Not a bad game. It's a little slow paced especially at the beginning. You start out with few troops and buildings. Before you can build stuff you have to research it. This means the first few hours of the game consist of choosing something to research, clicking end turn until you have it, then building that building. Along the way there are a few skirmish battles. As long as you aren't massively outnumbered these are easy. Resources generate slowly as well so often I found myself just clicking end turn several times so that I could get enough money or wood or whatever to build more stuff. Once I got enough resources and tech that I could actually play the game it was fun. The trade system and diplomacy options are good clean fun. So is blocking a country's trade routes and letting them wither before invading and taking their capital city. But because it takes a couple of very dull 'next turn next turn next turn' hours to get to the fun I doubt I'll try playing again as another country.
I've only played the first 3 so far but they were all excellent old school turn based RPGs. If you are in to that sort of thing these games are really fun to play. Each game takes about 35-40 hours to finish. There are alternate endings and ways to play/finish the quests so you can replay. One word of warning: These games are really hard. Like late 80s early 90s hard. Compared to modern RPGs these take some time to figure out how to progress.
The game has some cool weapons and a few good ideas. You can choose how you take out a target. You can use stealth and sniper rifles or go in guns blazing. You get a flame thrower. I love flame throwers. But there is very little to do and very little content. There is a huge empty world and you have to drive from one end of this world to the other. Sometimes some enemies pop up and you have to kill them. But the AI is terrible and they are just a nuisance. They are easily dispatched. Then you go back to driving. Sometimes the game makes you drive 10 minutes to get a mission. Then the mission sends you on another 10 minute drive. So you can spend 20 minutes between missions just driving back and forth, back and forth. The missions are boring. To unlock weapons you have to do a mission for the weapon dealers. That mission is always to drive somewhere and shoot a truck with a rocket launcher. So you drive for 10 minutes or so. Get out of your car. Shoot truck. Drive back for 10 minutes. There are also a ton of annoying animations that you can't skip. Just about anything you do leads to an unskippable animation. Take a pill? Heal yourself? Die? Gun jam? All lead to animations that bring game play to a halt. That's my biggest complaint about this game. Every time you start to play and start having fun, something comes up and makes you stop having fun to do a chore. Like drive on a dirt road for 15 minutes to get some pills because you're sick. Or kill a bunch of easy enemies that won't stop respawning.
