Crashes less than a minute into the first cut scene. I've avoided this game for years based on the bad reviews, despite the intriguing premise and art, but grabbed it for free during GoG's "protest" where they offered a bunch of games that were implicitly banned on other platforms by a bunch of god-bothering ne'er-do-wells who got credit card processors to punish any seller that offered games they didn't personally like on the mistaken belief their preferences should define what everyone else does. Unfortunately, banned for its content or not, it appears that it really is as janky and crap as people warn, as it isn't even playable.
People who hate this game will tell you it's all about the dice rolls and people who love this game will tell you strategy is the key. Neither of them is entirely wrong, You must put together a team of heroes with complementary skills, put them in the right order, and make the right decisions during combat and exploration. You can't just level up overpowered heroes to plow through the content. Sometimes you have to give up and sometimes you have to let heroes die. That would be okay, but the random element is pointlessly brutal. You can build the perfect team, execute flawlessly, and still get obliterated by a random string of bad dice rolls. This wouldn't be so bad, but the random beating this game delivers is relentless. You can be destroyed by bad luck in combat, pick up random debuffs or lose items while paying to get your heroes healed, and even take a string of Ls just walking from room to room for no other reason than that the dice didn't land on a scouting event and the next hallway is filled with traps and fights. Games that put you into unfair situations by chance aren't a bad thing, I just don't think they work for me in this format. FTL and Binding of Isaac worked had a short-form, self-contained nature of each game. If you start, get a bad run of luck, and die, you just start over. Getting almost all the way through then getting rocked by bad luck doesn't really feel that problematic. But here, because progress is saved over time across a longer narrative, and there are no real consequences for failure (like the game being over), it just winds up feeling like you're grinding through a progression that's unnecessarily slowed by the deliberately harsh dice rolls. It doesn't feel so much challenging as just cheap and artificially slow. I can understand why some people like this game, but, to me, it just feels like gambling in Vegas. It can be fun at first, but eventually losing just stops being fun and it's time to go home.
I'll be blunt, I don't get why some people love this game so much, and I don't think this is a very good game. Just over two years after it launched, it's still a very pretty game. The graphics are top notch and it's one of the few games out there that I feel like I might actually be missing something because my AMD card can't do proper ray tracing without butchering performance. But, aside from that skin, there's just not much here. The story is okay, but the only reason I'm finding it compelling is that it seems to be the only way you can actually find anything to do in Night City. If I don't play the main quest, nothing seems to be happening. Side quests seem to be few and far between, and wandering around the city randomly you won't add much else to your to-do list. Pretty much nobody you come across interacts with you meaningfully, and almost every door you find is locked tight. The few people of any consequence that you come across, like the various fixers, don't really get fleshed out in any meaningful way, and nothing you do seems to really matter. Hacking and sneaking works, but isn't really very useful anywhere compared to just going in guns akimbo, and dialogue options always seem to boil down to the same outcome no matter what approach you take. Everything is just so, sterile. The whole city is dead, like nobody has ever actually lived in it. I guess my biggest complaint with this game isn't that it's necessarily a bad game, it's just that it doesn't really offer anything interesting. It's an open world game that lets you run around a big city, but it's a boring city. It's a city filled with violence and corruption and opportunity, but you always feel like you're an outsider to all of it unless the main story forces you to participate. At the end of the day, the thing that condemns this game isn't the terrible, buggy launch, it's the fact that even after all the effort to fix it, there just wasn't really anything worth fixing to begin with.
I've been playing this game for 25 years, a quarter of a century, ever since I got the demo on a CD along with "The Space Bar" back in the Windows 95/98 days. I requested this game a LONG time ago through the community Wishlist, though, I only just now realized they actually fulfilled it. I love this game. It's buggy. The AI can be super dumb. There are some really cheesy and easy paths to victory, but I still love it. I have the full CD, and I've been playing it in a Windows XP VM since the original game broke back in Windows Vista. Unfortunately, my original CD has deteriorated to the point that the music no longer plays. When I saw it was FINALLY available on GoG, I was so excited I bought it without question. Better yet, it says it runs in Windows 10! But, it wasn't meant to be. On my first attempt at launch, it crashed on the intro movie. My second attempt crashed less than 30 seconds into the game. My third attempt, an independent install from Galaxy, crashed again within 30 seconds. I succeeded in playing a fourth attempt for several minutes, but it crashed when I tried to scroll the screen. The crashing aside, the game isn't complete. All of the animations are missing. Units don't slide from hex to hex, they just snap from one space to the next with no animation. Bombardment animations and sounds don't play, attack animations don't play. There's no life in this version of the game, even if you can somehow keep it from crashing. I really want to play this game on a modern OS, but this isn't the way to do it. As it stands, this is something you can try if you didn't love the original, but, if you didn't love the original, you'll probably hate this GoG version, and that's not fair because EOFS is a decent 4X game when it actually works. I've requested a refund because it's just not reasonably playable natively in Windows 10. I've also tried to install it on a Windows XP VM and it just doesn't play at all. I really want this game to work, because it's a lot of fun when it does. But, as it stands now, my 20-plus-years-old CD on a VM in Windows XP through VMPlayer works on Windows 10, this doesn't. I will pay for this game in a heartbeat if it's made to work through modern Windows operating systems, or, at least, with hacks through a hypervisor. As it stands, this version just doesn't work at all and I can't see any reason anybody should buy it.
Like the title says, old school doesn't have to mean bad. Unfortunately, Inquisitor tries to be old school, but just winds up being bad. There's something appealing about those old games that frustrated you when you were younger. You could spend hours throwing yourself at the same problem over and over again, trying to cheese your way through seemingly impossible challenges until, miraculously, you finally found a way to overcome the baddie or solve the puzzle or find that last secret. Inquisitor wants to be one of those games that captures some of that magic, but where other games like Hotline Miami or FTL have managed to find a balance between the fun of a failure-filled environment and the frustration of actually experiencing failures again and again, Inquisitor has just created a purely frustrating mess. Early on it can become pretty obvious that Inquisitor is not a well-designed ARPG with a lot of thought put into balance or smooth progression. Some of the earliest quests send you face first into enemies that can easily one shot you. Other quests are a quagmire of running in, killing something, and then running off to wait for several minutes while a stack of debuffs slowly wears off (this can be somewhat mitigated later in the game by acquiring the right spells or companions, but it never really stops being an annoyance, and never mind the bosses that can PERMANENTLY reduce your traits). Melee characters will dedicate most of their time to mindlessly watching their health and stamina bars and chugging potions to refill them, and quests will repeatedly come to an unceremonious end when you click on an object only to trigger an absurdly strong monster that one-shots you into oblivion the instant it appears. There are fans of this game - and I can appreciate why some people might enjoy the tedium of failing and trying again and again - but the reality of Inquisitor is that it isn't really old school or challenging as its fans insist. It's just bad.
It's a great game and I love it, but it's completely broken on GoG. When you try to launch it through Galaxy it brings up the launcher and then just crashes out. It worked when I first bought it, but it's been broken now for nearly a year. Totally unplayable and a complete waste of money. Fortunately, I still have my original disks from 20+ years ago and DOSBox, so I can revert to playing it that way. Should have never wasted my money buying it here thinking Blizzard would allow for any sort of convenience.
This game simply does not work on Windows 10. There are multiple claimed 'fixes', but none of them work. It's a great game, but, not if you can't play it. Sad, because it's not GoG's fault that Microsoft broke everything with Windows 10, but the reality is what it is: broken on Windows 10.
Make no mistake about it, FTL is painfully unfair in anything but Easy mode (and, frankly, it's sort of too easy in Easy mode sometimes). My first hour and a half of play with the base ship and no upgrades, when I stubbornly refused to stop playing Normal mode, was defined by death after death after unavoidable death. Boarded by 6 enemies at once with only three crew members to hopelessly fight them? Check. Multiple, unstoppable fires caused by an overpowered ship attacking me at random in the first sector? Check. O2 system destroyed many jumps away from the closest shop to repair it, impossibly dooming the whole crew? Check. Still, it's fun enough to throw a couple bucks at when it's on sale. There's no real consequence to your ceaseless deaths other than the annoyance it causes (in my best showing so far, I got to sector 6 on easy mode before an obscenely overpowered ship in a "distress" encounter wrecked my shields in one shot and lit the entire hull on fire on the second). If you can get over the fact that FTL's random nature is ridiculously cheap and comically unfair, each individual play-through is entertaining enough to keep coming back. Don't take it too seriously. You're going to die repeatedly to the wildly unfair mechanics. Unlike so many other games today that just rely on Skinner box mechanics to keep you playing to the next cool thing you acquire, the fun of FTL is in actually playing each encounter, even if that last encounter is essentially reduced to you being an ant under a magnifying glass.
Hands down, Witcher has the most annoying, repetitive and boring combat in any game I've ever played. I would honestly rather have it use a JRPG style combat system like you see in Final Fantasy, this system is so bad. That said, the general consensus seems to be that if you have the patience to get past that and the first part of the game you'll find a lot more to it. If you have the patience, it's probably worth a shot. I'd suggest, however, that you grab the demo if you can lest you wind up like me, quitting before you get out of the first town because you can longer see the screen through your streaming tears of boredom. The characters are interesting, the story is promising, and the initial quests seem to hint at a good game trying to get out, but oh, that horrible, inescapable, boring, annoying, mindless combat system just ruins it all for me.
