NOT RECOMMENDED. The units are made of rice paper and the CPU can send a constant stream of units w/o management issues, which it constantly does. A lot of non-responsiveness with unit commands and units constantly moving out of their positions on their own in the presence of enemies. The Seeking Attack only works in games like Myth where it is tied to user commands AND the unit quantity is limited. Keeping the units alive is impossible because they never stand still and if explicitly told to stand ground, they lose the last 1 % of their usefulness. This game is very, very badly designed. The only ways to win in games like this is to glitch or to spam more than the enemy (which you won't because the CPU will always outspam you). Glitching gameplay makes the bad design even more annoying, because it forces the same boring gameplay routine over and over again. It is a Russian RTS alright. I felt so sick playing this one I started getting Horde II flashbacks (it is another terrible Russian RTS). In short, it pretty much expects you to micro every single unit you have and to manage your economy, all this at the same time. Because of the bad unit AI, no matter how much you stack units defensively, they will get wiped if you don't baby-sit them all the time. This is largely because the unit quantity is high and your units do not concentrate their attacks at all, eliminating most of the benefits of superior numbers. It sux, don't try to endure it.
STRONGLY RECOMMENDED. The first game was a great game and this one is a graceful content upgrade with a brand new campaign that continues the original one. It is the same sandbox comic book hero engine, with the same bugs as the original had, with most of the major glitches painted over.E.g. prestige-farming and "teveryone" power-ups are no longer possible. There are new heroes and they are pretty solid. Tombstone ends up being almost as powerful as Maowar. Green Genie is pretty nice. Most old heroes you have almost from the beginning with already a lot of points to offset the shortness of the campaign (blew through it in 9 h). This one does not have any filler unlike the original that also had levels that often were 3+ maps -- a way too long. There should be a lot of modded content for the game. The sequel expands the modding assets, so if you want to play custom games, you probably want to get this release rather than the more limited first game.
STRONGLY RECOMMENDED. This is one of the best comic-book-themed games ever created. The only bad thing is the crash rare bugs, though the missions are so short you will not be losing significant progress even in the unlikely worst case. The voice acting is the best I have heard thus far in any game. The campaign is quite long and varied and the ending was quite satisfactory. The overall level of writing and design is high. It is very difficult to not praise the game. There are multiple playstyles with different superhero combinations and difficulty levels and unlockable skills. There is a skirmish mode for extensive gameplay. It is simply rare to see a game this well done. I strongly dislike the spoofed U.S. comics, yet I can enjoy the game and played it through. Probably because it features plenty of humor and does not take itself too seriously. It is a game worth trying no matter what kinds of games you usually like. This version includes the 3 bonus disc characters, e.g. Supercollider. P.S. The game is real time action and NOT "Turn-Based" as stated in the tags. Sure you can pause constantly, though there is no turn actions perform. It is mostly to provide more time for issuing unit commands to your dudes.
INSTRUCTIONS IF THE GAME KEEPS HANGS AFTER MAP LOADING AND NEVER GOES INTO THE GAME: the release files are in a broken state that requires reinitializing. Do this: 1. Add Ascaron.Exception.exe and PR2.exe to Windows 10 DEP. Reboot or it won't take effect. 2. Set the two .exes to run in Windows 95 compatibility mode. 3. Run PR2.exe. You should get a runtime error, PR2.exe shuts down and Ascaron.Exception.exe opens up. If you only get an error box about translation files and not the XML -something one. (Your game release is now intialized.) 4. Remove Ascaron.Exception.exe and PR2.exe from DEP and reboot. 5. Run PR2.exe. (Win95 compatibility mode recommended.) The game: NOT RECOMMENDED. Even though Port Royale 1 was a major across-the-board improvement over the Patrician franchise, PR2 plays even worse than Patrician games. It feels like work, the earlier decent ship controls have now been replaced with smartphone-tier mouse-crap (in addition to asaninely being limited to controlling the convoy one ship at a time) and addtitions & changes, especially the port towers, F-ing suck. The towers: they are small, impossible to hit with a full broadside and cause insane damage despite shooting out seemingly just one cannonball. You need a mid-to-late-tier ship mostly to be able to hang around long enough to take these game-design-hell F-ers out before you run out of convoy ships to send out (the limit being 6, not much when the enemy can send all those ships at once to gangr**e your ships one by one). The trading has been fucked up and destroyed even worse. Now the only practical trading strategy worth wasting time on is consumption scalping. This makes most goods with suboptimal consumption rates worthless to trade with. Your optimal trade routes will consist of two ports: the place that produces the goods worth trading and one port that consumes those goods in a heartbeat. It is a pain to play and requires weird things on some systems to get running. DON'T BUY IT.
NOT RECOMMENDED. Every mission comes down to some form of "destroy all enemy units." You have to accomplish this by using very low-durability, slow-and-expensive to build and badly pathfinding units. Repairing is too slow and useless to make a difference. Your mission content is you pumping out insane amounts of resource gathering buildings just to get enough for basic production and then produce basic factories to build advanced builders that can build advanced versions of the factory they were just built in. All this with everything taking a long-ass time to build. Even though the resources are limitless, I would rather have the tiberium harvester and limited resources any day over this redundant, repetitive, mandatory busy-work. And you need to do all this because the basic units can barely survive a basic small laser turret. The much-boasted AI does NOTHING when bombarded with artillery fire from off screen, meaning the AI has a limited functioning range. Many maps are initially populated with these range-cheesing units and they will pretty much crush your units in one go if you are not already doing move-dodging because even the bigger units are destroyed after just a couple rounds of bombardment. To seal your doom, the fog of war is major and only a few units, often the particularly flimsy ones, have vision beyond unit's width. You can tell from the content that the creators were "inspired" with "their" craft. The main theme of the game is pretty much Human 2 & 3 and Orc 5 from Warcraft II soundtrack mashed together and obfuscated a bit. It also has segments much like John William's Star Wars soundtracks, most probably because the producer Ron Gilbert was a massive Star Wars fan. The units suck, all of them. The small ones explode almost instantly and the big ones get stuck, often by unnecessarily driving into the enemy despite bearing long range guns. This often ends with both yours and the enemy unit getting sploded by your dudes barraging the enemy.
NOT RECOMMENDED. "Here is an idea: let's give the player a crappy vehicle, no repair system and a level 3 map full of enemies capable of killing the player in half a second during a long mission." On "Very Easy" difficulty, no less. Did not like getting killed over an over in Mission 3: Dr. Finch. Oh and let's put in enemies that you cannot see in sonar and take away the map so that you have no f-ing idea where you are at in Repetitive Sea Floor Mesh Land. To summarize, AN1 was ruined by terrible game design in the latter half. In AN2, it starts terribly designed from the get-go. I get the idea no normal people playtested the game, knowing that this kind of crap is exactly what kills early beta testers in droves until the devs finally fix it. Umm, maybe not inflict MAX damage on easy difficulties. Sure, put stuff man-maker like that into your games and do not be surprised when it turns out your game did not sell well because the only ones playing it are a bunch of broken divorce lads with self-redeement complexes.
NOT RECOMMENDED unless you are an Archimedean Dynasty veteran, otherwise five stars (AD AFAIK has much more "game design" to tolerate). The engine is decent, the controls are passable sans the hair-pullingly annoying jerkiness and steering resistance that makes aim correction with minor adjustments impossible, wrist-breaking mouse controls for driving, the idiotic double-tap thrust for turbo (you'll be accidentally activating it all the f-ing time) and a clearly rushed latter half with a lot mission objectives that don't work or that are outright misleading. The music is pretty solid. The voice acting is slightly over average. Don't get it. It goes downhill very fast after a solid beginning.
NOT RECOMMENDED. It is a pale imitation of Metro 2033 and inferior in every regard, except for 2033 Redux has the same quality drops in order to pander to the COD crowd (read: a singleplayer game to pander to multiplayers - pretty dumb). To sum up the inferiorities: 1) worse, overly serious voice acting (the Artyom voice is plain terrible - an American base accent with little comedy-Russian flavoring), 2) graphics are a grey mess in LQ and a smudgy black smearfest in HQ, 3) tons of slow-downs (e.g. when mutant models come close) and to-the-desktop crashes, 4) stealth that would be completely dysfunctional without the non-fatal finishing move and buggy implementing (read: enemies at times cannot see what is in front of them and 5) the gameplay and the other content incl. the story, is largely RECYCLED from 2033 with barely any changes. There are the same sections repeat, often with the same names and content. For example, Death City with visions of the past Moscow in both games and the burning station in Defense (2033) and Contagion (Last Light). It is very clear to me that Last Light and the Redux re-releases were made to cash in on the franchise. Especially the series collection (such as Retro Redux) is a very Slav thing to do. Last Light adds nothing to the overall story except for needlessly killing off Uhlman in the ending. The dude is practically not in the game until the short last chapter. Last Light Redux is the kind of game I would make if I wanted to get myself into developing COD. Last Light is a pure FPS, no matter what mode you pick. Outside chapters' Khan and Dead City minuscule horror elements, there is NONE. Nothing in the game matches even one second worth of 2033's Ghosts chapter. Because COD has no genuine horror (except for wave-gunning zombie modes), that's all there is to it. Even the DLC sucks. In Heavy Squad you are scripted to die in a rocket strike if you take too long (my enemy glitched into godmode). Gameplay sux. DL Metro 2033 instead.
NOT RECOMMENDED. All you do in this variety of Heroes 3 rip-off is MOVING YOUR DUDES and HEALING YOUR DUDES. That's what you'll spend most of your time managing. The HoMM formula, as a surprise to absolutely no one, gets vastly worse with this busywork metagame of constantly toiling to keep your stacks over zero HP. Even the champion stacks die super easily. The game WILL NOT RUN OUT OF THE BOX. You have two ways to change that: a) Enable Win95 combatibility and select the 800x600 resolution. b) Download the gl wrapper of Verokster for the game and turn off D3D. (The wrapper is quirky, so might need to mess with the About... windows to "wake it up." The original HoMM table top formula is so mangled and replaced with much less functional mechanics, that the only part intact and somewhat working, is: moving the units on the grid. Nothing else. Despite some improvements with the UI and graphics, the palette porridge and the same convoluted ways to perform actions still remain. You still need to go through about four windows AND have unused Leadership of the city, just to recruit a unit stack, so that you can drag it to your hero unit that for some reason cannot use its own reserve slots for recruiting. There are better games than this one. Even HoMM 3, despite that being more of a repetitive number-cruncher than a fun video game. Giving games a chance definitely did not pan out with the Disciples series, no sir.
NOT RECOMMENDED. It is very annoying and boring and just another difficulty-padded Heroes clone, with the same color-mess-up bug from Alt+Tabbing as in Age of Wonders 1. he user interface is so bad I needed to thoroughly research the manual to learn how to recruit units, the most vital action of all Heroes clones. Here's how it was done: go through the city view to the army view, then click on an unfilled unit stack slot on the city's garrison slots (it has a diamond mark on it) and a recruitment menu appears out of nowhere. That's about five steps too much, instead of just one. Frankly, I did not make it very far into the game (the UI has many other problems, e.g. the map units drowning into the similarly-colored decorative map graphics). The last straw was how the enemy, with full unit stacks from the get-go, of course. Attacks me out of nowhere and kills me. This underlines the sheer quantity of anti-fun this game is. Before Turn 8. These "all-seeing eye" and "early game crunch" kinds of forcibly-game-extending game design (you have to play slow, steady and optimally to have any chance of survival) is mostly obsolete and was not exactly fun even back in the day. They were popular DEVELOPER-SIDE because they let the developer substitute diverse and well-designed content with rapidly-replicatable, intentionally unfair maps. If the maps weren't this super stacked against the player, the player might notice that the campaigns were only 4 to 6 maps long and that the narration is ridiculously serious, as per the stereotypical boring D&D narration traditions.
