The build on GoG is currently rigged with a bug that constantly enable the keyboard inputs as soon as any controller buttons gets released which result in many input on the controller to gets ignored for a short moment (as it switch from controller to keyboard, then back to controller constantly). This happens even without any controller plugged/connected to the PC. (Disconnected my wired keyboard, connected a Bluetooth keyboard, turned said keyboard off and while no keyboard are active, the game still detects the keyboard as actif.) I'm having an hard time playing this game with a keyboard.
Let's get down to the point, this is an excellent spaceship-driven semi-open world game with an heavy emphasis on loot and, as such, repeated actions. The game has its fair share or "options" when it comes to variants/types of weapons and gadgets/equipment which will, for the most part, fit all kind of play style. Yes, this game is all about numbers. You fight, search, loot and get dropped stuff that slowly raise those numbers that makes the game at tad bit easier as you go on. It's also a game where enemies will grow as your level grow, hence it's not the kind of game where you can keep at it with the same equipment forever just because you like it. This is how I previously mean the "emphasis on loot". The game is what I call a "semi-open world" where it's divided into 2 layers : the space map in which you travel at super high speed (not exactly light speed, but close) and it acts as your basic "select where you want to go" kind of HUB. There are no combat in that layer, but as you travel, you will see nodes popping out displaying either new undiscovered area or, now and then, a random-driven small mission like a "Distress Beacon" or a "Unknown Signal" which gives you the opportunity to do small-scale activities like destroying a bandit base (which has a small boss and good combat loot), saving a stranded vessel which gives good income at the cost of a small cheap item, saving a convoy under attack (gives some incomes and some chances for equipment/loot) or just a mining field of asteroids for some resources. When it comes to resources, the game is not a game emphasis on survival or heavy-commercial activities. You can make some good trade with regional values and crafting is about simple component turned into something useful. The game story is interesting, but not ground breaking and I would say that it's the weakest point of the game (though not a bad one). It's predictable and the painting-like view of it kinda breaks the great graphics you got normally.
I purchased this game on my Xbox One S a couple of years ago and completed it in a really short amount of time. I only died twice: Once early in the game when I made a mistake and once against the last boss because said boss has a bit more bite than anything else in the game. The game is truly like Super Metroids on SNES, controls-wise, but instead of aliens to shoot at, you got undead and spirits in a kinda-fantasy settings, like in Castlevania. This is kinda like taking the Metroidvania genre to the letter. The only 2 bad sides are the duration of the game (barely half or even less than any other decent Metroidvania games in the genre) and the lacks of gameplay creativity + challenges. I only remember having to return to a save point 3 times (to heal and refill) as there was only 1 area in the game where you suddently face thougher foes (and once you master that part, nothing is hard anymore). This is the kind of game I would recommend at a $5 price range or maybe $10 if you're sleeping on that money.
Genesis Alpha One is the kind of game that you can sink countless hours in or just play it on a dime. It's the kind of game that can randomly punish you closely from the start or feel boring for hours. As a space-oriented Roguelike, it's right in that genre. I would personally give it a 4/5, but I got to be honest and point out that the game is more of an half-empty-cup of a game than an half-full-cup. The game is rough around its edges when it comes to preparation, which is also RNG-based, and feel, on some runs, as a waste of time because there was simply no good solution. The game "gameplay" is divided by "runs" that can last from barely 30 minutes to 30-40 hours depending on what you do, what you face and what you get. The game is mechanically and constantly introducing more hardship as you "move forward" regardless of how well prepared you may be and preparation is 95% based on luck/RNG and 5% based on whenever you decide to do an activity in your sector or not. You might have found blueprint for a high grade medical station and yet not be at the point in the game where you can even just get the resource to craft it and then find yourself against armed alien creatures invading your ship with nothing to even fight back, unless you could smack them with that captain tablet of yours that controls the ship. This is in conjunction with how the AI in this game is not autonomous when it comes to your crew, but it's more than efficient when it's on the opposite side. You can see your crew as an extension of yourself (or tools). You set them on a patrol or on a station (a module) in your ship to make sure you don't have to manually manage those and the AI is always doing a poor job at it. The AI will only target hostile living things and never do any "cleaning" nor fixing. You might have 5 nests in your ship that keep spawning critters every 10-15 secs and the AI will only hunt and attack the critters while you have to crawl around, cleaning the nests.
"Die by the Sword" and its expansion "Limb From Limb" were the 2 first PC game disk I have owned. In fact, I also learned about what were "expansion" disks back as I purchased the expansion before the base game. To put it in simple terms, the melee combat system in Die by the Sword is still, to this day, the most complex non-VR melee combat system to exist. There are multiple ways of controlling your attacks from using your mouse to control the movement of the weapon, use pre-registered attack pattern with shortkeys (this version uses numpad, but the original version used F1-F9 keys) or use the Move editor that comes with the game (you got to look up the .exe file in the installed files). (Note that I don't know if the move editor exists with the GoG version, but it did with the disk version.) The move editor is an hell to use because you basically put "muscle" action (bones movements) with the whole character's armature, meaning you need to animate many dozens of parts of the limbs for every attack you wish to impliment. It's also light-physics-based such as to "jump", you need to animate the torso down and move it up fast enough to create force upward. (Back in the days, it took me 3 whole days to make a backflip animation with the base character.) The combat uses a mix of base HP meter and body-part durability. You can loose 1 leg (which make you unable to run and limb around slower on 1 leg) and both of your arm (which make you unable to fight). Food magically restore your limbs too. Loosing both legs or your head is instant death. If you tough that the Souls series is the hardest, you haven't tried Die by the Sword. On top of the adv. combat, it's basically like playing Prince of Persia (the first one, not the Ubisoft one) in 3D with packs of enemies which, each, have at least half to 5x of your damages and/or health with barely any healing item hidden on the floor around. The traps are almost all instant death and some requires frame-precision controls.
Lord of the Fallen is generally what's everyone point it out to be: A game that attempts to reach players who loves challenging games in the likes of the Souls series. In a way, the game succeed at the attempt. but it comes with a few lacks and/or issues. First, the game is extremely short. Most of the hours put in the game are due to deaths & retries. In terms of content and lenght, the game is pretty much the size of Dark Souls II, but only up to the Gargoyes boss. Yes, it's that short. The game has about 12 different enemies with 2 or 3 variants of it (those being stronger) and has barely a dozen mid-bosses and bosses where some are reussed as spawning enemies later on. The game is either super hard or super easy depending on your ability to use the blocking, counter, evasion and position yourself properly in real time. From what I have seen and experienced, the first 2-4 hours are usually about getting the hang of those. After that, you got about 8 to 10 hours of content remaining unless you struggle against 1 boss or 1 group of enemies. Visually, the game is really looking great. It's looking a bit like the middle ground between the Soul's series ambiance within some sort of World of Warcraft design. The sounds are average and I can't remember any soundtracks that made the game stand out. The controls are typical 3rd person RPG fantasy focusing on evasion, but there's a clear issue with the hitbox of the characters and attacks. (Simply put, you got to know the hidden "size" of attacks and not just follow what you see. Even if an attack pass 1m above you head, you'll get hit and even if you strike thought certain part of the enemies, the hits won't register. Another bad thing about this game is the clear fact that the developpers dropped the ball mid-way. Initially, you get more or less what seems like some quests & objective left and right, but at some point the number of quests and their complexity and/or lenght drop to barely anything at all.
Nox is one of those games that nerver hit a major success due to it being overshadowed by a few giants at its prime time. The best way I could describe Nox is by saying that if you were to take the first Diablo game and instead of going for an advanced inventory & skills systems that became Diablo II, you pushed the physics &, animations and environmental interaction by 1000%. Yes, by that I means that in general the gameplay in Nox beats the crap out of Diablo 2 hands down. Not only does Nox have better controls & gameplay mecanism, it even have a level editor (which is quite complex to use, but works never the less!) It main lacking features which are why it wasn't able to push above the giants is that its content is generaly limited and as the development studio which made the game (Westwood) was starting to get active by adding new gameplay and content, they were purchased by EA and the IP got abandonned. The game truly feels like Diablo 1 on steroids with additional gameplay features (like being able to jump over obstacles or having actual impact from attacks from the environment like spells rebouncing off any surfaces). Even inventory wise, the game feels alike. I don't know if GOG version includes it or not, but the free expansion released separately from the main game is a MUST as it will add dozen if not hundreds of hours by having the Coop-Friendly semi-roguelite dungeon mode with semi-unlimited dungeons and a vast more complex randomized weapons & armors added into the game. If it's not included in the GoG version, I suggest you try finding it online and store it on a drive or something as it's truly the one thing that made this game stand on its own even in shadows until EA's acquisition, The only reason why I don't give full 5/5 stars is because the game does lack in some areas and the fact that it's abandonned by its publisher (EA) means that what you get is what you'll even have.
I remember purchasing this game for like 5 or 10 CAD at a toy store (I won't name it) in the early 2000's when my father purchased a new PC for his studies in 3D industrial design. I purchased this game myself after I completed the Die By The Sword series (game + expansion). Many could get the link why I went with this game in the first place. The game is a clunky and really hardcore game. It's quite like an arcade game that was made to be frustrating and make you restart a game after loosing all your lives stupidly. Yeah, this is one of those games where you starts with limited lives where dying too many times force you back at the start of the game. To put it simple, it's a game so stupidly hard that it's also possible to die while being invulnerable with cheats because there are deaths by loosing all your health, but also programmed deaths and traps that instantly kills you regardless of anything. I haven't completed the game as I couldn't get pass the last boss even with invulnerability activated. If I had to put some redeem quality of the game, I would point out that, for its time, the action and "gorish" feel of the game was interesting. At that time, it wasn't a common thing to have games with specific "gore" oriented things displayed on screen such as tons of dripping blood splashing and covering walls and cellings. It had this unkanny dark humor settings that you even rarely find today. (Same kind as you find in Die by The Sword, but only clunkered with really bad controls and graphics even for its time.)
"An incomplete piece of good arts." This is, in a nutshell, the best way I could describe the game Revenant in a single quote. I bought Revenant on PC back in the days and it's still in my shelf of those games that are "neither good nor bad, but that could have been way better with more love." As many points out, it's a game that starts strong... Really strong! The first few areas and missions show that the game had, at one point some really inspired and talented people in its development crew. The game is challenging, but doable and it's a game that requires you, early on, to make choices in terms of what to equip and what to bring or use. This works as this until the 1/3 of the game where the concept of the game changes from light RPG choices & stats to as much linear as you could get and where you litterally get stronger equipment by simply looking around the area. Each area has, by that point, its own 1 or 2 weapons (all swords) and 1 set of armor that fit perfectly to fight the boss at the end of the area. No mystery nor choices anymore. At that point, the number of quests drop insanely and you can do most of them by simply walking the light-maze like area. At some point, you got 0 reason to visit any previous area. It wouldn't be that much of a bad experience if the ending wasn't as much rushed and butchered. It's litterally like a "that's it, the end" appearing at a really bad time and, unlike most games in this genre, with absolutely 0 replayability or additional challenge. You can't even exit the last area (you're stuck there) and you're simply stuck at that save that precede the last "boss" (if you can call it a boss). There's clear sign that the project was abandonned by the 1/3 of it. So much that the game originally came with an half-baked PvP multiplayer mode with multiple characters, classes and stuff (main game has 1 class and 1 characters). I would give this 1.5 to 2 stars, but as the game comes with a game editor, I give it 3 stars.
