My biggest complaint out front. The copy protection hasn't been removed from Eye of the Beholder, the game is not DRM-free. It's not a big deal, but it is false advertising and thus minimal rating. At a point during the game, you are promted to enter a codeword from the manual, if you fail three times the game exits. Now all the Eye of the Beholder titles are first person dungeon crawlers, you get a party of 4 characters, which's stats thankfully can be either rolled or chosen. Your party consits of a 2by2 grid, the front characters able to engage in melee, while the back row can only cast spells and use ranged weapons. A rightclick on the weapon executes an attack followed by a cooldown. It is advisable to do hit and run tactics to not be a sitting duck during that cooldown. Though the game mainly follows some d&d rules, it is realtime, not turn based. Some people love this system, others hate it. Not many games were made following that formula, Legend of Grimrock beeing the only other series that had imitated the gameplay in the last almost two decades. Very good game, I've been waiting for to come to gog. Sadly, they didn't bother to remove the copy protection. Once that's dealt with, it's a five star recommendation.
First things first, the framerate of this game is not locked to 30. The field of view is adjustable from 60 to 100, which is insufficient, hence one star gone from an otherwise perfect score. So what we have here is a singleplayer-only shooter with some inspiration drawn from Hexen2. However, there's no elaborate hub level design, but a procedually generated dungeon. You enter a room enemies spawn, you kill everything, then advance to the next room. You can dodge every shot, so getting hit and ultimately killed is almost always your fault. Aside from your basic weapon - a wand, you can have a staff equipped, a spellbook and an alchemical weapon. You are also guaranteed to find a weapon at the beginning of each level, of which there are five. After killing sufficient enemies you level up and have to choose between two random perks, from which you will keep one. Aside from that, there's of course some random stuff and risk-reward areas thrown into your way and at the end of each level a bossfight is waiting. Ziggurat is a fantasy shooter which takes the best mechanics from 1st person shooters and rogue lites, resulting in a mix that is easily one of the best in both genres, with a high replay value. The number of availible perk and weapons is excellent, enemy variety is good. The game has been regulary updated since release about a year ago. Also one thing is to note, which is at least important to me, Ziggurat is fantasy, but it's no fauna-slaughterer. You are not killing wolfs, bats, rats and spiders because the devs lack creativity. All in all an excellent game. There is one and only one complaint I have about the game and that's the much to low FOV, so I have to play it in 4:3.
Now here is one of the best RPGs ever made. It has some minor balancing issues typical for that time, but that doesn't stand in the way of the experiance. So the story is that you start on a spaceship and then crashland on a planet where magic is real. One nice feature is that you can get a pistol in the prologue, which is extremly strong, but has limited ammo, it's kind of a joker. Now gameplaywise you are altering between three views: zoomed out top-down in ouside areas, zoomed in top-down in some areas and first person usually in dungeoons. The combat system is very unique. Your have a square grid and your characters can only be in the lower two lines, however you can choose to advance, in which case all you characters move forward and the now open bottom line gets dropped. The depth of the combat is okay, surely surpassed by today's standarts, but for the time and a few years after one of the best experiences you could get. Anyway, it's an interesting twist on grid based rpgs, that wasn't done too often. The game's greatest strength is it's immersion, I think. The gameworld is genuinely interesing and especially due to the switching in view modes, you can really feel the adventure. There's puzzles, nice graphics, and interesting cast of characters, well rewarded discovery, it's just a well rounded everything and one of these games that easily stands the test of time. I can completely recommend this game to every kind of player. One of the best games in the gog catalogue. However, be warned, this game takes it's player seriously, sometimes you die and need to rethink your approach, it's never unfair though. (Also there's alien tits! Seriously, the female aliens have four breasts, but cover only two. What a weird design decision towards nudity.)
So, Convoy is pretty much self-explanatory. You travel around an overworld map and encounter several random events you have to navigate in a multiple choice dialog, these may lead to battles, loot or damaged units - or any combination of these. You may also encounter camps, where you can noticeably upgrade your vehicles' passive stats, buy and sell weapons or purchase new vehicles. Weapon choices are pretty obvious, usually a weapon is flatout better or worse than another, yes some are better against shields, while others are better against armor, but all this has not too much of an impact on the game. The combat could have been interesting, but is more a trimmed-down RTS without buildings or unit production. the camera is focused on your main vehicle (MCV), which always moves to the right. Everything else keeps relative positions to that MCV. Now you might think, that you can use your MCV's breaks to shift every other vehicle to the right or you other vehicles breaks to move quicker to the left, but nope, thats not in the game. If everything is moving, you might expect ramps, to gain a temporary speed boost or pitfalls to do the opposite, again, these aren't in the game either. The only thing that can happen is your vehicles crashing into a building or a rock, which basically is an instantkill-zone entering from the right of the screen. There's tons which could have been done, but hasn't. It basically comes down to rightclicking the enemy to have all your guys attack him and occasional use a direct damage ability from your MCV. (MCV weapons are abilities). As you might have guessed, once your MCV is destroyed, you loose. All the random roguelite elements, which should give you replayablity, are pointless because everything plays so samy. This is effectively the basis for what could be one of the best games out there, but as it stands, it's a fun, but repetitive no-brainer. My recommendation is to wait for a content patch.
This game is exactly what you expect, choose one of 4 + 2 unlockable characters and have some oldschool beat'em up fun. Each character has 3 different special moves. To execute a special move you need to have the mana and hit the special attack button + direction, very smash brothers like, no streetfighter like executions. Kill an enemy with a special attack and you recieve bonus gold or hitpoints. Gold can be turned into upgrades at the end of each stage or will be substracted to revive you. There are 16 stages in the game, but you only play 10. This is because of how the level selection works. You have 4 areas to go to, whichever you choose first will only contain the first stage, the second will contain the first and second stage of that area and so on. So if you have trouble in one area, you can play it first on your next playthrough to make it easier. Enemy variety is not great but okay, levels are just cosmetic, no platforming whatsoever. Effectively this game is Fistpuncher in better. If you like the genre, buy it, it's one of the better titles, but, as inherent to the genre, don't expect much depth. This is a couch game you can play even with your dumbest friend and thats the charm of it. Just play, no knowledge needed. Balancing between the character isn't very good, but you can live with it. The only negative thing about the game are the bugs, expect clipping, scripting bugs or malfunctioning controls that will hinder you to make progress and require you to restart the level. Wishlist this game, wait for the patch, don't buy it on release.
Xenonauts is a Remake of the old XCom, which is probably one of the best games ever created. So basically all that is good in Xenonauts comes from the original XCom. Xenonauts took the approach to change as little as possible, which leaves the interface graphically updated, but mostly untouched. Changes include, of course, updated graphics, very slight changes to the tactical system, new minor aerial combat system, a lot of balancing, a new inventory system for bases, you now don't need to buy trivial stuff, such as ammo for weapons, and the removal of the build and sell "exploit" to generate credits. They have done a good work at emphazising what XCom meant to be, for example, satisfying countries to gather funding was almost irrelevant in the original, while in Xenonauts it's essential. Thus you will probably restart over and over again, because you mismanaged. The difficulty curve is done very well, don't expect a cheap tactic from the beginning to work for long. This is a retro game in all respects. If you want the original XCom, Xenonauts is the game for you, if you expect a modern game, you'll want to look at the alternatives. Xenonauts fixes the major mistakes of XCom, but not every quirk.
This could be the best city builder out there, you can get fairly easy into the game and it is really fun, unfortunately there are some bugs with the unit AI that kill the game. In a nutshell, your workers stop working and just idle around a meeting place. If you then save and load your game, they will go for one "tour" then start idling again, confirming that this is indeed a bug. This is an unfinished product. Avoid until it's fixed, at which point I would rate it five stars.