I could list the many positive reasons for playing this game but the best reason of all for you to play this game is to experience for yourself the fairer realm and the travelling troupe...
Far too many dialogue options peppered with far too many jokes/puns (that really don't need to be there because they interrupt the story like a persistant cougher in the cinema). I wanted to like it but after leaving the palace it just got longer, more drawn out, more dialogue, more (naff) jokey as though it was poking you to stay interested.
Your ship moves faaaaaarr tooooo slooooooowly and it rotates faaaaaar toooooo slooooowly in the beginning, painfully exposing the gimping at the heart of this game. Don't me wrong, once you pick up a few upgrades then the game actually starts proper and you are in for a good time. But why you are literally forced to trudge through about 10 upgrades before the action starts to feel meaningful. Can't we just choose our ship type, shield type and weapon type BEFORE the first wave? Why not? Seriously, why not? There's no reason not to and would help to move things along a bit. When you combine this with the disappointingly de rigeur cobblers of having to unlock all the modes and all the weapons and all the mods - because of course you have to for no decent reason - the first few hours of this game is currently a little trudgy and betrays the thrill of the action of an asteroids style game turned up to 11. The Wild Meta mode is all over the place and muddling all of those mods with the standard mods didn't work for me. I would to like to see an all Wild mode as well (and the artwork for those mods needs work as they stick it out - for the wrong reasons - with the rest of the game). The controls are decent enough but I sense the game is falling short by not allowing a twin stick option in the absence of speeding up the initial thrust and manoeuvrability of the damn ship. Finally the music is proper mmmT mmmT machine-based aural acne. I turned it off and suggest you do the same.
Waxworks on the Amiga is the best version of this excellent adventure/puzzle/mystery game. PC version is not good.
The humour and gameplay are very well matched in this simulation game with a very clear UI and clear campaign that never overwhelms nor patronises you. First rate.
Buy it. Play it. Feel Godly with all those powers.
I can't believe I still return to this game after all this time. Even though the graphics look "rough" and the wonder movies, sorry special projects animations, are equally quaint, bonkers, scary and cheesy, the concept and execution remains one of the best 4x games ever written. Yes really. The alient planet feels exactly that with it's living fungus and PSI attacks. The humans naturally spent the journey here arguing resulting in seven factions with distinct advantages and drawbacks that are able to define themselves (and hint at corresponding gameplay) on their own without subtracting from or relying on anyone else (save the actual alien races in the CrossFire expansion). Eventually the human can copy the PSI ability, capture or breed Mind Worms and shit really gets going then. The under-rated part of this game is actually the unit building part. Yes you can leave that on auto and still have a first rate game. However plugging together different parts that you've researched, building said monstrosities and sending them over the map has never lost it's appeal. In case you're not sold the game lets you build Buster weapons, which in their finally incarnation literally wipeout 25-ish squares including any units and cities on them and the land too. Of course you've just committed an atrocity which causes everyone to declare war on you but then with a few more Buster weapons there won't be anyone around to complain and you can spend the rest of the game with your pet Mind Worms, launching the terraforming buster to replace the land for them to play on. If I had to have one gripe it's that the hardest difficulty isn't that hard, but maybe that's because I've played it a lot.
Aesethic: great. Idea: creepy. Gameplay: ah, well, we've found a large banquet with only a few crumbs that are tedious to follow with not much else to do or eat. If you've never spent any time in your professional or personal life as a paper-pusher (or modern equivalent, data shovelller) then this game will educate you on how anodyne and beige such an endevaour is. I can understand why doing menial work all day long results in marriage breakdowns, mid-life crises, nervous breakdowns and other such ills that befall the poor sods whose role is merely that of conduit with nothing really touching the sides of your soul regardless of what horrors are being transferred. Shame really because to invoke Orwell sets the bar high but as anyone who has read anything the man wrote knows he was the very opposite of the tedium and unambitious gameplay found here.
As pointy, clicky, isometric manager games go this is one of the best. And just as time consuming (in a fun way) as it was back in the late 1990s. Once started it's really hard to stop until you've compeleted a level/map. Except now the screen is MASSIVE and it's more of a thrill to watch all the little Egyptian plebs and their camels walking around while the Gods bless and curse this and that.
