This game will make you want to hunt down the designers and smash them in the scrotum, over and over and over and over and over again....crushing their genitals with as much force as you can muster. FRUSTRATING does not equal FUN. FRUSTRATION is the OPPOSITE of FUN. Having to reload a scenario literally 45 times in a row before you can finally, barely, win? PURE suck.
INsanely frustrating and difficult. Not just strange game mechanics, the difficulty settings are BROKEN. You'll making agonizingly slow progess, and suddenly be overwhelmed and out of energy: game over, Again. The weirdo novelty wears off fast, as it consists of just making things elaborately complex, thus slow, thus the computer will beat you to the punch every time. You'll finish maybe four scenarios, and the rest are so hard it's ridiculous. Waste of time. Ripoff game unless you are a sick masochist who loves frustration.
A nightmare of complexity and frustration. Don't waste your time or your money on this turd.
Really campy old-school "silver age" style adventure. There's a free demo out there, just Google for it. One of the best purchases I ever made. Although challenging, the interface is easy on the nerves. Pause the game, click each hero, and a menu of choices drops down. Select what skill or attack to use, select the target, unpause the game, and the commands are executed. A dream of a game.
Steam offers this game for only $4.99
There is no way to change the game speed. The map scale is all wrong. Archers will fire at the speed of machine guns, and cavalry move at the speed of Ferrari race cars. Sounds fun, until you THINK. The computer can see the whole map at one time. The computer can, for all intents and purposes, issue orders to all units simultaneously. You are a human being. You have human reaction time, and you have to scroll around the map to find out what is happening where. The maps are fairly tiny, and cramped. You cannot keep up against the AI. You get a tiny army, and miniscule resources. The computer gives itself insanely huge hordes of soldiers, and appears to have completely unlimited resources. Okay, so, that means superior strategy will win, correct? WRONG. There is not enough ROOM to arrange your soldiers in the proper configuration. There are not enough RESOURCES for you to be able to muster enough men to fight off the COLOSSAL HORDES of unending enemies. You can never react fast enough, because archers and cavalry move TOO FAST for the scale of the map. Yes, your soldiers are equally fast. That does NOT MATTER. You cannot see the whole map: no mini map. You have to keep scrolling around, and by the time you get to trouble, it's too late, the battle is OVER.....yes, the game is that abrupt, unfair, fuc**d up and crappy.
I got sucked into this because of the premise: two worlds, one ruled by magic, one by science. I've always been fascinated by that idea. Unfortunately, the pace of the game was glacial. Game play consisted of tests of endurance and eyesight. You'd need a certain key, for example. Run across town, discover it is not there, and have to run, literally miles, back to where you started. To get a clue. Run back across town. Get sent, AGAIN, back to exactly where you started. This is where the key is. After an hour of randomly bashing around the room, you uncover it beneath a magazine sitting on a table, which previously couldn't be moved. Yes, the graphics were pretty, but this game was like getting slowly beaten to death. CRUSHINGLY boring. Game designers just don't get it: frustration does not equal fun. Clever puzzles can be interesting, but a lot of this was just brute-force "try everything until something works". Negative five stars.
If you've never played before, I suggest you search for a free downloadable demo to try the game first. If you've played SimCity, this game is a no-brainer in terms of the interface. This game play is tricky, challenging. I think what may set it apart from a game such as SimCity is the fact that the Gods have substantial influence, both good and bad, and if you don't keep them happy by building temples and holding festivals, you're in for some trouble. Fortunately, the game allows you to adjust time. After a few tries, I found it worthwhile to begin a game with time set very slow, go onto the map to build some roads, farms, and other basics and only AFTER that was done, would I build housing-- that way, as soon as people arrive, they've got a job to go to. So, you can slow time down to give you a chance to scroll around and think things over, but if you're getting bored, you can speed things up very fast. To me, every game on earth should have that as a standard feature. Some of the commands are confusing, you'll want to look at the manual and some forums for tips. I've only played a few hours so far, and give it a tentative thumbs-up.
You can probably still Google and find the free Demo for this game. My primary objection is the camera view.....there are actually TOO MANY options, and it's far too difficult to get focused and stay focused where you want and need to be. A good idea, but the execution simply doesn't work.
If you love the 1960s spy era, you're going to love the look and feel of this game, it's perfect. The graphics and music really put you in the right mood. Unfortunately, it's just a bit too difficult to be any real fun. The heroes are very aggressive and very very tough.....the game quickly shifts from being fun (building your base, training minions) to frustrating work (rebuilding your base and recovering from incessant attack). If you like being frustrated, buy this game. If not....don't.
