A great Remaster, adds accessibility features (better readable typeface), edited levels, remixed soundtracks, and one additional add-on for each Heretic & Hexen. Or disable all and play them in the original version. Fixes the sprite cut-offs in widescreen modes. This is the ultimate way to play these cult classics and the best release of 2025 so far!
I was too quick to purchase, thinking it was a real shooter like Heretic. It's just an arena shooter, not my thing at all. Wasted potential - the maps do look great.
Some folks prefer the family friendly LucasArts Adventures (yuck!), I'd have to go with HARVESTER and its satirical Twin Peaks-like setting coupled with some of the good old Ultra Violence. Live-action actors and cinematic footage was used for the FMV cutscenes, making the ultra-gory scenes even more brutal. The humor is very 90s and NOT politically correct which will send your Gen Z liberal into a temper tantrum - they sure don't make'em like this anymore. I'm honestly surprised by the ESRB M Rating with all the suggested nastiness with minors, an AO18+ rating would have been more appropriate. HARVESTER excels in atmosphere and story with a cast of hilarious characters that are unforgettable. Otherwise it's your typical Point & Click adventure (nor really my genre) of walking around, talking to NPCs and solving "puzzles" by picking up and using or combining items which you carry around in your inventory. For fans of Twin Peaks-like stories combined with some gory murders this is a must-own. Seriously, forget LucasArts, THIS is the best Point & Click Adventure ever made!
An excellent RPG that hasn't aged badly. It looks good for a 2000 game. Atmosphere & story are great and mop the floor with many games of today. My only gripe is that the entire game doesn't take place in medieval Prague. Well worth the price - and far superior to Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodline!
So they made a stealth DLC that rips off Escape from New York. No thanks.
Diablo 2 (be cursed!) started it with the tedious Act II, now every ARPG has to have one. What moron thought it would be a good idea to take the blandest and most boring area and make it the setting for your game? I got this DLC in the package (Definitive Edition) but end up skipping the DLC campaign entirely. It drags on for far too long, enemy variety is bland and repetitive, most of the tougher enemies are bullet sponges.
You play as 4 characters, that fight the Law Enforcement of a fictional totalitarian United States by bullying them (no, it's not a joke) and using "the power of words". "Deep" dialogues include lines like the classic "You are racists!". Oh yeah, one character can jump in the air and land on her butt to knock "enemies" over (not a joke). In a nutshell, this is a game that promotes toxicity and hatred towards anyone who doesn't think woke.
The worst aspect of this game is the horrible Warcraft-style combat: real-time with pause. It was horrible in Baldur's Gate - it's horrible here. On higher difficulties you are forced to micro-manage your party because the AI is brain dead, which means pausing the game every half second. So, why not make it turn based in the first place? Rounds don't translate well into realtime: when you issue orders there is a delay. This can be fatal when your squishy mage just took a critical hit and your "drink healing potion" command takes 5 seconds to execute. Mages run out of spell quite quickly (that's Dungeon & Dragons rules) and your brain dead mage will run into melee when he runs out of throwing daggers. Be prepared to rest after every major battle - spells need to be relearned, again D&D rules. Party-based RPGs should be turn based! No exceptions! My second issue are the tedious levels. ACT II in particular got boring really fast. The maps are usually just filled with combat encounters with bullets sponges, so the gameplay loop is, combat, rest, combat, rest, combat, rest. Next map, rinse and repeat. The maps don't look really good and don't reward exploration. It is a hard game that provides a challenge. I actually beat it on "normal" (which translates to hard in today's standards) (original CD version, not here on GOG), and I will never play it again. It was tedious, not enjoyable or fun. Icewind Dale was slightly better because it was a bit more original and the story was better. NOT RECOMMENDED.
Not a fan of the real time with pause combat. Sure, you have the choice of turn based combat, but it doesn't feel natural as the game was designed for the former. These Infinity-style games that copy Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 are very overrated. The ship combat is atrocious - it's bacially dialogue-based. Thankfully they added in an option to skip straight to boarding. I also did not care for the pirates setting, so if you're into that you can bump up the rating a bit. At least the dialogues are fully voice acted this time around (no more reading hours of text with only every other sentence being read). Overall I would prefer this type of RPG die out in favor of strictly turn based RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3, which is far superior to this.
A major turn-off for me is the "new gameplay feature" of refilling health bars (of course only for the enemy), so killing things takes extra long, because you first have to injure the creature (white health bar) then kill it (underlying green health bar) within a certain amount of time or it fills right bakc up. Of course the mechanic carries over to the bosses. The first boss gets ANOTHER REFILL once you kill him, so you basically get to do the same fight over again - kinda like in Sekiro. It was bad in that game, it's bad here. I'm just waiting for a "Soulslike" to bring in the 100 health bars for you to whittle down in 2 hours and call it extra challenge. No, just lazy.
