Very little to recommend in a game that has very little in the way of puzzles and adventuring. The game has a death/game over mechanic, where if you do something wrong the main character dies or is imprisoned, ending the game. This is the cardinal sin of adventure games because it means that it punishes you for exploring. It means having to listen to same dialog repeatedly. This also means that the game mistakes yes/no questions as 'puzzles'. Literally the first puzzle is a yes/no question that if you get it wrong it's game over. If you must play this game, do it with a walkthrough and get to the 2nd game as fast as possible.
I bought these when they were first released and played them repeatedly through the 90s. I had every motivation to get this GOG version to work and after many many hours I give up. I tried every trick from everywhere. I tried reinstalling, changing DOSBOX, changing mouses, buying a joystick, etc. It is unplayable. My game whiplashes between way too slow and way too fast. It doesn't recognize half of the commands, so it doesn't shoot when I tell it to, it doesn't turn when I need it to, and missiles will not fire without repeatedly hammering the button. The mouse freezes, and the only fix it to alt-tab away and then back to it. I sincerely hope you get this amazing game to run for yourself, but buyer beware.
The first part of the game is pretty much what you expect from a combination of a platformer and Portal. The puzzles are well designed will make you think hard. And then you get the Time Gun. When you get the Time Gun the puzzles are still well designed but if you aren't a God at Platforming then executing the solutions will be infuriating. The Time Gun allows you to record a short amount of you gameplay so you can, say, hit two buttons at once, one with your previous gameplay and one with your current. However you will need to overlap 2,3,4, sometimes 5 recordings all over each other, meaning you need a degree of precision in planning, jumping, and timing that can be almost impossible. If you mess up at all you have to start it all over again. The solutions can be worked out. But completing them is another story. If you aren't a master at platforming, give this one a miss.
The art and atmosphere are amazing and wonderful but the gameplay kills everything. I give this game a 2 star because this is billed a hack-n-slash platformer and fails at both. You move your character with the WASD keys, jump with spacebar, and can climb ladders and across ceilings. Very standard but whats wrong? You move with momentum, speeding up on slopes and slowing down on inclines. Each map is densely packed so your character constantly changes speed, seeming to stumble and jump awkwardly. You can't predict how your character will move, so you can miss your jumps completely. You stick to walls and ledges but you don't to ladders and ceiling climbs, i.e. the opposite of what you want your character to do. Movement is thus fighting your controls constantly. Throw in a timed run in the middle of the game where you must go through each element perfectly, and all things totaled you have a failure of a platformer. For combat, your character is fixed in the center of your screen, and wherever your mouse points is where your character is targeting. You click to strike and block, each taking a bit of time while your character goes through the motions of completing the action. Disorienting at first, but it can be learned. What goes wrong? Enemies can occupy the same space as your character, but you can only hit someone if at the end of your swing the tip of your sword hits and meanwhile enemies can hit you point blank. So most of combat is running away from your enemies using those wonderful platforming controls mentioned earlier in order to be far enough away to hit something! Combat works better than the platforming but once you throw in some enemies that have a 1-hit knock out ability then the combat stops having any redeeming value. You might get lucky and end up liking this game but I feel that a warning is necessary.
I bought this because I owned this on original Xbox. Game couldn't start until I did some fixes. Controllers, which worked plug and play style in the other POP games, are screwed up and unusable. Numerous glitches caused random deaths; falling through platforms, not grabbing ledges, and wall-running into invisible walls. Most solved by dying and retrying but 2 were completely impassable. They required a download of a saved game in order to complete the game. Great game, but I'm wish I hadn't gone down this infuriating road in the first place.
