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This user has reviewed 3 games. Awesome! You can edit your reviews directly on game pages.
Anachronox

One of the best SF CRPGs ever made

Centuries in the future, the human race has begun exploring the Galaxy, using FTL technology developed by a long-dead alien race. These aliens used 'Senders', huge FTL-boosting machines, to transport spacecraft from system to system. At the heart of the Sender network is Sender One, a vast sphere in the middle of which floats the spherical city of Anachronox. The city is built in districts and levels that shift around randomly, reconfiguring like a spherical Rubik's Cube. Sylvester 'Sly' Boots is a private investigator who is down and out on his luck until a new case leads him on a planet-hopping quest which will have ramifications for the fate of the entire universe... Originally released in 2001, Anachronox was the third and final of the flagship launch titles produced by Ion Storm, following on from the appalling Daikatana and the sublime Deus Ex. A computer RPG, the game used the Quake II engine (then already dated due to the release of Quake III) and was critically lauded upon release. Commercially, it was a failure due to poor marketing, but the game became a cult hit and attracted a small but devoted fanbase who remain active to this day. It's hard to sum up Anachronox easily. It's a game with plenty of humour, but it's not a comedy. It's set in an SF milieu, but also features superpowers and magic. It was developed by an American studio but features a Japanese-style turn-based battle system (both Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy series are cited by the developers as major influences) and several minigames. This mixing and blending of genres makes it a unique game, not quite like anything else out there, but also contributed to its poor marketing and lack of strong sales. Most of Anachronox is played as more of an adventure game than anything else. You initially control Sly Boots and his AI assistant, Fatima. The game demonstrates its inventiveness and humour almost immediately: Fatima is an associate of Boots who has died, but her consciousness has been preserved as an AI system and placed inside a robot which floats around the environment and is a shaped like a large, metal arrow. Yes, in Anachronox your mouse pointer is a character. This is an awesome idea, and leads to some humourous moments as characters in the city of Anachronox start getting annoyed if you hover your mouse pointer over them, since this results in Fatima's robot body buzzing around them. "Er, hi there. Boffo ship you have here." "I SHALL KILL YOU...WITH DEATH!!!" This is actual dialogue in the game rather than me taking the mickey for once. In traditional RPG style, you soon accumulate a large number of companions, two of whom can accompany Sly at any one time. You can switch between these companion characters at will to take advantage of their special powers in combat, or their knowledge in conversations with NPCs. At several moments in the storyline, the game splits the team up and proceeds down several parallel paths simultaneously, with the game moving back and forth between the different characters and sub-teams to tell the story in full. In terms of format, this style of playing will be familiar from the two Knights of the Old Republic RPGs from BioWare and Obsidian, but Anachronox predates them by several years. One of the highlights of the game's design is that the characters' special powers and abilities in combat are based on their characterisation. For example, Grumpos, the grumpy old man character who reacts to any dialogue options with sarcasm or caustic remarks about how great things used to be, has a special attack that allows him to waffle on at extreme length about various tedious subjects to bore an enemy into a stupor. Combat is played out on a grid which allows characters to position themselves, attack or carry out healing or buffing in a manner familiar from Japanese RPGs. Combat is not a strong focus of the game, however, and a surprisingly small amount of game-time is spent fighting. Battles are also usually avoidable, with lurking enemies visible in the distance, allowing players to choose alternate routes. Combat is enjoyable, especially as its relative infrequency means it never becomes repetitive or tiresome. Something that Anachronox manages very well is tonal variation. The game has a lot of humour in it, but it also has some extremely dramatic scenes and elements of political satire and commentary as well. It moves between scenes of comedy, drama, tragedy, pathos and satire, and handles these transitions well thanks to some great writing, a fine ear for dialogue and the game's constant streak of inventiveness. The planet Democratus and its entire population joins the party, meaning that technically Anachronox is the only RPG in gaming history with 2 billion party-members. It's impossible to talk about Anachronox without mentioning it's most barmy story element. In one lengthy sub-quest, Sly and his team arrive on the planet Democratus, where the ideal of democracy and collective leadership is worshipped but in practice is rather unsatisfying, reduced to a tiny, self-sustaining elite being voted for by a mostly-sheep-like populace who vote on pointless subjects for the most spurious of reasons. The satire here is obvious, but also rather amusing. At the end of the quest, after Sly and his friends have saved the planet from being devoured by a swarm of space-insects, the rulers of Democratus decide to hold a planetary referendum to vote for a suitable reward. Sly and company flee rather than endure the planet's long-winded voting process. Later on in the game, whilst in a bar, the crew are rather bemused when the door opens and the entire planet floats into the room. The populace of Democratus voted to miniaturise the entire planet and join Sly's team. From this point on, the planet Democratus is a member of the player's party and can participate in battles (using a fearsome planetary defense network and its own gravitational field as weapons) as well as conversations. Sly can also seriously confuse and distract NPCs by just talking to them with a 7-foot-wide planet floating over his shoulder. Later on, after a confrontation with the supervillain Rictus (catchphrase: "I SHALL KILL YOU...WITH DEATH!!!"), our heroes are about to die inside Rictus' exploding ship so Democratus reinflates itself to its full size, scattering the party about the planet's surface (and tearing the ship apart and dumping its exploding engine core in a remote area). The party has to reconvene through a series of sub-quests, including a Quantum Leap-inspired quest set in a mountain village and another one where a down-on-his-luck alcoholic superhero regains his mojo by saving a young girl from death. This latter quest has no dialogue and plays out through music and the characters exchanging facial expressions. It is brilliant. Criticisms of Anachronox are mainly related to its age. It's an older game now, so players may find it fiddly to get it working on modern systems (this post may be helpful). The graphics have dated somewhat, though this means even people with bottom-of-the-line laptops should be able to play it with no problems. From a game design issue, the opening couple of hours on Anachronox features a lot of fetch-quests and running back and forth through a re-arranging landscape which can be occasionally frustrating. More seriously, the game ends on a titanic, never-resolved cliffhanger (Anachronox wasn't the first game in a planned series, but actually the first half of a storyline that was broken in half due to length). Surprisingly, the game's creators have not ruled out pursuing a sequel, so have never explained how the cliffhangers was going to be resolved (but have promised to do so if they can't get the sequel made by 2021 at the latest). But that should be no reason not to check out this barmy, inventive, hilarious, nicely-written and finely-characterised game.

60 gamers found this review helpful
Icewind Dale Complete
This game is no longer available in our store
Icewind Dale Complete

An action-based RPG which has aged well

A band of adventurers arrive at Easthaven, a town in the Icewind Dale region of Faerun, far to the north of most civilised lands on the far side of the Spine of the World. The town's mayor asks the adventurers to travel to Kuldahar, a village of druids in the foothills of the mountains, where they have reported strange goings-on. The adventurers agree, but are cut off in the foothills by an avalanche. Proceeding to Kuldahar on foot through an area inhabited by hostile creatures, the adventurers learn of a threat to all of Faerun that is developing in the mountains and the caverns under them, and they must defeat this threat before it's too late. Originally released in 2000, Icewind Dale was the third of the Dungeons and Dragons games using the Infinity Engine, developed by BioWare and Black Isle (now Obsidian). These three games were effectively an attempt to corner three distinct types of fantasy: Planescape: Torment was the 'arty', literary and philosophical game, essentially a video game equivalent to Gene Wolfe, whilst Baldur's Gate was the more traditional large-scale, long, broad-based and well-characterised epic, following in the trail of Tolkien. Icewind Dale, on the other hand, was the much more combat-oriented, sword and sorcery adventure, much more of a romp than the other two. This led it to getting somewhat mixed reviews at the time, though viewed in isolation from its forebears, its positive aspects become much more apparent. Starting off, Icewind Dale has you creating all six characters in the party, giving them names and deciding on their races and character classes. This is unlike Baldur's Gate, where you only created the leading character and then picked from a range of pre-existing companions, and also unlike Planescape: Torment, where you had a pre-generated character (though you could change his stats). This is the biggest change from the other games, since your party is totally user-generated there is little to none of the party interplay seen elsewhere. There is no possibility of romances or rivalries erupting between party-members, which removes some of the flavour and unpredictability of the earlier games, but also makes Icewind Dale a lot more old-school and traditional, which is not entirely a bad thing. Once you've created your party, it's RPG business as usual. You can explore the opening town, solve a few puzzles (usually through item quests or combat, though you can resolve a few quests through dialogue alone) and so on before you're given the main quest. You have to fight your way through the mountains to Kuldahar (a town built in and around a colossal tree), which becomes your base of operations as you range out on various missions for the denizens of the town. These involve a lot of dungeon explorations and assaults on temples and castles held by various enemies, so a combat-focused party is a must, though the prevalence of traps and sorcerous opponents means you want to bring a thief and at least a couple of magic-users along as well. The game is well-written, but compared to the other Infinity Engine games straightforward (indeed, somewhat refreshingly so at times). There's a few nice twists but generally what you see is what you get, and what you get is a metric ton of combat. You fight dozens of different types of enemies, from orcs to powerful enemy wizards, and amass vast quantities of loot. You also level up at a rate of knots compared to other D&D-based games. Generally speaking, if more than ten minutes go by without a ferocious combat sequence, something's gone wrong somewhere. Luckily, Icewind Dale uses a later iteration of the Infinity Engine, with stronger graphics (including the heaven-sent ability to change the graphics resolution to something bearable on a modern PC), a friendlier interface and more options for character classes and combat (not to mention being able to carry lots more loot). In fact, if you ignore the simple fact that the game is 2D and sprite-based (there are 3D options for spell effects, but these tend to be hit and miss with modern graphics cards), it's aged very well indeed. The hand-painted environments are gorgeous, the sound and music is of a very high quality and the combat is fast and furious (though, as usual, you can hit space to pause the game at any time to issue fresh orders). The pace is only let down by the traditional D&D problem of having to rest every couple of fights to replenish spells, or having to quick-travel back to Kuldahar to unload the frankly ludicrous amounts of loot you amass on your quests at regular intervals. The game also ties in nicely (and unexpectedly) with the Icewind Dale trilogy of novels by R.A. Salvatore, despite taking place almost a century earlier (and fifteen years before Drizzt Do'Urden arrives in the area). This tie-in is very logical and satisfying, compared to the more obvious (and cheesy) cameos in the Baldur's Gate series. The minuses are, for the most part, the obvious side-effects of the positives. Almost every situation in the game is solved by you hacking your way through it (though there are a few more original and interesting puzzles along the way), and overall the game lacks subtlety. The writing and moody black-and-white cut scenes are great, but given you spend a lot of time in combat-focused dungeons, some time can go by between plot-related events happening, which occasionally threatens to reduce the game to a hard grind. And, as great as the graphics are, the harsh snow backdrops and the very large creatures show up some issues with the engine, leading to some pixellation. The combat focus of the game also means it's pretty unforgiving and total party kills are not uncommon. As with all Infinity Engine games, but moreso here, you need to have a finger hovering over the quicksave button at almost all times and remember to save between combats, before resting, after resting, before tackling a complex trap (especially the ones which can backfire and blow up your entire party if you fail a roll) and at least every five minutes regardless of anything else. That said, the game's not quite a brainless hack 'em up. The story, which it kicks in every now and then, is intriguing and the writing, when it does appear, is generally pretty good (as you'd expect from some of the same team behind Planescape: Torment). These elements give the game a bit more depth than its reputation suggests. In fact, if the game does suffer in departments, it's usually through comparisons to its contemporaries. Taken on its own merits and in isolation, a rewarding and impressive CRPG emerges. Icewind Dale (****) is a fun, furious and enjoyable roleplaying game which has aged excellently, and is let down only in comparison to more story and roleplaying-focused RPGs. For those looking into a great dungeon-exploring or more action-based RPG, Icewind Dale more than satisfies. Due to the game's age, there are a variety of ways of getting it. The Good Old Games edition may be preferable since it has been optimised to run on Windows 7 and Vista with no problems, and also includes the free expansion Trials of the Luremaster (which needs to be downloaded separately for other editions).

18 gamers found this review helpful