...And it still crashes in the first level? The Duke engine contains a fatal sound bug that causes certain games to crash at certain points. For Duke, it was dropping down the sewer pipe in the demolished building in Red Light District. I played Shadow Warrior back in the day and could never get past the first level because it crashed with the same bug when making my way down the subway tunnel with the turret at the end. There is a patch for this out there somewhere, but I was a little shocked, almost a decade later, to spend good money on a so called "complete" collection, apparently modified to run on modern systems, and have it crash at the exact same spot as it did so many years ago. I won't ask for my money back, since I got it on sale, but I think I'll be sticking to the Classic Redux edition on Steam-- just wish I'd known GoG couldn't be bothered to fix the bug until I'd already spent my money. Since my review of the game only covers part of the first level, I am compelled to give the game one star for being so short and crashing.
Played this when I was a kid and while the art design is inspired, the level design and overall difficulty borders on masochistic. I could never get past the first half-dozen levels, because the gameplay is just unrelentingly brutal and therefore not very fun. Everything kills you, everything happens without context and there is little to no difficulty curve. 10 years later, I've played hundreds of games including ones which are difficult yet fair and this one stays the same. Three stars because the level editor is easy and a lot of fun-- you can make your own, fair, playable levels to wash away the taste of cheapness that comes from enduring the campaign. Recommended as a history lesson on how many old games were inviting but inaccessible at the same time. Even the great artists had to start somewhere, fortunately it seems Ansel learned his lesson with this one and apologized to the gaming community with Beyond Good & Evil.
I know I'm coming into this game years and years after it was popular so my tastes have been spoiled by bigger and better iterations of the formula since its release. Regardless, a "classic" game should be able to wow a veteran or newcomer alike and this game just didn't do it for me. First of all, the story, or lack-thereof. Keep in mind I only played most of the way through the first, "Corporate" campaign before I just stopped caring. The writing for the mission briefings is abysmal, there are only two characters and their interactions are extremely generic. I spent more time trying to turn off that dizzying, uninspired "star-field" screensaver looping in the background than I did listening to them drone on. Every mission boils down to "go here, destroy this" or "go here, escort this". Nothing much happens over the course of the game, there is some intrigue involving alien artifacts that goes absolutely nowhere. The heroine is very unlikable, she never stands up to authority, just does what she is told and then fumes about it. How exciting. Game play is the same thing over and over again. Scout ahead, gradually move your squads forward in increments, find enemy, engage. No matter how careful you are, at some point during each mission you will be ambushed by enemy rocket infantry that will appear out of nowhere and proceed to annihilate half your troops, or go straight for your command APC, resulting in a mission failure. It doesn't help that your units PAUSE every time you give them a command. This is the only game I have ever played that has this. In the middle of a heated firefight, this can be fatal. When a hundreds things are happening at once and your vehicles are taking fire you need your soldiers to REACT, not sit there helplessly as you click madly on a location over and over. The environments are huge and the terrain is very confusing to navigate, which is fine and challenging, except that it means two thirds of the game is spent navigating and trying to find the enemy. These environments are lazily detailed and despite the gradual change from temperate to frozen climates over the course of the game there is little variety. Since there is almost no in-game music to speak of (there is some in the early missions but it is strangely absent later on) all you have to listen to is the constant droning of your units as you boss them around. I liked the "friendly fire" aspect, which requires you to set up your fields of fire carefully. I didn't like how utterly confused my vehicles behaved if I told them to go somewhere and there was an obstacle in the way. Complete chaos as everyone tries to shuffle around each other, like rush hour in a parking lot. Meanwhile, the enemy is attacking. The dropship design of the game is also pointless. You don't start out with all your units on the battlefield, you have to call them in via dropships. But you can only drop them in specific spots, which defeats the whole purpose of a dropship. This is supposed to give you some extra layer of tactical planning but is almost completely useless since I gaurantee you 100% of the time you will have the best chance if you dump all your guys right at the start of each mission. The game occasionally nudges you into mixing it up by offering you multiple drop zones, but you ALWAYS stand a better chance if everyone sticks together. Overall Ground Control is just a bad, rough-around-the-edges generic real-time tactical game. There is no base-building, no story beyond "kill the fanatics" and it's all just so slow and tedious. Air units are useless, enemy AA will pick them off from halfway across the map. The graphics are awful. It feels like the beta of a real, complete game. Play World in Conflict instead, that one got the formula right.
The art design is interesting, but convoluted; it's impossible to tell what is a door and what is a wall, etc. The voices all cut off in mid-sentence so there's no way to tell what anyone is talking about half the time. Worst of all, there is no way to complete the first objective in the game. The NPCs in the first house told me to "go to school", and I spent hours wandering around the main city area searching for this supposed "school" with no results. I ended up wandering around in the surrounding desert searching for some other way to progress the "story" and ended up getting killed by a pack of wolves. Uninstalled and haven't looked back since. Pass on this broken game.
I've never been big into adventure games outside of the wonderful Myst titles because I find most adventure games to be confusing from the get-go and thus fundamentally flawed. But I picked this one up because I'm a big fan of science fiction/fantasy and it had stellar reviews. Oops! First I want to say what I liked about this game: The environments are quite imaginative and beautiful. Some of the dialogue is quite amusing, and the story was probably pretty interesting for it's time. The main character is cute and likable. But I can't even keep a straight face on those points because of how two-sided they are, like everything else in The Longest Journey. The backgrounds, as finely rendered as they are, feel cartoony and illogical in their layout and artistic design. The characters that inhabit this world do not match the crispness of their surroundings; everyone is a low-res, polygonal mess, especially the main character, who looks like she was rendered in software mode while everything else went full-3d. Most of the dialogue is ridiculous and slapstick and the main character's words are often obnoxious, sarcastic or just plain stupid. I had a hard time caring about her survival or mental stability because of how uninvolving she was. Everything is a cutesy observation or pop-culture remark. And the main story? What main story? I wandered around for hours in this game, in and out of buildings and cities and entire dimensions, piecing together insipid, frustrating and unintuitive puzzles before someone bothered to explain to me what was going on. Where's the urgency? And that sort of sums up my main beef with TLG: it can't decide whether it's a serious game or seriously tongue-in-cheek. Everything in the game-world looks kiddish, there are talking trees and dragons popping out of paintings, but on the other hand your neighbor wants to rape you, corporate CEOs are involved in satanic conspiracies and a guy in a wheelchair will only relinquish a vital puzzle item in exchange for information on your virginity. I'm not kidding. That's about the time I stopped caring about The Longest Journey and just gave up. *And why was Tuvok from Voyager in the police station? What?) Where's my motivation? And the puzzles in this game are the worst. I had to consult a walkthrough for almost each one because THEY DON'T MAKE ANY SENSE. Note to game designers: give your player a reason to jump through hoops or else they'll just hate you and give up. I need a clearly defined goal to work back from in order to care about a multiple-part puzzle or else I'm just pissing into the wind. The worst one I can remember was getting a ring from some electrified subway tracks by creating some stupid contraption using a deflated rubber ducky, a stick, a gum wrapper and some PVC piping. I had to recover these items from opposite ends of the available game-world. This was extremely annoying because I had no motivation to gather or retrieve these items; what was I working for? Why should I care? Why fish objects out of a rotten sewer when I could just make a phone-call and have a professional technician come out and do it all for me? Some of the puzzles involve other people, and getting certain reactions out of them. These are even worse than the "invention" puzzles because, like the rest of the puzzles, they make no sense. Human-interaction puzzles in any game are thin ice because not everyone reacts to certain situations the same way, but the game makes you handle a social situation a certain way and this automatically alienates and uninvolves any player who would have reacted differently. 99% of the time I didn't know what I was trying to solve until I'd solved it. And it didn't help that the human reactions are slapstick and completely implausible. This would have been fine if it were a decidedly children's game-- most of the puzzles might get a pass as lessons in abstract ingenuity-- but I reiterate, we're dealing with themes of corporate corruption, rape and virginity. Kids need not apply. The Longest Journey tested my patience, but not in a good way. The puzzles are long-winded and seemingly arbitrary and the game-world can't decide whether it's serious or kiddy-friendly, a contrast that distracted me the entire time, like a bug under my skin I just couldn't itch. Play the Myst games instead. At least those games know what they are and play off of those consistent themes, the puzzles and gorgeous imagery being based on the uniqueness of whatever world you're visiting at that moment. The Longest Journey is more interested in taking your virginity for spare parts.
I bought this game over Amazon a month ago to see what all the hype was about. I installed onto my Dell Dimension rig with XP and eagerly prepared to be blown away, but simply put the game just doesn't run... After double-clicking on the icon, I got a black screen and my entire computer froze until I forcibly restarted. Strike one. Retrying in windowed mode, the program starts to open, then hangs indefinitely until I ctrl+alt+delete. Oh, oh, oh how I spent hours and hours trying to get the thing to work. From compatibility modes to alternative drivers and reinstalls and, finally, the purchase of a new disk, I must have sunk an entire week trying to get this stupid game to run. I finally got it to play with no sound and in software mode, in a window. While revealing to me what a potentially great game it could have been, this is no way to play a game and thus I uninstalled. I think I really gave up trying when someone suggested I purchase an "older" sound card or entire computer just for this game. Right. I'll get right on that. Since the developers couldn't be bothered to make the game compatible with as far as I can tell a fairly standard, if modern, machine, the massively overrated Unreal Tournament: GOTY earns a 1.0 out of 5.0 stars. I'm still quite amazed at how many people couldn't shut up about this game when I was little given that it doesn't run under simple conditions, and I'm a major FPS enthusiast. Keep in mind I own the original Unreal and it runs fine and I love it. Now I have two copies of UT: GOTY sitting on my table that are about as useful as two coasters. Pass on this non-functioning clunker.
