I played this on the PSX and PC CD-ROM, and I still have it in those formats, mostly because I couldn't finish it, even using walkthroughs. Nobody will ever complain this game is too short or too easy. The visuals are the best part. It's dark atmospheric steampunk with lots of rain and ambient noise. It is third person. There is combat and there is jumping and climbing, much like Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia. Unfortunately, it was made when designers still thought it was a good idea to make you rotate your character and then walk forward using very separate controls, like the original Resident Evil, and on many indoor scenes the camera view is obscured, making it very difficult to do the acrobatics. Some levels are long and you cannot save games at just any point, so it is quite easy to lose all your lives. If they made save games available at any time, that alone would make it much more enjoyable. However, they just had not developed that convention for PSX games. I would recommend playing it for the art, but it could have stood a lot of improvements.
Never heard of this when it was new. I found it fun and enjoyable. I feel like it deserves a higher rating. Cons: No saving games in the middle of a level No vehicles Limited weapons on each level (you get 3, preset, plus maybe a later heavy weapon pickup) Pros: Difficulty is balanced. Not too hard, not too easy Emplaced machineguns are fun to use Sound and visuals are good, no lag, good loud bangs from guns, screen shakes with heavier weapons There's a basic story, you're a spec ops superstar, terriss steal red mercury to make a suitcase supernuke, Russians/Arabs/American traitors blah blah. Basic Tom Clancy fare. Ignore it, the game itself is fun.
MOHAA main game gets 5/5 stars. It's stable, fun, levels are not too complex in terms of objectives and finding the way through, but not too easy to get through, controls are great, selection of weapons is the standard WWII spread (from M1911's through StG44s). Has mounted weapons, but no vehicles are available. Unfortunately Spearhead and Breakthrough, which I assume are just as great, didn't work at all, one star off for each. I have tried literally every fix on GOG's support pages and plenty others I found online, plus a lot of my own ideas, without any luck. I don't have any older versions of Windows to try out so I guess I'm out of luck. Everyone says they fine work on W7, so if you're still on that, this is a great deal.
I never played these as a kid; I only found out about them later when reading about the history of Wolfenstein 3D, so it was a real treat when GoG republished them. The first two are 2D top down, four color fun, and you'll want to slow down the DOS emulator to play them. The rest actually hold up very well for 3D games. They are not hard, but they're long. As you get to the boss fights, they do have a bit of tactics involved, much like the Wolfenstein 3D games. Low resolution monsters popping out around corners or out of the ground are still creepy. I had a tiny handful of crashes, but otherwise the games were very bug free, no freezes, I didn't get stuck in any walls, no strange deaths. To tell the truth I actually enjoyed them a bit more than Wolfenstein 3D. I thought they had better artwork and a bigger variety of monsters. The only thing that bugged was the movement. In Wolfenstein 3D, you could set arrow keys to strafe and the mouse to look, but in the later Catacombs, you can't redefine keys, and there is no strafing, so both mouse and arrow keys just turn left and right, slowly.
Very Myst/Riven-like controls and gameplay, so if you want your fix, this is your game. I owned the CD version way back. The graphics were so low-res that it was impossible to figure out some of the puzzles. I wanted to love the game so much, but I resented having to use a walkthrough for the first time ever in a puzzle game because of this (I think Uru: Ages Beyond Myst was the only other time I needed to). I see this one has a download size of over 7 GB, indicating it is the DVD version with high-res graphics, so I'd highly recommend it.
I don't know what happened. This game is very similar to Shogo: MAD in the version of the LithTech game engine it uses. But Shogo was smooth, it was bug free, it was pretty. This game is much newer, only maybe 10% prettier, and buggy as all get out, and took way more system resources. It's our protagonist Caleb, from Blood, but in the future, up against a dystopian evil biotech corporation. Yeah, swallow that. Anyway, it has some cool weapons, the dual wield M-10's are fun, dual wield double barrel sawed off shotguns are fun, but I remember hitting a lot of game walls, confusing cut scenes, and lots and lots of crashes. One cool weapon, directly out of the Phantasm movie series, is "the ball" which I used in the boss battles to great effect, but even then the graphic engine bugs made it impossible to know what was going on and then suddenly I had won. If you loved Blood, and finished all its add-on packs, and you still need your Caleb fix, as I did, go for it, otherwise skip it and go play Shogo: MAD, or Lo Wang: Shadow Warrior, or AvP, or Clive Barker's Undying, or anything else.
Review: But not not for everyone. It's got elements of adventure game, FPS, even fighting games like Virtua Fighter, and it got so out-of-hand trying to be good at all these (and succeeded) I think they ran out of time before launch, and so it literally has no sound effects. But that's OK because the musical score (by Xavier Despas) is INCREDIBLE so you wouldn't even notice for half the game if you didn't read this review. Most of the game is third person adventure puzzle, it's a huge world, it's gorgeous, you'll have fun exploring it. Premise: you can change bodies in a futuristic world to try and find out what's plaguing a city. You talk to people, you pick up very few objects, you up your skills, you infiltrate complexes and descend through different worlds, all of which are incredible, visually, and MOSTLY reasonably challenging. I did have to consult a walkthrough to get through two points in the game, the "rooftops" and the final boss fight, but overall it was balanced. It's worth playing for the visuals alone, but if you want to finish it, get ready to lose 40 hours of your life on it, minimum.
I'd played all the original DF games first run, including the PSX game, except Xtreme and Xtreme 2, so this is my first time on this game. This has all the fun of DF1 and then some, and what I mean by that is it seems like a remake of DF1, all the same missions, with a better engine and some added features. You can reload or replenish your health via packs mid-mission. You can drive vehicles or use the mounted weapons. It's still 1 shot death, still no saving mid-mission, but if you're killed, you can continue a mission as the other 2 Bravo squadmates, so you effectively get 3 chances to complete a mission now. If you're a DF fan, you know the enemy AI famously sucks. This one is better than the original DF1, but it's still a weak point. Overall a great, enjoyable game though.
Actually if you have a small child, this might be a good puzzle type game to go through. It's suitably short, and it doesn't require any kind of math or spatial awareness like many other games in this genre. It's gorgeous, I'll say that.
If you're of my generation and played Steve Jackson's wargame Car Wars long ago, know that this is basically a 3D realtime computer game adaptation of that in terms of constructing your car and its recent alternative future setting. The missions are fun, and the voice work and plot are hilarious.
