If you are looking for a relaxed, casually slow gameplay experience, this game will absolutely ravish you and steal some cab money from you when it is done. Despite the tedious alien gameplay in 2160, this game is the most tedious one. There is a ton to do and the game gives zero hints about how to do them right. This is also the first game where the unit management became sluggish and irresponsive to the quick movement orders, effectively killing the point of skillful unit management. Overall, the graphics are okay, the battle music will haunt your nightmares and the whole game feels like a gainless grind. Playing through the Moon Project LC campaign was one of the most pointless playing experiences ever and the experience of the other two iterations is not any better. Get 2140 instead if you want to have fun or 2160 if you care about the plot or interesting campaign content. This game is ideal practice for South Korean pro players. The fun factor 1/10. Try some demo first.
Summary: a time-consuming RTS with decent-yet-worthless quests, that takes some of the worst MMORPG aspects and adds infuriatingly bad unit AI and controls. Imagine an RTS with no "stand ground" unit command with absolutely suicidal units and you have Spellforce. The "RPG" parts with the fully controllable avatar are solid, mostly because there is no unit AI to mess up everything. If you can get past the controls, there is a lot of stuff to go through and enjoy here. The two major pros of the game are tailor-made maps and quests. Warcraft III's maps look so boring and repetitive after this game and makes Diablo series-style quests look rubbish by giving them some depth and believable narrative. For example, "Amra and Lea" is super-long with many different kinds of tasks to complete. As a major con, the ambient bird sounds are ear-splittingly loud even in low volume. I had to disable sound effects (SFX) because of that. SF is one with great content potential that I cannot recommend. I spent 95 hours on the first campaign and the horde mode style gameplay on some levels got really old. Speaking of which, the worst one i.e. "Rift" is the level from the demo. That is from near the end of the game, which is quite a hardcore choice. You can try the demo to get a good idea about the game. The plot was an anti-plot and the ending was the worst one I have ever seen. A hint: nothing significant happens. That left a sour taste in my mouth.
Pros: good text lore, some of the gameplay and the FMV sequences. Cons: most of gameplay, broken sound & video playback and old school sadistic mission design. This is one of those old games where you are punished by not doing every single second exactly as the developers planned, against much superior enemy numbers and controls that need to be experienced to understand how much they handicap the player. For example, touching a bush will BUMP YOU BACKWARDS and you need to have WALKING MOMENTUM for the jetpack to take you anywhere besides directly up. Together the controls crippling you and the difficulty ramping up steeply already at Mission 3, the game lacks modern polish of any kind. Even the DosBox is choking with the game, turning sounds into screechy noise while it loads, no matter how many or how little cycles give it. The graphics fidelity also becomes a problem as you enemies are tiny blocks of random pixels at max range, though if you come closer, they will ravage you in few seconds. You have to endure bad controls, choking DosBox and pointlessly difficult missions. Oh yeah, this game has escort missions. With time limits. Against tons of mechs that outgun you with ease. I just described Mission 4. You need to decide if you really want to painstakingly trial-and-error through 30+ missions. You have been warned.
Summary: the SR 3/4 gameplay with much less fun and humour for 10 hours tops. You can probably 100% the game in 8.0 hours or one sitting. Of the characters, Gat is very dull besides his dual blade fist-fight moves and Kinzie gets annoying really fast. You don't want to hear "Gravity!" every time you glide around. The "flying across the sky" from SR4 is back, now with wings that introduce almost nothing new. There is no songs and most music is forgettable public domain and video game stuff. The DLC, btw not recommended, adds purple wings (you won't notice the difference) and a skull-shaped beam weapon that frankly sucks. The new activities are okay and the usual Fraud one has some narration added to it ( =an improvement). Also, the demon enemies do not take much damage from anything besides bazookas and super powers. I swear I emptied about 100 shots per enemy until a realized to do something else. So gameplay is the same collectable-chasing chore as in the last game, the music is non-existent (even the credits have no vocal songs), the story is slightly bigger than the non-story in SR4 and graphics are okay. Bottomline, I would not pay 15 bucks for a Saints Row game that did not make me, the mega-shill superfan, smile even once. I even LOL-ed during the stupid beginning of SR4 (gawd bless Oleg). The only funny line in the game was the call-back character Dex calling out the main characters for working for Uthor. I do not feel satisfied with the game experience. Oh, there were four song sequences BACK TO BACK and then nothing. The whole game feels slapped-together and is carried by its short cutscenes and activities. Because of the price point, buy any other Saints game before this one. I recommend Saints Row the Third. Even though SR2 runs worse than this game & is a glitchfest, it is still more bang for a buck. That way you'll get at least 30 to 50 hours of fun for the same price.
Bottomline, Saints Row 4 is a game stacked high with parody and humourous references and remarks. Considering that it takes about 30 - 40 hours to quickly go through the task content, that is a boatload of stuff enjoy. That is, if you get the references. Matrix, Transformers The Movie (1986) and a ton of video game references including EVERY SINGLE past Saints Row title. You even have new dialogue for Julius Little. Some parts lifted straight from the past titles, including the scene with Veteran Child holding Shaundi as a hostage. This time they wisely give you a stun gun to replace the original SR2 scene of THROWING GRENADES AT THE TWO PEOPLE to 'distract' them. The game has a lot of replicating content such as multiple driving sing-a-longs to mirror that one in the beginning of SR3. Gameplay-wise, there is not much driving in the game as you can now glide faster than the max speed of a sports car. The flipside is that to get those cool abilities, you need to collect a lot of collectibles to unlock them. Thus, there are two bad parts in the game: the mandatory collectibles (you need about 1000 of them for full unlocks) and Genki Holiday Special activity. The game reuses the SR3 map and characters. It is considerably more resource intensive than SR3 when played on the street level, though runs okay when gliding high above everything. I hijacked a car only a couple of times during the whole game. The radio music is off by default and instead there is soft synth background music. I noticed more scenario-specific tunes here than in SR3. Most side missions revolve around activities, so here activities are practically the side missions. The main story is quite short and the bulk of the tasks is activities. There is no repeat activities from SR3 besides Fraud, so they are pretty fresh. The two DLC missions are extensive, 3+6 missions. The longer Enter the Dominatrix is particularly good. E.g. one of the objectives involve caging furries at a club.
No, SR2 is not "the highlight of the series." For example, one of the activities (Insurance Fraud) did not even work. You had to hit the road before you could start getting points from the car collisions. SR3 fixed that and much more. For example, they removed the need to grind Respect to unlock story missions. Because nothing says "fun sandbox game" like shackling a player to complete partially unwinnable tasks with zero plot relevance or fun factor. I played through 2 and 3 back-to-back in a short time and it is clear that 3 is a vastly superior product. 2 I was hoping to end sooner and 3 felt like something I was left with deep satisfaction and a desire for more. As SR the Third aka SR3 is all about making the series into something original instead of milking that boring GTA formula to death, it is fair to stop comparing it to GTA... I mean SR2. With 3, Shaundi and Pierce seemed to have switched personalities and the main character completely changed. Now Pierce is easy-going one (though still the comedy object) and Shaundi is a serious wench all about taking rival gangs down. My main character was a slightly fat white woman with shades, ginger moustache and a Dracula accent that made most lines sound pretty hilarious. My favourite character is Zimos the autotuned pimp. The guy talking about his hos in a serious manner with a constant autotune on is some funny stuff. I bet this jokingly-serious tone of the game is what the SA'ers do not like as they expect the usual serious-serious tone. Even the beginning of the game is a joke about heist movies and even the shoot-outs are sidelined with constant talking, the lack of challenge and infinite ammo. Alright, enough with details. The games runs great with my budget 2012 laptop and looks decent even in LQ settings. The graphics are decent. The radio tracks are mediocre, though there are some decent mission-specific tracks. Voice acting is good. All tasks were doable and somewhat fun. DLCs are a bit... minimal.
In short, if you do not have at least the listed rec. specs i.e. 3 GHz Dual Core, the game will be borderline unplayable. If you have anything less than a 2014 budget laptop with an okay graphics chip, you are screwed. With 2.5 Ghz Intel dual core ( i5-4200U ) and a HD Graphics 4400 GPU chip, the game was 95% playable. I was still slightly underspecced. The practically mandatory Gentlemen of the Row seemed to greatly improve the handling to 90% of GTA 4 level and added tire-breaking and side sparks for collisions, though it does not fix a notorious control lock-up glitch (2 seconds every time) and random input dropping. The lock glitch makes any car chase and a racing mission a nightmare as the car simply won't turn and costs you your mission. There is no point in digging into the content if any of the previous points unless you can deal with those big unfixable glitches and extreme system reqs. Otherwise you are better off watching the story cutscene clips off of some video hosting site than trying to suffer through the game. The story in general is a GTA3+ rip-off: do missions and destroy other gangs until you are the top dog. The missions range from alright to brutally difficult. Most of the last level activities are intentionally impossible unless you break the game in some way, e.g. finding that unreachable spot in Zombie Uprising. At parts the game revels in making things pointlessly difficult. That "save Shaundi from Masako" mission was simply awful. Especially when the game has the extra glitch of randomly crashing when you drive too fast across the map sections, especially when driving in the lower parts. The sparsely-populated starting neigbourhoods never crashed that way. So you need to master pedantic saving to not lose progress. The respect system requires you to practically grind in order to unlock the next story mission. Okay, a summary of good and bad parts: great main character and the rest, the music and superior to GTA4. Bads: graphics on ATI.
I finished my 55 h, full playthrough of the game. It is a great content-wise, only the plot and some minor lore implications suck, especially if you know about Jewish mythology and make the connection Pisha=Pizna aka Lilith. Besides that lore black hole, the gameplay consists of most fun I have ever had with a video game besides The Saboteur. Bloodlines gives a much more pleasant and broader introduction to the VTM formula than Redemption did, though Redemption was more comprehensive in demonstrating the lore, e.g. different vampire types and their creations. In comparison, Redemption has multiple communities of Tzimisce for players to rampage through whereas Bloodlines had one Tzimisce mage named Andrei. Nevertheless, I would play Bloodlines 9 times out of 10 over Redemption as its gameplay is light years ahead. You aren't shackled to being a nice guy. Well, the game practically forced me to dump a ton of exp points into hacking, security aka lockpicking and persuasion and some other utility feats just to progress in the game, which is silly considering that the player is supposed to be a powerful 8th generation vampire. Only at the very end did I have spare points to dump into the stuff I actually wanted to have. I played UP 10.0 and there was only one gamebreaker bug: trying to melee an unkillable teleporter vamp (Hallowbrook Hotel) with a katana always made my game hang if that enemy scored a glitchy counter-hit right before teleporting. The voice acting is nothing special despite the big name casts, especially when compared to the situational hilarity of the character dialogue in messed up situations. For example, a totally-not-a-demon flesh-eater moralizing the player about the necessity of death. You see, that broad never wipes the blood juices off her face when he says that stuff. I digged the hammed-up acting e.g. the bum. The side quests are fun and at times the game rewards you for being a total d--k e.g. the cover girl quest. Act failed to kill the game.
I owned the original boxed version of this game. Getting sounds to work with that took some work and even then it would crash every couple of hours. I am definitely not a fan of that version. I tried it a for a couple of hours and registered no issues with sound, game speed or anything else. People comment that the AI was awful in this one, though I am pretty sure it was awful in the original one too and in RTS games in general (with Dark Reign being a notable exception). I did notice enemies attacking my base and all that jazz, so the complaints seem pretty outdated. The music tracks were the same as in the original release. I would notice as a couple of them are my all time favourites. I did not hear any new tracks, so I guess those ones do not play during the default campaigns. That's okay as they frankly suck. Overall, a very solid RTS with unorthodox units such as rocket + twin laser tank and a plasma bomber. No way a game with so many boring "destroy all enemy units" missions can get 5. Even 4 out of 5 is pushing it. The almost Red Alert level battle AI of at least some ED tank units (the ones with independent turrets) makes the game so much more fun and effortless to play for me, hence the above-average rating.
Summary: this game can crash abruptly at any time and also upon loading a save game and completing the mission, rendering the save game / effort completely useless. That is on the top of my mind when playing this game more than anything else: that it will crash. Aside from crash bugs, Amazon missions 4, 8 and 9 are if not completely broken extremely badly designed with extreme difficulty. This game looks like Settlers II and plays like a slightly less tedious Settlers III, e.g. no need for road planning and the military aspect is super simple: buy a soldier and you'll have one. The visuals are clearly inspired by Settlers II. The music is awful. Fortunately, the GOG version does not play the worst tracks, though the menu music is ear-raping cello fest that does not obey the volume settings! It even restarts every time you visit the menu (which you need to do to load a saved game). This game is much faster than Settlers, though it does not have any new content to add to the formula. The laziness of this publication is demonstrated by how similar its German name is to Settlers': Die Völker vs. Die Siedler. Despite the claims that the different races play differently, one insignificant trade commodity is the only difference between them. Bluntly put, the races are identical and play the same. When the game does not crash, it is an average experience at best. The missions are mercifully short except for the couple bungled ones. In longer sessions, it is painful. I am never going to touch this game again. In comparison to Settlers II, it is just a much faster form of pain. Definitely not recommended. P.S. The Amazon ending shows a topless Amazon lady. That came out of left field for me.
