Settlers 1 to 4 are 2D rendered while the 5th and so forth are 3D rendered. From the 2D family this is the WORST instalment of the series. It's not Win10 compatible. You have to try an ungodly large number of combinations of parameters and tweaks at your window's compatibility tab until somehow you can make it work...for about 5 or 6 runs of the app, then it never opens again. When you do are able to open the app, you will face all kind of graphical issues, glitches and display mode errors. Once you fix them by messing with the in-game video options (although I still can't make it play in full screen mode) you will face the next problem with this game...the fps. No matter how powerful PC's today are, the game engine is old and runs at 30-40 fps. The animations, the motions and basically everything moves glitchy-slow, like eating their own sprite frames. Did I mention the cut scenes sucks ? They were made in an age were 3D graphics were basically blocky shapes with basic dot-product lightning effects with no shadows. Arggg, the primitives times... But if you are born with the gift of patient, you will gather enough will power to ignore all this. But don't worry, your mental skills will be put to the test the very next second...WITH THE GAMEPLAY ! Settlers 2 had a smart and dynamic economy-building system, but then Settlers 3 screw it up and Settlers 4 took all the those bad ideas from the third instalment and made them all worst (not gonna enter into details because I just ate a sandwich and I don't want to throw up). Basically clumsy map dotting, unclear resource deposit stocks, goods are all over the ground and you can't distinguish it from the eye-candy scenery, etc. But non of this actually matters because without any warning and without you being prepared the enemy will come and beat the living crap out of you ! SWIFT AND SWEET. You burst into a rage because of that but at least the game had the decency to crash intermediately after, so no offence taken !
You buy this game hoping to be the very lord and master of the evolution of species itself. But instead you get an loosely tied up bundle of 5 mini games that pretty much suck: First mini game) The cell stage. You play as an amoeba that eats meatballs and/or puke-green veggie balls until you're so fat and greasy that (somehow) your brain gets bigger and smarter, so you realise that you should pull yourself out of the primordial ooze mud-pond that is your microscopic neighbourhood. Second mini game) The creature stage. Now that you are out of the water and able to stretch your new and shiny legs and arms you are ready to beat the living crap out of the other species that also had the never to evolve just like you ! Third mini game) The tribe stage. Basically is the same game as the second, but now at tribe scale. You hunt for food, you practice your animal husbandry skills, practice your artistic strings with some crude instruments and then....you beat the living crap out of other tribes until you win. Fourth mini game) The civilisation stage. Again, the SAME as (2) and (3), but at INDUSTRIAL SCALE and at the modern times too. You will (sigh) beat the living crap out of your enemy civilisations by throwing them tanks, gun boats and combat aircraft. At some point you will shoot at HUGE missile at the planet itself and everybody dies and you win. Fifth mini game) The space stage. WELCOME TO LIMBO. Yes, and I say limbo because once you enter here the simulation never ends. You explore star systems, you create colonies, you trade spices, you BEAT THE LIVING CRAP out of enemy species and at the endgame you face a race of cyborg-like creatures that are the enemies of the galaxy...BUT, don't get your hopes up, they are unbeatable. Yup, they're just there to piss you off. OH, and you should get to the center of the galaxy to meet Steve, he will give you an garbage artefact that lets you terraform exactly 42 planets and it will break after. MUCH EVO! SO SPACE! MANY FUN!
Not much to say here. It's an awesome game. But play the window version (not the MS-DOS version), you can access it through GOG-Galaxy menu. I recommend you give this master a piece a try. It will be a 5/5 if it weren't for its super high difficulty level. YES ! you can actually lose the very first level of the good or evil campaign if you don't play smart.
The ever increasing complexity of this little city builder's economy systems makes this game a boring chore almost right at the beginning. You will quickly lose control of all your goods and services because of bad road planning or by bad city planning. Your farms will not tender the fields correctly and your walkers will be all over the city aiming endlessly to no clear destination. The map has too many elements, graveyards, warlocks, witches, dangers, dungeons and you will be there in the middle, struggling with your farmers for not being able to harvest turnips at the right season. If you love frustrating chores and pulling your hairs out of your head, this is the game for you. But not for me.
First of all, let me say i'm a huge fan of HoMM series. The second and third instalments are the best by far (and most people on the internet agrees with this). But...this instalment is the worst in terms of the campaign. It's plagued with bugs that literally won't let you advance. Trigger events that don't happen it's the most frequent bug. You need to either restart the mission or use the console's cheat code to either trigger the event or just outright type @Win() and be done with that sucker ! In terms of AI the enemy lacks intelligence and strategy. I feel like playing a match of chess with my pet goldfish and I think that will squeeze more "smartness" than this game. The graphics drips with colours and special effects just for the "eye candy" effect. But for the game play it only gets in the way, the camera is too clumsy and some objects are hidden behind trees and rocks. And at some point you have to reduce your setting because FPS goes down for no reason. The spells are awful, they don't feel powerful at all. The fireball and meteor shower kills only a few enemies and ONLY if they are not immune to fire. The resurrections and blessing feel like a waste of mana too. All the units feel weak, once i was fighting a bunch of peasants with some of my soldiers and it took me like 20 effing turns to kill them. The skill tree progressing sucks, you never know the entire set of skills to plan your hero build ahead. And even after learning the entire skill tree on some fan-made web you still can't build your ideal hero because your hero will choose RANDOMLY a set of skills to advance for you. LAME ! There's plenty of other reasons to hate this game, but those were the main reasons (and they should be enough for you to STAY AWAY from this game). Buy Homm2 or 3 or buy this one and prepare yourself to use the cheat console A LOT !!!
If I said it once, I said it a hundred times...STOP USING UNITY ENGINE FOR RELEASE VERSIONS OF A GAME !!!!!!!!!!! Unity is great to test your game design ideas but TERRIBLE for releasing a game. The Unity Engine takes WAY TOO MUCH RESOURCES to play any game at all. Potion Craft is cute, fresh and fun game idea but it runs super hot on my gaming laptop (75 Celsius) and it runs at 65 on my PC rig. Potion Craft is exclusively a 2D pre-rendered sprites game and it takes several minutes to load the main menu screen, it struggles to load several game variables in the background and at some point I saw a graphics glitch at the top of the screen (and yes, I have the latest drivers installed, Titan RTX 3090, blah blah blah). But enough of technical issues. Let's go to the game play. The demo was better than this release version and here are the reasons: 1) They changed the alchemy map for the worst. It's way too convoluted now with lots of intricacies. 2) Most potions now have rotations. A welcoming feature that adds complexity and challenge...BUT... you need alchemy salts to rotate potions and those salts are so expensive that adding just enough to give the potion its level 3 status you already screw the potion's profitability. 3) Some customers will give you absolutely no damn clue about what potion they want ! I think there are 3 or 4 dudes that always come to my store and I threw every potion I had in stock and they leave furious and ranting. 4) Crystals are a new and awesome ingredient but again...SUPER EXPENSIVE to buy. No fun at all. 5) Like some other games, money becomes useless in the long run. You don't have every day expenses like food, clothing, rent or taxes. You only make and make money like the Federal Reserve printer. Not fun at all. 6) The recipe book with its new tags is a MESS ! After writing down 20 or 25 recipes your book will look like a confusing pile of garbage rather than an alchemy book.
Nice rogue/rts game. But here its problems: 1) No manual save. The game actually expects you to play every level PERFECTLY from beginning to end. 2) If you spend your science points incorrectly (and you will !) in the tech tree you're pretty much SCREWED ! All future levels can't be completed and you will have to reset your ENTIRE CAMPAIGN !!! 3) The "Soldier" is the only military unit that is worth something in battle but it takes too long in the research tree to unlock it. You will have to do your way through the beginning of a level with those lousy rangers (a weak archer-girl with little hit points). 4) In the end-game you will probably have your base fortified with walls, towers full of snipers and automated defence systems, at that point you will probably want to dismiss that squad of 50 soldiers BUT, you will have to do it ONE BY ONE !!!, so tedious, such boring, much dull ! 5) Mutants and Titans (the coolest military units you can command) are WAY TO FAR both in the tech tree and the research tree. So, you will only be able to use them on the last levels of the campaign and you will only want to train them if you research them before walling and towering your base (bad game-timing design). 6) If one of your tents gets infected by a zombie attack it's pretty much game over ! Infection spreads WAY TOO FAST in this game. Your entire base is to vulnerable. 7) THOSE THEM HARPIES!!!!!. Harpies are zombie-girl monsters that are lightning fast with long and sharp finger nails that not only will slice your soldiers in half in a second but also climb your walls, ignore your defence turrets and infect your houses like the plague. A COMPLETELY UNBALANCE enemy if you ask me. 8) Building placement is awkward and non-intuitive. The game automatically places "invisible paths" between buildings that don't let you build your base at your leisure. You can't also place several production/extraction buildings in the same patch of resources tightly. ...etc, etc...
Cute design and i love the spherical hex grid in which the game happens. At the beginning it plays nice and swift, it reminded me to Settlers 2 (one of my childhood favourites). The problem comes at the middle game and gets worst in the end game: 1) In order to better your peep's lifestyle and happiness you must create better good and services for them, and to do that you must start colonising new islands (no single island has all the crops and raw materials). That means you must weave your network of trade ships and ship ports and at that moment the AI loses its brain...ships getting delay, goods not arriving at docks, etc, etc. You must use manual trading at some point to fix the inter-island economy (LAME !). 2) You will get attacked by space whales very soon !...YUP, space whales !. And they eat chunks of your planet that will never regenerate so you must rush your way through the tech tree to get that Aegis Shield and Whale Charmer, but that takes us to the third point in this list: 3) It takes forever to get the full tech tree. You must colonise between 3 and 5 new planets in order to get sufficient technology parts to unlock the tech tree. By that time the space whales had lay waste to your planets, sometime ruining your local island economies forever !. 4) Lack of statistical data. You never know for sure how much your peeps eat or how many clothes they use. You must build lots of farms and tailors until you "kinda feel" your peeps are having enough goods. 5) Guardians are annoying. The minotaur, the gremlins and the sphinx are stones in your boot. The first one scares your peeps, the seconds will steal your goods and the later will shoot at your buildings. 6) Space ships are TOO DAMN SLOW !, you can't build an efficient space trading system due to this !. 7) I hate the Unity Engine ! It makes game run too HOT, my PC rig runs at 60-65 and my Raptor gaming laptop runs at 75 with this game !. Developers should make their own engines for their games.
Nice fishing simulator with an intriguing horror story. You'll find yourself playing it non-stop until you master all the game mechanics and/or until you reach the end of the story. It has some flaws if you ask me: 1) No expenses: character doesn't need money to eat, pay rent, pay docking services, no taxes, the ship doesn't need money for fuel or routine repairs. 2) Money becomes useless in the middle/end game. 3) Ship's storage space always feels too small no matter what cargo upgrades you buy. 4) The trawling nets are a joke, I thought they were used to catch an entire school of fish BUT NOPE !, only to catch a few anchovies and prawns per hour of the game (super slow and non profitable). 5) Research parts are too scarce, I used Cheat Engine to increase their spawn probability to 100%. 6) Ship fishing gear occupies cargo space, LAME !!!. New tech comes at the price of reduce cargo space. 7) The night is TOO DAMN DARK, no illumination upgrade seems to tackle this issue. 8) The "special powers" you acquire by finding relics have very long reloading times. The banished ability is super useful but it takes a lifetime to recharge. The haste ability burns your engine too fast. The teleport spell is awesome, but rises your paranoia for no reason. Again, I used Cheat Engine to "tweak" those parameters. 9) Your fish catch goes "bad" if they are stored for more than 6 hours. Again, nice realistic mechanics, but the developers should have included upgrades to make the ship capable of conserving fish for longer times, like ice chambers or something like the real ships. (Cheat Engine fixes this !). 10) After the ending, you can't keep playing the simulation game. All your time invested in the game PUFF ! GONE ! No sense of continuation.
