If you bought this game you might discover incredibly fast how unplayable the GOG version is. The issues vary, mostly involving nglide for 3dfx. And while the graphics look nice like they did back in the day, multiple monitor issues were not taken into consideration. Simply put, you load the game, your tank gets dropped into the first scenario. But you can't move whatosever. You can't alt-tab either. UH-OH. After researching you learn the game must be run as Admin directly from the .exe because the GoG play button doesn't load the game right (that seems to be a common issue) and shortcut doesn't fair much better for some reason. After you finally try again, you notice when you swivel your view or cannon around...hey what's that happening on your other monitor?! It's your mouse cursor. Oh look! It's mimicking your movements in the game. Cute. Time to shoot some alien bad guys...wait wut? The screen has gone black? What's going on? waiting...and OH look now you're back to desktop. Did the game crash? No. Let's just click back on it and get back into the action that was starting up...oh look now, the game screen is black, you can see some of your tank's HUD, the radar is blurring and echoing...you can hear but can't see anything...oh well, time to close out and try again. Only to find it's an issue GOG never bothered to address. So your only recourse is to disable all other monitors and see if that maybe helps. (*see above that it has other issues). Is this game worth the trouble? No, not really. It's a novel concept, of a hybrid RTS and FPS. Uprising 1 was far superior (and stable). Uprising 2 gave it a fresh coat of paint but cheap one, and it felt rushed. Good: RTS/FPS action Challenging AI Simple, efficient interface/controls to manage it all. Campaign or skirmish, unlock new stuff. Bad: Terrible voice acting, SFX weak Tank doesn't feel "there", but more like spectator that gets stuck on small bumps or depressions in terrain Weak controls GOG versoin sucks
Wow, I'm okay with "retro style" but the gameplay is seriously lacking. It's pretty much a "pop a quarter arcade-style" fiasco. Emphasis on "fiasco". One of the most overrated tablet-games-to-PC games of all time. this is a like a freemium Alpha Early Access build. You're literally clicking a button...to see if anything happens next. Constantly. And if anything happens, its 100% combat, which is poorly done. It should be easy to toggle a weapon and click on the enemy ship, but it's like it has to shift 10 gears before anything remotely happens, but in the meantime, a pea-shooter enemy ship frags you because the game's system of energizing and firing a weapon were Made in China?! What gives? Just fire the F'ing weapon. Geez. It's not rocket science! It's like your weaponsmaster, once told to fire, needs 5 minutes to calculate some crap before it can fire. LAAAAME. But like I said, it's one "click to see if anything happens" moments, static, stoic crud graphics from one "clip" to the next. Sad! Embarassingly sad. If this game came out 25 years ago, it would still suck by even those standards back then. I KNOW, because I WAS THERE, and we had 10x more better games than this cheap cash-cow-wannabe-tablet/phone-"PC" "game".
I can't decide if I like Uprising 1 or Uprising 2 better. Or do I like the Battlezone series of games? The BZ games are linear. Do a mission. Do the next mission. OH LOOK, scripted events! Uprising 1 gives you some exposition, and throws you right into the fire. Your job? Defeat the enemy? How. I dunno, you're the commander-whatever guy, figure it out! And that's great. I hate hand-holding. Uprising 2 does some hand-holding at times. (sometimes). Uprising 1, you can take things fast or slow, it's up to you. The game requires you capture control points, which are the only spots you can build a base. Bases are comprised of giant citadel towers with a giant turret at the top. The other plots around it, you have to decide: do you build a structure for producing troops? tanks? aircraft? bombers? what? You also build turrets around your base to help protect it. If the enemy launches an assault, and you're far away, you can remotely link to the citadel turret and blast the attackers and command forces. If you have troops, tanks, whatever, units deployed, you can command them to follow you, assault bases. Alot of it is "beaming them in/out" or "calling" for them. Troops are effective against structures, tanks are effective against infantry. Bombers can take out citadels, structures, but are vunerable to defense turrents. It's rock, paper, scissors and the AI is pretty good. There is a lot of "back and forth" fighting across the map. You might focus on one area, and the AI kicks you in the nuts where you're weak farther away on the map. It can get to be pretty challenging and exhilarating at the same time. Win missions to rack up money, upgrades. Special weapon/items picksup can help. It's all up to you how to fight the battles. The game has a software mode and that's pretty much it. So it has that "retro" look, but it's fluid. The controls take time getting use to (mainly, remembering hotkeys). The sound is good, and watching things blow apart feels rewarding.
Some say WCIV is the best. How so? They give it the "Try and Fail" "Have to do things exactly this way or you fail"-treatment, much like the X-Wing/Tie-Fighter games had (early on). That's no fun, that pisses gamers off! That sucks! WCIII goes the correct direction with space sims. Instead of that "do the mission exactly this way, but you have to die a bunch of times to figure out that's how we developers wanted you to 'play' it lol at you"-shenanigans many space sims with uninspired developers do, WCIII avoids much of that. The game has a straight-forward campaign. You can lose missions, and still win the game. Lose certain ones, that are of an "obvious" and well-stated to be of critical nature, then naturally, you'll lose the game, or go on the "losing path". On the "losing path", there are still ways to turn it around. It will be difficult. If you succeed, the game progresses toward the "good ending". If you fail, you progress toward the "bad ending". Graphically, this is the WC that finally goes into actual 3D. There's no "3dfx" or 3D acceleration (what people see in modern games basically). Instead, it's all "software" rendered/computed/processed. So it looks shaky, clunky, and perhaps "weird". But you'll be flying at the seat of your pants to not even worry. The sound FX are absolutely sick, and the mix of live-action actors with some of the action, helps add to the atmosphere. Overall, the game story, the atmosphere, everything is rather intense, and dark. The phenominal, epic-sounding soundtrack, evokes this extremely well. The game is full of FMV with familiar actors playing beloved characters of the series (think Gimli, Luke Skywalker, Biff, to name a few). This is the best of the series. It's not terribly difficult but you can adjust the difficulty settings. Some of the space battles can be pretty hair-raising, coupled with the story-telling that occurs alongside it, like I said...intense. Even the "good ending", is actually pretty dark.
SHOGO: MOBILE ARMOR DIVISION, another Monolith game, uses the same Lithtech Engine. That's great. But why does Blood 2 have to LOOK like SHOGO? SHOGO was an anime-inspired FPS where it had sequences of being in a giant transformerable-mech bot and stomping thorugh cities blasting other mechs (it was not as great as that sounds, trust me). That game had a particular style in the 3D characters, in that they didn't even look like anime but blocky mutants. They look like skinny 3D model character from Dire Straits "Money For Nothing..." video. Terrible. Terrible even by the standards at the time. So now we get Blood 2, and they look just as bad. The game feels like I'm playing SHOGO but playing a "Blood mod" made for it by some fans. The 3D graphics are terrible, the physics are pretty much non-existant. The weapons look and feel cheap, like right outta SHOGO. The way NPCs and others move and "react" appears almost exactly like those in SHOGO. What a let-down. Kudos to GOG for at least bringing it back. The original Blood 2 was a buggy hot mess. As for the rest, the sound is cruddy, very low quality, some elements in the story/gameplay that rip-off Halflife, feels very tacked on. The sterilized 3D graphics, "puzzle"-level design drain all the fun. It's hard to take it seriously. It is no comparison to the original Blood and its gritteness. The whole "future" setting seems tacked on so they can rip-off Halflife with portals, future-y weapons, and stuff. Overall, the game feels uninspired. It was like the only fun the developers making it was putting in the cheesy jokes. Fans may wanna get it to (sort of) how the story progresses (to the toilet). Side note, the GOG version graphics framerate drops to single digits when looking at lighted enviros. Playing in software mode fixes that. Ironically, the software mode gives it a more "retro" look like the first game, and while terrible, it helps (to slighlty help) give the game the atmosphere it should have had.
The first game in the Blood series (2 games and expansions) is the best. Based on the Build Engine from decades ago, it offers far more entertainment than some of the newer games. Yes, that's cheap to say, but the gameplay is similiar to all FPS: waste everything. Where Blood stands out is its dark humor, visceral blood and gore (well, it's called BLOOD), great sound FX and music, somewhat gothic tones, and creativity. The sad part, is that it becomes more and more of a chore in the later "episodes" of the game. While it tries to present a story, the maps/levels do not feel associated with it in any way really. Some do, while others are just filler and seem completely random. Go from a crypt level to....a haunted mansion! Go from some underground evil temple level...to some maze of canyons and rocks and stuff? What? Why? But why?! The game starts out very strong, the level design is nice, it's not "abstract", but look more like "real' environments so where everything is at, and how it is layed out, "makes sense". But the game begins to run out of steam quickly, when it devolving into mundane mazes of caverns, crypts, more caverns, more crypts, to the point they are many and completely forgettable. The player will walk away remembering levels, like the Train level, The Carnival level. The Haunted Mansion level. Or the supermarket level (in expansion). But all those crypts, caverns, catacombs, weird high-elevation cliffs, mazes of snowy crevasses? Forget it. That's a real shame. Everything else makes up for it. The main character's dark wit, Evil Dead/Army of Darkness and other pop-culture references, and the weapons. Set enemies on fire with the flare gun, and watch them run around screamining. The creatures will scare the crap outta you, especially the ghost. Holy moly, the sound effects are good in this game. Creepy atmosphere. Some levels are tense, to where you are grateful you have an arsenal of bad arseness at your disposal in your journey.
Holy moly, this game plays by itself. I don't even need to do anything. I just pick a kingdom and watch the world turn. There's literally almost nothing to do in this game. Send a gift. Give a title to someone. Build something (which only works half the time, seems bugged), read pop-ups that let you know about something that happened...somewhere. OR, RAISE YOUR ARMY AND GO CONQUER YOUR NEIGHBORS! That's it. No, seriously, that is it. That is all you can really do in this game. You basically watch time go by and can fiddle around with the small handful of options to "do something". All it does is fudge stats. The game should be called: "Stat Fudging Kings" or "King of the Stat Fudgers". Send a gift, get 1% increase from that guy you sent a gift to. Change an overly complicated law to a slightly less overly complicated law...congrats!: you just increased tax revenue by 2.05432%. Amazing that people find this "intriguing". Maybe they are playing it with some DnD dice and using their imagination too? Is that what I'm supposed to do? Was there some link for me to download some DnD dice? Candles to light? A CD of some chick belting out some garbled European language celtic-gaul-like stuff and some choir of monks howling Latin? I don't get it. In anycase, there is the "RAISE AN ARMY, CONQUER!" aspect of the game. That is really the core game if you think about it. The fake "core game" that is presented is this utterly boring mess, where literally the game plays itself. I kid you not. As a result, the player becomes unnerved. The player desires to get "involved" with what they are watching. Stats are boring, but slaughtering people vis a vis WAR is "action". The game makes players desire "some action". Because it's so pathetically boring. So the real challenging gameplay, is the challenge of raising an army to destroy, conquer, expand, without pissing off all the world. It has to be done tactfully. And theirin lies the true game. CK2 is better but DLCs broke it.
Frustratingly linear, boring, sleep-inducing tird. Completely overrated. It's like Fable meets Dungeon Keeper. The game is brutally linear and hugely lacking in choices (obviously). The controls are laughable as your minions only obey your orders correctly half the time. The other half, they are getting killed because the game design to control the minions is terribly flawed, and they are unresponsive or to the complete opposite of what you just told them. Given all the time wasted in the lousy quasi-"tutorial" making everything seem so simple...how could anything go wrong? Well, it goes wrong about half the time. Is that enough? Instead of being a "dark overlord free to ravage the realm' you're more like an elected puppet of special intereste "minion" groups, who force you to do their linear missions on linear maps. I've heard people compare this to World of Warcraft, or claim it's like a single-player MMORPG....these are probably people who think Duke Nukem Forever or Daikatana were open-world FPS. It's like Fable in graphical look/style/charm/dorky music. Fable was good, so it works. However, just like Fable, the gaming world is basically a linear map. Only one way to progress. Once you wipe it out, what else to do except retread the same-ol' same'ol? Unlike Fable, you have far less freedom. You can't go off and do whatever. The game world isn't even designed that way. Dungeon Keeper games did far more for the "be the bad guy dark dungeon lord" genre than this sleep-inducer. Yes. It's sooooo boring. It's also frustrating in that you are given minimal resources possible to make the game seem "challengin and difficulty". In reality, if this was a true "build your base, be evil, conquer the lands" game, then even a dunce would be fairly effective. The flaw is in the game design itself. Doing chores for minions makes this game a chore. You will get bored extremely fast and probably fall asleep, it's so damn boring. Make sense that console sheeple loved it so much.
THANK GOD FOR GOG! This game is one of the most underrated games of all time and incredibly ahead of its time - so much that it's SCARY. This game game out when people were playing Duke 3D, Quake, right? This game poops on all of them. You're basically a squad leader in an armored battle suit. THIS SUIT IS AWESOME. It comes with all the "optional extras". It has a main visor you see out of and three critically important, interactive MFD displays. Weapons are mounted on your character's wrist. You can modify them, pick what you want. You also have a jump-jet pack, and you can choose a special item (extra shields, extra energy, auto-repair, auto-heal, drop a turrent, drop mines, etc.) EXAMPLE: -You have sensor/radar. -You can launch drones to scout ahead, like mobile radar stations, but you can also pull up what it sees on an MFD or your main display! You can also call it back if attacked. -You can use your MFDs to see what your squad-mate see (or see their stats). -You have max 3 other guys, have them up on all MFDs if you want. -You can order them around where to go very easily with them map. -The AI is very good at following orders. You can tell them to sneak, hold fire, cautiously engage, be aggressive, etc. It has a lot of commands like the ARMA games have but WAAAY more reliable AI. -Nightvision, zoom in/out. With these features, there's a ton of ways you can carry out your mission or make changes on the fly. The interaction with your squad, drones works so flawlessly, so simple, so well, you'll be angry why no one has made any game that comes close to this. ARMA series probably comes close, but falls majorily short on execution and features by comparison. Game story is campaign with FMV, Wing Commander style. There is Skirmish mode which helps replayability. LEAST: -Controls take getting used to. -3D Graphics ahead of its time: Weather effects, reflecting water. BUT, its incredibly pixelated, the game is barely SVGA. -Too bad there were no sequels.
I kept hearing a lot how great this game is, how you can do all sorts of things, that it is the definitive RPG we always wanted, that you can do so many things, so much freedom and bells and whistles, does great new things, and "oh hahahah, hee-hee-hee" "this and that" "hee-hee-hee, hahahah!" NAH, this game is totally overrated. It's a 3D RPG with poor to moderate, often inconsistent graphics/art, that does everything even the most generic RPGs do. C'mon things like "ooh you have choices in dialogue!" - that's been around a long time. I think a lot of people giving this game great reviews maybe haven't been around long enough to play other RPGs, older ones, or whatever. Most praise is based on a gimmick, that you can do things with the elements. You can break open a barrel of oil, light it on fire. Lots of games have features like that. Yet, this is what most reviewers talk about with praise. It's just a gimmick to hide how boring the game is. The developers place barrels of THIS, THAT, all over the damn place. It looks totally ridiculous, especially when they are at most encounters. If you started game without a caster who can do things with elements, you are screwed. This is the biggest grip of others is having to restart with new build! Game world felt very small, littered with brutally slow encounters, and SLOOOW turn-based combat, very tedious and clunky. Game is fake non-linear. At least you can destroy some things and kill some NPCs. Again, not revolutionary. I had one quest to talk to some guy I needed something from, but he would have me talk a million things. Game is WAY to boring and slow. So I just killed the dude and took what I needed. Solved! 1 star for that. Another star for the small touches and charm it had at times. Lastly, game also runs slow when it should run fast like other games on my system. It is a real HOG and graphics are dated. What gives? As if things aren't slow enough! Everytime I think of this game, I think of SLOOOWW-MOTION.
