If you can find this for $0.99 or less, I'd recommend getting it. The enemy placement does make the gameplay tougher, often to the point of being quite unfair, but I'm damn old these days and will switch to god mode when I get sufficiently annoyed at continuously respawning, so it's not a big issue to me. However, I'd still say that the enemies actually are one of the better parts of the "game", as they do actually give it a bit of realism (and for the late 1990s, enemies pretending to be dead at first is kind of clever). While the levels have some good bits (e.g. the boats, some of the more complex outdoor levels), they're mostly repetitive and boring, and the amount of "locked" doors that couldn't be opened in any case is rather annoying in the in-door levels. The weapons are pretty much the best part of the game, and don't look half bad either. The new character sprites have godawful faces (so much so that texture upscalers can't figure them out) and are otherwise rather average, repeated Duke Nukem 3D (some Shadow Warrior) assets really drive in the "this should have been a free TC" point - as do the "endings" which would actually have been even slightly better if they had been more akin to the slideshow summary ones that Wanton Destruction for Shadow Warrior had, instead of being more or less just big-font text blobs of "KONGRADULATIONS". Nam really reminds me a lot of the Park TC for Shadow Warrior (especially w.r.t. confusing, wide, mostly unlit forests), except that Park is available for free for SW, was more or less made by one person and would rank higher than Nam if it had been a commercial release instead. Nam is definitely a 1/5 joint - I'd have given it 3/5 stars if it had been a free TC for Duke3D instead - but it's definitely not worth the ~2 bucks I spent on it in the December 2024 sale.
In my 20-odd-years of gaming, I've witnessed only a few fan-made graphical/gameplay overhaul mods actually (whether almost or completely) making it to the end. The most prominent ones (e.g. Black Mesa (sans Xen) and Deus Ex: Revision) indeed took their time to get there, as did some smaller-scale but in no way less impressive mods such as Jedi Knight Enhanced for Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, and the Duke Nukem 3D High Resolution Pack for the eponymous game. It is indeed a grand achievement for any creator to smash through the roadblocks and just get their project done - and in this case, getting the final mod published through official channels. And it's always a step to the better direction to have the final result featured on GOG.com! So once again kudos and congratulations to Caustic Creative for their achievements - for (as proven by DXREV's current Steam rating) time has vindicated their efforts. :]
Every time the ages-old dilemma of "it has good ratings = it has to be good" vs. "it doesn't have good ratings = it can't be good" comes up, I am reminded of Shadows of the Empire. The critics slammed it, quite many players slammed it as well (albeit to a far smaller degree) and nearly two decades later, people like TeamFourStar have continued slamming it. It hasn't aged well and I can't fathom anyone who hasn't played it before buying and liking it. And I don't care. I have and will always think positively of this game - even though a lot of it is probably based on nostalgia (namely how SotE was one of the reasons I got interested in games to begin with). Yes, the Battle of Hoth mission is the best one (worth the current price tag of 5bux), but back in the day (up to the mid-2000s or so when I last played through the game) I had tremendous fun with Echo Base and Gall Spaceport - and to a lesser degree with the Ord Mantell, Tatooine levels and Skyhook. The rest were relatively nice to check out when playing through the entire game.
About time! Great memories, great music, great game. Doesn't like it when I try to save the game, though, but it's still far more properly compatible with modern systems than Jedi Knight for example.
Great games, one of the most influential in my life. Hardware mode not supported in Win8? Apparently, it's not worth anyone's time to really try to make these games work on current systems. It's the game engine's fault, though, not necessarily GOG's. I'd save my money on this one.
