The bad: almost everythig else. The only reason it's not one star is that I got it for free. Funny thing is, I planned on buying it for a long time now, had a copy back in the day and never liked the game, wasn't fan of the mechanics, esthetics, its unforgiving nature, impossible aiming, terrible level design,... everything. Since then, I've reconsidered a lot of my positions and now like a few of the games I found really bad back when I was young, when the games industry still was still not consolidated, so everyone was realeasing their own ideas of what the next step in the evolution of gaming should look like. This was one of the seemingly dead branches until Deus Ex proved it to be very much the future, but 3DO produced (not created, they released their own stinker, Crusaders of Might and Magic, the very same year) a not-really-intelligent shooter rather than anything else. The game is still terrible as it was then. I would recommend waiting for another giveaway before trying it out if you never played it. One good thing I have to say about it is that GOG seems to have made it not crash every other second, so I ran it on a new computer with up to date software without a single crash for maybe 15 minutes and it could have probably ran for more, which is absolutely not what I remember my experience being in the 1999...
or an exercise in scripting, at worst some kind of scam I wasn't able to uncover. Either way, it's not a game. Don't bother even if they give it out for free like when I got it.
If you were thinking "the old one is too hardcore for me so I'll try the remaster", don't bother. Mechanics were not updated, difficulty just wrong, graphics not charming in the slightest. If you liked the original and have money to spare, your choice. If you never understood what's great about the original, this won't make you. It's just a bad game all over. At least the original is, you know, the original.
The game has a unique contol scheme but once you learn it, it's pretty easy and is generally one of the selling points. The story is linear, but you can make slight detours, or stops, rather. It has nice graphics and design, good music, okay sound and I've met maybe one or two bugs during the whole time I played it - nothing game-breaking, though. I usually hate made up speech-sounds that seems to be ever present in games nowadays, but here it's actually okay. The whole thing is very short, maybe three-four hours, if you are taking your time, but that's not a problem. The story includes (a lot) cliches but it's not like anybody expects them not to be there what with the name and everything and they generally work the way they are supposed to. It's nice how some things in the story hint at what's going to happen next, actually, like with the girl (spoiler averted :). This is probably one of the best recent games I played (yes, 2013 is recent for me).
The game seems unfinished. There are technical problems, the dialogue choices seem like place-holders and it's not sure they do anything. It's linear and sometimes it feels like you skipped some possible interaction without meaning to, with objects in seemingly the same scene being unavailable after a time-skip you didn't mean to do because you didn't know, e.g. that initiating a dialogue is the thing that will do that and there is no way to get out of it. Also, the interaction with the world is mostly pointless, just looking at things. The story is not engaging and the voice acting seemed annoying to me, but that's possibly just me. The graphical design is mostly very beautiful, just the characters ... are really ugly. It has many unskippable scenes, e.g. the intro is really just credits and a bus going up a hill. The dialogue is skippable - except when it's not, for no apparent reason. This is literally the first game where I don't know when the cut-scene ends, it does not tell you in *any* way that an interaction is now possible and expected. I bought this thinking, okay, as long as the atmosphere is good and there are some nice puzzles, I'm fine with the problems others were mentioning. But in reality, it is much, much worse. Someone decided to make a somewhat interactive animated movie and by that introduced a lot of frustration and pacing problems. My recommendation: stay away or buy at the highest discount.
It does remind me of what it aims to be (Heretic/Hexen clone), so that's nice. The respawn is behaving strangely and the balance is slightly off, but the game is "in development" so that's fine, too. The real problem is that the developers know about certain issues and while they say they are working on them, after months they didn't repair them. The worst one is saving system. Today, I lost about 4 hours of progress. Last time, I lost 2 hours. I am a completionist and just kill and smash everything in this kind of game, going through all secrets, etc. If you are like me, this game is seriously not for you. It punishes this style hard. When you are no longer entertained, lose focus or just don't want to waste any more hours, you exit and your quest progress is lost. Completely. While you retain the inventory, that's near useless as inventory means weapons, not quest items. The game *does* tell you that at the start but the fact the quests are pretty long and there are not many puzzles or mazes, just annoying amount of chores to repeat, means the whole "die and reset" idea falls flat, on me at least even though in principle, it does merge traditional hard core gaming with modern games. The thing is, in modern games, the reset helps you, does not work against you. I love challenge, not torture. I am finished with this game unless I see in reviews the devs repaired it. Already I have invested too much time in this.
The story, graphics, everything is great and I really want to see the series continue, but: there are missing and mismatched lines of dialogue between subtitles and sound, there are a few game-breaking bugs that force you to to save like in the times of Sierra classics or lose a lot of progress and there is also an insane amount of pixel hunting with some scenes having a geometry written so bad that you have to reload them a few times for the right pixels to pop up to the foreground (literally, from behind an xml object with interactivity switched off, for example). Also, there are strange decisions like the game of "poker dice" which is honestly just a metter of luck (no, disguise does not work in gog version). I really like the series but this made me relive my childhood with larry and suchlike - all the frustration with a walkthrough right next to me to make sure I am an idiot and it's not a bug, and more often than not finding out, yes, I have wasted an hour and a some bytes on the disk with an unplayable branch which was probably not my fault. What is fascinating is that the creators know about the bugs but never removed them, there are discussion with them online proving it. Some of these repairs are as stupid as changing two lines of xml during the saving process - which you have to do yourself with 99pct surety in order to continue in the game roughly in the middle... If the game was finished and polished, it would get 5 for sticking to the roots; like this, 2/5 is being almost too nice.
One of the worse clones of Sid Mayer's Pirates. Cumbersome controls, unfriendly saving mechanism, uneven difficulty, no tutorial... The best thing I can say about it is, it works and if you want to be reminded of how much the world has changed since then, often for the better, it's one of the best examples. It wasn't world changing back then and today I wouldn't even call it good. I would recommend buying only to the fans of this particular game, certainly not the genre as a whole. Then again, I counted myself amongst both before playing it again after all those years. Not that I regret buying it... Just a word of warning, I guess.
I trusted the authors to have created a good game no matter the reviews. I was wrong. The nicest thing I can say about this is a botched updated Hexplore. Everything is wrong here: writing, RPG elements,... No, that's not right. The game is stable and the graphics are okay. Still, that is a norm nowadays, so no stars for that. Horrible game and a waste of money and time.
The game is horrible, I never played it at the time of creation so I have no attachment to it whatsoever; the controls are insanely bad, the game is so fast and illogical that you only watch out for which button to press instead of the animations, so even that is not there for enjoyment. It's just plain bad, I feel angry for the decision to pay for it, especially the amount gog asks. AAArghhdamnit.
