I can't even get out of the needlessly brutal tutorial, this is so punishing. The tutorial doesn't clearly explain what you need to do to get the numerous "moves" to proc and so they don't and you are killed repeatedly by orcs. Not fun, too frustrating, simple "avenge the murdered family" plot if you can even survive long enough to get into the game itself. A masochist's paradise. I'd demand my money back but I didn't pay anything for it. Thank God.
As Iconoclast92 said, this is prone to crashing: frequently crashes on initial launch, crashes at the end of the cinematics, randomly crashes while in the middle of a scenario. Glad I got it free. Controls are inconsistent: in the first scenario, "Q" is melee attack, but the melee attack will absolutely not proc when facing the intended target (??!?) but only when facing away from it (??!??) causing the attack to miss. In all subsequent scenarios, "Q" cycles weapons (??!!??). WHY WOULD YOU CHANGE THAT?? In one of the last intro scenarios, you have to detonate explosives, but the game doesn't tell you how. I had to pause the game and google it, the solution is completely unintuitive and is not listed in the control layout in Options. In nearly all intro scenarios, the grapple was good only for one-shot climbs. In the last one, it's suddenly capable of Spider-manning up tall buildings. After the intro scenarios, you're left in a hub area where there are renewable health powerups BUT NO AMMO (???!!??) before you're expected to take on any of three different deep combat missions. I got involved in a street battle between federal forces and rebels just to get some ammo. In the intro scenarios, walking over a dropped weapon added its ammo to your inventory. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, walking over a dropped weapon opens a popup during combat (???!!!??) asking you which of your current weapons you want to replace with the one on the ground. Taking powerups is a crap-shoot. About half the time, pressing "E" does NOT take the item even when you need the health or ammo. None of these changes are explained in-game or in the control layout, and several of the commands shown in the layout don't do in-game what is claimed in Options. And apparently after the first scenario, you don't have any melee abilities, so without ammo you are totally screwed. Frustrating and annoying. I do not understand the high ratings for this nonsense.
FEAR has a wonderfully slow-build creepy feel that ultimately does not pay off. After about an hour, the vague, distorted cutscenes of murderous ghosts, humans being skeltonized by red mist, people disintegrating into ash, rooms being set afire by a little girl, and cannibalism wear thin. The ongoing goal is to eliminate a supersoldier cannibal who commands a vast army of "replicas" (which are never quite explained but which appear to be conventional troops against which you are constantly told you have a physical advantage but don't in actual gameplay other than the ability to VERY BRIEFLY slow the passage of time, which is of little value) but as time goes on and you run into him repeatedly, the on-rails encounters always end with you being unavoidably knocked unconscious and it becomes obvious that there is NO way you can defeat this guy unless the defeat is also on rails. The rest is a standard modern military shooter, but the devs apparently couldn't figure out how to increase the difficulty without cheating. Each encounter finds greater and greater numbers of enemy troops arrayed against you with increasingly superior equipment until you're fighting a platoon of psychic superspeed runners in heavy body armor--which can only be penetrated by one particular weapon for which there is never enough ammo--as they spray you with heavy machine gun fire, never miss, shoot through walls and solid obstacles at a target they can't possibly see, and sling around grenades like they have an unlimited supply... which they do. Suddenly 10 medkits aren't enough to keep you alive for more than about 12 seconds. After about two hours of gameplay, the game begins to lag severely at random moments, often indicating that an enemy squad is about to spawn ON TOP OF YOU. No, not an ambush, it's like they beamed in from the Enterprise, guns blazing and unlimited grenades flying all over the place. Survivable only with cheats, really not worth the time and frustration.
Yeah, we get it, it's "a sandbox". But when the sole dev chose to reinvent the wheel with the UI, THE UI NEEDS TO BE EXPLAINED. And I don't mean the popups that are constantly blocking part of your view. Recruit people. HOW? Gather food. HOW? Learn to "git gud" at combat. HOW?? The interface is constantly pushing you to "build buildings" but you have no idea what the buildings would be for or how to build them. I have a staff in my inventory but no idea how to equip it or use it. How does combat work? NO IDEA. You're told to "click the 'Defend' button to defend but you won't ever attack". That's the sum total of information about how combat works! An alleged "Tutorial" only tells you that combat is nearly always fatal, you should never go out in the desert alone. The vast majority of NPCs are completely non-interactive. Of the very few that are, a minority have dialog and want four digit money to join you--many times the money you have. Okay, so how do you get money? NO IDEA. The UI keeps warning you about hunger. Okay, where do I get food? NO IDEA. I see a bartender has food for sale, so I buy some. Now I'm completely broke. The food sits in my inventory. How do I eat it? NO IDEA. I wander into the desert anyway. The cursor changes over a pile of rocks. I click. My character is now pounding the ground with a pickaxe. Am I harvesting some kind of resource? NO IDEA. Nothing is spilling out on the ground. Nothing is added to my inventory. After two hours of screwing around with this nonsense I uninstalled the game and will probably never touch it again. If you want people to play your game and choose to use a non-standard interface, YOU HAVE TO EXPLAIN HOW THE GAME IS PLAYED. Don't make the brain-dead excuse that "it's a sandbox". Leaving your players clueless and wandering around aimlessly... that's not what "sandbox" means. This is a proof-of-concept project you give out to friends. Not something you CHARGE MONEY FOR and pretend it's a game.
Others have said it all, but beyond the great look of the thing, it's no fun to play. Not enough info in-game to tell you which weapon or armor piece you should be using or what this other junk is that adds to encumbrance and can't be discarded. Timing jumps is more difficult than it should be, combat is slow and clunky, bosses can't be survived and once encountered can't be avoided. Every time you die, a "ghost" is added which is a predatory superhuman version of yourself. But because you lost all your "axions" or leveling skill points when you died, you have no hope of defeating your ghost, and have now spawned a second one, and a third one, ad infinitum, and these will seek you out wherever you are, preventing progress through the map. And speaking of a map, it would be nice if there were one in game, because you'll just keep wandering around the same level in circles as the mobs keep respawning around you. There is only autosave at vaguely defined spots in the game, but even when the saving animated icon appears, it's not really saving your progress. The only "saves" that are saved are made when you die. If you decide to start a new game instead, you have to go through the rigamarole of creating a new character and sitting through the slow, monotonous, unskippable cinematic prologue, which is in a language I don't recognize with English subtitles. There is no comprehensible story. Ducking for cover could put you in an inescapable instant death trap. Boring, frustrating. Any game where death in unavoidable that also gimps you every time you die is sadistic and misguided.
I got this game for free; it certainly isn't worth a $30 price tag. People comparing it unfavorably to Battletech or Mechwarrior are attempting to compare disposable razors to combine harvesters. It's a fun little arcade style "destroy everything" game, and it's certainly no challenge to destroy everything on a map. In fact, that's probably the biggest downfall: there is no challenge to this game once you master the somewhat odd steering mechanism (the devs call it "WASD", but it does not perform as you'd expect from that description, and the driving mechanic could literally have been operated by ANY four keys--using W, A, S and D confuses the issue because this is not played like an FPS). The game takes minutes to master, and after that there's really no challenge no matter what you do. The AI simply isn't capable of doing tremendous damage to you, but YOU are to it. You can infinitely replay any mission, and the maps and AI loadouts for each are always the same, so the "roguelite" description is completely inappropriate. Customization is non-existent, you graduate to slightly more capable war machines, but loadouts for each are not customizable, and you can't choose among "unlocked" mechs, you're simply assigned one for each mission. You earn igc for everything you do, but it's not clear what you're meant to spend this on, as there are no options you can purchase. There's no real story, just a static graphical NPC face and text "explaining" something about a revolution, and you work for... well, it's not clear whether you work for the government or the rebellion, but again the goal of the game is to destroy everything. Trying to discern a logical plot in this is probably a complete waste of time. Graphics are fairly decent, but don't expect photo-realism or even anything "modern" looking because this looks like an arcade console game from about 2001.
Haven't played the first game, but for an alleged supernatural badass, Rayne unavoidably spends much of her time on the floor being beaten with 2x4s and crowbars and getting kicked to death. Any encounter other and 1-on-1 (and 1-on-1 encounters are very rare) is a crap shoot because she doesn't do enough damage to put down the overwhelming numbers of opponents efficiently. "Evasive combat" is recommended if you can ever get the moves to proc, otherwise survivability is low. Boss fights are beaten entirely by luck; there are no reliable tactics to end these. As another user said in a review that has apparently been removed, the only worthwhile attacks are feeding and the harpoon; the much-vaunted combos almost never proc, feeding and the harpoon do not work on bosses, and you're left with a handful of basic moves and lackluster "powers" which just can't do the job. The "Ultimate Update" finally fixed some lingering bugs that made this unplayable, involving mobs endlessly respawning so that a level could not be completed, or ceasing respawning before the "puzzles" (all of which involve throwing live opponents into fans, pressure plates, crushers and electrical conduits) could be completed. Having experienced this, I do not understand the wild popularity these games enjoyed when they were new. I suspect it came from adolescent boys getting off on the graphics rather than anyone enjoying the very frustrating gameplay. When you stop screaming at the screen, you will uninstall this and wish you could get your $10 back. Graphics are just okay, cutscene animation is bad even for the era (character walking animation and hand articulation are embarrassing in these; there were games of the era that did this much better), but textures and level design are outstanding.
Civ I's greatest flaw was that diplomacy was designed to be against the player, and all AI factions took full advantage of it. Civ II balanced diplomacy somewhat, but added an unnecessary explosion of unit types with overlapping purposes. All Civ III needed to do was thin out that herd a little. Instead they made diplomacy even more predatory towards the player than in Civ I, locked all AI factions in an unbreakable alliance against the player on the very first turn, and gave the AI free reign to cheat like all get out EVEN ON THE EASIEST SETTING. No matter how large you make the world and how few factions you allow it, it is guaranteed that all AI factions will be within two turns movement of wherever you build your first city. The AI is allowed to cross your borders anytime, build cities in adjacent squares to yours, and steal your resources with outposts without declaring war. If you complain, send a single unit over their borders, or try the same predatory tactics, it's instant eternal war to the death and all AI factions instantly have an infinitely renewable number of troops right on your border ready to steamroller over your empire. No defense will keep them out, and any attempt to assault their cities results in the instant destruction of all your troops. Any time you come within two turns of completing a wonder, the city building it instantly goes into unrest, giving any or all of the AI factions two turns in which to start AND COMPLETE the same wonder before order is restored. AI factions will always be richer, happier, larger and stronger, and there is nothing you can do about it. Barbarians are "Rampaging" regardless of what difficulty setting you choose for them, and are capable of creating infinite stacks of troops to slam your cities literally hundreds of times per turn until they are destroyed. I loved the Civ series until this one. I will never touch another Civ game again after this one. What a waste of time, money and goodwill.
