Despite the intriguing and quality hand-crafted levels, despite the unique premise, setting and visuals, despite all the lore and fun it offers, for as much as I lament that it's the only level-based (i.e., not open world) Elder Scrolls RPG title, Battlespire is just too broken, too buggy and too undertuned and unpolished to be a good game, and thus, it's not game worth recommending. Again, I really can't overstate what a crying shame it is, because it can be fun, it has many good moments and cool characters. But unless you have bucketloads of patience and a willingness to start from scratch more than once, you probably won't get to those parts at all. If you're a patient, die-hard Elder Scrolls fan, a fan of Daedric lore, and a fan of old-school RPGs and dungeon crawlers, then by all means, go for it. I am all of the above and despite the frustrating mess this game can be, I did derive plenty of fun from Battlespire. Beyond that niche, however, I just don't think Battlespire is crafted well enough to be called a good game.
Redguard is an action-adventure spinoff of the Elder Scrolls series. It introduced a TON of new things that would change the way Elder Scrolls games presented themselves forever. Dwemer, unique architecture and world design, dragons, Empire vs. provinces, I could go on and on. The best things to do at Redguard are: talk to characters, look at the environments, solve puzzles, soak in the incredible atmosphere, jam to the tunes. The worst thing to do in Redguard is actually playing it. The controls are garbage, the framerate is garbage, it's just not enjoyable to play. I'm a huge Elder Scrolls fan, the "just can't get enough" type, so I put up with the horrendous controls because I liked the places that these horrendous controls took me to. I suffered through navigating the admittedly awesome dungeons because I could at least derive some pleasure from looking at them and solving the actually well-designed puzzles (despite pulling my hair out after falling through a pixel-wide crack for the n-th time). I completed them so I could get that next story step, that next piece of lore or information, that new interaction with the colorful NPCs of Stros M'kai. Ultimately, like Battlespire before it, Redguard is technically not up to snuff to be considered worth recommending as a whole. While Redguard, like Battlespire, is clunky and frustrating, I would, again, be lying if I said I derived no fun or enjoyment from it. Everything about this game except its execution on the performance and controls front is really, really good. But this is still a game, not a book, movie or series, so if the main reason for not enjoying a game is in how you interact with it, well, I don't consider it a game worth recommending to anyone but the most dogged Elder Scrolls fans. Play it for the lore, the story, the characters, the cool dungeons. But be prepared for a lot of navigational suffering.
Let's get this out of the way first: for me, it worked right out of the box, no complaints there. I tried upping the resolution some but since it looked decent enough and it worked, I didn't bother. I never played Moto Racer 2 back in the day, in fact, I didn't even know it existed, I only played the first game. While MR1 was an intensely tight, satisfying and buttclenching arcade racer, it was a tad short on content - you could breeze through it in like an hour or two if you were half decent at the game. THIS, however, is a bit more fleshed out. What I love about it is that they didn't change any of the features that made MR1 so good - the extremely responsive and tight controls, the relentless nature of races on Hard mode, the cheesy-but-infinitely-appropriate dad rock soundtrack, it's all there, there's just more maps, more modes, just more of everything. I like that they separated the MotoX and Street Championships and put a Mixed one after the first two, though you can play either of the three right from the get-go. There's also an entirely separate "simulation" mode, but IMHO it's just "bad controls" mode. Let's face it - back in the late 90s racing sims weren't really very realistic, so I much MUCH prefer Arcade mode that is just pure, unadulterated, silly FUN. It's janky, chaotic and intense, as it should be. There's not much more to say, really. I got it for 1.09€ on sale, which is the price of a fancy chocolate bar, and believe me, there ain't no fancy chocolate bar in the world to give you a rush like this game. I'm not a huge racing fan, but this
I played this game a LOT when I was a kid and I was surprised I still know some of the tracks. For me, it worked flawlessly in fullscreen (albeit in a dazzling 640x480 with black bars), and I could only make it crash if I alt-tabbed out. That said, I think I already have dgVoodoo installed because of Tomb Raider, so there might have been some wrapping in the background that I didn't even know, but in any case, for me, it worked without problems in fullscreen with no crashes. The gameplay is simple, ride a motorbike (either a street racing bike or a motorcross bike) and be the fastest. The controls are super-responsive, bike choice is really important and realism is thrown out, bath water and all, for pure, unapologetic arcade fun. This ain't no sim and it's not trying to be. It is, however, quite short and easy. Once you get the hang of the controls (which should take you anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds, because again, they rule), you can finish the game in under an hour with all gold medals. If you beat the game on Medium, you get a special mode, and if you beat it on Hard, another special mode, so there's some tiny tiny replayability here, but all in all, don't expect to get hours from it. BUT - at a price of 1.09€, which is less than a coffee at a bar, you can't really fault a game from 1997 for "lacking content". I'm a shooter and RPG guy myself, I played the odd NFS back in the day but racing games never did it for me - this one is silly fun and a bit of an exception. Get it on sale and kill an hour or two with it, you won't regret it.
If this game played like Dark Forces II, or better yet, if it were made in the modified Quake 3 engine like Jedi Outcast, it would've been an absolute MASTERPIECE and the only Star Wars action game we would ever need. But it wasn't. And it isn't. It's still enjoyable as a Star Wars experience, but it's just not a really good game. GOG did it again as far as compatibility is concerned, download, play, go. It runs flawlessly on 2560x1440 for me (apart from the cutscenes which play in a small window at the top left, which GOG does notify you about, but it doesn't bother me), the controls are set as good as they can be, and it works. It's capped at 60 but I capped it again at 30 with RTSS because the Asteroid Field mission was impossible to beat on Hard. What everyone says about the controls is true. They suck. Well, there's nothing wrong with the way the character walks etc., but the mouse y axis is hardbound to movement and it can't be turned off. Luckily, there is vertical autoaim to a certain point, but if something's too high, you have to press V, look up/down and shoot and pray you hit it. I just use the keys and ignore the mouse and it's serviceable. Another terrible thing is the old school consoley lack of real saves. The game does have discreet checkpoints but you're A) not notified in-game when you pass one and B) they can be VERY unevenly distributed (looking at you, Gall), as in 30 minutes until you hit the first one and C) you get a set amount of lives to play with each level, after that it's game over and start again. It's just a huge waste of time - this is a PC port, at least they could've done away with the lives and used a normal checkpoint system. THAT SAID, the characters are really good, the story is decent, the settings and levels are wonderful despite their occasional 1997 barenness, the flying parts are nearly on par with Rogue Squadron, the sound design is stellar. The packaging and vibe is nice, the gameplay isn't.
I have to say I'm biased towards this sort of thing because there's just something I find appealing about the whole rural American setting. I love the music and the over-the-top accents and silly, oh so silly ideas. But the gist of it is that despite GOG doing a decent job with the DOSBox setup, the game has a whole heap of problems. Technical, first - now most of them like insanely loud music and no widescreen and terrible controls can be solved by using a source port (I used BuildGDX, but there's also NRedneck/Rednukem which is apparently even better), but I realize not everyone has the patience to mess around with stuff like this. So out of the box, it's functional, but not very player-friendly. Then, there's the actual gameplay, and other people have mentioned a ton of negative things so I'll just sum them up: the hit detection is TERRIBLE (projectiles go right through enemies sometimes), the enemies are often unfair (why do shotgun-toting enemies take off 20+ health from halfway across a field?!) and the level layouts are the wrong kind of complicated. In Duke Nukem, and Blood (other Build engine games), keys were big and visible and more importantly, color coded. Here, they just lie on the ground and they're all brown and hard to see. Luckily BuildGDX has a "coloured keys" feature so it shows keys in either blue, red or brown (and the doors likewise). Without this feature you have zero chance of figuring some of these levels out, and even with that in mind, I still needed a walkthrough for some levels. One of the later levels has a hidden hallway under a totally inconspicuous waterfall. It's not a secret, it's the MAIN PATH. Sucks. But with all that said, I still had tons of fun playing this game - like I said, the setting is fun and caricatured, the environments, while convoluted, pretty lively and atmospheric and the music is cool too. I loved it because I love redneck stuff, if you don't, there's not much game here to keep you interested.
Like another three-star review before mine, I also feel giving it three stars is a bit unfair. In terms of visuals and sound - straight As. It looks and feels like a 90s FPS. Sound is very good, my only minor gripe would be that the rapid fire sound is very flat and weak compared to the shotgun's assertive boom. Otherwise, looks and atmosphere: top marks. The gameplay is wonderful, you have two modes of fire (rapid fire and spread shotgun fire), basic movement and bunnyhopping a la Quake. You're in a dark room on a platform and you get swarmed by demonic, wonderfully designed Lovecraftian atrocities. You shoot them, they touch you, you die, rinse and repeat. It really is one of those things that you'll either get bored with after a few tries (kind of like I did) or get completely hooked on and try and master it. I feel like some achievements or at least one other game mode would be enough to add some much needed depth, but what's there is good. There's just not a lot of it. I got it on sale for 2.49€ and it's well worth that, heck, I'd even say it's worth 5€ for what it is. Just don't expect too much.
