Even though the game is technically fairly old, we didn't have access to it until many years later. They did a good job of updating the graphics for modern platforms even though the character models have a blocky look to them. Having said that, the soundtrack is really good especially in regards to the final boss battle. The combat system is unique, but not in a negative way. Just different. I used a controller to play the game and swapping between that and the mouse for inventory management took some getting used to, but overall it worked well. The game itself isn't really long, but if you want to get all of the achievements, you'll probably need a couple of playthroughs to do so. If you like other Falcom games like Ys, you should enjoy this one as well.
Really good game, but extremely dialogue heavy. That may turn off a lot of players, but I personally liked it. Gameplay, graphics and music are all excellent, but the story does seem to get drawn out a bit too long. Personally I could have done without the After Story stuff specific to EX+ as I felt the main game with the epilogue was a satisfying conclusion. Having said that, I felt like nearly all of the characters were quite likeable, with the exception of Yuuki, but even he's not TOO bad. There's a lot of content to enjoy in this game and it's well worth your time. There aren't many games that I've gotten all of the achievements for, but this is one of them if that gives you an idea of how much I liked it.
Not a bad game really, but extremely frustrating early on. Your character is super fragile and it doesn't take anything for the enemies to squash you like a bug. Once you get the shield spell, the difficulty is night and day different, but persevering to that point is what is trying. The music score is pretty good when it's there, but more often than not you're playing in silence which isn't great either. I tried using the Undying Renewal mod, but it crashed on me fairly early in the game, so I stuck with the provided NGlide wrapper instead which was quite stable. Not a bad game really, but not exactly good either. Fairly average.
The game engine feels refined over the first Fallout rather than an evolution. This isn't such a bad thing, but like that game it can still feel clunky at times. Inventory management continues to be a bit of a bear especially in the later stages of the game. Having said that, dealing with merchants is greatly improved over the first game. The skill system is still mostly the same, but this time around it seems that some skills from before that were worthless could have a use this time around. The perk system is likewise expanded a bit as well. Charisma is actually a useful stat this time around as well as it determines how many companions you can recruit. Speaking of the companions, there are quite a bit more this time around and interacting with their inventory is vastly better than in the first game. You can also modify their behavior, though sometimes that can be a bit wonky in practice. Unlike the first game, there isn't a rush to finish the main quest. In fact, you could take quite a few years to get around to completing it if you wish. There's still a limit technically, but chances of you hitting that 15 year mark are somewhere between slim and none. The world seems quite a bit larger with a ton of sidequests available. The highwayman makes traversing this larger world much easier. Due to the greater number of sidequests with conflicting factions, the replayability of this game is quite high. This game has quite a few mods that further expand this replayability. All in all, this is a great improvement over the first Fallout and well worth your time.
I'd like to rate this game higher, but it gets docked a little due to the clunkiness of the interface, in particular inventory management. I should point out that I played the game as provided by GOG, so basically vanilla with an HD widescreen patch only. The story is really good and there's some pretty good replayability in that regards as well. Graphics are still quite good with some nice, gory deaths for enemies, but sometimes items blend into the background that are needed to advance the story. For that reason, I needed to check a guide here and there to figure out what to do. I wouldn't say I needed to use a guide heavily, but I did have to use it often enough to make it fairly essential. Music is atmospheric, but not what I'd call excellent. Definitely worth a go if you've never played it and want to see where everything got its start in the Fallout universe. Just be aware that it's not the smoothest experience nowadays. Not a huge amount of mods for this game as Fallout 2 gets more attention in that area to include Fallout 1 in 2 which just runs this game in Fallout 2's engine. Some people may complain about the children being removed, but that didn't really bother me much.
I used a patch from the Wing Commander Combat Information Center and the game ran really well with it. Honestly it's just a fun game. I'd give it more of an 85% rating, but it's hard to convey that with stars. GOG really needs to give us a half star option. The movies are incredibly dated, however. I really wish that this game got the DVD treatment the same way WCIV did. That would have made things much better. Personally this was much more fun to play through than WCIV and I'd definitely recommend you give it a try.
Greatly improved cutscenes over WC III if you play the DVD version. The storyline is much improved and more coherent as well. Unfortunately, the difficulty of this game is just so insane with one hit missile kills. It can work to your advantage against the enemy, but you have to worry about conserving your missiles when they don't. Too often I had to resort to using invulnerability due to this aspect and just some really poor mission design overall. It's a good game worth playing, but the frustration will have you reaching for the invulnerable button way too often just so you can advance the story. More of a 3.5 out of 5, but I couldn't bring myself to give it 4 stars due to how frustrating it could be at times. Just a hint for someone who has issues with mapping buttons on your joystick. Use the program AntiMicroX. I used it to map counter-measure deployment, lock on nearest target, pause and other such functions and it works perfectly. Actually it works way better than the crappy Thrustmaster profile software that came with my joystick. I can't see any reason why you'd play the DOS version of the game if you have that program available.
I just finished playing through Divinity II and I have to say of the original games, which includes Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity, this one is definitely the best. And that's not just because of graphical upgrades either, which are pretty substantial. One of the first things that I noticed was how much better the skill system is in this game. They took the best ideas of the previous two games and melded it into something much better. Another big improvement was the music. The music in the other games was great, but something about the soundtrack in this game just hits all of the right notes. I enjoyed the storyline quite a bit as well. I won't say it was filled with twists and turns, but it kept you invested. Playing as a dragon was quite enjoyable as well. I absolutely LOVE the fact that it has built in achievements as well. The game engine is the Gamebryo engine of Elder Scrolls and Fallout fame and I can say that the stability of this game in particular was a pleasant surprise. I didn't have a single crash or weird bug through the first portion of the game, Ego Draconis. Flames of Vengeance was mostly stable too, but there was one issue there. The final dragon battle was the hardest part of the game for me. It was also the part with the most issues. If you tried to load a save in the middle of the battle, it almost always killed the sound in the game completely. Another con that I'd point out would be the fortress battles. They became repetitive after a while. Not as bad as the battlefields in Beyond Divinity, but still. Flames of Vengeance had a large amount of side quests that seemed a bit misplaced what with a siege of the city going on and all. Without spoiling the plot, a major antagonist thread goes unresolved and likely never will get resolved which is sad. Other than these minor issues, I can't recommend this game enough. Definitely give it a try.
If you enjoyed playing Divine Divinity, this game is very similar but they made some significant changes. Personally I feel that the game itself seemed to run better than DD and that was with me running it under Linux with WINE. The music is really good in the game, but when you go to the battlefields, it's completely randomized so it can feel off. Imagine being in a dungeon with dead bodies lying around but having peaceful village music playing. The skill system is a mixed bag with individual skills broken down to components and several worthless skills now. You have two characters AND you can spend money to reclass your skills which was something you couldn't do in DD which helps. My biggest complaint with the game would be the battlefields. They're repetitive and frankly boring. Granted, they're optional, but it's something I want to warn people about. The overall floor layout is 'random', but I found that more often than not that they were exactly the same. Something like 8 of 12 floor layouts being the same in just one act. The whole post-game is supposed to be more of this. Yuck. The game itself also ends fairly abruptly. Running it on Linux, I found out that videos weren't playing. I loaded up the video manually to get some closure, and it was just a recap of everything that had happened before so it didn't improve things any. I think I've read comments about the voice acting being corny, but I didn't dislike most of it. There were a few cheesy characters here and there, but it wasn't too bad really. With all of my criticism, I'd still say I had a pretty good time with this game. The areas outside of the battlefields are pretty nice and you want to keep exploring. It's a step back from Divine Divinity, but it's not a bad game. More of a 3.5 star game where some of the team's experiments worked and others didn't. If you like DD, chances are you'll enjoy most of this game with the notable exception of the battlefields.
Looking at comments leading up to this game, I was wondering how good this game would be. For starters, I feel that it actually has aged well for the most part. Even today you can still jump right in and have a good time. Other places said it was like Baldur's Gate, but I don't see that at all. It does use the spacebar to pause the game though, which is a most welcome addition. The story itself is decent and has some pretty humorous aspects at times, but this game is really more about the gameplay. You'll get a load of play time out of this one with some pretty massive dungeons to explore and several side quests for you to solve. The early game can be challenging and it stays challenging up until you get into the upper 30's for your level. I'd say this is more of a 4.5 out of 5 stars due to some negatives. The first and most glaringly obvious is the inventory system which is just a mess. Things can get cluttered real easily and selling items to the merchants is a chore. They use a bartering system and the merchants often don't have a lot of gold on them. You'll need a calculator handy to figure out the difference. Good idea in theory, but not in practice really. The weapons also don't let you know if they're one-handed or two-handed until you equip them. I wasn't a huge fan of the randomly generated stats on items either. Getting supposedly legendary armor that has a much lower armor value than your current gear can be a letdown. The game also is very random with the types of weapons that are dropped. The story slows down a bit when you're stuck in Stormfist Castle and some of those massive dungeons I mentioned before can be a slog at times also. That may sound like a lot of downsides, but you can get over them fairly easily. The game has that draw factor where you want to keep coming back to play. I played this with software rendering over D3D which ran better too. If you like Diablo style games, you can't go wrong here. Great value.
