More or less the pinnacle of mainstream RPG, this game packs everything your average gamer loves. Engage in countless epic fights and regular skirmishes, watch your characters develop incredibly powerful abilities and interesting relationships, follow the enthralling storyline or wander in search of gold, treasure and tons of unique items. All wrapped in wonderful visuals, sounds, and voice acting, virtually bug-free, with support for high-end resolutions. Many areas were in their time jaw-dropping and the art has lost very little of its original allure. This game has aged extremely well. It has excellent pacing, looks well-polished, and presents enough challenge. Game experience will be very different with different parties, as all party members come with distinctive banter, side quests, and abilities. If you are the only RPG-lover on the planet who has not played this - do it now. Whatever today's RPGs attempt to do, BGII did it before them and, very likely, did it better. A very special mention needs to be made regarding player freedom. While there is a storyline to follow with enemies who scale in prowess, one is still allowed to wander around a lot. Side quests unnecessary for game completion amount for at least half of the gaming time. You may walk into a basement with high-level enemies who may annihilate you in seconds well after emerging from the stating area. Dusty old houses with strange doors are not to be entered lightly. The game world is huge and diverse, combat is fierce, dialogues are witty and fresh and the characters are amongst the most memorable you will encounter. Often imitated, never duplicated: BGII and ToB.
If you remember old Fallouts fondly, or if you are into tech/fantasy worlds, I'd say try it out. The gameplay is sadly rather awful and character development a bit hard to figure out (and if you mess it up you can have hell of a hard time), but the multiple endings and immense world with a sense of both tragedy and black humour hovering about can be worth it. The music is awesome, the atmosphere of the Industrial revolution going all wrong and magic trying to survive is really unique, and the game has just a very different feel about it than most games of the fantasy genre. Pity the interface and combat are bad, though not entirely horrible. If you decide to try it - worth the money, I'd say - be prepared. This not the RPG of today. You die fast even to the lamest, three-legged, two-teeth wolf.
In our age of instant gaming action, Fallout's system can feel painfully slow. While the Fallout world is awesome, customizing your character is nigh limitess and the amount of things to do within the game just insane, it takes ages to chew through it... and a lot, a lot, a lot of reloading. Bear in mind that combat here might seem insanely hard to today's gamers... if you think, for example, that Mass Effect II on "hard" setting is NOT in fact easy, then, well, this may not be the game for you. If your party ever gets killed in Dragon Age, this may not be the game for you. This game was done in an era when some gamers still remembered playing Wizardry VII and so it's difficulty was viewed as a decent middle ground. The game content is awesome, but it unravels a bit slowly today and is most emphatically not flashy. It's graphics are old, they are old, very, very old. It takes a lot of time, and several patches, and some patience, to chew thru the game. I knew I managed it once and had a hell of a good time, but that was many years ago. There are many great old games I love going back to, but I think I'll list Fallout 2 as a "gamer's achievement" and leave it on it's shelf. There is one thing, however, that this game delivered extremely well: very rarely do any games give you such a strong feeling of your character's transformation from a harmless, daft, slow and dumb teenager, who dies to a rat's bite, into a plasma-spitting juggernaut of Hell, who single-handedly takes on metal legions of badass evil racist supersoldiers armed with rocket launchers and leaves only dismembered bodies and spluttered brains behind. Yes... this was epic. Totally epic. It must be why this is viewed as one of the greatest RPGs of all time - the transformation of the main character through experience makes him/her do everything better, from talking thru gambling, stealing, using computers, seducing and having sex, to good ol' blowing things up. It also takes like 200 hours of gameplay. If you're new to the "old Fallouts", be sure you only try this if you're dead cert about wanting it. It is very, VERY big, and first twenty-thirty hours are VERY slow. Pick a guide for character creation and early tips - this is a game you don't approach lightly. Character development is not intuitive. Many character builds can be ridiculously tough for an average today's gamer to drag thru certain parts of the game.
This was an awesome game when released, and it's succes lies maybe at the heart of the RPG-genre's later success. But it has not aged well, unlike its great followers, BGII, Torment and IWDs. Last year, I remember doing a nostalgia-induced replay of my retail, and... well... it's still fun,kinda. A lot of stuff feels interesting and the expanse of the world (empty forests, empty ruins, packed city quarters) is enjoyable. But the story is a horribly cookie-cutter, droll fantasy adventure complete with orphaned heroes, good sages, evil schemers and hordes upon hordes of inept kobolds, greenskins and bandits for you to annihilate. The combat dificulty is either ridiculously high (if you cannot abuse the system) or ridiculously low (just hurl your fireball to the edge of the screen and bury up any survivors in arrows). It was five-star when it came out. It's a three-star today – the thrill is just not there. Worth a try, if you know you are a fan. If you've done it once, before BGII and Icewind and are thinking if you should go back to it... don't. You probably won't enjoy it. Oh, and the pathfinding is a nightmare.
This was the last Infinity adventure I had to experience. I played thru BGI+II like twenty times. Slashed thru Icewind Dales. I even slaked my RPG lust with the later releases, such as NWN, Jade Empire, or Mass Effect and tons of others. But Planescape... Planescape is the best, it is amazing, it is art, a gem amongst games. This comes from someone whose first playthrough came now, in 2010, after encounters with the lauded Dragon Age and Mass Effect II and other shiny clones of the good old games. Planescape remains unrivalled, and every bit as good as even the craziest people will tell you. Oh, and the improved resolution mod makes it also look very, very decent. With the awesome voices and fiendishly good music, the atmosphere of this game suffers no comparison. Yep. Buy. Play. Now.
Today's RTS have NOTHING on Ground Control. Set in a distant future where corporations fight over resources, you get to command an expeditionary force that expands and get experience with every mission in the campaign. Unless they get killed, in which case they get replaced with rookies - and you will soon find out the difference between battlefield vets and cannon fodder. Infantry is hard to hit but mostly harmless against tanks and wiped out by explosives. Tanks are vulnerable from the rear and from the air. Missile units pack a punch but die fast. Artillery is devastating, shoots in high arcs over the trees and hills, but needs scouts to spot enemies, plus you really don't want those shells landing on your own head. Avoid confusion, or half of your force gets wiped by friendly fire. Your commander is in his command vehicle on the battlefield - take care not to die. All that while the interface is unbelievably simple and all units are shockingly easy to control. No mindless building of swarms of battleship, no spouting off tons of tanks for the final zerg. You have one to three dropships, with up to twelve units deploying - but how you configure and deploy your squads is up to you. Missions are tough, briefings entertaining, background story is fun, and the graphics are rather acceptable even today. If you like RTS, you seriously need to get this one. It remains one of the best of this genre.
This is the ultimate Infinity-engine-powered dungeon crawl. You create your own party and set off for an epic plough through the evils of a wonderfully created world (you can even learn much about it in the game lore). There is no chit-chat, no love-affairs, no tricks, no talking sense into your adversaries. These spawns of evil are bad to the bone and you need to kill'em all. One of the best games in it's genre. When I played NWN, I came back to this. When I played IWD2, I came back to this. Five stars all the way. Worse than Planescape or BGII, but perhaps the only creation of the genre that deserves to be named in the same sentence as those two giants.
