Look, the late 90s was a bad time for adventure games. The genre had petered out when Lucasarts stopped making them, and Sierra crashed after trying to go 3D. What I'm saying is that when people call this game a "classic", it's only because the genre was effectively dead at the time of release and there was nothing else for adventure fans. But really this game was a mess. You play the whiniest, wordiest college student who never shuts up, talking to NPCs who never shut up, bouncing back and forth between a generic Blade Runner world to a generic fantasy world, solving the most ridiculous puzzles that involve nonsense logic with tons of walking all over huge environments wondering if some arbitrary event triggered a completely unrelated event on the other side of a city. One puzzle in particular stands out. You must enter a closed theater to talk to someone inside. The sequence of events that follows (all so you can distract the janitor to slip inside) is so ludicrous and convoluted, that I would put it up there on the same level as the infamous Gabriel Knight 3 "cat mustache" puzzle. Just go look up the solution to that one puzzle, and you can see for yourself how ridiculous the puzzle logic is. Give a bottle of dirty dishwater to a dying man in the desert, and he'll say it's the best water he's ever had. So too was the response of thirsty adventure fans in the year 2000 when they were offered The Longest Journey.
This game is basically an over the top Devil May Cry style brawler meets the weird stylish Suda 51 style story and atmosphere. So it's Devil May Cry that falls a little shorter than that polished action perfection, meets a weird atmospheric Suda game like Killer 7 that falls a little shorter than that weird story perfection. There's just not much else to say about it beyond it being a hybrid of those two games without quite being as good in each one's specialized area, but still good enough on its own. If you're a fan of either, buy it and you'll enjoy it without quite reaching those heights. Solid 4 stars.
Planet's Edge is like an awkward evolutionary mid phase for the space exploration genre, starting with Starflight and ending with Star Control 2's perfection. If Starflight was a fish swimming comfortably within its aquatic limitations, and SC2 a mammal running around on land, Planet's Edge would be the lungfish flopping around in a mud puddle. The game tries to be more actiony and fast paced than Starflight's methodical combat, but the tech and programming just wasn't ready for it. It all plays very clunky and janky. The biggest standout from the other games is the landing party portion. Rather than a lander vehicle to suck with minerals and lifeforms, your crew beams down as an away party. The game then turns into a mini-RPG sequence as you solve that location's story objective. This is by far the weakest part of the game and takes up half of it. It's reminiscent of Mindcraft's Tegel's Mercenaries and just as janky. It's extremely hard to figure out what to do because you're not sure if you're on the wrong track, or the right track being blocked by the clunky interface. Like SC2, you gather minerals to build ship (and landing party) upgrades. There is no central currency though. You must have the right mineral types for each build and you are often bottlenecked by not having the right ones. Ship upgrades are made more frustrating by the extreme slow pace you get better blueprints, hence you will spend most of space exploration running away from enemies that hugely outclass you. Overall it's really hard to recommend this over the Starflight games or Star Control 2. Each of those does what it tries to accomplish better. It was clunky 30 years ago and would only play worse now. I would only try it AFTER SF & SC2 and you're still curious where else the genre went.
Silent Hill 4 gets a lot of points for trying an original approach. You start in a "hub world" of your apartment, where some sinister lock keeps you inside and you cannot contact the outside world. Enter a portal to different levels. The apartment portion is a neat 1st person adventure approach. Some interesting and creepy stuff can happen there. The levels are ok, nothing great. Making healing items rare, but heal for free if you can make it back to the apartment is a more tense approach. Unfortunately, it all goes to crap halfway through. You're stuck with a permanent escort quest, you reuse all the same levels, it turns into annoying attrition as you cannot heal at the apartment anymore, and you're attacked by new annoying enemies. What really kills the 2nd half, is that it becomes an attrition slog where you desperately need certain limited items that you've been finding all game, but you're never told their value and aren't expecting the sudden halfway point shift in gameplay. It's very easy to waste all the items early on when you don't need them and don't know you'll need them later. Important effects of certain items are never explained. A seemingly harmless item will screw you over in the long term if you pick it up. Burping nurses are dumb. There's enough good here for a mild recommendation to series fans, but do yourself a big favor and set the difficulty to easy to avoid the immense frustration of the 2nd half.
...is still only 2 stars.
Not only is Sacrifice one of the most fun and best looking RTS games ever created, it's one of the very few 1st gen 3D titles (around '95-'00) that still looks great today rather than ugly triangles. Run around as a wizard summoning a few units. Kill enemy units, sacrifice the souls from all the corpses to create more units. It's incredibly satisfying as you slowly snowball throughout a level. Did I mention the art design is gorgeous? The best looking game from a company known for great looking games. Also as a nice bonus, it boasts the best story ever in an RTS. Lots of replayability as you run through the campaigns again trying out different gods, all of whom grant different spells, units, and levels. Definitely pick it up if you're an RTS fan. Unlike a lot of games labeled "classics" here, this one still holds up.
The game has amazing art and a great premise. Witness a murder take place, then wander around using your time rewind power to change the situation and avert the murder. Sort of like the old DS game Phantom Detective. But the execution is just too tedious. You quickly figure out what you have to do to prevent the murder, then you have to spend 4x the time tediously observing NPC travel routes, looking through keyholes, and dealing with the worst time rewind mechanic in games. You can't just hold down a button to rewind time. You have to select it, sit through a loading screen, an animation, then another loading screen before finally being dumped not at the time of your choosing, but at predetermined checkpoints. You'll most likely have to repeat more tedious following NPC patrol routes before you take another attempt at completing your task. More tedious rewind/reloads, patrol routes, and keyhole peeking await you. The controls are also terribly. Super awkward stuff like one mouse button to move, another mouse button to inspect, a different button to peek through keyholes. It sounds simple on paper, but it's super awkward in practice. The controls were so bad, I honestly thought this was a bad DS port, but it's a PC exclusive! The story gives you no reason to care. You're given zero backstory on who you are, who other characters are, and what this casino is. It might slowly be doled out with cryptic backstory notes as you go on, but I quit long before that happened. There's a good premise and serious art talent here. I hope in the future, the technical people hire better game designers and writers. It will be a huge treat when that happens. Until then, just go play Phantom Detective instead.
No other 90s developer consistently cranked out steaming piles quite like Capstone: Operation Body Count, Tek War, Corridor 7, Witchaven. Operation Body Count was their worst game. The worst of the worst. That's like being the worst LJN game for NES.
...is a squawking crow jump scare. I really wish I could say there's a single thing scarier the entire time, but there isn't. You're just wandering around solving a few annoying puzzles (that require you to actually write notes down on paper then walk all the way across the map to the puzzle the info is relevant to). The "monster" is so lame that I honestly thought it would turn out to just be a prank. It all feels like it was meant to be a bad Zork entry before a marketing team decided to advertise it as a horror game. I heard great things about this game and was massively let down how amazingly lame it was. If you want a creepy 1st person horror adventure game from the mid 00s, play Scratches instead.
For a couple years in early 00s, Empire Earth stood out in the RTS genre. Age of Empires was the grand daddy of the "advancing through the ages of civilization" RTS sub genre. Empire Earth came along and kicked that up to 11. Start as hunter gatherers, advance to far future. It was a great alternative for people who wanted even more scope to their Age of Empire clones. But then Rise of Nations came out in 2003 and did everything EE did, but much better. To this day, Rise of Nations is the closest an RTS ever came to an in depth game of Civilization. Sure, RoN owed a lot to EE for laying the groundwork, but the EE series never caught up. RoN remained superior for scope, while the Age of Empires games continued to refine themselves as a more refined traditional RTS experience. Empire Earth got left behind in a middle ground that was outdone by other games. Play Age of Empires 2 or Age of Mythology if you want a "historical" themed traditional RTS. Play Rise of Nations if you want a grand scope, meaty RTS civ sim.
