It's Saints Row. What am I gonna say. If you know what Saints Row is like, I don't need to say anything, if you don't you should probably not buy this game blindly. What I WILL say though, is that this version seems to be somehow botched. Not to say that the experience I remember was anything stellar, Saints Row on PC was always a secondhand experience, with the ports being... not well ported. My issue lies with the bugs though. I've sank about 3-4 hours into my current playthrough - I'm not far into the game. Meaning, not much savefile/scripting spaghetti to get tangled and cause stuff to bug out "naturally". Hence, obviously, this release is not the best. I've encountered an odd funny glitch here and there in my 4 hours; cars being stuck vertically in roads, enemies despawning or phasing into existence out of nothing... the usual. Just now though, I was driving, exploring, drove through a puddle THAT WAS KNEE DEEP AT MOST, and my car behaved as if I jumped off a pier into the sea, forcing me out, with the car despawning. Okay...? So I run the rest of the way to my intended activity, when a ped starts randomly attacking me. I kill them, and Morningstar suddenly starts hunting me, literally spawning 3 cars of enemies out of nowhere. Running low on ammo anyway, I run rest of the way to my trafficking activity. This progresses okay, I do 3 out of 4 drops, when at the last drop, Pierce just bugs out and stands in place, not moving, not even attacking, just shouting his oneliners, LITERALLY 10 METERS AWAY FROM THE DEALER, who also will not budge. After killing all the Morningstar, they stop arriving as well, so I'm stuck: can't finish the activity, can't fail it, can't do anything. Alt+F4, writing this review. 3 stars because the GOG version seems WAAAAY buggier than what I remember playing. If this continues next time I play, I'm refunding.
I'm not gonna lie, the game is absolutely amazing. I've played the first SC as well, and SC2 expands very successfuly on the first game. The unit roster is great for all three factions, the maps are cool, the gameplay is amazingly brutal at times, everything works VERY well together. Now, this is where it gets tough, for me personally. I'm not too big on strategy game campaigns and story. Now I'm sure that SC2 has at least a decent story, and I'm sure that there are loads of people who find most of their enjoyment of the game there, but that's not me. To me, if a strategy game doesn't have the ability to hold my attention with skirmishes / random map games alone, I won't play it. And that's the point: once you've played the game for all three factions once, the game won't surprise you anymore. I did exactly that, cranking up the AI difficulty with each game. That is fun for a couple hours, but it gets stale. It's not helped by the fact that the game has embarassingly few maps for you to play on. Even the unit roster, while each faction has a unit for every situation and specification, gets stale. You basically have around 10 units per faction if you play on land maps, 15-ish on water maps. That's nothing too great. I imagine that the game would probably be best suited for multiplayer matches, but again, not really my cup of tea. Hence my three stars. Super well made, well thought out, better than the first game, but there's just too little stuff to mess around with, and it gets very repetitive and boring FAST.
I bought Tropico 4 shortly after purchasing, and promptly refunding, Tropico 3. I also own Tropico 1, 2, and 6. While every entry in the series represents gradual evolution, I personally think that Tropico 4 is a perfectly balanced point right in the middle, with the game being just detailed enough to satisfy your OCD without giving you an aneurism, and at the same time being goofy and fun without being a full on arcade building placement simulator with an arbitrary budget. Tropico 1 and 2 are hardcore, oldschool, very detailed "dictator simulators" with heavy ephasis on the unseen; i.e. stats, numbers, RNG, ranges, etc. Tropico 3 started leaning more into the casual territory, yet it still suffers from a lot of stuff being straight up unclear, and thus making the game rough for new players. Tropico 5 and 6 are... not my favorite games. The developers made the games TOO accessible, and also succumbed to the plague of "let's release a million underwhelming DLCs and sell them for a price of a regular game". If a developer does that, NEVER EVER support them. Tropico 4, as I've said already, is perfectly balanced, as all things should be. You don't NEED TO be super heavily invested into the deeper game mechanics to have fun. You don't HAVE TO spend 10 minutes with the almanac open, pondering over graphs, stats, and lists. You are not REQUIRED TO elaborately plan out building placement on your island beforehand. Sure, your island will not be as much of a well oiled machine as it could potentially be, but you can still have fun in a goofy socioeconomic simulator without being too gung-ho about the actual social economics. If you DO, however, go all in and really try to understand how, and more importantly, WHY things work the way they do, Tropico 4 offers immense, well polished, and very fun depth which is very rare in strategy games nowadays. If you enjoy city builders with JUST ENOUGH economy and micro management, absolutely buy this game. DLCs not obligatory btw
Absolutely wonderful little gem. Pandemic really knew how to make games. I highly recommend the game, it has everything: Assassin's Creed like climbing and open world exploration, satisfyingly violent combat, really good stealth mechanics (once you learn how they work), engaging story and characters, and absolutely wonderful world for you to explore and re-saturate. Honestly, the game's main selling point, the de-monochroming of Paris district by district, takes something of a backseat in my book, serving only an aesthetic purpose. Instead, you are constantly soaking it somewhat oppressing, yet defiant vibes - and they sure are awesome vibes. Overall, if you enjoy open world sandbox games, WWII era themed stuff, and a good bit of dark and gritty humor, this is absolutely for you.
I have it on Steam. I love the period, gangster games, and am a fan of Kalypso. This game, however, is Kalypso at their worst. Saying the game is unfinished would actually be praising it. It feels like a pre-alpha, made only for screenshots. It's buggy, clunky, doesn't play well, includes mechanics which don't work or do not benefit the player to implement, forcing them to just spam the same strategies over and over. Combat especially is just... not even worth talking about. It's horrible. Not to mention how extremely linear, unintuitive, and frankly, extremely boring the game gets after the first hour or so. Do not throw away your money with this. I'm doing you a favor by warning you.
So I just spent a good while troubleshooting why the game is giving me an error before loading even the first intro logo, and then crashing. Tried all versions and regions of patches, and after scouring the limited information available, since the game is pretty old now, I found out the reason. Basically, if you wanna play this on a laptop that has an integrated Intel UHD graphics card.... you won't. Simple as that. No going around it. Seeing as Intel is the biggest supplier of integrated graphics cards on the market, and seeing as the majority of gamers that don't really need to own a '360 Noscope Pro Gamer Razer Gaming Rig 9000' are on laptops, I would very much like GOG to at least properly test the games they put on their store to check if the product is more than a virtual paperweight, since, oh you know... PEOPLE ARE SPENDING MONEY ON IT... At least add a warning to the store page or something.
