There are two kinds of RTS players: The competitive multiplayer crowds and the more comfortable single-player gamers who like to sit back and try out new strategies against a challenging AI opponent. Modern RTS games have almost exclusively favored the former group, but if you're in the latter then AI Wars is the best post-Red Alert 2 RTS game you could ask for. Almost every aspect of each randomly-generated campaign can be tailored to your style, from the map size (which can get pretty massive) to the AI's personality to the presence of third-party factions, so the result is a single-player (or co-op) experience that can scratch almost any RTS itch you have. Keep in mind that even experienced RTS players will need to spend a good chunk of time in tutorial campaigns. AI Wars is complex, and sadly its spotty documentation and interface don't offer much help. There are key tactical options that you have to learn almost by accident (like the fact that Champion frigates can warp back to your home base at any moment) and other hotkey functions that require multiple keys to do routine maneuvers. In fact one of the key factors in AI Wars' challenge is figuring out what weapons work best against what ships, and the intel reports that offer such information on each ship are horribly messy. The graphics in this game are oddly schizophrenic too. While I don't expect an indie game to look impressive, AI Wars is loaded with assets that look as though they came from 5 different games. You'll see meticulously-modeled home bases surrounded by pixel-art frigates and some rather cheesy nebulae in the background. The soundtrack is great in that 80's sci-fi sense, but has way too many melodramatic piano tracks for a game that almost completely lacks a story. As good as AI Wars is right now, I can't help but feel it would be a much, much better game with a redesigned UI and consistent art direction. That said, it's still one of the best single-player RTS experiences in recent memory.
Sudeki is a very interesting title, especially for the Xbox platform, which was almost completely devoid of JRPGs. Like Anachronox or Septerra Core, Sudeki is an attempt by a western studio to make an RPG with a heavy Japanese style. Even as far as JRPGs go, Sudeki's combat is weird. The gameplay completely changes depending on which of the four playable characters you currently control in battle. Play as the swordsman, and you have a standard hack-n-slash brawler game. Play as the gunwielding scientist, and you're suddenly playing an FPS. It sounds odd on paper but works great in game, giving you countless ways to mix and match playstyles except for the few unfortunate segments where you're playing as a lone character. Sadly, if you play this kind of RPG for an enthralling story, you're better off with Anachronox. Sudeki's world is woefully bland and loaded with inconsistencies and some ugly art design. Main characters are mostly likeable, but the relationships between them are poorly developed. The story does pick up an interesting pace towards the end, only to abruptly halt on a half-assed moral. I'd recommend Sudeki to somebody who likes shooters and brawler games and can't decide between the two. To anybody else, this psuedo-JRPG will come off feeling like supermarket-brand cereal. It gets the job done, but is totally missing the charm and flavor the originals had.
Entomorph, one of the most disturbing isometric-RPGs ever made. I solely blame this game for my persistent insectophobia and arachnophobia, and the game is crawling with reasons as to why. Instead of dragons and goblins, your enemies are gigantic insects with a taste for human blood. Some are even sentient and exist in aristocratic societies, like the dreaded black widow spiders. Simply put, if the thought ever crossed your mind that the big black spider hiding in the corner of your room was plotting to kill you, this game will convince you it's true. From an RPG standpoint, Entomorph is relatively shallow. Your pugilistic character never equips weapons or armor, and stats are improved by finding precious vials of Nectar, although it can be hard to judge just how much stronger you get with each vial. The story and narrative are where Entomorph jumped far ahead of its contemporaries. Character interaction is strong, with deep and memorable conversations with even minor characters. In that regard, it's worth mentioning that this was the first game to ever make me cry. Granted I was six years old at the time, but the shocking discovery that caused it was virtually unheard of for a pre-1996 RPG game. Even with low production values and dated visuals, Entomorph communicates a sense of bleakness like few other games. You really sense the loss of human life and growing isolation as the story grows more and more Kafkaesque.
Please note that this review only concerns SWAT 2. I have not played SWAT 1, but I understand that it is largely a FMV adventure game, which makes me wish these weren't bundled together because they're completely different in terms of gameplay. SWAT 2 is a tactical sim like no other. Being good at this game means never killing anybody, using as few units as possible, and wrapping up a mission before the AI blows it (sometimes literally) for you. On the flip side, you can play a separate terrorist campaign, where you must take hostages, coerce them into aiding you, and fleeing before the police surround you. Though you'd expect a terrorist campaign to be an afterthought in a game that trumps the late SWAT chief Daryl F. Gates as one of the producers, both campaigns are surprisingly fleshed out, offering a great depth of strategic options, tense missions and a dark story of conspiracy. In the SWAT campaign, you take control of elements of SWAT officers attempting to neutralize a hostile situation before anybody winds up dead. This could mean saving a daughter from her abusing father, foiling a bank robbery, or stopping a full-blown riot. Each mission demands a different approach, but you can generally ease (if not outright diffuse) the conflict by attempting negotiations. Missions start off nice and quiet, but the moment a gunshot or explosion goes off (highlighted by a change in the soundtrack), negotiations cease and you must resolve the situation immediately by whatever means. This is where SWAT 2's structure gets interesting: the AI dynamically decides whether or not it wants to play along, and you must adapt to whatever move the suspects make, especially if they decide to make a quick getaway or execute hostages! On the terrorist side, you play as the charismatic Guevara-wannabe Dante following orders from the enigmatic Basho. Your missions generally involve breaking into a building, taking hostages, and making your escape. Sometimes you must convince hostages to perform a task for you or join your cause. This is a flawed but interesting mechanic, because you sometimes must play with the hostage's psychology but don't have the option to directly communicate. So there's a lot of guesswork on your part whether the hostage is susceptible to Stockholm Syndrome (will join your cause just by being in the room with your guys for a while) or can be broken down if you start shooting other hostages. Coercing one or two bystanders can be fun, but missions with a lot of hostages (like one that involves a crowded high school, all the more shocking post-Columbine) tend to be sloppy. Whichever campaign you play, the tactics available to you largely depend on who you bring to the mission. You have a surprisingly deep pool of officers or terrorists to assign, and different skills and qualifications (like explosive experts, medics and k-9 units) change the role that unit can play. This also means that the death of an officer or terrorist could be a huge tactical blow, so you're pressed to keep your guys out of danger as much as possible, adding to the tension. There's a lot of fun to be had in SWAT 2, not only for the tactical depth but also the accidental hilarity. There's crude enjoyment in playing as SWAT and unloading clip after clip on bystanders and other officers to hear your debriefing sergeant scream at you. The huge amount of photograph portraits all look like people you would find tailgating an Allman Brothers concert circa 1995, and some of the acting is delightfully cheesy. Not enough praise can be given to the game's sound design as well. Gunshots sound incredibly clear and powerful for a mid-90's game, all the main characters are competently voiced, and the music tracks are gritty and suspenseful (especially an epic track that plays late in the SWAT campaign whenever the action heats up). All praise aside, SWAT 2 is not for everyone. A lot of frustration can be had in the fact that you aren't given enough information before a mission to properly choose your officers and equipment. If anybody dies at all during a SWAT mission, you lose out on a perfect rating, even if it's a terrorist that slipped up planting a booby trap in the first 10 seconds of the game. Hotkeys are clumsy to learn, and navigating with the mouse means taking time to issue urgent commands. Worst of all is the last quarter of the SWAT campaign, which puts you up against snipers that teleport to their positions out of nowhere, forcing you to replay the mission to learn their spawn points or lose entire elements of officers and VIPs. But while SWAT 2 is not a fair experience, it is a fun and deep game that puts a huge spin on top-down tactical strategy games of the era. Later games in the series are brilliant first-person tactical shooters, but SWAT 2 is the only entry in the series to involve as much strategy, variety and hilarity as you will find in these two campaigns. P.S. I have been planning to remake SWAT 2 using Neverwinter Night's Aurora Toolset. Contact me if you'd be interested in helping out :-)
This game was the first to ever seriously scare me. I was seven years old watching my dad play The 11th Hour when a cutscene of a women's face shifting into some horrible bug-eyed monstrosity freaked me out so badly I ran upstairs and wouldn't touch the computer for weeks. Naturally, this game would never have that kind of effect on a kid raised on today's games, but it still holds a darkly comedic appeal, whether or not most of the comedy is intentional. This game's predecessor, The 7th Guest, was no doubt a spooky game, but also a rather PG one, with cartoonish characters and a mostly pristine mansion that looks like the dollhouse of a psychopath. The 11th Hour steers the series deep into the macabre. The host mansion is now a dark, rotting mess loaded with bloody surprises and gruesome traps. The designers really put a lot of effort into giving you the impression that something horrible happened in every room you step into (and could happen to you). As in the previous game, the primary focus rests on puzzle-solving, and unlike other adventure games you may have played, the puzzles are not necessarily integrated into the environment, like trying to start a broken generator or anything. Rather, you're retracing the steps left by the mansion's insane owner Stauf, who left deliberate puzzles throughout the house, some of which can be brutally difficult and lengthy to solve. This gives the game a rather anarchic structure: There's no logic to the puzzles thrown at you, so each one tends to be radically different from the last. The story of the 11th Hour is also a strong departure from The 7th Guest, and this is were most fans of the short-lived series jump ship on this game. The developers went for more of a contemporary mystery story this time, and the result is an FMV-heavy narrative with the aesthetics of an early-90's TV crime drama. As you solve puzzles in the mansion, you unlock video clips that offer you a glimpse at what's happening in the outside world and lead you to solve the primary mystery. The cutscenes are just as poorly acted as in The 7th Guest, but since this game doesn't have its predecessor's cartoonish charm, it's harder to forgive the performances. Still, anybody who survived the cutscenes of the 3DO days should appreciate the accidental hilarity the actors offer. The 11th Hour is a controversial title no doubt, with fans of The 7th Guest urging players away from this sequel. But on it's own, the game has a wonderfully unique macabre atmosphere while retaining the spontaneous puzzles of the original. Perhaps it is difficult to like both games (I personally thought 7th Guest looks too much like a Saturday Morning cartoon), but if you want a spooky, cerebral adventure into darkness and decay, the 11th Hour is worth the trip.
Driver: Parallel Lines has been accepted as the black sheep of the Driver series. While that's not necessarily a bad name, it does mean many fans of previous Driver games were put off by the new gameplay mechanics and lost features D:PL brought to the table. But the core mechanics are here: Parallel Lines offers the best car chases you will find in any driving game at a difficulty reserved for the hardest of the hardcore. AI cars pursue you ferociously at suicidal speeds in the middle of cluttered New York traffic, and making the perfect escape will require pulling some impressive maneuvers that are both fun to execute and just look really cool. Sweetening the deal to the cinematic car chases is a little feature that lets you switch the camera view to a slo-mo cinematic shot of your car in motion at the press of a button, so you can see that narrow miss or epic crash as though you were watching a true 70's action flick. As great as the chases are, however, the game falls short on its new additions to the Driver formula. The city, though impressive in scale and destructible items, just wasn't made to be seen at less than 60 MPH. Pedestrians are lifeless when not dodging traffic and there are no little behavioral gimmicks to make you feel as though you're walking through a real city. Gun combat has been converted from Driv3r's FPS control to a clumsy targeting system, which leaves series fans scratching their heads since Driv3r's shooting worked just fine. The biggest loss is the removal of the Moviemaker mode. Previous Driver games would quite literally let you make small movies out of your adventures with cinematic techniques such as slo-mo, motion blur, camera tracking and even tripod cams that could be placed anywhere. The feature is completely gone in Parallel Lines, which is a true shame since there are some amazing moments in the course of a chase that you may want to watch from different angles, not to mention the moviemaker mode gave previous games loads of replay value to movie buffs. Parallel Lines may not be the best entry in the Driver series. But it's still a Driver game, and as long as it's the only one that GOG has, it should not be missed by anybody with a penchant for white-knuckle car chases and 70's aesthetics.
