I remember all the development and licensing issues with the series and how Betrayal in Antara had to create its own world to exist. I played it as a kid, and wanted to revisit it. If you run any kind of computer with a processor with more than one core (so anything), Betrayal in Antara will crash during cutscenes. It will crash if you skip the cutscenes at the wrong time. It will crash in the spots that it usually crashed in when I ran it on my old XP machine in high school. The forum members were generally trying to be helpful, but ultimately any game that requires one to download extraneous codices and extraneous random throttling software to get the game to run--and that still didn't work--is awful. The reason this review was not 1-star and a refund is that the (admittedly better) game, Betrayal at Krondor, does work.
While the release and the first couple of months were a bit erratic, it has with 1.1.1e found a functioning bit of amazement. The game is based on the Pathfinder RPG adventure path with the same name, and I really appreciated the strive to make it close to the original table top rpg. The slightly truncated rules make it enjoyable, if confusing for die-hard Pathfinder players (how do bards get magic missile?), but it's the closest we'll ever have for a 3.5 ruleset game. Think a love letter to Neverwinter Nights and Paizo.
The 4x genre is found here in this game. You grow your civilization, colonize worlds, research and develop, and defednd your empire...or crush your enemies.
I remember checking this out from my library as a high schooler. I had played Myst previously, and was enamored by the point and click adventure. I was delightfully surprised by the recreation detail of the Titanic, and Cyberflix's tight story writing.
I went into this game with high hopes; Master of Orion II was a pristine gem that still holds true even to day. Imagine my surprise when I tried this game and found it...poorly designed and executed. Some bugs (features?): -Custom race building is an unbalanced mess of disjointed and incorrectly-costed abilities. I assume the devs decided to balance the race building to keep pvp...'fair'? The multiplayer is NOT DRM-Free and I don't care about multiplayer in the slightest. -Unless you play on Easy, be prepared for blatantly unbalanced AI opponents. While I won't claim to be some kind of 4x master, I would like to imagine that I'm competent enough to observe. I tried to replicate the seemingly unfair advancements of the pre-built races and there was literally no scenario that could lead me to that level of development. -RTS ship combat is a clunky illusion of choice. Your designs will never matter, except to make your ships take painfully longer to build. -Building anything takes way too long...unless your the AI, and then whatever ship they build will always be finished before yours regardless. -Diplomacy is a confusing mess. Color coding dispositions is a great idea, but you will find that you are in some Cthuliod alternate dimension where 'green' means wary, tense, or hate. -Blatant copying of Civ is just the opposite of what I was looking. -There are so many vague alternate win conditions that it's unintuitive and worthless. -Unless you play the game in the precise way the devs want you to play it, you will be overtly and directly penalized. You want to be full defensive and be aggressive? That's 'ok,' here are aliens who will ALWAYS more stats. You want to just invade everyone? That's 'ok,' here are aliens that will find some backdoor to you place (and have more stats). Working on a victory? Here are aliens that will always be ahead of you on yours and so far ahead on the others that yours can NEVER win the game.
