Everything about this game is really boring and cliched. You fly around the galaxy collecting pieces of magical McGuffin for some old general type who's not at all going to betray you towards the end, and occasionally you take a break to talk with your stock character crewmates: - a scantly dressed hottie with huge cleavage and a chip on her shoulder - a cigarette chomping gruff war vet with a gravelly voice and a dark past - plucky alien comic relief who just doesn't understand human expressions (hilarity ensues) This all goes on for about 9 hours while you're trying not to slip into a coma because the combat is completely inane, your character moves as slow as molasses, and pretty much everything else about this game is cliched and boring. It's like the developers were going out of their way to tick off every box on the list of uninspired late 90s/early 2000s sci-fi shooter tropes. At least the visuals are nice for 2003, and mechanically it's functional. Some weapons even have a nice punch to them so if you don't mind the generic nature of it all then it's at least playable, I guess... Honestly, whenever I think back on this game, I usually wonder why I haven't played it more back in the day because I keep remembering that it had this cool-looking assault rifle and some of the visuals were nice. But then I reinstall it and it doesn't take me very long to remember why it sucked. This is definitely one of those games that you may remember more fondly but it's best not to revisit unless you really wanna ruin those memories.
I tried to give this game a chance many times over the years. Together with Aquanox 1 it was my very first purchase on GOG but I never really got past the first few missions. I'll be posting the same review for both games because they're extremely similar to each other, both in gameplay, as well as with how the single player campaign is constructed. The first thing that struck me about them is how much goddamned dialogue you have to sit through in between each mission. Sometimes it felt like it could go on for 10-15 minutes at a time, which is a huge issue if the missions themselves are extremely brief. It also wouldn't be such a hassle if it wasn't for the fact that the story isn't terribly interesting and the voice acting is just... bad. If you feel like you just want to click through all this yapping then playing the game feels all the more pointless, to be honest. And the missions? Well, they range from bland and formulaic to just tedious and confusing. As I mentioned, many of them are very short so the overall impression the game is giving me is utter boredom. When I fire up a shooter, I just wanna shoot stuff, and there's not much of that going on in this game, at least within the first few hours of the campaign. Finally, I'm just not feeling it when it comes to controls and combat. It doesn't really feel like you're steering a submarine, it's more like flying a spaceship and shooting other spaceships, except there's some plankton floating around instead of space dust. Rather disappointing. Overall, neither of these games were very satisfying to me and despite my best efforts, I just couldn't get into them.
I just don't get it. There are so many different directions you could go with a story set in W40k franchise but every single videogame insists on telling the same boring plot about a psyker or an inquisitor who betrays the Space Marines in the middle of an alien invasion and summons the forces of Chaos by the time third act kicks in. Except this time it's even a bigger cop-out because you're not playing as a Space Marine. You're a Fire Warrior of the T'au empire and I guess you could call it an interesting twist, since you're experiencing the invasion from a perspective of a xeno but it ultimately ends up being the same exact plot as any other W40k game. The lack of creativity in the writing is astounding. But anyway, the gameplay itself isn't particularly stellar, and the game is not very polished so its janky nature will become very obvious within the first few minutes of playing. But it never gets really tedious or infuriating and some of the weapons are actually pretty fun to use. I guess it strikes the balance between janky and fun, to the point where it could be called a guilty pleasure especially if you're a fan of the Warhammer 40k universe. It certainly retains some of the elements which are faithful to the source material. Like, for example, when you first pick up a bolter, it's not just some automatic machine gun - in the small hands of a T'au warrior this thing actually looks and feels like a big-ass gun that fires bullets the size of a rocket. When it comes to W40k licensed shooters, nowadays your best choice is the excellent Space Marine from 2011 but if you find yourself really starved for an action game set in this universe, Fire Warrior is also a fairly solid recommendation.
Annoying vehicle sections aside, the game stars off pretty strong, the level design is decent, doing covert missions and mowing down whole platoons of nazis is fun, and the orchestral score is as epic as I remembered it. Then I'm dropped into one of the most legendary missions in the FPS genre that single handedly kicked off the whole WWII shooter fad, and it's actually still pretty decent. "Man, this game is pretty awesome" - I think to myself. Unfortunately, however, right after Omaha, the quality takes a nose dive and the rest of the game is an excercise in frustration and poor design. It's incredible how badly it aged over the years. The first and second half are like two completely different games. The lowest point obviously comes during the sniper town mission where the only way to get through it is to save scum and hope you'll be able to figure out where the shots are coming from before you run out of patience. And don't even get me started on the ending. It was bad even back in the day. I didn't even touch the expansions yet but I'm already dreading playing them because I distinctly remember that the difficulty level drove me crazy even when I played them all those years ago. Honestly, if you want to revisit this game, don't bother playing it past the Omaha Beach mission.
Non-existent story and childish attempts at being mature aside, it's a genuinely solid retro shooter that introduced some interesting ideas for the time. The sidekick A.I. isn't perfect and gets stuck sometimes, which may be annoying but for the most part, it works fine and these guys are actually helpful in combat. Optional objectives and ability to interact with NPCs is also pretty cool but I thought it was under-utilized. Probably the first optional mission is the most intricate way this whole system was implemented but as soon as you acquire some useful guns, side activities become very rare and you'll be spending most of your time squeezing gats till the clip is empty. Regardless, it's an entertaining Quake 2-era FPS which deserves its place among the classics of the genre. The very same studio was later renamed to Gray Matter and went on to make an excellent Return To Castle Wolfenstein and you can feel some of this game in Kingpin.
I've heard a lot of bad things about the game over the years and actually found the description for modern releases funny but in all honesty, it's totally unwarranted. You just have to prepare for the fact that this is NOT Carmageddon 2. This game introduced enough tweaks to the formula to completely change the way it plays. While racing in Carma 2 was more like an afterthought and the meat of the game was to explore the giant maps, kill pedestrians, wreck opponents and cause overall mayhem, TDR 2000 puts a much stronger emphasis on the racing aspect. I can understand if that left a sour taste for someone who played the second game in the series and was expecting more of the same but let's be honest, Carma 2 wasn't without its flaws and TDR attempted to fix at least some of them. It became its own thing in the process. Whether you'll like it or not is still a matter of opinion ofc, but I think it's unfair to bash a perfectly fine and competently made racing game. Stainless Games are just being big babies about it.
As you might have read in some of the other reviews, the game isn't without its flaws. The critical hit system is completely random and makes the on-foot missions somewhat frustrating if you're not careful, the A.I. is absolutely brainless (both for the enemies and your companions), and some bugs will occasionally lead to cheap deaths. Honestly, though, my biggest gripe about this game is that it's too short. In the end, though, the most imporant question is that whether it's fun or not. And for me, the answer is most definitely YES. I always found it interesting that the game lets you do stuff any ordinary FPS would consider a mission fail. For example, instead of forcing you to reload a save when you start killing NPCs, it lets you figure out on your own that you either can't progress or you just unknowingly followed a different path in the storyline. And yes, there are multiple endings. The anime aesthetic is definitely unique and blowing stuff up in the middle of a city as a giant mech never gets old. The aforementioned critical hits make the on-foot levels a bit worse but once you learn to play it safe, it's not so bad. These levels are still a treat to play thanks to the satisfying gore and selection of weapons that all feel fun to use and fire with punchy sound effects. And with great sound desing also comes awesome music which is both appropriate for the game's theme and it creates a nice atmosphere. I'll admit that I have a big nostalgia for this game and playing it takes me back to these long nights when I only remembered that I was playing for too long when daylight started pouring into the room. But for any fan of retro shooters, this game will still be a curiosity and I guarantee that you'll have a good time playing it.
My favourite things about this game are definitely the presentation and music. Even though it's pretty old, it still looks gorgeous and it's really the little details that set it apart. Stuff like the shaky cam whenever you zoom on the burning engines or explosions, tiny thrusters firing on the side of the ships when they turn, the kinetic feeling of ships having to gradually reduce their velocity or the way they gracefully manouver during combat, etc. etc. It all looks and feels really nice and the ambient music only enhances the visuals. Nevertheless, I have to admit that I never got past the stealth mission since it was pretty confusing and I kept getting detected despite closely following the nav points. It was really frustrating and pretty much ruined an otherwise enjoyabe game for me.
First of all, I think you shouldn't approach Daikatana without the 1.3 patch installed. It is the only reason I finally decided to sit down and finish it. While it doesn't remove every little problem, it definitely fixes everything that kept me from playing this game all those years and adds a number of quality-of-life improvements. Right now, all you have to worry about is playing through the game. And how is it, exactly? Not bad, honestly. You just have to get through the first few levels before it gets going. The game starts off with literally the worst levels in the entire campaign so it does leave a rather sour taste, but things get progressively better after that. The entire first episode is pretty mediocre, mostly because of the small-hitbox enemies and useless weapons but as soon as you reach the second episode, it's a whole different story. I honestly enjoyed myself as much as with any other retro shooter from that era. You get better weapons, the enemies are cooler, and the environments look really nice, not to mention that level design gets way better. Second episode is definitely a highlight, although the third and fourth one are pretty decent as well. What I enjoyed about the game the most is the variety. Say what you want about John Romero, but with this game, he actually delivered everything that he promised back in the day. Without spoiling too much of the story, each episode offers a completely new set of weapons and enemies, and the environments are wildly different from one another. Despite the fact that it's probably the longest first-person shooter from that era I ever played (easily about 15-20 hours of gameplay), I never got bored due to how different each episode felt. The ability to level up either your abilities or the titular Daikatana also added to the enjoyment of the game. Once again, as long as you'll remember to install the 1.3 patch, this game is well worth your time if you're a fan of retro shooters.
I remember playing the demo of Redline over and over as a kid and back then, I was completely blown away by its combination of first-person shooting and vehicle combat. I was excited to finally play the full game and see what it has in stock after the first level. Nowadays games like that are a dime a dozen and probably the closest modern equivalent is Rage 2 since both games also share a post-apocalyptic theme but unfortunately, Redline aged very poorly and overall, it's hard to recommend even for a trip down the nostalgia lane. It would have been better if I skipped the full version and left my memories about the demo intact. One of the biggest problems is the fact that the game is programmed with 30 frames per second in mind which makes it rather uncomfortable to play and the first person view is almost nausea-inducing unless you use a patch to increase the FOV. The on-foot controls are sluggish and you'll often get stuck on the level geometry in tight areas and vehicle controls are rather finnicky and overly sensitive so no matter how you engage the enemy in combat, it is never fully satisfying. But the biggest problem this game has are the bugs, especially when it comes to level scripting. I quit playing after three levels because of the bugged mission where the game enters a failstate during a cinematic with a "mission failed" message because I destroyed the car, even though my ultimae goal was to drive it safely to my destination and then throw it into a lava pit. It's like the game remembered my first objective but then forgot about the other. I suppose that the post-apocalyptic visuals and destructive environments are still a plus but that's about it. Everything else, including the story, the music, voice acting, and OTT violence is a typical late-90s gutter trash that was trying to be edgy but ends up being silly. IMO Redline is not worth revisiting, even if you have fond memories of it.
