Title says it all. If you have'nt played this, you're missing out.
It's a good game, play it.
I'm only about 20 hours into POE II, but I am liking this better than the first game and I absolutely LOVED the first game. The exploration is more fun, I'm enjoying the turn-based combat, the story is top-notch, the user interface is excellent and overall look and feel of the game is just fantastic. If I win the lottery, I will personally finance a third installment of this franchise. Wish me luck!
I'm enjoying the game, but I feel it should be noted for interested parties that this is more of a resource management game than a combat RTS. The number of combat units you can control is fairly limited for most maps, resources are scarce for upgrades and balancing things out while taking into account things like Happiness, food, gold, fame and mystic research really takes up more time than combat does. So if you are looking for a medeival form of Starcraft, you will likely be disappointed. As I said, I am enjoying the game very much. Story mode is challenging enough without being tedious and the story itself is decent. The different clans offer distinct advantages over one another and the gameplay is different enough as to not seem stale. Unit special abilities would have been welcomed, but even without that the game is pretty fun.
Only 2 stars, here's why... First off, there are many annoying aspects that come with playing what could be an excellent game. You are only able to operate on a horizontal plane, no moving up or down. Not a problem until you need to target something above or below you. This is especially annoying when mining asteroids and they are located well below your weapons ability to target them correctly. Second, the game offers you difficulty levels for missions, but those levels are often SEVERELY innacurate. You will think you are going into an easy fight and find yourself warping into a spot where you are immediately surrounded and blasted to dust. The game bases your difficulty on upgrades you apply to your ship, but not all upgrades are relevant to certain types of missions and can be quite misleading and frustrating since there is no open save. Third, NO OPEN SAVE! Saves are done automatically when you dock with a space station. So you are forced to go out of your way to dock with nearby space stations before heading towards a quest marker. If you forget and hit a mission mark after having jumped through 2 or 3 different systems and find yourself dead... well, you're going to have to warp through all of that space, initiate your jumps again and this can get very tedious. Worse, you make it to your location, dock at astation before heading to that nearby mission marker and find the encounter is MUCH more difficult than the "easy" rating the game claimed it would be. Now you spend 3 tries dying and end up deleting the mission in utter frustration. Escort missions are the worst in this regard as you will face so many enemies that in many cases no matter how vigilant you are, the squishy guy you are escorting is going to get mobbed and explode. The game does look good and the comabt was fun for me when it didn't feel like the Kobiashi Maru. Unfortunately, many times it felt JUST like that. Overall, a fun game with a few glaring flaws that waste your time.
I cannot recommend this title enough. This is the best single player superhero game ever made. Cars can be picked up and thrown, light poles ripped from the ground and used as giant clubs and buildings can be knocked down. The voice acting is deliberately overdone and adds a lot to the silver age feeling of the comics it pays homage to. T The characters are fun and varied, and the hero creation tool allows you to import custom heroes you build from scratch! The list of powers you can choose and then link to desired animations is staggering. You can still find custom skins out there to replicate most popular Marvel/DC characters. Buy this now....you cannot resist... Oh yeah! Multiplayer!
I am a huge fan of the Heroes series, particularly the 3rd installation. This add-on content was pretty cool because they were sold separately and could run on their own without needing the original game. I still have the original discs, but the GoG version addressed compatibility issues that made t he original release crash or not work at all. The games themselves are a lot of fun, each one putting you into different terrains and focusing on different monster and city types. The game play is solid and addicting and will make you late for dinner as you take just one more turn. The only gripe I have is that the episodes tend to be much easier than the original release. You can adjust the difficulty, of course, but inflating the hit points of the mobs you face seems like a weak fix for levels that might have been designed a little better. In any event, a solid game! These chapters would be great for people new to the series, or returning users who enjoyed the HOMM3. But if you completed HOMM3, these chapters will likely seem easy.
Brass tacks... An exceptional game for the genre. You will find yourself taking just "one more turn" until the wee hours and wonder where the time went. I cannot recommend this highly enough.
