pros: interesting story good graphics good voice acting cons: token characters, some more token than others forced arcs, some more forced than others - rushed ending, it takes a lot of chapters to get to the mid-year elections and then half of that for the final year - long and boring chapters, some more long than others - extremely few meaningful choices given the length of the game - extremely poor ending (read ahead) The ending is by far the most disappointing I have ever seen in any VN. That alone gets -1 star from me. Without spoiling the fun, the issue is that, unlike any other VN in existence, Evangelie manages to have this message as an ending: "Bad Ending. Unfortunately you have not chosen a girl from start to end...." and you cannot "play" the last chapter. The End! Credits. This is not a joke. If you're not choosing the same girl throughout the entire game, then tough luck buddy, you have wasted 5+ hours of your life! While any other VN gives you a choice in the end to select the end-route, or at least does an average and chooses the girl/boy that you spend the most time or raised the most romantic flags, in Evangelie you actually have to choose the same girl, or get royally screwed! And to add insult to injury, after hours of playing their game, the devs have the impertinence to not even give you a "bad ending" scenario, like a chapter. They literally use a message box to tell you that you did not "choose right". And the title of the message box is "Bad Ending"! This rushed and insulting ending combined with some forced token characters and stories makes is a rather poorly designed and even annoying VN, with one of the worst and insulting endings I have ever seen. If they wanted a railed ending they could just make a "kinetic novel" and don't bother with their less than 15 "decisions" in 5+ hours of play.
First things first, the game is absolutely great! There is little I can add that others did not already praised, on short, it is a must to have and play for any strategy gamer alive! Now the bad part(s). While the game works, in theory, in practice there are a number of issues that makes it unplayable: 1. Map scroll speed! This is a game breaker, please GOG, fix this. On normal computers (anything above or equal to AMD FX or Intel i3) with a mediocre or above videocard (GT650 or more), you get absolutely no way to scroll the map with the mouse because of the incredible high scroll speed. Even at the |slow) setting, the scroll speed is so high that the map simply scrolls from one side to the other is 0.1 seconds. All you can do is to use the keyboard arrows, but even they must be "tapped" lightly or else, instant map scroll again! 2. bad/missing resolution and UI scaling. If you increase the resolution the UI gets smaller. All fine, except that it gets really really really small. If GOG can fix the UI scaling for larger resolutions that will be great. Also, lots of new resolutions are missing.... or they look weird in game. The game works on lower power computers, like a low end laptop. There the scroll is ok-ish and you can actually play the game. But there comes the resolution issue. The laptops already have small screens, so anything above 1024x768 will make the UI very small. But the 1024x768 is not a wide resolution, so the game is still small... and you are wasting a lot of screen space. So, if GOG wants this game playable on modern computers it must fix the map scroll problem and the UI scale on higher resolution issue. Again, the game itself is great and if you have an old PC you can use that to play this masterpiece.
Even after using all the tips on some forums about compatibility and such, it refused to start trowing various errors related to it's game engine. I am using a Windows 7 64 bit, and there is nothing I can do but un-install it at this point.
Couple of sentences, not quite "offensive", couple of "enemies" and couple of "stages". That is all. I got it during a discount, extremely cheap. The only actual insult I feel is the fact that this is labeled a "game" when in fact it can be a free flash/html web-page prank for a popcorn/soda promotion campaign. On short, I have "played" flash games more complex than this.
I can play any new title without a problem, but this game cannot properly move unless I play it on low quality settings. Even then the lags are present. I am far from impressed by its graphic quality, the animations are ugly, the voice is meh and the gameplay, nothing original. For the fans of Gothic this may be something to celebrate. For me not so much. Starting with the graphics that look quite ugly, this game tries to do something but fails. The locations are small, no open world or anything of the kind. Even on larger maps, the feeling of "I must go behind that tree, there will be something there" and yes, it will be something there, because the map is too damn small, so they placed things everywhere. The graphics are ugly. The characters have a better quality than the environment, but that is all. It has huge problems with lags and fps drops. The cut scenes are atrocious. The effects are worst that Unity's free ones. The animation is mediocre at best. The story? Unoriginal as hell. One planet, one comet, one "exotic mineral"... is this Tiberium? It sure looks like! They tried, they failed. The rest is mediocre, a mashup of Mass Effect and Fallout. Is this a good RPG? Maybe, if you consider KOTOR and Gothic 2 to be your game of reference. I am past that era. If you demand something better, sorry, but you will get nothing new. The interface is lacking, everything is done as fast as possible and it is visible. One big screen with tabs, just like a crappy 2d indie Zelda clone. The sound, it exist. And that is that. Does this game deserves 2/5? I have to admit that I was very curious, and had high hopes. The hype was real, and it seemed legit. But the disappointment was also real. Maybe, after they will patch the hell out of it, my rating will go higher, but for now, this is it. The devs must stop rushing half finished games and pretend that we are blind by hype. Yes, most of the time it works, but not always. This time it was too much for me.
The game is super, but there is a persistent problem with the sound volume. The "music" volume works as intended, and the "sound FX" volume works, but, there is the ambient sound volume that cannot be changed, regardless of the "sound FX" volume. This is especially annoying if you play on the laptop where you have even fewer options to silence the constant city buzz and church bells that will eventually start to annoy you. If the GOG team can fix this annoyance then yes, the game is perfect. Until then you will have to play it with the sound volume lower than expected, especially if you want to listen to some music in the background.
I start this review with this statement: "Knights and Merchants is not a regular RTS game"! This is extremely important, and it will change the way you will see and play this game. Why this game is not a RTS? Because is far slower than any RTS games I know, and is focused on resource management, base building and economy rather than combat and expansion. This game is more like Settlers or the later Cultures, than a real time game like Red Alert or even Stronghold. The battle is there, together with a complete unit list, from militia men to knights and even catapults in the expansion. You got formations, you got various units that can be mixed depending on the enemy forces making you feel like a real general, but the combat is not what you will do for the most part of the game, far from it. In most missions you start with a hand full of workers, couple of serfs and a storage house. From this you must build everything you need. And I mean everything! Basic resources like stone and wood are the backbone of your small village, then comes the farming sector with grain farms, pig farms, mills, bakeries, butchery, and even whine makers, all are interconnected and need a constant flow of resources between them so they can deliver the most important resource of the game: The Food! Yes, in this game everyone needs food! Serfs need food, builders need food, farmers, lumberjacks, stonemasons, and of course, the soldiers need food! You don't feed them, they starve. You let them starve too much, they DIE! Imagine your mighty knights that cost a huge amount of time and resources to build, starving away because your farms cannot deliver enough grain to the mills that cannot make enough flour for the bakeries., and they DIE of hunger! Everyone can die of hunger. If the builders die, you cannot build until you recruit more, if the serfs die the entire transport routes get slower, and if the army dies you're defenseless! Yes, it is this complex, and yes, I love it!
