Apparently, Phantasmagoria 2 has become a vogue "bad game." However, one should be forewarned, that Phantasmagoria is not funny bad, it's not silly bad, and it's not entertainingly bad, it's just plain bad. It's boring, insipid, and the character performances are so droll as to be entirely boring. Boring. That's the word. I'm not going to grace this review with the name of the person who has popularized this unmitigated garbage (because he is a creep), but I will tell you this. This game is not in any, way, shape or form, enjoyable. The puzzles are moronic and obtuse, the dialogue between characters is mind-numbingly slow and pointless. Nothing of consequence really happens, and the characters seemingly exist apart from the personalities, slave to the plot and whatever insane notion came to the writer's head at the time. This game is dreck, and not in the good way. Go watch The Room again, something, anything, other than this.
Indigo Prophecy is what happens when some lonely soul decides that, since no one has ever complimented on their intelligence, this means, that as arbiter of their own intellectual destiny, they are a genius. Then they make a game that is nothing but QTE's, insanely godawful writing, a plot as enjoyable and comprehensible as using a dental drill to remove earwax, and sadly, most sadly, necrophilia. I don't really want to start with where this game goes wrong, because really, there isn't a place where it even starts, or stops, going wrong. It's just a mess from the beginning. Maybe it has to do with the unnatural eerie quality of the abysmal animation. Or maybe it's because the characters speak like stilted versions of cyborg puppets planted on earth to emulate humans the best they can after ten minutes of research. Really, this game fails on every possible pretense, it's trying to be smart, but it's dumb as rocks, it's trying to be insightful, but it's about as clear or interesting as a fogged mirror in a bathroom full of Reader's Digests. It's just such a sad mistake that this game was ever made. It's an even sadder mistake that I ever had to pick it up one unfortunate December as I noticed it in the clearance bin for two dollars. Even now, I miss those two dollars.
GOG obviously realized that Alien Crossfire was one of the worst expansions ever released to ruin a good game. So they kept it off their beautiful servers. Do you really want to play Alien Crossfire? What is wrong with you? Don't play Alien Crossfire. It's really bad, like seriously, incredibly, unbelievably bad. Oh, and Alpha Centauri is amazing and likely the best 4X title made, so just buy this and forget Alien Crossfire ever existed, because in a perfect world, there would never have been an Alien Crossfire.
Here's a story of someone with a horrible idea: Someone sits down, says "Let's remove everything that made Settlers 2 fun." They take out the puzzle of transport efficiency and supply layout. They take out the automated combat that negated any chance of tedious stalemates. They take out pretty 2D sprite graphics. And then they say "Let's think of what is totally unfun." They think of horrible simplistic combat where you right click a tower and watch dudes smack away at its inhabitants, waiting nicely in a lane so they can take turns dying to the fool inside before they finally overwhelm the hovel. There are no roads, instead you spam buildings all over the hideous terrain and wonder "Why isn't the building and supply part of this game fun anymore?" Easy, because there's literally no more challenge of setting up an efficient supply chain and logistics. Guess what, that was the entire point of the first two Settlers game. I guess someone had an very long lapse of reason, because it took around, I don't know, more than a decade and a half for someone to release a Settlers game that actually put back what made the game fun in the first place. But who listens to someone that doesn't like playing tedious games that are antithetical to common sense? Definitely no one here.
It's a wonder Chris Avellone didn't cry himself to sleep while working on this game. I would cry myself to sleep if I was committed to spewing out purple prose for two years straight as well. What makes Torment a great read while making it a mediocre play? The combat is awful, you are forced into it. For all the claims of being able to avoid combat, you will do a lot of it, incessantly. For all the choice you have in dialogue, there is none in the gameplay. Either you go Mage, or you miss out on the entire point of the game. Some segments of the game are frightfully overwritten. The characterization is good, and so are the story beats, but there's more than there should be. The game is horrifically balanced. To make the combat even more insipid, Black Isle zoomed in on the action and removed the majority of ranged combat (with the exception of spells and one character). There are also Final Fantasy style spells, unskippable cinematic spells. Who thought this was a good idea? I don't know, but in a game where you spam spells, that probably shouldn't exist. But what do I know? I'm just someone who gave Planescape: Torment less than five stars. All I'm going to hear are your tears.
The shooting is broken, the fighting segments are broken and are incredibly unresponsive. Not only that, they're almost impossible to control. The game is incredibly ugly, even on release. The writing is insipid and droll, and is even worse than modern Quantic Dreams fare (if that's even possible). This game is a prime example of something incredibly ambitious that was just completely broken on release and fell short miles of its goal because of incompetent developers and an inexperienced design team. Why are all the other reviews so good? Why are the reviews for the broken shit-shell of a game Vampire: The Masquerade: Redemption, the mechanically insane and idiotic Postal 2? Because like always, this community is filled with thirteen year olds who were never around when these games were released, or couldn't comprehend them anyhow. It's a bunch of narcissistic elitism and it makes me yawn non-stop. I feel bad for the people who are going to play this shitshow because of the rating on the page, expecting something decent, then discovering there was a reason why this game was almost unanimously panned at release, with a few random outliers that mostly said "The soundtrack is really good." Which it is, so if you buy this sadistic failure of a game, you'll at least get the soundtrack. Oh wait, you don't, so you get nothing. You get less than nothing. You get Omikron: The Nomad Soul. And that's a really bad thing to have when you're 10 dollars poorer.
