In one sentence, this game can be summed up as: "An upgraded DOOM clone with Star Wars story". The story is quite well done for it's age and gender - you get animated cutscenes (voiced!) and detailed descriptions of missions that make sense as an overall plot. You get to see famous Star Wars characters like Mon Mothma or Darth Vader. Obviously the age of this game shows - early 3d graphics doesn't age well, but for me it has it's charm. Other things that we take for granted nowadays but this game lacks are in-mission saves (yes, not even checkpoints) and configurable controls. If you're a Star Wars fan and able to get over this issues, I fully recommend this game. GOG version appears to be the best one available. It's packaged with DOSBox emulator and tested for compatibility. I didn't encounter any issue I had back when I attempted to play an original version.
TITP consists of two parts. One is time management game where you decide to send your cops in response to alarm calls from citizens. Another is visual novel - like story with dialogue choices, presented in quite unique art style. The game part is fairly well done and gives feeling of running real police department, the story is good and voice acting is excellent. There is, however, one piece of mechanics that ruins the experience for me: when City Hall decides you perform bad it cuts your budget and forced you to fire out cops, which makes you perform even worse. Developers openly admit that this creates a vicious circle that forces you to start over. Well, too bad I'm playing a game and abandoning my progress because I have no option of recovery is just not fun.
Ultimate General: Gettysburg provides player with several features uncommon in other titles in the genre: - Civil War - era military tactics, - detailed map, accurately representing real life battlefield around Gettysburg, - very smart and challenging AI. You assume command over either USA or CSA forces in what is considered the decisive battle of US Civil War. Units are divided into 4 types: line infantry, skirmishers, videttes (horsed raiders) and artillery. Moving them is rather innovative, as you can literally draw the entire path with your mouse, without resorting to path/waypoints system common in other games. The battle itself is divided into phases and the outcome of each phase dictates starting positions in next. This simulates supply and rest factors that were historically relevant without getting into overcomplicated mechanic and numbers. Even before, that was the combination that captivated me for many hours. With patch 1.8, all balance issues that plagued the game before seem gone and I can honestly recommend it for all fans of real time tactical sims. It's like playing one of the battles from Total War, but more realistic and with less shiny graphic (which would only be a nuisance at this scale anyways).
The game does a good job at abstracting and streamlining important aspects of managing modern nation-state. GDP, HDI, population, unemployment are all there and make sense. However, it completely fails at making them interesting and gameplay consists of waiting until your next project gets implemented. International politics is completely separated from any factors we recognize, as geopolitics or common interests, and instead consists of single concept of relations that you can influence, and thus be an ally or enemy to anyone. Wars are only somewhat interesting, you send your troops to and abstract "operations" on a strategic level that can achieve their goals or not. Overall, this will probably be more interesting to fans of economic sims than strategy games.
This is brilliant adaptation of Jules Verne classic that gives great feeling of adventure to anyone willing to read a bit of (very skillfully written) text. Essentially you travel from city to city, where you can buy things and sell them later, find out about various routes (these are not known at all and need to be discovered along the way) and plan your next leg. Along the way there are many conversations written in style that mimics Verne's very well. These can give you new items, new routes or slow you down and lead astray. Everything flows rather natural and I didn't find it repetitive at all. The only little gripe I have is that game takes place in steampunk alternative history, so at times it feels too unrealistic and over the top. If you can live with it, I highly recommend this game.
Jade Empire is sort of re-telling of 1st KOTOR scenario in Far East setting. The missions are eerily similar, albeit placed linearly. Same goes for overall structure: visit several places, confront the main antagonist, wander some more, confront him again. However, Jade Empire has one quality that's very uncommon in modern CRPGs: it does not punish you for playing evil. It even puts there a convenient philosophy of egoism and self-reliance, to distinguish this concept from simply being "evil" as we know it from other games. Not only it does not discriminate based on player character morality, actually for the most part being evil is easier and/or more profitable than being good, exactly the way it plays out in real life. If you look for modern RPG game that let's you really pick your morality, consider this game.
Overlord feels very much like MMO, not to say - casual, akin to World of Warcraft. Like in many mainstream MMOs your (anti-)hero has a semi-open area to explore and discover. Quests are taking place in various subareas, aka dungeons, which are mostly linear and have a boss fight at the end. Perhaps it is just my impression, but I couldn't shake off this feeling of playing an MMO, only in some kind of solo mode. That the whole design screams MMO and casuality makes the game less enjoyable that it could have been. Quests have seemingly different goals and purposes, but in the end they're all consist of fairly unimpressive chain of repetitive fighting. Game mechanics is so streamlined (another MMO-like "feature") that after practicing several simple rules, there are no real challenges ahead. Puzzles are no-brainer and really solve by themselve - and I am a person who really dislikes hard guesses & pretty much all of point&click adventure genre. When I say that puzzles in this game are too simplistic even for my taste, I'm pretty sure they are an insult to anyone's wits. All in all, Overlord is an interesting concept with solid production values in visual department, but the overall MMO-inspired design kept me far from enjoying it.
I apprieciate the long, dynamic storyline and carefully designed quest. The graphics were top-notch in 2007 and music is very good, if not a bit repetitive. But Witcher is full of little things that can ruin all the fun. My foremost problem with this game are dialogues - large part of them were blantantly taken from books, which I am great fan of. So futher experience has been tainted from the start by the unshakeable feel of redundancy. The UI is almost a catastrophe. The only good part of it is equiping weapons. Inventory feels chaotic and game's attempts to automate some managament only make it worse. Skills screen makes your head spin unless you get used to it. And alchemy... n/c. I know the game must've had a certain, consistent look, but tables are being used all throughout cRPG genre for a reason. Combat system is plainly h'n's-ish, reflexes play as much a role as skills. Last but not least, I was appaled by the notion of being able to have sex with almost all of game's female cast of characters, and many secondary NPCs too. And usually it comes only after a several lines of cheap dialogue. Even BioWare is better at this.
