When it comes to old games you can encounter some issues - crashes, tiny microscopic font, unreadable pixels on high resolution etc. This game have no such issues, it plays flawless on my PC with modern OS. And font is readable, which is major pain when you come back to old titles. It funny adventure through the fantasy land where treasures and adventure awaits. A lot of looting, traps disarming and exploration with secrets here and here. You can find all party members on the first map, remember to check their Speed (the more HP they got the slower they are and vice versa).
Play as a gun for hire in the future, fedex quests waiting for you. Three city-prisons, forests of skyscrapers , each more hardcore than another, with more depraved prisoners populating them. Combat is hectic and intense. You have options to trach enemies (just punch a key to find nearby enemy, which is pretty handy when you loose sense of direction in a vehicle with free look. And remember - check your shield all the time, it's not uncommon to bump into building or other cars and loose the precious cover. Resourcefulness and tactics pays off in long term. How about technical site? It works pretty well and you can set it up to 1920x1080. There is one downsite - font does not scale with resolution so you have to find a sweet spot with resolution and either accept black bars or play in windowed.
This is one of the best turn based games I've ever played in my life, which makes me wonder why there were no more turn based D&D. It's combat focused adventure through the aforementioned Temple. Circled menus with dozen of tactical option available at any moment let you deal with most situations. Dozen of skills, spells and items to gather and craft. Like dungeon crawler but in different perspective with different mechanics. Played with Circle of Eight (both additional content and vanilla) and Temple+, it's the best combo to play the game. One tip - abuse camping ambushes to gain 2nd level for your group, game starts from there. You can feel growing power with every level (up to maximum 10th, but you can set it to even higher for even more ridiculous power).
One word of advice - get Arx Libertatis to make game more playable on modern hardware. Before Arkane started making more dynamic titles with great melee combat they made game inspired by Ultima Underworld. Claustrophobic (under)world of Arx in old mine have some charm. About gameplay - magic is not only fun but also mandatory. Halfway through the game there is something that make magicless players cry, beware. Few races from fantasy world, some intrigue, and a lot of mysteries and secrets waiting for aware and curious folks.
Simple mission - sabotage military installations of infected military forces. Sometimes AI of our partner have bad times and ignore out commands but with some switching it was possible to continue and beat the game. Sometimes it was hard to find where they were firing at you, there was one swamp mission with heavy, thick for layers but thankfully - enemies were as blind as me and my buddy. Sniper towers are worst, enemies just crouch and clip their guns through the thin metal covers and shoot you while you can't hit them. There was one place where game crashed if you saved the game, luckily it was few minutes before it ended. There was one mission (oil rig) where my partner could not use E key to do anything like picking up items but even with time limit and open field to get shot it was fun time... There was nice trick that let you grow stats faster - shooting dead bodies in the head increase stats. This way my team get max rank in the halfway, could carry more ammo, better guns and armors. I find it bizzare that characters have little less polygons than STALKERs ones despite few years in between them.
Pretty rough experience but totally worth your time. The closest resemblance here could be Divine Divinity - lot of mobs to whack but beside it - it's like RPG. No level scaling and hand holding or quest compass, already like it. Difficulty setting is deceiving. On Easy enemies die faster and you get more XP, but on Hard you get more gold and loot, plus your companion (you NEED to have him if you're Priest) get better stats. And you get less XP but enemies respawn here so it shouldn't be a big deal in the end... Don't invest into Identify skill, it does not work. I recommend playing as a Priest, other classes will have bad time later in the game (like they don't have it from the start). That's because the higher level spells are more than useful, the dirty job will be done by your companion. There is no offensive starting spells (they are here but they don't work), you need to rely on magic seals and your companion. BTW. prepare for massive potions consumption. Beside combat it become nice RPG, with nice written NPCs, plot, story and investigations. Good witch hunting, fellow inquisitors! Tracto cum illud
