I can only imagine how much better this game would have been if not for the annoying fanbase and feature creep. The core of the game and main narrative is fantastic. If it stuck to a more linear, polished experience similar to Shadowrun or Deus Ex it would have been a memorable work of art for decades. Instead we got a broken mess at launch and more and more crap content and untested mechanics that make the original experience even more annoying. But that's what happens when you try to cater to the mass market- things get reduced to the lowest common denominator. A story and universe about being punk is lost to a bunch of toe-the-line mainstream NPCs who want their dress up dolls, their loot skinner box, their virtual sex simulator. Pathetic. There is a silver lining though on a silver hand deathgripping a story covered in dirt and worth the slog. It's almost a meta experience.
I understand why SC did not gain significant popularity in the past after playing for 18 hours and finally beating the campaign. This game just eats up time and is utterly tedious for 90% of a match until you get to the point where you can churn out units. If you aren't starting with structure for a decent economy already then a good amount of time is spent simply waiting for it to get rolling. One hiccup at this stage is pretty much game over and you might as well restart. FA is a little better because of the expanded roster, but it's not too different. Once again the game loves to waste your time, you can't even skip cutscenes! The campaign is just so tedious, especially the levels where you begin with nothing and the CPU enemies have established bases. Is there anything compelling about the story? Not really. Pretty generic for the time. Management is tiring. In most RTS if you want to be efficient you need good micro like Starcraft or good macro like Wargame. Here you need BOTH, all the time, don't even blink. Sounds exciting? Well how do you get to enjoy the spectacle the game focuses on when doing so can suddenly result in a loss? Even on normal the CPU is brutally hitting you from all sides. The graphics still look pretty great though. So why do people like it so much now? It does scratch a unique itch. Once you get past the long, tedious investment stage you get to see the spectacle. Massive units, massive armies, lasers and explosions everywhere! It is challenging, so maybe the more experienced RTS players finally feel like they have a challenge. I think it's a much better multiplayer game than single player, but I've primarily played the campaign and I don't think it's not a fair review from others who ignore the SP. They often use mods. But I'm not rating it on that, because any game gets better with community mods. As the game stands alone, vanilla, it's not up to the hype. If the game simply sped things along I would consider it top tier.
Absolutely beautiful music, artwork, and interface. But the game itself is rather boring usually with a rapid ramp up into difficulty with many mechanics you have to juggle, resources, and hoping for a good map RNG for resources. It's just not very clear what you're supposed to be doing. At first that helps it feel like an adventure, but after a few restarts it loses the charm. It definitely feels like a niche game where you have to appreciate a combination of RPG, survival, and card game mechanics.
I can see why city builders don't really copy the same style as the Impressions games. Emperor is said to be the pinnacle, but it's mostly buried in unclear tutorials, mediocre UI, and lots of hidden mechanics that you won't understand without a guide or lots of trial and error. At that point it becomes unfun and frustrating. Often I find myself having what is often referred to as a worker death spiral, or there aren't enough stores of something, or some other seemingly innocuous metric. Not a fan either of balancing the Heroes happiness either, it's more tedium that if ignored can wreck your city or just one important industry and once again you slip into a death spiral. It's ridiculous. It's still pretty, the music is still enjoyable, but I think any great experiences playing is likely due to nostalgia.
As with BG2, BG1 is a classic and in my opinion the best of the entire series. BG2 is more like a typical DnD session, a bunch of adventures grand and exciting, but lack the cohesion of everything in BG1. Because I love the game so much it was painful to play through the EE by Beamdog. They utterly ruined the experience by injecting their own agendas, characters, and revisions that break immersion and it's very obvious because their writers are so poor next to Black Isle's. In addition they add in sprites from BG2 and other later games that stick out from every other model and it looks terrible. Do yourself a favor and get the real experience by finding an original copy. You won't regret it and it will probably be less buggy than the EE version.
Beamdog is an awful company as evidenced by their recent games that they had to make themselves. BG1 and BG2 are great games and Beamdog basically took that and claimed success while injecting their own awful characters and revisions that not only are poorly written, but break immersion as they stand out from the rest of the setting. What's worse is they've pushed the original GOG version off the site because they were afraid of anyone going back to the original and seeing how much better of an experience they'd have. Somehow the EE manages to be buggier too. If you're fortunate you bought the original and still have access to it.
I like the clean art and graphics and the cold war aesthetic, and it's interesting to see a more in depth air combat system. That said, it completely lacks the atmosphere of the games it was inspired by. There's no suspenseful music to go along with colorful and frightening alien designs. The sound design is weak and lacking. The UI is very clean, yet somehow manages to be unintuitive and hard to read. Now onto the game: It feels like a lot of RNG right from the start and not in the fun way. You have no idea whether you are doing things wrong or if the difficulty is part of the narrative. Many of the first ships you detect on radar will easily outspeed you, absolutely wreck your aircraft when not on autobattle. You would think the early game would slowly ramp up like in the UFO Defense. That's just good game design, but here you are thrown into a pool and left to figure out how to do things. Problem is you can't respond to many events sometimes because your craft can't even reach the areas far from your base. There's such a fine line between buying enough personnel vs not enough which will quickly cripple your efforts. The ground combat suffers from similar tedium and randomness. Your troops just plain suck and you only get 8 of them to begin with. I often found myself missing shots from point blank and aliens spraying across the map and getting lucky instant kills. They are also stronger than your troops in every way. Without the horror element like in the original it simply felt annoying instead of scary. I can't imagine having a fun playthrough without save scumming and dumping hundreds of hours into it. Never had that issue with OG XCOM or TFTD. The journey is long and it isn't enjoyable.
