GOG AS/ZS games from worst to best: AS1 (beyond buggy) << ZS2 ("if AS2 was phoned in") < AS2 << AS ZS1 Summary: NOT RECOMMENDED. It's an inferior, half-hearted copy of Alien Shooter 2. Not worth playing if you have AS2. Overall, this game is boring and feels padded all the way through. The player is in no point given a substantial reason to care. Unless you get fetch quests for stuff like maps and parts rivetting content. I DON'T, because that was already old and lame in the 1990s. No sympathy for a 2009 game doing that. The game starts as a pretty good zombie-gunning game, though it quickly becomes garbage experience when tons of SHOOTING "zombies" are added in. As you cannot really dodge dozens of enemies firing at least semi-homing attacks at you, the fun factor takes a dive because of the cheapness. The shooting range is so long that you are often shot by off-screen enemies, which you most often cannot shoot back at. Even if you survive the cheapness, there is no plot, clever level design or any other content to hold your interest. The whole plot is a copy of Save Princes Peach i.e. nothing. Those shooting things can kill you in less than a second unless you put your stat points into health. "On rails" is the best way to describe the game. You do not have any creative choice beyond whether or not you should use cheats and even that is a no-brainer "YES" if you value your time (type cheatm/h etc. for cash and stuff). The game is pretty much a copy of AS2 and seems to use a similar game engine. It feels like this game was made primarily to get more bang out of that engine and being largely an afterthought. It has the same vehicle sections, the MAGNA lab levels and equipment as in AS2 i.e. it's a recycled-assets galore. If you have played AS2, the only thing new to you is the graphics. The music is the biggest positive, in that it isn't the crappy OST from AS1. Still, it is worse than the one in AS1.
NOTE: this "Reloaded" version is a gutted version of the original Alien Shooter 2: Vengeance. The less music and the cutting of co-op campaign and multiplayer really hurt the offering. Also, it does not include the Conscription stand-alone expansion. There is no legal way to get the old version. In co-op, it could be a 4.5 / 5.0 game. Summary: The game starts as a well-designed, well-paced survival quest game, though after a couple of missions, degrades into mediocre, long slogfests that cover only one quest and last over 70 % of the playthrough. After you hit the latter part, the game becomes progressively more not-worth-playing. Graphics would be phenomenal, though the light colouring of monsters and backgrounds makes it very diffcult to easily spot enemies. Add in the pointless lighting busy-work with flare gun in order to hit anything and even the graphics become a drag. Despite 3D, the devs still did not make walls transparent, so you are basically blind to anything coming through narrow corridors or near the bottom and right-hand side walls. Fortunately, a lot of the levels are wide enough to minize the blindness. Music sucks in general and is mostly recycled from the first Alien Shooter. It uses the same annoying e-guitar track for action that is eerily similar to PS1 VIP Theme, i.e. is very awful. The original release had more music tracks. Levels are properly short in the beginning and gruesomely long in the end, with multiple segments. They are also littered with tough enemies, which start insta-spawning all over you at the later levels. That is pretty much going to kill you for sure or at least use a lot of your health packs unless you have end-game Ion Cannon, which most of the time it happens, YOU DON'T. Cheap AF. The devs fell back to their petty AS1 tricks such as insanely tough regular enemies shooting infinite range homing missiles and the acid spitters creating 5-ticks-per-second spots that last a long time. F this game. All about grinding.
Summary: Not RECOMMENDED. It has every single kind of bug out there and also the unique insta-crash-every-time-you-die bug. More importantly, it has a minigun that does not hit point-blank objects UNLESS YOU AIM FOR THEM. That is enough reasons to not touch the game with a ten-foot pole. Not even on sale. Expansions are lame and are generic harder-mode reruns. Simply, having just played through the whole content, DON'T BUY THIS. It's a game concept fresh for one level, stretched out to ten levels and something like six per expansion times two. There are so many things wrong with the game it is difficult to choose. The Orange Rhino enemies. Dear mother of Russia. Imagine an enemy with a practically auto-hit cannon that can shred in no time even with max health. Then add sick amounts of hit points to that thing and put a lot of them in the game. I have tested that you can shoot that thing with a pistol for minutes without coming even close to taking it down. Here's the fun part: the 2nd strongest weapon (flamey) is short-range i.e. completely useless against the dude. Alien spit that lasts for almost 10 seconds that is quick to kill you. You can have 100 health, walk out of a door with 20 stacks of alien spit and instantly die. Bonuses that do not last long enough for you to collect them. The horde will push you back and prevent you picking up anything, causing you to run out of ammo. Once you only have the first three guns, it's over. Instead of struggling, cheat yourself some cash, weapons and ammo cheatm/w/a and enjoy the hollow experience the game even at its best is. Only becomes casual fun (instead of old-granny-pace risk-management simulator) once you load yourself up with cheats such as super health cheath and tons of ammo cheata . All expansions do is add levels with even more enemies at once, no new content whatsoever except a couple token new monsters in Experiment.
Synopsis: Feels like an extended-budget browser game, in the way you can finish it in six hours and be completely done with it. It gets extremely repetitive, especially with the bug the crashes the game when you die of an enemy projectile and forces restarts. Main focus of the game: gameplay, music. Least focused parts: replayability. (Those two extra modes are more of the same.) To be fair, the devs tried to keep it fresh by having about 10 varied maps that get painted with gore of the gunned down foes. No, they do not disappear, unlike foe-dropped power-ups. Despite the pretty cool gorescape screenshots, you most likely do not want to play the maps again as there is next to nothing to discover, except for some hidden weapon upgrades that you also can buy from the store. Weigh carefully how much you want to pay for a single playthrough. The gameplay might look great at the beginning, though the novelty of gunning down enemies completely wears off about halfway through when the game starts to ramp up the amount of enemies on a map. At that point, you simply cannot take them on normally and use screen-moving rationing tactics to kill them little by little, even on Easy. Enemies tend to get weird movement speed boosts when they are clustered together in large quantities, which is double death for the player. That's much unlike the trailer-shown "gun-down everything" action. Oh yeah, the bugs. Although the game has a life system, the chances are you are going to have your game crash right when you die. There was one time in the game it did not crash. That was when I was killed by an objective bomb. The music is great and changes according to the situation.
Summary: a fantasy RTS built to emphasize careful microing of few units with crash-prone game engine w/ bad microing controls and terrible unit AI. The campaign is very well designed in that destroying enemy bases is not the-only-and-repeated mission objective. The narration is very DnD-like and the bestiary selection is very unconventional -- no orcs, goblins or kobolds here and a plenty of lizardmen and dark elves. The incorporated Eberron setting can be summarized with "golems and dragons." They seem most useful at destroying. Oh and the bugs. They are completely random, most common on complex maps and of the type "Unhandled Exeption" crashes. Basically the devs did not make the engine very error resilient. An epitome of under-designed. The music is above average. Neither annoying nor memorable. Rating: It's clearly superior to WC3 especially with the campaign design, +1. Has serious bugs. -1 It has no significant creative aspect or huge fun factor, not torturous. 0 It's average 3/5. I have Intel GPU, maybe it works with more or less bugs on something else. Traits: AI Army Hard Focuses on the First Frontline Unit All About Quests Broken Quests Different Quests for Different Characters DnD in Minimal RTS Clothes Everybody Kills Grim Reaper Gold Gets Rare Fast Hidden Quests Impossible to Select a Grouped Unit w/o the Group It's Raining Dragonshards Meaningless Campaign Conclusion No Death Save Against a Beholder No Sense of Achievement Replayable Quests Temptations of Having a Healer Army Underground Chest Gold Economy Units Get Stuck with Unit and Building Objects Where the Hell Are the Keyboard Shortcuts?
Summary: buy if you want a Spyro or Sonic '06 style game with the full focus on searching and acquiring enough collectables to unlock the next game segment and while keeping 1) a walkthrough, 2) the game manual and 3) the super vital game map open on separate tabs. Even with that optimal setup, it is likely to take well over 30 hours to beat this very arduous game. Caveat emptor. Vastly improved games of this genre have been made after 1999. Awards: Aimers Cannot Be Movers Amusing Accents Back Away and Shoot Charging Shots with Diminishing Returns Endless Path Forks Enemies Only There to Slow You Down Every Corridor Looks the Same Everyone Can Kill You Fast Travel But Not Quite There Features Dark Souls Garbage Auto-Aim Gatekeeper Trope Supreme God-Tier Polish Gore Galore Got Lost on the Second Level Gun Shots Ringing inside Your Skull Inverted Aiming & Swimming Up-Down Axis Controls It Is All about Collectables Killing Blow Mechanic Long-Ass Villain Levels Mind-Meltingly Torturous Ambient Tracks Minimal Texture Variety Budget No Bugs No Change as the Good Ending No in-Game Map Resetting Audio Volume Levels Spiral Maze Maps Stiff Controls Survives Task Switching The First You See Is Usually the Last You Can Get to Unlockable Big Head Mode Widescreen Cuts the Legs
Traits: Graphics: ok. Music: slightly impressive. Gameplay: repetitive & dull. Challenge: cheating, aggressive CPU opponents & staying awake. Content: 8 repetitive campaign missions, downhill mission quality. 4 parties. Technical issues: 1) a rare hang-bug during turn-changes, 2) cheat codes besides map reveal not working False marketing: "A unique gameplay style and interesting story set in the famous Might and Magic universe" FALSE - it references things like Eye of Goros while doing zilch, nada, NOTHING with them. The story itself is about take-over-the-world. I do not remember the part in M&M where you command hordes of gargoyles and ogres to slay knights and paladins and subjugate human towns to the forces of evil. French distributors such as Ubisoft are not to be trusted. Recommendation: SKIP. Buy HoMM 3 instead. Please. HoMM 1 & 2 are abortions of 3. This one is highly similar with no advantages over 3. Fan-made HoMM 3 content > all HoMM 1 or 2 retail content. Even if you got this one for free, 3 would still be more bang for your time. Just look at this game's feature listing: basically "that game from 1995, buy it, you game-collecting suckers."
In short, the the story-telling works, though the actual gameplay is uninspired, 3rd-person challenge, 1980s-era-bland missions that are basically tower defense except you have to kill everything by hand and on foot. It is a hack-and-slash with all of the genre weaknesses without any sense of progress. Even the strongest part i.e. the story can be summarized with "kill wolves until the plot lady is cured." What a hollow experience. Not recommended. If you get an error about failed disk write / access, enable the "run as admin" function. The Loading screen lasts a long time even when it works, no need to worry about it. To be honest, I would rather have a game about felling trees than this one. It felt like a stressful project at times. That might explain the lack of fun factor. Even the ending is super stale.
To get it work: copy the game out of the Program Files directory. To avoid crashing in-game: avoid using square select or touching the edges of the game screen. It crashes significantly less with 4:3 resolutions. Before the review, here is why it crashes upon startup: since Win XP (before which the game published), the writing permissions in the default Program Files directories have become stricter every Windows release and the game is probably not coded to acquire them. Copy it to something like C:\games\Corsairs Gold and it will start working. It will still crash if you start it from the launcher .exe, so run it from corsairs.exe to avoid that. Review synopsis: major technical issues hide gameplay worthy of being called the most terrible Pirates! clone out there, with cheating CPU to boot. Only for masochists. Basically, as soon as you take one enemy port town, that enemy will absolutely flood you with ships no way it could afford if it played with the same rules as the player. In practice, 150k gold is big money and enough to buy the biggest military ship in the game (Frigate), yet almost every single ship I board has that much and more on it. Where this gold is coming from is a mystery as I have not seen the enemy trade much in the game. The second you attack enemy as per your mission orders, you are flooded with unmanageable amounts of enemy ships even at 10% of normal speed, i.e. crawling. Because of the ton of micromanagement required to individually replenish every single ship's hull condition and sailors, even that crawl speed is too fast. The UI is not very helpful with this and makes things super slow. Yes, every single ship has its individual cash balance, another thing needed to micromanage. The worst part to micro is the godawful path-finding and the way ships get stuck into one other and fail to pass slower ships (instead they shift and turn infinitely behind the slower one). All this while the enemy is perfectly micro'd and never gets stuck.
Summary: missions are varied and fun to play exactly ONCE. The music is top-notch, something to play in your car. The game design kneecaps a lot of good parts in the game. E.g. not giving you enough credits to buy stuff and not putting the needed items on sale in the first place. The game runs very smoothly, unlike the two sequels. Possibly the best entry point into the series. The late missions are less fun -- more demanding and less new and intresting, the final boss being outright stupid and uninteresting. If you like restricted map-based games, this is the best of the series. If you want to (arduously and slowy) travel intrasystem, pick SW3 instead. SW2 is a worst-of-two-worlds kind of deal. Honestly, the most fitting reason to buy and play this game is to be able to listen to its soundtrack. SW3 has a couple of particularly cool tracks and SW2 has ton of weird funky ones, though their average quality level is low. The soundtrack will outlast the ultimately repetitive gameplay. Basically, what you do in the game is destroy stuff to get credits and sellable junk to get bigger guns to destroy even more and faster. It has paper-thin variety in the big picture. You do get chances to argue with characters, though 90% of the time it will backfire horribly and cause you trouble, so it is not worth it. I have played both the endings. With MSF aka Empire, you steal a Star Crusher-- Hammer and destroy a star to wipe out AI capital ship fleet along with an entire system by blowing up its sun. WIth corporates, you steal the hammer, the corporations first pay you, then 5 sec later try to assassinate you and only then the AI nemesis comes for your humankind. The game tries to be about simplified fleet command with plot, though it fails horribly with the plot. Despite being probably the best entry of the series, it still is not something you just cannot wait to play. It is one of those games you gift someone to mindf**k them. An accident game. Hope it is a happy one.
