NOT RECOMMENDED. It's a game hastily put together from recycled assets from KB the Legend. The plot is a paper thin joke of undead appearing along with a super obvious villain. This is such a lazy cash-in it's not funny. The same goes for the DLC content that ranges from useless and stolen (new units taken without changes from Red Sands Crossworlds fan mod) to generic and boring (the new Viking race). PSA: if you do not set the compatibility mode to e.g. Windows 7, the cutscene sequences are stuttery messes that have a real chance of crashing your game. Uve been warned. Things that suck in Warriors of the North and its DLCs: 1. Valhalla Edition (or 'Valhala' in the GOG listing) is COMPLETELY WORTHLESS. It gives you a four-set of equipment, none of which is any good. Also some extra artwork. The paid DLC in a nutshell: "Not to mention that those `NEW` undead lizardmen are just copy/paste units from Red sands mod for CW. NEW locations, as in they opened whole Demonis as in original game the Legend. NEW unit creature skill system, also taken from red sands mod. As far as I can see, only new thing here are cold elves (same models as old elves, with different talents of course), and maybe couple items/quests. All in all done by 3-4 people over new year holidays for easy gold coins inflow from fans of this great franchise." 2. Vikings reference the Norse mythology, though they are never fleshed out. That's like making a Metallica greatest hits record and not including Master of Puppets or any other hit. All Viking stuff you get is a few units that vaguely look like comic book vikings with horned caps and such they never wore in reality. No Odin, no Ragnarok. Even Loki is just an upscaled lvl 2 Viking unit with a morning star. So it's a Viking game with no genuine Viking content. 3. There is no plot most of the game. You beat up your bro, run from dad, kill some necromancers and done. 4. It never gets good. Unless you worship the "combat chess" i.e. battles.
SUMMARY: it's like a turbo-charged King's Bounty the Legend with most of the not-fun segments removed (no fillery marriage quests or arena battle tests). The same The Engine is used and the system reqs are low. Don't buy the Premium Edition if you want value, since it only adds a tiny amount of sub-par SIDE content to the game ). I played 100 + 60 hours completionist style (standard + premium -- the standard repair installation turned the Premium Edition into an extra buggy Standard one, had to reinstall the upgrade also). About 90 % of the generated items in stores are COMPLETELY RANDOM. This means unless you mess around to generate useful items, at worst you can get ones that are total garbage (*cough Lizardmen gear w/ any lizard units available cough*). The few useful items are almost always of the Artifact slot, which you have only one, at least on the demon chick. What you do have is a ton of Regalia item slots with almost nothing to equip into. In short, you end up skipping most of the items and going. Even your companions have mostly Regalia slots. On the other hand, your dude starts with almost +30 bonuses to DEF and ATK, so that +3 ATK sword that was top-tier in Legend, is quite useless here. TBF, some Legend items are in the random pool, e.g. the Rahha Shield w/ -50% dragon damage. Most of the content involves the quests. There are much less enemies roaming around the place than in Legend, so it is not a massive project to sweep the place for that supremely vital EXP. Stacking EXP bonus items and skills easily breaks the game. Got to lvl 86 that way (80 gives the "Max Level" achievement, LOL). Overall, the game is a bit spotty implementation-wise, but it works. As per the Russian game stereotype, quicksave before you do anything to see if you get screwed or not and continue once you don't. BTW, the Snow White char in the cover is a Carmilla who makes you kill "Gang of Seven" (dwarves) TWICE. Enjoyable. About 140+ quests. Premium is not worth it.
NOT RECOMMENDED. The insanely strict turn count restrictions are pure F-ery. For example, you are given about 10 turns to complete a map, in which traversing to the victory point alone takes 7-8. Add in relatively tough units, enemy path blocking and a wildly random RNG plus strange enemy stat boost glitch that make them randomly nigh-indestructible, you are not going to make it within the given time, unless you are fine geting really crappy mission rewards that you know will you bite you in the ass later down the line. One of the worst games I have bought here. You are constantly rushing to meet this non-explained turn count i.e. time limit. You cannot really strategize if you practically have Order No. 227 lighting your ass all the damn time. You either make it in time by successfully rushing through or don't. It has nothing to do with YOUR decisions, rather than trying to trial-and-error guess what specific monkey dance you supposed to perform to a T. The RNG has much more power over the outcomes than your token decisions. There is a clear difference between a game of skill and a guessing / knowing game. There is a difficulty selection. It probably only affects enemy strength and AI, not the main problem i.e. turn limits. Man, I get enough deadlines at work and there at least I get paid for putting up with it. A game that gives me that instead of fun, deserves no mercy. I could probably play through this with cheats. That would probably once again reveal how these difficulty-padded games do not have much memorable content. I would just be skipping through filler content until the credits screen. This "limited turn counts for challenge" is not very common. Usually the turns are counted for compiling battle logs, instead of pressuring the player. I guess the devs took the lazy way out cutting the turn limits instead of diligently balancing the game to make it more fun. I can tell the battle calculations have bugs. E.g. a unit in a river taking minimum damage.
NOT RECOMMENDED. It's a lazy sequel game to a game famous for its craptastic, over-convoluted and boring gameplay. Here, the campaign starts from being garbage, instead of starting okay and getting drastically worse over time. "If you serve well, you can become the lowest of the low slaves for the Empire." Wow, riveting stuff. Instead of story-telling and lore, the briefings are now filled with this "you are scum" worse-than-nothing filler crap. If you want a fun game of this variety, look up Creeper World and its variants. THIS IS NOT IT. Perimeter games are all about excessive difficulty (to pad out the lack of variety and content). Emperor's Testament is even harsher in this aspect. Like in the first game, every mission is a test of some kind. You don't gain anything from beating missions, so the game practically caters to the people with masochistic tendencies. I quit when the game put me butt-naked next to an escort building and kept spawning the end-game big snake to wreck the building before I could build anything beyond a couple energy cores. If that was too easy, there was also a crap-ton of Scourge crows constantly spawning to make it even more cheap. Knowing the dev style, even this... multi-way ravishment is on the "easier side" and this is just the Easy difficulty. The higher ones are even rougher.
NOT RECOMMENDED. It is basically the Creeper World flash game in 3D with much, much worse (cumbersome) game design and a lack of consistency or balance. In summary, the game is a bunch of tests masked as missions and a lot of work in exchange for close-to-zero fun factor. In other words, it gets old super fast. Don't buy this game. It looks fine the first couple of levels, then it starts throwing very cheap man-breaker tests at you out-of-the-blue. The game also crashes at times and even the pre or post mission menu narration bug out as if it fails to load the next piece of dialogue. Once you reach the level Biodamage, the game falls apart. You are presented with almost every single lazy dev trick in the book: limited time, a horde of digger units you cannot properly defend against because the specialized defense turret is bugged and refuses to fire at them, completely useless mission briefing etc. Oh yeah and the digger units counter the titular perimeter shield, which according to the manual is supposed to be the "absolute defense." The game F's with you hardcore and playing it on "easy" does not change that. "a very advanced terraforming engine." Translation: you get to wait a long-ass time for the mandatory terraforming to complete before you can slap down a building. Waiting that is a big chunk of the playtime, during which there is not much else to do. The lack of complementary game content and mechanics shows. "an impressive number of units" Ha - a good one! You are extremely limited in how many units you can get. Usually there is only one unit that fits a purpose (sometimes there is nothing, e.g. reliable defense against diggers). You have to build a command center for each extra squad slot and you cannot go over ~25 units / squad. Training the units is super slow and busywork-intensive. "A unique and compelling story" It's generic as hell. Bad human thoughts becoming planet-conquering bugs. A lame excuse for fighting bugs and player clones.
NOT RECOMMENDED unless you are one of those cheeto-dust-smelling OG D&D'ers or / and cannot get over the 1990s consumerism. Also, no point in buying this when the turbo-modded Heroes III exists. In short, it's boring AF. H2 is practically a mere content expansion to H1, with most of its short-comings and the lack of gameplay variety. The manual pdf claims that there should be more maps with objectives other than "Kill Em All." (" Many scenarios will now have different victory or loss conditions instead of the standard ‘Kill ‘em all.’ ") Here are the mission objective stats: OG campies: Roland: 9 Kill, 1 Dig objectives Good: 10 Kill Expansion campies: Price of Loyalty: 7 Kill objectives Descendants: 5 Kill Voyage Home: 3 Kill Wizard's Isle: 4 Kill, 1 Dig For comparison, H1 had 9 Kills and 1 Dig. H2's 95 % kill-em-all vs H1's 90%. Lies. In other words, expect the same castle-conquering and Hero-murdering gameplay content repeated over almost every single mission. To be successful in the game, you need 1) tons of time because the game is soooo slooow and micro-ing intensive, 2) tons of number tables and formulas to check if your numbers are high enough for what you want to do (e.g. "can I attack / recruit these monsters yet") and 3) principles of AI manipulation. E.g. the AI won't usually attack your city if it has a big-enough number of total garbage garrisoned in it. -The all-seeing AI is intact and it will B-line to your town from the other side of the map if needed. -The killed enemy Heroes WILL respawn on the following turn with slightly less troops, ready to Armageddon your army to pieces again. This cycle never ends... well for the player, at least. Even if you can deal with that, you still need to contain that enemy because otherwise it will B-line to your other non-defended towns, taking over your resource mines on the way there. -The campaign content is lame bad-DM-tier stuff and the voice acting outright cringy. Think of what you buy this for.
NOT RECOMMENDED for anyone new to the series. You have better options nowadays. Games down to being able to pick them up and have fun with without preparation. "Samsho" 5 Special fails at all aspects of that. 1. You need to find it and people to play with it (the CPU is an input-reading omni-blocker even on the lowest difficulty). 2. The game is very difficult to handle for many reasons. Basic moves do almost zero damage even when not blocked and some moves require diagonal direction inputs, of which the arcade cabinet maybe could input, though is excruciatingly difficult to intentionally produce with a keyboard w/ the complete absence of diagonal direction keymapping. If your chosen character has a lot of key moves with diagonal inputs, you are screwed. 3. There are a lot of quirks in the game mechanics and also with every character. Even the damage calculations are weird, in that sometimes you can hit a dude all day and sometimes you lose 80 % health after Haohmaru hit you two times. There is a counter damage bonus, though it does not explain everything. Also some characters simply do astronomical damage. E.g. most characters with swords. The special mention goes to the gigantic Kusaregedo, who's jump kick sprite and hitbox fill almost half the screen. That dude and traditional sword characters seem to populate the top of the tier lists. Some characters are clearly worse than others. Most people have no patience for learning fighting games. I like this genre, though even to me it is confusing, overly complex and stiff. It's Street Fighter in the way that if the move you are doing is not exactly what is most useful in the given situation, you are going to lose a lot of life because of it. It is a very punishing and hard game, even on difficulty 1. For comparison, Soul Calibur is easy, rewarding and fun, mostly because of simpler control and move schemes. Complexity and niche-overspecialization killed the fighting games at the time. SS5 demos why and how.
NOT RECOMMENDED. Low content and very bad controls. Generally, a gimmick game that is nothing without its "Gojira and Friends" theme. You will have a much better time with the arcade game Rampage (free multiplayer-enabled Flash versions exist) that is vastly better in most aspects and also fun to play. The game: -from 1991 -features serious arcade unfairness (incl. sequences where the CPU effortlessly dunks you, no matter how much you try to resist or manipulate RNG) -input drops (how the hell can you drop a basic two-button move) -stiff control scheme in general -in a grappling-heavy game damage-wise, the later opponents over-power and reverse about 90 % of your throwing attempts, leaving you with the low-damage dive move (as the other ones get countered almost always) -the 12-stage arcade playthrough is a padded w/ repeat monsters, destroying the point of "winning" them the first time around -the moves are extremely simple: punch, kick, a bunch of different throwing moves, a special dive move and a ranged move (that is so slow to charge up for, easy to avoid and extremely punishing when missed), that's all, don't expect much technical variation as throws do most damage As with the 25th SNK Anniversary DotEmu releases, the neogeo and game roms are included. Though as the game can pass 1996 game quality standards and has terrible controls, IT IS NOT WORTH IT. King of Monsters is one of the worst monster mash games I know of. If you really want an interesting one for PC, look up: I Was An Atomic Mutant . Even the demo of that game is more fun that this one that was none.
NOT RECOMMENDED. Beyond the badly implemented, laggy, buggy 3D, destroyable environment, this game is trial-and-error, loading-a-save-as-a-core-progression-element kind of trash. E.g. you need to save before AN ENGINEER TRIES DISABLING A TRAP WITH SPECIAL EQUIPMENT. That is not how it works. That is what you get for devs trying to stretch out a full content out of the same repeated success percentage dice rolls. For the same reason, SMGs and many other weapons are for masochists as their hit percentage drops to single digits a couple feet beyond the touching distance. Even the bread-and-butter mechanics of the game are awful. It always comes down to cheesing the extremely stupid AI and out-ranging, in case you don't have to save-scum the out-of-nowhere enemy to miss a full-auto burst at your dude at the point-blank range. Panzerkleins... Sure, let's screw up also the hitting percentage. How about hitting perfectly and dealing 0 damage. The whole point of those mech-suit contraptions is to introduce artificial complication and to force you to waste time searching for beam weapons that are practically the only thing that do significant damage to those things. There is no story (you'll find beam guns and PKs - that's all you'll get) and the mission design ranges from filler to garbage. Enjoy wasting half a building just because there is a hole in the floor in front a vital doorway, trying to shoot another way in. Guess what: explosives break the floor and even when shooting straight at he wall, you dude misses the target so badly it hits the floor instead. THIS IS A RECURRING PROBLEM WITH THE MAPS WITH MULTI-FLOORED BUILDINGS. Also, there are timed objectives that do not really work. Mission "Unknown Complex" also adds timed objectives and practically requires very video-gamy glitching to be properly completed. Demonstrating the lazy design, there is a time limit with the mission, leading to auto-defeat. It also has crapton of objectives. F this game and its devs.
