Release Date: August 28, 2007 Developer(s): Danger Close, Digital Illusions CE Los Angeles Publisher(s): Electronic Arts
System Requirements:
OS: Windows XP or Vista 32bit (64bit versions not supported)
CPU: 3.0GHz Intel or +3800 AMD
GPU: 6600GT / X1300 Pro ATI with at least 128MB VRAM
RAM: 1GB
Storage: 9GB
Other: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound
Graphics:
Upon launching the game an option setup menu comes up on the screen and here you get to select your resolution (that ranges from 800x600 to my native 2560x1440). You can choose to enable Vsync and adjust a handful of settings. You can only adjust the graphical settings in this menu, outside of the game. There are not graphical setting options when the game is running.
Player models are decent looking and so is the surroundings; buildings, vehicles, guns and so on. The overall visuals are still pretty decent looking for game that is push 17 years.
Explosions are a bit lackluster in visual department. Throw out a grenade and you hear the audio cue of it exploding, but the actual visual aspect of it exploding isn’t that gratifying. When you plant charges on objectives and they explode, they are much more satisfying to see. As it goes the explosions are kind of hit or miss.
Audio:
Spoken audio is great. You can hear the urgency in the voices while you’re going through your intro to parachuting as you jump from planes. Guns have okay sounds to them, but overall they do sound a little weak. The sniper rifles are very quiet when you fire them, almost like they have a silencer on them. Then you have the explosions, they are sorely lacking unless you’re right up close and personal with them.
Gameplay:
Starting the campaign you are first tasked with selecting a difficulty level of the game, there are three options:
Casual
Normal
Expert
No other information is given about how each difficulty actually impacts the game, but based on a quick test of each left me to feel that increasing the difficulty means you take damage easier, the bad guys are a bit more accurate and harder to kill.
Before you start a mission you have a loadout screen. Here you can choose what weapons you want to carry into combat; a primary, secondary and sidearm. Once you make your decisions you soon find yourself on a plane as you get closer your jump location. When you do jump your main goal is to land in or at least near the green smoke, these areas are considered safe zones. You’re less likely to land in the lap of the enemy at these spots. Once you hit the ground you and your NPC companions will work on progressing your way through the level to reach and complete your objectives.
Combat feels so-so. You don’t feel like you’re actually in combat. Everything just feels muted, almost like it was after thought in a first person shooter game based around WWII. When I’m firing my guns they clearly have kickback, but they don’t feel like there is any actual real feedback – the gun kickback animation just feels like it goes through the motion that it kicks back and that is all.
As for weapons there are a wide variety of them that you can take into the mission and that you can pick up on the field as you need. The more you use a weapon and get kills with it the faster you will level up the weapon and receive a bonus. For example, as you use the shotgun you will receive buckshot ammo that is an upgrade to the ammo it starts off with. This ammo is a replacement, there is no need to try and swap out ammo types. The buckshot ammo gives you slightly more powerful shots. Some weapons do have a secondary attack that can be unlocked as you level up your weapons.
When you do level up a weapon the game goes in super slow motion as the commendation award is brought up on the screen and you’re also shown the bonus for the weapon that you’re granted. The weapon is also auto-reloaded
The atmosphere feels hectic as you’re trying to move from cover to cover in hopes to stay alive and kill the bad guys, but at times if you’re not moving forward and just killing it seems the bad guys keep coming and coming. The only way to stop them from spawning over and over again is that you have to be the one that pushes forward to trigger the game that you are progressing. Your NPC paratroopers help shoot and kill, but the story/progression doesn’t move forward if you’re not the one doing it.
One of the big upsides to this game that I do like is the ability to drop into any location you want as you’re parachuting in. You can aim for the green smoke zones that are safe or you can drop right into the thick of things to see if you have what it takes to survive. This drop in mechanic also allows you to decide on how you want to handle the objectives and in what order you want to do them.
As you traverse the mission areas you will find “skill drops” where you can try to test your parachuting aiming and landing skills. Some of these locations will put you into niche areas that are harder to get to on foot and sometimes will find you a fun weapon to use such as a Panzerschreck.
Health is handled by finding first aid packs - you cannot mistake them, a white bag with a big red cross on them. Your health bar has 4 parts to it, each one can be lowered by a small amount to right down to the nub and as long as that part is flashing, if you can find a spot to hide from taking more damage that portion of your health bar will refill on its own.
Time to complete is roughly 4.5 hours from my personal playthrough on normal difficulty. If you’re a completionist it may take you at least 2 playthroughs to level up all weapons and attempt to earn all medals/badges and you may get 10-12 hours.
Controls:
You get your standard FPS controls; WASD for movement, LMB to shoot, RMB to aim (ironsights) and so on. You can remap all the controls to better suit your needs should you want to. Always a great addition to a game.
While the controls are responsive things feel slightly off, slightly slow. Adjusting the mouse sensitivity can increase the camera speed for you as you look around, but that doesn’t change that the overall feeling of controlling your character is kind of hampered, especially when aiming down the ironsights. After a bit of playing you should become used to it.
Scoped rifles have an adjustable zoom and as you’re looking through the scope if you hold the SPACE BAR to hold your breath so you can steady your aim.
If you're up close and personal or simply run out of ammo or are between clips you can melee using the "F" key. Melee is not an instant kill on Nazis from what I've found from testing with any old gun you're lugging around. However, the third upgrade to the shotgun gives you a bayonet that's mounted under the barrel and using the melee attack with the bayonet on the shotgun is a great way to drop Nazis with one hit.
Story:
You play as Boyd Travers (fictional character), a paratrooper of the US 82nd Airbone Division. Your job is to drop in and complete the tasks at hand with the rest of your division. You will have 6 missions to get through that will take you through a handful of locations in Italy, Germany and France.
Replay Value:
Low.
If you’re just into this for a single player game the replay value for this is just not there and sadly that is all that this game has to offer anymore because upon researching I have come to find that EA has officially shut down online multiplayer servers. The multiplayer servers were taken offline on the 16th of February back in 2023.
Singleplayer campaign just isn’t enough, at least not for me, to want to have this be a game that I will come back to for any kind of replay value.
Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:
First issue I ran into was getting the game to install off the disc.
The game will not install after it asks for the game key. I enter in the game key and a couple of windows quickly flash across the monitor screen and nothing else happens. After a bit of digging I found out that if you’re using Nvidia and have the current PhysX from Nvidia installed, the game freaks out and stops trying to install because it wants to install the version of PhysX that came with the game. Steps to resolve the issue:
You need to go to your Add/Remove Program and uninstall the current version of Nvidia PhysX
Run the install for the game
Then update the Nvidia PhysX to the most current version that you can do by running the install of your current Nvidia driver or by downloading the most recent PhysX version here.
Clipping of shots through walls, this becomes irritating. It usually happens more so in doorways, but don’t be surprised when you’re hiding behind the corner of a brick wall and shots are still clipping through and hitting you.
Melee, you can easily succumb to death from melee, especially if you land near a bad guy. They will pummel you to death extremely fast. If you’re lucky enough to survive it’ll most likely be with almost no health.
A few times I got to see some rubber banding on character models, they do give you a good laugh at times (see image below)
Availability:
The game is readily available for digital download from EA if you care for a digital version. You can also find a physical copy for the PC off of sites such as Ebay or Amazon.
Rating/Score:
Graphics: 4
Audio: 3
Gameplay: 3
Controls: 4
Story: 3
Replay Value: 1
Technical Issues/Info: 3
Overall rating: 3
Conclusion:
I remember this game being more entertaining years ago when I first played it. On the other hand I did play the game online with my brother so maybe me remembering the gameplay being more engaging was due to the fact that him and I were playing together. Singleplayer is just okay. The game feels like a second class citizen when compared to Call of Duty 2 that released almost 2 years earlier. I’m pretty sure I’m rather bias against this game because as I play it I cannot help but compare it to Call of Duty 2.
One of my favorite things to do is to cook grenades and try to time my throws so the grenades explode right as they get over the heads of my target area. I’d have to say that that is probably my only favorite thing to do. The next closest thing is to blast guys at close range with the shotgun, you do get some pretty decent ragdoll kills if you’re up and close when you shoot them. The rest of the game is mostly a mediocre FPS.
If you’re looking for an okay FPS from the WWII era and want to kill 4 to 6 hours this game should be decent enough to entertain you, but probably not for more than the single play through. I don't know if the game is worth $10 on EA, but if you ever see it on sale for $5 or less, it just may be a worthwhile purchase to kill a few hours.
Release Date: September 12, 2006 Developer(s): Relic Entertainment, Feral Interactive Publisher(s): Relic Entertainment, Sega, Feral Interactive, THQ, Sega Europe Limited, Aspyr, Buka Entertainment, Shengqu Games, ak tronic Software & Services GmbH, Sega of America
System Requirements:
OS: Windows XP
CPU: 2.0GHz Pentium IV or AMD Athlon XP
GPU: ATI 9500 or GeForce 3 Ti with 64MB VRAM
RAM:512MB
Storage: 6.5GB
Other: DirectX 9.0c
Graphics:
Cutscenes look dated. Images in them appear slightly washed out and pixilated to a point it’s kind of comical based on the fact the story and gameplay setting of WWII is supposed to feel more somber and stoic. Thankfully the graphics during gameplay doesn’t share the same dated appearances.
During actual gameplay graphics are still decent. You can easily tell the difference between soldier units, not just by the icon above their head, but by the actual equipment they have in their hands. You can tell the difference between a 3-man group carrying mortar equipment to the 3-man machine gun group.
Resolution options for the game ranges from 800x600 up to my supported native resolution of 2560x1440.
With all the graphic settings maxed I ran the performance test and it appears that even though there is no frame limit option or Vsync option for the graphic settings, the game is capped at 60fps and not actually synced to your monitors refresh rate because if it were the fps would be 120 to match the refresh rate of my monitor. The cutscenes and map intro scenes into missions, when there is movement it can look very choppy even though according to the performance test and FRAPS I am sitting at a solid 60fps. I went into the Nvidia Control Panel and for the game I set the Vsync to “Off”. Upon launching the game the menu screen spiked up to 1500+ fps so I quickly moved on to the performance test and found I was pulling 400+ fps. Removing the frame limit for the game was successfully at removing the choppiness of the cutscenes.
I ultimately decided to keep the Vsync under Nvidia Control Panel set to “Use the 3D application setting”. I don’t need to overwork my GPU just so the cutscenes don't run choppy.
Audio:
Audio is well done in terms of voiceover work, explosions ambient noises, vehicles and you name it. The music score is outstanding in terms of making the game feel more cinematic. It helps drive feelings of intense combat and a hectic atmosphere all while giving you the feeling of heroic accomplishments are within your grasp if you just keep pushing on.
Comments made by units as you're commanding them or giving them instructions, some can be pretty funny and I never grow tired of hearing it, such as, "Let them eat pineapples!" as you give the command for your rifle squad to throw a grenade.
Audio is top notch and much enjoyed.
Gameplay:
When you first launch the campaign after a new install you’re giving a popup asking if you wish to run through the Tutorial for the game. You do not have to, but if you’re unfamiliar with real time strategy (RTS) games it may behoove you to go through it. Even if you feel you don’t need it after you start it, you can simply back out and just load up the campaign.
Upon starting the campaign you can choose a difficulty level:
Easy
Normal
Hard
Expert
A bit of digging around online and the census is that higher difficulty levels doesn’t appear to make the enemy AI any more challenging. What happens is the enemy is granted more manpower, munition and fuel (resource) boosts. Think of it as if you play on Easy it’s like going up against a small stream of water you’re wading through, but as you turn it up to Expert it would be more like going against a flash flood in terms of how often and how fast the enemies build up against you.
Before Company of Heroes (CoH) any RTS game I played you had control of workers or peons, they were the ones you told to go and mine for gold/wood/food and you would then use those resources to construct other buildings and hire other units. In CoH the idea of needing resources is there, but you’re not sending your workers off to mine or gather them. You need to capture strategic points that provide the following resources:
Munitions – allows you to buy upgrades for units and to use special abilities they have access to, such as throwing a grenade or satchel charge.
Manpower – the more manpower at your disposal the more units you can have on the map and control at any given time.
Fuel – used for building structures, global upgrades and deploying vehicles.
When you capture a strategic point on the map it will turn that small section to the color Blue on your mini map. Any strategic points held by the enemy show up as Red on the mini map. One thing to keep in mind is that if you capture a strategic point and it is not connected to your other captured points on the mini map, you will not benefit from the resources that that point provides you. So be sure to keep an eye on that map so you can keep all your captured points linked.
You have a set population cap in your missions, to my knowledge there is no way to increase it. You'll need to be mindful of what units you build and how you split your squads up. It takes some strategic thinking to get through some of the missions with the limited population cap how much each unit takes up.
Engineers are your main unit for making building constructs that range from triage centers to tank depots. You’ll also need them for helping your squad to build fortifications such as tank traps and they are the only unit that can repair buildings and vehicles.
There are numerous different heavy weapons that you can claim on the battle fields with your rifleman or airborne units. Some of these weapons just add some extra stopping power to your unit and some of them will split the unit up. If you command a 6-man rifleman unit to pick up a mortar weapon, 3 of them will break off from the unit and become a mortar team. The 3 remaining riflemen could be pointed towards another heavy weapon or you could replenish the squad if you’re close enough to your main base location and bring the group back up to 6 men.
Each mission will consist of multiple objectives, main ones and secondary ones you can choose to do or not. These secondary objectives may prove to play a vital role in your ability to infiltrate the areas around you and help you survive, but as I said, they’re not required for you to do.
As you play through missions you’ll see small experience points pop-up on the screen as you kill enemies or even when some of your troops die. These experience points accumulate and once you earn enough you’ll gain a Commander Point – the Commander Points is a green circle button that is located right above your supply info and next to the mini map. The points can be spent on special abilities that pertain to the mission you’re on. For example one mission allowed me to spend a couple of points on Rangers. This is a highly trained group of 6-man units armed with bazookas. They appear to move a little faster than normal rifleman squads and have better accuracy. If you get a few units of them called in they can do pretty good work at pushing the enemy lines.
Tank Depots allow you to train/build tanks. Pretty straight forward. You can purchase a few upgrades for them, too.
Motor Pools allow you train/build smaller vehicle such as jeeps that are fast and good at scouting. Or you can train/build transport units to help you safely transport your soldiers from one point to another.
Each unit you build requires manpower, fuel and/or munitions. Be sure you’re capturing and holding all your strategic points so you can build up your supplies. Also, be on the lookout for caches of supplies that you can gather to help boost up your supply numbers.
Controls:
Unfortunately from what I can find, there are no options to change controls for the game unless you wish to manually alter them in the config files – you’ll need to search online how to do this if you don’t know where to find or how to alter the file already. Whatever keys are used as the default keys you will have to get used to using them. I was hoping I could adjust the camera panning to the WASD keys and not just have to rely on panning the camera with the mouse at the edge of the screen or having to hold the middle mouse button. Things will just take some getting used to it seems.
You’ll want to pay attention to the shortcut keys for actions to help make things faster so you’re not just using the mouse to point and click. Here are a list of some of the keys you’ll want to be sure you learn and memorize as you play.
One of the best to remember, for me at least, is “Ctrl + [Numeric Keys 0-9]” – this will assign the number key to your selected unit(s). Then if you quicky double press that number key it will center the map on that unit so you can quickly traverse the map to your units as you spread them out.
Your basic combat commands are:
A = Attack
G = Attack Ground
H = Halt
Y = Rally
R = Reinforce
E = Repair
T = Retreat
U = Unload
Control shortcut keys between controllable units are universal. For example if you’re controlling an engineer unit or an airborne unit, if you need either unit to build something you’d start off by pressing the “B” key. From there both units can build mines with the “M” key. Engineers can, however, build a machinegun nest with the “E” key and airborne units cannot. Once you start to learn the main shortcut keys it will make actions a lot easier for you to do over pointing and clicking with the mouse.
Time to complete, for me, was about 15 hours.
Having played the game before several times key shortcuts and tactics for playing the game started coming back to me over time. I probably spent less time completing the game than a newcomer would. I would expect someone that hasn’t played before to take longer, closer to 18-20 hours.
Story:
The story starts off with you commanding the Able Company. You will find yourself working on storming Omaha Beach on the first mission as you are part of the D-Day combat. Here you will learn to maneuver units and move them between cover as you’re racing to get to the barbed wire. You will follow Able Company’s path through the game and work on winning the war.
Replay Value:
Moderate.
Like many RTS games you should be able to get a handful of single player game play throughs if you enjoy this type of game. Aside from adjusting the difficulty up and having more and more enemy units rushing you, once you do play an area you will know where to enemy base buildings are located and kind of what to expect. With that in mind, you may find multiple play throughs tedious.
All else fails on the single player side you can play multiplayer, though I cannot personally comment on how those types of games actually play out.
Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:
The physical media version I couldn’t get to run. After installing the game from disc and applying all game patches, when I tried to run the game I would be meet with a screen asking where the game was purchased: Retail (physical), Steam or Direct2Drive. After choosing Retail the game would attempt to run, but then come up to a new screen saying I need to insert the game disc. With the disc inserted or not the game still wouldn’t run. In the end I had to link my game key to my Steam account and from there I could simply install and play the game through Steam. Sadly, this isn’t what I wanted to come across with playing these older games. I really dislike having my games tied to Steam that is a forced DRM in itself, just so I can play a game that I paid for.
Issues with Alt+Tab when running the game in full screen mode. If I Alt+Tab out and then back in the display goes from full screen to windowed mode and this sometimes causes video issues with screen staying black or images across the screen slowly pop back in, unfortunately this leaves the game unplayable. You have to kill the game and restart it. Most times you can click on the “Maximize Window” icon in the upper right corner to return the game to full screen. In the graphic settings there is no option to set the game to windowed or full screen, so if you Alt+Tab, the only way to get back to full screen is to click that maximize window button.
Even with Freesync enabled on my monitor and the game pulling 60fps (appears to be capped at 60fps) the cutscenes play choppy, almost feeling like they’re running at sub 30fps even though FRAPS tells me 60fps is the output.
When you garrison a building with troops or if you make a random building into a barracks, try to be mindful that if the building is up against a wall or rubble that sometimes all your troops won’t leave in a way you can move away from the building. I’ve run into a couple of buildings when I tell my unit to leave they only exit from an area they get stuck. Or if you train units they may spawn in those areas and be stuck with no way to leave. Be careful what buildings you enter into and which ones you decide to use as a makeshift barracks building.
Availability:
A physical copy just doesn’t work anymore to let you play from the disc. You can install the game from the physical media and even install any updates you find for the game, but you cannot play from just using the physical media. The only way to get the game to launch, you will need to link the game key for your physical copy to your Steam account. If you buy a physical copy of the game, do be warned that it may not work for you to link the game key for it to your Steam account because the key may have already been used. I would highly recommend you avoiding to buy any physical copy of this game unless you strictly want it to show off on your shelf.
If you would like to get this game then you’re best and safest bet is to get a digital copy. You can find it on Steam or even pick up a key for it off Humble Bundle.
Rating/Score:
Graphics: 4
Audio: 5
Gameplay: 4
Controls: 3
Story: 4
Replay Value: 3.5
Technical Issues/Info: 1
Average Rating: 3.43
Conclusion:
I had no choice but to give the Technical Issues of the rating a one simply because I could not run the game from the physical copy anymore. I was left having to link the game key to my Steam account so I could play. After some looking around I did find someone make a post on Steam forums about how THQ and bankruptcy, then the online aspect of Company of Heroes (CoH) being moved to Steamworks which is why the physical copy of the game no longer works because Steamworks is now part of the game, therefore requiring Steam to play. However, you can still apply your physical game key to your Steam account which allows you to download and play the most updated/patched version of CoH using Steam. I’m not sure how much of this is true about the shifting of online gameplay for CoH, but I do know that THQ filed for bankruptcy back in 2013.
My revisiting of older games was not simply to just replay them and spout off some of my personal thoughts about how they play and look, it was also to see how easily (if at all) that I could get older physical games to play on newer hardware/software. While I am glad that CoH is still available to be played, even if it is off Steam, I’m not happy that my physical copy is basically just pretty looking plastic with no actual value other than sentimental. Sadly, CoH failed on this aspect of being able to simply install and play it when I want, where I want and not have to worry about any online DRM, such as Steam, to play the game.
With my technical issue nitpicking aside, let’s move on.
It took a while to get used to the overall controls of the game, mostly for the camera. Being limited to panning the camera around by only the mouse on the edge of the screen made maneuvering the camera to places on the map tedious. I found the best way to move around the map is assigning a unit or set of units to a number key (use Ctrl+{number key}) and then just double pressing that key quickly will snap you to the unit's location.
I used to be a big RTS fan. I loved playing other RTS and it all actually started on the Sega Genesis when I got my hands on the game Dune: The Battle for Arrakis. I then came to own Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and many others up until about the time I got the game Company of Heroes. I’d have to say it was probably the last RTS that I actually fully played through and really enjoyed and I just haven’t really had much interest in them since. I’ve dabbled in some since CoH, but just dabble enough to play a handful of hours here and there on them and never go back. My enjoyment for them has waned and even though I have very fond memories of CoH I had a very hard time playing through the game again. I’d be psyched and ready to play and after about 20 minutes into a mission I’d just get bored and I’d save my progress and stop playing. A mission that takes 45-60 minutes usually took me 2-3 short sit downs to get through.
Had I been able to play from disc and not forced to play from Steam – resulting in me scoring the Technical Issues a one - I had very few issues with the game itself and the overall rating would have been closer to four. The game itself is pretty solid in terms of gameplay and should certainly be an addition to anyone that enjoys RTS and WWII games. If you haven’t played it before and you like both of these genres then I highly recommend you look into picking up a copy of it. For a game pushing 18 years, the graphics are still solid and the audio work is top notch making this a great game to play.
Finally, if you really do enjoy the game play and want more than what the base game offers, you're in luck because the Steam sells the complete pack version that comes with the DLCs: Opposing Fronts and Tales of Valor (as seen in picture number 3 below, all the locked missions are for the DLCs) that gives you a lot more missions to get through.
Loved CoH back in 2007-2008 when i got my first GPU that i payed with my won money, it was a 8800GTS 320MB and with Windows Vista i maxed out COH with DirectX 10, i don't remember the frame rate, but i did have 1280x1024 monitor and it was probably fine, above 30 fps since i played a few campaigns with it.
Release Date: November 10, 2005 Developer(s): Rebelmind Publisher(s): Meridian4
System Requirements:
OS: Win 98/ME/2000/XP
CPU: Celeron 800Mhz
GPU: DirectX 7.0 compatible with at least 16MB VRAM
RAM: 128MB
Storage: 500MB
Other: 4x CD-ROM drive
Graphics:
Resolution of 2560x1440x32 (or x16) is available in the game options, but choosing either of these options to match my native resolution causes the game to crash to desktop. I settled on 1920x1080x32.
Character models and enemies, they certainly have a blocky look to them, but at least they’re not low res spirits like you got in Diablo 2. So far the characters are almost mediocrely acceptable by today’s standards, but even that might be a very forgiving description of them. The surrounding world and environment is mostly sterile looking and drab, but that may be due to the fact that you’re stranded on a colony ship. There are environmental things such as some plant life (trees) and water, but it feels out of place most of the time like it’s only there to try to add some color to the levels.
Audio:
There is no spoken audio when talking to NPCs, sorry to say it, but you are required to read.
The music is sub-par and pretty bland. There are better 8-bit music scores from the NES days over what drones on in this game.
Sound effects are okay, barely. You get different audio queues when you’re walking over different terrains. The weapon/combat sounds are kind of basic, there’s nothing that really stands out and every single item that has dropped from bad guys has the same audio sound. Just going by the sound you only know an item was spawned and dropped, but you have no idea what kind of item it is without laying eyes on it.
Gameplay:
This is an action roleplaying game, one may call it an ARPG.
You start off with a simple energy weapon equipped, it’s a pistol. When you fire the gun you use energy. With this starting weapon every shot takes a little energy for every shot you take and once your energy is depleted you can no longer shoot. If you have at least 100 energy cells you can refill your energy level by pressing the “E” key. Every time you refill your energy level this way it will cost you 100 energy cells. Energy cells serve two purposes in the game, more on that later. The starting spot, at your feet, are a few items: a slingshot (this is a two handed weapon), a club and a couple of health shots. Be sure to pick all these items up just in case you need them.
All armor and weapons have a durability rating for them, except for energy based weapons. The more they’re used, the lower the rating becomes and eventually the item breaks so you can no longer use it. You'll need to get the item fixed/repaired. You can pay to have items repaired by talking to the proper person in the base area.
You have a stamina bar that depletes quickly as you run. When you have your movement status for running (“R” key) to off, you will slowly walk and slowly regain stamina. If you want to regain stamina fast, stop moving. Stamina regen is also slowed when you’re attacking.
You gain experience for killing creatures and when you level you appear to gain an automatic +1 to your max health and +1 to your max energy level. You’re also given 5 attribute points that you get to assign to one of your four stats:
Strength – increases damage for melee and ranged weapons and improves melee & ranged fighting skills
Dexterity – increases damage for all weapon, improves all weapon fighting skills and improves attack speed
Knowledge – increases damage for energy weapons, energy weapon fighting skills and your max energy level.
Endurance – increases your max health level and how quickly you tire (I’m not 100% certain, but I believe this means how fast your stamina drains)
Another benefit to leveling up is that it refills your health and energy to full.
Buying/Selling merchandise with vendors means you’re trading in energy cells. Energy cells have two purposes in this game:
Currency
Refill your depleted energy level (blue bars on the right side of your HUD).
Every 100 energy cells gives you 1 refill for your energy. Be aware that if you use the energy cells to refill your energy level that is the same as spending 100 energy cells with a vendor. Essentially you’re paying to refill your energy level. Energy does not regenerate on its own, so you have use energy cells to refill your energy level and this is done using the “E” key.
Health, the red bars on the left side of your HUD. Pretty straight forward, your health runs out, you die. Health will slowly regenerate at a rate of what appears to be 1 point per every 2 seconds. If you’re in a pinch and you have a health shot you can use that by pressing the “H” key to fully restore all missing health.
Death – if you run out of health that is it. You die. You drop dead and that is literally it. The screen gets little muted and you can maneuver the camera around to watch the creatures that you died to keep moving, but that is it. You do not respawn. There is no continue button or even a message about needing to reload last save. What it comes down to is that you are basically screwed if you die and you haven’t saved the game for a while. Do yourself a favor, use the Quick Save (F5) feature often.
At the top of your screen, towards the center left and the center right you will notice two icons with numbers next to them. On the left side, the number there is the count of how many enemies are left in the current map area you are in. On the right side is the energy cell icon and it tells you how many energy cells you have.
Combat is a bit different without having a key that allows you stand and just attack. Many ARPGs have the “SHIFT” key setup with this ability, but there is no function like that in this game. So when you’re using ranged weapons or energy weapons they have a limited range before you can even attack your target. You’ll see the cursor on your screen go from a yellowish color to red and that’s when you can click the LMB to attack. Otherwise the LMB just moves to the location your cursor is at. You’ll need some practice to get used to attacking with ranged weapons and moving out of harm’s way if bad guys are shooting back.
Enemies do not respawn, once you kill them they stay dead and the bodies will continue to litter the floor of where they dropped dead.
As for buying/selling with vendors you can only buy/sell similar items that the trader themselves have. If a trader sells energy weapons, they won’t deal with melee or other ranged weapons (such as a bow or slingshot). You can have these vendors identify any “UNIDENTIFIED” item you come across, but the same thing applies for having these items identified. If you find a unidentified energy weapon the only vender that can identify it is the one that deals with energy weapons.
Your inventory is pretty basic. You get a layout of spots you can equip items and your stash or storage area on you is also limited and be aware that items do not stack. So if you are carrying 10 heath shots, they are taking up 10 out of 50 total spaces you have in your inventory. The one thing lacking is an auto sort and to top it off there are no indicator pop-ups letting you know what items can be equipped in what places so you’ll have to figure it out by trial and error. There are 4 spots – 2 to the left and 2 to the right of where you would equip your helmet – where you can place biochips (think of them as rings or amulets). The biochips can be found or purchased. They will provide bonuses to your stats, damage, health, energy and resistances.
In your inventory there are 5 small squares that go around the location you can equip your armor. In these 5 spots you can put what are called Hi-Tech items. These could be thought of as special abilities or spells. The slot on the bottom left is tied to the numerical key “1” and going clockwise you get keys “2”, “3”, “4” and “5”. Each high tech item has a limited number of uses and once you use them all you’ll have to get one of the NPC merchants to recharge them for you. To use these items you have to press the number key you want and then to activate the item you press the “RMB” (right mouse button).
Weapons, armor and specialized items will require certain stats so you can use them. If you like energy weapons you’ll need a high Knowledge stat. Melee weapons and armor require high Strength stat, ranged weapons (sling/bow/crossbow) require high Dexterity stat.
While you traverse the ship you can pull up the area map using the “M” or “TAB” keys. It’s an overlay map and it’s pretty straight forward to figure out. The only lacking part on the map is that it doesn’t list the locations of any vendors. Actually, the map doesn’t really list anything on it so you need to remember what NPCs are vendors and where they are located.
There is some elevation in the levels that can hinder your movement or benefit you by being a blockade of sorts for bad guys. There are plenty of objects to use as cover from ranged enemies as well. Learn how to use these things to your advantage to keep from getting tagged from ranged attacks and to kind of bottleneck enemies at times.
Time to complete appears it will take you roughly 30-35 hours. I just entered into Biosphere 5 and my understanding there are 15 Biospheres to get through. I’m about 1/3 of the way through the game and I’ve put 9 hours into it so far. I don’t know if I’ll be finishing this game anytime soon due to what I’ve outlined in the conclusion section below.
Controls:
Controls are hard coded to the game, you cannot change them. Most are mapped to familiar locations for an ARPG game. Here’s a rundown of the controls:
H = Restore Health (med-kit)
E = Restore Energy (energy pack)
R = Enable/Disable run mode
M/Tab = Map
I = Inventory
C = Character Stats
F5 = Quick Save
F7 = Quick Load
F8 = Load last save
Alt = Hold to show items on ground, enemy life bars and description of items in the inventory
Space = Pause (only pauses the game if you HOLD the key, once you let go the game is unpaused)
Ctrl = Walk/Run, depending on if you’re walking or running
The camera can be spun by rolling the mouse wheel up or down. Or if you’d prefer to use the keyboard to spin the camera then the “,” (comma) or “.” (period) keys will need to be used. Overall the controls for ranged combat is clunky and takes some work getting used to it.
Story:
You play a solider named Hack that is traveling on a colony ship and for the life of me I cannot remember why (yep, that's how exciting the storyline is). The ship just happens to become overrun by aliens and it is your job to help as many people as you can by ridding the ship of aliens as you battle your way through 15 Biospheres on the colony ship.
You kill aliens to save people. That is pretty much it. Just a basic idea that is just enough to let you know it is your job to kill aliens and save people.
Replay Value:
None.
There is no big selling point to this game. It’s not Diablo and it lacks so much compared to even the original Diablo game. I can not make any kind of argument that would give anyone the impression that you could get more than one play through out of this game because I'm having a very hard time playing through just once. There is no skill tree, all you do is build up stats and get different weapons to kill the same-ish aliens over and over again.
Even if you’re a big fan of ARPG I would say it probably will never be worth the $5 the game goes for on GoG and Steam. Perhaps a sale where it’s $1.99 or less is a better time to buy it if you really want to take a run at the game.
Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:
Upon starting the game and trying to figure out graphic settings, going back to the main menu I accidently clicked on “Credits”. This took me straight to the credits for the game. I started pressing a few buttons to try and back out to the main menu, but nothing seemed to be working. After hitting ESC and Delete and Backspace a few times the game appeared to have crashed to the desktop. No big deal, I wasn’t even playing the game yet. I launched the game again and started playing. After about 10 minutes in the game I did an Alt+Tab to enter some info into my review write up and that’s when I noticed that there are two instance of Space Hack running on the menu bar on my desktop. I clicked the first one and I was brought back to the instance I was stuck viewing the credits – spamming more buttons on the keyboard the game finally took me back to the main menu. I quit that instance and was back at my Windows desktop. The second instance of Space Hack was still open on the menu bar so I clicked on it and it brought me back to the game where I had actually been playing. Apparently you can have multiple instance of Space Hack open on one system.
The following are not bugs unless otherwise noted, these are game limitations/issues I had with the game:
There is no auto sort for your inventory, this makes juggling things around a bit tedious. Also, one other aspect that bothers me is if you want to equip a two-handed weapon and you have a one-handed weapon and a shield equipped, you cannot simply equip the two-handed weapon. The game will not automatically remove your equipped items and put them into your inventory. You have to manually free up your right hand that holds the shield, put it in your inventory and only then will you be able to equip your two-handed weapon.
There is no option for equipping multiple weapon loadouts with a fast switch button. You will find yourself constantly opening up the inventory and trying to quickly swap weapon types for specific combat situations, at least early in the game, because some weapons do more/better damage against certain creatures.
Level design is horrendously irritating. You will find that the level designs are laid out in such a way that the destination you’re after is generally the longest route possible due to blocked off entryways or an impassible hill or something else dumb that forces you to run a zigzag type pattern to get through the map. Along with the stamina aspect this map level design is nothing more than a time sink to slow you down from moving through the game too fast.
There is no in-game legend for the map. You’ll have to learn what the various colored icons are that appear on it.
At the armor/melee vender there is a lack of a “repair all” option. Granted it may only save you 10 seconds, but it would be 10 seconds you don’t have to click repair for each and every item.
Death is literally the end of the line for you. If you haven’t saved anytime soon you have a lot of ground to go back through and it could be a giant deterrent that will keep you from wanting to play the game.
Camera limitations in certain areas. If you enter into a small building that has a roof on it, you get a very limited vision range due to the roof of the building you entered. This makes it very hard to see any possible enemies or proper layout if you’re trying to navigate or retreat from bad guys chasing you. Refer to picture number 3 below.
Items, there does not appear to be any difference in how an item shows up on the ground to help you distinguish a normal item and one that has properties that are unidentified. You will painstakingly need to pick up each and every item to see if it holds any value or significance for you. When you hold the “Alt” key to show items on the floor, if you have two shields and one has special unidentified properties on it, both shields have the same text color. You couldn’t tell them apart without picking them up into your inventory and holding the mouse cursor over both of them once inside your inventory screen.
There are no treasure chests to find in this game. Instead of treasure chests there are some green looking plant blobs that can randomly drop energy cells or items. So not only are you having to take the time to kill creatures with your attacks, you also have to take time to shoot these plant things. I feel it’s just a crummy time sink to lengthen the time you have to play the game.
There is no auto loot. If you see something on the ground you want, you must click on it to pick it up.
BUG: Several times I ran into odd graphical anomalies during my game play (see picture number 6 below). Random flashes of lights would come up on the screen. I had to save my game, exit out and restart to get the anomalies to go away.
Beneficial Bug – click if you want a trick that’s beneficial to the player
I found that upon equipping a crossbow, there is about a half second delay between taking shots because you have to reload it. If you get good at it, you shoot your target, take a small step and you can shoot again before the reload animation finishes. You can mow down bad guys very efficiently if you become good at doing this.
Availability:
If you fancy a physical copy of the game you’ll need to do searching online and look on websites such as Ebay or Amazon. If you want the game in a digital form you can find it on GoG or on Steam.
Fun fact about this game, if you’re in the UK or Europe area, you may remember this game having different names: Maximus XV: Abraham Strong – Space Mercenary or Novasphere 13. If you live in that region of the world these might be the names of the physical copies if that is your goal of obtaining one.
Rating/Score:
Graphics: 2.5
Audio: 2
Gameplay: 2
Controls: 2.5
Story: 1.5
Replay Value: 1
Technical Issues/Info: 1
Overall Rating: 1.79
Conclusion:
Stamina appears to be nothing more than an irritation put in place to prevent you from going through the game too fast, it really doesn’t have any purpose and I greatly dislike these type of unnecessary hinderances in games.
Combat is pretty boring and the enemies are, too. You either melee the crap out of stuff and spam your health shots when your health gets low or you try your hand at ranged. The bad side of ranged is if you use energy weapons you have two issues here; One – you use energy cells to keep your energy level up and Two – your energy cells are the currency in this game so now you’re left trying to micro manage your money and energy level. I recommend if you want to use ranged to stick with non-energy based weapons such as the crossbow, slingshot or bow.
The map layouts are all pretty similar in terms of needing to navigate your way through them in a zigzag like pattern to get from your starting point teleporter door to get to the next teleporter door. The map overlay is kind of helpful, but at times it adds so much extra to the screen you can have troubles seeing where you’re actually going.
There is no excitement nor reason to try and farm for items because creatures do not respawn (not to mention that combat is boring) and the random treasure system is really uninspiring. There are no item sets and there are no rare, special weapons/armors to find.
The images I provided are kind of limited because there has been nothing exciting to take screenshots of. Everything kind of looks the same and the game play is all pretty much the same from the start to the location I'm currently at 9 hours later. That's why I haven’t bothered to continue with taking screenshots.
Overall, this game is a pretty big snooze fest. It pales in comparison to Diablo (all of them) when it comes to pretty much everything. There are so many quality of life issues and a handful of bugs I ran into that on a technical aspect of things the game is a complete failure. The only thing really going for the game is the graphics and they're just okay for it's age.
TLDR; If you have a lot of free time on your hands and want to be bored for most of it while playing an ARPG, look no further because you have found the game you are looking for.
