Not even the star wars atmosphere can save the dreary combat in this game. The economic management is decent. It's shallow but satisfying enough. The space combat is really fun, the open dimensions in space are cool to see and the animations are neat. But the ground combat is atrocious and too present in the game. The storyline has you doing a lot of ground combat with vader and other heroes and it is terrible. Grindy, bad controls, no strategy just grind until you win. It pretty much ruins the game. I'd much rather play an excellent rts like total annhilation or an excellent 4x like civ. This game doesn't really accomplish either that well.
I never played the originals back in the day and trying to pick them up now is impossible. These games stink compared to modern RPGs. I know it's not fair to judge them this way but when it's my time and I can choose playing say Dragon Age Origins, Skyrim, or even a dungeon crawler throwback like Legend of Grimrock vs these I'll chose the new games every time. The mechanics are just too difficult to understand. I had no idea how to equip stuff or do stuff without googling the action commands to type. Then I got in a dungeon and got completely lost and killed by a rat. That's fine for 1985 when you bust out pen and paper to draw a map cus your pc had like 4k of RAM or whatever, but in modern age I don't want to be bothered with such tedious things. There's also very little rpg stuff going on, not a lot of story or character progression. I guess this is like the skyrim of the 80s but it pales in comparison to modern games. It's kind of like holding a Model T up next to a Ford Fusion. The first is fun to look at and talk about and drive on sunday's for a bit but just mechanically inferior. Unfair comparison but true. (Note: I am in my 30s and love a lot of classic games. Master of Orion is one of my favorites and I did not play it until 2013 when I got it off Gog so I am not biased against all older games, just these ones)
In this game you play a nameless hit man who every mission gets a coded phone call to go execute a hit somewhere, be it a hotel or restaurant or whatever. You go there and just slaughter everyone. The whole time you're kind of trying to figure out why you're doing this stuff and there are disjointed cutscenes and dream/hallucination scenes that confuse and obfuscate your character even more. It seems cool at first but I think overall the story is overrated. Without spoiling it, it's not as cool as it's made out to be. In the end I thought it was a bit generic. The gameplay is fun but quickly becomes repetitive. It's pretty hard because you can die just as easily as enemies. Like you pick up a bat and bash a gangsters head in with one hit, but said gangster can do the same back to you. No health bars, just death. Thankfully you quickly reload with very short stages between save points so you can progress. Thing is the levels get repetitive cus all you do is run through em and kill everyone. There's not a lot to it, no puzzles or items, a small bit of stealth. The presentation is also all retro 90s looking flair 16 bit style. It's cool at first but after an hour or so of play it hurts my eyes and ears. In all I like this game in short spurts but it's not one I'd play for days on end. It's like playing angry birds on your phone- fun way to pass time but not really deep. It's worth a few bucks though.
I'm not impressed by spelunky. If you live for side scrolling jumping platform games you will probably love spelunky, but I think these games are overrated in general (entire genre is a bit old and tired) and spelunky is insanely hard, it's just not rewarding. They should add difficulty settings in my opinion. If I really want to play a jump around platformer I'd rather play something really unique like Fez. Spelunky is kind of generic- jump on enemies to kill them, they touch you and you lose health, jump off and climb walls to progress through the level. Occasionally buy items. That's it. Also it's touted as a rouge-like adventure but it's really just a side scroller with perma death and random levels. That might technically make it rogue-like, but it lacks character progression. I was expecting a bit more rpg elements. There are items you can buy but there isn't really loot and no skills or abilities. It's more akin to a mario bros game than binding of issac, FTL or bionic dues, better executed rogue-like games imo.
Like everyone else has said, graphics and music are awesome. The gameplay is really good in some parts, annoying in others. In all I think it just needed to be fleshed out a bit more. The level design is what I disliked most. The first few levels were repetitive, then the game finally started getting good the last few, and then it was over. I think it just needed to be longer mainly, I beat it on easy in about 2 hours. And I really have no desire to go back and try for top ratings on every level, there doesn't seem to be much replay value. For $10 there just isn't enough there.
To the moon tries way too hard to be emotionally engaging. In the end it all feels forced. Basically to help this dying guy remember his wife who has dementia or something they make this fake world for him and he has this completely virtual reality experience where he meets her and they fall in love all over again. The hook is a real reach, it's basically that they decided IRL to go to the moon together and then it happens in his VR/dream/whatever experience so it's supposed to be all like ohhh how cute they remembered each other so much even in a dream they were together! But it's all fake. That's what I don't get. The guy wasn't really experiencing anything, his wife didn't love him any more or any less, they just gave him some super cool dream before he died. It didn't make sense to me. It's basically a really sappy love story. I might be forgetting a few details as I played this about three years ago but that's basically it. There is no gameplay which is ok if the story was good but it's not. And people rave about the music but it's very simplistic piano riffs almost anyone who's played for a year or two could make up.
When playing I was most reminded of a cross between FTL and darkspore. There's essentially three parts of the game. One is the city map where you choose your next mission. The layout reminds me exactly of FTL and the beacons in sectors, though you will be able to see what is at your next destination. The second part is the store and equipment screen. This reminds me exactly of darkspore. The loot has a ton of stats so it can be quite overwhelming at first and it is very difficult to min/max because some are flat bonuses that combine with other pieces of loot that give percentages. The third part is the mission gameplay. It's turn based but the turns happen as soon as you move your guy so it doesn't feel slow like most turn based tactical games. There can be a lot of tactics for clearing a mission, it all depends on your setup and the difficulty. Again, very reminiscent of darkspore, you can only control one of your four robots at a time but you can switch between them. In general it's a very fun game but on harder difficulties it isn't actual hard, because tactically the AI isn't that smart and if you go slow you will win. But it is INCREDIBLY grindy on those hard difficulties. You must re-equip the most effective gear setups between every mission or you won't have enough ammo/firepower to win and it gets quite dull. I think 3.5 stars is a more accurate rating, but this game is easily worth $5. I spend over 30 hours on it.
I had this game when it came out originally and I just retried it off gog. Still amazing. You basically start out on a map with a settler and some explorers. Then you found a colony and can build it up, raise an army and go conquer. It's turned based with turn based tactical battles in between so it has a civ feel with a bit of heroes of might and magic to the battles. I love building up my cities and founding new ones and the tactical battles are great. The game is simple enough you can jump into combat right away, or you can be a builder and try to upgrade all your structures, it's up to you. It's definitely not as build intensive as a civ game. The interface is a bit clunky, sometimes your units don't travel to where you want them to, but it's easy to figure out. Also this gold edition has a map editor so you can setup your own custom games.
