NOT RECOMMENDED. It is nowhere as good as what it tries to imitate and has NONE of the charm of those commercial releases. Even Resident Evil Survivor, one of the worst games in its franchise, has a better game feel than this one. This game has zero essence and zero polish. B for graphics, D for everything else. Some music pieces get a C. This one reeks of rushing and no game testing done by customer-class users. In short, a long list of major annoyances and no draw for buying it. It feels like assets piled together to recreate something in well-designed games with none of the design and testing to make sure it works, make sense and is fun to use. The sad reality is that a game made with 1998 game industry standards is pretty bad. I would give this game leniency if it at least ran like a 1998 game, though with Unreal Engine 4 and not much optimizing, no dice. When it starts to lose frames, it starts frame skipping like crazy instead of slowing the game down. It will keep taxing your CPU hardcore even when paused, proving that the game squanders computing resources like crazy. An incomplete list of annoyances in this game: 1. Crashes often "Fatal error" 2. The game feels delayed, e.g. 0.5 seconds after shooting the zombie gore splashes and takes damage 3. The story is peak uninspired and disappointing 4. Prompts for picking up items and activating stuff doesn't appear until you are practically on them and you have to be exact, making them easy to miss. 5. Level design is the typical trite of rooms filled with inert prop trash you cannot do anything with and so generic you'll get lost. 6. Maps are not always available. 7. In the time attacks, you are supposed to be like a 1994 Doom player and tap Use key while testing every wall in the level for secret entrances hiding MANDATORY mission objective items. This stuff is common in mods, not in serious publications. 8. Inventory limits and management in 2019 - super annoying 9. Melee attacks miss all the time Etc.
NOT RECOMMENDED. It is not fun and there is barely any gameplay besides min-maxing some wine attribute numbers. The UI is mobile app simple, yet requires diligence, e.g. closing a pop-up screen by right-clicking on it, not just anywhere like in most games. Most of the content is text and numbers. There is a short in-game tutorial that encourages looking into a 30+ article text tutorial index. It's a major reading assignment of a game. The content is split between numerous small pop-up menus, meaning you get the micro-management feel even when you are doing the most basic stuff at the beginning of a playthrough. The worst part is that the game refuses to tell you the variety-specific optimal wine attribute numbers and tells you to "experiment" with it, basically wasting your batches of wine and gameplay time and encouraging save-scumming and cheat-sheeting the numbers from some wiki guide. The wine critics give you vague hints about the numbers, though it is turning the knife in the wound of failure. That is because apparently you do not unlock good stuff such as better wine critics unless you make perfect 5-star wine. The 30+ article in-game tutorial would be tolerable if it take itself like a game and also included humor. The game is a way too serious. It tries to replicate few real-life wine business aspects, yet is simplified to the point of not feeling real. It should have picked one of the extremes: to be a game or to be a book. The only good attempt at a hybrid is I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (mostly because of a decent story, okay but not great) and this one is nowhere that good. So you work as a wine producer and try to get a high score in Terroir. This is the 1980s level of goal quality. Because of its real-life basis, you cannot be creative in the game, it does not allow it. You might as well work IRL and earn money if this is what you like to do.
CONTROVERSIAL. This is the opposite of a bang for a buck. Buy World in Conflict or GC2 (haven't tried it yet) instead, they are from the same makers and probably better worth. The main game is pretty fun w/ the terrain utilization is particularly superb tactics-wise and you can find it for free as it was released to promote GC2 or something. The expansion, i.e. the "ground_control_expansion" in the URL that you are paying for here, is utter feces in quality. Grading wise, the base game is 4/5 ("fun") and the expansion 2/5 ("dull and torture"). BTW, even the "paid expansion" you could've got for free in if you mailed a receipt copy and covered the mailing costs, about 5.95 USD apparently. Here is a content summary of the expansion: -Plot: Killed characters turning out alive (used multiple times) -No ending, plot development or explanation whatsoever (GC2 ignores most of everything) -Missions: a bunch of non-inspired material destruction missions with the plot excuse of either collecting supplies for a never-mentioned purpose or hindering the operations of a forgettable antagonist -a couple barely functional stealth missions -most missions pit you against vastly superior numbers -the mission objectives lie, change and trap you all the time, making the game a colossal trial-and-error time-wasting festival -still no save function (oh you made a tiny mistake 45 minutes into the mission, e.g. the enemies killing something vital as the b-line on the key targets faster than you can theoretically micro your units) -no game speed controls - enjoy waiting the for the units with godawful path-finding queue-up and waste 5 minutes going somewhere while nothing is happening -The new merc units are terrible, the mini-mechs are interesting but not worth suffering the expansion over. -The gameplay plot amounts to wasting a couple expansion-only commanders and doing stuff only to quickly escape back to the drop ship. -Expansion missions have the challenge mission stench. Boring af.
TRY THE DEMO and WATCH THE PLOT CUTSCENES. The game is neither bad nor good and runs fine out of the box in Win 10 unlike SC1. Pick this one only if you really need to play a Supreme Commander game. It is not fun enough to earn a recommendation. I recommend playing C & C Red Alert 1. As the main selling point is the big scale and how exciting that is supposed to be (instead of the job it feels like), the game concept is FUBAR. The big scale only succeeds in diluting the impact and satisfaction of individual actions because you have to do them by the thousands and you are not given a choice to not make them unless you want to lose. Also the actions are very repetitive, making it difficult to have any sense of wonder. The unstable units movement (Commander unit spinning in place instead of doing something) and crashing are back from vanilla SC to a smaller effect this time. The sounds work this time, though ALT+TAB'ing leads to crashes and the speed controls do not work, despite being the same as in the previous games (not in campaign or skirmish). Videos and voice overs generally work. The story scripting is much better. For some reason, the settings option to remove the pointeless intro videos is absent, demonstrating the sideways improvement style very typical to the series. Units are much unlike the first game. The heavy point defenses added in SC 1 FA have turned the game into a tower defense where most units are trash in comparison, reminding me of SpellForce 1's godlike tower spam. Most units have been toned down in power, e.g. battleships more vulnerable to ships and the hulking Megalith has been toned down both in size and power, to the point player takes down two of them in level 1. Also, the Commander unit no longer can walk in the sea bed while engineers can, which means you have to taxi it around with transports as if it was underage for entering a pub. All these changes are clearly for the multiplayer balancing and make no sense in the game universe
NOT RECOMMENDED and CAVEAT EMPTOR. The vanilla game is a badly broken POS that not even die-hards like and Forged Alliance is a partial re-design fix that makes the game vastly less negative experience. In Windows 10, the game has serious issues and does not work properly. The vanilla version randomly hangs and is not stable. Because of the sheer amount of various technical issues with it, here is a list of them. 1. Hangs (vanilla game) 2. Some sounds not working (both, bg music and sfx work, VOs never) 3. Videos not working (FA, black screen instead) 4. Unit cap not visible (vanilla, a standard RTS feature for a reason, the "unit cap reached" sound does not play because of #2, buildings count towards unit cap) 5. Crucial commands not documented (C-K to destroy units, see #4) 6. Accurate unit movements not possible because e.g. a command to move forward / backward sometimes causes the unit to take a strange double-90-degree turn or a half circle to move two steps. The units lose firepower when they turn and trying mobile tactics in this game gets your army mangled in record time. 7. Builders assisting other builders will never show up as idle even if the assisted one is and is doing nothing. The so-so assist mechanic (guard / help build) is central in the game and makes the game significantly worse. Overall, units are made of paper and offer no satisfaction. I was told Supreme Commander was the particularly good RTS (well, the mission scripting is above average). Basically something on par with the RTS gold standard that is C & C Red Alert. Instead I am given something worse than Star Craft 1 (the path-finding is terrible and units get stuck). It was weird watching the units (mostly in vanilla) touch an obstacle and start bouncing against it like crazy. In FA, the unit formations stay boxed up better instead of the suicidal column ones. In vanilla, if you send your main army somewhere without baby-sitting, it is most likely dead by the next time you check on it.
RECOMMENDED unless bored to tears by FPS games. The enemy AI is the star of the game, though if shooting clever targets is not fun to you, skip this one. The story content and the marketed horror are not very good and make zero sense. For example, a minute into the game, player's team mates get violently "peeled" and then a whole lot of nothing. Every rescue and escort mission fails in the similar fashion. You put in hours and hours to recover and escort a supposed key-person, only to find it in a crimson pool. This happens many all the times, to the point in Extraction Point, everyone in the city including the player end up dying. Overall, the gameplay is very repetitive shooting of the same spec ops troops quite like Half-Life's grunt over and over again. The recoil is a bit excessive as you have to make headshots to avoid bullet-sponging the enemies to a ridiculous extent. F.E.A.R. simulates body armor and weapon caliber very diligently, meaning that hits tend to ricochet off and do zero damage (showing blue sparks) unless you score a headshot. The high recoil makes that very difficult to do with most guns and even the first shots tend to not go where you point them at even though recoil should only apply from the second shot on in real life. Not fun. Also, the shotgun magically misses all the time if there is any objects near the enemy - the object absorbs everything. This game was clearly inspired by Half-Life as demonstrated by the out-of-place vending machines and microwave ovens. It in turn inspired a lot of cheap horror titles that replicated its repeated hallway gags numerous of times. The dream sequences are identical to the ones later used in Metro 2033, especially the Hunter ones. F.E.A.R. also references a ton of movies such as Grudge (Alma's looks) and Jacob's Ladder (the usual out-of-place wheelchairs). The best part of the game: Perseus Mandate up until Chen dies. Extraction Point is outright lame and the base game is pretty meh in comparison.
NOTE: the high-resolution support is a lie. Anything higher than 800x600 in "Fake fullscreen" produces those crashing Visual C++ assert errors. Line 152 in list.h, if you are interested. NOT RECOMMENDED / CHECK YOUR REFUND OPTIONS IN ADVANCE. Grave technical errors, high pricing and low content (mostly the dragon gameplay) with annoying, contextually out-of-place sexual and identity politics (of the two female characters, one is a hardcore feminist and the other is flaming lesbian most conserned about gay rights). The gameplay is forgettable. The RTS battles are either quick rushes or stalling until you can get your dragon out and crush the enemy. After you have blasted your first enemy with a fireball, you have seen the game. The RTS part is something that have been done much better in other games and it is uninspredly soulless in this one. The problem is that you cannot give accurate and specific commands while you are the dragon and the unit AI is very suicidal. You have a vastly inferior version of the Total War style world map with troops as casino chips. The whole campaign lasts only three maps, followed by a non-ending that only arouses regret of wasting time on such an anti-climactic game. The off-battle segments are pointless and mostly involve managing race relation percentages. Percentages do not really matter that much. The generals sometimes let you make a fake dialog choice (the wrong choice is an easy-to-spot "FU I got mine" one) where picking the intended one out of the two eventually gives the general extra combat abilities. You are supposed to let the lesbian chick get her gay rights, the feminist to get her way as if your emperor status was a joke and the males a chance to learn to apologize for their manliness. The queen / wife thing is purely a race relation factor with a pointless quest and afterwards she has zero function. Do not buy this game.
NOT RECOMMENDED. If you want a game that is easy and fun, skip Omicron. The theme is good, the implementation across the board REALLY BAD. The controls are some of the worst I have ever experienced, calling them stiff would be a major praise. The game randomly hangs, showing how the modern systems version is held together with flimsy hacks. But most importantly, the game is actually an adventure game, where your progress can be halted at any point by the vaguest hint not making any sense or not finding the secret compartment inside a secret compartment. This one is a puzzle game of the most arduous variety. And yes, there are recurring places like Jaunpur that are mazes. This game has all the worst crap a 1990s ultra-masochistic player would ever want. They found a way to F up the action button mechanic from Doom (1993) by making the activation range pixel specific and with a range close to zero. The other sections, fighting (w/ super non-responsive controls) and shooting (you bullets go through enemies while enemies never miss and hit you through walls). Despite being an interactive video game, most of the content is communicated through text. It is pretty clear the source material is a book. The devs did not quite understand that you cannot adapt a book into a game by cramming text into it. Oh and do not expect the game to tell you what to do next and how to do basic things like healing. It is as if it on one hand tries to not break the fourth wall by telling players to heal up by buying medikits from a drug store. On the other hand, it tells you that your character is a soul of video game player (subtle, eh). As a result, you have a very cryptic game that refuses to tell you clearly how it works and what you should do. E.g. that you should reincarnate often as every new body has new unique items and apartment keys to add into player's inventory. Or Sneak as the game tries to call it in-game (in the TAB menu it is called 'inventory', how pointless). Skip it.
NOT RECOMMENDED / PASS THE GAS. It is two games that are game-dev-wise super raw and not-there-yet, couched with some Lance Boyle FMV, Chances are you are going to like neither one of them. Go play some freeware Death Rally instead, that's how you make a driving game with guns. Megarace 1 relies on map memorization, pixel perfect road bonus collection and deleting your progress if you fail once, no continuing. Megarace 2 requires figuring out how to buy more ammo (I never did), somehow not die when one of the opponents starts laying mines in a narrow one-lane road in your face and not getting bored by the multiple repeats of same stages for no good reason. Also, no continuing whatsoever. Crash once and you will have to grind through the levels from the beginning. The controls are beyond floaty, especially in MR2. Do not buy this for the gameplay because it is not worth it. Seen better stuff in flimsy Flash games. Neither of the games communicate what their control schemes are and they are different between the "games." Space Bar shoots in both, , and - (MR1) / left and right arrow for steering and A (MR1) and up arrow for accelerating. The Lance Boyle humor gets progressively worse with the games, starting with "wow cool" and ending up with "for the love of the makers, please stop" by the beginning of the second game.
NOT RECOMMENDED. All of the content in the game will take a back seat as you will only remember the tedious base building. The UI is horrendously clunky and game has aged extremely poorly. It runs on modern systems, though there are too many better ones made before and after it. It has the soulless copycat feel, meaning the implemented features are at most a half as good and none as fun as they were in the source product the ideas were taken from. I have given this one multiple chances and it was not worth trying. (What is the gameplay value of doing the exact same stuff in every level 5 to 30 minutes at the beginning before you can make the slight navigational adjustments to beat the level at hand?) This game is work and none of the gameplay mechanics contribute to making the game more fun, rather than adding more optimal playing detail you have to grasp unless you like losing. Its challenge is mostly about adding more enemy units for you to deal with. If you have played any fantasy RTS games like Warcraft II, you have already seen this game. The original title was considered mediocre back in the day and this title has even lazier content as the party campaigns are missing. The "imperial crown" one here with dull "destroy all enemies" missions does not hold a candle for the any one of those and makes this release seem quickly-slapped-together in comparison. The story is an afterthought. This is one of the games where instead of upscaling the resolution in fullscreen, it adds black space and you'll see the tiny original resolution as it would look in your screen's native resolution. This could be one of those "fixed-resolution" games. If you have a 4k native monitor, the game could be in such a small box you'll have a hard time telling what is on the screen. It was made in the era where 1024x768 was considered high-res. CAVEAT EMPTOR.
