It is hard to talk about a game as old, yet important as this. We're not playing this in 1997, we're playing it today. I propose a simple test. Suppose the Diablo series, and only the Diablo series somehow didn't exist, and a version of it only came out today. Would you have a reason to play it? This might seem an unfair test to a retro game, but I think it really is not. Fallout, Castlevania, a great many older Final Fantasies; all games that pass it in my eyes. Even with endless sequels and successors, they have enough to them to draw a gamer back to the source. Diablo does not. But Diablo is Diablo. Not many game can claim to have launched an entire subgenre. This is not to say that playing it today is without value. It's still a playable game that manages to hit some notes that its successors could not. Playing through it for the first time recently, the relative simplicity endeared the game to me. No fussing about with 13% crit rates and 34.5% health on every seventh kill: there's not a lot of gear and not a lot of stats, but what you do get matters more for it. The relatively slow pace also appealed to me, even if the methods by which it was attained sometimes did not. But it's still an old, rough game, outdone by its progeny over the last couple of decades. Good for the time, yet iterated upon thousandfold, even with newer improvements like DevilutionX. Diablo set the stage for the ARPG, but it didn't start the performance. That honor belonged to its sequel.
Fallout Tactics, the grey sheep of the series: not quite the black sheep of Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, but it's just a matter of shades. I tried to like this game: I uninstalled it, then reinstalled it twice before ultimately dropping it. I think it remains obscure for a reason. There is not one big flaw I can point at. It's a cavalcade of minor issues that get in the way of enjoying the game. I can usually brush those aside - I've quite the tolerance for old game awkwardness, but there is just so much of it. The game runs in real time by default, but without a pause button, it's hard to do any precise work like VATS shots. In truth, everything's running on the same skeleton as the first two Fallout games, and there ARE two turn-based modes... but the game wasn't designed around using those either. It slows everything to a crawl, and on some levels, you'll be sitting for half a minute as unalerted enemies go about their turns... oh, and the UI for figuring out your movement costs is a pain. Regardless of mode, sightlines are important, more so than in the older games because of the new stance system, but you're getting no preview or display, so you'll just have to guess and hope for the best. And when the fighting is done and it's time to loot? The Fallout inventory system was designed for one hero with maybe some helpers, not squads of up to six. Have fun fighting with the range restrictions when you're trying to transfer gear, and then, once you get back to base, moving all your gear to the one squadmate with Barter so you can get a reasonable amount of scrip for your trouble. There is so much more. The pathfinding in general is messy, melee sucks, some skills are nigh-useless... It's all too much for the six or so hours I ended up spending on the game. And, yeah, that's the game. It's combat missions strung together by a basic plot. If you don't like that gameplay, you don't have a reason to play, and I didn't, so I won't. Maybe you will?
This is the best of the Fallout games, and one of my favourite games out there, period. I could go on and on about the writing, the branching storytelling, the factions, and all that on top of a wonderful exploration gameplay loop and I would not cover half of it. Some of the choices you need to make still roil around in my head, with and without the benefit of hindsight, wondering if I did the right thing and forcing me to reexamine myself as a person? So, why only four stars? Because this is a game that ran poorly in 2010 and still fights with your computer to this day. Now, this is fixable... but you do need to fix it. I've heard legends of people who can run this game without issues in a fully-vanilla environment, but I I'd have better luck finding Bigfoot that one of them. Check out the Viva New Vegas modding guide, get yourself some extra mods to taste to tune up whatever annoys you about the gameplay, maybe a bit of extra content while you're at it too. After some learning, a couple of hours, and a pinch of troubleshooting if you're unlucky, your spurs will be jingle jangling all the way to Mr. House.
This is the last of the mainline Elder Scrolls games I needed to finish. Yes, my grognards, I've even played Arena. At about 70 hours of game time, with some sidequests left hanging but most of the "good stuff" done, I can say this before all else: this game has aged poorly. Oblivion's world was one of unmatched scale and ambition for 2006, but not without cost. Bethesda made sacrifices to make the game as impressive as it was. Today, most of the details that set it apart from its contemporaries are common, if not ubiquitous. So, with the good watered down, you are left to ogle at the bad and the ugly. There's the horrible leveling system and its associated scaling, the agressively vanilla world strewn with an incongruous amount of copy-pasted castles and dungeons for the heart of a world-spanning empire. The potato faces, bloomed-out scenery, and middling, linear main quest. The awkward midpoint between the number crunching of Morrowind and streamlining of Skyrim. The overreliance on waypoints. The HORRIBLE level scaling, once more, for emphasis. The way how all the items level-scale is but one aspect of it, but does such a job to discourage exploration for the sake of it. Yet. Bethesda's games were always more than the sum of their parts. Oblivion is at its best when the music kicks in on trek between town and mine, with an enticing-looking shrine in the distance, trying to sway your attention. The sidequests are also pretty good when comparing to the other three modern Elder Scrolls games, although they don't quite reach something like New Vegas what with their linearity. Shivering Isles show a game that could have been, with the environment team getting to work on something that's not generic fantasy and the quest team going appropriately nuts (if still too linear!) Plus, this is the game where the mods truly kick in. Lots of the bad stuff comes down to numbers and can be alleviated, and there's plenty for you if you look. So, will you look?
Morrowind. Here I am, only having completed it now. 48 hours, if OpenMW is to be believed. I will never forget it. But is it a good game? Yes, But I don't think it's some timeless masterpiece with nary a flaw. Far from it. Lots to say, but reader attention span is limited, so I'll be short. Let's run through the good stuff, yes? Something new around every corner, an exploratory smorgasbord Bethesda became known for. The art direction carries the 2002 graphics and animations. The world woven is something unique, an interplay of distinct cultures as told through quests, ruins, and esoteric books written by a living god. Try to capture that one's soul and turn it into a hilarously useless pair of pants. It's good fun. You can even complete the main quest afterwards. But. You aren't doing that all the time, are you? I won't criticise highly subjective stuff, like quest markers. Let's talk about the moment-to-moment gameplay. Early on, you fight the fatigue system and a horribly-communicated accuracy system, and what little magic you can cast is unusably unreliable. Even Daggerfall didn't have spell failure chance. And that's with your trained skills, even. Point is, what works in a tabletop RPG does not in a 3D first person RPG. Ask a Morrowind veteran what to do to mitigate the early suck. No first-time player would know to do what they suggest. Blinding Speed, anyone? That's just it, really. So much basic stuff simply does not work how you would expect it to. The effectiveness of enchanted items vs spells is but one example. Leveling is another. There are many more examples. And later? It's so easy to break the game on accident, let alone the myriad ways you can do it "properly." And what if you don't? You get what is frankly a very dull, basic experience, chatting to walking Wiki pages that are most of the NPCs, and pushing the simple mechanics to their limits. Their depth is, frankly, an illusion. It's still a good game in spite of it all. But be warned.
I understand that you might be looking at this veritable antique of a video game and wondering if it can truly be worth it. To many, this is not only the best immersive sim, or the best RPG - no, this is the best game ever made. This last statement is not one I'd make myself. However, it is a most worthy competitor for the title. Yes, even today. I've played this game without the benefit of nostalgia, well after its release day. Yet, I still came out astounded. In its day, Deus Ex was a game unlike any other, and although many have taken its mechanics and story beats, iterating and refining upon them, the game yet remains worthy. What's so good about it? The level design in sublime, polished to a mirror-sheen, with so many ways to approach any given mission. The story touches upon themes few other games consider. It is often clumsy in its execution, but it hits nonetheless with topics still relevant and themes worth a great amount of deliberation. The game is long, longer than I anticipated, and only rarely did the length not feel justified. The soundtrack is plain sublime - more upbeat than you'd expect for this type of game, yet it feels just right. Deus Ex is also not a perfect game. The shooting mechanics rely heavily upon the skill system, and with the benefit of decades of game design, there are better ways to penalize low training than Deus Ex's approach of sluggishly zeroing in on targets. Balance, in general, is a bit off, with the often memed swimming skill and the tranq dart presenting a few comically underwhelming examples. The voice acting... look, if you're reading this review, I dare say you've seen the videos. In many ways, yes, Deus Ex has been outpaced, outmatched, obsoleted. However, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For the price of a somewhat-fancy cup of coffee, it's more than worth to try. If the game doesn't suit you, you won't lose much. If it does, it's an Experience, one worthy of the capital letter.
Right, so, this lovely mess. First of all, get the Circle of Eight and Temple Plus mods - the game works so much better with them and is a virtual hive of bugs without. With that out of the way, what to make of this? The Temple of Elemental Evil is an new approach for Troika: their moment-to-moment gameplay is passable at best, but the story, the story remains in the minds of all who brave the jank. This game is the opposite. It's the single most faithful recreation of the 3.5e Dungeons and Dragons ruleset on the market barring actual virtual tabletops. That's the main selling point here: turn based combat in an RPG system that defined the 00s. The problem is that 3.5e is also, with the benefit of about twenty years of game design, a hot steaming pile of design ideas that falls appart beyond level... 6? 8? 10 if you're generous. Magic is king and everyone else is slave to its whims. This game works around this by having a lot of monsters geared against spellcasters in the later stages as well as, well, being a video game, which prevents a lot of the bovine excrement associated with the use of high-level magic. However, to say that's the only bad part of a system is a gross understatement. Full attack actions, trap feats, XP costs to crafting, inpenetrable chains of requirements, the billion ways to completely negate a specific style of play... The point is, the baseline system is a mess, and this game puts it onto your electronic storage medium of choice, carbuncles and all. Furthermore, a lot of the fun of this system lies on the character sheet and the myriad ways you can fundamentally break the playing board, and this game is a bit barebones compared to other 3.5e/Pathfinder ports. With the system chatter out of the way, what about the rest of it? The story is barebones, some of the design decisions beyond the system baffle, the interface is often a big ol' pile of jank... so why rate this 3/5? Because I like 3.5e. And you probably do as well, reading this.
