I'm sure a lot of work went into this, but being unable to work with the source code really limited what Nightdive could possibly have done here. They added antialiasing and I think there was something like ambient occlusion in there too. These are 1996 graphics, peeps, and without extensively rerendering them or replacing them altogether, AA and AO aren't going to do very much for you. 4K widescreen? Umm, okay, but again these are the same 1996 graphics. Do you really want them in 4K? How bad could upsampling be? DOSBOX was perfectly capable of rendering the game without stretching it to fit widescreen monitors. p> Gameplay hasn't changed at all, but there are added sound bugs and differences in physics due to the new engine and you'll have to wait to see if they're fixed. p> A lot of the reviewers are crowing about "WASD!", "Mouselook!", apparently completely ignorant of the fact that the keys in the original ARE COMPLETELY CONFIGURABLE. WASD has ALWAYS been possible, and so has mouselook. In fact, I've been playing it that way since 2002, when I first rigged DOSBOX to run the game in XP. No third-party engine required. "Moan, whine, I don't wanna hafta change anything myself." Well I guess it's worth it to you to pay $10 to have someone do it for you? I wish I had your money. p>
The Witcher is basically an intereactive novel, not an RPG. The game unfolds in "chapters" which require that you complete one chapter before moving onward. Unfortunately you aren't told in advance what you need to do to move on, and in the meantime you're saddled with an inordinate number of fetch-and-kill quests and spend all your time running back and forth across a small area of unattractive countryside. Options that would be logical don't exist in the game. The much-vaunted "attack combos" are really just an animation loop that you continue by left-clicking at the appropriate moment. Some weapons are rated for damage or conditions, but the focus is on "Witcher swords" which don't have stats and so can't be compared to other weapons. There is no indication whether you should even bother with other weapons. In games like this, it's usually a useful tactic to gather weapons and armor from your fallen opponents to make some quick money, but that's not possible here. Nothing seems to wear armor, other weapons can't be added to your inventory. Items gatherable from fallen monsters are restricted until you own a series of very expensive books. Some of the quests require that you obtain items that allegedly grow like plants but can't actually be found anywhere and so have to be purchased with large amounts of currency that there is no way to obtain. Innumerable game-breaking bugs will stop you dead (literally trapping you, unable to continue the story) while you google a possible solution. In its day, the graphics were probably bleeding-edge attractive, but today resemble the gothic-inspired mannikins of Blood from a decade earlier. Too many NPCs are identical in appearance and name, which makes completing the boring quests even more tedious. After hearing glowing praise about this game for years, I can't only describe it as an utter disappointment.
I remember when this came out that I was still busy modding and enjoying Bioware's Neverwinter Nights. I continued to play NWN and never got round to Dragon Age till now. I can only assume that the glowing 5-star reviews come from brain-dead fanboys without any critical reasoning ability. The game uses a desaturated palette which I suppose suits the backstory, but it also makes the game much less attractive than NWN. Textures and animations are a bit smoother than NWN, which is an improvement. But NWN started you in a hospital, and making your way through the hospital to learn your mission and exit was in fact a very deep tutorial in which you learned how to do everything in the game. DA:O doesn't have anything like that. After a text description of the world situation, you're deposited in your bedroom in the palace. You're told a ceremony will be held to celebrate your being appointed commander in chief or something, but that that's hours away and you're expected to tour the merchant district in the meantime. But on going there, you're almost immediately confronted by your brothers, who demand to know why you aren't at the ceremony. Return to palace, no ceremony. Return to outside, see the same half-dozen merchants, only half of whom have inventories, but despite being a royal prince you have no money with which to buy anything. A guard tells you he was appointed to give you an escort to a gladiatorial match. Wait, why the shame-fest about not being at a ceremony that hasn't started yet if I'm supposed to be watching bloodsports? But going to the games results in staring at two no-names bashing each other in which no one ever loses health, the match goes on forever, no NPC has anything for me to do, there's STILL nothing on at the palace... Two hours spent and it still doesn't feel like an adventure game. There are no other options... except to quit the game. Call me Joshua, but I fail to see what the big deal was about this.
A lot of people have been voting this down because they don't understand what this is. It's not a shooter, it's not an RPG, it's not a platformer. You don't need reflexes or skill. It's all RNG and turn-based movement. What this is is an old-school maze exploration game with puzzles and RNG combat. Back in the 80s when this sort of game first came out, it was on a top-down grid like an early roguelike, but with more powerful home computers (and I mean relics like the TRS-80) it had pixels aligned on vectors showing the edges of wall, floor and ceiling tiles in forced perspective pseudo-3D, and turning 90 degrees to the right meant tapping the right arrow key twice because there was no mouse support. It's all turn based, and if that doesn't excite you, you won't like this. But for what it is, it's really not bad. Like some of those early games, the puzzles are sometimes impenetrable, and other times require hunting out a loose stone in a wall... that is always in the same position on every wall. There are gear drops and some inventory management, but even calling this a squad combat game is a bit of a stretch. The mechanics are less complex than the earliest Ultima games. But the graphics are modern and very pretty. If you are nostalgic about crowding around a black and white monitor with friends and having to write down clues on paper to figure them out and losing your way because you lost track of how many times you tapped that arrow key, you might really enjoy this. If on the other hand you were expecting Battlefield 1 or Skyrim, you're out of your mind and should probably play this just to learn how far PC games have evolved. It's very old school fun, but if you're used to anything made in the last decade, you may find it tedious and boring. I enjoyed it, but I probably won't play it a second time.
Ziggurat was clearly designed by someone who was as in love with Heretic as I was back in the day. The weapon designs and purposes and even some of the weapon names are nearly identical. Even some of the mobs are eerily similar in design. It's all much nicer looking than Heretic, because graphics have advanced a lot since then. But whereas Heretic had a tactical solution to every level, Ziggurat is a balls-to-the-wall shoot-em-up. Keep running, keep grabbing powerups, keep spraying your many, many opponents while you try to dodge their attacks. There is a pseudo-RPG leveling system at work here that is kind of compelling, allowing you to fine tune your character to cover its weaknesses. But like Legend of Grimrock, it's a very old-school game without much brain despite the modern looks, and the "randomly generated" maps reuse the same tiles and components so frequently that you might get lost just on one level if you pull two nearly identical rooms. Mindless fun, but after you get the rhythm down you might get bored with it quickly.
I remember this getting somewhat decent reviews when it came out. Graphics are dark and definitely evocative of Lovecraft's oeuvre, but the game.... hmm. There is no tutorial, and little documentation. You accompany the police to an abandoned mansion taken over by cultists, but your goals are really unclear. A firefight erupts between the cultists and police (funny, I don't recall that sort of thing ever happening in Lovecraft). Somehow, you can just walk right into the mansion. Are you armed? Hard to tell. I couldn't find a weapon in my inventory, and had no idea how I might use one or whether a weapon equipped would be visible in the inventory at all. The firefight continues, but you seem in no danger of injury. The cultists don't seem interested in you being there at all. Literally anything could be interactive, but there are no visual or auditory cues so you're forced to attempt to interact with EVERYTHING, making a search of a closet a time consuming process. Most things are not actually interactive, but you're never sure. Look, a photo. I interact with it. My character says, "It's a photograph, What's that doing here?" Gee I was kinda hoping YOU would tell ME. Some of the cultists get killed in the shootout. I try to interact with the bodies, hoping maybe I'll find a weapon. Instead my character says, "This guy's dead. Cultists sure have weird habits." Ya think? I didn't get very far into the game because this sort of aimless wandering is just not compelling. If I was supposed to find the cult leader and talk him down, find a lost tome of darkness, or anything that might be remotely coherent, I might have been compelled to continue. The feeble plot in which the cultists for some reason have collected photos of my character doesn't seem remotely Lovecraftian, more like a bunch of tattooed stalkers with guns... that you can't recover from their fallen corpses. Boy, some game designers sure have weird ideas. Ya think?
I missed this when it first came out. The reviews were great at the time, and the mission based levels sounded pleasantly like Star Wars: Dark Forces at the time. Getting it this late, I wasn't sure what to expect. Would it seem crudely old fashioned? I was pleasantly surprised to find that this stands up today, for the most part. Mechanics are sound, the levels look like a real castle/village/tomb, unlike the original Wolfenstein, which resembled an 8-bit interpretation of someone's fake-wood paneled basement with blue shag carpeting. Graphics and animations are decent; there are more modern games that don't look this good. Controls are responsive and feel natural; no reinventing the wheel here. Firefights are clever and deadly, and if you're not prepared for the next ambush you aren't playing the game correctly. But by midgame the whole thing devolves into a series of deathtraps that can't be foreseen by the player and are largely unavoidable. You're given an onscreen symbol when an object is destructible, and early levels condition you to destroy whatever you can--that portrait of Hitler might be hiding a stash of gold, or a couple of extra 9mm magazines. Once you reach the tomb levels, however, your conditioning will largely get you killed. Destroying anything will nearly always cause the ceiling to collapse, cause a pillar to fall on you or cause the floor to give way, all resulting in your instant, unavoidable death. Hidden pits, collapsing floors and incendiary devices are around every corner. If there is no way at all to escape death the content isn't challenging, it's UNFAIR. I realize this harks back to the generation of dying repeatedly until you find your way through, but I grew up on arcade and platform games where you were supposed to AVOID getting killed, and RPGs where the object is to NOT get killed. After the fourth unfair deathtrap on the same level I had to quit. Played a lot of shooters, but this is just obnoxious.
GOG deleted my original review of Desperados. So I'm trying again, because sensible people need to be warned not to waste their money. Many of the reviews talk about the "helpful tutorial". No such thing exists. All there is is a demo mode, and all the instruction it offers is in the form of a pixellated screenshot scrawled with vague notes. It suggests that the game is a shoot-em-up, but if you approach it like that you will get all your characters immediately killed. Not that it matters; there isn't really very much you can do to avoid that outcome anyway. The tutorial mentions that the characters have individual talents, but other than vaguely describing Kate's without mentioning how it is accessed, it really has no useful information. About generic combat skills shared by the characters it says nothing at all. It makes a "Quick Action Mode" sound like the pause feature in most tactical squad games, which allows you to give instructions to all your characters before releasing them. But it doesn't work that way. With the mode activated, the character wanders off to get shot after giving it the first command. There is NO way to coordinate multiple characters. There is no pause feature. Devs felt the need to reinvent the wheel with the UI, and without any sort of info it's a hindrance to your already limited control. NPCs have conning colours to indicate whether they've detected the characters, but their aggro range is huge. Before you're close enough to do anything at all the NPCs have guns out and blazing, and they never miss. I'm not sure what to think about a tactical squad combat game in which combat is utterly unsurvivable. There are supposed to be stealth skills, but they don't seem to work in that they don't affect the NPCs at all. My original review called this a game for masochists, and I stand by that. Unless you enjoy failing literally hundreds of times before you figure out how to succeed--if you ever do--you will not enjoy this game.
The corny Silver Age sensibilities of the game and its Kirbyesque art style might make this a hard sell. But the game leaves a lot to be desired in other ways, and after a short time can become very frustrating. It's definitely not the experience of being a superhero, something that several games have successfully captured. This game is not one of them. The tutorial unfortunately doesn't tell you everything you need to survive. A throwaway scene tells you to bash open rocks to find health powerups as if those powerups aren't essential. They are. You don't recover health without them, and despite being a superhero, you take A LOT of damage in every encounter. You are ALWAYS outnumbered, and far, far from invulnerable. The starting character has a force field that lasts seconds before STUNNING THE CHARACTER AND LEAVING IT TOTALLY DEFENCELESS. Without the powerups, you will die. Repeatedly. However, if you go around bashing rocks or anything in a real mission, you quickly incur a collateral damage penalty which retards your character's development. What to gimp yourself in a future mission? Go smashing stuff right now. Also, missions frequently have conflicting objectives. ALL objectives must be completed without dying, or you're penalized again. The first mission chain (you're solo, the team thing doesn't even come into play until some later stage of the game that I never reached) requires that you "Don't alert the guards" but also "Defeat all the guards." There is no way to defeat the guards without alerting them, there being no stealth combat skills. This might have been fun, but there's just too much of this conflicting nonsense arrayed against you. Maybe the sequel is better, but I'm not likely to try it.
Nice looking and easy on resources, the game resembles the late, lamented NCSOFT mini-mmo, Dungeon Runners, and has a similar humor. Unfortunately, the game is significantly marred by the devs' insistence on having the left mouse button do too many things: click to move, click to interact, click to target. There's a fight with a huge crowd and loot all over the floor. You click in the middle to attack. Which of these results do you actually get? A) You attack one target and then just stand there while the rest beat you to death. B) You move to that spot and just stand there while the rest beat you to death. C) You begin picking up loot off the ground while the rest beat you to death. See the problem? You're advised to hold left mouse whilst fighting to continue attacking, but rarely does it work that way. In addition, it's very difficult to accurately target anything whilst moving or to target anything moving, and absolutely impossible to target anything moving whilst you're moving. You're dependent on spells and potions for health recovery, both of which have lengthy cooldowns. The result is many, many, many frustrating character deaths before you give up on this. The game claims to be the heir to the Diablo series, but those games allowed you to strew an infinite amount of loot on the ground where it would safely stay put. Torchlight, however, forces you to use just two small containers. And the devs' insisted on a gear system with interlocking stats and buffs like WOW. Guaranteed you'll spend half your playtime just poring over inventory trying to decide what to keep. The limited crafting system is a lottery that will likely destroy the objects you put in rather than improve them. And the system is expensive even when unsuccessful, easily bankrupting the unwary. There are also bugs left unresolved when the publisher went out of business, like broken quests and items that fail to work according to their stats. These now will never be resolved.
