Bullfrog in its golden years was a paragon of innovation, with titles such as Populous, Syndicate, and Theme Park all providing incredibly unique gameplay that was surprisingly indepth and competent for their ambitions. Dungeon Keeper however, will always be their sublime masterpiece. You can almost write an unending list trying to say what DK does right, the sound design is unparalleled, the atmospheric phenomenal, the voice acting and creature design dripping with love and mischievousness, the mechanics are incredibly fine tuned and everything just works and makes sense, the interface is absolutely marvelous for the time, the spells are varied and there's just a limitless amount of little touches, like the varying first person perspectives of various creatures (flies have several eyes, hellhounds see in desaturated color), the missions are difficult and have a variegated selection of goals and structure, the pathing for your creatures is good, and yadda yadda yadda. I can just go on, there are some slight issues, of course, and most of those relate to some of the mission design (some missions are borderline impossible until you find the one particular strategy to slog through them), but even then, the game is just so wonderfully well made that it's difficult to not have fun even while you are getting utterly crushed. The game provides a fairly decent amount of thought while playing as well, trap layout, dungeon layout, creature composition, deciding which creatures to train up for which situations, making sure your monsters aren't causing issues with each other, setting up guard rooms in order to give a decent response time and forewarning to dangerous situations. You just almost always find yourself doing SOMETHING, and in a game where your units are mostly automated and do as they do, that's a simply stunning development. With KeeperFX out, you can even play with updated resolution and bugfixes. No reason not play this damn game right now, buy it, but it.
Baldur's Gate was certainly a technical marvel at the time, and it was also really the first game based of off D&D rules to understand that videogames were a different medium and that the rules had to change and adapt in order to create a tolerable experience, something even the vaunted SSI Gold Box titles tended to flounder at. However, despite its brilliant visuals, competent D&D adaptation, stunning production values and detailed furious combat presentation, the game was tremendously flawed from the outset. For one thing, Baldur's Gate did little to improve the early level experience, and considering that you start out BG1 with a level 1 character, the first few hours are extraordinarily simplistic and dull, compounded by the fact that the majority of sidequests are uninteresting fetch quests with mediocre pay-off. When it comes to plot and writing, Baldur's Gate seemed very infantile, the main story is uninteresting and poorly written, and very few of the characters are well developed, even iconic characters such as Minsc didn't reach their full potential until the sequel. Fallout 1 and 2 were showing the industry that incidental dialogue and the strength of your characterization and encounter depth were significantly more important than verbosity or having an epic plot. Half-Life had introduced players to a more visceral, immediate experience that finally crystallized the possibility that videogames could offer a unique, immersive narrative experience, even titles such as System Shock 2, released around the same time, utilized audio logs to enhance the story in a unique and engrossing way. The combat gets tired, the mechanics are half-broken and most of it breaks down into party-wide buffs and hasting to kill everything as soon as possible. The late game opens up, but the dungeons are uninteresting and too much time is spent aimlessly wandering through towns and wilderness. Ultimately, while initially a jaw-dropping spectacle, the guts of the game were poor.
When you first start off Age of Decadence it's fairly exciting, you get likely what is the closest to an original Fallout vibe there's been yet, it seems very atmospheric, and the backgrounds and choices seem versatile. Despite a generally clunky and mediocre combat system, it seems that the game really is very open to noncombat characters, and seems to welcome a general mix of playstyles that give a dynamic experience. From the very start there seems to be an intriguing web of interconnected quests and results from your actions that look like they'll vary each playthrough quite a bit. Then you leave the first area, after Teron, it's easy to see that the meat of the game, and the majority of its decent parts, were stuffed into the very beginning, and steam very quickly runs out. There's just too much wrong with this game, the content is thin, you can argue that replayability is the goal but there isn't much to it. Archaic skillcheck design means that you essentially need to have foresight of what skillchecks are coming in the future, as it's very unlikely that you'll build your character exactly to the game's specifications. This is especially true of the end game, where it's very easy to screw yourself over and end up in a situation where winning isn't possible. I haven't seen game design that poor since Sierra adventure titles. The combat also becomes insufferable very quickly, the quests are generally dull, and while the dialogue is above average, the plot itself isn't very interesting and the world building and backstory loses its mystique once you unpeel the layers and realize it's fairly uninspired. The endings are weak and uninteresting, incredibly anticlimactic, and even one with extreme weight to its decision is utterly underwhelming. The sound design is sparse if nonexistent, typos and terrible bugs generally mar the experience, and ultimately the game feels like a poorly assembled collection of Choose Your Own Adventure setpieces. Massive disappointment.
Project Eden presents plenty of obstacles. Obstacles, which, sadly, are only obstacles because you have to corral a herd of clones who have had the brains of recently thawed Neolithic vegetables transplanted into their bizarrely proportioned bodies. Everything in this game is an exercise in frustration, be it actually getting your squadmates to where you want them, or pulling off several actions in a quick sequence. It's borderline impossible to manage this herd of ignoramuses, much less perform actions that are level on scope with a kindergartener's block puzzles. It's simple game design, that puzzles and combat in a game should be difficult because they are genuinely challenging, but that's simply not the case in Project Eden. Nothing is challenging because it's actually deliberately intellectually stimulating, it's simply challenging because it's utterly agonizing to accomplish anything. Your doofuses will become stuck on walls, incapable of turning corners, they will be unable to navigate a bridge, finding that the abyss below them is preferable to life in this terrible world filled with meat dogs, worst of all, they will proceed to stare into corners and refuse to shoot the enemies murdering them. I think it's perhaps a result of every single texture in this game looking like a geriatric's morning stool, but it's more likely what happens when hiring mental incompetents to crew your futuristic squads of supersoldiers.
Somewhere, a middleschooler thought this game was funny. He is now a grown man and looks back on this game like a grown man looks back on Dragon Ball Z, something to be nostalgic about, and then something to be ashamed about at the same time. It's funny how human beings phase out garbage as they grow older, and it's funny how we can tell who the reprehensible human beings are when they defend the idiotic garbage they used to enjoy, simply for the fact because it's old or makes other people legitimately uncomfortable. The only people giving this unmitigated garbage good reviews are people who get off on other people being offended and worse, as Asians, hurt, by an pea-brained game developer who thought Vietnam War era jabs at Asians was funny. The only thing that's keeping this game from being as foul-mouthed and malicious as a GI stuck in the gunk with Vietcong advancing on his muddied position, is the fact that they don't use the word "gook." But that's really about it.
