https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st9grxLDh2c And then decide if this is your kind of game. In my opinion, this game is horrible as a game. Visually it is excellent, but it sucks as a game. The developers could have simply taken the real life challenges of a real ant colony and portrayed them accurately. Instead they made a mediocre ant-colony themed RTS. Such a wasted opportunity... I had this game for a while on my wishlist. It is no longer on my wishlist.
One reviewer said “Not too great”… Well, that reviewer was TOO kind. This game is very BAD. I wish I could give it a NEGATIVE rating, but... the lowest rating I can give it is 1-star. How about ZERO stars, GOG? I don’t want to waste my time on explaining why this game is so bad... But I will say this: DO NOT GET this game EVEN IF IT IS FREE OF CHARGE: You will regret wasting the moments of your life, for which there’s NO refund, if you play this… game. Better go find a man/woman to talk to. And if everything else fails… masturbate. Just don’t waste a second of your life on this garbage…
The system requirements listed on GOG are misleading. Microsoft and the developer are pushing Windows 10 and 11. Resist! I was not sure if I could run this game on Windows 7 (which is my main PC for everyday use free of Microsoft telemetry and spyware), so I ran the installer in Windows 7 compatibility mode and set the game’s exe to run in Windows 7 compatibility mode. The game runs PERFECTLY. Don’t be fooled by bogus system requirements! Next I will try Showgunners and Miasma Chronicles. I think they will run fine on Windows 7 (my Windows 7 system exceeds the recommended specs, minus the OS requirement). As for The Genesis Order (TGO) game itself, there are noticeable improvements over Lust Epidemic and Treasure of Nadia. Still, TGO has the same problems as the previous games (see my reviews of these games on GOG, if interested): - PIXEL HUNTING! There is MUCH more of it in TGO than in both previous games combined! - Too many scripted events which take control of the game when you want to do something. You have no choice but to watch these events while forgetting what you wanted to do/explore/pick up and where that item you wanted to pick up was. - Still too much text to click through in adult scenes. Too much fluff text unrelated to the story overall. Be ready to click SKIP… ... A LOT! - Too many sex scenes!!! They interrupt the flow of the game/story and GET OLD FAST. I mean, somewhere half through the game you WILL start frantically clicking SKIP. I promise: YOU WILL! VERDICT: The Genesis Order was an INSTA-BUY for me mostly because I wanted to explore the continuation of the story. Well, other than the story the rest of the game is pretty much the same as Treasure of Nadia: The devs employed a cookie-cutter approach. And, unlike in the previous games, there’s almost NO humor in TGO: it made me smile ... twice, maybe. I doubt that I will be buying the next chapter unless its reviews point to MAJOR improvements… like getting rid of dreaded PIXEL HUNTING.
My review of Lust Epidemic (LE) is in addition to my review of Treasure of Nadia (ToN) here on GOG. The LE is a prequel to ToN, but I ran out of space reviewing ToN, so I am adding something here. The two reviews should be considered together because ToN is the second chapter of LE and shares the same good and bad things with it. THE GOOD: 1. Lust Epidemic is a very interesting game REGARDLESS of adult content. Adult content is cool and all, but it is NOT what makes this game good (see THE UGLY below). 2. Interesting mystery/who-done-it story with many UNEXPECTED twists. This contrasts with most other games, regardless of the genre, where you can sense the upcoming twists a mile away. 3. Interesting characters (some two dozen of them), both male and female, pursuing their own hidden goals. 4. Events are sometimes spooky, sometimes funny. 5. Sensible quests and puzzles. 6. Good art (including animations in adult scenes). THE BAD (small things): 1. Inventory system. It is BAD. Gets in the way of solving quests and puzzles. 2. NO way to track quests – no journal/quest log of any kind, so you’d better have a notepad and a pen to write everything down so you can track your progress towards whatever goal/objective. 3. Pixel hunting!!! PIXEL HUNTING!!! Is this 1995 for fukc’s sake?! … Thankfully, there is not very much of this, but there is ENOUGH to make you google for it. SUCKS! BAD design! 4. All of the above applies to ToN as well. THE UGLY (MAJOR FLAW): 1. The Visual Novel part of the game is atrocious. It is absolutely HORRIBLE. There is WAY-WAY-WAY TOO MUCH USELESS, SUPERFLUOUS, MEANINGLESS, BLOATED TEXT. Especially in the sex scenes (see my ToN review for details). 2. The text in LE contains a horrendous number of spelling and grammar errors which sometimes make it completely UNREADABLE (this is NOT the case in ToN, in ToN they did proofread the text). The devs could have cut the text by 70-80 percent without prejudice to the game!
A part of me wants to give ToN 5 stars, the other part – 0 stars. THE GOOD: interesting story, horror and humor (made me LMAO a few times), unique characters, puzzles, adventure, crafting, RPG elements, adult content, great pixel art, environments, cinematics and animations and NO crashes. THE BAD: ToN is much LESS than the sum of its good parts. 1. The story is killed by EXCESSIVELY long SCRIPTED conversations you must read or you will miss the story. There is a SKIP button, but if you use it, you miss the (good) story. The adult scenes consist of short segments. Each segment contains A LOT OF TEXT. It is mostly primitive text, and you must click SKIP to move to the next segment. Many scenes have up to 50 sentences. I wonder if the devs ever had sex in real life. NO ONE EVER talks THAT much, not even in porn movies! It starts as amusing and then progressively deteriorates to intolerable. 2. You are CONSTANTLY interrupted by scripted events. So you forget what you intended to do and must rely on the in-game hint system or google. 3. Most puzzles are impossible, unless you google them. 4. Crafting is backwards. You have a Chest for recipes, BUT YOU CANNOT STORE recipes you find in it! A recipe appears in the Chest only AFTER you have used it. The scrolls remain on the ground but you cannot pick them up and store them in the Chest for quick reference later. 5. Inventory system is BAD. Items are constantly shuffled and it is hard to find what you need. 6. Fishing mini-game is atrocious AND, just like with all other elements, completing the game depends on it. You cannot solve the last puzzle without making the Bait Shop going broke. VERDICT: Great game killed by BAD design. If the devs cut the text by 70 percent, it would STILL be too much (especially in sex scenes). It took me 104 hours to complete ToN (and I googled half the puzzles). I was clicking SKIP so much and so frantically that it killed my enjoyment and now my wrist HURTS.
GOG, add a ZERO-star rating. Please. While watching the intro sequence I became suspicious: For an experienced (read “old”) gamer like me (with close to 1000 games owned and played, overall) it felt unimaginative, standard. Nothing caught my attention AT ALL. Standard language, standard sound, standard voice acting… EVERYTHING pointed to a few STANDARD-thinking IT guys making a STANDARD game hoping to make the STANDARD amount of money from STANDARD-thinking… consumers OF STANDARD junk. A few seconds later I became even more suspicious, but I hit the Esc key and went to Options. My suspicions turned out to be justified: There is NO mouse-look… in a 3D game. You hit E and Q to snap 90 degrees left or right, and you scroll sideways or forward/backwards with WSAD. Hmmm. BUT I DIGRESS: Perhaps there is a story somewhere there (which I doubt based on the quality of the Intro). And, while I am old school, I’ve seen a good number of modern games (say, 30-50) and the movement mechanics of Vaporum make me want to say to the developers – NEXT TIME MAKE A POINT-AND-CLICK adventure game if you want to “tell a story”. Make a graphic novel or something.
I played FoT back in the day. It was clunky in more ways than I can list here. I blamed it on my inadequate PC. Now that my PC is 100 times more powerful than the PC I had back in the day, I gave FoT another shot. Nostalgia, you see... Now I know, it was not my old PC. FoT is still clunky due to poor coding. LAG everywhere. But this is not the worst of it. There are NO tactics involved. The ingredients are there, but the AI sucks and the only viable tactics 95% of the time is to set your team on Defensive (so they don't shoot unless attacked), send a scout with high Sneak skill to find a group of enemies, line up your soldiers in a kind of a firing squad formation, switch from Defensive to Aggressive and let them annihilate the enemy. The rest of the enemies not directly involved will continue to go about their business as if there is no battle going on 30 yards away. Rinse. Repeat. Another problem is balance: This time I decided to include a strong Unarmed Master warrior in my squad... but I found no viable way to use unarmed skills as they have a range of 1 and every time she runs up to the target, the target moves and she just keeps chasing it...Yet another balance problem is that a single enemy can navigate through the wall of lead of your 'firing squad', get in melee range and kick the shit out of your guys. What else... There are 3 turn based modes: Continuous TB, while good on paper, does not work; Individual TB is insanely tedious; and Squad TB is something that I still don't quite comprehend (but it could just be my low IQ). ON THE BRIGHT SIDE -- FoT, OVERALL, is a BETTER game than Wasteland 2. Huh, you did not expect that, did you? Both games suck though and both are OPPORTUNISTIC ATTEMPTS at a kind of a rip-off: FoT is a below average Fallout-themed squad-based tactical game, Wasteland 2 is the same kind of a rip-off of the original. If you get FoT, get it at a DEEP discount just to try it out. But I would not advise investing time in it.
I imagine that everything the "Nostalgic rosy glasses" say about it was true back in the day, but the naked truth of it is that the game is so awkward and deficient in terms of movement (and especially combat which is a huge part of the game) that it becomes almost unplayable. It has not aged well *at all*. Please bear with me and allow me to elaborate a little. Before I stepped one foot into the game I made sure I've modded it with the best mods out there. I spent close to 30 hours researching the mods, making sure I did not install any mods that might be in conflict with one another... Long story short, I made the game look nice(er) and work better, and my actual install of Morrowind today is ... 12 GIGABYTE. TWELVE GIGABYTE... and the game still FAILS... because it is heavily reliant on COMBAT which is hopelessly broken and deficient (in spite of the Accurate Attack mod which is supposed to make every attack hit as long as you are in range). Bottom line is that if you create a custom character (who is not a mage shooting fireballs or some such), you have no chance of survival. Ok, you could tough it out and suffer through *countless* deaths (caused by idiotic combat mechanics and class imbalance) for the first 20-30 hours of game-play before you get a glimpse of a fighting chance at survival and questionable RPG fun ... or you could save many hours of your life (and a few coins) BY SKIPPING THIS hopelessly outdated game.
I am biased. I do appreciate games made by 1C , like King's Bounty series which I played to death and enjoyed every moment (in spite of the games being pretty difficult even on the Normal setting). Played Space Rangers HD (loved it for a long time but never finished because ... no room to explain here). 1C is a Russian developer. And I am Russian. So, yes, I am biased alright. Yet, though part of me wants to give Fantasy Wars a 10/5 rating (for MANY legitimate GOOD reasons), and while it really deserves a 4/5 rating... I am giving it a 2/5 rating BECAUSE: In spite of incredible finesse C1 is known for, in spite of incredible (and refined yet stimulating) complexity that games made by Russian developers (such as C1) are well renowned for... Fantasy Wars has one ginormous flaw: You have all the command and all the flexibility, you have all the military units you could dream of, you have all the customization options you might have imagined, you are the KING of your army and the skills of any and all units... Hey, you can even rename any unit so you can recognize it for its unique skills when preparing for battle... BUT: You do not EVER have a SLIGHTEST idea about what TYPE OF ENEMY UNITS YOU WILL FACE IN THE UPCOMING BATTLE.... which renders all of the above preparation, customization, unit skills, complexity and finesse ... NULL AND VOID. In essence, it is trial and error: Build and customize your army, upgrade or replace your units, choose which special skills/abilities to give to your units, start a mission, suffer game-ending losses, rinse, repeat. But it gets worse! You have a limited number of turns to complete your mission. Granted, you have X turns for Gold rewards, Y for Silver and Z for Bronze and while this is an intriguing idea, in practice it is a nightmare: Achieve the goal(s) in 6 turns (lose MOST of your army)=get nice rewards, do it in 20 turns (saving and leveling your units)=go broke (and new units/upgrades cost money).
