Maddeningly difficult, made worse by horrible, at times unresponsive controls. You'll be thrust into situations where precise, fast orders are the difference between life and death, only to find your dude doesn't respond to your desperate keypress and gets gunned down. Too frustrating for me. Difficult levels is one thing, broken controls is quite another.
Dungeon Keeper in space, more or less. I'm a newcomer to this game, playing this GOG version for the first time. I found it absolutely charming. The writing and humour adds a lovely, playful tone, and the game plays well. If you like management/builder games a la Dungeon Keeper or Theme Hospital, you'll like this. As management games go, it's fairly docile. It's not especially difficult once you understand how everything works, and sadly it's too short. It is, however, highly enjoyable. A bit of a google will turn up around 20 user-made missions which aren't half bad either. Highly recommended.
A great concept with, sadly, flawed execution. This game captures the atmosphere of being a James Bond villain very well. You build a secret island base, send minions off around the world to perform dastardly deeds, and fight off agents from world governments. Unfortunately, while the atmosphere is lovely, the gameplay kind of sucks. You spend most of your time sending your minions off on missions in order to get money, but this process is bland and repetitive. You don't get to guide your minions on their mission a la XCom, you simply wait until a timer ticks down. Base building is passable, but suffers similar problems to Dungeon Keeper. You're given tools like security cameras and alarms and loudspeakers and traps, in order to automate your base defenses, but it's almost always simpler, easier and more effective to directly order your minions to respond to threats. This makes all your cool toys more or less pointless. There's also some kind of... hotel building simulation? Apparently, to avoid detection, you need to build and run a hotel on your island to distract stray tourists, so they don't stumble on your base? In effect, you're expected to maintain a boring, bog-standard hotel while also maintaining an evil hideout. I didn't find that fun at all. There's no way to skip past the tutorial stages of the game. In fact, there doesn't appear to be different levels either (or maybe I didn't get up to them?). You end up unlocking new room types when the game thinks you need to have them. The problem is that you can't easily alter your base design once it's set out. You have to pre-plan for rooms you're going to get in the future, but you don't yet know what they are, what they do, how they work or how useful they're going to be until you get to try them out. I found I ended up restarting once I knew how all the rooms worked, but playing up through the starting stages again is tedious... In short, this game could have benefitted tremendously from some relatively simple changes: different levels and/or a skirmish mode, some way to skip the tutorials and unlock all rooms from the beginning, and dropping the "hotel" crap. It could have been even better if you got to actually do anything on the missions you send your minions on, such as a transition to some kind of minigame a la XCom. Instead of this game, I'd recommend Dungeon Keeper or maybe even Dwarf Fortress (assuming you haven't played them before). That said, you can't really go wrong paying $5 to play this and see for yourself. The delivery is charming and the execution is competant, it just has a few things holding it back from true greatness.
