It's dark, pretty, strange and lhas a phantastic landscape Gameplay is a little 2D-Jump&Run with a few switches and small riddles here and there. Even though this basics are quite similar to "Limbo" or "Inside", the Gameplay is not interesting enough. And the story is just weird and doesn't make much sense.
Took roughly half an hour to walk around and enjoy the dreamlike scenery shown in the pictures. A few rooms ask to collect and pile up pieces, and that's all gameplay there is. And after these 30 minutes I reached an end that didn't make much sense to me, But it didn't matter: I simply enjoyed the atmosphere of that strange, unreal world. Very short, I wish there were more scenes included, but for the price it's good. Will surely visit that world again.
Just 3 resources (science, money, food), combined with different kinds of land + power + bonus tasks + simple rules for flagging, military and costs. That's enough to create an intersting strategy game. Great game to enjoy half an hour and continue later, again and again... The free demo is nearly complete, full version adds different maps and allows to "fight to the end".
No story, goal or character building, just go from room to room, kill everything and collect stuff until you die. And you will die again and again and again, it's hard at the beginning. After every turn you increase your stats and make the next run a little easier. And quite oldschool, you learn how to beat each room, its enemies and how they behave. Doesn't feel repetitive to me, but like training. The layout of the pryramids is generated, a puzzle made of a set of rooms. Also you can collect scrolls that alter gameplay, including annoying bad ones. Also nice design, crossover of egyptian art & art noveau and future disco in the later pyramids.
I love MOO 2, so all of the MOO has to compete with and compare to it. Nostalgia: It's a joy to meet all the old races again. The better rendering, design and speech of the races add so much atmosphere to the game! Game play: Most important change: In MOO2 2 rounds per second were common, here it usually takes a minute for a round! Turn summary was nicely added to the general interface. New balance for colony upgrades, money got more important, moons alter the value of planets, nice handling of pollution and population growth. Robot ships to build structures in space. Invasion is just counting numbers without much meaning, beauty or control. Power of enemy and yourself are black boxes. Nice behaviour of planetary shields. Space battle got somewhat odd, ships sometimes don't do how they are expected to. Seems there's no boarding anymore?? I liked the turn based battle of MOO 2 more. Real time battle makes it hard to use the additional equipment when there are many ships. Gfx and sound: Nice sounds, very nice design of races and ships, really pretty overall.Each race has unique design patterns for ships that make sense: Humans a bit like Star Treck, Psilons like 50's flying saucers... A Psilon Titan coming from Hyperspace simply has a wow effect. Colony view now shows the planet instead of a landscape, imho boring, and landing scenes are pretty, but prefabricated and lack shadows. A landscape generator and some real 3D would have added much to both! Action camera during space battle can be entertaining, but more often it shows problems: Overlapping space ships, pixels in textures, poor explosions, damage shown by some metallic glowing texture, generally poor choices of camera location... Basically no graphics for ground invasion, just a planet and disappearing icons in the UI. All in all: Room for improvement, somewhat sluggish, space battle seems a little buggy. But still it's a very enjoyable game!
I've played the once famous Quake for the first time, and found no fun in it. Back in the days when 3D ego shooters were young and fresh. I love Duke Nukem 3D, enjoyed Blood, Heretic, Shadow Warrior. I also enjoyed the next generation of this genre, Hexen II, Unreal, Half life, when I played them just a few years ago. All of them share the basic game elements: Some different weapons, some different enemies, finding keys, pushing switches, finding secrets and an exit to the next level. Games based on Built Engine were a party with funny enemies, crazy ideas, references to pop culture, the later games had elements of action adventures and some story. For me that adds a lot to a game, even Heretic had more features with its item inventory and the behavior of the powered weapons. But for Quake the basics are all, it's the most straight of these shooters. I did not find joy in searching secrets, I have not found any joke hidden there, just ammo. A killed enemy is dead, no insane laughter and splatter fun of Blood, no shrinking or freezing like Duke, just another kill necessary for the next level, repeated again and again. It surely was technically awesome in the old days, but it did not age very well.
