My first experience with RTS games was with Warcraft 2. Soon after that, I found Command and Conquer. Both were great games that I played for countless hours each. I blindly purchased Total Annihilation on a whim after checking out its box shortly after it was released. It was released at the same time as Age of Empires, another RTS I enjoyed. Suffice it to say,Total Annhilation blew them all away and is still somehow more enjoyable to play than modern RTS games. First of all, let me outline some of the elements within Total Annihilation that set it apart from other games when it was released and then discuss why it is still the best of its kind today. Total Annihilation was the first game of its type to successfully utilize 3D environments. The terrain is filled with destructable objects such as trees that you can use to gather energy from or just let become part of the devastation of battle. The environment plays a big role in Total Annihilation. Gaining the high ground in a skirmish game and building a powerful defensive weapon can completely make the difference. The 3D world affects how missiles are projected and the graphics hold up, even by today's standards. The scale of Total Annihilation is huge. The battles are constant, massive, and utterly epic. Every battle will leave behind scars in the form of a graveyard of wreckage, which can in turn be harvested to gather metal resources or destroyed by the next battle wave. The variety of weapons is also astounding. Even in the original, stand-alone game there was a plethora of options. I was always fond of the Cans and/or Lugers on land, and Brawlers in the air. My favorite defensive weapon is the Annihilator, which, as I mentioned before, is incredibly effective when placed upon a large hill with some defenders to protect it from air attacks. Some of the maps are incredibly huge, especially considering the time it was released. You basically have the flexibility to create as epic of a matchup as you want. Amazingly, being able to select as many units as you wanted to wasn't a standard element of RTS games at this time, Warcraft and Starcraft being major culprits of this. Total Annihilation finally spared us of that ridiculous little roadblock, allowing you to select as many units as you could see. This is another little element that helps you realize the massive scale of the game. Despite it's size and scale, Total Annihilation somehow manages to stay personal. Every unit under your control keeps a tally of how many kills it has. If it single-handedly gets over five, it gains veteran status. This small and seemingly irrelevant feature makes the game just a little more personal and it was something just not seen in RTS games at this time. You'll care for your veterans and probably want to see just how far their skills can be taken by keeping them alive longer than the average cannon fodder. The resource system was quite different than most games at the time and gives the game a uniqueness unmatched until the release of Supreme Commander. In Total Annihilation, there are only two resources, metal and energy. Rather than gathering them and building up a stockhold to use later, you are expected to balance the constant amount you are using with the amount you are gathering (for example, you'd want to be gathering more metal, +20, than the amount you are currently using, -15). You can build storage buildings to store a greater amount and provide greater flexibility or padding for times of need, but it's not necessary for building a strong army and defense. However, if you don't keep a balance, you can run in to some serious problems. Running out of energy will severely inhibit your ability to build things, especially since your metal extractors require energy to work. More commonly, you'll run into issues of running out of metal, which is gathered at a slower rate. Keeping a balance between resources is absolutely key to winning the game, especially if you're playing another human opponent (who likely won't make the same mistake as you and won't hesitate to punish you). Total Annihilation is very customizable and still has a huge, active community. If, despite my insistence that the graphics hold up well today, you're unconvinced and think it needs an upgrade, you can download graphical enhancements that will allow you to zoom in and out and change views while providing higher resolution and texturing. There is also an incredible amount of maps and new units that can be downloaded or created (for the adventurous type). I would also be willing to bet that you'll always be able to find a multiplayer counterpart, though I mostly stick to playing over LAN with friends. Large and active communities, especially for older games, are always a testament to a game that has transcended time. For all the great things that Total Annihilation offers, I have two things to warn people about. One, I would recommend starting with vanilla Total Annihilation. There is so much content added with the expansions and especially with the downloadable units that you may be overwhelmed. As a seasoned Total Annihilation player, I was completely out of my league playing with a downloadable unit pack simply because I didn't know what units were effective and what buildings did what. Second, Total Annihilation is not about building a society (no Sim City elements). In other games, such as Age of Empires and games similar to it, your "civilization" really just serves as a way to advance, gather resources, and build a stronger army, making it not much different than Total Annihilation. However, those games do like to put an emphasis on building up a society even if it's nothing more than a red herring. In Total Annihilation, the focus is simply smiting your enemies with as much force as possible. All of my friends that played Total Annihilation ten years ago still prefer to play it than firing up a game of its unofficial sequel Supreme Commander, which feels somehow less personal to them. Though it's hard to explain this phenomena completely, I tend to blame this on the tactical zooming feature - something is lost when you're not in the firefights up close and personal. Being a seasoned RTS fan having played everything from the Warcrafts, Rise of Nations, Starcrafts, Age of Empires, Command and Conquers, Supreme Commanders, Company of Heroes, and Empire Earths of the genre, I must say that Total Annilation stands head and shoulders above the rest.
I just finished my first playthrough of Divine Divinity. Upon exiting from the first town my character woke up in and venturing into the world, my initial reaction was that Divine Divinity is an excellent game and after finishing it I finally understood some of the elements that kept it from being considered alongside games such as Baldur's Gate and Diablo series as one of the marquee RPG franchises. In a lot of ways it is fitting that I mentioned Baldur's Gate and Diablo, as Divine Divinity is sometimes considered as a game that effectively bridges the gap between those two games. Divine Divinity does do this well, but the end result, while mostly good, isn't necessarily without flaws. First of all, Divine Divinity is a large open world game, brimming with tons of quests, places to discover, and people to talk with. In these ways, it reminded me of the Elder Scrolls franchise. Even if you just spend time roaming the countryside, you will find all sorts of unique places to keep you entertained. However, in Divine Divinity, you need to be prepared for what might be waiting for you. Even in some locations just of the main trail near the beginning of the game you will find enemies that will give a much higher level character difficulty. This is a good and bad thing about the game. It's incredibly challenging at moments and doesn't always cater to adventurous players. Saving often is a necessity because of how unexpectedly the difficulty can scale up. A couple moments during my playthrough I got my character killed simply by being unprepared for a difficult encounter while I was traversing the countryside, only to realize I had been running around uncovering the map and killing orcs for a good hour. It can be discouraging to know that all the work is going to have to be done again. On the other hand, it's also very satisfying to gain a few levels, go back to that powerful enemy you encountered earlier and cut him down in just a few blows while hardly taking a scratch. Another great element of the game is all of the various skills that you can learn as you gain levels. In Divine Divinity you select a character class, but are free to develop your character however you want after that point. Your starting point will have an effect on your total life and mana throughout the game, but if you want to be a mage who wields giant axes and takes his enemies on toe to toe you can allocate a large portion of points to strength and build your warrior skills. On the flip side, if you want to be a barbarian who casts magic, you can give you character intelligence and build up the spell skills you like. Divine Divinity provides you with a plethora of skills to choose from and each seem to be useful. In my playthrough as a battle mage, I only really scratched the service of what I could have done. The game world itself has a pretty standard setting. It's populated by humans, mages, orcs, imps, dwarves, elves, demons, and other creatures you might expect. All the different races behave about how you would expect towards each other. While most of the setting is generic, the story is quite engrossing. The dialog is all well-written, sometimes very humorous, and contains very little errors, which is somewhat surprising considering it was all translated to English from its original language. One thing I did find odd is consistency among spoken lines. While most of the dialog must be read, some lines are spoken, though sometimes all of your character's lines are spoken while the person he or she is speaking with doesn't have their lines voiced, and sometimes it's vice versa. At times throughout the adventure (mostly earlier) it felt random. The game also sports some pretty sharp looking visuals for a game with an isometric perspective. There's no zooming in or out like in Sacred, but the resolution seems to be quite sharper than Diablo 2. I mentioned before that the game world is incredibly large and heavily populated, well this is also true for some of the dungeons in the game - namely the first dungeon you enter, and the last one you face. For a game that's so heavy on story, I found these dungeons to be a little burdensome. I wanted to find out what was going to happen next, unfortunately this meant a lot of grinding out dungeons - at least in those two situations I mentioned. In a game like Diablo this works because it is light on story. I had to summon some rather inhuman patience to make it through the first dungeon. For some people this dungeon is going to turn them off to the game because it's difficult and incredibly massive. That's a real shame, because the game offers so much that any type of video game fan would like. At the end of Divine Divinity, I didn't really have the desire to slog through the several dungeons before facing the antagonist because I wasn't necessarily looking for any new gear or loot, I just wanted to see what was going to happen next. Ultimately, I was a little underwhelmed by what felt like a little sudden ending. It would have been nice to be able to revisit the world as well. The first 3/4ths of the game is spent in a world that I spent time building relationships and then couldn't go back to. Luckily I have a save before this point that will let me go back and complete the side quests I still had left open. In summation, what Divine Divinity does well, it does really well - however, it's not a perfectly fulfilling game - but what game is? Despite my rather slight complaints, I would recommend this to any fan of the RPG genre. At the price on GOG, you are getting an incredible amount of depth and game length, with the potential for a ton of replayability. If you're still trying to decide on whether or not it's worth it, well it is - just summon the strength to make it through the first dungeon and you'll likely be hooked.
If you're looking for a massive, open-ended RPG that you can play casually with your friends over LAN, Sacred is that game. I tried many different avenues before purchasing Sacred from GOG. Most RPG's are pretty limited in how you can use LANs for some reason. In some cases you can only play on a portion of the game world and some don't let you use a LAN altogether, forcing you to play online. Unfortunately, for my friends and me, this wasn't really an option. Some of my friends either don't have an internet connection or don't own a decent computer of their own. Playing a MMORPG with absolute strangers also wasn't something that sounded appealing. Regardless of how much time you put into those games, there is always going to be more powerful characters than you. Sacred ended up being the solution I was searching for - a RPG that I can casually enjoy with my friends. Let me move on by actually reviewing the game by listing the games pros and cons. Pros - Excellent visuals despite its age. Sacred has very sharp visuals. You play from an isometric perspective similar to Diablo. However, Sacred's images are much sharper than Diablo 2's were and it also gives you the freedom to zoom in and out to a limited degree. You can actually view a pretty decent area of the map fully zoomed out, but this can sometimes cause even more powerful computers to chug a little. - Massive open-world map. The map in Sacred is huge. You will spend an awful lot of time exploring the world that has been created for you and uncovering all of its little nooks and crannies. Sacred populates this world with many different enemies, towns, and tons and tons of quests. - Limitless replayability. I have read other reviews saying that it doesn't contain much replayability and I must say that I disagree completely. To me, playing a game like this is all about building up your character that is exactly where Sacred excels. There is tons of loot to be discovered (not to mention tons of inventory space). The game itself is quite lengthy, but you will be rewarded with better loot by playing it again on higher levels of difficulty. On top of that, you will find plenty of items that only work with certain character classes. Fortunately, you can store the items you can't use in your chest, start a new character of the different class, and he or she can use the items your other character discovered. This gives your new character a bit of an advantage early on and gives you incentive to try out the world again. You can also import and export your character between single-player, multi-player, and between Sacred original or its expansion, providing you with flexiblity to work on his or her stats whenever, whether with friends or by yourself. - Smooth interface. Once you get used to playing the game, you'll find it's a breeze to use. The interface isn't quite as clean and easy as Diablo's, but it still works quite well. Spacebar will replenish your health by using potions when you get into the really hairy battles, you can easily map a special attack to your mouse, and the tried and true hack and slash combat is a joy. It's not quite as gelatinizing as Dungeon Siege, where you can basically set your character to auto-pilot as you traverse the world, but it's close. Cons - Story? Sacred contains a story somewhere, but I have no idea what it is. However, Sacred is one of the few games that can get away without much of a story because it's not about story, it's about questing and building up your character. - Landscape blockage - You'll encounter places that are difficult to traverse. You will find yourself in a situation similar to this quite often: I want to go from town A on one side of the river to town B on the other side of the river - there has to be a bridge near here, nope; well maybe down here, nope; I can't believe I have to walk all the way over there to get to where I want to go! There are frustrating little blockages like this all over the world, and it can be especially frustrating since the map is so large and you won't know the right paths until you've actually uncovered the entire territory. This leads to all sorts of back-tracking and unneccessary monster slaying of respawning enemies. - Auto-leveling and level-scaling. In a lot of ways, this game can more easily be compared to Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion than it can be to Diablo. Both feature wide-open worlds, which is a great feature, however both also contain annoying leveling practices. In Sacred, your character basically has his skill points alloted for him automatically whenever you level up. You will find yourself getting stronger, but will notice every time you level up you only get to allot one skill point - this is because the game automatically allocates the other skill points. What this does for you is prevents you from screwing up your character by neglecting any particular skill, but it also eliminates a lot of freedom of skill customization. You'll never be able to wield magic as a barbarian, so get that thought out of your mind. If you want to do that, you'll need to create a new character from scratch. Sacred also contains an annoying little aspect also found in Oblivion - level-scaling. The enemies strength in any given area will be tied to your character's strength. That's not necessarily to say the world will be as powerful as you are like throughout Oblivion, but it is disconcerting to an extent. Not only that, but if you return to an area containing weaker creatures, you will be given a nearly miniscule amount of experience for killing them, while a weaker character will receive much more. This is frustrating if you're playing with someone new, who is trying to catch up to where you are in the game, and you're killing little minions to keep him safe but receiving approximately 1/50th the amount of experience he is for each kill. You already need to gain tons more experience than he does for each level you gain, what's the point of the game reducing enemies experience value to values that will never, ever result in a level increase for you? I've heard the game also contains some bugs, but I've never encountered any in my time of playing. If you're looking for a game with lots of action that also contains deep story for a single-player experience, you may want to look somewhere else - I would recommend Divine Divinity in that situation - Divine Divinity also gives you absolute skill customization if you're looking for that and can be found on GOG. However, if you're looking for a character-building game, filled with all sorts of distinct weapon and armor types, that you can casually play with your friends over LAN and that will keep you occupied seemingly for an eternity, look no further than Sacred.
Two Worlds is a strange game. If you can past some of its more awkward aspects, there is quite a bit of interesting elements. On a personal level, it was one that I enjoyed quite a bit on my playthrough, although I will also admit that when I first began it, I quite after about five minutes and didn't think I would probably ever come back to it. Only after watching my brother play it for a while did I decide to give it another shot, and I'm glad I did. It's impossible to mention Two Worlds without the obligatory comparison to the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Part of the reason for that is Two Worlds release came not too long after Oblivion and it was unfairly dubbed by some media outlets as an "Oblivion-killer". The two share some similarities - both are set in a 3D open world for you to explore and contain fantasy settings. However, beyond those more obvious similarities, I wouldn't say there is anymore similarities between them then there is between Oblivion and a game like Sacred. Oblivion is clearly the more refined product, but ultimately, I enjoyed Two Worlds more - the reason for this is primarily because Two Worlds felt much more like a true RPG. I'll explain this by discussing the pros and cons of Two Worlds. Pros - The game world is huge and open-ended. While the game tends to push you towards the main story, much like in Oblivion, you can go off and roam the countryside and uncover the entire map if you want. - There is no level-scaling. While you can just go exploring, you better be ready for it, because you may encounter some pretty vicious enemies. The level-scaling in Oblivion was my biggest complaint of the game. What's the point of playing an RPG, spending precious time building up your character, if you're never going to get more powerful in comparison to the rest of the world? I was excited in Oblivion when I found my first plate of glass armor, only to return to town to find that now the entire population was sporting the armor. In Two Worlds this isn't the case. If you find a special weapon or set of armor, chances are it is special. Joe Schmoe back in town isn't going to have the same strength and loot as you. - You're free to build your character how you want. What Two Worlds lacks in customization of your character's face, race, and other physical attributes (whereas Oblivion provided nearly countless options), it makes up for in complete freedom to make the type of character you want. You don't have to worry about leveling up the "right way", like in Oblivion, you simply need to reach the next level and distribute your skill points as you want. Do you want to be a magic-wielding barbarian? Go for it. You don't have to spend time using different skills and different weapon types, you can simply use what works and continue to build the character how you want. - The armor looks awesome. It might seems strange to to give a pro nod to this by itself, but it is absolutely true. Your warrior looks unbelievably cool in some of the armor. The third person perspective really allows you to enjoy and actually care about how cool your character looks. Yes, you can also try to play Oblivion from the third person perspective, but your character will move like he's ice-skating and it is frustrating to actually do battle from that perspective. Cons - The world isn't very interactive. There isn't any mini-games, you can't purchase property like in some other big name RPG's, and you can't sleep in beds (or at all for that matter, I believe). NPC's basically seem like they're there to provide you with quests. This game is about you as an adventurerwarriormage, but it doesn't make you really feel like you are part of the world in any other capacity. In fact, this is taken to the extreme in the orc-controlled portion of the map. You can't interact with the orcs whatsoever and they control nearly half of the map. - The voice acting is atrocious. This is what almost made me give up the game when I first tried it. Things are said comically, inflections are given to the wrong words, and the attempt at an older English way of speaking is pretty amusing. I believe the game was developed in Germany, so it is somewhat understandable how it happened, but it is so poorly written and executed that I nearly felt insulted by the game in the first five minutes. However, once you get past it, if you're able to, it's not something that continually bothers you. - The combat leaves a little something to be desired. I almost didn't want to include this as a con because I like the combat's simplicity, but the only way to defend yourself is by jumping back, out of the way of an enemy's attack. It seems like sometimes this just prolongs a battle longer than it should. A block feature would have been nice. A combat system like in the game Risen would have worked quite well here. The story in Two Worlds is fairly simple. I wouldn't say that it's outstanding, but it's definitely not poor either. Basically, you begin the game trying to find your kidnapped sister and eventually have to save the world from some insidious evil - standard fare. The game has some moral choices, but most seem pretty inconsequential. If you want to see how the game ends if you would have decided differently, simply reload just before the end sequence and choose the other option. Overall, Two Worlds is definitely worth a look at the bargain price. If you enjoy a title that can keep you entertained for 30+ hours and provides you with a lot of freedom to create the type of character you want, Two Worlds is it. It's isn't refined enough to be classic, but has enough really good aspects to make it as a cult classic. A promising looking sequel is currently in the works and if they can address some of the issues the original had, it will be among the RPG greats.
