Pros: The game is nice, casual, relaxed, acceptable clean graphics. Each mission has two levels of difficulty. Get it done at the smallest difficulty and you can pass to the next mission. You can re-do any mission you wish and try to aim for the higher difficulty. Cons. The campaign is short. Not worth a full price. Too few building materials and options. You got stone, wood planks, wood pillars, rope and nothing else. It drastically limits the gameplay. You can't build ramps or inclined pontoons. The bridge walkway can only be horizontal. You can't disable the forces overlay. (I haven't see a button and tried random keys to no effect) So you will only see a green-ish red-ish bridge even after completion. Conclusion: It is a cut down casual version of Bridge It. You can complete it a couple of hours without too much effort. It is a good purchase for kids and only on sale.
A game about spies, cover operations and betrayal that manages to keep you on your toes most of the time. So the world is after some completely insane technologies that can change the future of the humanity, cure diseases, end hunger, teleportation and invisibility, but instead of celebrating this every faction seeks to outdo the other and get as many of these technologies for itself. The faction that manages to unlock the most of them will be in the best position to raise to the top and eventually dominate the world. So in this context you're getting the task to secretly infiltrate other factions, steal their research and scientists, sabotage them and of course, help your faction raise to the top. The game starts slow, each faction pretending to play nice, somehow old alliances are respected, and you cannot just make yourself too visible by barging in other nation's territory and starting a rampage. But as the game progresses the reality settles in. Others get the upper hand, your scientists are kidnapped, tech stolen, network hacked, agents killed. You start to understand that the surface calm is actually masking a complete underground war between faction and you give up on morals and dive in in full force. You will lose initially, but learn more and more about the world and how everyone, including the so called friends, are all just a bunch of ruthless a-holes that will betray you whenever you show any weakness. By my forth everything became clear. There are no morals, there are not friends or enemies. The world is your chess table and you're here to win trough any means necessary. Replayability is decent, choosing other factions and agents will surely give you different options each time. The gameplay is nice, the graphics are decent and it is quite well polished. I give it 4/5 stars as I feel like it could benefit from more content, more side stories, more technologies and so on, on short it was good enough that I kid of want seconds.
If close quarter team tactics is what you like, then this game is perfect for you. Without too much fluff you will get to command a growing team of heroes that tries to make sens of the massive changes that struck a fantasy kingdom. You will get no useless walking, no pointless NPC quests, no boring fetch, escort, kill x units, talk with y then come back, stuff. Instead you will get non-stop action, one fight after another. As your team grows you will get new and unique heroes with new abilities and new game play mechanics. Each time you get a new hero you may want to explore it's capabilities, see how you can use his or her powers in the best way or you can simply choose to ignore it and use the heroes you already know. As the game progress it will get harder and harder. Your skills and knowledge of the abilities will be tested and you will have to adapt to new challenges and situations. Some maps seem impossible to win, yet, after a while you discover new methods to use your heroes, new ways to improve your damage or mitigate the enemy damage and so on. It is a hard game that will challenge you. My only complain is that sometimes on higher difficulty maps, some heroes are a bit useless and you are forced to play with the ones that you dislike. I guess that's part of the "adapt to new challenges" thing but personally I wanted to win all the maps using only my favorites, unfortunately this is not a viable option on some maps.
This game is a real gem as turn based squadron games are extremely rare and most of them are quite low quality. Is well made, fun to play and has an unique retro-scifi design that I found to be quite refreshing. The story-line is divided in sections and each section is actually a combat map where you must help various heroes of the story survive an alien invasion aboard a luxury space ship. There are dialogues, mission goals, a lot of turn based combat and even a bit of puzzle elements. The graphics are quite nice, isometric, the interface is OK (I would not mind larger pop-up fonts to be honest for my laptop screen) and the gameplay is simple to understand. Is fun, sometimes challenging, it does not take itself too seriously and brings back memories of original Commandos, UFO and Star Trek Away Team, games that I truly enjoyed back in their time.
The game is great, like all old Close Combat games it is a gem and deserves all the praise. The Gog release on the other hand has big issues. The biggest of them all is the in-game scroll speed that is way to high if you're using a decent computer. Tested on both Windows 7 and 10 with the same result. This is a game breaker and sadly if you're not willing to keep using the arrow keys at every 2 seconds to scroll around you cannot play the game. Maybe Gog will read this and add a proper scroll speed that allows it to play on modern computers. Until then my old cd with the game still runs proper (with some tweaks on Windows 7).
Excellent game and super nice GOG release that can be played on all new systems. I test it on both Windows 7 and 10 and I love it!
I admit I wanted to like it, and I did finish it... in three days and less than 1.5 hours each day. The pros: + interesting and somehow innovative game mechanic The cons: - very few puzzles/challenges, no more than 4 in total, and all of them painfully easy - tiresome "global warming is bad mkay" idea. I hoped for more, for some kind of transcendental stuff, or something, anything except the crappy eco cataclysm that bores me to hell and back - very big minus is the fact that the developer(s) used government money to create a product and then sell it, SELL IT at full price! This is abject anti-competition things that you can only find in our dear EU, For those that don't know what I'm talking about, finish the game, read the credits in full... be amazed who sponsored this game and shocked that you actually payed money on it. Sadly this is not a true indie product even if it's disguise is almost perfect.
The game is great, and I used to play it a lot back in the day, even finishing it couple of times. Sadly, this Gog release is almost not playable due to its low resolution. There are no high resolution modes, and I am yet to detect any type of "setup" or "config" executable that you can use to change it. Therefore all you get is a extremely good 3D game that runs at 800x600. On any large monitors this is completely not usable.
