AN ACQUIRED TASTE - you need nostalgic feelings AND extreme glitch tolerance to like this version of the game. The game has godlike weapon selection such as wire traps and the street-sweeping champion Nuclear Grenade that enable numerous different ways to beat the levels. It also has godawful controls, e.g. a mouse aim requiring pixel-perfection to hit things, unable to select specific squad members without black magic, a super common glitch with picking multi-quantity items (seems like an bug in the max items check) and unability to get selected agents to shoot reliably. You have four agents, though they usually end up in a box or a line formation, meaning that the dudes in the back often fail to range and sight the enemy. Very often you will have your controlled dude shooting and the rest doing barely anything. You should never try to fix that by getting closer to the targets as that is a fast way to get your squad killed. Even though your dudes can tank like a Sherman tank, that is not much as the biggest issue is getting stunlocked by continuous enemy firepower. Whatever your strat is, it will incorporate lots of running and not getting caught. Enemies, too, are tanks. Please try the Vexilium "PC source port" because the the out-of-the-box DOSBox one has serious issues with regular game-breaking glitches. It is most likely related to the Magic Carpet 3D engine and how it was stretched from the parallel development project Dungeon Keeper to accommodate this game too. More difficult than S+. Most of the glitches and hangs reek of variable overflow issues, e.g. the mouse pointer getting permanently stuck to the left edge of the screen that can be remedied beforehand by moving the pointer to the left side, as if causing the horizontal screen location variable to properly reset to zero. These glitches become more common in later levels with a lot of objects, implying an engine issue. There was one hang when a turret was blown up by an particle-intensive rocket.
NOT RECOMMENDED. You are supposed to escort the suicidal followers to the finish line in order to keep getting upgrades that will make the later missions slightly less like torment. IT is not easy, more like the extreme opposite of fun. I have no idea who this game is for. The level 4-4 is bad enough alone to lower the rating of the game down to 2/5 - you are practically at the mercy of pure RNG there. The stupidest part is how the ranged shooters cause more damage and take vastly more beating to silence, than the armored riot policemen. I do not have the patience to itemize the flaws further - it is that much pure suffering to actually play and is very frustrating (i.e. do not play this if you have depressive issues, your issues are likely to worsen). I noticed slight performance issues with the level ending and starting transitions, nothing game-breaking. Regarding to the 2-player support: yeah, multiplayer is always better in any game. This not a game I would subject my contacts to and expect the relation not to worsen. You are better off with a better game for it such as Door Kickers and even Expendable. I have seen the end and know there is no point in giving this game a chance - there is nothing at the end of the rainbow except a survival mode with more idiot escort suffering. Speaking of Suffering, it is another game more worthy of your hard-earner mula.
STRONGLY RECOMMENDED. The character design and the scripting alone is enough value to play the game. The Silk engine runs amazingly well for a 2013 game and looks decent even in LQ settings. No bugs or glitches whatsoever. It has a lot of things like crafting and the Ass Creed fighting system in simplified forms. The quests are repetitious and the rewards besides experience are quite worthless, though extra content nonetheless. To unlock all the quests, you practically need a walkthrough to do the right menu choices. Those choices make no sense. For example, to unlock the two seperate quests, you need to kill a dude who merely refused to pay for his hookers and you need to SPARE A SERIAL KILLER (so that you can kill him later). It is extremely pleasant to play the main quest content if you do not spend too much time on the fighting. The content is only for three chapters, though there is plenty of progress feel and major plot points happen constantly. The main character Roy and the bounty hunter Tenacity have particularly good dialogue.
RECOMMENDED. It runs smoothly, the end goal is well established and you are given the guns to deal with the obstacles. You should give the game a chance, it has a lot of cool factor in it because of how well the horror setting is established with situational music and it puts the old and slow Nosferatu films into a real time tempo. It is not too long, you can beat it in a day. Any longer and the game would turn into a repetitive drag. The bad parts: 1) respawning enemies - Every time you leave a room, there is a random chance to spawn an enemy into your current room and its spawn point can be next to you. This is bad because the enemies are fast, hit hard and do mostly melee damage. This is irritating as hell. Once you start getting plenty of firearm ammo, you can delete them fast, even without the broken-tier-effective machine gun. 2) Enemies in general - There is no reward for killing enemies, though you have to do it because they will get you from 100 to 0 fast if you try to ignore them, even the least powerful dogs. The only good thing about them is that they do not attack the escorts that are following you. You cannot hit stun enemies - if they are close enough to hit you, they will eventually start hitting you, even if you seemingly hit-stun them - the damage happens regardless of whether the strike animation plays or not. The jumping ones are worst as the damage always happens before the animation plays. The animation issues make reading the enemies not very fun or useful as it makes little realistic sense. 3) It is a rush game where you have to save your dudes before their elimination times happen. In practice, this means you will have to quickly blow through the enemies and collect stuff to not be late. You cannot have too much fun with this game, it is work. 4) The procedural level generation sucks. It reuses the same room layouts so often you'll be locatinally confused when you arrive into the third identical room. Also, maps tend towards maze-like.
IT IS A BRITISH THING. You have probably seen everything after a couple of argument matches and it gets repetitive. It is a practically madlibs with a super-limited word selection and a strict grammar requirement, making up sentences in chunks. E.g. your mother + is deceased + and + has never seen Star Wars. This implementation eliminates the fun imaginative part of madlibs of coming up with stupid words and stupid meanings. You cannot form anything high brow or clever (double entendres, satire) with a pre-selected word set and the given words are barely applicable to one other. Very often the word selection is so terrible, you are forced to make arguments "your math teacher was born in you, sir." The good parts are the British accents of various unlockable characters that read your awkward argument aloud and the brief party game / surprise-a-friend potential. The game is simple and situational in its use as there is not much there to play without getting bored. I would rather play conventional madlibs and make up my own goofy sentences without any vocabulary or grammar limits.
NOT RECOMMENDED. I have yet to successfully reach the main menu of the game. The loading screen animates for a while and then a random crash, input irresponsiveness or random Win10 processes (net1.exe) start crashing, probably because of how resource-starving these Unity processes tend to be. The aftermath of the crash leaves also other programs in a inresponsive state, requiring them to be restarted. Specifically the GOG Galaxy client. Not worth the massive trouble and data loss risk in its current state.
AVOID THIS INCOMPLETE PRODUCT. Too many crashes and runs the system hotter than coal. Try the demo first to make sure it does not crash with your system AND that it runs tolerably. It reeks of an untested product. Expect a game that is all the worst kinds of a lazy PC port. The game was clearly primarily made for other platforms (Switch, PS4, X1). You can tell this by how much it relies on pre-loading and loading screens. First time, it crashed in the menu loading screen. After that it kept crashing at the campaign loading screen. The errors were about D3D11 OGRE and device errors. The CPU and GPU are decent and I only have these problems with crappy "for modern systems" remakes and games made by junior developers' products. The FPS in the main menu was 1 to 2, i.e. total garbage, barely usable. If you cannot make a basic main menu that does not lag, F**K YOUR GAME. Lowering the details in the menus does nothing to the performance and you are not allowed to change the resolution i.e. the main performance factor. This resolution restriction and the lack of genuine LQ graphics options tend to be a growing trend. The crashing is clearly tied to flawed graphics programming, according to the error messages. Cannot give a favorable review the game refuses to let me play it. Letting people play the games they buy would help the sales and the refunds.
NOT RECOMMENDED. In short, trying to have a tiny bit of fun and not focus on every single button press 100 % all the time, will get you killed. Most of the content is either busywork gathering resources, fighting random encounters until the game decides to open up the next place in the list to fight random encounters at and eventually boss fights that are essentially random encounters with pointless dialogue. Aside from jokes about putting root veggies up your bum, there is nothing unique or interesting there gameplay-wise, except for the bad UI design and basic fighting moves requiring MAGIC POINTS. Skip this game, it is raw as hell and it is very clear the gameplay is padded with the killing of the player. Because of the massive amount of busywork progressing in the game involves, losing progress as intended upon death is anti-fun. Pressing a wrong button, among many other things, wastes your turn and / or harms you. The advertised "HUNDREDS of hours of immersive RPG gameplay" are 90 % of wasted hours because the game kills you and you have to re-grind everything again. It kills you a lot, mostly by a whole slew of intentional beginner traps. The most annoyingly parts are the messed up way the game handles status ailments and the move-rage-MP mechanic. The only way to cure 'cursed' is to waste your turn using up limited heals while the enemy is free to give you the ailment immediately back with damage along with other ailments. Any risks you can take may end up being lethal, e.g. traps that leave you with 1 HP. In a game with permadeath. Oh and the benefits of dying, i.e. the whole point of these roguelites to offset the annoyance of dying, is usually NOTHING. Keep in mind the game expects you to book-keep how much MP you have and requires you to constantly use "reposition" moves to have MP to not deadlocked and able to do nothing because of lack MP and the MP-generation-crippling Wound-ailment. Enemies generate multiple ailments for you all the time.
THIS S**T DOES NOT EVEN WORK! I got the dark blank screen with the CPU heating up enough to boil water. The cursor was visble. These recent demos made with Unity do the exact same thing with high likelyhood, e.g. the Vagrus one earlier. It is usually these 3D Unity games that have under-performance and over-heating issues. I have noticed that engines that try to reserve and 100 % utilize multiple CPU cores at once, have the heating but not necessarily the underperformance problems, e.g. Tomb Raider 2017. Smart engines skip enough visual frames to maintain smooth FPS and things generally work. This has all to do with Unity engine's 3D functionality and a lack of optimization by cutting excessive processing. Game developers these days should put more effort into testing and understanding their tools to eliminate this kind of run-time issues.
DO NOT BUY - get the original version or even the demo instead. The remake is one of those awful emulate-and-upscale cash-ins that offer nothing you want extra and ups the system requirements at least tenfold. In practice, a game that you could perfectly run with a single-core CPU, this version manages barely 10 frames per second on a quadcore one. You cannot change the resolution in the game. When the game lags, it prioritizes graphics over input (read: an absolute no-no implementation) and causes input drops. Content-wise, it is inferior to the demo because the rocket mission in it is infinitely better than anything in the final game and the levels feel hollow and repetitive as hell. If you want a good game involving killing viruses, try Darwinia demo or Creeper World browser games, especially Creeper World 2: Academy. The game feel is much better there, as in Darwinia various dynamics and UI turn out to be shoddily made, e.g. you have to change the weapon of Squad every single time individually. Overall, whole game is super clunky and janky and I am happy to be eternally done with it. Yes, the ending and the story are worse than nothing - the usual poetic stuff that goes nowhere and never develops. The demo version gets two extra stars - good vs. the barely functional and technically worsened full game.
