Nope. Does not work. Despite GOG's already applied fix that limits its number of cores to 2. No amount of tinkering with compatibility settings seems to work. I know this game came out a year before Windows 7 did but...A YEAR??? A YEAR IS ALL IT TAKES FOR A GAME TO BE CONSIDERED "ABANDONWARE" BY ITS OWN DEVELOPERS? THIS IS SUCH AN ASININE, BACKASSWARDS WAY OF DOING BUSINESS. Because most of us have Windows 7 64 bit now, since even just browsing the web can take up more than 4GB of RAM, and a 32 bit OS cannot usually access more than 4. And 4GB is only good these days for running old apps that came before 2010, and definitely not enough for games that came after. And limiting the game's FULL compatibility to OSes that came before Windows 7 is, again, idiotic and utterly asinine, since Windows 7 now has roughly 45% of the market, which means HUGE revenue losses. Bethesda, if you do not intend to support your games, then at least offer them for free and-or open source them. Ironically, there is a possible workaround, and it involves installing Linux (not too difficult, just grab a Linux distro .iso image like Ubuntu or one of its derivatives, like Xubuntu, which is highly recommended, grab a cheap thumbdrive, format it with Rufus or LiveUSB Creator, and unpack the contents of the .iso with its automated procedure, and insert it before the PC boots after setting the computer to boot off a USB drive first), running the installer through Wine, which is a compatibility layer for Windows applications. So this is what I am going to do now: I am going to download GOG's offline installers, and see if I can get it to run. How disappointing. Shame on you, Greedesda.
Before I review the title, there is a thing I need to mention: on Windows 7 Ultimate (64 bit version) and Intel HD 4000, this game has a mildly annoying audio stuttercrackling issue. No amount of tinkering with compatibility settings seems to solve it. I do say it is MILDLY annoying: it is usually only present during dialogues, and not so much during the rest of the game. That said, the biggest issues are 1. its length: I haven't counted how many hours it takes to finish it, but a rough estimate puts the number at about 8-9 hours; 2. the annoying "sit rep" thing: the game has no "saves", it has sit reps, which are locations marked by military insignia of some sort you have to move your squad to. The annoying thing here is you usually command two teams, sometimes three, and you need to move all of them to that location; and sometimes, both teams can be far from each other, and there is no button to call all of your teams to a given sit rep location; also, consider that each of your squads has to be moved multiple times before it reaches it. Seriously, what was the point? A quick save or checkpoint-based system would have been much smoother and less annoying. 2b: each sit rep ends with "Sit rep saved... Out."; the original quote is much longer and "drawn out". You hear it every time you load a game, and there is no way to skip it. What an oversight. 3. You sometimes cannot "lock onto" a cover quickly enough with your mouse; it's hard to explain. I don't remember it being such a pain on the Xbox; 4. No controller support. Lame and reeks of being a rushed PC "port"; 5: you cannot issue an order while another order is already being carried out; you can cancel your current order and issue another one, but it would have sped many operations up. 6. literally the worst of them all: when switching from a team to another, it takes time for the camera to "reach" the selected team: it is not istantaneous. 6b: sometimes very bad camera. Otherwise a solid, 78100 game.
This is definitely a good game, and one of the three, main reasons I joined GOG.com, the other two being KOTOR I & II. But this is by no means a masterpiece; it is unique, sure, but it is mostly that uniqueness that accounts for it being called a masterpiece. There is a lot of wasted potential in this game. Too bad they never released a sequel that shoud have addressed some of its flaws. I first played the game on the original Xbox, and man were the load times atrocious. This PC version eliminates the problem, and, if anything, loads the next areas (almost) too quickly. An annoying thing, despite the GOG fix that consists in setting its core usage to 1 (Task Manager > Affinity), is that before you are even given the time to block your enemy's attack after he's done talking to you, you almost immediately get hit, as a consequence of this. That's right, the enemy manages to almost always hit you first, which, at higher difficulties, could give you some trouble, and among the reasons I think Skyrim sucks. I should also talk about some of the ugly textures present in the game; they have a very unclean, dirty look, and feel choppyblocky. This is what I disliked in the Xbox version, and that's what made me mention load times at the very beginning; I never understood what the hell the game was supposed to load all the time. Another issue is that in this version, the controls have been changed somewhat, and definitely not for the better. If I recall correctly, the Xbox version allowed you to turn the camera around your character with the right stick, and all movement was handled by the left stick. Not so much in this version. I played with the Xbox360 controller, and moving sideways (<-- or -->) places your character in some fighting stance, albeit always moving, but slowly; annoying, and not something I was able to get used to till the very end of the game, but maybe not even then. All in all a good game that will give you about 19-20 hours of fun, if played on Easy.
