After several attempts on multiple platforms, I've found a lovely little "Easter Egg" that pretty much explains the effort put into updating this software's compatibility in order to run on modern systems. While attempting to tweak the game to run (at all) I found a fairly self-explanatory author's note.... Launcher.exe, "Properties," "Version," "Comments." The author simply states -and I quote: "If it doesn't work, bite me." Cute. Four workstations, three different OS, all possible compatibility modes and options -all resulted in the same Crash-to-Desktop Error. The Support page on GOG is totally devoid of assistance or solutions for the issue, and my request for aid has gone unanswered for weeks. I *loved* this game back when I bought it nearly 20 years ago -and immediately purchased it when it appeared on GoG. In all fairness,,, it is a fantastic game, but I would suggest waiting until it's been made ACTUALLY compatible with modern systems before spending the $6 and a dozen fruitless hours to see the launcher screen, a blank screen, and your desktop again with the ever-so-helpful "Would you like to send an error report to Microsoft's 'ignore forever" department?" message, [Sigh] I don't know what combination of hardware and OS they made their test-run of this game which convinced them to declare it ready for wide-spread release -but a good chunk of effort indicates that you better have a *precisely* identical setup... and even then, according to the programmer assigned to this project, there's bound to be a hefty degree of frustration getting it to run. It's an awful shame, especially considering how desperately I tried on multiple systems to achieve the same, frustrating error. Despite being a bit buggy back in its heyday, this gem of a game really deserved better treatment and back-end coding than "Screw it, I'm tired of working on it -ship it as-is,"
This is one of those odd games that I never thought would be all that interesting, until I started playing it. Queue playing about three dozen different heroes and something like 300 - 400 hours of gameplay later, and I can definitely say that - depending on your tastes - this game can definitely keep you entertained for a while. As some other reviews have stated, the only thing keeping me from giving us a full five stars is the poorly considered patch which destroys the usefulness of summons, and subsequently completely and utterly wrecks the balance/usefulness of several races and hero class types. This is particularly frustrating because undead is one of my preferred races, and playing a lich or necromancer is basically rendered useless as a direct result of this particular version of the patch. That said, if you don't feel like reverting to previous version via implementing a few work arounds (which could very well risk screwing up the DRM in any other game, but considering I used to play this game off of a USB drive that I had copied the CD contents to, I think it's safe to say that is one of the few things you don't have to worry about), there are other races and classes that are still quite fun - imperial is probably a great starting race, as is one of the melee specific classes for your hero, but personally I prefer play Plaguelord and pre-patch Undead. One particularly lovely thing about this game is the fact that if you can read this review, then chances are about 100% that your computer can run this game just fine. Much like Doom and Doom 2, it probably will run just fine on a toaster. For a game that's under $10, you're unlikely to find too many other titles the same price range this entertaining which can readily occupy the amount of time as this one.
