I thought I was a fan of strategy games, especially the turn-based kind, but quite frankly this game is a massive let down. It's my first experience with the Jagged Alliance series, and I seriously hope that this game is NOT exemplary of the series. It's hard to know where to begin really - but it's biggest flaw has to be the difficulty curve like a overhanging cliff that really prevented me from getting into the game. Add to that the all too easy possibility of the pyrrhic victory wiping out your entire game, and the whole thing really devolves into a tedious nightmare of loading and reloading, and you play with a rotten RNG that doesn't hold back on the one-hit kills - and don't save in the wrong place either, because there's no new random seed on reloading either, if you want something different to happen you have to DO something different. I get that the game is supposed to be an uphill struggle as your band of mercenaries takes on the might of the army of Alruco, but there's uphill, and then there's vertical. This is a game that clearly didn't get much playtesting - and was aimed for an audience that already knew how to play it. Even if you get through the first area, which I find is a bit hit and miss in terms of difficulty, there's the fact that you seem to run into a brick wall. You look into online guides, even the official stuff, and they mock you - they all advocate tips which are bordering on cheating, that few people who want to play this game just to play it will actually ever think to do. This is a game that will troll you, testing your patience, pretending to be a legitimate game. Maybe I'm more demanding from my games, and like to be able to have fun playing them, rather than wining through cheating and save-reloading my way to victory. Where I'd rather not have a game ruined by a RNG because computer opponents don't care if they live past the next encounter or not. Where I don't have to spend four hours trying to find a weak spot while crawling through scrubland to have a bunch of dicks with a granade wipe out my entire squad - because for some reason, the AI always manages to have the perfect counter to everything I have, being able to make shots that my team clearly find impossible at half the distance despite maxed out Marksmanship...
Okay, this is largely more a case of me just being a grouch old mare, but having just failed the first mission because the controls are so wonky, I'm not exactly enamoured with the entire Earth series right now. Maybe I'll give it time and get better with more practice, but as an RTS veteran who prefers simplicty and style, the Earth series, including Earth 2160 just doesn't seem to cut it for me. It's a bland setting combined with a cumbersome control system that seems counter-intuitive to classic RTS play. I'm glad I got this as part of the promo, because if I bought any of the Earth games individually, I'd be sorely disappointed with them all.
Why, oh why, do the designers insist of having to make these games so damn awkward? I thought I was an RTS fan, but clearly I've been spoilt, as I've obviously been lucky enough to pick up the better games right from the start, and avoid the dross, where whatever clever ideas the designers have are ruined by the simple fact that the games are so damn awkward to play. What ever happened to simple interfaces and simple gameplay? Now you need a neural interface just to get past the fast few missions - because I'm pretty sure I spent more time fighting the interface than I did with the enemies. At least this time the AI works properly - it's just a shame that doesn't matter when the game itself can't seem to tell between cancelling a selection, shifting the minimap, and a move order, and your construction units spend more time wandering across the map than they do building things simply because you need the power of electrokinisis yourself to get the game to work properly. I wonder if they've fixed all this in time for the THIRD installment?
Quite how Earth 2140 managed to make it as a Good Old Game is beyond me. If I hadn't picked this up as part of the weekend promo, I would have been thoroughly disappointed. For all the good of the fairly generic storyline, the two bland factions (mechs and robots vs. androids and tanks), the biggest let down had to be the playability - this is really just an inferior clone of Command and Conquer. Apparently they tried to do something novel with the idea of generals - getting the AI to take control of your units to help in battle, but this is poorly implemented: The generals feature actually replaces the generic AI that units have, so you have a choice, let the vastly inferior AI play for you, or babysit every damn one of the units under your teams command, as they won't even so much as retaliate without your say so, and to make it even more awkward, you cannot control teams that are under the control of a general without first removing the general, giving them the order, and then setting the general back up - not really something you want to be doing in the middle of a heated battle. All in all, unless you are a rabid RTS fan, avoid this otherwise you will just be disappointed by it's lack of playability. I just hope the sequals are better than this...
This "game" is a charming waste of time, because there simply is no point to it besides exploring to see how everything links up. There's no puzzles to solve, no challenges, nothing - just wandering around looking at wonderful graphics and experiencing surreal characters. This may appeal for a short while, but if you are looking for a game, this will leave you unfulfilled.
I have yet to find a decent racing game that doesn't fall victim to the same gameplay flaws over and over. It is like the entire racing genre is defined by these flaws, so I find myself both loving and hating racing games at the same time, and have probably found myself ragequitting to these games more than any other kind of genre. My key gripe with racing games is that they tend to focus on speed and perfection over a very short space of time, and the usual scenario is that even a single mistake can cost you a race, as you can go from first to last place as the result of a single prang, shunt, or poorly-coded physics issue, where as opposed to being able to going really fast the tracks themselves all seem purposely designed to slow you to a crawl. I have played Flatout and Flatout 2, and had the misfortune of playing the sequel before the original, in which many of the above issues are resolved. At least in Flatout, you can improve by crashing into things and destroying the scenery but this is only ever a bonus to placing - you still need to be able to place, and this is done by not crashing and not going Flatout. Thus I rate this as a 3/5, because to be fair, Flatout needs to be reviewed in two different contexts. As a racing game, it is one of the better overall, and would score 4/5, and I hope GoG can snag Flatout 2 on here ASAP. But as a game overall, it only scores 2/5, but then most racing games only score 2/5, because despite all the preamble about going fast, they rarely actually fulfil this as the game develops. Maybe one day...