So System Shock 2 was basically the start of modern first person horror PC games. Unfortunately it was kind of clunky and the RPG system (breaking weapon!) really detracted from the experience. Undying was basically the first post-SS2 game that made the focus all on traditional action FPS gameplay. It half succeeded. For the first half of the game, it was pretty good. A spooky intro before any enemies appear. Weird stuff happening. The early ghoul/wolf enemies (howlers) were the first melee enemies in an FPS game to actually be a threat (SS2 and Doom monsters could be endlessly back stepped). The weapon/magic system was innovative at the time. Then, shortly after you dispatch the first sibling, it starts unraveling. You go from spooky gothic monsters to fighting human monks (snooze), unscary pirates, and finally cavemen(!) in a level that seems like it was taken out of a Turok game. They obviously ran out of time making the game and you're rushed straight to the last boss. So you had half a good game...for the time. It has NOT aged well at all. The action is clunky and the enemies are just annoying after 15 years of advancements. And that's while you're still in the first half! Once the boring 2nd half kicks in, all but the most hardcore nostalgia players will most likely quit. For the super nostalgic and game historians only.
The Suffering was fantastic when it was released. It proved that horror games didn't have to be survival horror, sparsely giving you ammo that must be horded. No, this game gives you double tommy guns with hundreds of rounds and is proud of it. All this one year before Resident Evil 4. At the time, this game had the best "things go to hell" opening since Half Life. The action was great. The atmosphere was creepy (the blade arm guys dragging their knives across the ground). The game also never had any dull parts. Adrenaline that still managed to be creepy all the way through. It was up there with Fatal Frame, Silent Hill 2, and oBscure for my favorite PS2 horror games. What it lacked in pure atmospheric horror, it made up for with action. Deducting a star though because it's only age moderately well. All the awesome stuff that was new when it was released has been done by other games since. It was also released at that awkward time where PS2 games were obviously lagging behind in graphics compared to all the competition. Watch a video on it, decide if you don't mind the old graphics, and go in with the expectation that you're not going to be playing a Resident Evil 4 caliber horror/action game, then there is some genuine fun to be had here.
The question on everyone's mind is "Is it better than the MoO remake?". Yes. It is more of a sequel to MoO 2 than the remake is. The short version is that it eliminates a number of poor design choices the MOO remake made, most notably the combat is now very much like MOO 2 (in fact it's better than MOO 2 with better feedback for movement, range, and animations). There's just a bunch of weird decisions though that keep it from being very good. Everyone has pointed out the poor interface. Windows will pop up and a wrong click can advance something behind the window. Windows cannot be closed by right clicking or any other way but clicking on the 'X' in the top right corner like it's LITERALLY Windows. There's less need for micromanagement like the MOO remake (no pollution nonsense), but for some reason they kept some of that games bad micromanagement choices. You can assign transports to a "transport pool" which abstracts your empire's logistical capacity, exactly like MOO 2. However this pool can only transport food. To transport colonists, you must take them out of the pool and manually fly them to the planet to pick up colonists, then manually fly them to the destination, then manually drop them off. One at a time. Every time. Production is weird. Along with food and money you must mine metal, which is used to build ships but not planet buildings. Why not just have ships limited by production? They also retain the 4X feature of assigning production to income/research, but instead of a portion of your production being converted to that resource, it doubles that resource. A planet with 100 research but 1 production will become 200 research 0 production. A planet with 1 research but 100 production will become 2 research 0 production. Huh? Research screen is poorly organized, with categories and levels layed out randomly. There's other head scratching features, so in short this would be a new classic if they cleaned up the interface and design.
If you're like me, you wanted to like Panzer General back in the day, but were put off by its flaws: limited "useful" unit types, annoyingly restricted time limit that required perfect play which was only possible with advanced knowledge of the enemy setup, and the ridiculously harsh unit experience grind where somehow American troops in 1942 north Africa were as experienced (if not more) than your troops that have been campaigning since 1939 Poland. Fantasy General solves all of this and adds more. -Tons of unit variety. Skirmishers (slingers) are weaker but can attack melee units without retaliation, and much welcome additional option for softening up tough targets whereas in Panzer General this role was limited to air (nullified by abundant anti-air) and cumbersome artillery. Archers are weaker than skirmishers, but can attack ANY unit without retaliation and support adjacent units. Various mage units have special spells. You can balance your army between "magical" units that start out tougher but cannot be upgraded, or mortal units that start off weaker but can be upgraded. -More flexible time limits. You can actually slug it out like a wargame now to win scenarios within the time limit. Panzer General was more of a puzzle game that demanded nothing less than the one perfect solution. No more silly Panzer General situation where you inflict 10 to 1 losses but still lose the battle. Fantasy General offers you more pitched battles whereas Panzer General was just a series of annoying speedbumps to slow you down. -More between battle stuff. You get the option on where to battle. You get gold between battles you can divide between R&D for new units (you even get to pick the category of units you want to focus research on) and purchasing units. All in all, you if you liked even just the concept of Panzer General, then definitely pick up Fantasy General, by far the best of the "General" series.
Forget nostalgia, this game was terrible even at the time. The mid to late 90s was the time of "me too" RTS games cashing in on Warcraft the same way the early to mid 90s had a wave of cruddy FPS cashing in on Doom. This was released 2 whole years after the original C&C, and the same time as Starcraft. It's just embarrassing compared to those 2. It doesn't even come close to C&C's graphics despite being released 2 years later. In fact, the graphics are on par with Dune 2 from five years prior. THAT'S how far behind the curve this game was. Show Dune 2 and KKND gameplay to a millennial then ask them to identify which one is the pioneer and which one had 5 years to improve on things. So how about that gameplay? I've never seen an RTS deprive you of so much information. Your resources are hidden by default and must be enabled to see. There are no names or icons for stuff on the build screen which wouldn't be that bad if the graphics were decent enough to tell them apart. You have no idea how much damage, armor, or health anything has. The shotgunner is 50% more expensive than the bow & arrow guy. Is he 50% better? Why isn't the research center unlocking any new units? You will never figure it out on your own without reading the manual. There are SO many better RTS on GOG for the same price. In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of a WORSE one. If you want a traditional C&C type one, pick up Act of War. If you want to pick up one from the same time just to see how sad this game was even in 1997, pick up Battlezone. KKND is just a waste of time for anyone not jonsing for nostalgia. Hell, even if you are nostalgic for it, I'd advise to keep it a happy memory and not try to play it again today.
Fran Bow is essentially Alice in Wonderland (or maybe more Return to Oz) meets Silent Hill. Early on, the central mechanic is introduced where you use your pills item to enter the dark world, much like Silent Hill. Except Silent Hill used the dark world as part of the story, and had you enter and exit it at fixed times in order to maintain pacing and allow you to explore each. In Fran Bow, you instantly enter the dark world at any time with the pills, then instantly leave it. It's creepy maybe the first 2 times you do it, but it becomes boring fast. The game quickly boils down into "enter room, search for action hotspots, takes pills, search dark world version of room for new hot spots, exit dark world". Repeat for every single room. Worse, with very few exceptions, the dark world is just lazy. Most of the locations are exactly the same in the dark world, but with just a couple pools of blood added, and characters replaced with corpses. The game experience boils down to "New room new character, take pills, yeah yeah blood and a corpse oh a new item take that, back to normal world yawn what's next?" What should be an atmospheric mechanic instead is reduced to Arkham Asylum's detective vision. There really aren't any meaty puzzles either. Most of them are just using an item or lever that only exists in the dark world with no additional thinking required. As if to balance this out, there is one total bullshit puzzle (hospital door combination) that, even after looking at the solution, still made no sense at all. The game is also all over the place tonally. It starts in a mental hospital where the dark world contrasts with the mundane ordinary one, but then shifts into an Alice in Wonderland weird forest, yet retains the dark world mechanic even though the dark world is hardly any different. In the end, Fran Bow doesn't know what it wants to be, unsuccessfully melds mechanics with atmosphere, and offers no puzzle meat to prop it all up.
This game was an innovative blast back in the day, taking a sci-fi gun based approach to Ultima 8: Pagan meets Syndicate with the cheesy FMV cutscenes of Red Alert. And it worked!...back in 1995. It really did age terribly though. You know how awkward it felt trying to go back to circle strafing with the keyboard in Doom after you had played Quake? Now imagine keyboard circle strafing in an isometric action game where your only quick movement option is "roll to the side 10 feet at a time". It's a mess. This was one of the first game's the have "enemies running around screaming on fire". You could also remote control robot kamikaze robot spiders to blow up hapless office workers. It made you giggle evilly back in the day, but it would be left behind less than 2 years later in those departments by all three of the Build engine games (Duke Nuken 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood). So you're left with a very primitive isometric Postal with awful controls that can't decide if it wants to be an action game or Twinsen's Oddessy. Sometimes it tries to be a platformer and O-M-G are those parts atrocious (the engine just isn't build for it). Get any of the Build engine games, Postal, or Syndicate over this. I was in love with this game for half a year back in the day, and even I can't play more than 5 minutes without getting bored now. Trust me.
This game is very VERY similar to Sid Meire's Colonization. In fact, it's almost the same game, just with the whole "independence" mechanic taken out and a tactical battle component put in. Short review? Colonization is the much better game and you should just go play that. And although the Imperialism games aren't quite the same, I'd recommend them as vastly superior games in a similar setting. Long review? What really sinks it is the lack of easily available feedback to make decisions. Like Civilization/Colonization, the early game is huge and even wasting 3 turns trying to find a first city site can set you behind big time. In Conquest, city & building placement is INSANELY finicky. You simply cannot tell the different between flat land you can build on, and "sloped" land which looks exactly the same but can't be built on. You waste so many turns moving your (extremely slow) settler around the green patches trying to find the one spot it will let you build on. When you finally do build a city, you find out you can't build anything around you because what you thought was more flat land turns out to be sloped. Same with other kinds of buildings. You get bonuses for placing near resources: mills get bonuses for being near forest, mines being near mountains, etc. There's no easy way to tell this though. You have to go to the build screen, select the building, then drag it over tile by tile looking at percentage bonuses. There's no one easy yield display to get all the information like Civ. Don't be fooled by those super zoomed in screenshots either; everything is a tiny blob you can't tell apart in-game. Tactical battles are not enough to make up for the strategic shortcomings either. Again it's a matter of no information. It never tells you your chance to hit. Should you fire separately or together? What kind of bonus does combined arms get? It never tells you. Mostly you just get bogged down and miss a lot. Give this one a pass and play Colonization instead.
Pretty much what rwaylor's said. If you're going to make a game that's 95% story & dialog with almost no meaningful gameplay, it better be DAMN good story and dialog. That is not the case here. It would be mildly amusing banter if it were attached to an actual game, but when you're forced to focus on it because there IS no other game, it's very much lacking. Almost every single line of dialog can be boiled down to either "I'm an insecure jerk!" or "I'm an insecure wuss!" or "What's going on?" You control a character walking a ridiculously linear path from point A to point B. You will exchange said banter along the way, and be frequently presented with near pointless dialog choices that you don't even get any time to read. You can maybe skim 2 out of 3 before the time limit runs out and you say nothing. Here's hoping that some day game designers drop the awful timed dialog response mechanic that Telltale popularized. Eventually, after enough banter has been bantered, you reach a location. Some poltergeist thing happens or a light flashes or an acid trip breaks out. The characters say, "What was that?". Back to walking the linear path and repeat. Every once in a while you get a "puzzle", which never strays from "stand under a light and adjust the radio dial until something happens". That's it. In nearly 3 hours of play time I have yet to come across anything else. So you're left with an exploration game that's totally linear, dialog that's too banal to carry a story heavy game, an adventure game with no puzzles, and a horror story that's about as scary as Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind. Watch a Youtube clip of the opening and ask yourself if hours of that looks interesting.
This was overall an excellent update to the classic Pirates game. The swordfighting segments are much better, and there's just plain more stuff to do. Even the dancing mini-game isn't as bad as people say. Unfortunately, there's one big snag. Eventually you reach a point where you can effortlessly win every single swordfight, and at that point only the hardest difficulty (swashbuckler) presents a challenge anymore. But the difficulty level also ties in to how much the wind affects your sailing. So when you turn it up to swashbuckler, suddenly the sailing becomes AGONIZINGLY slow. You will be at constant standstills, being forced to sail in the most roundabout zig zags taking FOREVER to get anywhere. In combat, the bulkiest of merchant ships will constantly outrun your top of the line blockade runners and frigates. It is not at all fun. This game would be such a blast if someone would come up with a mod that eliminated or drastically reduced wind strength. You'll enjoy it until you get good enough to reach max difficulty, but then you will be supremely frustrated by the wind, struggling to have fun. (I'm surprised everyone hates the dancing mini game so much. To me, the worst mini game was the stealth one used to sneak into town. It's a super slow paced, stealth version of Pac Man that gives you zero sense of direction or perspective)
