of thinking, which is nice! If you talk to everyone about your problems, you will get ample hints, although some enterprising NPCs will charge you for their help. There is one very mild platforming section that becomes exciting when the physics engine surprises you halfway through . . . but it's still pretty simple. The part immediately following that takes some careful walking and well-timed running, but it's not too bad. A few puzzles require a bit of simple physics use to solve, which was fun even if it felt a touch tech-demo-y. LEVELS, STRATEGY, and OTHER ELEMENTS: As I've mentioned repeatedly, the level design is great - lush forests, scenic vistas, lively cities, and fun puzzles. The big levels and huge casts aren't a problem thanks to the possibility of asking anyone you meet where they last saw any named character. Unfortunately, the cast in the main city is so large that some characters will be off the menu until you ask about a couple others to cycle the choices. This is pretty much the only significant complaint I had at any point in the game, and it was entirely surmountable. Memorable characters and the helpful district signs along the main city road are generally guide enough, and you can use the ever-so-handy teleport devices to mark important characters to whom you expect to return. I really liked a few of the game elements that played fairly minor roles, most especially the Sannegtas - anything that forces a change-up of tactics is nice. Each island has its own unique feel, and even though there aren't many enemy types, the AI is good enough that attacking each fortification plays differently, depending on your approach and the lay of the land. The story kept things moving, and nothing ever got to the point of feeling stale. THE VERDICT: Outcast feels like the developers set out not to create any particular game, but to build a world, populate it, and then they found a place for you that lets you explore, experience, and participate in its story. With a few tweaks, it looks fine, it still sounds good, and the story is engaging, cliches and all, thanks to good acting and a cast of dozens that make everything come to life. For building and maintaining an immersive experience, and for clean, varied, and frustration-free gaming, Outcast earns a well-deserved 5/5. No matter what you like in games, at $6 you have no excuse not to try this out!
I think calling Far Cry a "thinking man's shooter" is perhaps a bit of an overstatement, but there's no denying that it plays differently from most other FPS games, particularly on Realistic difficulty. Every enemy is potentially quite dangerous, and you want to use every tactical edge you can manufacture for yourself, but much of the early and mid-game boils down to patient elimination of soldiers unwisely staying in camp from extreme range. Fortunately, in later levels you are forced into the effective range of the AI, and start encountering real threats. The game really shines here, except where level design or planning issues produce irritating bugs or effectively force you to use exploitive tactics. GRAPHICS: When it came out, this game was praised from all corners for its gorgeous graphics, and 6 years later it still looks wonderful. Good draw distance, lush foliage, nice lighting, sparkling water . . . it has a lot. Character models don't look wonderful up close, particularly your disturbing lizard neck in cutscenes, but overall, it stands up very well. Fortunately, what once required a high-end rig to run reasonably can now be handled by a relatively modest modern machine (but a good one will let you really crank everything up, and it will be ever so nice). It is certainly the most graphically advanced game on GOG as of the beginning of 2011. All of that engine power is well-used, both in sprawling, lush outdoor jungles and beaches and in shadowy, sometimes creepily-lit base interiors. Not only is everything pretty, the designers have done a good job creating the right atmosphere for every area. CONTROLS and GAMEPLAY: It's your standard FPS control set, with a 4-weapon inventory. Throughout much of the game, you're likely to primarily use two, switching as tactics and the ammo on your most recent victims demand, while the other two slots hold a sniper rifle and occasionally a rocket launcher. You'll quickly learn that the machete is essentially useless, so drop it when you have a good chance to increase your tactical options or ammo capacity. Your armament options are pretty standard fare: a pistol, M4 assault rifle followed later by two increasingly advanced models (AG36 and OICW) with low-power scopes and underslung grenade launchers, MP5 (silenced) and P90 SMGs, a combat shotgun, a nice 50 cal sniper rifle, a rocket launcher, an M249 machine gun, and a machete that turns out to be not only weak but noisy as well. I found that I mostly used the best AR I could get my hands on for accurate long range shots, the P90 at short ranges for its lovely rate of fire, and the shotgun against the sturdy trigens when ammo was available. You rarely find ammo without a gun, so if you run out, replace the empty one to broaden your options. In my usual ammo-hoarding way, I underused the sniper rifle, but with patience and sufficient ammo, the AR will serve at range, particularly the highly accurate and slightly scoped advanced models. Most scopeless weapons have a slight "zoom" in which you presumably focus on the iron sights, although your view does not. As with many "realistic" games, using the scope induces some random swaying, particularly if you are standing or crouching (prone is pretty stable) - amusingly this makes the rocket launcher more accurate at most ranges when you are *not* zoomed in. On realistic, you can't take many hits, and the enemy are both reasonably good at finding you and capable of spotting and hitting you at a surprising range. This means that whenever possible, you'll want to sneak around the outskirts of camps or beaches and pick off enemies from as far away as you can - when you have ample AR ammo, this is often just the maximum draw distance while prone and zoomed. When you're far enough out, you can just burn ammo until enough shots have hit to take out all or most of the enemies - they generally will not come for you (although they do at least attempt to take cover, which just means you have to wait and/or burn more ammo to finish the job). Similar rules apply for patrol boats, and carefully picking off the driver and gunner will provide you with a nice supply of rockets for shore bombardment, which is always enjoyable and does speed things along quite nicely. Vehicles work quite nicely, and enemy vehicles are reasonably effective enemies if you wander into their target zone, but most spend all their time on programmed tracks and don't change their behavior under fire unless they spot you. Deep in foliage or at extreme range, you're completely safe. Your magical target-tracking binoculars will help you spot enemies when they are concealed in foliage, although you can't fire in that mode; this is primarily useful for verifying that you've cleared a camp as much as possible before approaching to take out the last few hiding out of sight among the buildings. Fortunately, you can't always get adequate sight lines from really far out, so you have to get close enough that enemy soldiers will respond to your attacks by sending out a hunting party. The AI occasionally uses flanking tactics, so you'll have to think about maneuvering and finding concealment whence you can pick off incoming enemies one by one. This does liven up the game a bit, and the game gets points for occasionally sneaking up behind me when I thought I was safe [listening carefully for rustling leaves can save your life!] Later in the game, a lot of time will be spent indoors, where you will need to use corners and chokepoints creatively. A lot of areas are designed with loops, and the AI will properly employ these, sometimes even leaving a couple soldiers to distract you from the front while their buddies come around the side. Some soldiers even know how to sneak silently, which is a rude awakening the first time it happens to you! You will also eventually meet the trigens, who are both quite tough (bring a shotgun) and eventually armed; they do make things a bit more interesting because you can't hide around a corner and just headshot them when they show up - a few bullets to the braincase won't finish them off before they maul you. Most interesting and at times irritating are elite soldiers toting riot shields, who need to be staggered by a hearty helping of lead and then quickly shot before they get their shield back up. I didn't really use grenades much until I started meeting those, but boy did I need them then! On the grenades note: you have HE, smoke, and flash grenades, and each can be useful. Unfortunately, on Realistic it is all too common for one guy to either successfully evade the flash or decide to "spray-and-pray", so flashbangs are mostly a desperation tactic to cover a retreat. You can also throw rocks, which on realistic rarely does much, but in a couple cases can be a helpful distraction. Unfortunately, in water more than knee-deep, you can't fire weapons or throw anything at all, and one of the most irritating shortcomings is that there is no melee other than the terrible machete (which won't stagger most enemies), so if you're out of ammo, you may be completely unable to cause damage in any way. Sneaking around is vitally important in this game, but while foliage cover is critical and the tactical value of sneaking is undeniable, the combat value of stealth is extremely low - sneaking up directly behind someone does not allow you to quickly or quietly slit their throat, so you might as well shoot them in the head from a distance. Once aroused, the AI will usually search thoroughly, so you can't unrealistically melt into the shadows after taking out half the guys in a room. This does feel a lot less silly, but it means that play indoors requires a fair bit of traditional twitch shooting: you better put some lead in every head that comes into view, and quickly too. STORY/ACTING: A typical and often over-the-top James Bond plot, essentially - nothing new or special here. The protagonist's voice acting isn't great, but there isn't too much of it. You aren't here for the plot, and it sure ain't Half Life 2. Your occasional companion Val isn't too bad either (although in a fight she's kind of stupid [never crouches, wears white, ignores firefights if she's facing the wrong way and sometimes charges enemies patrolling a populated base while you are trying to stay in cover 200 feet away]). I actually liked the missions where I had to follow her between objectives, because she forced me to play a bit less conservatively and really use all the tools at my disposal to successfully push to the target (and she's a decent shot and not too delicate). So, the game gets no points whatsoever for originality ore acting, but doesn't lose any for being painful either. DIFFICULTY: This depends heavily on how you're used to playing games. I play like a sniper all the time, and I'm cautious and conservative whether I need to be or not; thus I really enjoy games that force me out of that comfort zone, and I found the basic gameplay of Far Cry both a good fit and not all that challenging. However, in those levels where deliberate and methodical sniping isn't an option, the challenge definitely rises. There are a few sections that will seriously pile on the pressure, including a defense segment with wave after wave of elite troops, many carrying riot shields; a push into a big, open cylindrical ramp that brings down a small horde of the same guys; and the final big mutant fight where you can only barely bring in enough ammo to deal with the overdose of rocket-launching superheavies. Plenty of other sections will throw unpleasant surprises and unexpected flanking maneuvers your way, so it stays pretty interesting. Unfortunately, part of the difficulty comes from bugs in the way that some set pieces and some of the much lauded nonlinearity are implemented. While the game is objective-driven and mostly linear, you can indeed take different paths ith the big outdoor levels . . . but this may rob you of critical checkpoints. Sneaking around the back way to every single radio tower in that level worked pretty well for me, but in a couple levels I spent half an hour or more wandering about and cleaning out camps without triggering a single checkpoint. I generally survived, but ocassionally by the skin of my teeth . . . and sometimes I didn't. Worse though is the method they've chosen to keep the wonderful and cinematic soldiers vs. trigens battles going - until you pass certain invisible boundaries (which often are not checkpoints), all enemies in some areas are invincible or respawn once they've taken lethal damage . . . without dropping ammo. In a game that encourages sniping from a distance, this can lead to a lot of accidentally wasted ammo, and a lot of aggravation when you're not sure. It feels rather silly to sneak around a battlefield searching for an invisible trigger so that you can finally sneak back to your sniping position, wait for it to resolve, then pick off the survivors. However, the worst problems occurred in (at least) two areas with multiple paths to the exit, one of which was the mesoamerican ruins battle. There are three trigger points that set off different enemy arrivals, and you can get them to fight each other . . . but if you set them off in several apparently-untested orders that work particularly well for starting the fight, you will make some of the enemies permanently enter a respawn loop. This is bad enough in general principle, but when one of those enemies is a rocket-launching heavy that spawns in the next area you have to pass, and walks down the only hallway to enter it, this becomes a little bit problematic. In one of the cases, I never did manage to trigger things in the "right" order, and had to charge through a room full of effectively invincible defenders until I was able to set off the next trigger or checkpoint, mortalizing them and enabling me to desperately fight them down. This was an interesting challenge and a great opportunity to use those special grenades I'd been hoarding . . . but not exactly the most fair gaming experience. The final level is composed of three segments, all hard, but only one really enjoyable. The first presents you with a lovely arsenal, then traps you in a fairly small room with a bunch of elite troops who spread out and use the ample cover on their end very effectively. This took a lot of tries and a few tactics, but was very fun. The second is a boss fight that was depressingly easy once I figured out the only apparent way to not get splattered. The third was the aformentioned area where you hardly have enough ammo, in which you also lack proper cover and which I was only able to beat by taking advantage of the AI in a way that felt fairly cheap (the popular method seems to be to exploit the doors so that you can escape the arena - but I have since then watched a walkthrough and learned that the M249 does a lot more damage than I realized and would have let me beat the level in a much "fairer" way with similar tactics . . . although then it wouldn't really have been much of a challenge anymore [on further reflection I'm not sure I believe that he was playing realistic, given another video where he clearly is not]). LEVELS, STRATEGY, and OTHER ELEMENTS: I mostly covered this in the section above. A few of the levels have bugged triggers that can result in invincible enemies blocking your path, and sometimes taking advantage of the flexible open world (when possible) can leave you without any checkpoints . . . but overall the levels are well designed, and reasonably varied. Camps are a bit cookie-cutter, but there's only so much you can do with quick-assemble buildings, some tents, some turrets, and a tower or two. The different surrounding landscapes provide some variation in base-clearing strategy One aggravating level not mentioned above is a driving section where you're manning the hideously unprotected turret in a jeep that Val drives. It's effectively a rail shooter, since all you can do is swivel and fire, and it involves a swing through an occupied base with too many targets to effectively cover at once (you simultaneously enter the field of fire of two snipers and at least 4 others). Even if you ace the entire previous run, taking out all opposing vehicles with minimal ammunition expended and no damage to yourself (which I did consistently), at Realistic difficulty it is quite a crapshoot whether or not whichever of the guys you aren't focusing on gets in the few lucky shots needed to kill you; I tried many different orders and even saved rockets for the base, and only succeeded essentially by luck after a lot of tries (after viewing some videos it seems that I may have been paying insufficient attention to the second sniper, but I was getting a lot more fire from those guys on the ramp than I've seen in any video). Be careful about checkpoints, as it is possible to trigger them with enemies nearby. In the waterfall run level, I triggered the checkpoint right before the helicopter with a trigen on my back, in leaping range. Loading that point resulted in immediate death except if I turned and dodged in a very specific way, and then successfully zig zagged all the way to the water to shake the beast. The time it took to do this allowed enough further enemies to show up that I had to just keep going, which triggered an unexpected helicopter attack (without warning from doyle), but I managed to reach the opposite shore, triggering yet another checkpoint that teleported me back to the downed chopper. Unusual behavior and very odd. THE VERDICT: I am only giving minor bad marks for the overly hard jeep-on-rails section and a couple other irritating bits because I did choose to play on Realistic (although that really feels like how the game is meant to be played), and I may well have been doing something wrong. However, the trigger-point bugs and other checkpoint weakness are not only frustrating, but also really break the otherwise solid immersion . . . and having to go back several checkpoints and redo good work simply to figure out how to avoid triggering a game bug is much worse than just failing to reach the end of a too-hard segment. A game with that sort of problem (particularly when it is repeated) simply can't earn a 5 in my book. However, outside of the problematic sections, it's a solid game, with a nice level of challenge, a good feel, lovely graphics, and some fun guns. A very solid 4.
I spent a long time wavering between 4 and 5 for this game, but after cooling down a bit from the frustration I felt at the final level (never a good thing!), I've decided that it's still a 5. There is so much to love about this game that a few frustrations can be forgiven, even though I usually reserve 5/5 for games that, while possibly flawed, never truly aggravate me. A tremendously original concept, bolstered by fun game mechanics, great storytelling, fantastic voice acting, spot-on and varied visuals, plus a hearty dose of overall enjoyability, Psychonauts is worth buying for almost anyone. It lacks polish here and there, but even if you're not a big platformer fan, you should check it out; you'll find a lot to love. VISUALS: While it lacks the beauty of, say, Prince of Persia, Psychonauts is a visually near-perfect game. The graphics are cartoony and fit the light-hearted feel of the game, reminiscent of class LucasArts adventure games. Each person's mind has a distinct visual style and level design, which really adds to the atmosphere and prevents the game from ever feeling stale, even if you spend the extra time to complete the many collection bonus tasks. It doesn't take a very powerful machine to get it looking nice, although on my newest computer running Win7 64-bit I experienced intermittent, mysterious slowdowns even with fairly low settings. The camera is generally very cooperative, and while it can take some searching to figure out where to go or how to get there, I don't recall ever having to take a blind leap. The variation in environments does sometimes combine with camera restrictions to make it unclear why a particular jump is failing, but this is quite rare. The few occasions in which enemies are hard to see are mostly due to probably-intentional environment features, and movement and view work surprisingly well in warped environments that should be far more disorienting. Clearly much attention was paid to this critical aspect of platformer design! STORY/ACTING: The core concept of psychonauts (exploring and tinkering with people's minds) is both clever and perfectly tied to the wonderfully varied gameplay. It is enhanced by truly excellent voice acting and great characterization for a broad cast of fellow students and instructors, with plenty of fun interactions to be had if you explore a bit and chat with everyone. One of the main rewards for exploration sub-tasks throughout the game is unlocking slide reels with character backstory . . . and I really looked forward to them! It is rare for a a game to be so well written and acted that it is worth spending extra time and effort just to experience a bit more of the world, whether it be through collecting memory reels or simply trying to talk to everyone everywhere. Psychonauts not only pulls this off, but makes it feel perfectly natural. All your tasks, rewards, and even the fun and helpful game mechanics are tied in and fit perfectly with the story, which rarely even feels linear despite having a pretty straight progression. You level up over the course of the game, and some time is spent just working towards getting critical abilities, but there really isn't any feel of grinding, since you gain rank by completing mission tasks and collecting "figments" as you play through levels. If you make a half-decent effort at collecting the most obvious figments littered along your path, you'll have plenty to complete the game, and a bit of extra effort in whatever area most appeals to you will net you some helpful extra skills. The key is that it never feels "tacked-on", integrating well with the story being told. CONTROLS: This is one of the areas where the game shows some lack of polish. Everything has a somewhat floaty feel, which is generally appropriate and probably intentional (especially when you are actually floating!), but makes it hard to be really precise; even as I repeated levels I liked to complete collections, I really got good *at those levels* more than I improved my overall control skills. However, this is in part due to the strong stylistic variation in the levels, which is generally a good thing and keeps the game from getting stale. The game also frequently lacks the smooth flow that characterizes well-done parkour-style platformers like Prince of Persia. This isn't always a bad thing: it allows the set up of some challenging sections that take a bit of planning and sharp execution . . . but it sometimes takes you out of the experience a bit. Climbing and swinging sections in particular tend to involve elements such as tightropes, on which you move slowly, and which can take a couple tries to jump between when they cross at an angle; while realistic, this does disturb flow somewhat. All that said, the controls *are* responsive and the camera very rarely causes any pain; you might make the wrong jump, but Raz does consistently jump the way you told him to! The great variety of ways to get about can add to the challenge but the controls are well-designed so that you always do the action you intended, and while they may take more time to master, having extra options makes gameplay more interesting. It is always nice to come up with a clever way around a more obvious path that involves a skill you don't like. DIFFICULTY: This game is challenging in all the right places. Too many platformers are hard only because of a few unforgiving sections with sparse checkpoints that kill you for any small mistake, or because you are placed in situations where camera and controls fail you. Psychonauts has some hard-to-collect items (mostly optional), and some skill challenges that take a good chunk of time and effort to beat (but are generally safe to try until you beat them, but rarely punishes you too harshly for minor errors. You will have to learn new skills fairly frequently, both as you acquire new abilities and as they get used in novel level designs, but the game accounts for this with low-risk or no-risk areas that both train and challenge you. The bubble-floating chamber and the race in Milla Vodello's mind are two excellent examples that also have some of the best flow in the game. Despite the complex environments, it is usually clear where to go, and if you have trouble with anything, including the many and varied enemies populating different minds (including bosses), you acquire a method to ask for help early in the game. Like everything else, it fits the story perfectly. Furthermore, you will quickly acquire tools that allow you to exit a mind at any time, or just return to the camp to cash in collectibles and level up, grab some healing items from the store, or otherwise restock and regroup. Even if you lose all your lives, you're just booted out of the head, and when you return you can warp to any major area you've already visited, so even in the worst case, backtracking is limited. This is also very helpful if you choose to return to collect items you missed on the first pass. Thanks to all this, it is alright to have a few segments that take a lot of tries to complete; as I said, the game does in fact have some challenging bits - it's just that it neatly dodges frustration almost all of the time. LEVELS, STRATEGY, and OTHER ELEMENTS: It bears repeating that every level is unique and wonderful. The concept I liked best was one where you helped a possessed descendant of Napoleon defeat his ancestor in a board game by shrinking to manipulate the board and then further to talk to the pieces in order to convince them to serve their leader. That level ultimately wasn't very hard, although it had a couple challenging jumps when I saw a shortcut. Milla Vodello's mind probably has the best flow - in it, you learn various uses of your levitation ball, including floating (by climbing a brightly colored tower in columns of bubbles) and rolling (by racing against your fellow classmates until you win) - both of these involve continuous movement, and the latter has a wonderfully natural way of guiding you - in early runs or when you are behind, the various accelerators will be demonstrated to you by the others ahead of or passing you, and most fast routes are not hard to see, just a bit challenging to reach. I replayed this level many times in order to collect everything (there are figments on every path!), and it really stayed fun. My favorite boss was probably the bullfight, in part because it requires you to do some fairly complex power use at high speed, but that turns out to be entirely manageable [which speaks well of the control design and makes you feel awesome]. You have a fun arsenal of offensive psychic powers, and while certain powers are better than others against some enemies, you really do have a variety of options in every case. There is a "lock-on" ability that helps with big guys, and a strong degree of auto-targeting if you're facing the right way keeps combat smooth and enjoyable. You get a crowd-clearing (and quite fun) jump-slam ability early on, and the camera generally provides a wide field of view around you, so getting surrounded is uncommon and not a death sentence. Most enemies can climb and jump though, so you won't find many places to camp and snipe . . . which keeps things interesting, and you shouldn't need such exploits anyway. Bosses do often have puzzle-type solutions, but these are varied, often fun, and if you can't figure them out, heavily hinted if you ask your little in-ear assistant. Furthermore, most "repeat N times" anti-boss attacks are limited to at most three times, so it doesn't get tedious. The only level I have a major complaint about is unfortunately the final level. There is an escort section, and it has all the unfortunate features common to escort sections. You are protecting a little kid chasing his pet bunny, and have to grab the bunny for him while fending off an endless stream of enemies. This is fine and doable; the kid isn't too fragile, and you can handle the bad guys with little difficulty. The fact that the kid has bad path-finding (he got stuck behind me repeatedly) doesn't actually make things any harder, since you're pretty set once you reach the kid, but it does make you hate him a bit more. The real problem is that he travels to four successively more difficult-to-reach areas, and starts taking damage while you struggle to reach him. If you fail, the game forgivingly does not take a life away . . . but it does set you back to the beginning. Nothing is more irritating than repeatedly getting through three hard segments only to see all of that go to waste when you are almost in reach of the last stage. This is enhanced by the introduction of a new enemy whose attacks must be exploited to reach the next area - a fine mechanic in general, but a dangerously irritating one under a time limit. Furthermore, those segments have unusually bad camera angles, AND a fun extra feature you're likely to discover on the last segment: even though things stick in them, those wheels aren't as solid as they look! Specifically, if you jump against one in order to better grasp a passing pole, you're gonna go right through and enjoy starting the segment over. After so much good game design, this one was jarringly unpleasant. Also, in the following bit, there's a difficult (in a fine and challenging way) netting climb - at the top, be aware that the little platform the local enemy is standing on is NOT where to jump, and is in fact not solid. You need to be on the other side, as clever as getting inside may have seemed at the time. A couple other levels have their own irritations, but have such overall appeal that they don't stand out as bad. The second one I'd caution on is the Milkman Conspiracy . . . it's a very clever level with wonderful warped geometry (which the controls and camera handle wonderfully), but it is fairly large and easy to repeatedly miss something for which you are looking as you traipse back and forth completing sub-missions within. That is probably the only level where tedium intruded, but the concept there is so whimsical that it gets a pass. THE VERDICT: OK, the final level and a few other spots had definite issues, but taken as a whole, the game is a thing of beauty. A fantastic story, well-told and well-acted, genuinely varied abilities and a control scheme that lets you use them well, a cooperative camera, absolutely inspired level design that makes every area a genuinely new experience, and overall just a lot of fun - this game does so much so right while simultaneously staking out new territory that it really can't be given anything other than a 5. There's something here for almost everyone.
First up, this is a rather short game; it took me about 10.5 hours in one sitting, and that's with a lot of time wasted in two particular sections. It's very pretty and when you're on a roll, quite fun to play. Unfortunately, although it escapes many issues common to platformers, it still suffers from occasional camera problems and the control issues, particularly in combat. Overall, it is easy, but this enhances the frustration of several much harder sections. VISUALS: Although most levels are pretty monochromatic, it never seems dull or undercolored. The visuals fit the setting perfectly, and some of the more open levels are really gorgeous. Close inspection will reveal that some elements are rather low-poly, especially the characters, but the detailed textures and fluid animations compensate for this so well that you'll rarely notice. It should run smoothly with attractive settings on any fairly recent system. The prince's superhuman acrobatics manage to look extremely natural thanks to excellent animations and smooth transitions from one to the next. However, combat is less polished and sometimes felt positively jerky by comparison - each move is fluid and elegant (the game will sometimes smoothly go into slow motion to show off a particularly nice flip), but transitions there are lacking, and sometimes the prince appears to complete one move before he is ready to do another. This is a minor complaint from the visual attractiveness standpoint, but it can interfere with gameplay at times (see below). CONTROLS: As usual with a console-focused game, the controls are quite simple; WASD for movement, mouse buttons for attack and special movement, space for jump/roll, E for dagger use, and R for time manipulation. With so few buttons, everything is very context-sensitive, and this generally works very well; in the platforming sections you can really get into a smooth roll taking the prince from action to action simply by pointing him the right way and tapping space or RMB. It can be a bit frustrating if you're not headed in quite the right direction and the game decides you want to run up a wall instead of along it, but thanks to the time-reversal mechanic, this is usually a survivable problem. This may be in part due to the coarseness of WASD for movement compared to a console stick (at least in scenes were camera control via mouse is too limited). Camera angles are a significant contributor to control issues; your movement is relative to the camera, so any time the camera suddenly switches direction, so will you. This is most noticeable when it makes you run back out of a small room right after you run in, but the biggest problems occur in combat. The game does not use transparency for close shots, so rooms with pillars can be terribly annoying, as the camera pops around frequently, potentially redirecting you into an enemy. At times (particularly in towers), the camera will switch to a fixed angle, which are not always well chosen - it may not be clear where you need to go until you switch to first-person view, after which a blind leap may be in order. Fortunately, this is an infrequent problem, and again there is more of a problem in combat when you ask for a fixed angle and find it suddenly reverted. The simplicity of the controls can be a real handicap in combat though. Jump is a context-sensitive action, and when your sword is out, you can't jump over shin-high walls, instead preparing for a leap attack. Furniture and other destructible scenery cannot be jumped over or bounced off of, making it a huge trap in some fights. Furthermore, the lack of a basic jump feature means that low sweeping attacks are both unblockable and unavoidable if you have anything behind you, which seems awfully silly for our leap-happy prince. The prince turns somewhat slowly, which is helpful when the camera moves during platforming sections but can seriously throw off your aim in combat, because it can hard to tell exactly where the prince is facing. This combines with involuntary camera movement, the lack of a target indicator, and the context-sensitive dagger button to produce the most irritating and common combat failure: after killing an enemy, you must stab him with the dagger in a certain time limit, or he rises again . . . but if the game decides you're aiming at a nearby enemy instead, you will use valuable time and a dagger charge by stabbing him (freezing him) instead. STORY/ACTING: This game suffers a bit from the cliche use of British accents to indicate royal/classy characters, which is a bit jarring given the setting. I suppose it's better than trying a middle-eastern accented English though. A few of the NPCs you'll briefly encounter are a bit irritating (security system guard, I'm looking at you!), but nothing grates horribly. Your companion Farah is not overly chatty, but there is some fun banter between the two of you. She does sometimes respond briefly to what you're doing in-game, as well as shouting warnings in combat (or apologizing if she shoots you, a nice touch). The story is acceptable and even a bit original, communicated largely by voice-overs from the prince. The framing story (worked nicely into the whole tale at the end) is that the Prince is telling the tale of his daring exploits, which leads to amusing comments when you die - "wait, no, that didn't happen! Let me back up." The big mechanic of the game is time-reversal, which in addition to being a wonderful idea for a platformer, is tied in to a core element of the story. DIFFICULTY: This is generally a very easy game, thanks in large part to the wonderful time-reversal mechanic. When you screw up a jump, you can use a charge from your dagger to reverse time, which is amusing and almost completely alleviates the frustrations common to 3D platformers or caused by dodgy controls. Just be sure to back up far enough; in reverse it is easy to mistake the beginning of a move as a rest position, thus wasting the charge as you watch the prince leap to his death once again. Another common frustration is eliminated by making it impossible to fall off an edge - any time you do, the prince will grab on and hang there indefinitely, and the key for dropping off (C) is thankfully used for nothing else, so it's very hard to press accidentally. Of course, in a timed section or on a moving platform, that slip may kill you or force you to go back anyway, but it is often recoverable at least once. Furthermore, many of the timed sections involve a slowly closing door and various blade traps, which turn off when time runs out, making returning to the start a lot easier. There are (silent) checkpoints throughout the game, generally when switching between areas or encountering a cutscene, in addition to a large number of visible save points (including one after every major combat); I can only think of one really painful platforming section with a long area between checkpoints that ends in a particularly hard segment. That particularly hard segment is one of the only really dangerous moves: the downward chimney-leap. The prince can climb up a narrow gap by leaping from wall to wall, and you do this fairly often. However, a really wide gap allows the prince to climb down by this same method, only the timing is completely different, and you do it two or possibly three times and messing up on the first few is lethal. This is moderately irritating when it is soon after a checkpoint, so you can practice by failing repeatedly, but near the end of the game, there is an incredibly frustrating section where it comes at the end of a long, tedious sequence (with one further complication I will not spoil). With the exception of that one part, platforming is not a problem (particularly with the "visions" you receive to guide you and the completely linear path). Due mostly to the control difficulties mentioned above, combat is where you will encounter most problems. I've already covered most of the specific frustrations, but even with those, only a few combats are much of a challenge, thanks to time reversal (again, be careful to go far enough; it is easy to miss the beginning of an attack move in reverse) and the tremendous same-ness of fighting. With all but a few enemies, spamming jump+attack will have you lethally flipping about the arena, destroying everyone. Unfortunately, later enemies can counter this, hurting and staggering you in the process, which is doubly bad since you use the same key for evasive rolls. In later combats, you will be stabbed from behind by an off-screen enemy with depressing frequency. Getting boxed in by jump-blocking enemies is generally lethal and thanks to the camera often goes unnoticed until it is too late to time-warp out of, but only happens a lot in a couple crowded areas. Unfortunately, the hardest part of the game by far is also the most aggravating, a single fight near the end that took me almost an hour and a half to finish. Out of 41 chapters, a single fight took 14% of my total play time! The incredible difficulty spike here felt rather unfair, and the fact that most of my deaths were directly attributable to the control system made things that much worse. I'll go into more detail in the section below. LEVELS, STRATEGY, and OTHER ELEMENTS: As I've mentioned, the levels are both very pretty and highly linear - you will not generally spend much time trying to figure out what to do. If you have trouble, return to a save point to watch a short vision full of hints. This removes one of the potential sources of challenge, but more importantly it removes one of the key frustrations platformers can induce. A little attention to the environment will let you find 10 very helpful life upgrades, and a couple dagger-upgrading sand clouds are slightly hidden or require an extra trick to reach, but other than that, there isn't much exploration needed or possible. Some of the areas look very challenging and feel like you're doing something very cool without actually being all that hard, thanks to the time reversal saving you from little slip-ups (a limited but sufficient number of times). The descent into the prison springs to mind - long strings of retracting platforms and timed elevator leaps that flow beautifully. Overall, the platforming is excellent, blending at least the appearance of challenge with a near absence of frustration. Combat is a mixed bag; early on it feels pretty cool as you flip over enemies, stab them in creative ways, and earn some sweet slo-mo zooms, but it eventually gets pretty boring, and as mentioned above, is a lot less smooth than the platforming due to delays between actions (which can also hurt!). Farah requires protection from time to time, but is actually helpful, staggering enemies with arrows that only rarely hit you, and even successfully defending herself a lot of the time. By the mid game, almost every combat is either boring or aggravating, depending on how much the area triggers camera and control issues. Key culprits are pillars, which cause excessive camera popping, and furniture, which unreasonably obstructs your movement but fails to create usable bottlenecks because enemies warp behind you once they are far enough away. The fact that most fights are too easy despite all that indicates how weak the combat is overall (and the final fight stands out as particularly unsatisfying; I took maybe three hits and never used any sand). The horribly hard fight mentioned above combines every feature that brings out problems with combat. Farah stands in a corner, meaning that any rescue attempt is likely to get you trapped, there is a lovely drapery around her half of the arena that the camera likes to get stuck behind, the curved wall offers ample opportunity for sudden camera changes, the arena is just big enough to prompt enemies to warp behind you, but not large enough to maneuver around a cluster and safely use the dagger on a fallen foe (due to the camera and crowding in several areas, the game is far more likely than usual to redirect a finishing stab to a different enemy), and when it isn't blocked, the camera is often too close to show enemies behind you preparing to stab (or simply turning any evasive roll into a blocked leap-over attempt). Getting knocked down often gets you surrounded and unable to get up. This would be bad enough in any fight, but in the longest fight of the game, with exclusively heavy enemies, it will make you hate the developers with a burning passion. THE VERDICT: Sands of Time has the makings of a truly perfect plaformer: fun sections, a few challenge rewards, a neat mechanic to rescue you from small mistakes, nice scenery and beautiful action animation. Unfortunately, it doesn't really provide much challenge in the parts that work well (although all the dangerous traps can create that feeling without actually hurting you), and the only real difficulty comes from a couple sections where poor design choices lead to unnecessary frustration. That one horrible fight alone might have almost brought it down to a 4 even if everything else were perfect, but the fact that control and camera weakness occur throughout and are only mitigated by the overall easiness put it definitely in that territory. It's probably not possible to make a platformer that is both challenging and never frustrating, but even when I wasn't angry at it, the weaknesses in Sands of Time were still evident. Between all the "wow, I feel cool now!" moments is a bit too much repetition, and I still can't get over the silliness of things like being unable to just jump at will. Still, all the good parts definitely raise this game far above average and earn it a solid 4.
Back when I reviewed Aquanox 1, I said "I feel a bit bad giving it a 3, but it just hasn't earned that 4. Still, I'll buy AquaNox 2 if it goes on sale," and I'm glad I did. Aquanox 2 is a strict improvement on the first game, reducing or eliminating most of the irritations of its predecessor, as well as offering more overall polish. VISUALS: I thought Auquanox 1 had aged well, thanks in great part to good use of textures; Aquanox 2 is a definite visual upgrade, with everything using more polygons, crisp textures, nicer lighting, and much cleaner effects. The improved sharpness solves the issue of vision being obscured by weapon flare in crowded combats, but clearly seeing torpedoes and weapon trails from 20 ships preserves that great hectic feel. The strong styling of each faction is preserved, and the upgraded models look excellent. One thing I didn't really notice until I returned briefly to the original is that the HUD is *tremendously* improved. Not only is it sharper and more attractive (as the game is designed for higher resolutions), but it is also far more useful. Instead of spreading your armor indicators around the periphery and splitting up other data, each corner has a unified group of critical data: all your vital stats, all the tactical info on your target, and your weapon/buzzers/subsystems are each available at a single glance. There is now ample room to have your local 3d map up at all times, significantly aiding navigation. Most water is clear enough that your visual range slightly exceeds your map, which means that it pays to actually keep your eyes peeled! CONTROLS: As before, you have an odd set of 5 degrees of freedom: three axes of linear movement, pitch up and down, and banking (instead of simply yawing [turning] left and right, you roll and pull upward to turn, with a tunable degree of automatic leveling). I guess the rolls make it feel more simulator-y, but the implementation is rough and it interferes with aiming. Aquanox 2 adds an "FPS mode" toggle, but that didn't seem to make circle-strafing more possible. The problematic vertical axis through which you can't rotate (you can never roll or flip so far that the floor is "above" you) is much better here than in the first game - aiming at a moving target above or below you is still a bit rough because the auto-leveler will swing you around, but tracking a target as it passes over or under you is much cleaner than before. The control scheme does take some getting used to, even if you're a veteran of 6DOF games like Descent. As the game progresses, you may find that maneuvering skills adequate for one enemy type are insufficient to defend against new enemies, and you will of course benefit from tuning your movement style to the strengths of your current ship. This means that there is a continuous learning curve to the game, at least on your first playthrough. Due to this, I wouldn't recommend the game to someone looking for quick lightweight simulator fun. That said, the ships generally feel more responsive than those in Aquanox 1, with the caveat that there is more noticeable handling difference between the heavy and light ships than before. Although there is still a sometimes disappointingly low ceiling, more vertical space is available than before, and vertical positioning has a much stronger tactical role in combat. I found myself using both terrain features and the bodies of capital ships significantly more in this than in it its predecessor, and that really improved the feel of underwater freedom of motion. STORY/ACTING: This was possibly the biggest downfall of Aquanox 1: the grating voice acting that made me want to murder several wingmen and made me fear their talking more than the wasted effort when I had to replay a level. Thankfully, that has been completely fixed. There is still radio banter between the skipper and your wingmen, but it is always related to the current action, no one has a fingernails-on-chalkboard voice, and the delivery is generally decent. This alone is the single most important improvement in the game. The story is odd but somewhat interesting, opening with a hijacking by a crew whose motives are uncovered over the course of the game; in another vast improvement over Aq1, there are no more droning plot summaries by the protagonist as you travel from area to area. The unstructured list of people to talk to in each port has been replaced by a selection of locations on your base ship or in ports, each of which may have several people to talk to at any given time. This takes a bit more time, but pays off by being more engaging, particularly because each location has actual art including people, even though most locations don't change in appearance when different people are present. The voice acting is nothing special, but the primary characters all get distinct personalities that are communicated effectively by the actors, and again, none of them are painful to listen to. If you want, you can quick-skip any conversation and just jump from battle to battle. All that said, there are still a couple problems. First, the long opening and ending videos, while interesting, seem to have extremely little relation to the plot of the game, but this is a very minor issue. Second, there is a romance sub-plot that will railroad you along a path that has obvious bad consequences and is likely to disagree with your own leanings. This really ticked me off, even though I suppose it fit the characters. DIFFICULTY: As with Aquanox 1, the unusual controls and wobbly turning may be an issue, but they're acceptable once you get used to them. Again, those used to flight sims will lament the lack of a lead indicator. Repeating missions from the start can be frustrating, but I mostly found it to be a nice challenge that enhanced the tension of later stages. Getting hit by a sniper in most games merely causes a reflexive quickload, while here it creates an adrenaline rush as you struggle to stay alive and complete the suddenly-desperate mission. Furthermore, ridiculously long missions with multiple really hard segments (the kind that make you curse the lack of checkpoints) have been eliminated. I therefore count this as a bonus; if you're having trouble, you can always lower the difficulty rating. Bonus objectives make for an interesting twist on gameplay: although many are merely "find a hidden freighter", a few are rewards for showing extra skill or doing more dangerous things in combat. It is irritating that you are not told what the objectives are, but you are often given hints in radio chatter - in general, paralyze any freighter you see, defend any target being attacked by pirates (especially when the skipper tells you to ignore them!), and hunt down any enemies that remain after the mission ends. Some bosses have allies that flee when he dies, which usually means there is a bonus for eliminating them first. Alternately, if his allies don't flee, you may get a bonus for taking out the boss first, which can ramp up the difficulty a lot. On several occasions the skipper offers a bounty for the pilot who destroys a particular high-value (and high-danger!) target, throwing you into a contest with your wingmen, which is rather fun. There seem to be no complete lists of bonus objectives on the 'net, so I'll make a forum post of the list I built from archived pages and a bit of exploration. As with the previous game, difficulty can vary extensively and there are a few really hard missions. The harder "boss fights" are generally either standalone duels or are front-loaded so that you don't have to repeatedly replay tedious sections only to die at the end. There are a fair number of "protect the Harvester" missions, but even on high difficulty she's a sturdy ship and will generally survive as long as you don't wander away from combat for too long. Sometimes there are critical targets that need to be destroyed in small time windows to achieve protection, but once you get the hang of this, it's not too bad, just challenging. Many protection missions include a full complement of wingmen, allowing some amount of teaming up and assisting in keeping up the pressure when you get bogged down in a dogfight. Allies are tough but worth aiding occasionally, as they are not invicible. Fortunately, they don't die, instead leaving combat for repairs when their armor reaches critical levels. This allows huge battles to happen without being overwhelming, and the final big battle is a both a great set-piece and a lot of fun. A word of advice: there's more than one way to deal with a squad of heavy bombers! LEVELS, STRATEGY, and OTHER ELEMENTS: As noted above, level design has been much improved by pretty much eliminating long missions ending in extremely hard parts, and chopping several fights into two missions to isolate the really hard parts. This deals with the painful parts of a no-quicksave, no-checkpoint structure. Completing bonus objectives will net you some nice loot including some unique upgrades that can really make a difference in some missions, but you can do without them and will have acquired a pretty full complement of weapons by the end of the game no matter what. EMP weapons are more widely used this time (and feel less forced), although don't believe the manual or Fuzzyhead about being able to salvage anything you disable - only specific bonus targets will grant salvage (there are, however, over a dozen such goodie bags). Sparing the lives of several major characters will not only give you a bonus but result in bonus missions later in the game, which I thought was a very nice touch. Early on, EMP may be your strongest weapon against a few high-armor targets, and the second-generation EMP missiles available in the late game can one-shot most enemies. I actually used almost every weapon in the game at least several times, as each has a useful tactical role to play, making gun and upgrade load out a nice tactical consideration in addition to your torpedo selection. You only have access to 4 ships in the game, all provided by the plot, but they feel better differentiated than the options in Aq1, and your newest ship is not always the best choice. Finally, the replay value is significantly enhanced by a vastly improved "instant action" selection including every game mission (unlocked as you beat them), as well as the provision of 40 save slots (there are 33 missions) - you can therefore replay anything with your own arsenal, or with a preconfigured ship. In addition, every major character you beat becomes unlocked for a one-on-one duel, culminating in a battle-royale series of all of them. There are also 8 "training" missions, several of which are quite large (and challenging!), and one of which involves fighting waves of almost every enemy in the game (with helpful regenerating ammo). THE VERDICT: Aquanox 2 fixed or at least improved on all the aspects that forced me to give its predecessor a 3, and has certainly earned its 4. It could use more work (particularly in tightening up the controls), but it has no glaring flaws left, and it's quite fun once you learn to play well. Different classes of enemy move and behave differently, and thus require different tactics to come out on top (as do large battles vs small dogfights); this really makes the game much richer and keeps you on your toes as the game progresses. I was particularly impressed with the execution of protection missions (so often a source of pain) and the great feel of large-scale battles, and the "boss fights" were never gimmicky find-the-weak-spot puzzle bosses, just extra-tough ships with good pilots and escorts. If you like space combat sims, it would be worth giving a spin for its unique feel. [Oh, a final note of warning: the game saves .tga screenshots, which chew up disk space quickly (~6.5MB/shot at 1920x1200).]
I'm not very good at RTS games like StarCraft because they quickly become too fast for me to manage; a slower, more strategic game is exactly what I need. Alien Nations seemed like a good candidate, but it went way too far in the other direction, and flaws in the way units behave add needless frustration as well. During the early stages of a mission and sometimes during fights, the speed is just right, but overall, this game is *painfully* slow. The simple addition of a speed-up command would have made it tolerable or even fun, but in almost every mission, there are many long stretches of time where you must simply wait. If research could be queued, you could walk away from the machine; as it is, I got through many missions by reading a book and simply starting the next research when I heard a completion (or glanced up and noticed the helpful "you're not doing research" symbol). Against a computer opponent, you're effectively invincible once you build several towers, so in production-target missions, I could set up a basic town, actually walk away, and return to a victory screen - it's a bad sign when you complete a game by letting it play itself for half an hour (or longer!). The long stretches of waiting in the midgame were irritating enough, but even in combat missions, it is fairly easy to cripple the enemy so that he literally cannot win, and yet have 15+ minutes to go before you're done. Finishing a foregone conclusion should not take that long! The concept of issuing orders indirectly that your workers will fulfill on their own (building structures, harvesting food from farms) is a good one, but the implementation is at times frustratingly bad. There is no way to search for idle specialists, so when a lumberjack runs out of nearby trees, he may stand around doing nothing (possibly hidden behind a building) for quite a while before you notice that you're running low on wood. Food collection is a low-priority task for workers, even when the colony is starving. Worst of all, construction must compete with a variety of factory-type buildings for both wood and workers, and I had to shut down all of my industry on several occasions just to get a stalled building built. Workers can also get into logjams near storage buildings; one mission grants you an impressive army of workers at the start, and I could not build anything without repeatedly sending 4 groups of them on long trips away from the city. It took several minutes of doing this to get 3 storehouses set up, and throughout that mission I still had to break up other blocks of motionless drones (and then re-assign specialists I'd accidentally knocked off-task). Several interesting elements of civilization management are only saved from being painful by their tremendous lack of importance: rising populations demand various expensive buildings to keep them happy, as well as several types of produced goods. Fortunately, discontent has minimal effects, producing weak criminal units (solved by a police station), and causing minor damage to buildings over time. I soon realized that it was far cheaper to ignore my citizens' whining and eventually direct a small amount of money to contentment (which is both cheaper and easier than meeting their building demands). Starvation appears to reduce your population growth rate, but other than that isn't really an issue; in one mission where farming was disallowed, I spent a very long time in starvation with no trouble. Several of the story missions seem specifically designed to highlight the painful slowness of the game, and at least one is ridiculously difficult, with an lovely bonus of potentially becoming impossible to win without letting you know (you have to fetch some items to your original city, but if you missed that little detail, the game won't end when you lose that city - this allows you to spend hours completing the objective before realizing that it doesn't count). Since you suffer scripted attacks by a gang of top-tier units who destroy all training buildings and sometimes attack your Town Hall, starting less than a minute in, the only way to win seems to be using a set of terribly cheezy and labor-intensive exploits (eg keeping your town full of school building sites, which the enemy usually attacks first) for an upsettingly long time while building a second city *without agriculture*. Finally, the game is prone to crashes in a couple unfortunately common situations: save files from very long missions tend to crash the game when loaded, as does completing the final mission of any storyline (again seemingly time dependent). The latter can be dodged by using a mission-winning cheat-code before meeting the victory condition. Multiplayer might keep the midgame a bit more interesting by presenting an actual threat after you get towers, but can't solve the overall slowness, and I can't imagine that many people have the patience or time to play regularly. Overall: The primary, overarching problem with the game is the huge amount of time spent waiting between the enjoyable bits. The combat can be interesting when it happens, but that isn't very often, and the indirect control of your units would have been much better if they didn't have boneheaded priorities that frequently require slow manual intervention to get anything done. This poor AI decisionmaking extends to unchallenging computer opponents, and the missions tend to emphasize the painful parts of gameplay. Instead of winning missions by walking away and letting the game play itself, I suggest winning by walking away and buying a different game. 2/5 because it had some enjoyable bits and I got some reading time by playing.
