Really it's a modern implementation of the classic pirates! series. It's over 10 years old but still holds up due to the cartoon art style. Land combat is greatly improved making it more strategic and make sense. Sea combat is virtually unchanged except you have different cannonball types. Sword combat is changed to become a reaction mini game. It's not worse or better, just different. The one major downside I hate is sneaking into towns. It's now a mini game instead of a random check, but the mini game is super boring and takes too long to do. Overall this game has a ton of achievements and can keep you occupied for hours. It's a lot of fun.
This is finally the best option for those who haven't tried all the dlc yet. I own the original on dvd and purchased return to ostagar dlc with bioware points, but there is currently no way to purchase the rest of the dlc since bioware points are gone since origin launched. So they only way to get the complete version is to buy on origin, steam or gog. Origin never discounts and the steam version has many players reporting technical issues where it fails to validate their account. This gog version is exactly what I've been waiting for. I'm pumped to relive this amazing game and see all the content. As far as the game itself, well it's amazing but there's so many other reviews giving full detail I'm sure. I just wanted to encourage players to get this version as it is the most superior option if you want all the dlc.
This is by far the scariest video game I've ever played and the best in the dead space series. The latter two improve on combat and add some cool weapons and ways to move around, but they lack the feel of the first game. You play as Isaac, an engineer sent with a team to a mining ship that's gone silent to see if you can recover it. What you discover there is a complete nightmare of alien lifeforms taking over, and you're thrown into a quest to try to survive and make it home. Along the way you discover bits and pieces of what happened to the ship and it's really eerie. What makes the game so scary is the over the shoulder camera view gives you just enough vision but not quite enough to see what's to your side or around the corner. So stuff pops out at you all the time and it never ceases to be scary. You'll hear sounds of necromophs (the alien lifeforms) coming and start scanning the room, is it over there, no here! And all the sudden a bunch of them are on you tearing you to pieces and you're flailing your weapon frantically to try to escape. It's frightening to be stalked in such a manner. And even more frightening when you know you're about to enter a room full of them low on ammo... Another cool thing I liked is Isaac never talks in this one and you never see his face. It makes you really feel like you *are* Issac since he's not revealed as a character. The later two he talks freely and you see his expressions all the time so it feels like you are playing as a pre-existing character, not experiencing the horror first hand. It was a somewhat minor design decision but it makes a really big difference in game feel imo. Just get this game, it's awesome. It plays fine with mouse and keyboard or a controller.
This is my favorite heroes game. HOMM1 is quite good but lacks a few necessary features. It's a bit too easy to exploit in some situations. HOMM2 fixes a lot of those balance issues. It introduces a lot more resources used for certain units, better upgrade paths, better spells and ways to cast them/mana costs, a much larger combat map, customizable heroes with skill upgrades. HOMM3 I feel goes a bit too beyond this and gets almost too complicated. HOMM2 gets it just right. Plus the campaign is very fun. It's a bit too hard at times. A few missions feel like if you don't use a walkthrough and do it exactly the right way it's near impossible. But in general the balance is great and it's fun.
This game was amazing when it came out. I played every mission and found every secret sinking countless hours into this game. Unfortunately it's very old and the resolution is terrible. For a strategy game like master of orion this doesn't bother me as much, but on a flight sim/action game, I found tie fighter really hard to enjoy. Just my two cents, ymmv.
This game tries to be hard for the sake of being hard. It's an intentional design choice but not a very fun one. Really it's just frustrating. First if you don't have a controller don't bother, the keyboard controls are ugly. With a controller it plays out much like 16 bit platformers of old, but it's insanely hard with no option to change difficulties. Instead of making more interesting gameplay, possibly leveling options or gear/move choices, the devs decided let's just make this as hard as possible so people repeat levels a bunch of times to win. The game has very little variety, just a bunch of hard stuff over and over, just you trying to master simple jumps and attacks to not die during the same level over and over. It's not fun for more than 20 minutes.
As a bunch of others have said, it's reminiscent of zelda games- a third person adventure with action elements (or maybe vice versa). But that said, the controls on pc are hellish, you really will want a controller for this. And I still found a lot of the puzzles frustrating even with the controller, especially some of the timed jumping puzzles. A lot of them you'll repeat a dozen times just to get right. I guess in my younger gaming days this would've seemed cool, trying to master a button switch, then a running double jump combo of some sort, but now it just seems tedious. I'd rather fight bad guys or explore or watch the story unfold. Combat is also very bland outside of boss fights. The boss fights are your usual scripted mess but they work, I did not find them dull or tedious for some reason, I rather liked them. Also the rpg elements of this game are too watered down to have a serious impact on gameplay. It takes FOREVER to level up weapons, they might as well have no increased benefits. It would've been a better game if they have made the leveling up matter more and easier to do so you could specialize War (the name of your character) more. The scenery is a bit drab too. Very grey and repetitive. Otherwise I did like the visuals. It's a solid game especially at this price, just don't be expecting a must play classic, but rather an enjoyable action adventure game you won't feel like you wasted your time playing.
Maybe I'll get blasted for posting this, but this game looks and feels like a browser game and doesn't entice me into playing more at all. Gave it 30 minutes cus of all the amazing reviews but the graphics tech looks like something from 1990 and is not appealing. Maybe the story and gameplay is sweet but not sure why'd I'd play this over like sword of the stars the pit or FTL. Those games have retro graphics, not simply out-dated ones. I mean this looks like original ultima if you just reskinned everything with nicer 2d sprites.
Pros: +Awesome visuals +Amazing music and sound +Interesting story with multiple endings +Lots of loot without being a grindy lootfest +Fun challenges in addition to story Cons: -Short -A bit too easy -Controls are usable but not good on keyboard The gameplay here is really good, kind of torchlight meets legend of zelda, but the whole game feels a lot better with a gamepad. I strongly recommend one. The gear system is extremely well done. How it works is throughout the levels you unlock weapons and spirits (the liquid kind, not the ghost kind), then you equip them in your based before each level. You can have a couple spirits equiped that act like perks or talents, like one may increase your crit by 5% while another grants you an extra life. Then you also get to pick two weapons so you can combine anything- a bow and a katana or maybe a polearm and revolvers or go all ranged or all melee- whatever you want! It's awesome without be all crazy you must min/max stats, cus there aren't stats on the weapons and it's more about how well you use them. Along the way there are also challenges to upgrade your weapons and from there you get to pick the upgrades as well. As an example you can choose whether your shotgun has more range or a wider spread, or whether your repeater crossbow has more shots or more damage. Lots of ways to customize your combat without getting bogged down. There's also a really cool arena type combat for grinding money, which you don't have to do, but it's a great place to try out weapon combos.
I love this game and prefer it to Age of Empires 2 actually. The star wars universe is just cooler and this kind of RTS works better with less melee unit types and more ranged unit types because they don't all get messed up in formations and collisions as much as AoE2. My main gripe is still the AI and moving commands. If your guys are shooting an enemy and it dies and you click a new one they won't all attack from position. They'll try to reform and then shoot. Kind of stupid and most times you're better off attack-moving and not concentrating fire on a target but letting your units free aim. Just like AoE2 some of the missions are rather stupid and killing buildings is really hard, but the open battles are a lot of fun.
