Total Annihilation was a great game and one of the big gems of the RTS genere. Sadly not even the GoG version will work anymore on a modern Windows 10, so I strongly recommend to not buy this if you have Windows 10.
I gave this a try as I am usually interested in difficult RPGs, but this game is definitely not ready yet to be played. Starting with a very unintuitive interface, you spend the first minutes in this game to figure out how to actually do things. For some reason camera movement is flipped in the Y direction, instead of using the standard point & click controls you move with the right mouse button and also give orders with it by holding it long enough till a menu pops up. Most of the landscape is simply empty, dialogues are sparse, and everything feels so random. The AI is erratic, features unexplained and often leave you puzzled, animations are whacky. In all ways this screams "early alpha" and it probably is. That said, there is some potential in this game: it is deadly brutal in its difficulty and makes no compromises to give you a literal hell of an experience. I dies so many times I lost count, sometimes even seconds after creating a new game. But all the times it was a fair death, usually because I run sword first into danger instead of first assessing the situation and planning (or running) accordingly. If you like an excessive difficulty in games, this one will give you one. Aside from that the option to craft so many things and even build entire villages, have massive amounts of followers around and have them work for you in a very immersive way, tells me that there is also a lot of reward for going through that hell. If you like difficult survival games, keep an eye open for Kenshi. Maybe in a year or two this is going to be polished enough to actually be fun.
This game is about building vehicles and shooting stuff with it. Usually to get resources or unlock new building blocks for even bigger and nastier vehicles to build. It is also possible to build a small station for processing resources and some very basic AI blocks to have your own harvesters working that base. Basically single-player Robocraft with a story. However aside from that this game is very unfinished. It is completely lacking any endgame motivation, and building an all powerful vehicle that can beat all enemy AI vehicles is surprisingly easy. Stations serve no real purpose, and your own AI controlled vehicles usually get stuck in terrain after 5 minutes top, requiring you to rescue them. Essentially this is - as it says above - in development and really unfinished. The release speed of the team is slow but steady. So you can expect new blocks every few month, but that also means there won't be a full and final release within the foreseeable future. So what you can expect from this game is fun block-building vehicle action with lots of explosions that keeps you entertained for 2-3 days, then you have done everything there is, and will most likely have to wait for the next update. And those updates are coming to GoG much slower, waiting for over a week now for the latest update that was already released on that other (very evil) distribution platform. At this moment this game is recommended only for hardcore vehicle building fans.
So you build a factory to produce things to fight off aliens. If that idea is not appealing to you: don't buy the game. If it sounds great, you get everything you ever wanted. Factorio has that bad way of bringing that idea to your mind: "What if I build this factory a little different?" and you are lost again in several hours in this game, just to come up with an even better idea afterwards. Soon those aliens are nothing more than an annoyance, an alibi-goal you need to explain why you just spent a whole week designing a factory to mass-produce everything there is in this game in the most efficient way. And why you probably do it the next week all over again. While this gameplay-idea is done with excellence in this game and keeps you excited if you like it, it also lacks many other things. Once you built your first few factories and got the idea, you can either build a more efficient one, or just wait a few more minutes to finish the level. This game lacks any motivation to build a better factory except for your own drive to do it. Some say this is a good thing, because everything else would be unnecessary, others find this game just plain boring after a while. So if you are that guy that spent hours with automation mods in Minecraft, or just love improving automation for any other reason: this is the game for you. If you seek for deep and compelling gameplay just an inch away from that, you won't find it in this game.
The game feels like someone brought the Infinity Engine up to date and tried to make a new epic RPG in the style of good old Baldur's Gate, nut only partially succeeded. The graphics are ok, nothing to write home about, but sufficient nevertheless. The focus lies heavily on dialogs, which the game loves to display endlessly in all kinds of situations. There are no cut-scenes, everything is explained in long, sometimes interesting, sometimes just plain boring dialogs with an average level of quality like you would find it in common medieval fantasy novels. If you love RP-heavy RPGs you will get what you are looking for. The story starts slowly and continues equally slow, but doesn't feel catchy at all. You happen to be a special soul in a classic fantasy world and can speak with other souls - dead or alive - while you try to figure out why. Nothing you haven't heard somewhere else already. Characters are well scripted, but none is really notable. Important dialogs are voice acted well, although only English voice is available and played no matter which language you choose. The (German) translation is mostly fitting, but contains frequent mistakes, sometimes to a point where you have to guess what the person is trying to say. Where the game really fails is the combat system, which is roughly a copy of DnD 4th edition with different names. This could be a good basis, however the devs decided to have two kinds of HP: permanent and temporary. Temporary are healed automatically after each fight, permanent are only healed when resting. This makes most fights either meaningless because you effectively take no damage, or enemies kill you in 2-3 hits and the fight becomes an annoying pain if your chars just drop dead randomly. Traps are basically harmless, because you just heal all damage right away then proceed with looting. This could have been a very good game, sadly the combat system and lengthy dialogs destroy most of the fun. Still a good RPG for those who love them.
