An excellent game with brilliant turn-by-turn combat. Some flaws: - Game flow is quite irregular with some sections which lack action. - It's a game that makes control very powerful. You can paralyze enemies in various ways. The downside is sometimes it's kind of combat-breaking (by attacking before combat starts and denying bosses their abilities). - Crafting makes little sense, but is quite mandatory to reach your full potential (though you CAN play without it no problem) - Charisma is disappointing. The bits where you have to negotiate are quite optional, use a faire bit of randomness, and because of the way the scores work, you need a very high score to make a difference. - Special attack bypass your attack scores, which is kind of weird. - Charm effects are brokenly powerful, because the AI treats charmed enemies as full-fledged foes and unleashes hell on them, rather than leaving them well-alone until it fades (as you would do as a player). I personally chose to not use Charm for that reason. - The story is quite complicated and I didn't really bond with it
I had fond memories of FO1. I kind of stopped playing FO2 rather early. The quests are often just go-there-and-fetch, and are usually solved either with doing nothing or fighting. Skills are definitely not equal. Don't expect FO2 to be that game where you can play the oddball build, like a doctor or trader. It won't work. You need a maxed-out melee build, or any shooter. In fact you need to be a decent fighter to survive the first compulsory "dungeon". Many skills do you zero good if you increase them with your points (rather than magazines or trainers). Maybe I did miss something, but it shouldn't be that complicated. The interface is clumsy. It's not a date issue. There is no reason why you need to go through all those clicks just to give stuff to your allies, and no reason why you need the right click menu, or the hold-left-button thing. Does it get better? Maybe.
The Good: it's a racing game with guns. There aren't many around. And it's good. In fact it's decent if played without the guns. Tip: play in "Classic" mode. You get more armor, less laps, and thus less blow-up frustration The Bad: - inconsistent difficulty. Some track are "win on first try". Others are rage-quit material, mostly because of #&@*@& obstacles in the middle of the road. - as typical of such games, robot cars have a behaviour that's inconsistent with yours. Some go at insane speeds, others turtle along, shooting at stuff. - while weapons and upgrades have stats, chassis don't. ALso the fact that you pretty much have to spend you cash upgrading the starting vehicule means the chassis don'T see much use. - the 3rd person view is more useful than the 1st person one. TOo bad some car models obstruct your view...
First off, absolutely get the unofficial Direct3D fix which sets it to 16bit, removing the cripping slowdowns and load times. It becomes a fully different game! Also the resolution fix is great. There's a 1.34 patch but some claim the GOG version is newer, some say it's based on 1.29. game itself's solid, but: - dialogs are nothing to write home about - there's not much choice at all. It's not Fallout - a couple tactics are game-breaking (e.g. the controlled scorpion) - but you can avoid them easily - I find that the dungeon are too long, and then the non-dungeon "fetch quests" sequences as well. nonethless a great diablo/Baldur's Gate mix.
