While I can agree with all the negative points in reviews posted here, it's actually a very immersive game. Having said that, due to so many bugs still remaining officially unfixed, flaws, and unfinished content, Fallout 4 is almost trash in its vanilla state. It only begins to really shine after installing unofficial patches & bugfixes, and many, many mods, using a load order program like Mod Organizer 2. Expect to end up with at least 40 mods including many bugfixes (you'll really need the latter), and probably lot more than that in the course of re-starting the game with new characters to test different builds.
Back in the 90's, this was the "fantasy" counterpart to the Civilization game from the same producer, arguably much more fun as well, and boy did I play the game up and down countless times, even many years after. In the early 2000's an effort has been started to patch the game's numerous problems, bugs, and AI being blatantly weak, even after the last official game patch. This soon evolved into a continually updated community patch, this game is updated with the latest version of it, and it really changed the game a lot for the better. If you know your way around DosBox, you can actually play the game with better music than what it is configured with by default here - IF you are on Windows 10, maybe 11 as well. You'd just need to edit the dosboxMOM.conf file with Notepad (if you use that to start the game) in the Master of Magic Official Release sub-folder, in the folder where you installed the game to, and change the setting midiconfig=0 if it isn't set to that already. Then start DosBox to a prompt, without launching the game immediately, run install.exe in the above-mentioned folder, and change the music setting from Soundblaster Pro (later) which it is at by default, to General Midi (save & exit of course). This will use the default MIDI driver of Windows 10, which is actually... a 100% authentic Roland Sound Canvas SC-55 driver (absolutely non-advertised, and very little known fact) and the music in the game will sound a whole lot better with it.
Got the game on current sale for €19.82 down from 59.99, though (personal opinion) it should honestly be cheaper than that. While trying to start the game it immediately crashed, each time I tried, until I looked up online and edited the game's config file, buried deep in debris of folders, to change from windowed to full screen, lower the FPS etc., which allowed me to actually start it. Joy. It does look mildly interesting, music in the beginner area reminds a bit of the old Knight of the Old Republic games, though the game didn't exactly make me feel the excited "click". Still I gave it a go, and soon around the first corner - crash to desktop. Good thing I used a quicksave before that. Re-start. proceed further into the game until I found a stranded ship, right at the entrance door to it - crash. Ok, I reviewed my graphic options, lowered or disabled this and that, the everywhere recommended to disable "global illumination" option was already turned off. Game kept running fine up until I reached the first town. Quicksave, entering it, and right inside the town - crash. After that, I couldn't even manage to enter it anymore, tried 6 more times and each time the game crashed, so that seems to be a hard stop for the game to me, and my patience. Honestly, I expected a lot more polished experience from the game with an obvious upgrade to the original from a few years ago, and patched, from the look at patch versions, multiple times to boot. I might not have the most current hardware but my gaming laptop is very capable of running this game on very high settings, and shouldn't be having such a bad game experience. As such, going for a refund of this game, personally I think this is not how finished and patched many times game should be acting. Which is a shame, it actually did mostly look interesting, but not really playable with the crashes, and not acceptable.
Overall a very atmospheric, bleak post-apocalyptic game experience, which is very effective on delivering the atmosphere after the end of the world, and scare shiver moments where applicable. The automatic save points instead of a normal manual saving system are ok, I've played Metro 2033 Redux so I'm familiar with the experience. This game has overall a faster, action-based pace and choosing the bit more ammo-generous Spartan mode instead of Survival, when starting to play, is a good choice. Not a fan of the "hold your ground fighting hordes of cannon meat until something arrives to progress" moments, which are frequent in the game, nor the boss fights which are often frustrating and at least for me personally not fun. That is one star down, out of five. Especially the giant bear fight (which I'm sure is rather well-known) which so far EVERY time bugs out in one way or the other, leaving me unable to proceed. Obviously some flawed scripting, but it doesn't help that restarting this boss fight doesn't help no matter what. So for me, that was when the game was finished, though I might try again in a day or two. That is the two other stars down. If not for those flawed and obviously unfixed things left in the game, I'd be happy to give it all 5/5, but as it stands, if you feel like trying it out - be warned it's a very rough and oftentimes bugged ride, even if definitely very fun most of the time.
Yes you can download the offline installers and it is DRM-free. However the game has a few annoyances which are no fun, like getting hungry and thirsty way too quickly, and there are mods to fix that. So just go to Nexus Mods, install those mods, and enjoy the game, right? Wrong! Mods only work with a mono branch of the game, and the only way to get that is through installing GOG Galaxy client & downloading some additional files. Also if you want to play online, you can't without Galaxy either. So no mods with offline installation, and no playing online either. You can play the raw game as it is, or get the Galaxy client and accept DRM. Fortunately it was only 5,99€ for me during the reduced price offer, so I don't mind. Just keep that in mind, that if you'd like to use mods, you're forced to install GOG Galaxy for that.
I played all 3 of the Gothic games, many times. I got them not here on GoG, but on original installation discs, so my review comes from experience of all games mentioned here. I feel Gothic accomplshed what Ultima IX failed to, 2 years before it. True, Ultima 9 was the actual first true 3D role-playing game to try claim that title, but came out very buggy, unfinished and animations of enemies and NPCs were weird, wooden and lacking actual 3D feeling. Where Gothic managed to create a believable 3D world not only through it's landscape design, but also with the well-designed - for that time - animations of every non-static entity. What more, it actually made every NPC performing some kind of daily activity - imagine that kind of complexity in Ultima IX! Even the occasional NPC following or leading you, to fight together work well here - they have the working artificial intelligence to climb the cliffs or jump down to stay close to you, and only very rarely get stuck in uneven landscape. Ultima IX had none of that. While it can be argued that in 2 years much had happened in the gaming world, I feel it was Gothic, and not Ultima IX, which deserves to be called the first true 3D role-playing game on the market, from historic point of view. Even now it can still hold it's own while playing, even if landscape and NPCs / enemies are very low-polygon by today's standards, and controls are only really working on keyboard, there is no mouse view like in newer games, all fighting is done by pressing SPACE + direction keys. It feels awkward at first, and very old-school, but once you get into it and developing the feeling of how to engage individual enemies, fighting can be done. Just never - never - try to fight more than 1 opponent, the fight controls are not able to handle it. Even fighting 1 NPC can be a frustrating experience, until you master the controls and the know-how how NPCs move and fight. But when Gothic came out, it can hardly be argued that it was amazing.
