If only this game had normal vertically - a strategically placed ladder reachable over a short gap there, a cable walk here, and the occasional jump onto soft landing or rare timed leap onto a moving object. And not as the main mode but simply a little here and there for neat immersion, well integrated into set design to help escape a horde if you don't fancy berserker mode. But no, this game is all about parkour - superhuman spiderman parkour. Even without the web (sorry, I mean zip line) the rooftop long leaps, wall climbs and vertical jumps are plain unrealistically over the top, and overused, and work as a sort of forced altrernative game mechanic to fast-travel. Some bozo said hey, how can we make our bog-standard zombie game different? Deeper story and more world building decisions & consequences? Nah, bigger leaps man, look at me jump 100ft gap with these upgrades! Or look cool or have better weapons with these DLC (at least you don't have to pay extra for them in this edition). And forcing you out at night just for the sake of stressful gameplay when anyone with half a brain cell would stay indoors until daybreak is plain silly, gimmicky and annoying. Such a shame.
The early game is all about moving your first one or two ships around the map, mandraulic but fun enough as you learn the ropes of the game and taking orders/commissions and a few rare passengers. You have to balance prices, capacties, wear & tear, crews, pirates, a little base stuff too like warehouses. But to grow an empire you need to master setting up "automated" trading routes because managing more than two or three convoys manually becomes a pain. This is done by finding and hiring a named captain from a port, selecting a series of ports and what amounts/prices you're prepared to buy or sell at. This is where your manual experiences in the early game helps, because by now you know where stuff tends to be cheapest and where it tends to be in demand. But thankfully it's not that simple, because things aren't static. Prices can change (gluts, shortages, seasons, plagues etc). And your ships need repairs and crewmen after pirate attacks, so your earlier manual experiences and attention are still required. And as you build your trading empire there's other things too, like running for mayor and eventually head of the whole league. You need to first raise your presence & standing, get married etc. Your actions have affect how likely folk are to vote for you. Once into thsi side of the game you get involved in a little bit more base building (walls, garrisons, plagues, feasts etc). And there's sometimes a little fighting/plundering at city walls (it's basic and poorly optimised but ok because it's really not a significant part of the game, very minor/occasional in fact). Along the way there's also things like setting up your own industrial buildings & hiring workers, and eventually setting up a new town, become a banker, send a convoy to explore further afield to the med for lucrative new towns and goods. All from a 2D god map and in isometric displayed towns & pirate mini-battles. And surprisingly it hasn't dated too badly because they don't try to do too much.
Having played the goty version, GOG won't allow me to refine my initial review there, so I'll post it here. That original review was based more on the tutorial (very good) and graphics (great except I wish I could've disabled the actively shifting time-of day shadows enitrely because on the lowest setting I needed they looked too blocky). This review is more about content and gameplay. The story and level of situational detail here is very good. Even as a mature fan of sci-fi and history, I quickly bought into it all. There's also some mystery to keep you playing. The only issues with that side of things are there's only two main branching ways to play - religious zealot or uncaring autocrat, and the mystery is not very fleshed out. This means it's largely a one-dimensional story - the frost of course. Build around heat centres and get enough fuel & upgrades to survive the killing cold events. That in itself isn't a bad sci-fi story, and the Victorian time-setting is a nice twist, The trouble is it throws the main benefits of city builders out of the window - namely, relaxation and planning aesthetics. For even during the less cold times you can't relax because you're in a deadly race against time and you don't really know how well you're doing or how bad the next event will be, so you can never really take your foot off the pedal. The other problem is there's really only one way to build - as closely and efficiently packed as possible around very constricted heat centres. You can at least turn down the difficulty (severity of the frosts) to feel less pressured, and take in the novelty of the story, but that doesn't change the mechanics underneath which is that of a pretty limited city builder. Get it when on sale - it's well made, has a neat story, a proper tutorial and so is worth playing once. But it has low replayability (two main life choices) and lacks the underlying joys of city builder games.
There's a lot of love for FO2 (and FO1) on this site, but don't buy into the hype today! After loving FO3 but being an old-timer (PC gaming since the 1980s on a zx spectrum+), I tried both games and though I can see why they were deemed great in their day, trying to play them now is quite painful in every way - except for seeing the birth & development of Fallout's universe. Franchises go through this arc from neat ideas (FO1) through story improvements (FO2), then combining all the lore into better gameplay (FO3/FNV), then better graphics (FO4) then shameless cashing in (FO76). Somewhere in the middle there's always a franchsie sweet-spot where story, gameplay & graphics are all good enough - and here that clearly happens in FO3, not FO2 (sorry). Other sweet-spot examples are Medieval2 Total War (Kingdoms), Silent Hunter 3, Half-Life 2, Mass Effect 2, etc, etc, etc...
The game I downloaded did not appear to have better graphics - maybe on a small 1024x768 screen it looks improved, but on my 1920x1200 it looks blocky terrible and worse than I remember the original ever being, even though I've not stretched the image at all. Other than that - oh boy, it's been so long since I played this game I'd forgotten how ugly and flat the 2D image 1990s' game-world navigating was. Did I really put up with this 20yrs ago? Also, I think the intro's missing or mostly edited out - no info, just a book page I clicked on and was just there on the (heavily pixellated) island. I carried on for a bit but, I guess from having been spoiled by decades of good gaming graphics and at least basic isometric or 3D gaming since then, I just can't put up with it. Sorry.
Those defending or applauding the game just don't get it. Games like this promote and perpetuate the offensive and false impression that Brexit voters were all drunken, ignorant racists and xenophobes - and that they would bring about the collapse of the country. If I produced a game where the Labour Party in Britain stopped Jewish people from working in schools or hospitals, or as doctors, or police or civil servants, or indeed any local government jobs, and gameplayed "regaining" all the money that "Jewish bankers stole" from "the people", and then gameplayed "wiping Israel off the face of the Earth", I'm certain it wouldn't even be allowed on GOG or anywhere else. And yet these were some of the actual opinions of anti-semites that recently came to the fore in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, rather than an extension of falsehoods levelled at Brexit voters by Remainers, so such a game would be based on facts rather than fantasy. How GOG let this game in is beyond me.
I'd already heard the music and really like it. Now, you can currently buy this soundtrack on Amazon for £10, or buy it as part of the gold edition of the game here for just £4 while it's on sale, with the added bonus of the game thrown in too! Already listening to the tunes. Guess I might play the game some day too... Thanks.
Chouiqui was not a major battle nor of massed Sherman tanks, but a skirmish for 2 companies of US-crewed Stuarts attached to Blade Force - but please note Blade Force was a British brigade. Yes, the raid on Djededia Airfield was a temporary success for one American unit, but it was just a dozen M3 Lee tanks and as part of an overall offensive by mostly British forces. And Tebourba was not captured by the Americans but by the British Infantry, who held it for 10 days until a German... Oh, I could go on, but this is just one of many games that ignores history to bring you another story of how America singlehandedly won the war. You only play as the US or Germany - enjoy your fantasy.
Finally got to play this game at Xmas having been gifted it, and it looks great at 1920x1200 (native on my monitor) but with the rest of the settings set to medium, despite a nowadays modest i5-2500 and gtx 750ti. I'm getting a very smooth 45fps but because my gpu is just below spec I expect to drop to low settings as the city grows. This is much better builder than Surviving Mars: First Colony (see my review of it). And someone actually thought through a sensible enough tutorial integration for FrostPunk - not perfect, but miles better than Mars. This reminds me a little bit of Cliff Empire but set in Victorian times and with added societal choices. If I didn't already have it I still wouldn't pay £40 for the GOTY - maybe I would pay the £27 in the current sale, but I'm an old timer and normally wary of anything over £15. The last time I risked it (Surviving Mars, £18 in the sales) I thought it a total waste of dough. But FrostPunk wouldn't be.
