Sacred is standard Diablo derivative ARPG fair with all the usual trappings, which is of course a totally awesome thing. Sacred brings a wide open world to the table, making it as much of an MMO as you'll get in a single player game. It is packed full of quests and dungeons and caverns to explore in a fully traversible world, and of course as much loot and endless experience as you can expect of any ARPG. Sacred executes all the standard ARPG trappings expertly, with intuitive mouse controls, easy to use menus, a simple yet brilliant presentation and no end of randomized loot. You are also freer to improve your character than in most ARPGs due to the plethora of character stats that players may invest in manually. Character unique combat arts appear as loot drops and quest rewards and are about the only thing differentiating the games generous offering of compelling character classes from each other. This allows players to freely invest in their own character by equiping loot, investing in attributes and assembling combat art combos largely unhindered. Combat is straightforward, visceral and satisfying. My only gripe would be that the game's inventory is rather limited for the sheer amount of loot you'll be carrying. If you plan to cash in your unwanted spoils of war with regularity, then you can expect frequent trips back to the nearest merchant. This is by no means necessary as the game will have you swimming in gold you'll seldom have reason to spend anyway. There are a lack of convenience options, such as the ability to auto-sell equipment or sort the inventory. Some quests are bugged The game's *ahem* 'retro' budget manifests itself with some rather entertaining quirks that keep the game from showing its age too badly, particularly in regards to voice work. The graphics are good looking. Small, careful features litter the environment for those with a keen eye for detail and exploration across Sacred's vast world is often a lucrative venture.
Neverwinter Night's core campaign is about as dull, monotonous and unenjoyable as one can imagine short of being flat out insufferable, but it is broken by one face-palm inducing design choice in particular. Namely, the decision to limit the player to one AI controlled companion at a time. This limitation is in stark opposition to the whole core of DnD. It is - after all - a multiplayer game where a group of diverse talents can prevail where a lone intrepid adventurer would surely fail. This makes about every class but the largely self sufficient cleric almost impossible to play and throws tactics and strategy out the door, making NWNs core single player campaign play like a poor man's Diablo. The story is dull, achingly predictable and largely beside the point. The characters are flat and dull. Despite fully implemented 3e rules, players can make little use of game mechanics and are largely at the mercy of the RND. It is good then, that Diamond benefits from solid expansion campaigns that are vastly superior to the base game. Admittedly, NWNs strength lies in its construction set and network capabilities. NWN is how you play DnD on your computer with friends. It allows DMs to construct fully realized virtual campaigns to operate with players online while letting the game handle all the rolls and math. Neverwinter's interface is versatile and intuitive but the presentation is abysmal. Dialog scrolls down floating text boxes that are as hideous as Windows OS. The graphics are poor even by the standards of the day and every 3d model must adhere to an environmental grid which is so obvious it makes environments look like they're constructed from dirty Lego bricks. Rudimentary voice work certainly does nothing to improve the narrative at all. I had GUI scaling issues on all of the game's resolutions that I couldn't fix. Neverwinter Nights is functional which is about as much as can be said for it. Have a hoot with the CS and enjoy the game's expansion campaigns.
There's a reason GoG was giving this away. AoW isn't even worth considering. I'll go so far as to declare it unplayable. Like every other dysfunctional 'strategy' game with obscene 'challenge' AoW pummels you with overwhelming odds and AI that doesn't abide by the same limitations as you. Resource management is horribly bungled. You simply can't take in enough income to amass units quickly enough and the AI will swarm you within a few turns with superior numbers that it couldn't have reasonably acquired were it playing by the rules. The game doesn't offer any worthwhile strategic options. AoW's main feature - spellcasting - is too limited to be of any use. This is not a thinking man's game as it simply doesn't offer enough options. The fog of war is too dense and doesn't provide enough of a comprehensive view of the state of play for you to make any informed decisions, and the sporatic means by which the AI will randomly throw itself at you with little rhyme or reason makes the opposition too random to prepare any sort of careful defense. A game this horribly designed doesn't even warrant mention of its atrocious interface - one of the worst I have ever seen. - Unbalanced to the point of unplayability - Mechanical design so poor it breaks everything, especially in regards to resource management and production - Shallow: AoW is 'dumb' and doesn't afford any worthwhile strategic or tactical options to make use of - AI that prevails through sheer force of numbers and by ignoring the mechanics by which players must abide - Underwhelming, even useless spellcasting. - Atrocious interface Give this one a pass
I'm not sure what to expect with Port Royale. It's basically a bare-bones trade sim where the only technique is to buy low and sell high. Production and consumption takes place virtually automatically and is so hands off it can be difficult if not impossible to manage much less influence. PR is *not* a construction sim. You can acquire buildings that improve production or your convoy or towns defenses but they are purely upgrades and don't factor in to any simulation. Neither is this a Pirate sim. You can steal goods through combat and seek bounties but the naval combat is shallow and unfulfilling. All it does is have you acquire goods to support your towns and sell them at a profit to upgrade your holdings and occasionally defend your holdings from attack or expand your empire through combat. But everything involved in improving and expanding your holdings is tedious and unfulfilling. There is a lot of watching not much happen other than numbers scrolling across the screen. In terms of presentation I have seen facebook games more attractive than this. In fact, PR is exactly the sort of game one would expect to find on facebook. It's simplistic. The mechanics are too shallow to toy with the simulation. Success comes too easily and there isn't enough of a difference for doing well to provide any sort of satisfaction. Not enough stands in the way of Caribbean supremacy, and the methods of owning the high seas are too few and too shallow to be of merit. I have no idea where all the praise for this game comes from. Perhaps I missed something? Would have been good for its day, though even for its time there would have been better contemporaries, but Port Royale doesn't hold up as a good old game by today's standards. Chances are if you're expecting more, you're gonna get far less.
Sim City 4 is about as advanced as the series gets before it started to devolve into the monstrosity it is now and it's about all you can expect from the definitive Sim City experience. This is as good as the series city building gets. For a construction and management sim the controls are hardly flexible though the interface is intuitive enough and the game does not easily accommodate mistakes. I don't know what some idiot was smoking when they thought up the vehicle missions. They are dumb sloppy pointless and trivial. I wish there was a way to make the mission markers disappear. The game looks like nothing short of disgusting on anything but the highest graphics settings. But it functions as a solid CMS. Can't do much better than this, but this could have done better itself.
Arcanum gets off to a rather poor start, immediately spewing campy exposition with no build up, pretext, or even so much as a heads up and assumes that players will naturally give a crap. Then some guy starts blathering to you about stuff that wouldn't make any sense even if you *did* have the slightest clue what was going on. In that respect it serves as a rather solid introduction because that feeling of awkwardness pretty much prevails this adventure. About the most Arcanum has going for it is its extremely versatile skills based character progression which pretty much allows you to build whatever character you want without restriction. The interface is obtuse. It's not impossible but it is far from intuitive. Minor things like not being able to quick-slot items from the item transfer screen or not being able to quick slot more than one of the same item aren't headaches but still make life less than easy. I'm still not sure what all the loads of indicators that clutter the screen are for. Combat is lame. It could practically play itself but it does provide a variety of weapons, skills and spells to play with. Otherwise the game is huge, open and free-form with plenty of content, a unique fantasy universe and a solid premise. A good idea lacking in solid execution.
Unfortunately rM:ME's graphical overhaul is not an improvement, even over its predecessor. This is *far* from the photo-realistic quality visuals this remake should have presented. In fact, the environments seem even more fake. The vegetation, specifically, being the most obvious overhaul just stands out as jarringly *un*realistic. The appearance is just too far removed from the original presentation. Environments look plastic and the lighting doesn't add any finesse. For all its lower poly's and texture quality and pudding water, realMyst's presentation is superior. Mechanically, rM:ME doesn't add anything new or useful over its predecessor other than an additional time cycle and weather effects in certain levels. No new surprises. The flashlight is completely unnecessary. The real time movement controls have also been bungled up. Very imprecise and spastic. Why realMyst's mouselook needed to be changed is beyond me. The view no longer centers on the cursor, so you can only pan by moving the cursor to the edge of the screen. Still a good game. Still works. Inferior to realMyst. I expect better out of rM:ME to justify its existence.
Intrepid adventurers familiar with Myst will find a bit of a bastard stepchild in Uru. The Ages Beyond Myst was born from the desire to take modern day explorers to the fabled ancient subterranean city of D'ni in ways Myst and Riven could not - in real time 3D. Having initially been envisioned as a persistent online adventure, players will dress their own avatar and explore the ages beyond Myst in 3rd person. Because of the dramatic shift in context and presentation, players who are less intimate with the Myst mythos than your average die hard fan might feel a tad out of place in Uru wondering what any of it has to do at all with its predecessors. But the Myst essentials are all present. Namely, compelling puzzles and richly realized and beautifully rendered alien environments that are so vivid you can't help but get swept up in them. Some awkward controls, cumbersome platforming and the inability to pick up and carry physics objects needed to solve puzzles all plague the game's interface. Explorers might find themselves hard pressed to get involved in the game's narrative as the story is toned down a notch, weaving a somewhat awkwardly delivered tale about the follies of a lost civilization from a mysterious character players are never fully introduced to while piecing together bits and scraps of largely inconsequential exposition from journals and recordings that are little more than nonessential filler. Make no mistake, Uru's adventure is still one of the series best despite being rather removed from its predecessors and a bit cumbersome at times. Uru is every bit as immersive as its predecessors. The challenges are a bit less cunning than before, but enjoyable nonetheless. Uru stands as the quintessential modern Myst. A vivid reimagining for a new age. And a remarkable experience that is to be lived to be believed.
