It works, at least, on modern machines. However, the AI is still as bad as ever, soulstorm is completely broken and always was, with AI not playing for objectives on the Take and Hold missions and being quite useless in other modes too. Expected a little more polish in this. Overall, its about the same as it always was. Not sure if its worth paying more money to get the same game ported to modern machines. Might be, I will see how Multiplayer works.
It has great atmosphere, fun quests, a very good world built around tech corporations. Its a very good game, actually. Just had a bad launch.
This game is amazing... if they had done any testing. Or fixed the bugs. At least the game breaking ones. If it was not for the bugs, it would be a 5 star. The atmosphere is great, it looks amazing and has a unique but fun and challenging combat systems. There is a ton of things to do, a ton of quests. Sadly, I got stuck in the terraine. I got stuck on conversation screens. I got stuck on other screens. I got completely fucked over by graphics settings that took me 30 minutes to fix. And all of this combined with their horrible save system which could work good in a game that did not have game breaking bugs every 5 hours. If you wanna get this, dont pay the full price. Its a buggy mess, it does not deserve the full price for it. If you get it in a bargain, you will enjoy it. But install the mod that makes it so you can save all the time. You want that, you need that. There is nothing more infuriating than loosing hours of progress because of a bug.
TLDR: Honestly, the Dwarfs book series deserves better. The game is mediocore, the gameplay kind of dull. The combat clunky and the camera wierd. All the animations seem off and the voice acting... oh god. In a game so driven by the story, you would actualy expect better voice acting and cutscenes than this. The soundtrack is nice, but there is not a lot of tracks. So you hear it all in a while and then it gets dull. The game is not really bad, 3 stars suit it fine. Not a great game, not a masterpiece, but it is playable and you can get enough fun out of it to justify buying it discounted. I think it lacks final polish... A few more months of development and it could have been much better. Oh... and maybe better voiceactors. Some more info: Lets break it down a little. Into categories I think could use with adressing. The story: If you have read the books, its the same story. There are slight changes here and then and you experience all of it just as Tungdil, so you never see what happens in Porista, you never see different things that happened to other characters in the books. Weather that is better or worse is for you to decide, it did freshen up the story and makes you understand Tungdil a little bit more. Voiceacting: Its just dull. Not enough emotion in their voices, sometimes too much emotion. Alfs sound like Sauron on helium and any conversation with them just sounds really stupid because of that. Combat: Combat is real time with pause elements. I think the game would actualy be better if the combat was turned base. They tried to go for the Dragon Age combat but failed to make it as engaging. It feels clunky and you often kill your own heroes by accident, as friendly fire is very much a thing and even stupidly so. I would think Boendal could actualy hit a target in front of him... not an ally to a side. There are some cool abilities, but most are just standard "do more damage" "Damage a cone" "Knock an enemy down". The game is about 6/10.
