Michael Clarke Duncan, Patrick Stewart, and RAS combined couldn't save this clunker. I gave up on level 8, which had the most baffling design choice ever. Let's review: you have to take out four warlocks, who will respawn, while also fighting up-close enemies who also respawn, in order to take down an ice gate. Oh, and while the warlocks are alive, they're continuously repairing the gate. Oh, and you can only take out the warlocks with ranged weaponry, and only ONE of the three characters is ANY good at ranged damage. Does that sound like fun to you? Well good, because you get to repeat this exact same gameplay mechanic on the end boss! That was the point at which I quit. The game was just "meh" up until that point. Chapter eight graduated it to "actively damaging the brain of anyone who makes the mistake of trying to play it." The PC port is abysmal, besides. Extremely limited options (literally the only in-game option is "subtitles"!). Bad graphics and screen-tearing. Controller is practically required to play, and even then, expect some seriously clunky moments. Especially since all the gameplay tips still give things in the default keyboard config! Everywhere! Even in menus! And you can't control the camera at all, leading to some awkward moments. The game is also HORRIBLE at communicating anything to the player. The characters may suggest you have to take down an obstacle, but don't communicate how. What are those little scrolls I keep picking up? I think it's XP, but I HAVE NO IDEA. Avoid. AVOID. It's an incredibly poorly designed console port that plays like baby's first hack 'n' slash and is nowhere near worth its starring cast.
Advent Rising is a textbook example of what happens when a game dev dreams just a little too big. The end result is an unpolished, buggy muddle that you somehow wind up loving for its ambitions. I can safely say this is one of the only games in which I went from somehow storming the beaches at the alien equivalent of Normandy to boss fighting a giant gorilla, in the same level. Also the end boss is after the end credits for some hilariously inexplicable reason. The game's story is nothing to really write home about. It's standard Orson Scott Card fare--if you like that, then you'll enjoy Advent Rising's story. Otherwise, it can best be summed up as "rocks fall, everyone dies" followed by "and now you are Space Jesus." ...Like I said, standard OSC fare. It also tends to bring up a lot of questions it presumably would've tried to answer in the planned two sequels, but...well. Oops. As for the bugs...well. There were crashes, my character repeatedly insisting on targeting a wall, enemy AI taking a cue from lemmings and jumping headlong into lava for no apparent reason, a female NPC suddenly turning into a different male NPC mid-cutscene, and my personal favorite, the time I wound up hanging on for dear life to thin air. (I'd been clinging to the edge of a bridge, which then exploded. At which point apparently the protagonist decided obeying the laws of gravity was for suckers. Bless.) On one completely positive note, however, the soundtrack to all this madness is fantastic.
Highly crash-prone on Windows 7, even with GoG's fixes. If it's not a Windows "AWcompat.exe has stopped working..." error, it's map draw errors from the game itself (each time I click on a city it was like playing Russian Roulette--will the game let me city-build, or is it going to spam map draw errors into infinity?). Honestly, I've seen more stable Bethesda games. This is just absurd. I stuck with the game through to the level "The Safeland" though, at which point the difficulty curve didn't so much jump as it did hop in a rocket and make for outer space. Between that and the crashes, I was oh so very done.
