Very grindy with inelegant UI, but combat is fun and leveling up is rewarding. Gradually getting strong enough to beat up screen filling Cloud Titans is a high that no other DOS series can match. The other half of this game is dungeon exploration which is among the best of its era. I'd put it above everything except the best of the Gold Box engine.
Great game but be ready for a few design flaws. Some puzzles are too difficult, quests will sometimes expect you to find random plot triggers without guidance, and combat difficulty spikes are very stupid. It feels pretty bad when you play a pure melee character for most of the game with no issues, and then suddenly you're as weak as a Hobbit trying to 1v1 a Ringwraith.
Although the writing and tavern songs are great, the rest of this game is truly awful. I have no idea why they bothered to make a remaster.
Halfway through the game. Here's what you can look forward to: - After every act, I have to manually unzip my save file and delete 90% of it because of how horribly inefficient the save format is. For some reason this doesn't break the game at all. This fixes loading times, ingame lag, and savefile bloat. - The Act 4 finale is very unbalanced even on normal difficulty. I know what I'm doing in this genre and my party was getting wiped by enemies that could 1v3 my entire tank frontline dead in two hits. These guys could appear in pairs, alongside 3 normal guys and 2 heavy casters in the back using Hold Person which is also guaranteed death if it hits. Switched to easy mode and skipped through the dungeon. - The game crashes every time I exit. - Inventory is full of garbage that I have to keep, and sorting never works. Anytime you pick up a magic item you have to spend another 30 seconds finding it again in your bag before you can see if it's worth using. - There's a ton of good QoL difficulty options but I can't imagine how bad this game would be without them. Half the combats in the game would normally require a 7 day roundtrip out of the dungeon and back home to heal. That could make your game unwinnable from all the time limit events. - "Kingdom Management: Auto" works but is really janky. You get constant UI popups that make no logical sense. The game is telling me that everything is failing, my kingdom is collapsing due to riots, and I have to just keep playing and trust that the spaghetti code won't game over my 40 hour save.
Unlike the excellent first game, this developer doesn't fully understand Star Trek and just made a normal FPS that takes place in that universe. The UI is all changed. None of it's bad but it's not Trek anymore. There's no "Welcome to LCARS" greeting on startup, instead you watch four animated logos from the devs and publishers just like every other game. They did keep some LCARS UI ingame but changed the font and bar sizes lmao Gameplay is more difficult and has lots of bad design choices; escort missions, protect this NPC unlocking a door, time limits, etc. Guns now need to reload for some reason, map design is often confusing. Main character is a generic alpha bro with no personality. Female MC option was removed.
It has full keyboard customization which helps a lot to modernize it. But be ready to have your eyes bleed from very low FPS, low resolution pixel graphics. It'd do very well with a remake.
Just be warned that space combat is horribly broken. Anything above easy difficulty and you'll get constantly instakilled without warning. Also the mouse controls are terrible so it's nearly impossible to hit moving targets with your blasters, while the AIs all have excellent shot accuracy. Your only real weapons are missiles and wingmen; once those run out you might as well restart the level.
OK expansion. It's fun but too long and has design issues. Ragnarok and Atlantis were better. Some notes because the game description is misleading: - "A whole new epic quest line spanning 4 acts" is a total lie. It's 1 new act with 10 waypoints. Everything in EE is grouped as 'Act VI' or 'The East' ingame, same as all the other expansions. - You don't need to play through all 3 difficulties first. Create a new character in Legendary mode and it'll put you right in the EE starting area.
I'm at 40 hours having just finished normal mode and EE is supposed to be another 15 hours. Fun game but I can't imagine how people run multiple characters all the way through the third difficulty lol
A few issues but very good overall. Great visual diversity after the dull looking base game.
