First of all, while most know all about Cleve's controversial), downright bizarre (and VERY racist/bigoted) political assertions I am not going to base my review on such here but for those who care about such you may want to spend some time reading what he has to say before purchasing, especially if you are not a straight, white male who hates 95% of earth. I avoided the $40+ price for the game when I purchased on Steam -I paid $10 and the game worked so poorly that I soon afterwards ended up requesting Steam to delete my account and over 50 games I paid for. Yes, that bad! I am not opposed to difficult RPGs. I enjoyed Wizardry 7 for the most part but there are some games in which the difficulty is not in the form of 'Hey that puzzle was really hard!' but instead take the form of 'This game feels -not like a difficult game- but instead like doing a lot of hard work!' Grimoire is such a game. The interface/UI is just plain convoluted, forcing you to ask "WHY do things this way?!". I normally give RPGs bonus points for having a lot of character builds but Grimoire is full of confusing and stupid crap in this regard. Puzzles make no sense and neither do some of the character races such as the male Nagas/Giants. Don't even get me started on how an 8 person party rides around on a giant sea turtle through underground tunnels! I don't give a 1 star review because I like 2D artwork/graphics and here they are as good or better than say Wizardry 7. There are a very few 'That was ok.' bits but still most of this game feels like working some sort of office job where every day is an exercise in trying to get people to do simple things in strange ways because of bizarre company rules . Notice the positive reviews on here are all 5 stars and most of them do not give actual reasons why the game is good. They instead just say something like 'I agree with Cleve's politics and am only here to counter all of the negative reviews .'
I already own both the original CD game (which does not run on Windows 10) as well as a version put together by the popular "All video" ebay seller (his real name is Chris) which installs and runs in Windows 10 x64. For starters, contrary to what the first reviewer said, this is not an RPG by any stretch of the imagination. It is a Gauntlet-like arcade/action game where you start with one guy and then recruit up to three others. Unlike Gauntlet the game does not constrain itself to a single endless dungeon. Most of your adventure takes place above ground though there are some challenging 'dungeons' as you progress. I don't play many real-time action games anymore because I am largely unable to given my age and health issues but Hexplore I can still play. Combat is not so overwhelming (as it is in the "Gauntlet: Slayer" edition) that I am forced to give up and for this type of game everything is done really well. The characters, dialog, graphics and gameplay are all well done. It has been quite a while since I ventured far into the game so I cannot comment much about actual levels, enemies, tactics and details right now but the game is excellent!
Warcraft II: Battle-net Edition is the best version of one of the best real-time strategy games. The Battle-Net edition adds features such as 'ctrl + (number) to identify groups that can be easily selected by pressing the 1 - 9 number key you have identified that group with. As for the game itself, Warcraft 2 that is, despite my hatred of real-time games in general I plowed through this game (the 'Orc' campaign at least) in like 1998 (long before the 'Battle-Net' features were added). Don't even bother trying to play the first Warcraft game. It is literally like working more than it is like playing a PC game. Warcraft 2 combines charming and powerful voice-overs, very nice graphics and splendid art direction with great single player campaigns and maps (and random maps) for a game that even a turn-based junkie like me can enjoy! My actual score would be 4.5 (four and one half stars).
Plain and simple: the Hellfire expansion pack from Sierra adds so much to the game (including three new classes to play, new quests, etc.) that Diablo without such is a two or three - star game (at best).
When this game was first released, and for about 14 years afterwards, I had little interest in playing it. The 'race as class' thing reminded me of OD&D - a game system I absolutely hate- and the 'Create one PC and recruit the rest' thing was at the time starting to get on my nerves. But I bought it on GOG with the idea that maybe there was some fun to be had if I found myself really bored with no other games to play. Boy was I wrong. For starters after playing this for a while I could understand why they went with the 'class = race and class' thing. It has a lot to do with how the skill and abilities system works with classes in the modern Might and Magic games. It makes a LOT more sense to me now that I understand the reasoning behind it. I won't waste space here with elaboration on this though. Play this game and you will see. And the 'Create one and recruit the rest' aspect, while I never hated such in any RPGs I have come to really appreciate in this game (Plus there is a custom add-on script thing which you can download from Greyface's M&M page which allows you to create all of your party members). One reason is that dragons...are unfortunately way overpowered and being able to create one as your primary PC would have made the game hard to enjoy. At least this way you have to go achieve some things before being able to recruit a dragon. Sure the 'recruit most of your party' aspect, as in most RPGs which use this - allows you to exploit and get absurdly powerful characters earlier than you should but really most people who play this (your typical average RPGer) will not even think of going on a near suicide run to be able to exploit healing temples and recruit a level 50 knight before their party is level 30. And so having this option does not really hurt anything. Running out of room here so I will end this a bit shorter than I would like.
The problems started with character creation. Despite the impressions you may get from the description you are limited to creating only a human character (and recruit others as the game progresses). The story is Baldur's Gate (2 mostly) redone AGAIN which would be excusable if this were 2001 and/or the rest of the game were good. A shame because the description implies something less 'crusading heroes out to save the world' . There is a tutorial mode but it is next to worthless. You will come to a section early on where monsters will continually respawn while your PC yells "close the holes!" but after trying to figure out how to do this for hours with ZERO help from the tutorial I was done. I like hard RPGs well enough (I am a Nahlakh player since the mid' 90s and you do not get more difficult than that) but this is the wrong kind of difficult. It is not tactically challenging but just hard in terms of UI. Fans of the various incarnations of 'The Dark Eye' RPG might be more impressed but not me. The game does not make you want to destroy your PC, (go play the buggy Blood Bowl game from Cyanide for that!) but it will make you want to give up and go play something fun.
Make no mistake, this game is not a racing game. Not really anyway. I mean yes, there are tracks and if you were to race through them and beat everyone else to the finish line of the final lap, I assume you would win. I say "assume" here because I am not sure I ever tried that. You would really have to be aching for some sort of hardcore challenge to be actually racing against other cars in this game. The best means of winning the races in Carmageddon 2 is to destroy the other automobiles. Pull over after the race starts, turn around and drive right at the other drivers. This may sound kind of boring to some, but I assure you it is not. There is no greater thrill in video games than pulling off impossibly acrobatic maneuvers while destroying other vehicles. You earn money and points by performing these stunts and damaging and destroying other vehicles and this money can be spent immediately to repair damage to your own car (by hitting the backspace key IIRC). When you destroy cars in races you are then able to select those cars to drive yourself in future races. After every three or so races you win in the campaign game you must complete a mission. These missions vary from jumping your car across multiple rooftops to destroy satellite dishes to trying to take out people in an air traffic control tower. They get increasingly more difficult as you progress. Some of the latter missions are nearly impossible to complete but you will have a ton of fun trying.
I will detail the few but significant flaws before going into what makes this game so amazing. For starters, this game is deservedly one of the worst offenders for 'Level scaling' and horrendously re-spawning monsters. Monsters often spawn at a level higher than the PC party (at least until the middle to latter part of the game). And the turn-based combat can lead to some random battles taking over an hour to finish (however see my 'good' points regarding this further down). Damage spells are very ineffective compared to de-buffs and such. The game is shorter than CotDS by a long shot. And that's about the extent of the flaws. Combat is brilliantly turn-based and Wizardry 8 introduces 'tactical formations' for your party members which, combined with using terrain to your advantage, really adds something to the first person combat. Magic is well thought out and, other than the aforementioned weakness of damage spells (like Fireball), a lot of fun. The exploitative class-changing of Wizardry 7 has been fixed here and makes a whole lot more sense. The designers really improved upon D.W. Bradley's original design in several ways. For starters they replaced the cumbersome "Kirijutsu", "Skullduggery", "Legerdemain" ...etc., with instantly recognizable terms (i.e. "Criticals", "Locks and Traps" etc.). The classes and races are better balanced and more interesting to play than they were in W7.
First of all, contrary to what the "Content is King" review says, only the first two Avernums/Exiles are solely underground. The third one is primarily above ground. RPGs are really tactical simulation games and the Avernum games really shine here. My only gripe with the first two Avernums is that the first two only allow you to play humans, which bores me to tears and limits the strategic/tactical options. But from the third game onward they are much more enjoyable both because of the two nonhuman races and the expansion out of the underworld. The Avernums lack the combat options of top down CRPGs like Natuk and Helherron such as aiming for specific body parts, wielding two weapons, etc. but they make up for this with great encounter design and challenging enemies. Blades of Avernum is probably the best of all of these games because it allows you to play unlimited user-created scenarios (like the old FRUA game system) and the fan made scenarios are often even better than the official games and scenarios from Spiderweb. I prefer Blades of Exile (BoE) over the BoA because I like the old game system better and it is free/open source. The text holds no interest for me but thankfully you can ignore it and still get through the games without much trouble. Overall I give Avernum 1 & 2 three stars, Avernum 3, 5 & 6 four stars and Avernum 4 two stars (it is easily the worst Spiderweb game ever made). Blades of Avernum gets four stars for being so infinitely replayable.
