I bought this game back in the 90s, and it was incredibly dissapointing. Repetitive and boring. I can't hardly recommend this game to anyone.
When GOG released Tron 2.0 I decided to dust off my old, original copy with the wonderful Killer App mod. I had not played the game since I bought it on 2003. As a "Good Old Game" Tron 2.0 is an interesting piece of work with some specially good ideas, like the subroutine system, which forces you to select which acquired skills do you want to use in each moment, and which skills do you want to upgrade. The artistic design is beautiful, even for today's standards. The art is faithful to the movies, not as a copy, but as an evolution. The game has some problems, too. Some areas of the first levels are incredibly hard until you get the disk, while the rest of the game feels unbalanced. The lightcycle mode, which was really funny on multiplayer, its incredibly annoying on the campaign, due to an overskilled AI that can make both the most quick and deadliest ambushes or the dumbest self-kill moves. Also the script seems just a sketch of a story. With some good ideas that should have been developed more thoroughly. The final boss fight seems out of place, like something designed for Return to Castle Wolfenstein instead of Tron. Besides these errors the game is worth a try. It's really funny, with some specially nice moments.
This could have been a great game. I really wanted to like it, but it was not possible. I have nothing against games that are slow paced. Good slow paced games are games that want the user to experience more than gameplay. The problem with Aquaria is that it doesn't have much to show. The art is nice, considering it was released back in 2007, but the overall gameplay design is very poor. -Enemy design: when I started the game I crossed paths with an eel, a very aggressive kind of fish... nothing happened. Two minuted later I was severely harmed by touching a harmless looking turtle. WHAT?! -Map: everything is sooo big... and empty. You may spend 10 minutes swimming around without finding anything interesting. No puzzles, no interesting enemies, no different landscapes... just the same water and rocks over and over again. Even your personal cave is so big you can get lost in it. Again, nothing interesting. -Music: sounds nice for the first two minutes. After that you'll start considering turning the music off and looking for something in your personal music collection. -Story: there may be some story there... but after spending half and hour trying to play this game you'll start to wonder where is it. It's like the developers wanted to make an aberrant mixture of a Metroidvania game and a "walking simulator" without actually exploring the characteristics of the genre. It seems that some people like this kind of mixture... not me. If you want slow and relaxing games better try flow. If you want a good metroidvania try Guacamelee.
THis game is a must-buy for Tomb Raider kind of game fans. It's a very funny game, really underrated in its time, that's worth its price. The game is mostly about four things: fist fights, platforming, shooting and puzzles. The fist fights are nice, the platforming is fun, specially the whip sections, the shooting is a bit simple, and some of the puzzles are actually cool (specially those that are related with ancient traps). There may be some problems with gamepads, but if you use Xpadder or the Logitech software profiler everyting should be nice. Anyway the game can be played with mouse and keyboard. This is what GOG is all about: recovering the fun from the past.
The problem with this game is not the lack of death. For me it was not a problem. The two main problems of this game are: -It doesn't have an interesting story (it probably has the worst story of any Prince of Persia game since Prince of Persia 3D). The characters are underdeveloped and the dialogues sometimes seem written by a little child. -The game is in fact a succession of quick time events, specially the fighting, which makes the game a quite repetitive one. If you love the saga you may buy it, but you won't find here anything close to the good old Sands of Time saga.
