For starters, a piece of important advice: CHANGE YOUR MOUsE REPORT RATE. Many modern gaming mice report 500 to 1000 times per second, and this is too fast - motion will be jerky to nonexistent as information is dropped. I've heard reports of values as high as 250 working, but I set mine to 200 and minimum DPI, and that worked very nicely. Visuals: The game looks good - decent geometry and detailed textures prevent it from showing its age too much, and it's perfectly happy to do 1920x1200. Weapon effects look nice and are varied enough to distinguish at a glance. In a heavy firefight, you can lose sight of a distant target in all the flash, especially if you're throwing a torrent of glowing bolts from a Plasma Gatling - for me, this was a bonus, emphasizing the hectic nature of a crowded 3D battle. Enemies and allies are visually distinct, with each faction employing ships sharing their own unique style - and some of the ships look pretty cool! Controls: Gameplay is a mixed bag. The concept of free 3D motion in an environment that has a definite floor and ceiling (unlike open space) is rather neat (and provides an opportunity for interesting visuals), but the execution could have been better. You have 5 degrees of freedom in movement, but unlike most space-based 5DOF games (such as DarkStar One), the dropped element is roll. You can yaw (you actually bank left and right, but automatically come back to upright when you stop turning), pitch, strafe horizontally or vertically, and accelerate/reverse. This arrangement guarantees that the seafloor stays on the floor, and the vertical strafe is tremendously useful in some situations . . . but it also creates one of the most irritiating limitations of the system -- there is a fixed vertical axis through which you cannot pitch. If a target passes above or below you and you've been pitching up or down to track it, once you reach vertical you have to spin around to continue to track. The other unpleasant limitation is that many missions have a very low (and invisible) ceiling. Thousands of meters of vertical space from which to launch surprise 3D flanking attacks, and you can't use it. It was a real joy to have that vertical freedom in the one mission that involves escorting a rising buoy, but normally the low ceiling limits your firing angles (really irritating when trying to hit small targets on top of several nasty enemies), traps you behind just-barely-too-high mountains (usually not a huge issue unless exploring outside the main mission area), and turns what could have been a game of true-3D tactics into something where battles and defenses are dominated by 2D positioning, more constrained than even a terrestrial flight sim. Story/Acting: The story is fairly typical fare, predictable but sufficient (if you can ignore the ridiculously bad science driving several plot elements). The writing is merely mediocre, although the monologues for the movies are over-long, overwrought, and underestimate the player's intelligence. The protagonist mostly re-hashes recent events in a slow near-monotone, offers some stultifyingly obvious "insights", then delivers a faux-philosophical wannabe-warrior-poet musing. Over time, this becomes less irritating, although I'm not sure whether it's due to getting used to it, or the writers running out of time and padding the speeches less heavily. The voice acting, however, ranges from bad to terrible, with a healthy sprinkling of rage-inducingly painful. The most grating element is Lt. Bonham, with her whiny voice, strangely off-tempo delivery, obsession with grade-school fun science facts (not all of them correct), and tendency to ramble. It's bad enough in the "talk" sections in port, but those are skippable / can be read with headphones off; the worst bit is that she talks during missions. It's a bad sign when my reaction to failing a mission is not "dangit, all that wasted effort!" but "Oh NO, I have to listen to my wingman again!!" instead. Difficulty: Initially, the unusual controls may be an issue, but they're fine once you get used to them - the only real problems I had were the slow ascent, low ceiling, and occasionally the vertical pitch limit mentioned above. Those used to flight sims will lament the lack of a lead indicator. Long missions with distinct, cutscene-separated sections can be frustrating to re-do from the start when you fail, but I mostly found it to be a nice challenge that enhanced the tension of later stages. Where an unexpected Scalar Howitzer to the face might just prompt you to return to a save from two minutes ago in some games, here it creates an adrenaline rush as you struggle to stay alive and complete the suddenly-desperate mission. The final mission did become frustrating, but finally beating it at high difficulty gave a nice feeling of accomplishment. At higher difficulties, strategy matters, and you need to think about tactics in the harder missions (hint: you *can* consistently hit Headshax with guided missiles if you do it right; look at what allows them to go into that failing orbit). Fortunately, you can change the difficulty level any time in port. As with many games, some missions make certain ships invincible so that you can't derail the story. Fortunately, you'll realize rather quickly and can avoid them. More frustratingly, there are a couple occasions when a ship you know you want to destroy is marked non-hostile; if you're not paying attention, killing it fails the mission. Just watch the color! Levels, Strategy, and Other Elements: A customizable Single-Player instant fight would be nice, but the 4 included arena fights are at least interesting, particularly the you-vs-an-army "Asylum" (hint: you can retreat and recover as much as you like, it's neither timed nor an escort mission). The game does get points for crowded, hectic battles, including the final level and the 3-area defense against the crawler assault late in the game. I found the latter unfortunately easy even on max difficulty, but it was still fun. It also earns points for genuinely varied weapons: the EMP gun is a bit forced (useful only in missions requiring non-lethal assault), but all the weapons have a useful tactical role at some point. You can trade in your guns, hardware, and ships at purchase price, so you can change load-out every mission, to anything you can afford. In addition to providing some fun variety, that choice can matter a lot, particularly your missile mix. The Verdict: Overall, the game has a neat concept, looks good, has decent controls with a few limitations, gives you freedom to try and switch between all affordable load-outs, and provides weapons varied enough to suit a variety of tactics; this would earn it 4 stars, but numerous irritating flaws drag it down to a three - the voice acting, the tactics-limiting low ceilings, a couple situations in which missiles should not fail but do, and the frustration with multi-part missions, although I'm of two minds on the last one because I usually liked the challenge. 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.
Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death is a surprisingly fun little diversion, emphasis on little. The 11 chapters go by rather quickly even on the hardest difficulty and spending extra time and effort to maximize your arrest record. Arcade mode does add some time, but with the exception of two, those twelve levels don't take very long to beat with a maximum rating either. Playing on Hard, I earned Judge Dredd ranking on all story missions and all but one Arcade level in one day; not bad for $6, but a pretty weak value next to most of GOG's offerings. Still, it had the potential to earn a four, but gets dragged down by a few moderately irritating bugs. VISUALS: This is a budget game, and it shows. The engine isn't bad, but the models are low-poly and flat-textured. That said, it looks fine, and the fire and gas effects are plentiful, if not particularly advanced. Environments are a bit sterile, but there are setting-appropriate if simple decorations, the cityscape skybox is nice, and varied lighting provides a bit of atmosphere. STORY/ACTING: Amusing enough. I don't know the comics, but the theme is clear, the various criminal charges are often funny, and flavor comments from Dredd, perps, and bystanders are varied enough to be engaging. Story is fairly standard superhero fare, and the whole game is silly enough that weak voice acting in some of the dramatic scenes doesn't matter at all. DIFFICULTY: As noted at the top, this is an easy game. On Hard, you can lose most of a health bar to a zombie charge, but there's not much risk of that unless you're trying to save ammo (which is never necessary) and beat them up in hallways where you can't dodge. Most levels have a couple Med-judges to heal you and give you a medpack, which automatically fills your health bar once it empties. For enemies with guns, you have a shield that can take a couple pistol hits and recharges after a few seconds. The attempt at providing challenge comes in the form of "rankings" - at the end of the level, your kills, secondary objectives, and arrests are tallied, and you unlock arcade levels and multiplayer characters (or cheats, in arcade levels) depending on how well you did. However, this just requires that you play properly - arrest everyone and you'll make Dredd every time. Thanks to your shield, it's not too hard to camp in cover and slowly shoot guns out of perps' hands so they'll surrender. For those perps that refuse to surrender or gang wars where they're shooting each other and depriving you of arrests, you have gas grenades. However, beware - the ranking is based mostly on total sentence time, NOT number of arrests; the one level I had to repeat was the mall one, where I managed to take out all the perps' guns before any of them fired a shot, resulting in short sentences. Make sure they fire once first, so you can give 'em life (100 years) for assault of a judge. When you see Cult Guards / Assassins, take them out and surrounding cultists generally give up. Another tip to farm sentence time: some vagrants, most scrawlers, and some civilians will refuse arrest if challenged from the front, but submit from behind; each refusal adds five years until the fourth, which gives them life for resisting arrest. Also, anyone on their knees (due to gas grenade) can be arrested, even formerly innocent civilians, and the innocent always resist arrest! Abuse the system for fun, profit, and Judge Dredd ranking! :-P You get credit for arrests even if they die after they're cuffed (most useful in the Judge Fire level - fire barely hurts you, so you can run around issuing traffic and smoking citations before too many are fried by your fireball-tossing foe). Finally, when you're out of 'nades, death cultists who won't surrender will stop picking up weapons once you shoot several out of their hands, and if you leave for a bit then watch from a distance, they eventually get scared and surrender. Outside of the story level where I didn't abuse the law enough, I only had to repeat two arcade levels, both of which are timed zombie kills. "Night Shift" merely required a change in strategy (keep charging upstairs and using ammo quickly - the grenade launcher respawns when you're down to 2 shots), and "Visiting Hours" is the only one I haven't reached Dredd ranking; protecting the civvies is easy enough, but I haven't yet gotten enough vampires to spawn while doing so. This raises an point of mild irritation about rankings: while arrests and undead kills drive your rankings in story mode, arcade levels aren't made clear. Generally, if it's timed, you want to complete the objective as quickly as possible, while if it's "survive/protect for n minutes", you want to max your kills. (There's an added twist to "Public Relations" that isn't clear until you finish it - technically it makes the level harder, but it actually makes getting max ranking easier, if only I'd known!) One irritation that shows up any time you're escorting is that ally pathing is really bad - if it's not a straight shot to you, they are prone to falling off of stairs and ramps, or getting stuck on corners; when there's a rescue zone the last one can get caught behind the fronzen rescued ones, forcing you to load a save and try again, and when the last rescue zone is also your exit zone, you might leave the level before they step in, losing you a secondary objective. CONTROLS & GAMEPLAY: Standard WASD+grenade+action, with an extra action for "challenge" (do this so you can arrest perps or random bystanders guilty of owning hamsters without a license) - it works well enough, and everything is responsive; any vaguely recent machine should handle max settings smoothly. Jump is a bit flaky, especially combined with crouch - time it wrong and you'll end up doing not much at all, with a slight delay before you can try again. Fortunately, it's rarely necessary. There aren't many objects lying about, but it's still possible to get temporarily stuck on geometry, particularly in tunnel doorways or near railings; this can break your stride when dodging vampires, which is upsetting. "Action" is used both for arrest and for switching weapon - text onscreen tells you what you'll do, but when approaching a perp it's all too easy to accidentally swap your secondary with his pistol, or to arrest him instead of swapping (which makes you stand and freeze for about a second). Also, in arcade levels, you swap your current weapon, not just the secondary - this is confusing until you get the hang of it. Your primary gun has a wide array of modes, all of which pull from the same clips (with varying per-shot costs). This would have been a lot cooler if I'd used anything other than armor-piercing. The burst-capable standard is pointless because and AP isn't actually just anti-armor, it's a more powerful, accurate single shot. Hi-ex rounds pack punch but are more trouble than they're worth for the most part, and incendiary is fun but a pointless waste of ammo. Ricochet is similar, and the only time I used heat-seeking was to see if it would track undead once they were on fire (it does). LEVELS, STRATEGY, and OTHER ELEMENTS: My favorite level is the final, a desolate outdoor wasteland with surprise-spawning enemies, flame geysers scattered about to keep things interesting, and a loaded Lawrod right at the beginning. You have way more than enough ammo to spend the whole level sniping, even if you miss a lot. My least favorite is the one where you rescue a Tek Judge, because he got trapped in a room by unarrestable vagrants twice and stuck on geometry three times, requiring a reload every time (shooting innocents gets a big law-meter penalty; I had 5111 years of sentence but I like my clean record, ya know?). Be aware that you move fastest running forward - you back up at about vampire speed, but can easily outrun them if you turn around. When using the Lawrod, always turn and run when you hear spawns, then snipe at your leisure. When short on ammo, anything can be beaten senseless. 2 hits for normal undead, 3 for the fat ones, 15 for the ludicrously obese, 3 for vampires, 4 for skeletons. At close range, undead can hurt you when they roar, with no noticable attack animation, so either get behind them or attack at the end of their 5-swipe charge (run up at the third swipe, hit, and back off). Vampires have terrible aim, so you can circle around and hit them when they pause after a leap or stand and roar - this is pretty safe with up to three in a wide hallway, but don't get stuck on any corners. If you're feeling cheap, all monsters have some sort of range limit - past a certain point they either turn around and go home or get stuck and stand still while you beat on them. This counts against the game because in some hallways, you'll end up hitting this point accidentally when trying to beat them up, which takes out the fun. A few more tips: steer the heck clear of the civvy shotgun (Stump); slow ROF, 4-shot clip, long reload, and low power except at point blank combine into "you should be 4-tapping AP from your primary", which you can do 8 times on a clip and at any range. The Lawrod has a large clip and fires AP-equivalents in accurate 3-shot bursts or has an instakill sniper mode which is tremendous fun outdoors. The only round you need on the Lawgiver is AP (32/clip), and there are usually dead judges lying about to give you 5 clips each. The Las Rifle charges shots when you hold fire: a half-charged shot to the head or fully-charged blast to the chest will kill a Guard/Assassin. It zooms, has a big clip and any level where you find one has Assassins to drop more, so have a ball. If you're low on primary ammo and can't find a rifle, the civvy pistol is accurate and good for disarming perps. The Lawrod is lovely but sniper mode makes disarming harder - you can usually shoot the gun or arm, but with the Lawrod arm shots are lethal. The grenade launcher is lovely when you don't need arrests, but look out - some vampires seem to resist it really well. Finally, reloading can be interrupted by melee attacking - the resulting partial clip is plenty for an emergency, particularly with the machine gun. THE VERDICT: I AM the Law! I did enjoy the game, but there's not much here, and it's not much of a challenge either. Worth a few bucks, a fine buy on special, but it just lacks the usual GOG value. If it weren't for the glitches, it might have earned a 4, but as it stands, it gets a respectable 3. [I try to use a balanced scale; 3 is just fine but nothing special, leaving room for 4 & 5 to distinguish good and great.]
It's difficult to review a classic like Fallout - it's been done many times before, and there's little if anything left to say that hasn't been covered already. It suffers from some irritating interface problems, a few significant but not game-breaking bugs, and balance issues, but overall it's fun, rich, and worth replaying at least once. VISUALS: A standard isometric projection view of the world [which is hex-grid-based]; walls and roofs fade to local transparency when you're near them so you can see yourself. When targeting, all possible targets are outlined so you can select people standing behind walls. Items in the inventory are given a lot of space, so you have very detailed item icons, which is nice (but most have a generic icon on the ground, since mostly you pick items out of containers). The small action/event readout is scrollable to an extent. In order to show good detail, the immediate viewable area is fairly small, but you can scroll quite a ways. The tileset is fairly limited, but there are a decent number of different environments, so it never feels too stale. Cutscenes are in relatively low-textured 3D renders, and there are decently animated faces when you talk to major characters. The faces express the characters' current emotional reaction to you, which is both interesting and useful. A few little touches liven up the world - the day/night cycle both is visible and has (minor) tactical effects, and combat animations are nicely varied, especially the sometimes amusing death sequences (which are weapon- and damage-location specific). I took off my power fist sometimes just so I could see my character kicking certain bad-guys in the head, for the fun of it. STORY/ACTING: Interactions with major characters (friendly and not) are all animated and fully voiced. Characters have different reactions based on their emotional reaction to you, and the actors did a good job expressing themselves. Most major character conversations have a fair number of branches, and circumstances do change what you see. Combat is spiced up with floating-text comments that respond to actual events [try hitting super mutants in the groin for a few good laughs]. You are under time pressure to achieve your original quest, but you have plenty of time. The order in which you complete major quests (as well as various time-triggered events) can have significant in-game effects, ranging from ticking off major characters to resulting in the destruction of entire towns. This lends replay value as well as making the world seem more alive (and making you feel more like a participant, since your actions [or lack thereof] have much more effect than granting a few XP and access to a merchant). There are also multiple ways to solve several critical missions, and there are perfectly viable evil (or just ruthless) paths, from working for mob bosses (against a rather dictatorial lawman) to stealing from desperate towns (to save your own). CONTROLS & GAMEPLAY: Movement is simple, click and walk there (unless, of course, your allies have chosen to camp in a doorway). Combat is turn-based (and therefore quite slow with lots of characters, which is often), but normal movement is real-time. You'll be quite bad at shooting weapons with which you have no skill, which is a bit irritating, but does make the weapon skills matter a lot. You can change modes, reload, or swap weapons/items from the main screen, which limits trips to the inventory screen. The inventory is pretty, but if you're a packrat (like me!), you'll find the screen a bit short, requiring a lot of scrolling. Furthermore, the three-digit limit when moving stacks of items will eventually become a pain. Containers are helpful for organization but can be unwieldy to use, and trading with companions can be a serious pain, especially when close to the weight limit. You have to use the inconvenient theft interface or trade items at value, which just slows things down. Missing shots can hit allies or bystanders, which is an interesting gameplay element but leads to the common problem of being hit in the back by Ian or shooting a guard and turning an important ally hostile; this is a good reason to save before even the simplest combats. DIFFICULTY: I initially played an unarmed-only character because it was fun to punch out, well, everything. This led to some difficulties when fighting large groups of enemies armed with rocket launchers and laser gatlings in the endgame, compounded by my maximum-size party that I was trying to protect [and in one mission, ridiculously weak low-level allies]. Furthermore, my character was optimized for exploration, theft, and getting all the conversation options, rather than combat. Nonetheless, I was successful after a few tries. Replaying with guns was a complete cakewalk; a solo character with the best armor and gun (which can be acquired quite early) can easily take out anything the game throws at him, even without a combat-optimized build. As hinted above, most companions are more of a liability than a help after the midgame or so. They make poor tactical decisions like firing into your back or switching to melee weapons against heavily armored opponents, and they often choose targets with little apparent reason. Skills distribution can be a bit daunting, since there are so many from which to choose. The fine-grained control this offers is nice, but it also means that it is necessary to plan ahead; you can't train up many of the skills, and skills require so many points that it is difficult to change build plans if you don't do so early on (also, a lot of related skills are split into highly specific parts, requiring many points to max out). Overall, the system works well in that it gives many options and fine-grained control without encouraging colorless jack-of-all-trades characters, but it would have benefited from some trimming, as there are too many ways to waste points on unhelpful skills. A few of the perks come too late in the level progression to be useful, as well. LEVELS, STRATEGY, and OTHER ELEMENTS: I recommend having a high stealing skill and a decent lockpick skill, and unless you're going pure melee, you'll eventually want energy weapons. Good communication skills aren't critical but do give you more options. There are a couple fantastic weapons that you might get in two unique, rare random encounters, one a rifle and one an energy weapon. Don't waste points maxing out too many weapon skills - pick one or two and stick with them. Perks that improve your speed or reduce action costs in combat are quite helpful. Don't forget VATS in combat; once you have a decent chance of making called shots, the improved crits can be very helpful (but once you get a really powerful weapon and speed perks, you'll get more use out of the extra shots simple fire will provide). An implementation problem makes AP ammunition ineffective, so don't bother with it (except AP rockets). If you want one of the best (and most loved) companions in the game, you may want to go to Junktown early and charge to the northmost area, as there is a bug that can result in him being unrecruitable. You don't need to buy many supplies, since you can find or earn pretty much everything you need; however, skills manuals are worth buying, particularly for tech skills that are really useful in the endgame. They are very expensive, so stockpiling caps is worth doing. Fortunately you can barter, which lets you overcome the world's limited cap supply to some extent (although weight limits mean your only other major currency will be stimpacks). THE VERDICT: I enjoyed the game despite its flaws, and I enjoyed the replay as well. Unfortunately, the huge variety of possible characters is of limited value, since many options are uninterestingly weak - but taking different story paths maintains the fun. On a second playthrough, it becomes evident that some quests aren't really worth doing, which flattens the experience a bit. Still, there's a lot to the game, especially on the first playthrough, and the game succeeded at making me care about my actions, making it a proper role-playing experience and a solid 4.
