Picked this up for about $2 and got plenty of fun out of it. Played it way back when at age 10, got frustrated I kept failing in Hong Kong and quit. Wish I'd stuck with it. Nice cheesy pulp adventure. It has a Tex Murphy/High Road to China with Tom Selleck vibe throughout, especially with the dialogue options and action comic cut scenes. Graphics are a bit rough, but I was surprised how easy it was to see which items were hot spots. Fast paced story, logical, straight-forward situational puzzles and it was neat to be able to swap characters to open up different solutions to problems. There are several plot branches which don't seem to lead to dead ends necessarily, just different scenes/paths to victory as the story progressed. There's actually a couple combat sections (one vehicle based and one character) you'll have to either grind hard to figure out through trial and error or just watch how the controls actually work on youtube, which is what I ended up doing, but you can also just skip them if you can't be bothered. I'd recommend this to anyone who loves old school point and clicks and pulp adventure, but keep in mind it's only going to be a short (2-3 hrs) afternoon of play at most, even if you go back and try some of the different branches, so judge the current price accordingly.
Pretty self explanatory. Tried so many times over the last year? 10 months? reinstalling, tinkering, exercising my Google-fu to try and get the game to actually start. No go. Launches, cutscene, opening, set-up - all work smoothly. Then the first tower loads half way and crashes to desk top. Every time. This is actually now my second, new computer trying to get this game to work and it just isn’t happening. I put off writing a review since I expected a patch at some point, but it’s clear this game is never getting fixed (at least for me) and I’m not joining some discord or volunteering to be a beta tester for this game that should never have been released in such a state. I miss the old days when games shipped complete on disc and a company’s rep hinged on it working out of the box. Now? Everyone is releasing unfinished crap, banking on early sales to either cover the cost of finishing the game properly a year later or just making enough $ to justify the effort and moving on. Maybe the gameplay is fun. Maybe the story is great. Maybe it’s really a dota clone or like Heroes of Might and Magic or its a Baldur’s Gate killer or even a flight sim. I’ll never know, because after a year, I’m done with it. Into the bin it goes.
Enjoyable enough. Fun, destructible environments and cool selection of historical gear. I was actually having more fun with this than the new X-Com. Then I got about 2/3 of the way through the Allied campaign and every single saved game suddenly became corrupted and wouldn't load. I restarted... which was tedious in the extreme after shepherding my original squad through the whole way. Got almost to where I was at the last time I had to reset...and all of the saved game files corrupted. Again. I was saving in new files with every single mission, plus the quick saves, PLUS copying the files and putting them in a backup folder...and they still ALL failed, even the backups. Neither Google nor the forums reveal a solution. I refuse to start over again or try and marathon the entire campaign just to see the end. If I hadn't only spent like $2 on it during a sale, I'd probably feel ripped off. As it is, I'm just disappointed a potentially good game is getting deleted and never played again because of something so inexplicably lazy and game-breaking as poor code leading to persistent saved game failures. Maybe it's just me and this hasn't happened to anyone else. I doubt it, but whatever. I'd have given 4 stars, if the game had consistently worked as intended.
I enjoyed the game well enough and don't regret the purchase. Fun art design. Easy to grasp controls/rules. Progression is broken, as are loot drops + the ability to steal everything not nailed down. By midgame, I was already starting to outlevel opponents, w/ 100k in excess gold. By endgame I was a god w/ 1000k+ in gold and nothing to buy. Crafting is good for arrows, spells and to mod dropped gear. Anything else is a waste of time. The story is serviceable, if a little cliche, with a rather tacked on and unsatisfying ending. Your choices don't matter much at all. The turn-based combat is fun enough, but once you've figured out how to break each encounter -including the stupidly powerful stunlocks, teleport and charm- every battle becomes a foregone conclusion. Even the endboss. The computer simply cannot win unless you act stupidly. Scenario 1: You see a group of yellow or green NPCs who are clearly unflagged bad guys with a convo waiting. Take one of your two PCs, separate from the party chain and walk up to them alone. This will trigger the encounter convo between that PC and an NPC. Switch to the rest of your party and position them around the NPCs. Start a fight with an AOE, granting you "surprise" and putting your party at the top of the initiative table. The PC and NPC in convo are excluded from the combat until you end it, allowing you to annihilate the rest, end the convo and finish off the last one. Scenario 2: You see a group of flagged NPCs just chilling in their camp: 4 mages, 2 archers, 2 fighters, a rogue and a priest, all at your level or slightly above. Could be a challenge. Or not. Have your fighter, with his insane carry weight, drink a potion of invisibility and start dropping the poison and flaming oil barrels he has gathered all around them. Then have the archer or mage AOE the camp and watch them all take explosive, fire, and poison damage. Your party gains surprise, and you finish them off in the first round of combat.
