I played through this game the first time on easy... A look in the manual reveals why the "secret" level is mostly secret...As this is a older game, this game has two easy modes instead of two variants of hard...So most people propably played this once on Easy without realizing and thus haven´t unlocked the level after completing the game...So with that knowledge i played the game on hard which was also fun, though doing it for the secret level isn´t really worth it as its basically just killing enemy waves that get increasingly harder the nearer you draw to the statue of liberty. It´s a 5-10 minute challenge level and thats it. Don´t expect anything crazy with playing on hard as well, you don´t really need to get more tactical...Just push your squad less headfirsst into fights...Though what you will quickly realize is that killing enemies really eats your ammo as their health pool gets larger and they hit harder which just means letting your squad defend a good spot for longer instead of helping them with the weaker enemies.
I wanted to have this game aswell on GOG after i 100%ed the game on Steam and getting all achievements in this game is pretty fun...But as soon as i opened the game, all achievements began popping up (i assume its either a bug or the game reads the files of the Steam Version, dunno), defeating the purpose of this purchase...While i will refund the game therefore, i can wholeheartedly recommend playing and actually getting 100% of the achievements, all characters are distinct enough (Big Quests) and fun to play...You can easily sink in 150 hours to get all achievements, depending on how good you are/ how the rng is but the hours are filled with pure fun and i would even recommend it for full price.
Nice roguelite overall though a little on the short side (it took me 13.5 hours to 100%, though i didn´t have the motivation to unlock the last scrap ups)...Explosions and projectile were my go to, lasers didn´t seem that powerful although i haven´t really used them outside of the prism guy. The orbital weapons feel more like you need to deliberately use them instead of focusing on collecting scrap and evasion, which is the reason i also kind of avoided them Overall you can´t do much wrong for 4 euros, much less even for the saleprice of two euros (although i understand that there are many vampirelikes around 5 euros which offer more content than this game, i´m just glad this game is part of the roguelikes also on GOG) .
I haven´t played an hour yet but i can already tell that i´ll like the roguelike system in play...So gameplay, story and such are all nice and dandy but the game resets with every start the difficulty to easy mode and the language to my system language (German)...If these annoyances were to be fixed, i would give it the full five stars it deserves.
I refunded it...Yes, the modern controls kinda suck bc you can perform half the actions you can with the classic controls which are fine to use...What really kills it is no qol features like a save and load confirmation screen...Like cmon, it can´t be that hard to implement, "modern" gamer or not...I´m sure it would save atleast some people from headache...Also the cutscenes sometimes stutter in video and desync in sound and other times its completely fine...Also is it just me or are the cutscenes worse? Maybe i´m remembering them wrong but i thought you could atleast make out actual facial features of the woman in the beginning of TR 1 instead of pixel mush but thats propably just me lol.
I don´t know of its the d3d8.dll file meant to fix bugs with a frame rate of over 60 or if the game resets everything itself with every game start but it is effin annoying...Oh, also it doesn´t quite recognize that you´re in the game so the first mouse click throws you out of the game and you can only alt-tab back in bc it doesn´t even show in the taskbar.
I liked this game, though it took me longer than for most people to finish this game (8 hours, first game of this sort). The action is fun, its short...Just a silly little B movie shooter. Yeah, the goons might be a little too accurate but the real kicker is the shotgun which can one shot your full health+ plus some armor (its inconsistent). Other problems include audio mixing (the voices are too quiet sometimes), the captions disappearing too quickly, the last boss sucks (the last level is the worst in general) and some other minor bugs Overall i recommend the game, especially if you can get it for less than a euro.