I've been a huge fan of STR back in the days. Deserts of Kharak is an interesteting prequel to Homeworld, the narration is great, the graphics are beautiful and the game performances overall is fine. However, the game suffers from design issues that seems inherited from homeworld and which, for me, makes it boring: - Units controls is really annoying, units can be stacked in several different groups, which is great, but it's a chore to remove them, so if you accidentally added an unit to a group, or want to rework a group without totally dismantling it, you can't. - The overview is too small, having a clear picture of what is happening is nearly impossible, moreoever, there's no minimap - The game is heavilly scripted. It's great that STR evolved from the time when the good strategy was to zerg the ennemy, even if it was cool. In Karhak, ressources are incredibely limited and ennemies come by waves, after checkpoints in the game, they have no base. So basically you cannot have a real influence on the scenario. Make sure to prepare yourself as necessary, deplete ressources to the maximum, then trigger the checkpoint. If for some reason your units setup is not good then ... meh, restart it. For this kind of dynamic, turns by turns game are more appropriate. Here, not only it makes the game boring, but it also seems like a gamble at some points. - Units transfering from one world to another is great, but the ressources are so limited that you can cumulate a debt over and over the mission and then having to start over, or to start with default ressources. So hey, well, I remember I did not complete Homeworld back in the days because it was cool but incredibly hard to control and too scripted, I am going to finish that game but I'm not having so much fun with it.
For some reason, the game is working badly on my computer. When I am switching between walk mode and inspection mode the screen looks like a duplicated wallpaper made of miniature game screen for a few seconds, before being playable again. This happening every-time makes the games unplayable because of the number of time you switch modes. UAKM worked pretty fine, I did not test Overseer so far, what I do not get is that I already have the steam version of Pandora directive and it works flawlessly, even if they seems the exact same dropbox version. This being said, the game itself is incredible, Tex Murphy is one of the best characters and set of stories ever made. So before you play Tesla Effect (a masterpiece) grab the full series anyway.
I had it as a shareware as a child and somehow manage to unlock it I do not know how, you have to buy it.
The game is great, I am not going to talk about it, people already made it better than I can. However, I start to play in french because I had trouble understanding the texts in english. Usually I play in the original language but for once I was making to many bad choices because of this. And there we are: the french translation is A SHAME. There're numerous mistakes everywhere, the style is completely lost. Producer probably wanted to save pennies and gave us that shit. Will probably not buy the second game just because of this.
