I love the Hitman series - multiple ways of completing your objective, lots of clever tactics, sneaking, picking off people from a distance or planting traps to get the victim to kill himself while you're already out of the building. But this game ... this is one to be avoided. It's just waaay too hard and while it did sire the rest of the series, this is where they made the mistakes they learned from. The biggest mistake, is that the game won't let you save anywhere - combine this with how easy it is to screw up, and you're looking at replaying missions 20-30 times before you succeed. Some parts are random as well and the AI often behaves differently on several retries making it even tougher. If this game had included a limited amount of in-mission saves, it might have been worth playing but this is impossible to recommend now. 3 stars for its historical importance but as a game on its own? 1 star.
This game brings back so many memories. Sure, playing against the computer mostly sucks, but playing with friends is about the most fun you can have! Especially if you make your own maps and even create your own sound pack. This is one of those games where good or bad luck can completely change the game but in exchange, you can get some big laughs as one badly aimed bazooka sends your own worm flying through an entire mine field, causing it to knock several of your opponent's worms off the map or into the water, turning a badly aimed suicide shot in a win! Now tell me, how many games let you do that? If you have a friend to play with, this can't be missed!
I played this years back and was expecting another weak Myst-wannabe. What I didn't expect to find, was a very gripping and atmospheric tale of horror. The skill with which the developers let you uncover piece after piece of information that only serves to make the story creepier is amazing. You're basically in an old abandoned house, having to stay a few nights, and learning about a curse and many other things. For those who loved the Dark Fall series, this is a real must!
This game was made during the golden FPS year of PC gaming, when technology finally was adequate enough to give us smooth and polished FPS games. Released a mere month before Half-Life, it hadn't been influenced like many other games would be months later. It was still a standard FPS with virtually no scripted sequences, a very sparse story to tell and no real sense of reality. To get the bad bits out of the way: Blood II is far from perfect. The maps are made in such a way that you'll be scratching your head more than once. Moving from one area to the next without any reason at all, feels very odd now - from an ancient cathedral to a railway station for example. The game also doesn't really have any logic to it. You enter a house, end up on the roof only to fail finding an exit so the only thing left to do is go back to the first floor and leave the building ... which reveals that a way previously blocked has become unblocked. Why did I enter the house then? Or how about the game starting with you fighting your way through a moving train which then crashes. Cool, certainly, but when the EXACT SAME sequence happens again later in the game but with different enemies on-board, it makes you wonder what is going on. Despite this, the game gets nearly everything else right: the levels themselves are very well made for its age. A city is my favorite kind of setting so gets bonus marks, the enemies are interesting (except for the water slugs and odd spider things which are just annoying) and the weapons ... Oh the weapons... Blood II gets those right more than anything else. Every single gun is highly satisfying to use and you have a LOAD of them. From dual pistols to an assault rifle to a sniping rifle to a rail gun, to a light flare gun, to double shotguns - rarely have I played a game where each gun was deeply enjoyable and switching to another weapon due to lack of ammo never feels like a punishment the way it does in most games (yes, even Half-Life. In the end, Blood II is a simple classic FPS game at heart: lots of good fun shooting, great and interesting settings, enemies that are fun to kill and a good strong atmosphere. This game is in my top 5 of favorite late-90s shooters (along with Half-Life, Kingpin, Hexen II, Shogo & Deus Ex).
The heavy push for 3D games in the mid to late 90's caused many games to feel clunky & fiddly today and GK3 is no exception. The camera moves smoothly & the controls are pretty decent but moving around can feel clunky & slow, having to wait for Gabriel to catch up can feel a hinder but after a while you get used to it. The low resolution textures often make it hard to recognise stuff but luckily the game lets you examine almost everything of note. Less ideal is the inability to skip dialogue lines - if you skip, you skip EVERYTHING in the current conversation including back & forward responses so you can miss out on vital clues this way if you accidentally skip dialogue lines. The puzzles are all over the place - from relatively logical to extremely obtuse (cat moustache anyone?) so a walkthrough is heavily recommended. In the end I prefer the first two games for sure - especially the second game stands high above GK3 and has aged quite a lot better. GK3 suffers from very dated graphics and I'm not surprised it was the last game in the series because fans of traditional adventure games likely weren't too keen on the new 3D engine and fans of more modern games likely wouldn't enjoy a slow game like this even if it was in 3D. A lot of publishers made the dumb mistake of thinking gamers only wanted flashy 3D but history has proven them wrong many times over. Broken Sword 5 being 2D again after two very mediocre 3D adventures proved this more than anything else.
