Calling it a game is not right, it's a narrative that uses game mechanics of the 16 bit era in order to tell it to every person in it's own natural pace. It's hard for me to write about this, because the topics struck me right to the core since several of my own personal tragedies are reflected in there, but I'll try nonetheless to do it withouth spoilers, because spoilers can surely ruin this piece a bit, because it's all about the story. No big studio would ever create such a piece of software. It's made by heart from an obviously emotional person with a good education and an overall good background knowledge. He knew what he was doing and he knew exactly which kind of messages he wanted to send to emotio and ratio as well at the same time. The characters are diverse and interesting, there are no stereotypes in the game in spite of the topics which would make every other studio use stereotypes. The narration in combination with the soundtrack is very effective by design and in order to not get too depressed or to have too much tension, there are a few minigames spread throughout the timeline, but nothing that can be in any way frustrating, because this would kill the flow of the story instead of loosening the tension here and there. It works very well. The reason why I'm giving it a 4 star rating instead of 5 on GoG is simply because GoG lacks the Linux version that I got from Humble Bundle and finished yesterday. I bought it on GoG at some point but the Linux port was never given to us here since the introduction of Linux support on GoG, which is quite sad, hopefully it will come later.
Triple roll over in the air because of slightly touching a curbside at mid speed? Sure! Flying 30m out of the windshield because of slightly hitting your door/side at a rail? Of course! The graphics are nice, the music is good, the execution is a mess. Of course it's different from FlatOut 2, the physics seem more realistic at first and make the game harder, why not? Seems legit, you simply use the brakes a little more and don't push the pedal too hard. After a while I constantly got situations like mentioned above and thanks to the weird collision query that surrounds a thin lamp post with a thick invisible tree which you still hit when you aren't rouching the post at all, things like this happen a lot. The controls are the next problem. It is not possible to use the right analog stick for acceleration and brakes, so you have to rely on buttons for this which practically results in feet of lead always instantaniously kicking through the irons when pressed. I usually don't quit games before I finished them, but after buying a very expensive car, upgrading it a lot and being halfway through the gold cup I deleted the game because the problems with controls and physics. The AI...the distance between the first few places and the rest is usually huge. Use nitro for preventing far slides out of corners, if you use it for more speed you'll end up crashing and flying very far because of the many hills placed right before MANY tight corners in the tracks...
I play Dungeon Keeper for Win once a year with the common D3D-Patch, antialiasing, anisotropic filter, etc... under WinXP and just wanted to have a version to run like this on my win7 nettbook and without needing the CD for the athmospheric background music. All you get here is the rancid Dos-version and Dosbox in terrible quality and performance. I am really disappointed by GoG on this one and hope, that they will bring us a more compatible version of the Win-D3D version soon, otherwise I thunk about leaving this site. The latest version of the game should be on here, if they are sold by these prizes and if not, it should be mentioned clearly. I just wasted my money, same with Carmageddon from GoG.
