Played as a child and decided to revisit the game, glad I did. The moments which spooked me as a kid was quite laughable, especially since it was basically the comic relief character who startled my trousers back then. Of course with my now years of hardened gaming eliteness, hardest difficulty was a must. The beginning had a unique horror atmosphere as you take unexplored hallways and corridors, which is easily one of the best highlights of the game early on, and in general. The story starts to slowly pick up and you notice the pathing with the now same hallways are reused quite a bit, that special uniqueness fades over time. Afterwards the game takes a dive into new themes, keeping you refreshed and interested enough to carry out the story, not to mention Lizbeth. Slightly after getting the meele-god build weapon, the game starts to actually get boring, since you're basically dungeon crawling for quite some time, until you meet Lizbeth again. You get a new spell which made me rethink the entire mechanic system of the game and to be truth, it challenges that of even current games. The amount of min-maxing and APM'ing with your abilities sky rockets the game to new, interesting heights which you never expected, and that's the thing, the game keeps on delivering things you just don't expect for it's time, including the lighthouse area with a certain character interaction which was surprising. You have a ball for a few more hours, climb the story, intrigued, then something weird happens. Cave men. The game becomes weird, like Alice in Wonderland weird, but in a bad way. Until this point I was 100% item pickup, achievement god...now I literally had no interest other than completing the longer than expected campaign. It delivers well in the end. My main question, why hasn't the game been remade. It could sersiously be something.
Like the previous title you can invest an insane amount of time on one mission, even though the objective is usually quite straight forward. I personally played for my own reasons of revisiting the lore and unique characters by enabling shortcuts and boy...you sure do meet some pretty lore-worthy bros in this one, which was very cool. If you're looking for an old RTS feel to kill some time, this surely will fill your cup. The UI and responsiveness is a huge upgrade from Orcs and Humans, meanwhile the naval and open water play, wasn't a fan if I had to be frank.
Obviously years have it's toll. It's a fun sit down with cheats enabled to play through a game which literally shaped history. Other than that, that's as much your going to get out of it. The little story is interesting enough if your a big time fan. When the credits roll you can tell the small team had a hell of a fun time making this small little game, including the "kitchen sink".
Even for it's time it's still surprisingly a chill game to kinda lay back and finger blast your mouse for more hours than I expected in a full playthrough. The imagery, especially towards the end with a certain Altar was a nice touch of horror. Of course it's old, so the only thing that really grinded my gears was the ranged mobs and how they would run, run..and keep running from you the whole way to Narnia when you played as a Warrior, lol.
