This game is like playing the best novel I've ever read. I wouldn't think it'd be possible to make an almost all-dialogue RPG feel well-paced and easy to absorb, but somehow it is. The fact that it's almost all well-written and well-acted just seems even more improbable. And then there's the fact that when you get right into it, the game almost feels therapeutic. Disco Elysium is a game about wrestling with one's own loss and damage without deploying platitudes or excusing the shame and regret that comes with dysfunction. It's world is a fictionalised caricature, but it's a very sober reflection on post-communist failure, a bombed-out district where the hope and romance of better tomorrow turned sour and then got ground into the dirt. It's a game a about a massive hangover and the cold light of day - the literal one the booze-soaked amnesiac protagonist wakes up with, but also an emotional one, a political one, a philosophical one. It's a game about starting in the shadow of failure and regret with no realistic chance of anything better, and then finding a way to live with it all the same. It's a game about immense sadness that is also sharp, funny and compelling. It's darkly humorous without being nihilistic or edgy. It's often cynical, but not hopeless. It's tender, but not cloying. It's explicitly political and extremely dense, without being too pretentious or self-serious. It genuinely feels like it should be impossible to make something like this and have it also be enjoyable, but it is! If you're looking for a more informative review, well, sorry. But the reason I'm almost entirely focused on writing is... that's all there is, really. It's part RPG and part adventure game, but even the stats you level up are all about engaging in dialogue with different aspects of your character's own brain. If you're the kind of person who loves a good book but feel too addled sit down to read one anymore, then give this a go.
Having gone into this game without any nostalgia filter, I think I can easily say the game's milsim core has held up in a lot of ways. For sure it's flawed and clunky in a way that almost any old game is, but what kept it worthwhile for me was the fact that the game is seriously committed to making you feel like you're on a battlefield. This is probably it's greatest strength, AND it's biggest weakness. Right from the start you'll be thrown into the kind of unglamorous, long-range firefights that have you crawling from cover to cover, taking potshots at enemies you can barely see and clenching every time you hear a bullet land near you. Controls are built around you feeling like a real soldier on a battlefield, which helps with immersion but can really take quite a bit of adjustment. If you're a pervert for this kind of immersive difficulty and want to feel like just another grunt on a battlefield then you're on board already, but it has problems, most of which revolve around level design imo. An example: one particularly infamous level has you separated from your squad and forced to rapidly navigate your way over whole kilometres of open country filled with enemy patrols. This kind of slog can still have a certain kind of realistic appeal and it's certainly a memorable experience, but all too often levels ask you to invest a lot of time in slow-burning tension, only for you to repeat it because an angry dot on the horizon put a single bullet through your back from half a klik away. It's the kind of irritation that comes up when a game is prioritising realism over fun, and while that might be what people buy this kind of thing for (I know I do) It'd be so much better if they just gave you the option to save more than once per mission! I still have to recommend it, though. In spite of it's problems and graphical limitations, it manages to be surprisingly immersive when things heat up.
Played a pirated copy of Battlezone '98 a few years ago and found it a really unique, enjoyable game. But it's also incredibly flawed and awkward. It'd be worth a four-star review to the kind of person who doesn't mind playing something awkward and flawed so long as it's unique (i.e. me) but it hasn't aged well enough to justify this price tag. Don't consider it until you can get it for maybe 60% off.
The idea of a Shooter-RTS hybrid had been done before, and you might suspect that a game that does both is a game that does neither very well. You'd be right in this case, but Hostile Waters still works so well because of how lean it is. Warfare is asymmetrical, as you never control a large army or build infrastructure and only ever dispatch a handful of elite units from a lone supercarrier, carrying out lightning-fast assaults on enemy facilities and salvaging the wreckage for resources. The AI, however, maintains large bases and harvests resources with which to churn out massive numbers of units that it'll use to pro-actively hunt down your carrier and units. It's deceptively simple gameplay-wise, but things get complicated quite quickly. You can end up dispatching salvage vehicles, scouting enemy territory from the air for promising targets, and co-ordinating tank assaults to destroy enemy factories, all simultaneously, and all on the way to completing a mission that initially seemed simple. It's fast-paced and seems basic initially, but punishing if you don't keep your momentum up and fight tactically. And why are you doing this? Well, you're defending the fully automated luxury communist utopia of the "future" (2012) from the resurgent and insidious forces of capitalism. That's not really reading between the lines, either - it's an endearingly goofy and far-out premise, but a sincere and explicitly political one, which was rare back then and possibly even rarer today. It's fairly minimal and a bit daft, but sombre atmosphere, tight writing and excellent voice acting give it genuine weight. Seriously, if you find anything said about this game even slightly interesting, you should buy it. Few games are this unique, and fewer still were this great.