NOT RECOMMENDED. A hastily put together, messed 3D Robotron / Smash TV -like with everything feeling painful. The shooting is guessing whether you hit or not, aiming with a keyboard is not precise enough and aiming with mouse makes it harder to shoot. All in all, you get a carpal tunnel syndrome in record time trying to shoot, strafe and aim (meaning you have to focus on at least three control buttons at all times, causing the carpal tunnel). It's mentally painful as it has no stimulating content, just objects to shoot at. The lack of genuine content and 3D functionality, lowers the game functionally to the level of Asteroids (1979), a primitive arcade game with a similar control scheme. Even if the controls were improved, the content is ZERO, making the title extremely forgettable and not worth any time investment. This is disappointing. Try Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising instead if you are looking for a GOOD Rage game. This one's barely on a low-end PS1 level of quality. For a 1999 title, that is pretty bad. Graphics do not a game make.
NOT RECOMMENDED. The AI enemy will ruthlessly crush you ruthlessly with multiple army stacks while you are economically and time-wise crushed trying to maintain even one. All this by turn 5. On Easy. On first campaign mission. Is this kind of "balanced" experience what you want to pay for? Usually the excessive difficulty is a lazy-ass ploy to difficulty-pad to compensate for lacking content. But no, the campaigns are about 15 levels. Provided that you consider the repetitive kill-all-levels in a slow-ass turn-based game good time. Apparently the devs incorporated multiple modes of AI from do-nothing to spamming-fliers-to-cap-your-remote-towns-as-the-upkeep-system-instantly-kneecaps-you-for-trying-to-defend-anything. Why have a difficulty option for easy if you are not gonna provide that? Also, a lot technical glitches with the game. 1. If you ALT+TAB from the game, your colors get messed up and your screen split in half with the halves being visual copies. 2. There is no options / settings menu to set up sound volumes or anything else in-game. There is some "Settings" executable, though it is the usual game launcher. For me, it gives the options "Install" and "Exit." If I choose Install, it demands an installation media ("Please insert the Age of Wonders CD"). That's the last thing you want to see with a digital copy of software with the retail discs nowhere in sight. 3. The worst game save screen ever. After extensive trial-and-erroring, I found out that clicking on the file name selection descriptor line in the bottom half of the screen actually lets you edit it and create your own save file names. Because saving on that "autosave" might not be useful as it most likely gets overwritten as soon as you press End Turn. Overall, AOW is a design downgrade even from the first HoMM game, with a worst aspects of unit and city managing taken from Civilizations and Master of Magic. Paradox publishes it bc the original one had issues.
NOT RECOMMENDED. "The captivating campaign" involves infinitely spawning 50 - 100 enemy units every minute. The only units that do not get instantly owned by the weakest enemy units are 1) your avatar hero and 2) EXACTLY ONE tower surrounded by hordes of your units. The waves weaken only if you manage to plow through a lot of obstacle-like unit clusters to kill the summoners. The phenomenon of inifinite enemy spawns is also known as the Infinite Hole - this game is BUILT on it. One third-party summarized the single player campaign as "long chore", probably because of how much micromanaging and bad-AI exploiting it entails. BTW, the GOG release does not play the cutscenes (the .ogv files), which where a significant part of the original and its story-telling. Speaking of which, the voice acting is annoying with the messed up voice tones. Stay away from this de facto tower defense game. An RTS with this generic maps and repeated content is worthless.
IT ALL DEPENDS ON YOUR GAMEPLAY PREFERENCES. It is still exact same kind of content variation here, i.e. narration through convobox walls-of-text. It tries to change things up from the previous Legend, though the variation does not go much further than the text blocks and an occasional sight of new textures, portraits and character models. In fact it is not that much better than the phone-in-job of the series (Warriors of the North). Nothing significant has changed. It is difficult to state any demonstrable improvements or even changes from Legends or how it supposedly beats WOTN. Frankly, the games between Legend and Dark Side should not have happened (read: Legend clones). Dark Side changed things and incorporated new and better ways to do play, e.g. teleporting, auto-recruiting and adding a hub worth revisiting. I can see attempts at freshening things with Officer's Patent, though it is clearly deliberate and involves going through the same old text-block-rich convobox stuff. Here's the contents: 1) the old Armored Princess main campaign (has Mac support, "that's why included"), 2) The Arena one i.e. a bossbattle gauntlet short enough to speed run in a 3 hours, 3) Defender one (max 2h long with half a dozen special trap battles) and 4) the Orcs the March expanded main camp (NOTE: with no Mac support according to a dev). In practice, anything besides #4 is a waste of time and even #4 is only differently written than Legend, the core gameplay is still the same. The Legend one was already stretching the limits of boredom. I noticed that most of the time in 1C KB games is taken up by 1) textboxes and 2) fights. I'd already spent 2h until competing the tutorial dungeon and the couple fights, mostly because of the big text boxes. Later, the fights will hog a big chunk of your time, because the autobattle requires certain late-game units to be usable. And the game makes progressing there super slow. E.g. kill 50 snakes, get 23 exp when you need 200. How annoying.
NOT RECOMMENDED. The sadistic movement scheme ruins the game. It's basically a big-mapped game, where you move on a grid, exactly ONE STEP at a time, per movement command. Even if you are okay with constantly giving movement commands to get anywhere, the max speed is too slow. This most likely to keep pace with the long-and-slow battle animations. There is no keyboard movement support, most likely because it might feature more directions than the 8 of a grid. The horrible movement system alone reduces everything else to a minor nitpick in comparison. I This game is a dungeon crawler by design, except with image graphics instead of the tradiotional character ones. Speaking of graphics, a lot of it is inert decoration i.e. background variation. You cannot quickly tell what is an object and what is background i.e. not a point of interest. The character based crawlers never had problems like this because an unoccupied grid cell was marked clearly as an empty space. And they had the vital keyboard movement that is makes fast tapping possible. The same with mouse will injure your finger muscles because of the much muscle contraction required. I feel tempted to give the game my "broken game" rating of 1 star because of the missing, achetypical keyboard movement controls AND the laggy-slow game pace. Technically it boots and functions, so a begrudging "not fun to play" one of 2 stars it is. P.S. This game is like Rogue. It is literally a Rogue-like, even though NetHack would be a better example of the genre DONE RIGHT (instead of F'D UP). The full name of Rogue (1980) is "Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom." That coupled with the turn-based step-by-step movement is most likely the origin of the genre term 'dungeon crawler.' If you want to understand the origin and the implication of this forcibly-re-defined roguelike term, lookup "Berlin Interpretation." It basically tries to take the 'crawl' out of 'dungeon crawl.' Welcome to the modern day politics of ignorant rule.
NOT RECOMMENDED. The game uses cheap permadeath kills as a crutch and for not giving you any benefit from dying, it becomes a pure bore with no incentives. A proper roguelike is supposed to give you something to keep playing to offset the dullness of dying. Even that mediocre Unity game Black Future '88 got that right. Also the two-digit price point for a seven year old indie with no attractive content is a tall order with most 1990s games that look just like it have long since turned either free or out-of-sale abandonware. For example, Assault Trooper, of Finnish origin. Even Aleshar let you save to offset the perma-crippling and permadeath. Avoid Teleglitch at all costs. Save your "permadeath dread" for the work time - the legends claim you can earn money on the side.
Summary: RECOMMENDED. Best directed campaign with plenty of intermission cutscenes and high-variety missions. It's basically the 1990s 3D Return Fire 2 game without an oil-tanker-full of suckage. Best unofficial sequel to a dead franchise. The game lacks multiplatyer, though the single-player makes up for it. The setting is complex. Calling the player the commander would be misleading. Check out some gameplay videos to get the right idea. For example, the main characters are dead people made into AI microchips. A certain segment of the story is lifted from Starcraft. Not gonna spoil it. Things you might not like here: 1. the reliance of infinity-hole enemy spawning until you destroy all oil derricks, 2. clunky vehicle driving controls w/ a overly zoomed-in camera view and 3. an idiotic unit AI that by default gets killed in seconds and requires constant babysitting. There were no music, though most of the silence was filled with the banter between your crew members. It is surprisingly entertaining. 21 missions in total. Includes a couple stealth ones and one boss fight one. Most of the missions have an evolving element that changes the type of further goals or adds some element to the level, usually but not always: new enemies.
NOT RECOMMENDED & barely worth trying for free. -The program does not work properly and is a glitchfest. E.g. quitting does not restore the system resolution and the scrolling is F'D UP. -It tries to introduce new systems over the heavily borrowed system from Age of Empires 2, though messes up everything. For instance, horsemen are gods, because their counter is so weak the horsemen will kill it without breaking a sweat. Generally, the horseless units are too weak to bother with. E.g. an archer with almost no damage - completely useless. -The campaigns AKA Adventures are horrid. Got fed up with the infinitely spawning riders (while you were given ZERO). Endless grinding deluxe. The "story" parts end up being inane setups for the billionth mass-kill quest in a row. -The units are not responding to commands. They will attack enemies when they feel like and even when they decide to attack as per your direct order, they'll have a BS 2-second do-nothing break beforehand. Get AOE2 instead to save yourself major trouble. So basically it is barely working and has game design flaws up the ass that make it extremely tedious to play. Imagine if you had to stop every 60 seconds to refill your troops' individual food storage to avoid starving them to death. "How tedious" sums the game pretty well. One extra point for booting up and having a level editor. It's not worth your time.
NOT RECOMMENDED. The game starts repeating itself after the first kill. It's extremely brainless and there won't be any pay-off for anything you do in it. Any progression is usually rewarded by spawning yet another Horde-Mode-styled wave of enemies to kill for no gain. Good: + The tech is okay for an FPS. Bad: -Super-repetitive. -Relies on player stepping on a specific spot to trigger a necessary enemy wave spawn. -Has numerous "collect X items to continue" segments, which do not belong to an FPS. -Only 4 to 6 hours long. -THe last fight is a stupid puzzle with ring-jumping instead of a straight one. -Most of the time you will be trying to find the spawned enemies. -Enemies will be spawning in places that you already cleared. -Looking for those artifacts to solve classic FPS door puzzles sucks and is boring af. -It has a sewer level.
[This is a no-choices visual novel (VN), so do not expect any active gameplay. It's basically an interactive diorama i.e. a still pic show w/ tons of text.] This seems to be a re-release of the original August 2002 one with assured modern systems compatibility and extra, redrawn character images as an option. In short, it's a cult hit that got a lot of continuation and anime and movies of it. This is important as if you don't like to read a ton during a game, you are better off watching the first four episodes of the anime that cover Onikakushi events. I had to reduce a point because of: 1. the sheer amount of low-importance text, 2. the general lack of crucial events before the last two sub-chapters, 3. a bizarre ending that that resolved nothing i.e. rendered the whole story a non-sequitur and 4. a narration that leans too much on the external TIPS segments and is mostly about various characters repeating their non-factual guesses and other worthless me-think. The following Chapter 2 Watanagashi is supposed to be much more tense, with the notorious Sonozaki estate scene at the end. Again, consider the anime instead if you don't feel like reading A LOT.
