I know other people say this isn't configured well on GOG, and personally I hate playing this on a mouse and keyboard. It was meant for an aracade cabinet, but the fact that GOG is giving this to you for free is pretty cool. Despite growing up in the 90s and early 2000s I was lucky enough to be exposed to some classic arcades where I was growing up and I love top-down shooters. They're simultaneously mindless since you get to just lean on the fire button and leave it there, but also strategic and intuitive. If you're a fan of the genre, be thankful this is free to play. Enjoy!
So, if you're like me and you received this for free from GOG it's more than worth the time put in. It's an old school point-and-click adventure game and all the functionality of that era has been preserved. So you have to press F5 to bring up the menu. There's very little customization or interactivity, and there's no such thing as autosaving, so watch out for that. Especially around the end of the game where there are a handful of situations where you can "die." The game is relatively short if you cheat when you get stuck like I did. Only a handful of areas comprise the entire experience but if you're trying to figure out what to do next, you'll know each of these rooms like the back of your hand. The writing is surprisingly good, but the voice acting is pretty terrible across the board. Also, I don't understand why so many gamers obsessed with the "classics" rag on modern video games for being too cinematic, since so many adventure games I've played from this era are really just trying to figure out ways to trigger more story cutscenes. Also, it does that adventure game thing where some of the solutions just seem really obtuse, and it also does that adventure game thing, where you have to combine items in order to progress at one point, but it's the only time in the game you ever need to combine items, so why would that occur to the player? In general though, I felt like the solutions are much more straightforward than some other adventure games. Within the context of the gameplay and the setting most of it works pretty well. I'm running out of characters to type with here, but the story is cyberpunk sci-fi dystopia and rips off of Harlan Ellison a bit, but has a really great tone and atmosphere throughout the whole experience. If this is already in your GOG library I'd say it's worth your time.
Of all the "walking simulator" games that have come out over the past few years, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is the one I most wanted to try in that genre. I didn't know much about it, besides the gorgeous screenshots and the somewhat surreal imagery (like the astronaut running through a primitive forest). Now after having tried it out, I've got to say, snidely referring to this style of game as a "walking simulator" is honestly pretty accurate, but there's still a lot of cool stuff to be experienced here. The gameplay is pretty simple. All you can do is walk/run around the somewhat small map, and interact with objects. Your goal in each area is to piece together items in such a way as to recreate the murders that took place there, and then you psychically have some story revealed to you through cutscenes, and you move on to the next area. You can also crouch, which annoyed me because I had no idea you could do that, and you only actually have to use the crouch button once in the entire game. I don't want to talk about the story too much because the game is rather short (7 hours for me) and to say anything about it would be too revealing. The game is made by its atmosphere, and it does a pretty good job with that for a while, but for me, the atmosphere fell apart when I reached the "end" of the game, and then had to backtrack to complete other tasks I didn't know I needed to do in order to actually see the ending. Also, although I didn't encounter any bugs or glitches per se, it did lag on my computer, and I was usually worried something would go wrong, since you can't actually save your progress, and the game doesn't seem to really like autosaving. Not a whole lot of information is communicated to the player, which I understand is part of the atmosphere, but made me wonder at times if I was doing something wrong, or if the game was broken. If you're interested in a somewhat creepy, definitely atmospheric walking simulator it has my reccomendation.
So, I've been trying out some of these economic simulation games lately. I'm not normally a big fan of the genre but my brother is and I thought I'd give some of them at least a few hours of playtime to see if they deserve a fair look. Of the few I've tried so far, I found myself getting the most into this one. I have no experience with the Tropico series, so I'm not sure how well it stacks up to the others, but I really got into the Carribbean/Latin flare of the whole thing, and enjoyed the humor and the factoids about dictators around the world. The game has a really good flow to it once you get into it. Managing the resources and population of a small island nation, but constantly having to improve on your infrastructure and economy in order to stay afloat. The things that did bug me about the game, were, I found the islands too small, and combat. Combat is pretty stupid in this game. You can't actually control your troops directly, so you just have to build defenses in places where you think enemies will show up, so in order to effectively protect your island, you need a gigantic military infrastructure, which ends up being a huge drain on your resources any time you don't need a military. I honestly found this part of the game to be pretty frustrating, but other than that I really enjoyed my time with Tropico.
Not really a 3 star review but a neutral review. Game runs well on a modern OS and I found the interface easy to understand. However, getting dropped into this was a little difficult as there is only a half-hearted tutorial, after which I still had no idea how to do basically anything in this game. I believe because with the original game, you would have had to learn everything from a manual booklet included with the game. It seems to work well as a classic economic simulation game, but doesn't explain much through the game itself.
So this isn't really a 3 star review, it's a neutral review. I'm not a big fan of these economic simulation type games but my brother is and he recommended I give this a shot. So, I'm happy to report that it runs perfectly well on a modern OS and computer and the gameplay is actually fairly easy to understand once you get the hang of it, although there are a lot of systems and menus to navigate through. but after completing the tutorials and messing around with the game a bit, I'm sorry to say that I was just incredibly bored the whole time. That's not a knock against this game though, it's just to say that it's not really my thing, and I'm sure that people who are fans of economic simulation type games will likely enjoy this far more.
So I've put over 40 hours into this game, and from what I can tell, I still have another 20 hours or so of story content to go. I'd really like to play this game through to completion, but with so many other games to play, and with this taking up so much time I decided to put it on hold for a while. Here's what I can say about the game though. It offers a fair amount of player choice in how you can approach various situations and resolve quests. The thing about this game that the developers always seem to be trying to highlight through gameplay is the elemental magic system and how it interacts with the environment. Given various elemental conditions you can freeze, burn, shock and poision enemies and also buff and debuff NPCs. It's a great, really innovative way to approach combat, and the level of player interaction with the environment is really something to see. But I started to feel at times like the developers were a little too proud of themselves with this, as there's certain combat scenarios where you essentially have to use the environment in a certain way in order to resolve the combat, and I found that a little annoying. Also, although I hear the sequel is much better, the storyline in this game fell a little flat for me. There's a lot of corny, wacky humor for one thing, which I'm sure some people will really enjoy, but I personally didn't care for, and then the main plot and setting seem very much like just by the numbers low fantasy tropes, and the story is mostly explained to you rather than you discovering it as you go or really interacting and affecting it. Overall, I think this is a great game and definitely one worth checking out if you're a fan of top-down cRPGs, but after a while, I was getting so tired of battle after battle, and it was taking up so much of my time, that I decided that the story wasn't really worth pursuing all the way to end, although I thoroughly enjoyed the time I did spend playing the game.
So, this was the first of these Telltale interactive movie, adventure game type things that I've ever played. And on top of that, I have very little exposure to the Borderlands series. I played some of 1 and 2 on consoles but never really got into either one. I thought they were just really shallow games with no story, although I liked the setting and aesthetic. With that said though, I was pleasantly surprised by this game. I was definitely not expecting to like it as much as I did. I watched the TotalBiscuit review of this game on Youtube, and he said that if you always felt like Borderlands had the potential for great story but never delivered on it, you'll like this game, and that's exactly how I felt about it. I don't know how much of this is just par for the course for Telltale games, but there was a real emotional depth and complexity to the writing the surprised me, in addition to it just being pretty funny and goofy for the most part. The gameplay, is pretty much what I was expecting from what I've seen of Telltale games, that is there was very little of it. It basically just boils down to dialogue choices and quicktime events. I was fine with that, but there was only a handful of times where I felt like I was really making an impact on the story. The rest of the time I just felt like I was watching a somewhat interactive movie unfold. At least I enjoyed the movie. Side Note: I need to look up the soundtrack to this game later because there was a lot of music in here that surprised me with it's quality. I got this game during the GOG winter sale as one of those "stars" that I got for four bucks and ended up giving me all five episodes of Tales from the Borderlands, and I gotta say, for that price, it was more than worth it. Not sure if I'd pay full retail for this kind of experience but I did really enjoy it while I was here.
If they ever come out with an optimized version of this game I'd bump it up to 4 stars. So, let me just say that I really enjoyed my time with Tyranny but I wanted to get the bad out of the way first. This game is really poorly optimized. Considering it's meant to be reminiscent of RPGs released over tne years ago, I shouldn't be encountering so much lag when playing it on a modern PC. There were a handful of times when the lag was so bad I actually wondered whether or not I was going to be able to beat the game. The game doesn't have too many bugs but there were a couple that I got caught in which stood out. Namely characters ocasionally getting stuck in certain animations, and the game sometimes getting stuck on loading screens. Also, not sure if it's a problem with the game or GOG but none of the achievements I got after a certain point in the game showed up, despite me having beaten the game and unlocked all the spires. Apart from the technical performance gameplay is very much reminiscent of isometric RPGs, and so requires a lot of micro-managing. It's not that bad if you're playing on a normal difficulty setting, but I'm not a huge fan of that type of gameplay in general. And although I was enjoying the Bastard's Wound DLC, for some reason, the combat in there seemed leaps and bounds more difficult for me than the rest of the game. So, onto the good. I did really enjoy my experience with the game overall. Some people feel the game isn't fleshed out enough or too short, but I really found myself getting wrapped up in the story, the world and the chracters. Although I'm not sure I'll be doing a second playthrough anytime soon, there is also quite a lot of variation in how you can approach quests and the game's overall plot. Overall, I'd definitely recommend the game on the strength of it's story and for fans of isometric RPGs, but technically this game falls very short for me, and I'm not sure I'd want to do it again until a few things are updated.
I got this game through free on GOG. I have beaten Alan Wake and American Nightmare on Steam, so I'm just going to copy and paste my review from there: If you haven't played Alan Wake, you might actually enjoy this, but won't really understand what's happening plot-wise, if you have played Alan Wake, you should definitely pick this up because it fixes a lot of the mechanics from the main game and adds more to the Alan Wake story. If you enjoyed Alan Wake, but disliked the flashlight and shooting mechanics, you'll really appreciate this as the gunplay and combat is vastly improved. The enemy types are similar to the last game, and although they follow the same formula of flashlight-stun-shoot they have different abilities and appearances. This game is set in the Arizona desert as opposed to the last games lush Pacific Northwest forests. The setting makes for a nice change of pace, and the big open landscape is really beneficial to the combat and exploration in my opinion. Also, whereas the last game took a lot of cues from American horror literature... and Twin Peaks. This game takes more cues from American horror films, and television, specifically the Twilight Zone, and it's very well off for it. The story doesn't do as much as I would like in continuing the storyline from the first game but is still fairly interesting on it's own as it gives glimpses into what's going on in "the real world." I think the developers wanted to do more in that regard, but held back because they're still hoping to do a proper sequel at some point. Finally, I'm not sure if it's because of the restraints on the development or just a design choice but the biggest drawback of the game is the constant backtracking. You replay each area at least three times due to a weird time travel element in the storyline. Although it does get sped up each time due to you changing things in the past it's still fairly annoying, I would have preferred more areas, or just a shorter experience honestly.
