The game has all the hallmarks of a bad adventure game: bad story, cringe dialogues, cliched characters, awful fake accents, illogical puzzles, cumbersome interface for its time, lots and lots of long-winded boring cut-scenes and a disappointing "to be continued" at the end.
After giving this a try now and again over the course of decades without making much progress I just finished the game following a walkthrough in about 2 and a half hours. The art is great and features some cool animations (for its time) and the voice overs are well done but the gameplay? It's a chore. Obtuse puzzles, hunting down ingredients, tedious brewing mechanics where order matters, possible dead ends, random death traps reminiscent of old Sierra games and inventory management, because you only have 20 slots, which is actually more than you need most of the time but is a horrible limitation if you do not already know what you need. The story is also very thin and not awfully interesting and the last portion of the game forgoes classic point and click gameplay for a potion brew-a-thon, playing towers of (h)anoi twice and finally randomly clicking on the screen in a die-repeat loop until you find the right spots. I understand people remembering this fondly but without the nostalgia it has little worth beyond mere curiosity.
The combat feels good and turning your characters into omega level threats is fun but ultimately the game is laughably easy on normal. Almost all ancounters ended in 1 turn oncluding bosses unless a mechanic demanded otherwise. End of game damage stats for my 3 characters by order of initiative: 300k, 100k, 6k. Final boss? 1 turn kill. The tinkering with cards and items is fun, but the skill grid is needlessly complicated and random, the loot is bad (maximum values go up in late game but minimum remains the same, legendaries are mostly useless), the explorer minigame is a chore and when you pick a starter deck for a character you will have to stick with that strategy for a very long time and it will cost a lot to change it taking out a lot of the flexibility. But again, combat is fun and with 10 characters with 4 starting decks each there's a lot of variability.
Good stealth/action game with a heavy cyberpunk theme and great synth music.
Wetlands is an FMV based on rails shooter like Rebel Assault or Creature Shock where all you do is move your cursor and shoot at things and watch videos of the story unfolding. It's fairly short with about 1.5 hours running time if you ace every level on the first try (good luck with that) but it has good (for its time) animation and prerendered 3D cutscenes that deliver a nice sci-fi B-movie. The problem, as so often with these games however, is the bad controls and some bad design choices. You can play with eithe mouse (default for gog) or joystick (enter "install" on the dos prompt after quitting the game to change) but 19 out of 20 levels are impossible with joystick and 2 out of 20 are impossible with mouse, so you will have to change to joystick controls for that one mission and then switch back and just cheat on the final one or risk getting carpal tunnel. Unfortunately there are two levels that require guessing without any hints whatsoever and if you guess wrong two or three times you have to start over, which isn't horribly bad if you are lucky enough, then it just adds to the adrenaline, but utterly effed up if you guess wrong repeatedly (search youtube for a playthrough if you need help). Overall it's still a fun shooter with lots of style that's easy to pick up and ridiculously difficult to finish even on the lowest difficulty setting. And thanks for bringing it back. After I sold my copy about 20 years ago I kept wanting to go back and finally finish it which I now did with help from youtube and cheat engine.
The game is beautiful for its age and the main protagonists are charming enough. The parkour part is mostly nice and fluent. But the horrible camera, imprecise controls and questionable combat mechanics make it a tedious experience. Automatic camera jumps will make you change direction at crucial times, and the controls will often make your character do things you do not want him to do, especially in combat. Also, whose brilliant idea was it to make a 3 second animation mandatory for dispatching enemies on the ground? Beyond stupid! The combat is generally very bland as you constantly fight against 3 or 4 enemies. Kill one, and another joins the fight until you've taken care of all 20 to 40 enemies. That only gets exhilarating - and in a bad way- when off-camera baddies stab you in the back or your character attacks someone even though your directional input should point you in the opposite direction.
MY original Steam review: "After finishing all Spiders RPGs up to Bound by Flame I must say, this is their best work I have played so far and they are all underrated in my opinion. The games do lack some polish and variety and are on the short side when compared to AAA hallmarks like Mass Effect or The Witcher but they have their own charm, great atmosphere and mature writing. Combat in Bound by Flame was brutal at the beginning. I played on normal (Hawk) and died during the tutorial and often and repeatedly during the first half of the game. But as your power grows and you figure out how to go about combat more cleverly things actually become a tad too easy towards the end. The penultimate boss in the game was even a real pushover who hardly even touched me. All in all a very satisfying experience that I would rate as a 7.5." Took me 18 hours to finish and I played as Thief with some Fire support, so it's not true, that you can only play one class (never ever listen to people just claiming things like that). As a Spider RPG it's actually surpassed by Technomancer in all aspects except for atmosphere. The village tune from the first act is still one of my favorite musical pieces in a game. I often lingered there much longer than I had to, to listen to the music.
Massive Assault has an interesting approach to combat, that differs from normal TBS games in several ways: - units always do a fixed amount of damage, even at low health - you cannot move into spaces of units destroyed in that round - first step into an enemry territory gives them money to raise guerillas at the start of their turn - territories free of enemies can build units at the end of your turn - freeing an enemy territory and capturing it's capital gives you a one time resource bonus to buy units All of this allows for some interesting tactics and strategies in both defense and offense and even though the game only has about a dozen units, it doesn't feel like it really needs more. Unfortunately, the AI seems to be broken. Campaign mode often came up with the message "This game appear to be broken. Please restore it." Which I did, and the message came again. Then I changed my tactics a bit, but to no avail. But when I did something stupid instead, the game went on without a problem. By this I surmise, that the AI crashes if you stray from the expected path. Therefore I cannot recommend this for the vs. AI gameplay, and for multiplayer I would recommend the superior Phantom Renaissance.
