I can't recall another expansion in the last two decades that has added so much content to a game and improved it so immeasurably. Age of Wonders III was already a rare and precious gem in this modern era of PC gaming, and now it's even better. Anyone who enjoyed one of the best 4X games in recent years should not hesitate to purchase Eternal Lords.
What can I say? I still remember getting this game with my family's first ever PC back in 1993 when I was nine. I was absolutely mad about Indiana Jones as a kid and getting this game was like a dream come true. This wasn't some lazy cash-in like so many others were. No. This was a true Indiana Jones adventure and more than worthy of the franchise. The plot has Dr Jones looking for the greatest prize conceivable within the realms of archaeology: the lost city of Atlantis. This quest will take you to various locations around the world that involve a great mix of dialogue, fist fighting, and puzzle solving. What's more, the game has three paths to choose from: team path for those who prefer a more balanced game, fists path for those who prefer action, and wits path for those who enjoy a more cerebral approach. Each of these paths are excellently designed, lots of fun, and lend the game amazing replay value. The graphics are great and the music is beautiful. It was the so called "CD talkie" version that I got way back in 1993, and what I didn't realise at the time was that there was also a version that didn't have speech at all. Quite often I'll encounter people saying, "wow, I never knew this game had proper speech in it!" Well, GOG have naturally got the "talkie" version so you can enjoy the excellent voice acting. Doug Lee does an excellent job as Indiana Jones and would also later return for the role in the excellent Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. I hope GOG get that some day. There isn't enough space here for me to give this game all of the praise that it deserves. It is, in my opinion, the best adventure game ever made by a mile. It sparked off my own lifelong obsession with the subject of Atlantis and means more to me personally than I can ever articulate. My only regret is that we never got to see a movie version, because make no mistake, this IS the true Indiana Jones 4, complete with the series motifs that we've all grown to love. Essential buy.
Rise of the Triad began its development as a sequel to Wolfenstein 3D, but I'm very glad it didn't end that way, because what we have here is the definition of fun and one of my favourite games of all time. It definitely doesn't take itself seriously, but the funny thing is that you quickly get absorbed in the gameplay, and at that point you might as well be playing the most gritty, modern FPS you can think of. Missile weapons, magical weapons, all kinds of traps, cool opponents with different abilities, massive levels, countless secrets, a points and lives system, and amazing music make this a game I still love to play even now. What always made ROTT stand out are the sheer number of cool features like warming food up to get more health from it, making your enemies beg for mercy, them stealing your weapons and using them against you, launchpads... just too many to name. I love this game more than words can articulate. It truly is one of a kind.
I love this game. I really do. It's also a classic from my childhood. So why the three stars? Atlantis: The Lost Tales is, on the one hand, a truly magical game thanks to the beautiful music and environments. On the other hand, it's quite illogical. This game is never more enjoyable than when you've already finished it and know the solutions to all of the puzzles, because at that point it becomes more like an interactive movie, the atmosphere of which you can enjoy without the frustration of getting stuck at any point. Atlantis: The Lost Tales is the embodiment of reason and logic compared to its sequel, but there are certain points that will just baffle you. There is at least one point in the game where you're almost certainly going to have to resort to a walkthrough. The problem is that if you ever die the game loads the last "checkpoint", but in this particular situation, the resolution to the puzzle lies before the last checkpoint, so if you missed it then you're likely to spend hours and hours in utter bafflement just like I did. Thankfully, although many of the puzzles make little sense, they're at least mostly resolvable with some good old fashioned trial and error. If you're looking for a good adventure game or point and clicker to test your thinking, this isn't the one. But if you're looking to be immersed in strange and beautiful worlds and don't mind solutions making little sense, then you can't go wrong with this.
A friend of mine said to me, "that Eador: Genesis looks pretty good." I had never heard of it, but after reading the brief description of the game given on GOG, I was definitely intrigued. That friend and myself are avid fans of the turn-based strategy genre. We spent our teenage nights gathering friends (some willing, some unwilling) around his PC to play Warlords III until the early hours of the morning. Since those days we must have played just about every TBS available, from the well known Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic (my personal favourite), to the more obscure Warlock: Master of the Arcane. I say this to make clear that I'm no stranger to the genre, and so when I say that I've been playing Eador: Genesis almost non-stop since I bought it, you know it has to be offering something pretty special. In this review I want to mention the aspects of the game that I wanted to know about before I bought it. Personalisation is very important to my friends and I. We always loved naming our heroes in Warlords III. Lets face it, you care more about heroes when they're named after your friends. I'm not sure why this simple feature is absent from so many TBS games (even the mighty Age of Wonders), but it is absent here too. Instead, you create a "profile" when you first begin the game in which you choose your name, the name of the place you came from, and design a very basic flag for yourself. You do not appear in the game yourself (like in Warlords IV), but the name you chose as your home will be the name of your starting province. In that starting province you can recruit heroes, soldiers, and construct buildings from a technology tree so vast that it's hard to know where to begin. What's interesting is that you could spend hours of gameplay even just in your starting province, since each province can be explored and all manner of encounters are waiting for you. When you lead a hero and his troops into a new province, you claim it after the initial battle, but until you've explored it to a decent extent, your people will find it difficult to settle there, and thus expansion will be slow. You need heroes to both explore and lead armies anywhere, and there are four types: warrior, wizard, ranger and commander. Their names and starting gear are randomly generated, and each have their own strengths and weaknesses. I think this is one of my favourite aspects of the game, because the heroes really are good at what they're meant to be. Ever played a game and been like, "WTF, this guy is meant to be a warrior but he dies to a giant spider!" Well, that doesn't happen here. Warriors really are warriors, and will frequently be the ones that save the day, wizards really are powerful magic users, and so on. They will level up, allowing you to develop their abilities in the way that you see fit, and at level ten you get to choose a secondary "profession" for them. For example my current warrior became a "Holy Knight" at level ten, opening up all kinds of new possibilities. Heroes get increasingly expensive the more you buy, even more so if you're recruiting more of the same type. You have to keep a close eye on your them, because as they advance they're allowed larger armies to accompany them, and their weapons and items will also degrade through use. When this happens you'll need to return home to get them repaired. Not doing so can be disastrous. There are other things to be done in home provinces too, like maybe you better send your wizard to the library to learn all of those juicy spells he found from raiding that tomb. The tactical battles are very basic, graphically speaking. There aren't even any movement animations, but you soon forget about that as the mechanics involved in conflict mean you really have to focus on your approach. Morale, vitality and terrain are subtle but important things to consider along with the usual strength and speed. Individual troops can also gain experience and new abilities. You can even bestow them with medals if they do particularly well, which enhances their performance but also increases their upkeep cost. The battlefields you'll come upon aren't incredibly varied, but this is something else that will cease to bother you after a time. With all the exploring, conquering, appeasing unhappy populations, hero management, random events, moral choices, and settlement development, it can be very easy to forget that somewhere on the map are AI opponents that you also have to contend with. Needless to say, there is no such thing as a quick game of Eador: Genesis. No matter how small a custom map you might ask it to generate (and there are lots of customisation options), you're going to be there for a good few hours. Eador: Genesis is one of those games that seems incomprehensible at first glance, but before you know it ten hours have passed and you're dealing with the latest slug infestation as adeptly as if you'd been doing it for your whole life. I definitely prefer it to the Warlords and Heroes of Might and Magic series, but I think its indie origins mean that it can't quite come up to the epic standard of Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. On the other hand, they are very different games in many respects, and I can see myself switching back and forth between them. Sometimes a rather obscure game will get a new lease of life and you wonder what all the fuss is about. That definitely isn't the case here. Eador: Genesis is an utterly absorbing game that is packed with gameplay, and if you're a fan of these kind of games, you might as well cancel all the events on your calender before you start playing.
The other reviews have already said it all: Thief was the beginning of a trilogy of true classics. They're definitely amongst the best games ever made. However, you'll encounter a lot of problems playing them on modern systems, and while GOG have dealt with most of them, the movies still don't work. So here's how to fix that. 1. Search your PC for the file called "regsvr.exe", without the quotation marks. It will be located in your System/System32 Windows folder. Copy this file into the Thief Gold folder. 2. Create a new text document and enter in the following text: regsvr32.exe /s LGVID.AX Save this text file as "RegIndeo.bat" (without the quotation marks) into your Thief Gold folder. Now, before you play the game, simply double-click on the RegIndeo batch file, and the pre-mission cinematics, intros etc, will work. By the way this also works for Thief 2.
Most Seven Kingdoms fans will tell you that the original game is the superior one. As someone who has consistently played both games since the very day of their release (see my Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries review) I can see why they would think so but I disagree. Let me explain. There is no doubt at all that Seven Kingdoms II was rushed. Like with the original game I still have the manual and it was basically copy and pasted from the first meaning that it was totally irrelevant to the game at hand. I remember as a kid being confused by the manual telling me that villages could hold a maximum of sixty people when in fact, Seven Kingdoms II allows a maximum of one hundred. There was a proper manual making the rounds online a few years back but I haven't seen it in a long time. The gameplay itself also suffered as a result of this rushed development with their being no balance at all between the fryhtan races and the human ones. Perhaps this was intentional but I doubt it because it's very possible to begin a game and have literally no hope against the fryhtan opponent deciding to rush you immediately. There are also a number of grammatical errors scattered throughout the game which struck me as clumsy even as a kid. All that aside though, I still say that this patched Seven Kingdoms II is easily on par with the original and in fact contains some new features which make it essential for any Seven Kingdoms fan. I wonder if Trevor Chan regretted titling his original game Seven Kingdoms because it kind of put him in something of a corner. In this game there are in fact twelve human kingdoms to play as, however a new addition is the ability to play as one of seven fryhtan (monster) races. Ah I guess the "Seven Kingdoms" thing works out after all. The fryhtan races play in the exact opposite manner as the human kingdoms with large scale destruction for resources, and indeed survival, being the order of the day. This offers a refreshing new slant on the Seven Kingdoms formula which remains largely the same as in the first game just with a few enhancements which make all the difference. For example rather than extracting peasants from their villages one by one which was always a tedius process in the original game, you can now remove caravans of ten at a time with no significant loss of loyalty. The human kingdoms themselves offer more than in the first game with each having a peasant unit, a regular soldier and an elite unit. Research now goes beyond war machines and into all kinds of areas such as military methodology, production, farming and espionage with your spies now having the ability to cause wars between two kingdoms. Something that is truly devastating. The random events have also been vastly improved. No longer are they always natural disasters. Sometimes a peasant might dig up some gold or some artifacts. Maybe a powerful hero will join your cause. These events can also be brought about by prayer which is an excellent idea because you don't always have a use for your God every time your prayer reaches its peak. There are some silly additions like the campaign which is pointless. The fun is still with the randomly generated maps. There is also the option to have large buildings which is so ridiculous it should have been removed from the game. With large buildings enabled the maps because too crowded too quickly. Actually if there is one complaint I have about Seven Kingdoms II it's that the maps are too small even with the building size set to small (which they will be anyway if you're sane). Aside from that, the host of enhancements I've already mentioned and all the rest I haven't often have me reaching for my Seven Kingdoms II CD instead of the original game. Yes it was rushed and there are a few rough edges, but it's still Seven Kingdoms as we know and love it, just with some great new features. Buy it.
I remember when I first bought Seven Kingdoms it came with a copy of Graham Hancock's book Fingerprints of the Gods. It was an appropriate free gift for while Seven Kingdoms has nothing directly to do with Atlantis or any lost civilization, it does place familiar cultures in a kind of mythical prehistory. You can play as either the Mayans, Greeks, Japanese, Chinese, Persians, Vikings or Normans and conquer the known world. And that's where the fun begins. You begin the average game with just a single village of your chosen nationality and a fort connected to it containing your king which you can name after yourself if you've got a gigantic ego like I do. From then you must utilise your people to mine raw goods, manufacture, go to war, pray, make weapons of war, or farm, depending on what the situation requires. The key to expanding is capturing neutral villages who have not yet pledged alliegiance to anyone. The first thing you must do is build a fort connected to the village with a general ideally of their own nationality. The resistance of the village to your rule will slowly begin to decrease but you can speed the process up in a number of ways such as paying them off, slipping a spy in there to sow dissent or simply attack the village until the population surrenders. Of course doing the latter will have a dire effect upon your reputation which upsets your people and makes other independant units less likely to join your Kingdom. Of course there are other Kingdoms trying to do the exact same thing as you and while you can trade, make friendly treaties and even form alliances with them, war is inevitable at some point. To fight wars you of course need soldiers. Troops are placed under the command of a General or your King and the higher his leadership the faster your troops combat skill will increase and the more effective they will be when fighting alongside him. There may even be a future General in the making in one of your forts so it's wise to keep an eye on who is showing potential for leadership. Of course if you're in a hurry you can always build an inn or two and recruit mercenaries which come in all nationalities and trades. Beware also that every unit in your Kingdom has an individual loyalty which may slip if you feel you do not acknowledge their achievements enough. Bestowing honours upon them is sometimes required. Then there are spies which you can sneak into enemy Kingdoms to sabotage production or research, to become soldiers or if you're lucky even Generals. Then there are the Gods which will also reward you if proper devotion is shown. Each nationality has their own unique temple of worship and God which can be summoned if there has been enough prayer. These Gods all have different abilities which can give you a massive advantage in certain areas. Of course just because you choose to play as one nationality doesn't mean you're restricted to them. You're free to expand in any way you see fit and this might include bringing additional races into your fold and utilising their unique soldiers or perhaps even their unique God. The game contains several scenarios but the randomly generated maps with their wealth of customisation options is where the fun is at. Really, any attempt to explain all that is great about Seven Kingdoms within a sane word limit is doomed to failure. Perhaps it is enough to say that I bought this game in 1998 and I still to this day play it regularly even though I've played every other strategy game you can think of. The Ancient Adversaries expansion pack which is included in this GOG download was really a standalone game. I remember ripping a page out of my Seven Kingdoms manual and sending it off as proof of purchase to obtain it for free. I still have that manual sitting beside me. Ancient Adversaries added three new nations, the Zulu, Mughal and Egyptians and the ability to play on snowy maps. Nothing significant but it certainly made a sweet cake all the sweeter. In short, if you've never played Seven Kingdoms or its sequel then you're missing out on what is quite simply the best RTS game ever made.
