I bought this game thinking, hey a hack and slash game in the might and magic universe, what could go wrong? boy was I in for a surprise. TL;DR terrible combat most of the game is travel from place to place and the story is almost nonexistent. The Pros: I'll start with the good stuff because there's less of it. 1. dialog is spoken, which is a feat even by today's standards, for most characters except for the monsters you meet later. 2. graphics are not bad considering the year it came out, and there's a mod for updated textures on moddb. The Cons: 1. Terrible controls, this is mostly in combat, you have to aim with the mouse where to strike but there's no crosshair or something like that. this also applies to the platforming, which is annoying because of the semi tank controls that the game uses. 2. Getting around is rubbish, there's a map of the general world and it shows you which part of it you're in now, but that's about it. no mini-map, no local area map, and with the fog to cover the awful draw distance I had to use the old maze tactic of sticking to the right wall to get around. 3. Voices are badly acted, 'nuff said. 4. had a ton of technical issues with it, won't run on 1080 only on 1680x1050. and no music, so I had a choice between the annoying footsteps or silence. 5. most of the game is empty, and this is before oblivion gave us fast travel, so you have to repeat certain areas in order to return to the quest giver. 6. like older titles, this suffers from "guess what each thing does", or have a wiki open for every item you pick up. very immersion braking, and annoying. 7. it is not clear at all times where you need to go, so I had to look at a playthrough to finish some parts of the game because wandering around searching for stuff isn't fun. those are the main issues, buy at your own peril.
I did not play this game when it originally came out, so I came to the experience with a clean palette not knowing what to expect. TL;DR The game is broken on so many levels, not just because of age. So I was thinking what could be so wrong with a game made in the golden age of 3d games of the early 2000s and made by eidos? apparently a lot. The acting for starters, so bad, not resident evil bad, but so bad. add to that the dialog cuts and pauses caused by the engine and you get the worst storytelling experience ever. And that is accompanied by the biggest flaw in the game, the pace. everything and I do mean everything is slow. painfully slow, as in get up to the bathroom come back and then continue without missing a thing slow. This is not a technical bug, it's how the game was designed. battles are slow, walking is slow and spoken text is also slow. to the point, you feel tired after a session of the game and not in a good way. I will touch on combat lastly, yes, it was relatively a new genre in the west, doing RPGs that are not based on d&d, but they could have looked at any RPG from japan to avoid all the pitfalls of the combat. I'll list a few areas where the combat is broken, compared to my vast RPG experience from all over the world. 1. Buttons placed in weird unintuitive places, and the icons not clear enough to understand what they do. 2. Filling the ATB takes ages, and when you do finally attack the animations are slow and convoluted. 3. Missing happens way too much, and stats and levels do nothing. 4. Skills and magic and items are mostly unused to the point you forget they exist. And I'll end on one final thought, this game tried to be a lot of things, and succeded in none. Stay away and keep your money for something good.
This game is the weird not so polished brother of the original Deus Ex. that's basically all you need to know to decide if you like the style or not, but i'll try to expand on it, and go into more detail below. At first, i'd like to state i tried this game way back in its day, and i put it away very quickly. but, it has been almost 18 years since it's launch, and i got this again on GOG, and due to a graphics card failure decided to give this game a shot sine my current graphics card could handle it. Let's start by stating the fact, i did not play the vanilla version of GOG, and nor should you. there's a great modding community that is still modding and patching this game daily. i got at least 3 or 4 updates during my playthrough. Now, onto the game, to anyone who played Deus Ex and loved it, this would be like playing it for the first time, or getting new content. the feel of the game, some of the sound effects, animations, graphics and other things are identical and will hit that nostalgic spot enough to get you to play this. Unlike Deus Ex, it's a linear game, very reminiscent of 90's FPS like Doom and Quake. no RPG elements or choices in dialog, but it does allow you the same freedoms that Deus Ex does in choosing how to complete a level. you can power up acrobatic and jump to higher places or away from enemies, or power up things like attack and go in guns blazing. overall it's a good game with good level design and story, but it has its flaws. for one you get 2 sidekicks along the story, and their A.I. is let's say less than stellar. though this is an issue being patched by the modding community, it is a bit annoying. there are ways to get around that, like the feature to play without them that was added by the modders, or using codes to teleport them to your location if they get stuck. to sum things up, it's not the most polished game or the best it can be, but if you enjoy Ion Storm's games and design give this one a chance!
