HIGLY RECOMMENDED AND A MUST-BUY IF YOU LIKE CYBERPUNK AND CAN BEAR 2D PLATFORMING. Most of the content is side quests that are very well voice-acted and designed. The fast-travel map system works great. The real 2D city districts puts even River City Ransom in shame for how detailed it is. The movement controls are super stiff, so don't expect a fist-ballet. Tons of different ways to beat the main quest, though the side quests pretty much require maxed out lock-picking and charisma skills and a couple of utility implants. Graphics: comic book stuff, it works except a couple parts are too light or too dark to be seen properly. Sound: the music is fitting ambient, nothing special. One of those games where you learn to hate the battle music. Gameplay: let us be fair, the fighting system is awful. As soon as you perform a move, your character locks up and cannot be controlled for a fraction of a second. That incentives two ridiculous-but-practical fighting approaches: infinitely jump-kick-and-roll-away and equip-the-regen-implant-and-trade-hits-like-an-idiot. Sure, there are unlockable moves and combos, though they suck. E.g. sweep does no damage (useless), high-kick pushes enemies out of your hitting range, etc.. Jumping, rolling and grabbing ledges works quite well, demonstrating how much the game was made for platforming and not fist-fighting. The guns are pretty okay, though there is not a single target in the game that you really need them for, no bosses whatsoever. The toughest enemies i.e. Armagear soldiers are more vulnerable to fists anyway. Story: the main story is meh and is a total rip-off of Blade Runner. The side quests are completely different (read: much better) and are a lot about Cyberpunk: the blood-thirsty outlaws and the megacorps as blood-thirsty outlaws with a presentable face. Lorraine has most development: you most likely beat her in the first fight of the game and later she reappears with tons of implants for a rematch. 15 h of content.
In short: ONLY FOR HARDCORE POINT-AND-CLICK FANS. It does not have much content (not even the usual jokes about observed objects), the action performance is clunky and the latter half of the game has tons of puzzles that really painful to solve, starting with the gorge jump project involving tons of puzzle-like bike fights. The new graphics and / or sound make no difference as most of the time it's quite silent and it is just slightly less pixelated. The content itself is mostly untouched. The Remaster resolution is 720p i.e. 1280 x 720 and it cannot be changed from the menu (you can choose between fullscreen or windowed). The commentary is not that great and focuses more on the work office arrangements than explaining the strange game design choices. Instead they talk extensively about recording some guys Harley-Davidson and also about the Haitian janitor. A bit filler-like. The Monkey Island special edition was much better in that aspect. It seems more like they scrounged together some stories just to have something. All of the mini-games are really puzzles that can only be solved one way. E.g. piling tons of car wrecks on top of the dog car does nothing, though lifting the dog car up solves the puzzle. Also, there there are timed puzzles at the last part of the game, without the usual interact-able object highlighting, no less. A playthrough took 5 h. The guy in the commentary mentioned that the game took 2 h in comparison to Day of the Tentacle's 40. That's probably because even if you know what to do in the game, it is not clear how to do it, especially during cryptic minigames. I didn't like it. It was quite painful. The whole catch of the game is the cinematic western animation, though I have seen vastly better anime and the "wow" factor of the time is gone. Even the 1980's animation slaughters it and has more expressive power in it. The content feels outdated and sparse. Not gonna replay ever.
In summary: ONLY IF YOU LIKE BEING TESTED EXTENSIVELY. Sure, the music is slightly above average and the gfx are clean, though you have no goal besides going towards the end of the screen. The gameplay mechanics only handicap you in every way. E.g. you lose a chunk of your money if enemies hit you, just to rub it in more. You will be hit because the enemies use various means to be cheap, e.g. you cannot even hit the stone thingies. Oh and you are not given a map outside some minor dungeons. Imagine Symphony of the Night without a map - you have no idea where you are or where you are going or whether or not you are going anywhere. It is fitting as the game has no believable goals or things to look forward to. It's just another me-too product with no soul of its own. Reminds me of those quick Flash games on various sites. The game was made with GameMaker Studio. That is probably why it feels like a 10-month level creation project with some sound and gfx assets slapped onto it. The controls are okay, though they are all equally worthless. Moving around takes a long time (because the character is hauling a heavy sword with it), though you can speed it up by using the attack / sling actions, i.e. substituting tedium with significant amounts of work. The attack move is where the controls fall apart and that is also the most important part of doing anything in the game. It is difficult to describe briefly, its overall effect is crippling the gameplay. It never gets easy to do basic things with it, because it requires work. It's a permanent, NEGATIVE weapon gimmick. Castlevania and Metroid had POSITIVE weapon gimmicks that added more options for dealing with things and made the games more fun. Here it is just a burden that keeps getting worse. The story is complete trash and the other characters say completely useless things. It's like they were added in to fill some kind of quota or a to check a check-list item.
In short: NEVER RECOMMENDED. It has the merciless ticking-down needs that will kill you if any of them hits zero. It is more about mandatory, non-stop optimization-math than playing a game. It offers no incentive to finish AKA beat it, though will kill you fast if you stop microing it with full focus for a second. Basically, if the game really hates you, your "survivor" can die during its first resource-harvesting trip and that survivor is not replaceable. Also, it randomizes the starting stats of the random 3 starter survivors, so you can get shafted really hard (to the point of unwinnable) if you don't start a new game. This game tries to be challenging and ends up being unreasonably, cheat-codes-requring or walkthrough-mandatory-hard. I ended up getting rapped mercilessly despite microing my dudes hardcore. Good luck making the vital food when the game decides to constantly break your energy generator and your electric food processor while the trip to the repair resource piles is getting longer and longer, i.e. less resources to fight off the needs and crappy game design. "An unlockable survival mode?" Every difficulty I tried was ruthlessly challenging. Kids and people with redemption complexes ( and / or / i.e. shills ) might like it. I can see that the game is trying to screw me over and waste my time and I will never find that enjoyable, let alone fun. This game is garbage. No music, barebone graphics, laughably generic plot.
In shirt: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, doubly so if you can tolerate Company of Heroes 2 the vastly inferior product. Despite the Ubisoft logo, ZERO bugs. The only lackluster parts are the mission design in some places, the repetitive, impact-draining nature of killing hundreds of tanks on almost every level and the lack of replay value. The expansion adds the six Soviet Missions that are on par with the original 14 USA ones. Not much to say about this one. Took 16 h to beat slowly on Easy, though someone could probably do it in 10 . The worst parts of the missions are the optional objectives that are often timed and / or obscure. The worst one is the POW camp defense one (14th?) where you are given choppers to take down artillery, though not given any pointers where they are. All you get it from the side objectives are extra medals (worthless) and some assets (that you don't really need).
!!! NON-OPTIMIZED UNITY GAME WARNING! CAN COOK YOUR CPU. !!! Summary: NOT RECOMMENDED. It's a me-too product that poorly imitates other games out there (Diablo, D&D games, even MOBAs) and fails to make those elements any fun. It's the same mandatory-clean-sweep style of gameplay for 12 levels where you click on things and fight everything in a 100 % linear fashion. Add in a boring rip-off of a story and gameplay that gets old after the first level, the buyer's remorse will be strong with this one. Graphics: looks like a PS2 game, yet is so horribly non-optimized that it runs worse than Saints Row 2 PC port. Lowering details does not do anything, lowering the resolution only helps a bit. Sound: the usual placeholder ambient. Gameplay: various issues. Diablo controls without item highlighting ( you have to pick up all gold coins from the floor like a slave ), various kinds of busy work and mandatory fetch quests (Level 4 is mindnumbingly bad with this) and most importantly, tons of forced trial-and-erroring with the fake choices that permanently punish you (e.g. the fountains that take away your attribute points). The randomly-generated item drops are all trash. "7 unique characters" Nope, they, too, are all rip-offs. A knight, a thievish marksman, a dwarf, etc. everything you have seen before. The only unique parts are the equipment restrictions and whether they melee or ranged attacks. "Complex skill system" NO. You have two minor bonus effects per skill. You can only have one and one of them is usually vastly better than the others (like it is with most "choices" in this game, only option gives you something useful). "Rich equipment system" A lie. You can either equip your best gear or not. "150 enemies with unique skills and tactics" They are all the same. Even the level bosses come at you like idiots and walk into your traps. All they do is get into the attack range and start spamming attacks and skills. The storytelling is worthless, repetitive fluff.
Summary: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. It takes out the raw prequel parts such as the paper-weak rune warriors and replaces them with stuff that works beefy companions that are helpful for a change instead of straight up dying. If you are new to the series, start w/ this one i.e. SF2 and SF 1&2 segment ranking by most fun: SF2SW > SF2DS >> SF1SotP > SF1OoD > SF1BoW Sounds: SF never had good audio. In SF2, the ear-splitting ambient thing is gone and you no longer have to switch of the sound effects. Graphics: grayish pastel, tends to swallow objects. Pretty even in LQ. Characters do comical fistpumps when they agree. Gameplay: feels very fun and is not SF1-style grind against hordes and massive clean-sweeps on every single map. The Westguard personal fiefdom sim was very fun. Time to beat: 100 h. Much less if you don't 100% (the extra content is the best part of the game, so skipping that is not beneficial.) The Dragon Storm expansion has a short campaign. Some people do not like the streamlined level-up system. The prequel system was basically "everyone besides a melee fighter blows" w/ a ton of non-viable options such as necromancy (no end game prowess), ranged (completely useless if someone melees you i.e. the most common scenario) or mages (cannot take objectives as only melee fighters can damage buildings). Besides pleasing some D&D character sheet purists, the SF1 point allocation system was much less fun, It's great that it's gone. Fixes to the sequel: 1. Quests don't fail easily anymore or punish for not save-scumming or reading a walkthrough. 2. The maps with endlessly respawning enemies are a rarity and often you are given NPC waves to counter-balance them. 3. It is very difficult to mess up a character now and the reliance on the randomly dropping items is greatly reduced. 4. Your troops no longer are a waste of resources. 5. The plot progresses smoothly instad of ten hours of fighting just to get to the next plot guy. And the list goes on. SF2 > SF1
Summary: DON'T BUY THIS. Otherwise instant regret guaranteed. This used to be a free goodie download. You can get both the game and the soundtrack for cheaper. This store item makes no economic sense and I fail to imagine a situation where buying it would be the best course of action or even beneficial. I own the original, moddable version of the game that has since been removed. Like with most old game releases, the soundtrack was one of the downloadable goodies. There is no new content in this release. It's like its only purpose is to trick newbie shoppers or HiFi snobs into buying the sountrack twice or sth. To review the content a bit, most of the soundtrack is unbearably weak. I am a fan of this synthetisized kind of music, yet I have to lie to praise the tracks. Most of the tracks are forgettable filler. The melodies are very simple and lack catchiness and original ideas to be memorable. Yes, in the beginning, they might sound decent, though you get bored of the few ones you might like. Most of the soundtrack are weak ambient tracks. That stuff you can get endlessly free from a bunch of places such as YouTube. It claims to be 320 Kbps. There is no mention of remastering, which could imply dirty re-encoding. Let's assume it's 320+ for funzies. Most human ears cannot tell a difference between post-192-kbs improvements. You could hear some difference from a distance with an amplifier-equipped stereo system on noise-complaint-loud volume levels or in a rave party. 99 % of the nerds playing this game are never going to hear the difference (read: less white noise or artifacts on high volume). 320 Kbps is the DJ quality. In practice, with low-volume and headphones, even 48 Kbps radio quality sounds fine and fits with the old graphical presentation. Overall, the more you listen to these tracks, the less you are going to like them. They are slow and drony and I doubt you want to pay a relatively hefty price for mediocre stuff worse than free alternatives.
Summary: For the anime fans that can either read Japanese or that do not mind watered-down translations & have tolerance for possible lack of balance. (Hakumen can do about 15 % damage with a basic, spammable Strong Attack.) Gameplay: 1. Very big hitboxes & some characters with uselessly short range moves. 2. Diagonal directions fail to register reliably with keyboard, though they do come out when trying to do something very different - a major newbie stumbling block. There are the one-button macros, though it is not the same & those don't work in ranked multiplayer. 3. It uses the Street Fighter style move priority tables to decide who hits who with simultaneous attacks. So basically even a faster jab can get ignored just because the game decides the other guy has a superior move. That and tons of incvincibility frame moves make the game look very stupid and feel unintuitive. For instance, you have Bang dashing through Hakumen's super long slashes. That gives the game a heavy rush-down focus. Even the biggest projectilist (Nu-13) has serious downsides (i.e. they are all situational) to its moves. Graphics: Brightly-colored comic book character graphics. Hit boxes tend to be bigger than the visible animation. Some similarities to SNK's KOF games, e.g. the menu engine is very similar to KOF XIII's. Story: GARBAGE. Too similar to the godawful FF 13 in style, with "quantum" technobabble and all. You are never told anything in a way to build intrigue. Instead you are kept in the dark and expodumped after the relevant moment is long gone. Sound: More melodic than GG. Plenty of heavy guitar riffs. Has ENG/JAP voices. English voices are bland and completely fail to express e.g. the insane energy of Nu-13 and Terumi. JAP-wise, Taokaka is probably the most well-devloped and developing character of the bunch. Overall, I would rather play most no-projectiles KOF games than this. No tech issues. Fighting, graphics, sound - it all feels mediocre and non-satisfactory.
NOTE: you need to replace kb.exe with a NO-DVD 1.7 version from GamesBurnWorld (1.7.35,234) to get past Upper Hadar. The default 1.7.34,387 is faulty. Copy & replace the file and you are set. This and the battle repetitiveness are the rare flaws in the game. Summary: STRONGLY RECOMMENDED. Gameplay: the real-time parts are particularly fun and the plot and the storytelling are competent. Graphics: superb animation and crisp art. Sound: a phenomenal soundtrack. One of the best I have heard. "Under the Shadow of the Oak" is a community favorite. Time to 100% it: 90 h Not gonna like this if: You fail to replace the faulty KB.EXE file OR you try to play it like HoMM AKA the creature meat-grinder. The creature reserves are mostly limited here (unless you use garbage hordes). Special mechanic: Spirits of Rage i.e. earned damage spells earned from withstanding and damaging enemy units. Pretty much like the Super moves in Street Fighter games. The "Time Back" reset move after a Sacrifice spell is crucial in replenishing the non-resurrectable, rare LVL 5 units. Quests: About 100 (a lot of them give you choices that affect the outcomes, generic kill quests are rare, most of them involve visiting places and sometimes fetching or picking up stuff, not repetitive and the rewards are decent) Overall, you can tell from the end result that the game got a lot of care and polish. Someone clearly cared about the product. The battle sections have some of the tabletop-RPG repetitiveness, though the map sections are pretty solid. Especially Demonis.
