TLDR: When I was about to get bored from the game and give it some 2 stars and a "meh" review, it turned out to be one of the best games I played in a year. Do not play this game as just another 2D space shooting/trading sandbox (that is how it feels at first). Play it as a story rich space exploration game that it truly is. It is easy to miss some of the great campaigns that are started by some average looking missions from the spaceport. It would be great if the first "tutorial" mission series ended with the old retiring captain saying something along the lines of "Good luck in your travels youngster. If You are looking for a great adventure stop by the spaceport on XYZ." Because I spent the first hours just playing the game as an average space sandbox doing randomly generated missions with some small single missions from the spaceports that were hand written and were just a tiny taste of what was to come, when I completely by random stumbled upon a galaxy altering hand-written campaign with dozens of missions. It had a great storyline, plot twists and great characters.
PROS: It runs on Windows 10 with the occasional crashes to desktop around once per hour. Since it is old, it is fine, just save often. I finished both "The Suffering" and "The Suffering: Ties That Bind". This one is definitely the better from those 2. It involves less escort quests and the ones that are present at least did not present such a huge challenge to the pathfinding of the NPCs. The NPCs seem to suffer from the same bad pathfinding but at least in my case they did not get stuck so often as in the second game. CONS: Bad NPC pathfinding, but after playing the second game it is not the worst I have seen. The story is nothing great and very linear, but I guess its enough for a short shooter.
PROS: It runs on Windows 10, with the occasional freezes and crashes to desktop around once per hour. Since it is old I can overlook this and this is also where the PROs for this game end. CONS: The first game was better, because at least it did not involve so many escort quests with NPCs trying to walk through walls, getting stuck indefinitely or just running around like headless chicken until they do get stuck. This game so far had the worst NPC pathfinding that I have seen. And since the good ending is dependent on You successfully finishing these escort quests, trying to get it gets seriously frustrating.
Lovely little tavern management with lots of possibilities and progression at your own pace. I will probably update this review once I get more hours in it.
RTS aspects: - building structures (both defensive and civilian) - building vehicles - researching technologies - resource management (in most missions resources are very limited and are so scarce that You will be even recycling structures and vehicles to obtain some) RPG aspects: - there is a YOU character through the whole campaign, that You can make dialogue decisions with and that You must keep alive - character skills with levels from 0 to 10 for: - fighting (combat effectiveness with personal weapons, also some defensive stats) - building also affects repairing structures, structure levels of built structures - mechanics also affects driving (combat effectiveness of driven vehicles), repairing vehicles - research also affects medicine (healing characters) - characters are persistent through the whole campaign (they may not appear in every mission but they can reappear in later missions if they are alive) - there is no way of producing manpower, therefore people are the most precious resource Originally there were 2 story campaigns with branching missions (Your decisions and mission performance change the story and what the next missions will be). The 2 story campaigns are from the opposite sides of the conflict, letting You experience the story from both sides. Later there was a fan made campaign for a 3-rd faction with a full story and branching missions of its own. This is truly a game that deserves its place among Good Old Games. People still play it, mod it, write about it.
I am surprised that none of the other reviews here mentioned what essentially drives everything in this game = "the constant time pressure". The infection rate is increasing essentially per minute and every single real time second counts, if you don't want to get overwhelmed by waves of too strong enemies. You have to line up your research, manufacturing, looting trips and taking care of your bodily functions just perfectly to avoid "swimming" in enemies. So for me the greatest CON of this otherwise good game is that the enemies don't scale with player progression, but only by time passed. And the higher the difficulty the shorter time You have to outpace that enemy progression. Even on the easiest difficulty You will get overwhelmed if You have not planned ahead in terms of what research and resources You need to get the correct set of better equipment for your playstyle to have a chance in fights.
So Mount and Blade definitely wasn't made to handle the age of firearms too well. + The ship to ship combat turned out to be better than I expected and is the only part of combat where You can actually use some tactics to influence the battle. - All the other combat is a mess, in medieval modifications of Mount and Blade like Bryttenwalda, You can use formations, ranged units and cavalry with at least some sense of tactical combat reminding me of the Total War series. But here combat is a complete mess, on land it turns into a blob1 vs blob2 and when boarding enemy ships its the most chaotic "everybody everywhere" where everyone is running around like headless chickens. And the side with more chickens often wins, but there really isn't much that you as a captain can do there. Summary: Get a medieval or ancient themed Mount and Blade modification and enjoy shield walls, flanking and such things.
