Advent Rising, is, as advertised, a third person shooter/action game with a plot written and directed by Orson Scott Card. You can tell it's written by Orson Scott Card, because themes involving divinity and insult wordplay come up a lot. The gameplay is generally pretty good, and while the game has its flaws, it's definitely worth a look if you're a Card fan or if you like this genre of games. STORY 4/5: Unfortunately, Advent Rising was supposed to be one of those franchise-starting games, and ends on an explicit "To Be Continued" (when I say explicit, I mean it. The words "To Be Continued" will flash up on your screen.). However, besides the blatant cliffhanger, the story of the game is pretty good. In a nutshell, you're Gideon Wyath, a space marine and pilot who is selected to be part of a diplomatic mission to meet with the first alien race humanity has come into contact with after spreading to many worlds and resolving a civil war with its own colonies. The new race seems friendly, to the point of being openly worshipful of humanity. Then another race shows up, intent on killing all humans, and things go downhill from there. Generally, the story is delivered by cutscenes which sprout up at irregular intervals during the game, and every level has at least three story chunks in it. Sometimes the gap between the cutscenes and the gameplay can be a little jarring, but it's generally pretty good. However, due to the aforementioned lack of sequels, there are some plot-points introduced in the cutscenes that are never really explained at any point in the game. GAMEPLAY 4/5: When you're not watching a cutscene, you're usually either shooting things or driving some kind of vehicle around and trying not to get blown up. The action never lets up, which might be a good thing or not, depending on your perspective. After a little practice, all of your guns and powers are fairly easy to use, because they all work in roughly the same way: you target, and then right or left click to fire. You can also switch into First-Person mode if you want to hit distant targets or just play a style of game you're more familiar with, but in close quarters auto-aiming is usually faster. All weapons and powers have a leveling system that makes them more effective and/or develop further abilities as you use them, giving you an incentive to specialize. That said, by the time you learn to lift and throw things with your mind, guns are almost useless. This game does have a difficulty curve, but for some reason it slopes DOWNWARDS. Your enemies do not get substantially more powerful as the game goes on, but you learn more and more special abilities and level up the abilities you already have. Basically, the game is a non-stop xeno slaughterfest after the first few levels, particularly because, after you learn telekinesis, you also gain the ability to completely regenerate your health as long as no one shoots you for about ten seconds. Your foes do become more numerous, true, but their weapons aren't any tougher and just learn more ways to kill them. SOUNDS 4/5: The music is very good (epic chords and latin chanting FTW!), but it's limited. There's a few different fighting tracks, a few ambient tracks, and that's all. Occasionally the music gets drowned out by ambient noise, especially when you're driving any kind of vehicle. Turning down the ambient noise also makes it hard to hear anyone talking. Voice acting is generally pretty good, so not being able to hear it is annoying. VISUALS 5/5: This game is quite shiny for the time it was made. The aliens you encounter generally do look fairly alien, and their ships even more so. Generally speaking, there is nothing in this game that I would describe as badly designed, visually, and in particular the hand-to-hand combat fatality animations are pretty cool. Although, for some reason, all the humans have unnaturally long legs, but you get used to that. OVERALL 4/5: My two biggest complaints about this game are that it is too short and the plot remains unfinished. Having finished it, I would like to play some more of it, and that should tell you something about its quality.
AquaNox is a fun game if you're looking for something like Freespace underwater, and it has a fairly interesting setting and characters, but generally lacklustre voice-acting and some annoying mechanics keep this from being more than a forgettable time-waster. STORY 3/5: AquaNox roughly translates to "Night of the Water," which pretty much describes the whole setting. It's a post-apocalyptic story set in a series of underwater cities that managed to survive a nuclear apocalypse which devastated the surface. The atmosphere of these places is a kind of cyberpunk land, full of advanced nanotechnology and biological sciences, with a dash of noir thanks mostly to the voice-actor who plays your character, Flint, who does a passable Sam Spade impression. If this sounds good to you so far, I should warn you that that's where the good stuff ends. Problems with the plot include: 1. It deals with so many factions working towards different goals. 2. This is actually a sequel to an older game, Archimedean Dynasty, and you never really learn the full plot of that game through Aquanox, so a lot of the plot continuity will fly right over your head if you don't know what a "Biont" is before you start. 3. The story is unfocused. What faction you're fighting for or against changes with every mission, which doesn't really help your understanding of any one part of the story. 4. The end cutscene in particular raises far, far more questions then it answers. 5. You never get to see the INSIDES of any of the places you visit. The game's setting and plot come only from the character's voices that you cannot turn off no matter how much you want to. As such, you can expect every cutscene and most conversations to be exposition dumps. GAMEPLAY 4/5: I must admit, someone put some thought into making underwater combat cool. Currents affect your submarine and the speed of any projectiles you launch. You can make torpedoes move faster by firing them while moving forward at top speed. There's a wide variety of vehicles and weapons for you to experiment with. However, not all is well. For one thing, your ability to move vertically is limited by the ocean floor and an invisible ceiling, more often than not, so unlike Freespace you do not have much room to maneuver. Also, targeting ANY enemy with ANYTHING can be rough if the target is in motion sideways to you, and combat at long range is an exercise in patience. You don't have any radar system to tell you where enemies are, changing weapons is inconvenient, torpedoes are easily diverted from their courses and move slowly (meaning you can really only fire them from point-blank), and occasionally you'll be thrown a mission where you're not allowed to kill anyone, which is annoying mostly because all the EMP weapons suck. Overall, though, shooting things with lasers underwater is fun. GRAPHICS 3/5: The graphics are nothing to write home about. They're not bad, but they're not so impressive that I feel motivated to write anything more about them. SOUNDS 2/5: The voice acting is one of the first things the game shows you, and the voice acting in the early parts of the game is especially bad. The Humphrey Bogart-esque fellow doing Flint's voice isn't bad, and some other characters like Harper are fun to listen to, but generally the voices vary from being uninteresting to downright awful. The sounds of gun/plasma/torpedo/laser fire all sound like they could have come from other games. The music is nice, though, which is why this category doesn't get a 1. OVERALL 3/5: This game is worth about what they're selling it for, and no more. It is by no means a great game unto itself or one of the better games on GOG, but it's good enough to waste a day or two on if you have money to burn.
Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader is a game that most people aren't aware Black Isle made. It is often overlooked in favor of other products, like the Icewind Dale series or Baldur's Gate. And rightly so; it's really not that impressive as a game. It's not bad, but it isn't exactly stellar. STORY: 3/5 - The backstory is interesting enough; this game takes place in an alternate earth wherein a great catastrophe that happened during the 3rd Crusade brought magic into the world, and significantly altered the history of much of Europe. The game is full of historical references and in-jokes; you can get Shakespeare to read poems to you, help Leonardo da Vinci build outlandish devices, or take on Torquemada's quest to rid the lands west of Barcelona of a goblin menace that's been sitting around since the Mongols were beaten off (the goblins themselves dressed and act like mongol midgets). However, most of the interesting stuff only happens in the first half of the game, when you're messing about in Barcelona and not actually following the plot. The core plot of the game is actually really simple, and has almost no depth to it at all; even though you've inherited a magical spirit from Richard the Lionhearted himself (hence the title, and no, I don't think this is a spoiler since you learn it about five minutes into the game), there's apparently nothing special about you, and you basically just run through the game killing things until there's no one left to beat. After which there is a cliffhanger. VISUALS: 3/5 - The graphics are not ugly, but they aren't pretty either. Actually, special-effects wise, Lionheart doesn't compare too well to other Black Isle games. There aren't even any rendered cutscenes... Overall, it's underwhelming. SOUNDS: 3/5 - Voice acting is generally pretty good in this game. Shakespeare's voice is sooo soothing.... hmmm... That said, the persistent grunts of pain you and your enemies make all the time will get annoying fast, and the music suffers from odd glitches from time to time; for instance, you might enter a new area to hear both dramatic introductory music and the normal ambient music at the same time. GAMEPLAY: 2/5 - This is where the game fails. SPECIAL system problems are nothing new to Black Isle games, but Lionheart has more than its share of them, for two reasons. Firstly, you MUST specialize in at least one combat-oriented skill (preferably 2, one of them ranged) to make it through this game alive. Nonviolent options don't come up often, at least not after you leave Barcelona. Secondly, quite a few of the skills you can learn are useless, or worthless beyond a certain level. On top of that, Lionheart makes a very abrupt genre shift once you leave Barcelona for the first time. Once you're out of the city and on your quest for whatever faction you joined in the first plot-quest, you may begin to feel like you're playing Diablo, because constant fighting and looting is all you do. It's not even INTERESTING fighting and looting, for the most part; combat in this game basically boils down to selecting a sword or a weapon and then clicking on whatever you want to die until it dies. The only strategic thinking you'll ever need to use is to know when to just charge in and kill everyone and when to purposefully lure a few enemies at a time away so you don't get overwhelmed. Also, you never get enough potions. Ever. Even if you buy out every shop you find whenever you find one, you'll never have enough health potions. OVERALL 3/5: This is a REALLY GOOD GAME... while you're still a low-level rookie, wandering about the starting town with eyes full of wonder and looking for all the rich hidden goodies. It goes downhill from there, though, all the way to its arbitrarily hard final dungeon and anticlimactic ending.
