This could have been so epic. The world building, the atmosphere, the storytelling... all really strong aspects of this one. BUT - games are not movies. If i want to get into a really good mafia story, i watch The Godfather. Games are about interaction. And the game mechanics are just so bad. Shooting works best in comparison, and it is barely functional. The driving... oh my gosh, don't get me started on this one. And worst of all, the mission design. So many missions are pure trial and error. You do them again and again, and by sheer luck you succeed sometimes. I absolutely loath trial and error, and it ruins everything else for me. If you prioritize storytelling far above game mechanics, this game could be a 4 for you. But to me, a game still has to work as a game. And in my opinion, this one does not.
I can't really understand those nostalgic feelings about this one. Aye, Tomb Raider 1-3 were outstanding adventure games, but this one...? Just no. The problem is not the difficulty. It is just a complete trial and error mess from beginning to end. Sometimes you have to make jumps where you have to hit a three pixels wide angle to avoid being set on fire and end up trying that jump 20 times before it works by pure chance. Then you have to force your way through traps that drain your health massively and wich you can't avoid. You find plenty of medkits so that is not that big of an issue, but come on, what kind of messed up game design is this? Even with using exploits, you will hit quicksave and quickload way more often than in all the predecessors combined. I don't even have to mention that the puzzles don't make much sense, you'll just have to search every square foot of the huge areas to finally find the small gap in a shadowy corner to finally move on. They had some good ideas, to be fair - the hub levels like Alexandria are a really cool idea, but it does not make up for all the massive issues the game design has. There are quite a lot of bugs, too, like when moving under water and drown because you get stuck in corners over and over again. Oh, and the screen solution doesn't work with modern systems so I can't even see my health bar, but that's just a foot note at this point. Core design were obviously tired of doing the same game over and over again, and it shows - that's the main reason the designers killed Lara at the end, by the way. Eidos should have taken away the franchise from core much earlier - Tomb Raider 4 would have been a good moment.
Even for the time, this game is a bad joke. Invisible walls everywhere, you take one step in the wrong direction or hestitate for a second to long and an artillery shell kills you out of nowhere, even if you are in full cover. In it's best moments you just keep shooting forever at mindlessly charging enemies. Other world war shooters have similar problems, but this one just takes the crap cake. Don't waste neither time nor money on this. There are better alternatives everywhere.
Maybe it's the nostalgia, maybe I was starving for decent RTS games for some years. But this was quite fun. Really fun, actually. The gameplay is solid, al little simple maybe on the base building side, but come on - so was C&C. And therefore, it adds some tactical elements, like the cover system for infantry or the damage classes and vulnerable zones of mechs ect. The art design is just wonderful, and even the story is quite decent - sure, Starcraft2 is better, but gosh have I seen worse in all those years. Most of those harsher reviews seem to relate to the buggy state of the game - I started playing it in February 2022, and I had no problems with bugs whatsoever. Those who still criticize this game, propably did not expect an oldschool RTS with simple economics and base building, but with quick and intense gameplay, tactical variety and a strong focus on the singleplayer campaign. And it does a wonderful job at all that.
I played this thing back in the days... not for long though. It is clearly the weakest game of the Baldurs Gate series, it felt like a mediocre Diablo-clone. And now you charge 30 bucks for this. Have you completely lost your mind, or are you simply insulting our intelligence as gamers? I really like in general what GOG does, but this is simply impertinent.
This made a huge impact when it came out back in the days. The story was really exciting, and the dogfights intense. And these huge battleships which you could blow to pieces with a couple bombing runs.... so satisfying. And even today, the graphics are somewhat okay. Only surpassed by Freespace 2.
I waited a long time before I tried this. I wanted to be disconnected from the grandiose first and third game of the series, so I would be able to look at this objectively. And... what the hell. No. It is not a decent game, even if you don't compare it with the others. The animations are ridiculous. The inventory is next to useless. The level design makes no sense most of the time, and the hit feedback is not there at all. I tried to play it for some time, but I had to force me every minute of it. It is not even frustrating, but boring like hell. I just did not care for this game at all. And I couldn't bring myself to play it for more than a couple hours. Don't waste your time with this. Play the other ones.
I think, everything that has to be said had already been said here, so I just go with: You are absolutely right, this is game design at it's very best. What an incredible piece of software. Thank you, Mister Spector!
I don't really get it. 4.2 stars and a metacritic score of 90? This is a straight shooter with a nice atmosphere, yes. But that's about it. It is ridiculously linear. Even old school call of duty's are open world games compared to this. Hell, even the first doom had way better level design. It's just one tunnel after another, without any other option than to shoot your way through. And if you do a little something the game does not want you to, it simply kills you right away. I played for like 5 hours and encountered 2 different enemies. Humans and mutated killer rats which all look and act the same. And weapon variety is also very limited, even with the kinda nice mod system. Altogether, it is very monotonous most of the time, and when it's not, it just frustrates the hell out of you. The problem is not the difficulty, but the game design itself. It is an okay shooter, but nothing more. The world is full of way better shooters than this. I really don't get the fuzz.
I waited so long for a game like this. Such great atmosphere, charackter design is also pretty great. Everything feels really authentic, a musthave for all those medieval fans, especially if you had enough of all those fantasy elfdwarforc-standard stuff. More of this please, warhorse FTW! Oh, and those few bugs in the current version are not really worth mentioning. Like Skyrim still has more bugs than this now :D
