The game itself is a tribute/parody on the Sentai (Power Rangers & Co) genre, as well as any "Team of color-coded heroes defends from main villain and his mini-bosses in each episode": Voltron, Ninja Turtles etc etc etc... Gameplay-wise you get equipment, base upgrades, very basic resource management, crafting, character skills, and some interesting "teamwork" combat mechanics that take a while to get used to, but yield good bonuses. It starts really well with a really quirky premise, where you have to defeat enemies in the most spectacular way to get most of the "influence" (which is your main way of getting other resources). But it gets really repetitive really quick. In the last 20% of the game I was so fed up of jokes and 1-dimensional dialogue (which is kinda part of the parody side of the game) that I started using rewind. The mini-bosses are plenty and diverse, but few of them require really special tactics. Overall a solid 4-star game and if you are a fan of the genre (and can cope with overabuse of 1-dimensional jokes) give it another star. I couldn't.
People took one of the greatest old games ever, completely rebuilt it from scratch on a modern engine, extended it with TONS of great stuff, keep it active for over a decade with updates, improvements etc and all this for FREE. Where is the sixth star option, GOG?
This game cannot compare with the genre-leading AAA-class titles, but it's simple, does not have [virtually] any learning curve and is fun. Best played with kids - they enjoy the cool animations and the fact that the game is super simple, and you enjoy oh-so-not-childish remarks that the main characters often produce and show off your strategic genius by helping them in the boss fights. A word of caution, making it run on more recent Win10 version has been a hit-and-miss experience. The game is old - check the forums.
The game is good and stable, the general level of the plot is decent. But 90%+ of the game is linear. There are like 1-2 side missions, very little character development, no choices that matter etc. Basically, it's like "we've built an engine, here's what it can do" type of feeling. Somehow reminds me of Half-Life 2: great engine, solid story, solid experience, 100% railroad shooter. Except that HL2 did not pretend to be an RPG, but this game does. Shadowrun Dragonfall, for example, feels quite differently (even though after classic CRPGs the world feels a bit empty of action, and controversial choices could matter a bit more..).
Don't get me wrong, the game is nice, except that s was designed for the consoles and some funky stuff like the 2nd controller trick (google it) won't work. But it is a really old game, what the F price? Same thing as with EA titles - I would have bought some to pay respects, but not at this price level..
If someone offered me to trade back the game experience for time spent after finishing this game, I'd take it. Pros: * Stable. I had 0 glitches * The graphics are nothing you'd want as a wallpaper, but OK. * Voice acting is actually MUCH better than expected. Probably, the only thing that I will remember a month later about this game. * Background music is very good, reflects the atmosphere well. Too short for OST though. * Quest items are spawned at the beginning of the game, not when you take a quest - combined with fast travel saves you a LOT of back-and-forth - a very respectable game design decision! Cons: If you know the typical cyberpunk cliches and played Deus Ex, the story and setting will be 0% new and 100% feeling of copy-paste. Plot twists and endings (most unsatisfactory endings ever!) are predictable; writing, characters and quests are bland. There is no depth and no emotional attachment. By the end you don't care who lives of dies - you just want it to end. DROD had better writing! When platforming you have no clue which objects are material (can stand on) and which are just background decorations - they all look the same, causing tons of confusion, and falling damage. Why? The secondary attacks when hacking are not mentioned in tutorials! I've found out about them only when I started reading guides, because hacking was so darn hard. And YouTube is full of videos of people never finding that the secondary attack actually has 3 modes, not just one. Combat (both ranged and melee) is very simplistic. Stealth pretends to exist, but doesn't really. Bosses do not exist. The final "boss" is a fat stationary turret, which you kill by moving your joystick left and right in a repetitive pattern for a minute or so. Summary: The game feels as if the devs had lots of great ideas, but only 30% budget. So instead of cutting the breadth and having a few 100% great mechanics, they give you lots of not-even-half baked ones.
Worms 2 was great at the time, but them Worms World Party and Worms Armageddon followed - I'd buy those, not this one. Where's "Worms2 Bundle"?
I belive this game is hugely overrated. After so many years the only things I can remember about this game are beautiful backgrounds, lots of empty rooms (to showcase backgrounds?) and necessity to WALK A LOT (so you could marvel at the backgrounds again?). The rest (puzzles, story, setting) was mediocre. I do remember many details of games like Goblins / Larry / Monkey Island / Culpa Innata much better than this. I believe System Shock or Deus Ex w/o combat could still be better quests than this. It looks like devs thought: 'Well, we got nice concept art, let's make a game around it! And let's split it in two, to cash more!'. I would not recommend it to others. However, many love the game - maybe I'm missing something..
I replayed it about 4 times over the course of 5+ years. I played it in school, I played it in university, I played it after I graduated and got a job. And probably I will replay another 1-2 times with mods. This says it all.
I got the game because of the reviews, and played it to the end, so I want to warn others, who are not aware what JRPG really means in terms of gameplay. Patience and diligence are of the core values of oriental culture, and you can definitely tell this by their RPGs (anyone remember Lineage with insane amounts of harvesting?). From the westerner point of view this game is an absolute time waster: 60%+ of the time is backtracking, 50% of the remaining time is watching combat animations, which leaves about 20% of actual gaming time (20 hours out of 'whopping 100 hours of gameplay'). The whole story can be told in about 40 minutes, the exploration of new areas is about 5 hours, and the rest are repetitious drab battles. Anyway, 80% time playing this game is plain wasted! And - don't be surprised - this is a very good JRPG! It's just how they're made, because the values are different! Details follow (for the brave): 1. The game has INSANE amount of backtracking. There will be areas which you will cross left-to-right and then right-to-left more than 6 times, each time fighting the SAME enemies in the SAME places (enemies respawn every time you re-enter the area). To make matters even worse, some areas are mazes with switches, that raise/lower barriers and open/close doors. You can have up to 5 switches in a maze, and most of thies time after you hit a switch you have to lug your party across the whole area, so you will fully cross the same area 8 to 10 times easily. And there are about 20 areas like this in the game. Furthermore, there will be areas, with lots of recursive backtracking: Area1->Area2->Area3->Area4->Fight the Boss->Area4->Area3->Area2->Area1. While still fighting the SAME enemies in the SAME places. I mean it! Most normal games give you a shortcut or a cutscene after you've defeated the boos (or achieved something equally important) and you're immediately transferred to your camp or world map - but not this one! And, yes, there will be a place with switches AND recursive backtracking. To complicate the matters, the plague of 199x games - getting stuck in the pixels - is here as well. Be ready for lots of manual control over your characters when passing narrow doors and ledges, walking around trees and flower pots and so on. Overall, expect to spend 60%+ of gaming time lugging yourself through areas to which you have been at least twice before. 2. Well, we all understand that certain amount of marching and backtracking is essential in every RPG to maintain story. But here comes another failure. At first 30% of the game the story is really interesting - the unusual concept of the layered world, biomechanics, core magic, etc. But then you realize that the writers probably forgot the main rules of drama dynamics: every good drama has it's pace accelerating towards the culmination in the end, so you expect major events to happen quicker, pauses to become shorted and the fights to become more intense. Well, this is true of boss fights (expect to fight two bosses in a row a few times), but as for the rest - the process is the same from 30% to 98% of the same: walk mazes, flip switches (see previous sections) and fight the SAME enemies in the SAME places, up until (and including) the final stage. . After about 60% in game you run into lots of situations when you have to go through an area only to talk to a character at the other end (no there's no shortcut even if it's 25th time you're being here! while being interrupted by critters that yield 38 exp (when you have about 15000 to level) about 8 times! (See section on battles below). Game designers try to keep interest by providing a variety of environments, but still the whole thing turns into routine about 50% of the game and even at the very end of it you need to collect 4 colour switches and flip tons of switches to get to the final boss. Also about 30-40% in game you realize that the plot and the characters are quite sketchy and cannot actually convey the cosmic scale of events. At about 60% of the game you get tired of parade of cliches including many 'noble deaths' that fail to create any feelings. The main characters are not much better, but at least you get a few side quests to end ideological quarrels between some of them. There is also lots of loose ends: you need to find a boat to cross a lake, when you have a flyer capable of delivering you anywhere (which could be solution to endless trekking, but, alas), and so on... And finally, RPG assumes certain choices that you can make to affect the global course of events. Well, sorry, you can't - it's an almost linear walking/battling quest! 3. So, the game is not about role playing, and not about story. it's about walking a lot and fighting approximately every 20 steps you make. What about the battles? After looking at the screenshots and game description you may expect something akin to Heroes of Might and Magic 2/3 with hero development, tactics and use of skills. Well, the hero development is out of your control - the whole group gets equal XP, the stats simply grow as characters level up (no point distribution, no skill trees, nothing). Certain skills open as you reach certain levels, and that all about it. You still can quip your party, though with typical JRPG-style items (Sword, Sword+1, Sword+2, ... Sword+99, etc) with little variation. The only interesting point here is getting weapon upgrades that unlock new skills for certain characters. The battles are on par: you get skills that hit targets 'close together' or 'in a single line' but there's no movement on the battlefield! Your group and the enemy group just STAND there exchanging blows (another typical CRPG/JRPG feat), there's no difference between melee vs ranged, no maneuvers, nothing. Sometimes enemies move (zombies closing in), but that happens very rare and you cannot move your characters anyway. The initiative mechanism and card combos are interesting, though, and we can see these mechanics getting into 'typical' strategies and RPGs. But probably the worst about the battles is lengthy combo/casting animations (some of them are like 20 seconds) which you cannot skip! Expect to dedicate about 50% of your battle time to them (including jumping into the battle sequences, which can sometimes be veeeery looong). === Conclusion === I understand that most of the explained above are typical traits of J/CRPGs, thus 3/5, not 1/5. If you're fan of tactcal battles: get HoMM2/3/4 and download fome 'Adventure' type maps (my favourite one is a map for HoMM2 where you start with a single Ghost and take on 500 Black Dragons in the end). If you're RPG fan, well, this is NOT an RPG. If you're Diablo/Witcher Action/RPG fan - this may be good for you if you're fine with the fact that 80% of the time you spend doing useful (NOT really fighting, NOT really developing the plot). But better buy Witcher cheap from GOG if you haven't been through it yet!
