the game is full of SO MUCH frustration set by randomness that has no "fairness". "random generated enemies!" okay, cool! You'll fight slow monsters with claws. It'll be easy! Then one guy shoots too much in a room and your entire team dies of suffocation. the next round? Literal soldiers with sonic weaponry (while you still have basic rifles) that can see better than you and you cannot physically win the level at all. So SOMETIMES, it'll be really dialed in. But really, it's a complete randomness. There's NO BALANCE to the random dice throws. I've played EIGHT HOURS and still never once beaten the FOUR LEVEL CAMPAIGN. Think about that. You could be like "this guy sucks, even though he understands the majority of the game concepts, when to move rooms, how to equip soldiers, how to bait enemies" or... maybe... just maybe... the game is hair-pullingly unbalanced. There's SO MUCH potential in this game. But that's just it. It "could" have been great, but after hours and hours you'll find out that it never actually pays off.
This is not Unreal Tournament 99, which I fell in love with. This is "Unreal (1)" and it's amazing how bad it is compared to UT99. I thought "UT99 but with a single player campaign!" Nope... nope.... just nope. This is so clunky, and so dark on whatever wrappers they use, there's a high chance you won't even find the exit to the first room. The keys are all archiac clunky for no reason (even UT99 has a 'FPS' keybinding for WASD). The actual gameplay is... just colored quake. If you aren't playing this for NOSTALGIA, there's nothing to find here that hasn't been done better in later games.
This game crashes CONSTANTLY. Any time you make progress, crash. You have to replay most levels over and over. I just unlocked a grenade perk for killing nazis with grenades. Load the menu? CRASH. Load the menu and click MAP? CRASH. Windows 10. pre-Ryzen AMD. GTX 1060.
Four hours of mostly walking forward and doing mindless tasks to progress this visual novel. Except the novel you're reading has every 3 out of every 5 words deleted, and they thought it was genius to force the player to constantly try to figure it out what those words were. This is basically Neon Genesis Evangelion meets Metro 2033, except not as good as either. The ending will piss. you. off. and explain nothing. The online explanations don't explain it. The wiki doesn't explain it. It's just a waste of your time while making every walking sequence twice as long as necessary because its "atmospheric." The game mechanics don't scale and once you know how to play, it's not hard at all--basically a clicker game. EXCEPT, hilariously, the dialog that explains what's going on (is happening DURING the clicker game so that you're constantly juggling stuff instead of actually reading the story. Beautiful art. Bad game mechanics. Stupid story. There is literally more depth in game mechanics in BROFORCE than this game. You'll have a much better time with that game too.
I love Metro. I beat the first two games... twice...in a row. I. love. Metro. This isn't metro. Take all the greatest parts of Metro 1/2, the corridor shooting meticulously planned out by brilliant level designers. ... get rid of it. Take the WORST parts of the the original two.... RNG and not knowing where to go.... and make that the entire game. There's darn near an entire HOUR of "stand around and wait for people talk" scenes in this game. The "bosses"? Almost none, and worse, they literally RE-USE old bosses. All of the iconic Metro weapons? Guess what, they're balanced for corridors. You know, the levels you normally see in metro 1/2. Now take those same guns and try to make shots at 500 meters away and enjoy missing 9 out of 10 shots. You want to know what Metro Exodus should have been? Buy Far Cry 2. It's practically the same game except came out a decade earlier and has a better story and weapon handling. And better fire simulation. And better vehicles. And I'm no "mega fan" of the Far Cry series. But Far Cry 2 manages to be bleaker, sadder, stronger, and more fun in pretty much every way--even in spite of FC2's many flaws.
If you don't know exactly what you're getting, watch some YouTube videos or something. Because this game is so incredibly sub-standard for a new player, it will blow your mind. The controls are keyboard only (the mouse is very rudimentary). The MUSIC BLARES so you can't even hear most of the game sound effects. And the game itself is IMPRESSIVELY BAD. I'm used to build engine games. I love me some build engine games. I've beat Duke 3D at least 8 times by now, Shadow Warrior, and even WW2 G.I. ... GI had problems with hitscan enemies. This "game" barely passes for a Unity game someone with no game dev experience built in a week. I started on the second-to-highest difficulty, and kept dying so often I ended up down to the bottom difficulty just so I could figure out what the hell was going on. The graphics remind me of a somehow worse controlling version of Might and Magic Mandate of Heaven. Everything is FLAT. Huge open areas with nothing in it. The Build engine was NEVER made for this kind of ugly, open terrain and it highlights every flaw the Build engine ever had. (That is, you play to your strengths when you use an engine and they did the exact opposite). Now, for nostalgia kids, there's nothing wrong with loving this game. But as someone who never played this game (but played TONS of 90's games and Build engine games), this is bottom-of-the-barrel. This is the kind of game quality you would expect from a cereal box. Except Chex Quest is actually playable.
SWAT 2 DOES NOT WORK IN WINDOWS 10 What's the point of having a "GOG release" (the assumption being.. it's updated to run on modern systems)... if it doesn't actually run? You can load the game, click start mission, and then it quits.
You CANNOT beat this game. I've tried THREE times now (three different computers across 7+ years). Every time, the game's bugs grow until you cannot proceed without corrupt saves, freezing, or crashing to desktop. Also, the quest system breaks down all the time and you can't proceed. Not one, not two, but three different places. The Fang quest yielding crash to desktop. Quest stuck at Talk to Mercenaries (google it! Many people with this problem). Quest stuck at the Military Base. Enemies DON'T appear, and then you'll reload the save and magically all those missing enemies? Spawn next to you and kill you. There goes THAT save. I'm so sick of trying. You put 20-30 hours in each time, and presto, it's gone. Even with STALKER: COMPLETE mod, I couldn't get through. I used every "hack" in the book to get passed all the broken quests, I finally make it to the hospital and nope, sorry, once again, CRASH TO DESKTOP. I wanted to like STALKER: Clear Sky. I LOVED the idea of the faction system. Too bad the entire game is a broken, bugged, UNBEATABLE piece of trash and after 60+ hours, I'm sick of trying to fix YOUR game for you just so I can try to enjoy it. Buy either the 1st or last STALKER. Avoid this trash. Even if the story was really good, you'll never get to see it.
