I bought this game on a whim, thinking it would be a Railroad Tycoon clone, but it turned out to be a neat little puzzle game. Your objective is to lay tracks in a way that connects all stations as efficiently as possible, send as many trains along the tracks as fast as possible and, of course, avoid train crashes. It sounds simple but with topography getting in the way and stations facing in specific directions, some of the later levels can get tricky. The game is great fun though and, once I'm done with it, I'm definitely going to give Train Valley 2 a try. For the price of a cup of coffee (when on sale), I can't recommend this highly enough!
I picked this game up because it was on sale for 50% off and I realized that I had not played a RTS in ages. 50+ in game hours later, and I'm still hooked. Definitely worth every cent I spent on it. As other have said, the game plays like a cross between Settlers, Age of Empires and Civilization, and it is a lot of fun. It's fairly easy to learn, but can be devilishly hard to master. There are many aspects to one's economy, never enough workers, and everything is a valuable resource - food to feed your clan, wood to build more buildings, stone to upgrade them, iron to improve your workers and warriors, gold to pay for just about anything, lore to learn new abilities, even happiness, which decides how quickly your clan grows. Mix in the fact that the map is divided into tiles, which have to be colonized (and often conquered) first, and most of them are unique in what type of and how many buildings they can support, and you can have some pretty hard to choices to make... And on top of everything, there's the neutral factions that will regularly invade your territory (kobold, draugr, or even just wolves), and the other players who don't exactly have your best interests at heart either, so you'd better not just focus on having a healthy economy but also a strong enough warband to defend and expand your territory with... All in all, a great gem of a game that rekindled my love for the whole RTS genre.
I enjoyed DK games, so when I saw this one was on sale, I figured I should give it a try. Having now beaten it, I think I would, overall, give it 4.5 stars if I could. As other have mentioned, the game indeed has a DK-ish feel to it, stays mostly true to the originals and the gameplay is fun even if one or two missions feel a bit unbalanced. If you stick to the campaign and don't try to get all the achievements, the game can be surprisingly short though. You can literally blitz your way through in a couple of hours. The Heart of Gold DLC adds a few more hours but if you're not a completionist and just want to beat the game, you can find yourself done before you know it. There is some replay value thanks to the achievements that can force you to play any given mission couple of times, adopting different strategies, and you can always play multiplayer or sandbox... Finally, the lowest point of the game, which is definitely the backstory. There isn't much to begin with, what is there feels very rushed and the ending is downright disappointing. That said, this is not the kind of game you would play because of the story anyway. If you enjoyed DK games or just like RTS games, give this one a go!
Many praise this game for it's satire, and I will agree that satire is definitely a real reason to play it. Unfortunately, it is also the only reason. It's not laugh-out-loud funny and often not even terribly inventive, yet it manages to amuse most of the time. The story is really just the backdrop to the Bard's snide comments and is (intentionally) a tongue-in-cheek version of the common save-the-world RPG theme. The gameplay itself, not to put too fine a point on it, is just plain boring though. Summon a tank and shoot with your bow, or summon a ranged unit and be the tank instead - this is about the only choice that you will have to make throughout the whole game until the very end. The repetitiveness of combat is only made worse by the fact that everything respawns the moment you leave that particular part of the map (something that I never minded in games like Diablo) and the enemies only come in two or three basic flavors. There is no inventory management, no real companions, only a hadfull of abilities that you will end up getting most of anyway even if half of them are useless for any particular style of play, no meaningful conversations... I could go on and on but I guess I'm making my point. This game is funny and can be kind of fun in a weird, boring way but it has very few of the things that make RPGs enjoyable for me. I went through the game once and I'm glad I did but I can't really see much value in replaying. If you have nothing much to do, for a few bucks, this game is worth it. If you're looking for a more serious RPG experience, look elsewhere...
I was intrigued when I first heard about this game and despite some of the surprisingly negative reviews online, I think it is utterly brilliant! It might feel somewhat overwhelming at first, unpolished in a few aspects and the abruptness of the ending comes as a surprise (two spires in one area, I'm looking at you) but in general, I just loved everything about Tyranny. The storytelling and lore are well thought out and the companions are interesting, but what Tyranny really shines in is being unique, both conceptually and in game mechanics: First of all, you aren't here to protect the weak, help those who need it or save the world. You are just an underling of a seemingly omnipotent overlord and you are sent to do his (her?) bidding by ensuring that his armies crush a rebellion in one of the areas of the empire. You have options, yet none of them seem very appealing for "good" characters. Do you help the rebels, fanning the flames of a civil war that will cause immense suffering to countless people? And can you, even if you wanted? Or do you do as you're told, ally yourself with one of the Overlord's armies and help crush the rebels, leaving a trail of bodies behind you, assuring that at least there will be peace? Is the Overlord really evil anyway? In most cRPGs your choices affect the outcome, yet I haven't seen a game in which every single outcome could be changed quite as drastically as in Tyranny. I have also never before felt such a desire to immediately replay a game that I had just finished to see what can be done differently. Secondly, the game mechanics are innovative and appealingly logical. You still spend points on "constitution," "intelligence" and so forth, skills, however, get upgraded as you use them - keep waving a sword around, you get better at it. It just makes sense. Spells are not learned from a defined list, instead they are constructed. I could go on and on but what I'm really trying to say is, this game is fantastic - give it a try!
I first heard about this game from a friend who, as he puts it, "borrowed it from the internet." The dark atmosphere and simplistic graphics somehow captivated me, and so after playing the "borrowed" version for a while, I figured I should get a proper one. Imagine my surprise when at that time, Limbo came up as one of the discounted games here at GOG for a measly few $. I've now finished the game, and I can honestly say that I enjoyed it from the start to the end. The puzzles are fun, some are difficult enough to make you feel good about yourself once you've figured them out but in general none are too challenging. The black and grey world has a lot of charm to it, and despite how simplistic the graphics is, it manages to convey the worrying feeling of being lost in the dark woods or the terror of being chased by a gigantic spider, and the soundtrack only adds to the feeling. The game is short and for me it wasn't one to spend the whole evening with but rather something to come back to for half an hour when I felt like it, but that might be just me. I guess the whole game can be finished in a few hours of playing, but somehow I felt that in this case less may indeed be more and making the game longer wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. In sum, I would highly recommend Limbo to anyone, whether you're a fan of this type of game or not. I know I'm not one, and I still loved it.
The premise of an alternate medieval world with magic and magical creatures as well as real historic characters in it was enough to sell me onto this game, and I really enjoyed the first half of it. Admittedly, the story is very linear, and even though you do get some choices, which at the time might look important (such as which faction you join), in the end the decisions you make amount to absolutely nothing. You do get a lot of conversation options, plenty of side-quests to do and areas to explore though, the soundtrack is great, and the graphics, while slightly dated, is quite pretty. You start off by choosing whether you play as a human or one of the "magic-touched" races, which will affect how some people react to your presence and will also impact somewhat on the choice of what you can teach your character. The choice of how you build it is entirely up to you though, and you can come up with a lot of "career paths" that are perfectly viable. Sadly, all I’ve said above only applies to the first half of the game. The moment you leave the city, you are stuck with a poorly balanced hack-and-slash aRPG, where non-melee characters find themselves significantly disadvantaged. Oh yes, and you can't forget the companions. While in theory designed to help you, they soon become a source of intense frustration. You can’t control them beyond switching between “follow me” and “stay here” modes, they are so dumb as to be suicidal, and for most part they are weaker than many of the enemies you meet. Effectively, what this means is that you end up inching slowly forward and rapidly running away at the first sight of an enemy, hoping to separate an individual from the group, so that you can easily kill him. And then you repeat. And again, and again, and again. Still, for £4, the game is worth trying even if only just for the first half, and perhaps, despite all the problems mentioned above, you will find yourself liking it enough to actually finish it. I know I did.
The raving ratings here made me expect something beyond special, which is probably why I only end up giving the game 4 and not 5 stars. Don't get me wrong, this is certainly a very good game with some novel ideas, decent storyline, and the first half or so has an amazing atmosphere to it. Each and every monster can easily kill you if you're not careful, you never know what you'll find around the next corner, and the first boss is just plain scary. Occasionally the game really had me almost jump out of my chair, and that's something that hasn't happened to me since I first played Aliens vs. Predator. Unfortunately once the you get past the first stages, I found the game suddenly didn't have much to offer any more. *Minor spoiler ahead* Once you acquire the shield spell, suddenly even the fiercest enemy that ambushes you ends up doing no damage, leaving it at your leisure to shoot it, decapitate it, or blast it into oblivion, and you just end up barging through the levels, no longer worrying about that dark corner, or that strange sound, massacring enemies left and right, which obviously completely kills the atmosphere. With that said, is the game still worth it? Absolutely! Go and try it for yourself.
When I tried Planescape for the first time, I was just getting into the RPG genre, and I remember being rather confused by it, and after an hour or two I gave up. Some years later and with more experience with various RPGs, I decided to give it another try, and I couldn't believe I had stopped playing it in the first place. Planescape, even 15 years after it was released is still easily one of (if not THE) best RPG you can play. It has a great story that kept me interested and thinking about for days, various characters to interact with, each with a different personality, and even if it sometimes feels a little rough around the edges and you can't help the feeling that the devs originally intended to give you more options that for some reason didn't make it into the final game, it is still almost like reading a good book. The game mechanics work exactly as you would expect for this kind of game (which is amazing given how old it is), but unlike many newer titles, in Planescape there really is no such thing as a "free lunch," and you are often left to your own devices to figure out what to do next. That said if you really are stuck, there is a bunch of walkthroughs online, so if you need help, you can find it there. Even the graphics, which obviously feels a little dated has aged really well. Essentially, I could go on about Planescape Torment for a long time, but to make a long story short, this game is an absolute must for any self-respecting RPG gamer!
