Honestly, I get why people don't like the navigation in this game. I find it confusing, and I love mazes in old FPS. That said, it does help with the feeling of being an alien mess of flesh, just going with the flow not understanding where you are going. Makes for an annoying completionist rerun, but that really isn't the vibe of this game, and it's not annoying enough to ruin the amazing fun I had in the first run. Genuinely, one of the best games I've ever played.
The framerate slows to a slide show when there's more than two enemies on screen. The resolution is slightly higher than a tamagotchi. The audio in cutscenes and the menu ost constantly pops. No quality of life improvements like a control configuration menu. I'd like to talk about the gameplay, but honestly, if this was the best game ever made it would still be unplayable in this state. Remember people: just because it is in GOG doesn't mean it can work without a fuzz. Or properly.
I don't know about you, but I'm not a fan of buying a game on GOG just to have the same headache and spend the same amount of time fiddling with dosbox configurations I'd have to if I just pirated the game. I spent nearly 3 hours playing with every possible combination of configurations just to end up playing on a low resolution with an unstable frame rate in windowed mode, unable to hear the MIDI version of the soundtrack. Honestly, any money made here should just be sent to the guys in the BloodGDX, without them this would be nearly unplayable. BTW, yeah, it's a pretty good game, but I think people here need to start separating things: the point of these GOG page reviews is to say if the ports are working well, people had 21 years to make reviews of this game, yours is probably gonna be redundant. I am aware that I didn't follow this advice before, but until this game I was sure that all I had to do to play a game I got from GOG was to just download it and start it up.
Playing this game reminded me a lot of the last time I played Call of Duty: I really wanted to have fun on the crazy shootouts, quirk dialog and cinematics, but 90% of the time I was utterly confused: -The audio mixing is...non existent?. Sounds don't have priority over others, so there will be multiple occasions of trying to listen to mission relevant dialog while ship noises, explosions and gun fire blarr in the same level. Or you could lower the voice and fxs, permanently, giving a constant sensation of actually being underwater. -It's really hard to cauge distances, which would be less of a problem if weapons didn't have different ranges and if the game gave that information on things other than what you are currently aiming at. Also, some weapons zoom further than your projectiles distance, why? Or rather, why I can only zoom with some weapons? I would get no significant advantage with that other than not squinting my eyeballs out when trying to hit something. -It's impossible to tell if a missile is actually gonna hit me: the alarm doesn't change depending on the distance, position or speed. When the alarm goes, it could be a pebble flying two blocks away or a nuke right under my nose. -Nonsense mission failures: "That ship that a character set to explode on a desolated location? Well, it exploded there, but it exploded because the enemy exploded it .1 seconds before it's self destruction." -Impossible extra objectives: Extra money for each ship you take down -> Turns out, the game takes control away from you when it considers the mission done for 20 seconds until the menu loads. -Tatical decisions don't matter: sacrificed yourself to protect a ship you gonna have to escort later? The ship is still gonna start the next part of the mission with battle damage! Love all the characters, as insane as they are, and I love this quirky, baren underwater wasteland, but not even the cheats would work to help me sit throught it. For once, I really want a novelization.
If it isn't clear by the fact that the two factions fighting for the future of mankind are called "The front" and "The Order", this is a silly game. It's no surprise they decided to take a silly approach to the game narrative: the game has 5 voice actors doing the voice of 15 characters, maybe more: no serious history could survive the Austin Powers' level of characterization going on to try to make these voices distinct. But that's for the best: the inerent humour in it gives is a lot of good faith for the, at times nonsensical, story, the incorehent AI or the labirinth level design (it's no wolfenstein 3D, but JFC on some of the levels, specially the ones with teleporters). To say the story is nonsensical is not entirely knocking on the game, because the writing is still really clever. There's certain twists in this game that are setup up long before, the main one is Black Bird's line "Why is every mission on the underground? I've seen an underground". There's also jokes plenty sprinkled around, specially in the missions you character is infiltrating. But it's pretty nonsensical still, and it's clear that most of it was an adhoc explanation to a certain level. Slight spoilers: you need to kill a certain responsible for a supposed collective inteligence of The Order: At no point in the game they appear to have a collective inteligence, not that mission seems to affect the game world at all. Gameplay flaws: it is impossible to hit certain enemies with in certain elevation, and it's hard to understand would this game was supposed to be played back when it had no mouselook given the level design. On the hardest difficulty the "machine enemies respawn at certain points. At first it's fun, it forces you to constantly move; on the other it gets really annoying when the strongest enemies in the game constantly respawn when you're trying to clear an area. But plenty of fun in the normal mode, and it's pretty open ended. It's not deus ex tho , that's just silly.
