I played PAX IMPERIA when it was released and though I am a huge fan of turn-based 4x games (such as Master of Orion 2) I absolutely loved this real-time game (you can slow or pause time if you need a minute to think or step away from your PC). In fact, I loved PAX so much that for the last 15 years, while playing something else (like Galactic Civilizations) I kept remembering about PAX and I wanted to drop whatever I was playing to go back to PAX. The problem has been that I could not get my CD version to work correctly on modern machines, so thanks to GOG for making it available here. Of all the games I've played over the last 25 years, this game is among my top ten most memorable ones.
Some two years and 4 patches after release, most of the original W2 problems still exist: - character creation is a mess, most of the skills are useless or redundant - leveling up is stupid: you always walk around with unspent skill points - you spend 1/3 of your time sorting through inventory and dumb weapon upgrade system where you cannot simply detach a desired part from a weapon - instead you have a LOW chance of getting a RANDOM part regardless of your weaponsmith skill - you spend another 1/3 of your time opening objects as nearly EVERY object has a booby trap, a lock and an alarm and your "security specialist" will critically fail 2 out of 3 times even with 68+ percent chance of success, and the loot is mostly junk, and you wonder who would secure "that box" in this manner to protect ... junk - item/skill system is unbalanced: the best setup is 2 snipers, 3 riflemen and an energy weapons specialist; pistols, melee weapons, shotguns, heavy weapons (and related skills/tactics) are useless: why "tactically" approach when you can kill at range? - later in the game you can't wear good armor - it makes you MORE VULNERABLE as energy weapons which do double damage to armored targets, and early in the game strong armors don't exist - combat requires NO tactics: AI always charges at you to get within range while your snipers with longer range kill them; there is NO prone position; you cannot move while crouched - you must stand up wasting APs; head shots are useless until VERY late in the game when your skills are maxed; that's because head shot penalty is minus 40 percent chance to hit - some quests are still broken - many interface/inventory icons don't match what you see in-game - the story is plain and the ending is idiotic: try for an alternative ending - instead of approaching the main villain shoot him in the head with a 100 percent chance to hit and without being spotted but instead of dying he starts a never-ending and annoying speech...
This game is a HUGE disappointment. I bought it on Steam early access . The game was incomplete and horribly broken, but I hoped retail version would be fixed. Nope. Not even close. When the game shipped it was still broken, badly designed dull and even now, nearly two years and several massive patches later, the vast majority of the original problems still exist: - you spend 30 percent of your play time sorting through convoluted inventory and nonsensical weapon upgrade system where you cannot simply detach a scope (or any other useful part) from a weapon being stripped for parts - instead you have a percent chance of getting this or that part - you will spend another 30 percent of play time opening boxes, chests and safes as nearly EVERY box, chest, safe, door and gate has 1) a booby trap, 2) a lock and 3) an alarm (! and you need to use THREE different skills to disarm them !); and, your 'security specialist' will trigger critical failures on these nearly EVERY TIME even with 68 and higher percent chance of success; and the loot you find is random, nearly always useless junk, and you wonder who would secure that box in this manner to protect useless junk - item/skill system is unbalanced: if you have 2 snipers, 3 riflemen and an energy weapons specialist you are set, rendering pistols, melee weapons, shotguns, heavy weapons (and related skills/tactics) useless - in the second half of the game you can't wear any good armor as it makes you MORE VULNERABLE because enemies use energy weapons which do double damage to armored targets, and in the first half of the game good armors are unavailable - some quests are still partly broken and most quests require a LOT OF running back and forth - sound of the dot-matrix printer (showing events feedback) is maddening and cannot be turned off - the story is cliche and the ending is idiotic (where shooting the main bad guy in the head without being spotted triggers (instead of his death) a never-ending speech...
This game appears to be perfect at first - all game play elements are excellent. So what gives? Firstly, the checkpoint Save system with only one save is awful. I am presently stuck on the surface with my gas mask filter about to expire ... and I've just hit a checkpoint save. Now I must reload the whole chapter from the start. As for gas mask filters, "... Most gas mask filters will last around 24 hours in an NBC (nuclear biological chemical) situation." Yet in the game a filter lasts two minutes. So instead of playing, you search for filters half the time. You have no idea where you should go: You know you must reach the church but there is no way to figure out which way it is. So it is trial and error - try this way, suffocate as your filter expires, reload; rinse, repeat. Secondly, I think we needn't another title infused with Russophobia. The game is based on a novel by a young Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky (born in 1979). He wrote it in the early 2000s. When the Soviet Union collapsed he was 10-12 years old. He knows nothing about it. When he was growing up there was a lot of anti-Russian, anti-Soviet propaganda... revisions of history got to the point of saying that the USSR had nothing to do with freeing the world from German Nazis and at the cost of no less than 27 million soviet citizens butchered by the Nazis. I am American but I was born and raised in the USSR long before the author. I saw what "the evil Soviet empire" was really like. So to me the idea that the Russians who survived the nuclear Armageddon in the depths of Metro are twisted, crazed, murderous monsters divided into fascists and communists (both equally cruel and evil) is preposterous. It is criminal to imply that German fascism and Russian communism were the same. Play this game if you want your mind poisoned. If you have already played it or its predecessor, try to strike from your subconscious all thoughts about how inhuman and psychotic the Russians are - they are NOT.
As the title implies, the game is barely playable as is. No, I am not talking about technical problems or crashes - I have not experienced any. The game is barely playable because of bad design (I have not tried any mods yet, not sure if I care to try): - nothing is intuitive and nothing is explained and there is nowhere to get relevant information (do you use anti-radiation meds before entering an irradiated area or after? so trial and error meaning save/reload A LOT); - a survival/horror game like this should have perfect directional sound so you can determine from where potential danger comes (if some people on my left five yards away are talking, their voices should be coming from the left, not from the center of my head like a mono song from a headset); - I have a noise meter showing how likely someone is to hear me, but I can never hear anyone approaching - no enemy movement sounds to speak of; - graphics are rather bad, vegetation moving in the wind is jerky and unnatural; - Inventory management is clumsy; - weapons are extremely inaccurate; - "awesome atmosphere" means it is always night or twilight and it is always raining; - you spend 50% of play time pressing R (reload weapon) and quick save/quick load buttons - by the time you finish the game you will have pressed each of these buttons 20 thousand times (automatic reload anyone?); - you will die and reload last save a horrible LOT - so where's "immersion"? - most side missions are not doable because they are on a timer, so to do them you must review but NOT accept the missions and only accept them once you've found the required item, then just accept and complete right away; - wire or bolt cutters are non-existent and everywhere there's barbed wire that you cannot penetrate (you are funneled through the game world... open world my a$$) GOG now limits review size, so I have no room to list all the "great features", but I guess you get the idea. Save/reload A LOT is not my idea of fun. Is it yours?
Firstly, except for an occasional crash (rare) I found no technical problems related to porting from console to PC (unless very poor car handling is a porting problem). But I watched Playstation walkthroughs on YouTube and I was not impressed by how cars handle on console. I played Saints Row the Third first (a couple of years back), but since everyone and their mother has such a high opinion if SR-2, I decided to buy it here on GOG. I regretted the purchase. Honestly, this should be a 2.5-star game. Here's why: - homies (your gang members) are completely useless. If you take them on missions hoping they will help you they will always get stuck in the environment, fall behind or die. In the case of 'soldiers' you don't care, but on many missions you have your lieutenants with you (Shaundi, Pierce, Gatt) and if they die you will fail the mission. Most missions are on a timer and having to revive your homies only slows gets in the way. - cars (even with Gentlemen of the Raw mod) are nearly impossible to drive, unless you are willing to set Cruise Control and drive slowly (and even then it is nearly impossible to drive straight on a straight road); and driving slowly is not an option if you need to chase someone or escape, and then trying to get anywhere by car or bike is an exercise in frustration. - I spent the first half of the game buying cribs. I thought I'd get an achievement bonus for buying all of them, but there's no such bonus and aside from looking cool, the cribs serve no purpose as you spend 80 % of the time in Purgatory (the original crib you get for free), plus a good 30-40% of missions originate in the Purgatory. - missions design is nonsensical - for example I have 50 grenades and an RPG but to blow up some rival trucks I need some guy to rig them with explosives and protect him while he works. - female characters (except Shaundi) are THE UGLIEST EVER... My list of complaints could really go on, but I've run out of space. SR-2 - not recommended
Convoy was clearly inspired by FTL, but it is a MUCH better game than FTL ever was. All the problems I found with FTL have been addressed in Convoy. So let's say a few things about FTL first. If you played FTL, you should know all its flaws. If you have not played it or thought it had no flaws, you can find my (LONG AND DETAILED) 2-star FTL review on Amazon (the review is entitled - Has potential...). It describes all the real problems with FTL and presents clear and specific game-play examples thereof. One such example would be the fact that you never knew where the stores (supply depots) were - they showed up on the map at random; and if you did not have enough scrap to buy what you wanted when you were at a store, more often than not you were unable to backtrack to that store later when you had enough scrap because the rebel fleet had already taken over the area. Another example is that availability of weapons and upgrades in FTL was completely random and combined with the above-mentioned inability to visit stores at will your success or failure did not depend on you at all. ALL your efforts were at the mercy of random chance and it was quite typical to reach the final boss in Sector 8 with amazing shields and EMP weapons but no weapons actually able to harm the boss. In Convoy you have a clear map of the planet and you can go wherever you want whenever you want. The camps, once discovered, remain on the map, so while in FTL you could never approach your ship's upgrades strategically and had to rely on random chance, in Convoy you can upgrade your vehicles as you want. This is a HUGE improvement over FTL and if you liked FTL you will love Convoy. Combat in Convoy is a lot better than in FTL. Here you have multiple vehicles with different combat roles (if you choose to design specialized vehicles). Before purchasing Convoy on GOG, I watched a few game-play videos on YouTube. I recommend you find Convoy Gameplay - Full Release Version! - Let's Play - Ep 1
The game looks promising. When it was announced on GOG I went ahead and watched beta 12-day game-play on YouTube. I got excited. I bought it immediately once it became available. Paid full price. But the game quickly made me feel stupid for doing so. I think this is the last time I buy into the hype of any kind. Example: You need to scavenge for supplies to survive and you have locations on the map. You also get descriptions thereof. It is logical that seeing and hearing explosions and machine gun bursts coming from a certain direction makes you decide – there's fighting going on there and therefore I should not go there tonight to scavenge for supplies. On the other hand, there's a location that is apparently untouched so far by the fighting, but its description says something like 'we should only go there if we are desperate and prepared to steal from those people'. Does this make any sense to you? Hell, if I had means to help others and I were lucky to still be able to try and 'live a normal life' like the people in the above described untouched by war location, naturally, while I would not be willing to give away absolutely everything my family got to help the more unfortunate, I would still try to help in some way or explain why I can't help. Why is it impossible to even ASK someone for help in this game? In this game you basically have to either sneak around and steal or fight and rob or run away. There is simply no way to talk to anyone. It is like this game implies that in a war zone it is every civilian for himself. This is just NOT true. I know. Don't ask how I know. In short – my family has been there. The only moral decision in this game seems to be the heart-tearing clicking of the NO button to say to someone you have no bandages to spare for wounded children… because you actually don't have any bandages. Another would be turning away a refugee who asks you for shelter… because you have no room… Anyhow, this was a good idea and this game COULD become a great simulation and a morality evolution tool if the developer continued to, well, develop it and make it more humanly realistic (instead of what it is now – a rough and completely unrealistic rogue-like wannabe where humans are good and kind among the group of survivors you control as the player but outside of that house they turn into unprincipled pricks encountering no one but other unprincipled pricks who would never talk to you other than to tell you to go away (that is if they don't shoot you on sight). AND did I mention that in the three hours that I've played the game so far it CRASHED on me FOUR times? Stay away. Wait for a patch or two and for a price drop to give it a try.
I discovered this fantastic game on GOG. Yeah. But since I did not know whether I would like it I decided to check Steam. Found the original King's Bounty: Armored Princess for $6.95. Bought it, and enjoyed it like I haven't enjoyed a game in a very, very long time. According to Steam I logged close to 280 hours playing it. That's quite amazing. The version I got does not include Crossworlds and I would very much like to get it (though by some accounts the expansion adds fairly little to the original game). If I do get it on Steam for $9.95 I will have paid for the whole package some 30% less than what GOG wants. If you are interested in the detailed review of the game itself you can find my review on Amazon. Sort reviews by 'newest first'. The review title is ' A shining example of a perfect game'
I am not sure on what computers/monitors everyone is playing this. The game was made for CRT monitors which did not suffer from the limitations of LCDs native resolutions. At my native resolution of 1920x1080 I can't read anything - the font in this largely text-based game is wa-a-a-ay too tiny. I tried every single resolution the game graphics settings are capable of only to find that even at 800x600 the text is barely readable as the font is blurry at ALL resolutions other than the native one. Perhaps I need to buy an external 30-inch monitor for my laptop to be able to play this game at the monitor's native resolution of 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 but as of right now I have no way of playing this game without going blind.
