During the tutorial, you can pretty much do anything: steal and kill without consequences. BTW: killing... That's not as easy as it might sound: although you see a visual representation of your character swinging a sword, it depends on the virtual dice roll in the background if you can actually hit a sleeping, stationary target you're standing right next to. You can abuse the hell out of Enchantment system and become an immortal, omnipotent god that can 1-hit any enemy. Handling: your character's speed depends on your stats - you'll be slow at the start of the game. Menu systems are utterly useless. Journal is also useless, you'd better make notes for yourself. Sounds: NO voices for characters. You'll be doing a lot of 'talking' (it's an RPG, after all), but with the characters being voiceless, it's a lot (A LOT) of reading. Most of the info you gain from dialogues is useless, but even completing the main quest will be about a 100-page worth of 'dialogues'. Graphics: Water and Sky textures are acceptable, character models are terrible. Quests: The backbone of RPGs. Quests in a normal RPG: go get the Divine Something of Someone's Ghost - Here's a map marker, GPS coordinates, and when you're there, look for a door with a big red X. Quests in Morrowind: Go eastwards for about a day until you see some weird-looking rocks, then take a left turn (seriously). This is the reason i gave 3 stars - i actually like it. Except how you can't finish even a simple quest without magic: Found the cave? Ok, the item you need is in a place that you can only access by flying there, hope you bought a Levitation scroll or two. Oh, you forgot? Too bad, you have to walk back to Balmora (because that sloppy excuse for a fast travel system is not even worth mentioning)...
Had gotten this as a full game included with the Gamestar magazine long ago. The difficulty can be punishing, but it's worth it. You start with a crappy truck and your first order of business will be to save enough money to buy the truck called T-1000 (Yes, the truck the T-1000 used to pursue John Connor in T2, lol). After that, it will be a lot easier. You can go from trucker to truck company owner with several trucks. Tip: Don't stop for anything, buy the radar detector.
- Rob your planet of all its resources - Cause an environmental catastrophe in the process - Establish a power plant on the Moon, relaying the power back to Earth by microwaves (penetrating the ozone layer would cause another environmental catastrophe) - Have only one receiving station on Earth, not accounting for the planet's rotation (scorching a sizeable portion of the planet with the directed energy beam) - Have your moonbase resident go crazy so that they decide to abscond with their spaceships (that are not fit for anything other than going back to Earth in an emergency) 'OUTWARDS'. +1: Have a space elevator on the Moon. Spoiler: it's also impossible to build one there. And unnecessary, btw. Seriously, you don't have to be a physicist to hurt your brain with the plot holes. Not to mention the occasiional FPS drops. Optimize your game, learn physics and try again.
Let's make something clear: the difficulty is absolutely PUNISHING. It's about as difficult as it would be to colonize a planet. Hard to find terrain that's fit for construction. Hard to keep the resources flowing. Hard to get enough workforce to operate the equipment. And when it fiinally seems that your base is OK, machinery start to break down -> need spare parts -> need more resources -> need more workers. Then you realise that your people eat up all the food and suck up all the oxygen, so you need to build more machinery and when you think you've stabilised your economy, your slaves- i mean valuable pioneer colonist get DEPRESSED, forcing you to spend precious material on entertainment facilities. You may not get as many types of buildings as in an other strat. game, but Planetbase is about resourcess: you have a s-load of variou reources that you need to produce, refine, store, and use. You need to carefully manage both exterior and interior space to be able to build everything you need on the planet and inside your building (yes, buildings are worthless when empty: you need to build equipment inside the buildings). This game really does feel like a struggle against the extreme conditions of an alien planet.
You can't choose the graphics device on whinch you want the game to be rendered, so laptops equipped with both integrated and dedicated GPUs may force the game on the crappy iGPU as in my case. Otherwise, it's a great game kind of a sci-fi Gothic. Although even the easiest difficulty is a punishment, it's worth playing.
Hilarious one-liners, awesome graphics, great weapons. Absoultely fun if you want some mindless slaughter.
Ok, this game is a classic. Even with the random memory register overflow and ccess violation CTDs, it's worth buying, BUT... There are 2 huge flaws you need to bear in mind: - Game breaking bug: when getting the gearwheel in the Old Mine (in chapter 2), there is a clipping bug that prevents you from climbing up the ladder from where you got the gearwheel. This means you won't be able to complete the game, unless you learn the Acrobatics skill (10 skill points, see Buster in New Camp) that lets you jump longer so that you can ascend to a higher poing and jump back from there. The other option is to spend some skill points for extra mana (5 skill points, any trainer that can increase your max. mana) and buy a 'Transform into bloodfly' scroll (which you can't use if you only have 10 max mana) so you'll be able to fly back to where you came from. - You MUST increase your maximum mana or learn Acrobatics: apart from the game breaking bug above, you'll need to use Telekinesis in chapter 3 to get the focus stone in the mountain fort. You cannot use the Telekinesis scrolls if you don't have at least 15 mana so you must go there prepared. An alternative way is to learn acrobatics (see above) and jump down to the focus stone from the 2nd floor balcony (be sure to heal up before: you'll take some fall damage).
As with the Gothic games: it's fun but has a hundred tons of bugs. A word of advice: you MUST finish the "Patty wants to leave town" quest BEFORE advancing into chapter (regardless of which faction you join) 2 or else you'll not be able to complete the game: after chapter 1, you won't have the dialogue option with Patty to lead her out of the town, which will prevent you from doing a main story quest in chapter 3. If you are already in chapter 2 (or 3) and you did not do the Patty wants to leave town quest, you may still be able to recover your playthrough but not without cheating. Other than that, it's a game worth playing.
None of the original bugs (thanks to the Piranha Bytes guys) were fixed - on the plus side this means that you can still exploit bugs like the fire dragon godmode flag, the black ore permanent speed boost bug or the destroy undead spell exploit (not going to explain how exactly these bugs can be taken advantage of. At least not in this post). New issues: NO base game only installation anymore: the current installer won't allow you to install Gothic 2 only without NOTR. So you either play the game in hard mode (more expensive learning, tougher enemies, etc) or don't play at all. Also, window border remains visible throughout the game (covering the targeted creature's health bar, so good luck guessing how many attacks you need to kill/KO your enemy). Ok, this sounds terrible, so why 3 stars? Well, Gothic games are known for their immersiveness and the number of possibilities offered by their open words. Even despite the bugs, it's still worth playing. Just don't forget to save often. And save your game into 2 different slots at a time because the game may crash during saving (corrupting your save file).
