Really I'm only rating it that high because of Lynch. Also because I expected it to be grittier and edgier. Instead this whole thing played out more or less like a really bad American action movie complete with cringey not-Venezuela not-Cuba where of course your guy is connected to CIA and Illuminati types because reasons. I never would've bought this game had I realized that I was not in fact just playing a realistic portrayal of two psychopathic criminals in a raw, dirty way, but instead just a really dumb and cringey over the top American action movie. Also no, the shooting is bad, the cover is bad, the mechanics is bad, none of this feels like it was "intentionally done for realism of chaotic firefights" but instead just done badly and this is all the more laughable when cops just stand there in the middle of the road, NPCs just stand there shooting at you or run all the way across the map out of cover. Lynch is the only really redeeming quality, and I don't personally think it's necessary to play this first in order to play Kane and Lynch 2. Like even Kane is somehow supposed to be a guy "just trying to save his daughter" like he's this cringe American action-dad some reddit posting office worker would dream himself up with who'd get mugged by a 16 yo kid. Maybe they did it to try and make him more "relateable" or give some narrative direction but frankly the shallow emphasis on Kane trying to find his daughter killed the sole thing this game had going for it, which was a half effort at grittiness. Like why tf am I supposed to believe this guy that just skipped out on his daughter all her life and couldn't even bother to write a card would care now? Spoilers but unsurprising, he doesn't even bother to associate with his daughter after this game either. He's an unloveable psychopath, that's supposed to be the point. Pass on this one, even at $2
Normally I strongly dislike walking simulators that all look like the same lazy clones of each other, however this one I actually liked. It was a pretty interesting world to explore, comfy spooky somewhat, from (to me) the interesting perspective of being a Pole after the Nazis won WWII and then ended the world in a nuclear exchange. No real gameplay, if any puzzles exist they're too simple to be called puzzles, you basically walk around and explore. Also surprisingly performance intensive, don't get it if you're on an older system trying to do 1080p and above, due to its nature lower graphical settings I wouldn't recommend. Only loses a single star for being a walking simulator.
Let me put it to you this way: IGN gave it a bad review the same way they gave Alien: Isolation a bad review. Take from that what value you will because it means the same thing. It can be hard but it's not that hard, atmospheric, memorable, gorgeous graphics, fun, frankly on sale for $4 is ripping off the developers. Would I pay $20 MSRP for this game? YES. GET IT. You know that Kermit the frog after he plays a really great game meme? It's that good. I savoured its post-game nostalgia for days on end.
Just kidding, that's the system's RAM. Back in mah day, it was expected to just run your game off of Intel CPU. Sometimes idk which surprises me more, how far along PC hardware has come, or how comparably not complete shit specific 90s and 00s games look despite literally being able to run on a micrchipped toaster like some Tamagachi pet. Ah lad the 90s. So yeah this was one of my very first gaming exposures, and it really just goes to show both how far along we'd come, but also how far we've fallen. I think the irony here is just how sublimely tasteful this whole game was, both in presentation/artistic direction, as well as per environmental storytelling, and its sheer ingenuity. See, thing is back in the day we really didn't have much in terms of genres, as in, technological innovation back then was quite literally inventing all the genres other games are based upon, like 3D shooters, crpgs, RTT, etc. and this was among the very first survival/stealth games and iirc first thief sim ever. It was so incredibly basic seeming but they used every inch of what they got, in all ways, and this includes not even having hardware accelerators aka "GPUs" then until companies like 3DFx. Ah, how naive when we thought getting a Voodoo card was oligarch tier, you can't even buy a bottom end GPU with locked down proprietary BS for the money thanks for nothing nVidia. tl;dr if you can adjust to the old school mechanics, lack of physics, graphics etc. and just play purely on S-O-U-L you're going to have a great time, and even better if you want to better understand the technology and learn vidya history, like Doom, Planescape Torment, and Starcraft.
Not really good except for multiplayer, and then not even. It's pretty much just a reskin of your own old campaign vessels, and like a couple different things otherwise like ship and skills. They do look neater granted, but what you're basically left with is a clone of the Chaos or Imperial factions because they do the same basic stuff. It is great for fleets relying on lots of boarding/LS and interceptor/bomber spam which is what I liked to do, but otherwise it's perfectly skippable and really just amounts to showing how far they've come in the DLCs and development department that what's a paid DLC here would basically just be a sub-faction of the numerous races available at launch in the basegame of BFGA2. Don't get me wrong, I like this whole game a lot and miss the XCOM-ish way of leveling up and micromanaging your individual ships and crews, but this DLC is the low point. Really I'm only reviewing this DLC at length to test if I can come back and edit later to put some reviews for games on here if I change my mind later or want to add something). Two stars for the DLC having at least some unique traits and it being useful in MP, one extra star solely for it being BFGA1 which I bought all the DLCs for (stupidly on Steam I might add, God why didn't I make a GOG account sooner)
It's free Game itself is like a 4/5 at best, maybe even 3.5/5 and that's really mostly just because it can get a bit repetitive with gameplay (which, to be fair, is a lot like both the tabletop and any other simulation of this terminators clearing a spacehulk thing). You battle waves of Tyranids and that's pretty much it, HOWEVER the environments are the most gorgeously detailed I have ever seen and quite possibly the best rendition of the 40k/decayed Imperium which I have ever seen and it deserves 3 stars for just that alone.
Only giving it 3 stars instead of two because of the races and only giving it two instead of one because at least it's not Master of Orion (aka MoO4 the newest one, which somehow manages to be even worse than this). In all honesty it's about a 2.5/5 game. A lot of people would argue with that but I found these some of the best done races in any 4x game ever and I'd literally have to wait until the Endless Space games to ever find it again. And no, having space furries is not "just what you do" in 4x games, we only tolerated it in MoO2 because we literally had to because back in my day we literally just had MoO2 to play. The races of MoO2 was hands down the worst thing about that game that unfortunately got cargo culted by clueless halfwits in nearly every other space 4x which was the one horrible thing about it. The original races sucked except for Silicons, Darloks, Trilarians, it really was just ants in space, robots in space, cats in space, bears in space, it was completely godawful in Master of Orion and Master of Orion 2. Here the races are actually quite imaginative and very well designed with the inexplicable exception of making Trilarians worse (they got turned to fish in space when it was the one actual alien race in MoO2 like just WHY), including gas giant races for once, and at least making the insectoid races somewhat palatable as alien seeming. I actually had a lot of fun with it. That being stated I really wasted my life playing this game as much as I did. Micromanagement is broken and made 1000x worse than MoO2, no custom ship design, ship combat is broken, you're forced to sit 10 min a battle, space combat is just terrible in certain circumstances.
What the other reviewers said is true. It's not just the dumbed downness, the bad gutted mechanics, etc. Just the strategy layer itself is terrible. They made it more like Slipways or something where the entire mechanic is now about protecting system gates basically rather than protecting planets or systems. I dropped this game hard. The fact they had the audacity to then bundle 3 of the original reasons as 3 separate $10 DLCs only added audacity to insult, making this an overall much worse game across the board than a 25 year old game and costing $90 for the complete game on release. You will notice even now the "collector's edition" doesn't even include the DLC, which you'd still have had to buy seperately if you're foolish enough to buy this game just to add back a few races they took out of the original 90s game, including one of my favourite ones to play, the Trilarians, because ocean races are fun. This is not nostalgia speaking--the game is literally worse than the 90s game, and that includes the aesthetics (which I find overly cartoony compared even to the 90s game; if you like cartoons, you might give a star for smoother graphics which isn't a compliment vs over 25 years old games). I own virtually ever 4x game out there that isnt complete garbage. Endless Space 2 overshadows ES1 but the first is also good, GalCiv 3, Gladius and a variety of civ games, Stardrive2 being probably my present favourite. Playing Ralyeh is like playing Trilarians in a real MoO2 remake and Stardrive 2 is awesome. I have so many tons and tons of space strategy games, 4x or otherwise, on my PC, AI War 1&2 to Star Ruler 2 to BFGA2 and Final Theory, that I'd rather play than this hot garbage. This is literally one of the only 2 space 4x games I ever previewed & was so unbelievably terrible I never bought it and promptly erased after trying. This alleged "Master of Orion" 4 is like it was made by thick rim glasses Silicon Valley phonetrash shovelware devs; I even liked MoO 3 better.
Clem not dying in the end and the final scene of her with her leg cut off and everyone joking at the table was really the best summation of the pseuds wishing they could make it in Hollywood that wrote this drek. To be fair, it's not anywhere near as bad as the third, but that was literally the worst game I ever played in my life. I'm not even joking season III is literally the worst "game" aka cutscene simulator I ever subjected myself to in my whole life. By the time I got to the final "season" of this cutscene simulator I was so inured and numbed to everything stupid about the writing, all the different random and unpredictable horrible bugs, all the broken saves (seriously if you're dumb enough to not heed this warning don't bother playing, you WILL have your save broken at some point if you don't duplicate the files you'll lose everything) but not that it matters because old saves are shown literally meaningless entirely by this game, basically I was so numb to everything that the usual stupidity and broken games stopped phasing me. It's junk. Remember how unbearably stupid The Council turned out to be with the demons family bs? That would be this more or less. The first season was just aggravating, and you should've stopped there. Know how it started going downhill in season 2? It doesn't get better. I had to head canon it that Clementine dies and is left all alone and it ends there with the shack because the real ending made all of it a stupid waste of time to placate the kind of halfwit that likes stuff like this. If you don't mind all the unbearably atrocious writing, complete lack of choice and consequence etc., the game is straight up broken and playing Russian roulette with an unpredictable variety of different bugs. I can't think of a single redeeming feature.
This game pretty much almost singlehandedly got me into point and click adventures. I don't even like point and click puzzlegames, at all. Yet in spite of all this it remains, along with Brotherhood's other fabulously excellent PaC Beautiful Desolation, one of the most engrossing and memorable titles I have ever played. Graphics are crisp and beautiful, gameplay is nice and engaging even for a puzzlegame, it just werks but even that's beyond the point. This game is one of the creepiest, scariest games I ever played---a point and click adventure game. That's just how good it is to me, which speaks volumes considering I played everything from SOMA to Deadspace to Darkwood with the lights off. Absolutely play this game with lights off late into the night. Even though it's super short it's super memorable, and definitely check out their other games. My only one complaint is I found the swearing made the writing come off as juvenile rather than edgy, a sin many less experienced writers seem to make and crpg Tyranny had the same problems, but otherwise writing is okay (though Beautiful Desolation is where The Brotherhood really came into their own). I would strongly recommend Stasis to any horror fan, or familiarish to crpg players. As a puzzlegame they're not too hard, but strong enough you have to think about it. REALLY great soundscape btw, completely adds to the immersion. Absolutely a steal when it's on sale and I already have Bone Totem wishlisted. These guys are just great, and Stasis is a wonderful chaser to something like Alien Isolation or Deadspace.
