But it is absolutely brutal to play. I died like 30 times in the first five minutes and was not having any fun. It's just frustrating. There's no learning curve. It's just punishment. It's entirely possible there's a good game in here, but good luck finding it. I LOVE Dwarves and I consider myself a pretty dedicated gamer, but...aren't we supposed to be having fun, not just dying repeatedly with no explanation? I also got bugged in the first scene and couldn't even continue without restarting the entire map.
If you loved 90's TBS games with an RPG flair and are also a fan of hex-based map wars, hey, this is the game for you. If you enjoyed Heroes of Might and Magic you'll enjoy this. But unlike in HOMM where you can freely move about the map exploring, this one has a hex grid and you must own a territory by battling or negotiating for it to move through it and in that sense, it feels like a Civilization or other turn-based strategy game, although a lite version. This game is much more HOMM than it is Civ. That being said, it's a ton of fun and it's cheap. It was made by one person in an indie studio in Russia and there's a real depth of gameplay here that you don't even necessarily get in AAA titles. The only thing that might detract is that there aren't battle animations for your units or movement animations for your heroes on the map. I also found that I spend most of my time battling the enemy armies and don't have as much time to really explore the world and RPG elements. I love the aesthetic, though, and put plenty of time in. I'll give you a couple of tips: Use healers to keep your units alive so they can level up. If you treat your units like expendable canon fodder, you're going to struggle later. That being said, don't stress if you lose a few. The fastest way to level your hero is by capturing territories. It's also easiest for new players to use the Scout, IMHO, but the Warrior works, too. Finally: GLHF!!!111
A lot of the reviews of this game are tainted by early access issues and dislike of the devs for stopping patching, so take them with a grain of salt. I got this heavily discounted and for the money had a blast. The only other game I've played like this was "A Game of Dwarves" and I thoroughly enjoyed it, as basic and dated as it is. Pros: + Dwarves! + Addicting (expect sleepless nights of "Just 30 more minutes..." + Pretty! Love the interface and graphics. 64X FSAA. + Hours of fun to be had. Cons: - Text tutorial can be overwhelming. - Performance: After my colony grew to a certain size, I started getting performance stutters and the game was no longer playable. It seemed to happen when I really opened up the mountain/got a lot of dwaves. - Monsters don't path around, although waves will spawn and flood your base. - The overworld doesn't have much explanation and when you pop your head up, civilizations you were trading with are gone and new alliances have cropped up. War will be declared on you. It doesn't seem to matter much what you do up there in terms of building or gaining reputation, as long as you can get a good price for goods somewhere. It can be fun to support one side of a war (or both), but I didn't really understand it. It doesn't feel fleshed out. I'm used to that sort of thing from small devs, though. Big ideas, lite implementation. - Your dwarves underground will take ages to build scaffolding or explore and once you've opened up a lot of the mountain, be prepared for exploration to slow down. Speeding the game up isn't really an answer to this as the overworld goes nuts. - Mass transit systems don't seem to work right and are very hard to build. The mountain itself isn't conducive to using them. Summary: This is a really fun game, if you don't get caught in a performance trap like I did. The game became unplayable. The devs have announced no more updates for the game and have moved on to other projects, so it's unlikely to ever be fixed.
First off, I haven't played "Kingdom" or anything else people say this is similar to, so I don't have any "Preloaded Burnout" as it were. First off, Dwarves are awesome. Take off, Elves! Secondly, killing Goblins and Orcs is always a fantasy slam dunk. Thirdly, finding resource nodes, sending workers to collect them and then building up your town is fun. And that's pretty much what this game is. My favorite part is how much progress you can make in a short amount of time. It's also very much "pickuppable" and "putdownable" because it's based on grinding (as you might have surmised after watching the vidya). If I need a break, I can play for 5-15 minutes, clear a map or two, enchant my weapons up a bit and feel like I made some progress before getting back to whever I was doing. I'm about 25 hours in and it hasn't started to wear thin- there's always a new land to explore and you have no idea what you'll find. I have to tell myself, "only five more maps and then you're going to bed! Okay, make it 10." The city building aspect isn't very in depth. You build a few basic structures for yourself to use. A tavern to recruit NPCs and make money off of travelers, a storehouse to store, you guessed it, resources, a smithy to break down and craft new gear, a runeforge to enchant gear, market for buying/selling loot, etc, etc. After you build your nine base structures and upgrade each one 3-4 times that's all she wrote. It's now just a regular hack 'n slash RPG. The tavern mini-game is a little confusing. As long as you keep clicking you'll win and you can automate clicking from within the game by design. As soon as you get all the achievements, it gives great regular game bonuses. Once you have all your resource cards, spend about an hour playing it and you'll thank me. My main beef is that the quest log isn't very robust and sometimes quests don't show up as solved, leaving you wandering around looking for more. Thankfully, the dev monitors the forums and fixes quest bugs.
Got this one for free during a GoG sale at the same time I purchased HOMM3 and didn't think much of it as I got right to work liberating Erathia. Well, today I needed something to do while I had my morning coffee on my day of and so I decided to liberate Aer (the world in this game). I have to say I'm impressed. All the story is voice acted, it's got great art and visuals and really harkens back to a time when game designers gave their all to give games a feel and make them believable. For anyone who's played a hex-based TBS before, this'll be a breeze to pick up, and yet somehow still manage to be challenging even if it seems "primitive." There's no resource management in terms of collecting gems, wood or taxes or any of the like in other games such as HOMM. You find gold as you go by liberating towns, caves, dungeons, etc. and use that coupled with the spoils you get from your defeated enemies to replenish your troops, research upgrades and new ones. Then deck out your armies with items you find and go crush your enemies (if you're lucky!). If you don't go into it expecting too much, I think this one will end up on your favorites list for sure. And it works flawlessly on Windows 10 with the Anniversary Update (just in case you were wondering). But DOSbox pretty much works flawlessly on everything, to be fair.
I remember when this came out, and for the price, a game that looked very similar to, but somehow worse than SimCity 3000 five years later coupled with a few underwhelming reviews kept me away. Fast forward a decade and a half and its' for sale on GoG, so I thought, "why not?" I would pick it up, force myself to play for an hour, get bored and then leave. Over and over. The tutorials aren't super useful. It wasn't until my last game session when I forced myself to play for three hours that I realized just how little there is to do in this game. It was also when I realized just how finnicky and annoying everything is. Laying track and roads is mind-numbing. Fiddling with station catchment areas is just ridiculous. The mini-map is almost worthless. And the hideous graphics where everything looks the same are also a hindrance. Oh, and that awful soundtrack... I can finally say that after having put a few hours into, it's just not really worth playing. This is someone coming in from Railroad Tycoon and many, many citybuilders and all this game does is make me want to play them. It's just missing...the "fun" feeling that a good sim gives you. It feels more like clicking tile-based work with some anxiety about whether or not your catchment is good enough...The A.I. weren't too interesting either. They seemed to just connect to all the same stuff as you, but because of catchments, everyone had plenty of resources to haul...I looked all over the internet to see if perhaps there were some guides offering an understanding of the game at the mathematical level such as with SimCity. I was curious what tiles spawn what resources at what rates and where the best place to put stations is. I was curious abotu the rate of growth of towns with deliveries...I wanted to know something about how this game worked so I could at least try to be efficient at it. But nope. Most of the guides were "build buses and then trains lol." Maybe some things are just better off remaining a mystery.
It's got it all: Style! Humor! Music! Flare! Disasters! Scenarios! Other stuff! Seriously, though, this one outshines the rest. It improves upon 2000 in many ways: nost just graphically, buy through play mechanics and dynamics as well. Unlike SC4, it has personality and soul. SC4, unfortunately, suffered from the EA syndrome where they buy a company, milk the IP for money, then liquidate everything after the initial cash grab (all of The Sims integration was just to sell more boxes of The Sims). Don't even get me started on whatever SC5 was supposed to be. SC3K is just one of those games that is fun, start to finish, all the way through, it's enjoyable— even when your treasury is in the red and everything is on fire, it finds a way to make you giggle. The news ticker is perhaps the best part of all. You'll be laughing the whole time you're building. I hated the music at first, but over the years it grew on me. It's a sort of techno-infused jazz that is simultaneously Art Deco and Post-Modernist. As others have mentioned, it doesn't have the complexity of SC4 in terms of region management and other things, which I didn't particularly care for. SC3K is far more attractive than four as well and features a wider area of visuals and building diversities. Your cities feel real and they grow and evolve along with you. No two ever really look the same no matter how much you try. No matter how many times you've played, it will still challenge you and every time you try something new, it'll push right back and make you do it better and faster. It loves to make you second guess your expenditures. I've been playing this game off and on since 1999 and I will probably play it off and on until I die. It's just one of those rare games that holds up to the test of time. You can't consider yourself a real gamer until you've played it, IMHO. You can skip the rest of the series, but this one is a must in anyone's gaming education.
What can I say? I loved it when it came out and I've already lost another 50 hours since it came out on GoG. My first foray back into the world was a "straight eight" session. Sid Meier is a sort of genius.— for a lot of games and reasons. This is basically Railroad Tycoon 4, and I like this better than the others in the Railroad Tycoon series for a lot of reasons you'll see below. You play as a railroad tycoon (shock me, shock me) beginning a rail empire in the 1850s and lasting until the 1970s (you can keep playing long into the future if you wish). You can play sandbox, random map or scenarios with up to three opponents (and things can get realy hairy!). The scenarios take place in the U.S., Britain and mainland Europe. You build your rail empire hauling everything from grain to automobiles. You lay track, build stations and buy industries. You can buy stock in and eventually buy out your competition. The supply chains are pretty basic, but they're rewarding enough. People who liked the complexity of RRT3 may be a little disappointed in the options. There is even an official developer Christmas mod! I've also played other mods, one based on dogs where you haul biscuits and frisbees (it was actually a lot of fun). Pros: + Beautiful, even for its age + Large variety of trains, landscapes and goods + Easy-to-use interface + Easy to get started playing, especially for people new to the genre + Interesting scenarios with varying challenge levels + Competition is fun + Easily modable and there are readily available mods that work with the GoG/Galaxy versions + SUPER FUN Cons: - After you learn what you're doing it does feel kind of easy. - Competition can get ridiculous when multiple companies are all hooked up to one city— the tracks look like spaghetti! - Eras move a little too fast to enjoy some engines - Train upgrades are spaced out oddly, you won't get any for awhile and then you'll get a few at once - No soundtrack...music only plays near cities
This game was heralded in magazines as not only an RPG, but an RPG written by R.A. Salvatore of Drizzt fame— and therefore should be amazing by default. What came out was by no definition an RPG— it had a lackluster story and offered only played-out and oddly angled completely linear sidescrolling with a healthy does of button mashing. Suffice it to say, the game fell flat on its face at retail. This game suffers heavily from it's PS2 co-development: Tiny levels that are barely rendered with washed out graphics— most things are 2D in the background. The PS2 was an under-powered console and this game is the worse for it. It's a straight port. Let me reiterate: This is not an RPG. It's a hack 'n slash game that gives you some points to spend on making moves more powerful at the end of every mission, but ultimately gives you enough that you can power up every move in the game, even the ones that aren't worth using. Any RPG elements feel like they're tacked on merely because this game is set in the Forgotten Realms. In the end, this game has more in common with Contra than anything else. Let me reiterate again: It's an extremely average and ultimately forgettable story. R.A. Salvatore has never proven himself to be a particularly talented writer and in that regard, this game doesn't disappoint. Let me reiterate for a third time: This is just a sidescroller button masher. Some of the angles are weird ala Resident Evil 1 and 2 where you are running toward the camera while enemies you can't see charge at you making for frustrating fights. There are very brief moments of isometric views to make you feel like it's a real game and you can actually see what you're doing, but then it goes back to being Contra sidescrolling or being annoying. There are almost no secrets or anything to mix it up. You just run down a 10' wide path from start to finish. Why did I buy this again? It was part of a D&D pack and I thought "maybe I was too hard on it back then..." I was not.