Patch 4.0 has ruined the game. So many game mechanics are just completely nonfunctional and will be introduced into the game by the randomly generated AI empires in a broken state. Balance work also just hasn't been done on the core gameplay. Absolutely do not buy this game or any DLC for it at all until at least 2026. That's how catastrophically broken it is right now.
While this game was released in 1999, I first played it in 2018. It is the peak of the Breath of Fire franchise and has all the hallmarks of a top-quality RPG. Everything about this game is excellent: the story, worldbuilding, characters, and the gameplay itself. I don't want to get into spoilers so just play the game.
There's really just no excuse for how poorly conceived this game is in so many areas. I'm very unhappy with my purchase as so much of what's going on here is just catastrophically bad. First of all, bugs. There will be bugs. The gameplay experience is _very_ rough because of visual bugs and poor pre-loading. Patch 1 proudly proclaims that it fixes 1000 bugs. That means the game launched with far more than that. This is a Bethesda-tier launch experience, which is horribly ironic since Starfield is a remarkably stable game and boasts only a few very niche bugs. Second, characters. The "Origin" characters, who are the clowns you're going to be made to suffer with for the vast majority of the adventure if you don't know better, are suffering from "tragic" backstories, and by "tragic" I mean they're each kind of an idiot. There are one or two who are decently written and not infuriating to deal with (you get 1 guess who), but mostly they all want you to feel sorry for them suffering the consequences of their own decisions. One thing that all the characters do seem to have in common, though, is that they are all really eager to get in your pants. While I don't have anything in particular against the existence of orgies or bisexual polycules, I'm really not here to play some kind of harem simulation game. Besides, the writing and animations for this game are heinously bad, with all the worst consequences of 3D model interaction like air hugs, ear sniffing, and bizarre facial expressions. If you can't even match Tidus hugging Yuna in FFX when that game was released (checks notes) 22 years ago, don't bother. You're wasting your time. Beyond that, core gameplay? Eliminating the grid does wonders for D&D 5e, and Larian's signature environmental interactions add great depth to an otherwise kinda shallow system. The main story, however, is blatantly unfinished and obscenely short. Maybe if Larian spent less time writing Twilight fanfic this game would have released finished.
When you say you're modeling a game after Black and White, Settlers, and ActRaiser, that sets the expectations completely differently from what's happening, here. Sure, there's some Black and White and Settlers influence that is easily recognizable, but on the line between Economic Simulator and Real Time Strategy, those two games lean rather significantly towards the RTS side. Conversely, this game is a Dwarf Fortress clone which leans much further towards the Economic Sim side of that scale and is designed to be nigh-unwinnable. You have very little direct control over the game and the goal is to just last as long as possible, which is really not what I signed up for.
The other games in the series just have a lot more going for them. Shadow Magic has crazy wargame shenanigans and 3 has a solidly balanced but still deep and interesting interplay between the races and magic, each leading to very satisfying experiences on the tactical layer. This game has, by far, the most complex economics out of the other games in the franchise, and I do like how they handled sectors and such. It's not as deep as Civilization or anything, but I like it more than the slightly-more-complex-than-HoMM approach previous entries in the franchise took. Unfortunately, the extra economics just don't lead to a satisfying experience on the tactical side, because the factions and secret techs have zero depth compared to AoW 3. In theory, the unit mods system makes up for the lack of variety in units you can produce, but very few mods even provide meaningful alterations to the unit's actions in combat -- more often you just wind up organizing performance mods around a strategy like setting things on fire or shredding shock resistance with lightning attacks. The lack of unit variety also lends itself to relatively lacking unit counterplay, and since offense tends to be stronger than defense that results in your "army power" number being a disappointingly accurate predictor of how the battle is going to go, often with the winning side having very low casualty counts. TL;DR -- There are a lot of really cool things going on, but they're never really interconnected or leveraged in a satisfying way, leading to a game that's much less than the sum of it's parts.
In all honesty, this game is a stellar example of why video games just aren't made this way anymore, and what that's a good thing. This game presents a lot of things excellently in terms of style and setting, but the crunch of the game is just... bad. I'm going to get straight to the point because it's a very important point that people need to know before buying this game: The overwhelming majority of the gameplay in Grimrock is mouse controlled. Your 100-something keyed keyboard has exactly 6 buttons on it used, even as this game boasts significant gameplay depth. If you have any kind of manual dexterity issue, and probably even if you don't, then you should absolutely look into getting an Auto-Hotkey script for this game so that you can have actual keybindings for basic actions. I get that a certain group of people have a ton of nostalgia for the kind of gameplay on offer here, but there's a reason games that control in this manner stopped being made -- this control scheme is a crappy artifact of cross-platform console dungeon crawlers. It sucks, and we can and should do better in the 21st century. If you think that will make the game too easy or some nonsense like that, then make the game harder in a way that doesn't involve forcing people to play with a worse interface than a typical phone game. Character building is kinda bland, but it's basically fine. The presentation of the game is great, the themes and environmens are great, the immersion factor and exploration is great, the only real problem is that the controls grate.
The game that started a Genre from the simple concept of "Hey, let's take Rogue and just make everything real-time!" Incredibly solid old-school game. Furthermore, has a fanmade 'conversion/update/modernization' patch called Belzebub which is pretty high up there on the list of best things ever. If the vanilla classic is maybe a bit too rough for you to play, then rolling up Belzebub, instead, is an excellent way to experience this classic game with just the right sprinkle of extra QOL and gameplay depth added.
Let me start by saying that Stars in Shadow is a solid, modern take on Master of Orion 2, and that a large part of the score reductions are for UI and performance issues. Starting off, MoO 2 is *much* deeper than this game. There's a wider variety of weapons, greater customization in ships, a battery of different colony improvements, custom races, and an espionage system that's simply absent from this game. All that said, this game does do *some* things to play up their takes, but in my opinion not enough. For example, this game takes the very open-ended ship design system of MoO 2 and replaces it with pre-designed ship chassis with hardpoints. This could be a plus, since the pre-designed ship chassis restricts strapping 1,000 of the best guns you've got to a ship and just throwing it out there, but for the most part there's only one or two ship chassis designs for each size class of warship, so that's kind of what you do anyway. That's a real lost opportunity, and there are examples of this happening . As an aside, the ship design UI is also pretty atrocious. The big issues I have with this game are performance issues. Even though 90% of the game's assets are 2D sprites and the closest thing this game has to animations are sliding static sprites across the game screen, particle effects, and dashed lines that crawl across the galaxy map, the startup time for this game is obscene and loading or generating galaxy maps also takes far too long, seemingly in spite of how basic these maps appear in practice. The AI is also quite time-consuming for how simplistic it is, making you wait for quite a while with each 'end turn' come endgame.
TL;DR -- While enjoyable, this game is bad. You will not stop playing this game out of boredom like many others, you will stop playing it when the great theme of Giant Robot Punching and Shooting stops covering up the abhorrent stench of laziness and indifference that permeates 95% of the time you spend playing this game. The tactical layer of this game is great. Satisfying Robot punching and shooting, good presentation of information, and an adequate User Interface/Controls. Outside of the tactical layer, everything else is really, really bad. Game performance is bad, required account for content patches is bad, UI is bad, specific information about how the game works is obscured and/or badly presented, cutscenes are repetitive and unskippable, campaign story is OK but very badly told, Bioware's signature meaningless dialogue trees are back, game starts with a forced tutorial, you go through a whole character creation process that determines less about your character than 1 fight in a midgame chapter, game has really bizarre difficulty spikes (which are almost managable because the AI is so bad) and collapses (which are boring and feel like a waste of time for the same reason). I think the worst thing about this is that mech customization in this game falls into all the same traps as mech customization in every other Mechwarrior game -- of the options presented, there are about a half-dozen good options and everything else is just stuff you do until you get those good options. Instead of, say, LRM's and ML's like in Mechwarrior 3, for example, in this game it's AC/20's and SRM's. Long-range options fall by the wayside because for all the stuff the Devs added, they took away any sort of customization of sensors or engines that might have made long-range options actually useful in the game.
