PC Game Retro Reviews

[neatfeatguy]

With all this talk recently about graphics and what is better, FSR or DLSS. Then all the new, what feels as, bi-yearly additions to DLSS and RT/RR from Nvidia and seeing how current systems with high-end GPUs are struggling to play some games natively without tricks and gimmicks, I've decided to go back and play older games to see how I feel they hold up by today's standards. Maybe these games I post on here will spark some interest in folks looking for something that's not trying to kill their system and play a game they never new existed or they simply forgot was there.

I'm going back to games that are nearly 15 years old or more. Some of them I've played through before and completed. Others I may have played at some point, but for one reason or another I never finished and even others are games I've had in my collection for years and never even opened. You need to remember that games in this time were ran on cards that that had 1GB or VRAM or less. In 2007 the G92 chip released from Nvidia and a powerhouse of a card, the 8800GT with 512MB VRAM, was a higher-end GPU then and games ran great on it (yeah, yeah, yeah....except Crysis, it was a beast of a game and required settings to be turned down to run well). Just 15 years ago 512MB VRAM was on most cards whereas today the average card has at least 16x that.

All these games I own physical copies of and I've been slowly going through the process of getting them downloaded and capable of being played without a CD so I don't have to juggle discs. I will not be posting about how I'm doing this as per TPU guidelines it's not allowed to be discussed, so please do not ask.

As for my review process I've decided to rate the game in 7 different categories and score them 1 thru 5, 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest. Below are the categories I'll be using:

• Graphics
• Audio
• Gameplay
• Controls
• Story
• Replay Value
• Technical Info/Bugs

I'll post some screen shots I've taken from the games as well to help showcase them. As I play through a game it can takes weeks to get through them since I'm only devoting a small amount of time here and there when I get it. The reviews will trickle out as time permits. This is something I've always wanted to do, but until recently I haven't taken the time to going back to play these games.

I hope you enjoy!

________________________________________________________________________________

Advent Rising

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Release Date: August 9, 2005 (PC)

Developer(s): GlyphX, Demiurge Studios, Cavetap

Publisher(s): Majesco Entertainment



System Requirements:

• OS: Windows 2000/XP
• CPU: 2.0GHz Pentium III or AMD Athlon
• GPU: 128MB ATI 9000 or GeForce 3
• RAM: 256MB
• Storage: 5.5GB
• Other: Direct X 8.1 or higher compatible sound card

Graphics:

The graphics of Advent Rising felt a little dated for a game that launched in 2005. Halo – Combat Evolved released in 2001 and in my opinion it has better graphics. That doesn’t mean the game isn’t worth a play through just because the graphics aren’t up to par with some other games released around the same time.

The game is limited to a 4:3 ratio from 640x480 up to 1600x1200. You are given a handful of options for graphical settings:

• Shadows
• Projectors
• Distortion Effects
• Dynamic Lights
• Draw Distance
• Fog Distance

I wish I could say more here, but in all honesty Half-Life 2 released a year before this game and it looks a whole heck of a lot better.

Audio:

Sometimes the audio with sound effects during gameplay can become limited or almost muted (lots of explosions going off, lots of gun fire) like there aren’t enough channels for all the sound effects to come through.

The music score is pretty good and I really do enjoy it. I find the music fitting during parts of the gameplay to help drive the atmosphere of feeling hopelessness, lost.

Without the unofficial patches I installed, the audio with the cutscenes would be out of sync and it really distracts from the game’s atmosphere.

Gameplay:

Saving your game, this is done automatically at checkpoints. The checkpoints appear fairly frequently so if you die or if you suddenly quit the game, you shouldn’t have much to replay through to get back to your previous location.

You get to pilot two different vehicles and the controls for them are very basic. Use your forward key (W) to accelerate and your backward key (S) to break. The direction you’re looking is the direction your vehicle goes, you don’t turn with the left or right directional keys. The use of the vehicles are very limited so if you don’t find them enjoyable, just get through the 5-10 minutes of use in a few spots in the game.

Weapons, you get two varieties of flavor as you run around: human based weapons and alien based ones. Each side has similar types that range from pistols, a couple of rifles and rocket launchers.

Powers are earned as you progress through the storyline.

You can also do melee combat and it is a nice change of pace to blasting things with powers or shooting things with guns, especially once you level it up you can do different takedowns (these takedowns are automatic, you just simply mash the melee button) and your attacks become more powerful. Always a fun option to use at times.

All weapons and powers can be leveled up. It’s a basic system. The more you use a specific weapon or power, the higher level you’ll get it. All weapons/powers start at level 1 and finish at level 5. Each level will grant anything from unlocking a secondary fire mode to increasing damage and using less energy.

Some areas, even with all your powers and weapons, can feel a bit overwhelming. If you’re hanging back in areas trying to cull the bad guys as they’re pouring through doorways or dropping in from above, sometimes the only way to survive is to run! Standing around in some spots is a sure way to get yourself killed because the waves of bad guys never seem to end in those areas.

Time to complete the game is roughly 8 hours.

Controls:

Basic controls for the most part in this shooter game. Left Mouse button to attack with your left hand and the Right Mouse button to attack with your right hand. Pretty simple.

There is one different aspect that I cannot recall having in any other game that I’ve played. The game implements what is called “Flick Targeting” that’s done with the mouse wheel. The idea here is to help streamline your ability to quickly target enemies and keep your attacks going without breaking a step. However, there is a downside to it, sometimes you find yourself targeting a bad guy that you didn’t have in mind because there is no easy way to determine what direction your targeting box will shift when you roll your mouse wheel up or down.

I find myself fighting with the camera at times, it can be frustrating, especially when you’re in a hectic battle and you’re trying your best not to die.

You can change between First Person and Third Person by using the “T” key. I found myself, in some situations early on that using First Person made a few spots easier to play.

You have two hands so you can carry a weapon (of any type) in each hand or you can assign a different power to both hands. Or you can wield a weapon in one hand and a power in the other. Mix and match as you see fit!

Story:

The screen write for Advent Rising was done by Orson Scott Card and Cameron Dayton. Even with these two authors behind the story, I find it fells kind of cliché (alien hoard, fight back against all odds, save the girl), but still entertaining enough to find out how things unfold as you play.

The story unfolds as you play as Gideon Wyeth, a Human “hot shot” space pilot. You’re inbound to the main star port for your home world because you were called in to assist with the alien ship that has shown up and is now orbiting your planet. You are to meet up with your brother Ethan, he is the pilot for the ship to be sent to the dock and meet up with the new alien race.

You’re soon thrown into chaos as you’re working hard to escape and save your brother and your fiancé as the prologue plays. You come to learn that the Seekers are looking to eradicate the Human race because of the tales of the power that Humans are said to have.

Replay Value:

Limited.

If you enjoy the combat and mixing of weapons/powers, you may find yourself playing through the game at least once more. If you enjoy the story enough for a second play through, it certainly can be compelling enough.

There are no alternate ways to complete a mission. There are no hidden secrets or special areas to seek out. There is no online/multiplayer aspect to the game. For most people this game will probably be a once and done.

On a sad note, the game was designed to be a trilogy, but because of poor sales the trilogy was scraped and there has not been any indication that this game’s story will ever be completed.

Technical Info/Issues:

I experienced two crashes to desktop during combat and I have also had a couple of crashes to desktop when a cutscene was about to start. I have seen enemies get stuck in walls to a point where I cannot even attack them anymore. I have also experienced a couple of locations in the game where your ability to progress forward was hindered by events not activating; such as a platform not coming up or a door not opening. These issues might be due to not killing all enemies or perhaps not all enemies spawned. The only way to fix this is by restarting the checkpoint and trying again.

Getting the game to run on Windows 10, from the physical CD does not present any issues for me.

I’ve installed unofficial fan patches to fix audio syncing issues for cutscenes, updates subtitles and resolves low framerate issues. I’m not sure if these unofficial patches are the cause of the problem with the game crashing at times when a cutscene is about to start, but it is a possibility. The game crashes to the desktop which requires me to relaunch the game. Thankfully, from what I’ve experienced so far with this problem, once I load my game it picks up right on that cutscene so I don’t have to replay an area.

My understanding is that the Steam and GoG versions of this game incorporate the updated patches and these unofficial patches out there are only to be used with a physical copy of the game.

Availability:

Advent Rising can be found on GoG and Steam for PC. You can find used copies of the game for PC, there is no digital DRM tied to the game. Install and play.

If you have an Xbox (yes, an original Xbox) you can find the game used if you look for it on places such as Ebay or Amazon.

Rating/Score:

• Graphics: 2
• Audio: 2.5
• Gameplay: 4
• Controls: 3
• Story: 2.5
• Replay Value: 2
• Technical Issues/Info: 3

Average Rating: 2.7 out of 5


Conclusion:

The game has some decent entertainment value with the mixed combat with guns and powers and an okay story. However, it does seem to have a few odd crashes, glitches, audio syncing issues (without the unofficial patches for the physical copy version) and some underwhelming graphics compared to other games that were available around the same time is why I gave it about a 2.7 out of 5. The fact that the game did so poorly upon the original release means that the next two entries of what was to be a trilogy will never see the light of day and that is a big reason this game may not interest someone. The idea of playing through a game and it ending on a cliffhanger can be hard for some people to deal with.

If you do want to give it a try to kill some time, this game can be something you could easily play through and enjoy a onetime run and gun, but you’ll probably never think about it again.



(Screen captures were kind of an after thought as I was nearing the end of my playthrough so the images are kind of limited on this review.)

 

[Hyderz]

Ah 2006 and 2007 my pc gpu started to struggle was running ATI Radeon 9600 pro
but it powered company of heroes but came 2007 i wanted to play medal of honor airbone and i just barely able to play hl2 eps 1

 

[stinger608]

This thread is frigging awesome!!!!!

Can't wait to see some more ole nostalgic game reviews.

Great job @neatfeatguy

 

[QuietBob]

I enjoyed your analysis of Advent Rising. And yes, the graphics look very poor / terribly dated for 2005. UE2 was capable of so much more.

EDIT: Turns out the game was developed for the OG Xbox, with the PC port releasing two months later. That would partly explain the sub-par presentation. The Xbox had been on the market for 4.5 years at that time, and its successor launched the same year as Advent Rising.

I play mostly old(er) titles myself. I've been sharing my opinions on them in the What are you playing? thread for some time. Being a huge fan of retro games, I look forward to more reviews here!

 

[neatfeatguy]

This game is probably going to be the most current one I review, it's only 14 years old, but still a helluva game to play and I still find it very enjoyable. So much so that I spent most of my free time over the Thanksgiving break playing it, spent over 30 hours.

Release Date: December 3, 2009
Developer(s): Pandemic Studios, Hands-On Mobile
Publisher(s): Electronic Arts, Hands-On Mobile

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows XP SP3/Vista SP1/7
• CPU: 2.4GHz Core2 Duo/3.0GHz Pentium D or faster
• GPU: 256MB 7800GTX or ATI 2600 XT or better
• RAM: 2GB
• Storage: 7GB
• Other: DX9.0c sound and video capable

Graphics:

To adjust the game’s graphic settings you need to do it before you launch the game using the SaboteurLauncher. Once that is open, pick “Options” and for any gaming system today you can just crank up all the settings to max, adjust your resolution and then enjoy!

The character models are well done and still look pretty good by today’s standards even though the facial expressions and lip movements are pretty stiff. Car models/skins look great, I’d say even better than character models. The game does have nudity and if the nudity bothers you, you can set an in-game option to turn it off and you’ll be left with clothing or tassels covering up any unwanted nudity.

The use of the noir look (black and white) in areas that have not been liberated is very well done and a nice touch to the game. As you’re transitioning from one area that’s all drab and into a vibrant and colorful area is very cool to see.

The view distance is amazing, but the draw distance for trees/vegetation/details aren’t very good. You’ll get flowers popping in as get closer and once trees are 50 yards or so away from you the detail for them drops. This was most likely handled this way to help manage things in game with the lower available VRAM back then.

To top it off the handful of cinematic cut scenes look great for a game that released 14 years ago.

Audio:

The music is great, it fits the era and certainly adds to the atmosphere of the world around you. Different songs will sometimes play on the radio as you hop in and out of cars and even at times when you’re transitioning from one area of a city to the next.

Explosions, guns and cars all sound really good and the voice acting is well done. I personally don’t have any complaints, I actually wish more games had audio as well as this game does.

Gameplay:

The game is an open world with only a few loading screen transitions that take place when you enter hideout locations or a few other below ground areas. For the most part, there are no loading screens and the world is your oyster.

Guns have an accuracy and a lethality range. If you’re aiming down the sights of your gun and the reticle doesn’t change from yellow to red, then you’re not guaranteed to hit the guard you are aiming at nor guaranteed to get a kill shot with one bullet to the head. Guns have decent kick back so you can’t expect to be a long ways away from a guard and instantly drop them with your SMG as you spray and pray. Same with shotguns, their range is not as effective the further away you are, but they are very devastating when you’re up close and personal. I find the best guns for close quarter is the trenchgun and a SMG. If you’re scaling rooftops then a rifle or scoped rifle is your friend and of course if you’re trying to be sneaky, sneaky, then you’ll want to make use of your silenced pistol and the Viper SMG (once you unlock it). A lot of the weapons have a time and place to use them.

Currency in game isn’t dollars/gold/silver that you find, it is based off of a contraband system. You can come across special crates that hold contraband items such as liquor, cigars and such and each item has a set amount of contraband that it converts to automatically when you pick them up. You also earn contraband by killing high ranking officers and blowing up Nazi stuff such as heavy artillery, sniper nests, anti-air guns and so on. After you wreak havoc and build up some contraband, find a black market arms dealer in the area to buy upgrades, weapons, ammo and other goodies they can carry.

You gain perks as you do tasks in the game. For example, if you blow up enough guard towers you’ll earn a perk to carry more demolitions and in my opinion even with this unlocked perk it still feels like you're not carrying enough. You can also purchase some perks from black market dealers. One perk that is good in a pinch is the ability to call for backup, you’ll get a few guys on your side drive up in a vehicle, jump out and help fight the Nazis. The perks have nice upgrades to really help you along your way, but they’re not necessary to have fun nor complete the game. The discretion is up to the player if they want to pursue completing these perks or not.

You can save your game at any time from the menu screen (or do a quick save) and auto saves do happen, but you don’t start where you saved your game. The saved game just saves your progress and when you load in you’ll find yourself in a safe house so don’t expect to save your game and instantly pick up at that very location you saved it.

Cars, there are a good variety of vehicles that you can “borrow”. All cars handle differently so don’t expect to hop into a truck and have it accelerate, brake or turn like a small car. Also, don’t think that every small car handles like the last one you were just driving, they too vary in terms of controllability and acceleration. You can collect nearly any vehicle that you drive, you simply need to bring it to a local mechanic garage (once you’ve unlocked them) and once there you just exit the vehicle and it’s yours! Just be aware that some vehicles do require certain perks to be unlocked before you can collect them. You’ll now have that vehicle in your collection and you can call any car you have collected from any garage. Another great thing about cars is that you can use them as an explosive device. You plant a bomb in it (default key is “Q”) and drive it at high speed towards a target and then bale out in time to watch the vehicle careen into your target and explode on impact!

You have the ability to use disguises in the game to make it easier to navigate off limit areas. You need to obtain the uniform of a guard that you kill, but you cannot shoot or blow them up, you need to beat them with your fists or do a stealth kill. As long as no other guards are nearby, you use F1 key to change into their clothes. Don’t do anything to draw attention, walk slow and don’t get too close to other guards or they’ll see through your disguise and you’ll be trying to shoot your way out.

You will run into invisible walls on the outskirts of the map once you’ve hit the edge. It’s a bit of a pain if you’re trying to elude the Nazis, but I find it better than being some random out of bounds area that somehow just gets you killed.

Finally, there are alert levels, much like you’d see in the Grand Theft Auto 3 game. The more mayhem you wreak, the higher the alert level becomes and the harder it becomes to escape by eluding the Nazis and leaving the alert area or by using a designated hiding spot. There are 5 alert levels so be sure to have fun!

Time to complete the game, if you stick just to the main story line is about 11 hours. If you wish to explore to see and do everything you could easily put in 45 hours.

Controls:

You can change all controls in the settings as you see fit and even have options for secondary keys. This is awesome. Some new games that come out don’t even have this functionality.

When you’re climbing you make use of the Jump key (default is the “Space” key) to climb up and if you want to climb down you press the “C” key once to drop to the next available handhold. If you wish to drop further, hold the “C” key down. If you want to drop off a ledge to start your climb down, simply walk (don’t run) off the edge and you’ll automatically turn and grab the ledge – the same thing works for ladders. You literally just walk off the ledge and you’ll automatically grab the ladder so you can slide down.

I find the lack of button for a direct pull up of the world map to be extremely irritating. There is no way to map the map to a key, either. I’m not staring at the map that often, but when I want to view it I find myself constantly pressing the M key (thinking M is for Map) and then getting annoyed nothing happens. The only way to view the map is by going into the game menu, choosing MAP and from there you then you need to click on “Full Map” at the bottom of the screen so you see where you are or find the closest garage and black market dealer. A slightly faster way is pressing ESC (to pull up the menu screen) and since MAP is the first option at the top, press ENTER and then ENTER again.

Driving is pretty smooth and shouldn't take more than a few minutes of being behind the wheel to get the hang of everything. You use your directional keys to steer the car and accelerate or break. The “Space Key” is for the e-brake to help drift. You can use the mouse to look around while you drive, but the camera will snap back in the direction you are moving. You don’t have to worry about orienting the camera at all, just use the left (A) and right (D) keys to turn, W to accelerate and S to break and the camera will pretty much take care of itself.

Sometimes small ledges or lips on edges and buildings can make your character kind of hitch up and not start his wall climb or let you make your jump up to a ledge above. You can also run into some minor issues with the camera angles at times, but they’re so far and few between it shouldn’t be much of an issue.

Story:

The game takes place in a Neo-Nazi World War II era as you’re in Paris helping fight back against the Nazis.

The protagonist is Sean Devlin, an Irishman, dragged into this war due to personal loss and wanting revenge. A bit of his backstory is a short playable section early in the game, designed to help give the player an understanding of his situation and why he’s willing to fight back. Sean is angry and clearly he wants revenge, but it’s not until Luc approaches him at a gentleman’s club that Sean even does anything about it. Luc has been keeping his eye on Sean for a while so it’s not just a happenchance he meets him. Luc helps set Sean on his way to Nazi killing, wall climbing, carjacking, blowing things up and being an all-around pain in the Nazi’s ass.

Along the way Sean will find other main storyline type characters that offer him missions to complete – from driving a getaway car, to infiltrating a Nazi compound, to blowing stuff up and even racing!

Replay Value:

Moderate to High.

With the game being open world you can go anywhere you want and climb to the top of nearly any building or structure that you see, yes, even the giant Ferris Wheel in the game. There are dozens of vehicles to find and collect, there are 10 different perks to level up and master, a slew of different weapons to obtain and an endless supply of Nazis to kill. On top of all that the story is pretty good and requires at least a solid 10+ hours to get through alone, not to mention the other side missions you can do. There are even 2 mini games you can find on your explorations to spend time playing.

Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:

You reach a point in the story where you can blow up a train bridge, after that there are a few other bridge locations throughout the map where you can blow up other train bridges. This requires the use of “bridge killer” explosives you purchase from the black market. Blowing up a bridge requires 5 charges to be placed. The first 4 are easy to place, no issues. However it is pretty difficult to place the 5th charge because when you’re prompted to press “Mouse 1” I find that I’m swinging my fists instead of placing the explosive. It usually takes half a dozen tries or more to get the camera just right so I’m prompted to press “Mouse 1” and eventually it works, it’s just a lot harder than it should be.

Cars float. Yes, that is correct. They float. It’s not often you might find yourself in a position to drive a car into the water, but if you do, they just float.

Speaking of water, be careful of where you jump in – do not jump into any fountain because you may not be able to escape it. I was forced to reload my game once due to jumping into a fountain as I was escaping a swarm of Nazis after me. I couldn’t climb up any part to get out.

Then speaking of vehicles, if you are able to find and collect any large vehicles or tanks, not all garage locations will be able to spawn these vehicles. It appears to be a space issue, not all of the garages have a proper location to accommodate the size of these large vehicles or tanks. It is a minor inconvenience, but something you should be aware of.

I’ve had a few times that Nazi soldiers would end up floating in the sky after platforms had been blown up that they were walking on, but it was a rare bug. I only encountered it twice.

Upon exiting the game through the menu and clicking on “Exit to Windows” the game has locked up on me a couple of times. Thankfully I am able to pull up the task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and put an end to the program to get back to the desktop.


Availability:

The game can be found on GoG or the EA Store if you would like a digital copy. If want a physical copy you can find physical copies of the game on places such as Ebay or Amazon for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.


Rating/Score:

• Graphics: 4
• Audio: 5
• Gameplay: 4
• Controls: 4
• Story: 4
• Replay Value: 4
• Technical Issues/Info: 3

Average Rating: 4 out of 5


Conclusion:

The game is fun. You get some aspects of GTA3, Mafia and Assassin’s Creed all rolled into one game that comes littered with Nazis you need to eliminate. I’ve played through the game before and I forgot how much I enjoyed it then and how much I'm enjoying it now as I play through it all again. At times when I play I can have a goal in mind – head to the next mission marker – but on my way I get side tracked because I spot a tank I can get in and drive or I see a car I don’t have yet or a giant fuel tank begging for me to make it explode or I’m carrying a sniper rifle and I just want to pick off as many Nazis as I can from a high perch before I get overwhelmed. I can play for an hour or two and not actually progress the storyline. I highly recommend this game to anyone that enjoys open world type games and enjoyed playing GTA3 and Mafia.

Replay value here, I find is moderate to high. The game is entertaining enough that it just begs you to play through multiple times unless you’re a completionist and do every single thing in one run. 11 hours to roughly play through just the main story, if that’s good enough for you, so be it. Maybe, though, just maybe the idea of blowing up Nazi scum will be enough to make you want to come back for more!







(yes, I blew up cows because I could)

 

[nomdeplume]

This game is probably going to be the most current one I review, it's only 14 years old, but still a helluva game to play and I still find it very enjoyable. So much so that I spent most of my free time over the Thanksgiving break playing it, spent over 30 hours.

Amazing, I found this one today and was preparing a purchase. It looks like a helluva game as you say. A worthy final effort from Pandemic Studios before EA shuttered them.

Can you confirm whether you are using a gog download or the physical copy. I read somewhere the physical copy doesn't work very well on modern hardware.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Amazing, I found this one today and was preparing a purchase. It looks like a helluva game as you say. A worthy final effort from Pandemic Studios before EA shuttered them.

Can you confirm whether you are using a gog download or the physical copy. I read somewhere the physical copy doesn't work very well on modern hardware.

Physical copy.

I got it running on Windows 10 with the game disc just fine, but as I put in my original post I'm working on getting all my physical PC games functional without a disc. I did get Saboteur running without the disc needed. You may need to jump through some hoops to get physical copies to work on more modern machines. Usually these things are easy enough to figure out with a bit of searching. The system I'm using for these games is in my System Specs.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Boiling Point: Road to Hell

​

Release Date: May 20, 2005

Developer(s): Deep Shadows

Publisher(s): Russobit-M, Atari SA, Atari, Ziggurat

System Requirements:

• OS: None listed
• CPU: Pentium 4 2GHz or AMD Athlon 2GHz
• GPU: GeForce 7500 LE or Radeon X300 Series with 128MB
• RAM: 512MB
• Storage: 4GB
• Other: Sound DX 9.0c compatible

Graphics:

Character models are pretty bad, very blocky. It looks like I’m running around in Half-Life (maybe even slightly worse looking), a game from 1998. Everything has the same look to it, the characters, the buildings and the vehicle skins – blocky and very dated when compared to what is available in 2005, such as GTA: San Andreas or even Resident Evil 4 (not the remake, clearly, but the original release).

I can generally look past dated graphics, but this one is really hard for me to not notice as I'm playing.

Audio:

I don’t know if all spoken words from your character and the NPCs are supposed to be voiced or not, I’m thinking they are, but at times there is no voice audio during conversations. Sometimes your conversations with one NPC is spoken dialogue and other times part of it is not. I don’t know if it’s an audio bug or not, but I find it annoying.

As for the voice acting itself, it is pretty bad. Most of the time it sounds like the voice actors don’t give a rip about what they’re doing, like listening to Ben Stein from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Music isn’t very impressive either. The music picks up when a bad guy is nearby so your given a bit of an indicator that trouble is near. However, the music is less engaging than even some of the more iconic 8-bit games from the NES days. Don’t expect too much in this department.

Cars don’t have very good sound effects for them, half the time I can’t even tell if the car I’m sitting in is turned on while I’m idling which makes me forget to turn the car off if I'm exiting it.

Gun fire is okay and explosions are okay. I think this is the best aspect of the audio for the game and sadly I still find it rather underwhelming.

Gameplay:

This is an open world game mixed with RPG mechanics. You can go where you want, when you want and do what you want.

Factions:

• Government (soldiers/police)
• Guerillas
• Indians (natives)
• Bandits
• CIA
• Civilians

These factions you can either make happy or piss them off depending on your actions. Early in the game I appear to have made enemies of the Government faction based on some side missions I took and they are not happy when they see me. I can try to “Fraud” (lie) my way by telling a made up story when I’m confronted by these NPCs or I can “Bribe” them. If I try to lie and they don’t believe me, then guns are drawn and it’s a shoot out!

Taking damage, you have 6 parts of your body that can be damaged; arms, legs, head and torso. As any part takes damage you’ll see these parts of the body change from bright green (full health) down to red (severely injured). To heal up you need to drag food or medical syringes (apparently the stronger the syringe is the faster it can make you addicted to them). To heal a specific body part you need to open your inventory and drag the food/syringe to that specific body part. You can also visit a doctor to patch you up, for a price.

You can get drunk in the game. When you drink in game you get a rainbow-ish looking hue over everything on your screen and getting around is entertaining at first and is a bit comical. However you’ll soon find out that the controls of walking or driving will be very unforgiving. As you try to move forward your guy will drift to the sides or backwards to give the feeling of being unable to control his bodily movements. So, be careful on how much alcohol you consume.

Cars - from what I’ve experienced you cannot just jump into any car you see parked, but you can carjack someone by shooting the driver or shoot the car enough to get them to stop and exit the vehicle (they will attack you when they exit it). Then you can get in the car and drive off. Otherwise you need to purchase or be given a car. Once you get in the car it’s just W/A/S/D to control. Space bar is the e-brake key. You can change the camera view while driving with the F9 (first person), F10 (third person), F11 (going in reverse) keys if you want to experiment with them, I personally stuck with the first person view. One thing you must do with the car is turn off the ignition before you get out because if you leave the car running it will burn through your gas and you’ll soon be searching for a gas station to refill your car.

You can learn to fly planes and drive boats, too. You can do combat on the water with boats, the couple you get to “learn” on are equipped with guns. You can also apparently find/fly planes that allow you to attack, but not the training single engine plane you learn to fly with.

The world map is easily accessible and you can interact with it by adding your own location markers (with Green Flags) or waypoint markers (with Blue Flags). Any marker you add you can choose from the Mission menu area and the chosen marker will become easily visible on the map so you know where you need to go. I find this to be a very helpful addition to the game. Once you're done with a marker you just choose it in the list and press the DELETE key to remove it.

The inventory screen has a lot on it. It shows your current cash, how much weight you’re carrying, items and allows you to access the ability to upgrade your weapons if you have the correct items needed in your inventory. The screen also has your mission log, character profile (you’ll see faction info there, tiredness, stats and so on) and a couple other tabs you can look at.

Upgrading weapons can be done to boost things such as range, magazine size, reload speed, etc. Each weapon type (pistol, rifle, etc) has specific updates you can do. For example I found a level 3 pistol upgrade that increases the range of its effectiveness and now it has a range of up to 140m (doesn't mean you're accurate at 140m, it just means you can hit something at that range if you're lucky). You can attempt to upgrade the weapon yourself or if you find a guy to do it for you then the upgrade is less likely to fail if you’re not experienced enough.

When wandering the jungle I find it extremely annoying that I seem to come across snakes over and over again. Trying to kill them with the knife you have is pointless so don’t bother, just shoot them or run past them. I’ve also come across a couple of jaguars, they run pretty fast and can be a pain to shoot before they close the distance. You also come across random wandering Government soldiers in the jungle and Guerillas, if you’re enemies of either one they may shoot first and never ask questions.

Seeing as I pissed off the government faction I seem to have constant helicopters that zero in on my position. You can buy/find RPGs and anti-air craft missile launchers, but the choppers constantly drop flares to throw off the AA launcher’s heat seeking, so time your shots carefully. If you can’t shoot it down, find a way to drive away fast or hid in a building until they leave.

Controls:

Driving, don’t touch the mouse when driving because you can steer the direction of the car that way and it is too sensitive and makes controlling the vehicle you’re driving harder than it should be. Stick with the WASD keys.

When shooting, the RMB gives you what appears to be a ZOOM (or look down the sights of your gun). You are limited to the use of this zoom; if you turn too fast or move too fast you lose it. Take a little time to get used to it and it should help you out some when you're in combat.

Flying – what a pain. At least for me. The controls were very touchy and a bit unforgiving. But I’ve never been a fan of flying in games so maybe those that like to fly in games might find it fun.

Driving boats, there is no first person view. You use third person only and it makes driving larger boats a pain because it can be very hard to see what is coming up in front of you.

You have general basic controls as you would find in most first or third person type games like this, crouch, go prone, jump. Most of the controls should be pretty simple to learn and use, you just need to get used to how the vehicles control when you use them because they can be very sluggish or overly sensative.

Story:

You play as Saul Myers (voiced by actor Arnold Vosloo). The story unfolds as Saul finds out that his daughter has gone missing. Saul is a veteran of the French Foreign Legion and he takes it upon himself to head out to the fictional South American country from Realia to rescue his daughter.

You’re left to your wits and experience from your military history to do what it takes to track down and save your daughter. You can be bad by helping out the Bandits or Guerillas or be good by helping out the CIA and local Government and Indians. Or mix it up and try to make everyone happy. How you do it to save your daughter, that’s entirely up to you.

Replay Value:

Moderately low

Seeing as how it’s an open world and there are many ways to go about trying to achieve your goal of finding your daughter - or so I thought when I first started playing. I upset the apple cart too much and it actually has blocked my main story line progression. Only way to fix it is a lot of time gaining favor or restarting. Maybe this is an oversite or I’m just playing the game wrong?

Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:

If you’re using a physical copy, be sure to track down any updates/patches for the game otherwise from what I’ve read you’ll experience a lot of bugs. Steam and GoG versions have the most up to date game, so if you’re playing a digital version there is no need to patch the game.

Cars are few and far between in the starting town, but don’t be surprised when you come across cars that cannot navigate simple roads and become stuck in the environment.

This isn’t so much as a bug or technical issue, but the bad guys couldn’t hit the side of a barn with how poorly they shoot. It’s like taking on an army of Storm Troopers. There are times I’m not even 10 meters away from a military guy and he’s just spraying and praying with his assault rifle. I might take a minor hit here and there, but I’ve got time to empty my 5 round clip from my pistol at him, slowly reload (takes about 2 seconds) and take a few more shots at him without needing to move.

I’ve had several missions that were bugged. I either couldn’t start the mission – travel to the indicator location on the map and nothing happens or I couldn’t finish the mission because the NPC I was tasked to rescuing wouldn’t follow or would get stuck following or run in circles. Reloading and trying the latter type of mission again would sometimes fix the problem. The missions that won’t start, just delete them from your mission log and move on.

Availability:

You can find this game on Steam or GoG. If you wish to find a physical copy then you’ll have to turn your attention to places such as Ebay or Amazon.

Rating/Score:

• Graphics: 1
• Audio: 1.5
• Gameplay: 3
• Controls: 2.5
• Story: 2.5
• Replay Value: 2
• Technical Issues/Info: 2.5

Average Rating: 2.14 out of 5

Conclusion:

I have to keep reminding myself that the game is from 2005 and is 18 years old as of this review, but I’m having troubles getting into the game. I enjoy open world games, but this one just doesn’t have the atmosphere and pizazz to keep my interest. I like that I can traverse anywhere in the game world and that the world is pretty impressive in size (25km x 25km map), but it feels too large and too empty at the same time which simply could be due to a technological limitation back then.

With the story being rather cliché it doesn’t really grab you and drag you in. You’re not really invested at all in the characters so all that is happening to them throughout the game doesn’t really resonate with the player and the poor voice acting doesn’t help.

There is a lot to the game in terms of the gameplay value and I think that’s the strongest part to this game. Don’t get me wrong, I do find it rather impressive for a game that’s nearly 2 decades old and perhaps if I played this game even 10 years ago I would have found it much more engaging.

After nearly 10 hours of playing, screwing around, learning things and then finally starting to progress the main story line

I’m walking away from the game because…

You can’t play the game how you like. Pissing off the government faction is keeping me from progressing the main storyline. I can rebuild the trust for the government faction, but seeing as it how I have the government faction attitude towards me all the way down it’ll take a long time of hunting bandits and mafia guys (who I’m currently friends with) before the government faction people will even talk to me without shooting. Even after that point I may still need to build up the trust level more before they even help me. I’m not feeling this game. I don’t have it in me right now to restart after putting almost 10 hours into it and now I’m stuck. Honestly, restarting and getting back to this point in the main story will probably only take me a few hours, I just don’t want to start over.

Steam and GoG have pretty positive reviews for this game, even though it is nearing 2 decades old. So, take mine with a grain of salt.

In time I might return to it, but for now, it’s not holding my interest to restart it. I can't really recommend this game unless you absolutely love large open world games and you don't mind the graphics and limitations of the a nearly 20 year old game.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Wife was a bit under the weather this weekend so I had extra time to myself to play another game:

Shadow Ops: Red Mercury

​

Release Date: June 15, 2004
Developer(s): Zombie Studios
Publisher(s): Atari, Atari Inc

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP
• CPU: Intel Pentium 3 or AMD Athlon @ 1GHz
• GPU: 64MB of VRAM w/ DirectX 9.0 compatibility
• RAM: 256MB
• Storage: 4GB
• Other:

Graphics:

The look of the game is pretty decent for the time. Character models are a bit blocky, but better than other games I’ve seen from the era. Gun skins look good and the surrounding environments are not just some blocky eye sore.

Cutscenes are designed for 480p, any resolution over that they’re a little grainy. As for game resolution you’re stuck with 5:4 ratio options or 1.33:1 ratio options. Pick what suites your personal references best.

For the age of the game and compared to other games during that time, I’d have to say the graphics are pretty good looking and I don’t mind them.

There is no blood or gore. You shoot the bad guys or blow them up with explosive barrels or grenades, there is no carnage with it. The explosions look okay, but they almost have kind of a comic book-esque visual to them when they go off.

Audio:

Guns have decent sound and most explosions are well done. Grenades, however, sound like a muffled bang so at times it can be hard to hear if they went off if things are noisy around you. So don’t just go running around that corner you tossed a grenade around too early, keep your ears open for that muffled bang sound they make when they explode so you’re getting hurt from your own grenades.

The music is okay, but nothing that really adds to making you feel engaged with the surrounding atmosphere. It sounds mostly like filler music for a B action movie than something that was designed to add to the atmosphere of the game.

Spoken dialogue is halfway decent from most characters, no real complaints here.

Gameplay:

This is your standard FPS game. See the bad guy, you shoot it. See the red explosive thing, you shoot it! All while trying not to die.

You start the game off by creating your profile. You pick your name, what game mode you’re playing (I’m not sure multi-player is even a supported mode for the game anymore, I never tried it) and you can enter in a name you want for the profile. Then you are able to choose the difficulty:

• Infantry (Easy)
• Ranger (Medium – this is the default setting)
• Green Beret (hard)
• Delta Force (Unforgiving/Ultimate)

The main difference between the difficulty levels, aside from the fact you die faster the harder you make it and the fact that the game is very unforgiving (even more so) on Delta Force, is that once you pick Green Beret or Delta Force you’re treated to the fact that if you reload your gun with ammo in the clip, that ammo is discarded. So, do not reload your gun unless you’re okay with tossing away ammo.

As far as I can tell, there are no save options. If you die during a mission then that’s it, you have to start it over from the beginning (Hello good old NES days!).

Health and ammo finds: Health is regained by finding first aid kits (look like a backpack with a big “+” on them). Bad guys sometimes drop small ammo boxes or even first aid kits after you kill them. The small ammo boxes contain 1 random ammo clip for any weapon that you carry. Sometimes the box might have pistol ammo, sometimes rifle ammo or a grenade and so on. If you’re low on health, be sure to look in all the nooks and crannies to see if you can find some, same with ammo. Bad guys do not drop weapons you can pick up and use.

Hit boxes are pretty good, but it goes both ways. If you’re exposed by any means you’re liable to be shot.

The enemy AI is pretty good for the time this game came out. They do try to make it to cover and don’t just normally stand out in the open like a fool waiting to get shot. At times they will move between cover points. They will also toss out grenades or flashbangs and the flashbangs are more dangerous for you. The screen goes white and a high pitched ringing is going off. The bad guys can try to pick up and throw back your grenades or even kick the grenades away from them – you’ve been warned!

The start of each new mission you’re given 3 weapons and those are the only weapons you get for that mission. Be aware that your weapons can change on you when you load to a new mission starting area.

Levels where you have teammates, they feel rather useless for the most part. Sometimes they’ll take a few bad guys down, but it feels like you’re mostly playing babysitter and clearing out the map by yourself.

Controls:

Your key bindings can be changed to whatever suits your needs best. This is always a welcomed aspect to the game. There are newer games that have come out over the recent years that don’t even let you bind your own keys, yet games from multiple decades back have this feature.

There is a lean feature, but it only works when you’re aiming down the sights (Right Mouse button). Once you’re aiming, you use the left (“A” key) or right (“D” key) to lean out and you can use the up (“W” key) to peak over cover.

Speaking of aiming, when you’re using a scoped rifle, the scoped view is kind of touchy and a bit tough to aim, especially when you zoom all the way in to the 17x magnification. When you’re on the scope you have a bit of a sway that there is no way to hold your breath to steady your aim. The higher the magnification, the harder it is to hold the crosshairs on your target.

Your default movement is a jogging type speed, you cannot sprint or walk. You can crouch behind cover and then use the leaning options to peak out or over things.

You carry 3 weapons and they’re changed by either using the number keys of 1, 2 or 3 or scrolling the mouse wheel up or down.

Story:

You play as Captain Frank Hayden. The game starts at about the halfway point through the story, leaving you at a cliffhanger you need to play through the beginning to get back to that point and see where things take you. After the first mission at the official start of the story you find out you’re recruited by the CIA to help put a stop to Red Mercury – a tactical nuke. Your job is to hunt down a Russian rebel that has his hands on this nuke and stop him before it’s too late.

It’s about as good of a story as most FPS games come with. Bad guys want to blow stuff up and you’re job is to stop them. Nothing special, but still good enough motivation to shoot things up.

Replay Value:

Low

It’s a basic FPS. It’s a fun game to run through and blast guys, but it’s mostly a once and done type of game. There are no alternate routes to take, you go down the designated path design of the levels, blast away at bad guys and work on saving the day.

Each mission should take about 15 minutes (more or less), depending on how fast you move through them or have to replay them if you die. If you play through a level multiple times, you learn where the bad guys are going to be since it’s all scripted. If a bad guy is hiding behind a corner the first time you play through the map, he’ll be there the second, third, fourth time and so on. You can memorize the bad guy locations and it can make the game a lot easier, but at the same time making things kind of boring.

Time to complete is roughly 6-7 hours.

Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:

I have experienced some clipping issues with taking gun fire through corners of cover a few times, it is annoying to have happen, but it’s not that common of a thing that should ruin your day.

Also, bad guys are very fast on the draw. As they come running into your room/upstairs/turn a corner and you’re ever so slightly in their line of sight they’re shooting and you’re taking damage.

You can get hung up on cover when crouching and trying to move around it. If that happens the only way to free yourself is to stand and back up the way you came from. It’s annoying, it happens more often than I like.

Small obstacles that you should really be able to walk over (like a fallen telephone poll), you’ll be stopped at. You’ll need to jump these small obstacles if you want to pass them or just walk around them. There is an early mission where you have to move across dilapidated walkways to plant charges and I constantly got hung up on trying to cross them. I had to jump to get on them and once I was on them it could easily walk across them. I also came across some stairs that when trying to walk up them I couldn’t, I had to work on jumping up the stairs to get up them, but it only happened on one level.

Game is crashing on me on the level “Into the Gauntlet”. After about 3 minutes into the level as I approach a door I need to enter the game crashes to desktop. I’ve uninstalled the game and re-installed it to see if this helps….and it did not. The game has a “Cheats” area in the main menu, I tracked down a cheat to use a level select and I bypassed the “Into the Gauntlet” level so I could continue on playing the game.

Availability:

The game can be found on Steam and GoG if you’re looking for a digital copy. You can also find it on Xbox or a physical copy for the PC if you search on places such as Ebay or Amazon.

Rating/Score:

• Graphics: 4
• Audio: 3
• Gameplay: 3
• Controls: 4
• Story: 3
• Replay Value: 1
• Technical Issues/Info: 1

Average Rating: 2.71 out of 5

Conclusion:

I originally never completed the game, but the reason why eludes me. Perhaps it was that crash I experienced when playing through this time around? Or the more likely reason is that I started it, played a little, started playing something else and never came back to it.

It’s a FPS from the early 2000s, not much to really expect from it. Graphics are surprisingly better than I thought they’d be and it’s a good way to kill 6 to 7 hours. The game is kind of unforgiving, though, especially if you play on harder difficulties. You take more damage and even if you’re trying to be very careful and peer around corners quick, those bad guys are fast to shoot you so it can be frustrating in some places. The bad guys are scripted and once you learn their location they show up, it makes the game kind of boring to replay.

I have to give the Technical Issues aspect of the game a 1 simply because of the game breaking bug that caused the game to crash on me. Without the use of cheats to bypass it I couldn’t have completed the game. Remember, I have the physical copy that is patched with the latest patch I can find. So maybe this game breaking bug/crash that happens to me doesn’t happen on the digital versions.

 

[droopyRO]

If orgot this game exists, i have a DVD of it somewhere but i don't think i ever played it.

 

[neatfeatguy]

One of my favorite games of the WWII genre.

​

Release Date: October 25, 2005
Developer(s): Infinity Ward
Publisher(s): Activision

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows 2000/XP
• CPU: Pentium IV 1.4GHz or AMD Athlon XP 1700+
• GPU: DirectX 9.0c compatible 64MB
• RAM: 256MB
• Storage: 4GB
• Other: DirectX 9.0c compatible 16-bit sound card and 8x speed CD-ROM or 2x DVD-ROM

Graphics:

Right off the get go, after applying the most recent patch I found I load up the game and get into the settings and I can crank the resolution all the way up to my native screen resolution of 1440p. I can also set the refresh rate to match my monitor at 120Hz.

Character models are great for a game pushing the envelope of being 20 years old. Facial movements are stiff when characters are speaking, but it’s not something you’re really looking for during hectic combat. Skins for vehicles are well done and all the various weapons look great.

Due to the technical limitations when the game was released (low VRAM availability) you will notice a lot of pop-ins for details on vehicles (specifically tanks) as you move close to or away from. You’ll also notice vegetation such as grass popping up as you’re running through fields. At times it can be a little distracting if you’re not busy focusing on fighting for your survival.

Capping the frames at 120fps and maxing all settings at 1440p resolution the game utilize roughly 1300MB VRAM and runs my 3080Ti up to 53C. If I uncap the fps (turn off vsync) the game will use up to 1450MB VRAM and run temps up to 80C. The game may be nearly 20 years old, but if you let it run an uncapped framerate it’ll work your GPU hard.

Audio:

Sound effects are top notch, be it from guns, explosions, screams of pain, comrades yelling out commands, vehicles and you name it. It all sounds absolutely amazing.

The music helps lift the atmosphere by driving in a heroic feeling moment or a moment of impending doom. I’ve got no complaints with the audio in this game, top notch.

Gameplay:

The intro movie once you first launch the game, aside from clearly being dated due to the resolution of it, feels movie-esque. It feels like you’re watching a hard, fast action trailer of Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers. Also, all the real video clips that are tied into the game as you transition between missions are nicely done. The way they created everything to tie the story together and show you actual footage is amazing.

You are thrown into the heat of battle about 4 minutes into the game, right after you complete the “training”. Be ready to run, shoot, duck, crawl, throw grenades and swap weapons you find as you run low on ammo because you’ll need it all to survive this war.

Your fellow soldiers aren’t just some schmucks that don’t help. They’re running in and work on clearing areas with you. They yell when grenades are thrown and move if you’re trying to get past them. The game makes you feel like you’re not the only one participating in combat even though you’re trudging through a single player campaign.

As you go through missions you’ll have various objectives to complete and some of them can be done in any order you feel like doing, so it gives almost a slight feeling of being open world even though you’re confined to the area.

Don’t forget you have smoke grenades (default is the “4” key). You may find these very useful in some situations. Pop that smoke and use it to your advantage!

You carry 2 weapons at any given time. Doesn’t matter what they are, you only get to carry 2 weapons. You can pick up any dropped weapon to swap with what you’re carrying and if you simply run over any weapon on the ground that you carry you will automatically pickup ammo for it. All weapons have a different feel to them, from pistols to rifles and to panzerfausts. Some weapons reload slower than others and some have a high kickback or really poor accuracy if you hold down the first button instead of shooting in short bursts.

Difficulty level of the game, if you play on easy you’re a pretty decent bullet sponge. If you play on the hardest difficulty a couple of shots in a short period of time and you’re done. I’ve found myself replaying some parts of a mission quite a few times while on the hardest difficulty because of a misstep or wrong turn. If you’re hurting, get into cover and wait a moment for your health to come back.

There are little things as you play that helps add to the game to make it feel like you’re actually there; like when shooting at the head of an enemy, sometimes the shot only knocks the helmet off and the reaction the NPC gives is cool to see. Soldiers attempt to crawl away when injured or some will even prop themselves up, take out their pistol and shoot at you until they bleed out or they are finished off.

Since you are the one to progress the story line and missions, you will find that many times when you’re working on try to reach the next destination/check point that your troops will not push forward until you do. This can be treacherous at times because that puts you out in the open and thus becoming the main focal point of enemy fire. Learn to play cautious at times before just running out blindly.

Controls:

You can change all your key bindings to fit your needs and playstyle. You can also have secondary bindings. I love when games have this designed into the control options.

You’ll do a lot of ducking and crawling and aiming down the sights of your weapons, so be sure you have these key set to ideal and easy to access spots for you.

Weapons, you only get 2 that you can carry, as stated above. You swap between these weapons using the default “1” and “2” key. It doesn’t matter what key you press, they both cycle to the other weapon. One feature I do like with the controls when you’re using the sniper rifles, you can steady your aim using the default “SHITFT” key.

You do get to drive a tank in a few missions. The turret will swivel independently of the direction you’re facing, but if you don’t want it to then hold the SPACE key to keep the turret facing the direction you’re going. The tanks move faster than I expect and aiming the turret is a little touchy, I found myself stopping or slowing down more than I liked to aim my shots, it left me more vulnerable than I liked.

Story:

The game has 4 different campaigns that follow parts of WWII. There is a Russian (Red Army) campaign, 2 British Army campaigns and 1 United States campaign. While the stories told in the game are not true (they’re made up), the actual battles in the game did take place and the military units in the game all existed.

To start the game you play as Pvt Vasili Koslov in the Red Army. You’re dropped into a very quick how to play and within a couple minutes you’re being rushed out of your training and into real combat. You work with your company to defend and retake strategic points in Stalingrad, to repairing communication lines and blowing up a German field office.

The second campaign puts you in the shoes of a British bloke that goes by the name of Sgt John Davis. You’ll find yourself in El Alamein, Egypt, out in the desert, working on repelling the German forces that have been pushing their way further and further into Egypt. As you continue to play the British campaign you’ll eventually end up controlling Tank Commander David Welsh as you get to drive a tank or help clear the areas for your armored escort to get through. You’ll go back and forth between Sgt John Davis and Tank Commander David Welsh as you play through the British campaigns.

Once you unlock the American campaign you control Cpl. Bill Taylor as you participate in the D-Day assault on Point du Hoc. You’ll find yourself frantically working on scaling the cliffs and clearing bunkers on your way to disable the artillery guns. Soon after you’ll find Dog Company working on taking out flak crews and tanks in Wallendar, Germany to take control of the Rhine River.

Replay Value:

Moderate.

Granted this is a FPS and the story doesn’t change and there aren’t really any other ways to move yourself through a map – you basically follow the designated level design – but the size and even complexity of the maps makes you feel like the combat is never the same.

I find the stories told engaging and the combat to be frantic and intense, rarely a dull moment. I’ve played through this game numerous times and I enjoy it every time I do.

Time to complete the game is about 9 hours.

Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:

There are a few times that bad guys may get hung up on doorways or sometimes it feels like their pathing is glitched and get stuck in a small loop – meaning I may see a couple of bad guys running up to a door, but turn around at the last second and run back for cover behind them and then they repeat it over and over again until I engage them.

There are a few spots that when my army buddies and I have cleared an area I’d get a random bad guy or two almost spawn out of nowhere behind me. Perhaps they emerge from a room or direction I overlooked, but I find it hard to believe that would be the case because I get notified that the current objective is completed and it’s time to move on to the next.

Not all low obstacles can be hurdled over like you think they can. Also, rarely (but it has happened a couple of times for me) you may find cover that you can get hung up on and you get stuck, making you fight to get out by crouching, jumping and moving every which way.

As I progress further into the game there are a few spots here and there in some missions when you’re clearing out areas and you’re down to about the end of the objective, your teammates will sometimes be unhelpful. They will stand around or hide in cover and not assist, leaving you to be a one man army to finish the objective. It doesn’t happen that often, but enough that you will notice it every once in a great while.

Not a bug, from what I can find, but I do consider it an issue – you cannot throw back grenades thrown at you. However, the bad guys can and will return your grenades many times over. On the flip side, the guys on your side can also throw back grenades thrown at them…..you are the only poor soul that doesn’t know how to throw back a grenade.

On two occasions I’ve had bad guys clip through a floor or wall on their way to attack me. Out of all the buildings I’ve cleared and ground I’ve covered, this is really rare when I see it happen.

On the mission “Hill 400” I did have the game crash on me about 3/4 of the way through. I’m not sure what the issue was, but it happened multiple times in a row until I lowered some of the graphic settings a step. Once I did that the game ran fine and I was able to complete the mission and continue playing.

Availability:

You can purchase a digital copy of this game on Steam or you can purchase used physical copies of the game for PC or the Xbox 360. If by some chance you’re looking to try out the MP aspect, the PC can host up to 64 players while the Xbox is limited to 8.

Rating/Score:

• Graphics: 4.5
• Audio: 5
• Gameplay: 5
• Controls: 4
• Story: 5
• Replay Value: 4
• Technical Issues/Info: 3.5

Average Rating: 4.42 out of 5

Conclusion:

Many of the missions are very hectic, you’re running, jumping, ducking shooting and doing your best to survive. Sometimes you end up with friendly fire in all the chaos, I’m sure that happened a lot during the war. I know there have been times I’m clearing a room and I turn around to see someone fast running into the room behind me and it’s hard to tell if he’s with you or a German soldier coming to kill you.

I can’t say enough good things about this game, even the first part of end credits is entertaining to watch. I had some tough spots on my playthrough to complete the missions at hand, getting picked off from all sides, it was outright frustrating and I can only think that my frustration is just a tiny fraction of what soldiers (on all sides) felt during the actual war.

I didn’t check for myself since I’m not a fan of online multiplayer, but a quick search online shows that CoD2 still has an active multiplayer. If you’re at all interested in it, be sure to check it out.

I would strongly recommend this game for any FPS fan or WWII buff, even if you’ve played it before and its sitting in your collection, go back and replay it for a fun time.

 

[Remeca]

A couple of things that really stood out to me at the time it came out:

Some non-linear level design, in some levels there's just an open area with several objectives that can be completed in any order you like. This is a departure from other linear shooters that mostly kept you on a set path of objectives all the way through.

The ability to melee with anything in your hand. This may not sound big, but my previous experience with fps's at the time was you mostly had to switch to a different weapon to melee. I don't think I'll ever experience the feeling again of the first time running around in multiplayer bonking people with grenades.

 

[neatfeatguy]

A couple of things that really stood out to me at the time it came out:

Some non-linear level design, in some levels there's just an open area with several objectives that can be completed in any order you like. This is a departure from other linear shooters that mostly kept you on a set path of objectives all the way through.

The ability to melee with anything in your hand. This may not sound big, but my previous experience with fps's at the time was you mostly had to switch to a different weapon to melee. I don't think I'll ever experience the feeling again of the first time running around in multiplayer bonking people with grenades.

I've died numerous times to the Germans running in fast or maybe they're right around the corner and they're bashing me with whatever weapon they're holding. It is a brutal way to go, just getting bludgeoned to death. On the other side of the coin, I found myself with both weapons I'm carrying with empty clips and my only option left is try to hit the Nazis with it. The game is a blast to play, even to this day. This game released on my birthday back in 2005 and that's when I picked up a copy that I still own to this day, I had a lot fun playing it then and the handful of other times over the years.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone

​

Release Date: September 14, 2004
Developer(s): Stormfront Studios, Zono
Publisher(s): Atari, Atari Inc, Akella, Atari Europe SASU

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows 2000/XP
• CPU: Pentium III or AMD Athlon 1 GHz
• GPU: Geforce 3+ video card or equivalent with 64MB
• RAM: 256MB
• Storage: 2.8GB
• Other: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card

Graphics:

There isn’t much to the graphical options for the game. To set them you need to run “demonlaunch.exe” first. Here you can set your graphic options by checking boxes for:

• Shadows
• Advanced Graphic Effects
• Disable HW Pixel Shaders
• Disable HW Vertex Shaders

You can use the sliders for adjusting the levels for Particle Density and Gamma Adjustment. Otherwise, you pick your resolution setting (called “Mode”) and it appears any resolution your monitor supports is an option to pick from so I set mine to 2560x1440 @ 60hz.

You can also adjust the keyboard configurations and even the joypad controls in this option launcher.

Characters are kind of blocky, but are okay looking for a game from 2004 that appears to be mainly created for the consoles of the day (Xbox and PS2).

In in any combat/fight while playing feels like the game is chugging, struggling to run. So I ran FRAPS and it shows I’m pulling 20-60fps while in menus, but once the normal game play begins the fps drops into the 6-20fps range and everything plays like a slide show. This could be a limitation to how the game plays with newer hardware or multicore CPUs or it could just be a complete piece of crap and that’s how it runs normally. I don’t know for sure. I’m playing the physical copy, for all I know the digital version could be better suited for current hardware and it may actually run just fine.

Audio:

The audio is questionable. The start of the game the devs clearly wanted it to sound like you’re caught up in a war – which you are making your way through – but the combat and surrounding audio is lack luster.

There really isn’t anything special about the music so far. To me it’s just filler noise – maybe this will change as the game progresses, but I doubt it.

Sound effects are pretty generic to fit the needs of the actions – swords hitting something, magic missile being cast and so on. Nothing stands out in terms of basic sound effects.

There are some big names and good voice actors for this game, such as Patrick Stewart (Khelban Arunsun), the late Michael Clarke Duncan (who you might remember as John Coffey in The Green Mile, voices Slaad Lord Ygorl) and even John DiMaggio (folks may be familiar with his voice on Futurama as Bender). As I play through I do hear familiar voices from actors, so that’s a nice addition to the game, but not enough to be the saving grace for the rest of the lackluster audio.

Gameplay:

Combat has no feedback. I’m hacking and slashing at bad guys, but you feel no feedback when you strike your target. It’s like you’re simply just swinging your weapons at air. Sure, the creatures have generic reactions when you “hit” them, but they don’t feel like they line up when your weapons make contact.

You get to control 3 characters. You get a warrior, rogue and a mage.

The warrior is blunt and up in your face melee combat. He kind of gets his butt handed to him by ranged characters.

The rogue isn’t much different, however she can become invisible after a second or two when standing in shadows. If she’s invisible and approaches bad guys at just the right angle, she can stealth kill them. Shadows are marked with a glint (looks like purple sparkles) in shadows when you are controlling the rogue.

The mage can do melee, but he can also cast spells. Starting off you only have a magic missile spell that you cast using the “T” key.

As you progress through combat you earn team experience and/or gold that can be spent on upgrading your skills or applied to new spells. There’s nothing really creative about the skills or spells, they’re just basic skills you learn to boost the power of your attacks or health.

Combat, when there are a lot of bad guys you’re fighting off can become very, very irritating. You can constantly get hit over and over again and you get stuck in a “you got hit” animation that is hard to get out of, even if you’re holding the SPACE key to block. Sometimes you will find your health just getting whittle down because you’re cheaply stuck getting your ass kicked and there’s nothing you can do about it expect pray you can find a way to block or fight back.

Time to complete is 7-8 hours from what I read online. I couldn’t get through the game due to the slide show issues.

Controls:

The camera is not controlled, it adjusts to the direction you’re forced to run and it can be very irritating if you’re trying to fight in a spot that has a camera angle transition. I don’t care for this aspect of the game, the camera isn’t something you should be fighting against.

“T” is the key used for casting spells or doing ranged attacked with the other characters as long as you hold “T”, and you have ammo (throwing axes for the warrior, for example) or mana, you can cast/throw ranged attacks. When trying to use ranged attacks the game automatically picks whatever target is kind of in the direction you’re facing to lock onto and usually it’s not the target you want to attack with your ranged weapon/magic. I find myself constantly adjusting the direction I’m facing in hopes my next attempt to lock on to the target I want to hit is picked for me.

You can do different attacks with various key presses. Left Mouse button does your normal attack, chain a few of those in a row for a combo attack. You can use the Right Mouse button to do a punch attack, you can mix things up as such by maybe doing a LMB + RMB, throw in a another random key such as T

SPACE key lets you block. Simply hold it down and you should block any incoming attack from any direction. When you’re blocking you cannot move.

You can change between characters on the fly with the F1, F2 and F3 keys.

As you fight you build up your special power. You can use it when it’s full with the “Q” key. It’s basically an AOE attack. If all three characters have their special power built up you can use the “R” key to have all 3 characters active their power attack at once.

Story:

Still trying to figure it out, but I think this is the gist of it all:

The intro shows a mage (voiced by Patrick Stewart) that captured two powerful creatures, while in combat with each other, in a Demon Stone. Apparently they were able to escape so I guess the story is that you’re going to be going after them.

You find out that Ygorl is one of the bad main villains – he is the leader of the Slaad army. The other main villain is Cireka, a general of the Githyanki. Basically you’re on a journey to follow the bad guys, kill them and win the day.

Replay Value:

None.

At least not for me. The whole game is basically on a rail. The camera adjusts to the direction the game forces you to go as you progress through it. You have zero control of where you go and how you get there. It’s just basic combat, over and over again.

Try to kill the ranged characters that are shooting you while you’re trying to fight/defend off melee characters that are trying to beat on you.

Once and done is what this game would be for me if it actually ran at a playable framerate.

Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:

Got the game going, loaded into the main menu, looked through the options and then started the game. The game loaded in the character model (all character models) being colorful and detailed, but anything else in the game world that had textures and shading to it was gray (see the first image below). I exited out of the game and went into the demonlaunch.exe and checked the two boxes for “Disable HW Pixel Shaders” and “Disable HW Vertex Shaders”. I relaunched the game and the gray issue was resolved. I don’t know if the game just didn’t load correctly the first time I got it running or if disabling these two options helped, but I don’t feel like screwing around with settings to find out.

Upon starting the second level the spoken audio cut out. I reloaded the level, but that didn’t fix the issue. I had to exit out of the game and restart the game to fix the audio.

The fact that the game runs like a slide show during combat made it very hard to play through this game. There were times where the game would even freeze up and then the image would almost start to melt (like a bad video transition between cuts/scenes) and I could hear combat and I think I could keep controlling my character for these 5-10 seconds of no response on the video end, then everything would snap back and the video would play normally – well, as normally as it would at around 10fps.

Availability:

The game can be found on GoG if you want a digital copy. If you want a physical copy you can search for it on places such as Ebay or Amazon for a PC, Xbox or PS2 version.

Rating/Score:

• Graphics: 1
• Audio: 1.5
• Gameplay: 1
• Controls: 1
• Story: 1
• Replay Value: 1
• Technical Issues/Info: 1

Average Rating: 1.07

Conclusion:

This was one of my games that I never beat when I purchased it years ago and I couldn't remember why.....but after trying this time around I think I know why.

After 3 hours of struggling to play through the slideshow I gave up.

In good conscience I cannot recommend this game, at least not in the PC physical version. Digital may be a different story, it may actually run properly? The game just wouldn’t run well and it was too hard to play because of it.

I can get past the mediocre graphics, they weren’t that bad for a 2004 console port game. They didn’t really bother me, but with how old the game is and how poorly it runs I cannot even give a forgiving score for graphics for this game.

The game feels and clearly plays like a console game. There is no feedback when you’re doing combat and the lack of control for a camera makes combat more of a chore than anything. And to top it off, trying to target a bad guy to hit with ranged attacks is harder than it should be.

The game just wasn’t any fun. It reminded me more of a bad arcade beat’em up type game that was deliberately designed to be unfair to make you pump quarters into the machine to keep you playing and paying. To be honest with you, I’d much rather go back to my youth and pop quarter after quarter into The Simpsons arcade game that released in 1991 or hell, even the Michael Jackson Moonwalker arcade game that released in 1990. The graphics and gameplay were so much better on those games and the gameplay was so much more engaging than this game was or ever could be.

In the end, the only thing that kept this game from being a complete letdown and scoring a full 1.0 was hearing some of the famous voice actors, but that was honestly it. Perhaps my experience is just soured by the fact I’m running the game off a physical copy on the PC and maybe it’s a much better experience on the consoles or through the digital copy available on GoG.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Soldier of Fortune
​

Release Date: April 3, 2000
Developer(s): Raven Software
Publisher(s): Activision

System Requirements:

• OS: Win 95/98/NT 4.0
• CPU: 233MHz
• GPU: 3-D hardware accelerated with full OpenGL support
• RAM: 64MB
• Storage: 700MB + 100MB for Windows swap file
• Other: quad speed CD-ROM, DirectX 7.0 for Win 95/98

Graphics:

Graphics are surprisingly well for a game pushing a quarter of a century. NPCs are a bit blocky, but they look better than a couple of games I’ve recently went through that are newer by 4-5 years.

The game supports 4:3 ratio up to 1600x1200, set it to your preferred resolution in the options and enjoy!

Gun skins (when you're holding them) look pretty good and explosions look good for a game this old. The guns look terrible when they're on the ground, after bad guys drop them when you kill them.

Vehicles, as few and far between that they are, look like where constructed from Legos. The wheels aren't round, they're more like octogens. The only vehicles that really play any part in the game are tanks. The cars/trucks you see pretty much serve no purpose other than something you can use for cover.

Audio:

Ambient sounds are decent and the background sounds are decent – if you’re in a war torn area you’ll hear explosions off in the distance. If you're in a bazaar/market area you'll hear people talking. The music is okay, nothing you’re going to be humming after playing the game, but it’s engaging enough to fill the background with something that doesn’t make your ears bleed.

Guns sound okay. However, there are times where too much audio noise is going on and the gun fire becomes muted. This happens in multiple spots in the game.

Gameplay:

It’s a FPS. You shoot the bad guys, they try to shoot you. You blow up red barrels and bad guys try to blow you up. Fun exchanges back and forth.

When starting missions you get an opportunity to create your own loadout for your character. You get to decided what couple of weapons you want to bring with (pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, etc) that are readily available and even a few items (grenades, body armor, night vision and so on). Once you’re out in the field if you don’t like a weapon you brought or maybe you find a weapon that a bad guy dropped that you want to use, you can always drop one of your equipped weapons (“Backspace” key) to make room in your inventory.

What set this game aside from other FPS games years ago was the gore associated with it. You can dismember bad guys, easily done with a shotgun – shoot a leg off, blow a head off, shoot the other leg off and an arm! The limbs fall to the ground. I still find this addition to the game to be extremely satisfying and entertaining. If for some reason this is too much for you and you want, you can lock the gore (password lock it) in the game menu.

Bad guys don’t always die right away, sometimes you clip them and they’re hobbling around, other times you’ve wounded them badly and they’re on the ground squirming. They will try to duck behind cover at times, they do roll out of the way, too. They don’t just hang out in the open waiting for you to kill them, generally. The enemy AI is okay.

The downside to the game’s enemies is that they’re always in a set location. If by some chance you die and need to replay an area, you’ll know exactly where the bad guys are on your next time through.

Buttons and switches to open doors and progress the mission – they can be tricky to see. They don’t flash, they’re not highlighted and they certainly are not bright in color. The buttons are square shaped, they’re generally darkly colored and very easy to miss. So, rule of thumb, if it looks like a button (once you recognize what they do look like) try to push it with your use key.

The game is based on the fact that you are a mercenary for hire. You're doing this for money. You earn money from completing missions and here's the cool thing about the money. You do absolutely nothing with it. You make all this money doing all these missions and you get to spend your money on nothing. I don't know why money is even tallied up (see screenshot #4) after missions because you have no use for it in game.

Time to complete the game is roughly 5-6 hours.

Controls:

Lots of controls to do everything and you can map any key and any mouse button to each and every control if you see fit.

Standard control scheme for most FPS. W/A/S/D for movement, LMB to shoot and so on. You can scroll through your useable items (medkit, grenades, flashbangs and so on) with the braket keys “[ ]” and then press the Use Item key (“Enter” key) and you will use the item. However, if you want to setup each item to have its own use key without needing to scroll through your inventory, you can do that, too. I personally set grenades to the “G” key and set the night vision goggles to the “F” key.

There is a lean function you can map to keys, it can come in handy when needing to keep in cover, but still allow you to shoot the bad guys without sacrificing your armor or health in the process.

I find at times when strafing that my character keeps gliding sideways after I’ve let go of the A or D keys, if I was holding another movement type key at the same time, such as the crouch key or the run key. Almost feels like you’re just sliding across ice. This tends to happen on inclines more than it does on level ground.

Swapping between weapons is slow. I find it faster to reload the weapon I’m holding over trying to swap to a different weapon when the one I’m shooting is empty.

Story:

You take on the role of a John Mullins (this is a fictional role for the game that was created after the actual John Mullins – a real life mercenary consultant). John is a soldier for hire and his current line of work has him getting paid to find and destroy the 4 nukes that were taken.

You’ll find yourself running amok in New York City, Sudan, Siberia, Tokoy and a few other places as you work on tracking down and putting a stop to the stolen nukes and the organization that is behind it all.

Replay Value:

Low.

It’s a decent FPS for its age. The story is kind of lackluster, but the whole idea of running around through all the missions and blowing limbs off of bad guys is rather entertaining. You should be able to put a couple of play throughs on this game over the years, making a worthwhile FPS to have just for the fact of shooting bad guys and watching them squirm.

Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:

Once the game is installed it won't launch on Windows 10. The game itself appears to run in the background (as seen through the task manager), but nothing comes up on the screen. A little digging and it appears you need to create a copy of the SOF.exe and rename it to something else, then create a shortcut of that renamed file and add the tag “+set console 1” (without quotes) to the target field in the properties of the shortcut. The game then loads up and runs just fine.

The train mission, as you’re making your way up the train there is a helicopter that makes its rounds, guarding the train. I found that once I made my way to the engine car and helicopter stopped attacking me and would clip through the ground, then reappear high in the sky and go back through the ground, over and over again, like it was stuck on an elevator.

Movement bug (feature?) when strafing – explained in the control section of the review.

I have gotten stuck on a door when I went to open it. The door didn’t open all the way, but my character model was clipping through the door, the bad guys on the other side could shoot me, but I couldn’t shoot them. They killed me because of it. Yep, fun times.

I also got stuck on a lever you pull down to open a door. Yep, stuck on it. Tried to duck, dodge, dip, dive and dodge, but I couldn’t get free of it. I had to restart the level.

Bad guys, if they do not see you, they do not always react to the fact that their buddy standing two feet away just got shot to death.

Availability:

The game is available on GoG. There are actually two versions of the game for the PC, one that runs on Windows and the game was ported to Linux. If a PC version isn’t what you want to try and track down on places such as Ebay or Amazon, you could find a used copy of the game for the PS2 or the Dreamcast, just search online to find folks selling them.

Rating/Score:

• Graphics: 2.5
• Audio: 3
• Gameplay: 3.5
• Controls: 3.5
• Story: 2
• Replay Value: 2
• Technical Issues/Info: 3

Average rating: 2.79

Conclusion:

The game is certainly dated and for those of you familiar with the original Half-Life, that is what the game looks like when you’re playing it. The upside to the fact that it is dated, is that you can blow bad guys up into tiny bits with a well placed grenade or blow limbs off or heads off.

Aside from a couple of technical issues I can overlook, such as bad guys not always acknowledging you or the two times I got stuck on interactive items, the game is halfway decent for a 23 year old FPS. It doesn’t have the story line that Half-Life has, nevertheless, it is fun to blow stuff up and take limbs off the bad guys.

Not a bad throw back game to the FPS genre if you're looking for something interesting to play that will run on any modern day system, even a potato.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Time off from work for the holidays has let me put more time into these games. Here's the one I just finished.

​

Release Date: June 1st, 2004
Developer(s): Starbreeze Studios, Tigon Studios
Publisher(s): Vivendi Universal Games

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows 2000/XP
• CPU: Pentium 4 / Athlon XP @ 1.8GHz
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce3+ or ATI Radeon 8500+ with 64MB
• RAM: 256MB
• Storage: 4GB
• Other: DirectX 9.0

Graphics:

Resolution settings, I am able to choose 2560x1440 (my native resolution), but the game image becomes distorted, overly stretched (see picture #2) to fit that high of a resolution. The game was never designed to run at that high of a resolution. I can run the game at 1080p without any image distortion (see picture #3).

A game closing in on 20 years and it looks great. Character models are well done – except everyone seems to have a head that’s just a little to big for their body…..maybe it’s just me? To top things off the weapon skins look good and the environment is well done. I’d say that this game easily competes with my opinion of Call of Duty 2’s graphics, but I’d give the CoD2 a slight edge simply because the character models in EfBB have those heads that look slightly too big for their bodies and it’s a little off putting if you sit there and stare for too long.

Audio:

Voice acting is good, at least as good as the Riddick movies. If you liked the movies you’ll like the voice acting from people such as Vin Diesel and Cole Hauser. There are some other notable names such as John DiMaggio (well known for the voice of Bender) and even the rapper/actor Xzibit voices the character Abbot.

Nothing exciting about the music. Just good enough where you don’t realize how bad the music score is, but not bad enough to make you feel like it’s obnoxious noise. It just seems to blend in with the background and you may not even notice it at times.

Sound effects are good for the most part. Gunfire is okay. It’s not as good as CoD2, but let’s be real here because when you think about Riddick you’re not thinking about going in guns blazing. You’re thinking about stealthing in for the kill the bad guys didn’t even know was coming or the up close and personal beatdown in a fist fight.

Gameplay:

This is a first person shooter type game that is built around two game play styles that you can mix and match as you please. You can try to stealth your way through the a lot of the game – looking for vents and shadows to help you sneak your way past guards or into a position for breaking necks. Or if you’re holding weapons (rifles, shotgun, pistol and so on) you can shoot it out with the bad guys.

The stealth gameplay is handled well in this game. You can sneak around in a lot of areas and try to approach things in a quiet manner. Shadows are dark and hard to see things, once your eyes are shinned it makes navigating the shadows so much easier and more entertaining trying to sneak your way around (see pictures #7 and #8 to see a screen image comparison of normal vision vs shined vision). Not many games have done well with stealth and I’d honestly have to say that perhaps the Splinter Cell games do it just a little better than Escape from Butcher Bay.

Guns have good kick back and each weapon has it’s place. Shotguns work best up and close whereas the rifle works well at mid to far ranged, but be mindful that accuracy really drops for long distance.

If you’re up close and personal with the guards and even if they’re armed, they don’t always try to simply shoot you. If you’re right next to them, a lot of the time they like to hit you with their weapon. When they do that, if you time it right when you’re holding a shiv or just using your fists, you can counter them and kill them.

The start of the game you’ll find yourself battling it out with fisticuffs or maybe a shiv for the most part. As you attack you can move forward, sideways or backwards to do different striking animations. Play around with them and try to figure out a few combos that work well. Don’t forget you can block punches, it’s always better to get your guard up over letting your face stopping the fists.

Cigarettes – you find them, buy them or trade for them. There are 62 in all and each one you obtain will unlock concept art and the movie creating EFBB. Track them all down or don’t, but some of the extras you unlock are cool to see.

The guards in the game are pretty spot on with their eagle eye vision and they’re quick to shoot and look for you, even in the dark where you have the upper hand.

Time to complete is roughly 8 hours.

Controls:

You’ve got total control over your key bindings in this game. This is always a great thing to have so you can setup your keys to fit your needs.

Weapon switching is done with the numeric keys at the top of your keyboard or you can use the “V” key to cycle through your weapon choices and when you find the one you want, just press the left mouse button to equip it.

You use the use key (the letter “E”) to do your climbing – you can jump up and automatically grab ledges at times, but if that doesn’t work then press “E”. When you climb your perspective switches from first person to third person. This happens every time you climb something, a ladder, a ledge or you’re scaling across an overhang. It can be a little irritating at times, but shouldn’t really cause anyone issues. Also, when you’re viewing in third person you can swing the camera a little, but in the end, you don’t have control over it. Also, switching to third person mode during these actions pulls you out of using your shine mode to see in the dark. The game designers did it this way so you could have a feeling of like you’re watching a movie, but at the same time controlling Riddick in the game.

Story:

The story unfolds with Riddick breaking John’s neck and escaping into the sewers. There is no way Riddick is going to prison….

That is, until he’s awoken from his dream. Seems Riddick is still restrained and is being transported to Butcher Bay. As John works on haggling the price of Riddick’s bounty with the Warden of Butcher Bay, Riddick is escorted into the prison facility. Here is where the real escape needs to take place as Riddick works on making a break for it and escaping the hell hole he was dropped in.

This game is a prequel to the movies. This is the story of how Riddick earned his shine on his eyes and how he can see in the dark.

Replay Value:

Low to moderate.

Riddick is a game where you can find multiple ways to progress through a level, stalking quietly in the shadows as much as possible or going in guns blazing. Maybe mix it up a bit. Also, with the decent voice acting it’s kind of like playing an interactive movie and a lot of movies are worth watching at least a couple of times.

Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:

The game won’t run on Windows 10 without a little help. You’ll need to find and download a program called Nvidia Inspector (the most current version I found at the time I used the program was 2.4.0.4). Once you have it and open it up, at the top in the “Profiles” search bar look up the game “The Chronicles of Riddick”. Once you choose that profile scroll down to section 5 called “Common”. Under there you pick the 5th option “Extension Limit”. In the drop down list pick the one titled “0x000011A8 (Medal of Honor: Allied Assault)”. Then just click on APPLY CHANGES on the top right corner. Now you can launch the game and it’ll load up without any issues.

I’ve experienced one game crash, it hung up on me and stopped responding, right after I had accepted a side mission. I was forced to Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up the task manager and kill the game.

I’ve had a couple of instances when trying to use a ladder the use key wasn’t triggering the action to climb down it. I’ve also had a few issues with trying to pick up interactive items on the ground – be it cigarettes, a shiv or even a weapon. I’d had to spin and walk around it to get the on screen item indicator to show up. It’s a minor inconvenience and shouldn’t be a problem during combat action, just something to be aware of.

Availability:

From what I can find it looks like you can purchase the sequel to Escape from Butcher Bay (Assault on Dark Athena) on the Xbox Marketplace, Escape from Butcher Bay is included with Assault on Dark Athena. You can find physical copies for the PC or the Xbox on places such as Ebay or Amazon OR find a physical copy of Assault on Dark Athena, then you'll get both games in one.

Rating/Score:

• Graphics: 4
• Audio: 4
• Gameplay: 4
• Controls: 4
• Story: 4
• Replay Value: 3
• Technical Issues/Info: 4

Average rating: 3.86

Conclusion:

This is amazingly still a great game to play to this day. However, getting it to run on Windows 10 (and possibly 11) takes a little extra work using Nvidia Inspector program. Graphics are a certainly a bit dated, but it looks great still and plays very well.

I enjoy the stealth aspect of combat and the gun combat is decent. The ability to take out lights to make places dark and the guards are pretty persistent in looking for you once they know you’re around. I get a solid 7-8 hours to play through the game. The story is pretty good, the voice acting is good and the overall gameplay is good.

I’d highly recommend this game for anyone that enjoys these types of games, unfortunately you can not find a digital copy for the game anymore (I think the Riddick games, once upon a time, were available on Steam) and you have to find a physical copy for the PC or have a Xbox console to buy Assault on Dark Athena (my understanding is that Escape from Butcher Bay is remade and included with AoDA).

 

[neatfeatguy]

​

Release Date: December 16, 2008
Developer(s): Liquid Entertainment
Publisher(s): Electronic Arts, Codemasters

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows XP/Vista
• CPU: 3.0GHz Pentium or AMD equivalent
• GPU: 128MB with Geforce 6800 / Radeon X1300 or above
• RAM: 1GB Windows XP / 1.5GB Windows Vista
• Storage: 8GB
• Other: DirectX compatible sound card

Graphics:

The game looks halfway decent for being 15 years old. It is a console port from what I can tell simply because there are zero graphic options to adjust for the game. The only graphic related thing you can change is the game’s resolution. By default the game does match the native resolution for my monitor of 2560x1440, at least the game supports a wide array of resolutions. The menu screen (use Esc to access) during gameplay only supports 1080p, if you’re resolution is set higher than 1920x1080 then the menu screen will not fit the whole screen (see pictures 3 & 4 below for example).

You can manually adjust some graphic settings off or on in the LiquidEngine.ini file located here: C:\Users\Xxxxx\Documents\My Games\Rise of the Argonauts\LiquidGame\Config. Any settings under [SystemSettings] you can screw around with if you think it may help. The only option I adjusted was MotionBlur=True, I set to False. I hate motion blur.

Aside from there being zero graphic options to adjust in the game itself it’s not too bad of a game to look at. Character models look okay and the surrounding environment looks okay. You’re not going to be praising the graphics, but they are good enough where I’m not thinking about how they look as I’m playing the game.

Combat dismemberment looks pretty good, removing of heads or cleaving a body in two. I was rather surprised by it and enjoyed it.

Audio:

Voice over work is pretty good. I find most characters are easy to listen to and actually sound like the voice actors are actually interested in their line of work. There are a couple of characters where their voices were supposed to be that of a child, but they came off as being more creepy than childlike, they are very breathy and kind of sound like they wannabe Bill Istvan’s take on Pennywise in the It movies from 2017 and 2019 – not scary, but laughable.

Music is decent. It generally plays well with the game’s atmosphere, but it’s not something you’ll find yourself humming later in the day once you’re done playing.

Sound effects are good for weapons. The ambient sounds are good. Nothing I could really complain about here.

Gameplay:

There doesn’t appear to be any kind of markers or notifications on the screen to help you figure out where to go once you make it through the intro to learning the basics of the game. I found myself meandering around the palace for about 15 minutes before I found the correct way to go and the correct people to talk to (and eventually learned about the map you find in the menu after pressing the “Esc” key).

As you talk to people you are at times presented with dialogue choices. These choices didn’t really seem to play an important part for me, at first, until I realized you can go into the menu screen and see how much you’ve appeased certain Greek Gods to earn points towards earning aspect points you can apply towards skills/power ups that each of the 4 gods offer.

• Apollo – you can bolster your shield, armor and health
• Athena – you can bolster your spear damage and incorporate lightning into your attacks
• Hermes – you can bolster your sword damage and focus on speed/time/air for your attacks
• Ares – you can bolster your mace damage and gain the ability to turn enemies to stone and shatter them.

All your dialogue options don’t really have much sway, as far as I can tell, in the progression of the story. I wouldn’t be too concerned about the options you pick because they mostly feel like a false sense of control over the story's narrative.

You get to play around with the three weapon types that Jason carries, a sword, a mace and a spear as you run through the intro. Each weapon feels ideal for specific situations. If you want something fast you use the sword, if you want something that hits harder (but it swings slower) use the mace and if you need some extra reach (and the fact you can throw it) then you use the spear. Each weapon also has its own unique kill animations.

As you fight and come closer to dying the audio will become muffled and the outer area of the screen will start to turn a faint red. You can regenerate health as you stay out of combat or can avoid taking any more damage.

I’m left wishing there was some sort of fast travel feature in the game. The starting area feels a little bit like a walking simulator. Run around the palace, then down to the dock and a few spots between. Then run back up to the palace, then across the current map and back to the docks. After progressing through the game and putting about 6 hours into it so far, I do believe that 4 of those hours is simply walking back and forth between the same locations to talk to various people to unfold the story. Actual combat with bad guys feels almost secondary to walking and talking. I’d expect walking and talking from an old school RPG, but even in those games you get the random fight encounters as you walked that keep things interesting.

As you earn Aspect Points and apply them to your skill trees, some of the skills are God Powers. You can equip up to 4 God Powers.

There is no HUD and no health indicator that I knew of until sometime much later into the game. Apparently there is a “Show Combat UI” (which is defaulted to NO) and a “Show God Power UI” (that is defaulted to ON USE). You can change the former to YES and the latter to ALWAYS or NEVER. I wish I knew about these sooner so I would have known to figure how to use the God Powers before the very last 20 minutes of my gameplay.

Time to complete the game is roughly 12 hours.

Controls:

Controls can be adjusted to suit your playstyle for the mouse/keyboard and the game appears to have controller support on the PC. I don’t use a controller so I cannot comment on compatibility or functionality for using one.

The camera is on a swivel on the X axis, you can spin it around all you want just by moving the mouse left and right. There is a little play on the Y-axis, but when I say a little it is a very little. Mostly you’ll be spinning the camera about to get a better angle on combat.

You get the ability to do normal/quick attack (LMB), a strong attack (RMB), block (Space) and a shield bash (MMB {middle mouse button} or “F” key). Mix and match button presses to do a few combos. As for weapons, you can change between weapons using the “Q” and “E” keys. You can throw your spear using the “R” key.

Alt key, hold it when you do your LMB for a specialized weapon attack. The spear you will sweep outwards, the sword you do a dashing slash and the mace you do a ground pound that knocks most targets in your immediate area to the ground.

ESC key brings up the menu to view the map, stars and gods (skills).

Map shows all active quests.

• Golden circle is main mission
• Black/dark circles are side missions/events
• Red circle on map is your current location

You cycle through all your missions using the left and right arrow keys.

God Powers – how do you use them? Good question. I have no idea, that was, until I searched online how to use God Powers for PC. I looked through the game’s manual and it shows a picture of a Xbox 360 controller and a note pointing to the Directional Pad for using God Powers. If you are using a controller, great! You know how to use God Powers. If you’re using the mouse and keyboard, you’re basically left guessing. Online searching shows me that you active God Powers using the number keys 1 thru 4. Just pressing the keys won’t active the powers, you need to hold one of the keys for a second or two for the God Power to active.

Story:

Jason, the Greek king, has his wife taken by death and he embarks on a quest to seek the Golden Fleece to bring her back.

The story starts out with Jason and his wife being attacked. She is assassinated by a member of the “Blacktongue”. As her body lays in the mausoleum Jason refuses to give her the last rights to allow her spirit to move on. Instead he and Hercules being their quest together to track down the Golden Fleece to bring his wife back from the dead.

As you progress through the game you’ll learn of tragedy and betrayal. You’ll need to battle your way through and make it back to your beloved wife with the Golden Fleece so you can bring her back to life.

Replay Value:

Low

I found this game is just a once a done game. The story is okay, but not something I'd replay the game for. The combat is fun, but needing to get through so much walking and talking until combat becomes the focus towards the last 1/3 of the game is not making me want to come back to play this again.

Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:

I’ve experienced a couple of moments when spoken dialogue was muted from NPCs.

I’ve had the game crash on me twice, to the desktop, during conversation moments. Game just locked up and crashed to desktop.

Since this is a 3rd person view game, camera angles are very important. In this game camera angles when in tight areas are bad, you end up right on top of Jason or if your teammates are running along with you, they can get behind you and block a large portion of your viewing field – especially Hercules because he’s basically a walking wall. You will find yourself fighting with the camera more than you want and it’s very annoying.

I found many times at loading screens, if I was actively moving my character when the game pauses for a moment, his movement will become stuck and he’ll free run on his own. Sometimes getting him to stop free running takes multiple button presses. Other times, especially on the ship, when opening the door leading from the below deck to the top deck I found myself getting stuck on the edge of the screen and one time I couldn’t free myself of it so I had to quit to the menu and load up the game again.

Invisible barriers that get put in place to prevent you from leaving an area when you’re in combat. Most of the time these don’t cause you any issues and if you can’t progress forward that usually means you still have a bad guy or two to kill. However, I have had on multiple occasions where a bad guy gets stuck on the far side of these barriers and I can’t get to him to attack him. I have to try and equip my spear and throw it and hope it hits him and he doesn’t just constantly dodge it like one time and the only option for me was to quit the game and restart.

Zero info how to use God Powers with the mouse and keyboard.

Availability:

The game is available on the PC in digital through Steam. If you wish to have a physical copy of the game on PC, Xbox 360 or the PS3 then you’ll need to make your way to places like Ebay or Amazon.

Rating/Score:

• Graphics: 3
• Audio: 4
• Gameplay: 3
• Controls: 3
• Story: 3
• Replay Value: 1
• Technical Issues/Info: 2

Average Rating: 2.71

Conclusion:

There are some glaring issues in the game, such as the lack of information about how to use God Powers when using the mouse & keyboard and fighting with the camera more often than naught. Even with those irritating problems I found the combat to be enjoyable. The different fighting techniques with the three different weapons and the way you could smash or dismember bad guys was entertaining (especially when the slow-mo kicked in, you could swing the camera around and watch the action slowly unfold from your lethal strike).

I did, however, grow bored of all the walking. Walking, walking and more walking. The first 2/3 of the game there feels like there is more walking than fighting. I grew very tired of the back and forth. Thankfully the maps aren’t that big, but some locations are large enough with the twists and turns of the map to make traversing on foot deplorable. As I grew more and more annoyed with the walking, I grew more and more irritable with having to listen to a lot of dialogue so I found myself at various moments just clicking through and skipping chunks of spoken dialogue. I my have missed some important bits of information here and there, but the story progressed forward whether I listened to those NPCs talk or not. If you can make it through the game and get to the last 1/3 or so of it, that’s where most of the combat happens. More smashing, less talking. That’s what I wish the entire game was like, more smashing and less talking…and even a whole lot less walking!

You get a lot of choices during conversation. All your choices are tied to one of the 4 gods and you earn a little aspect experience towards that God’s skill tree, but in the end your conversation choices appear to make little or no difference in the outcome of the storyline.

This game may be something people could still find entertaining today if you got it a decent price so perhaps wait for it to go on sale on Steam.

 

[Hyderz]

Looks nice reminds me of dragon age similar level of graphics

 

[Splinterdog]

This game is probably going to be the most current one I review, it's only 14 years old, but still a helluva game to play and I still find it very enjoyable. So much so that I spent most of my free time over the Thanksgiving break playing it, spent over 30 hours.


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Release Date: December 3, 2009
Developer(s): Pandemic Studios, Hands-On Mobile
Publisher(s): Electronic Arts, Hands-On Mobile

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows XP SP3/Vista SP1/7
• CPU: 2.4GHz Core2 Duo/3.0GHz Pentium D or faster
• GPU: 256MB 7800GTX or ATI 2600 XT or better
• RAM: 2GB
• Storage: 7GB
• Other: DX9.0c sound and video capable

Graphics:

To adjust the game’s graphic settings you need to do it before you launch the game using the SaboteurLauncher. Once that is open, pick “Options” and for any gaming system today you can just crank up all the settings to max, adjust your resolution and then enjoy!

The character models are well done and still look pretty good by today’s standards even though the facial expressions and lip movements are pretty stiff. Car models/skins look great, I’d say even better than character models. The game does have nudity and if the nudity bothers you, you can set an in-game option to turn it off and you’ll be left with clothing or tassels covering up any unwanted nudity.

The use of the noir look (black and white) in areas that have not been liberated is very well done and a nice touch to the game. As you’re transitioning from one area that’s all drab and into a vibrant and colorful area is very cool to see.

The view distance is amazing, but the draw distance for trees/vegetation/details aren’t very good. You’ll get flowers popping in as get closer and once trees are 50 yards or so away from you the detail for them drops. This was most likely handled this way to help manage things in game with the lower available VRAM back then.

To top it off the handful of cinematic cut scenes look great for a game that released 14 years ago.

Audio:

The music is great, it fits the era and certainly adds to the atmosphere of the world around you. Different songs will sometimes play on the radio as you hop in and out of cars and even at times when you’re transitioning from one area of a city to the next.

Explosions, guns and cars all sound really good and the voice acting is well done. I personally don’t have any complaints, I actually wish more games had audio as well as this game does.

Gameplay:

The game is an open world with only a few loading screen transitions that take place when you enter hideout locations or a few other below ground areas. For the most part, there are no loading screens and the world is your oyster.

Guns have an accuracy and a lethality range. If you’re aiming down the sights of your gun and the reticle doesn’t change from yellow to red, then you’re not guaranteed to hit the guard you are aiming at nor guaranteed to get a kill shot with one bullet to the head. Guns have decent kick back so you can’t expect to be a long ways away from a guard and instantly drop them with your SMG as you spray and pray. Same with shotguns, their range is not as effective the further away you are, but they are very devastating when you’re up close and personal. I find the best guns for close quarter is the trenchgun and a SMG. If you’re scaling rooftops then a rifle or scoped rifle is your friend and of course if you’re trying to be sneaky, sneaky, then you’ll want to make use of your silenced pistol and the Viper SMG (once you unlock it). A lot of the weapons have a time and place to use them.

Currency in game isn’t dollars/gold/silver that you find, it is based off of a contraband system. You can come across special crates that hold contraband items such as liquor, cigars and such and each item has a set amount of contraband that it converts to automatically when you pick them up. You also earn contraband by killing high ranking officers and blowing up Nazi stuff such as heavy artillery, sniper nests, anti-air guns and so on. After you wreak havoc and build up some contraband, find a black market arms dealer in the area to buy upgrades, weapons, ammo and other goodies they can carry.

You gain perks as you do tasks in the game. For example, if you blow up enough guard towers you’ll earn a perk to carry more demolitions and in my opinion even with this unlocked perk it still feels like you're not carrying enough. You can also purchase some perks from black market dealers. One perk that is good in a pinch is the ability to call for backup, you’ll get a few guys on your side drive up in a vehicle, jump out and help fight the Nazis. The perks have nice upgrades to really help you along your way, but they’re not necessary to have fun nor complete the game. The discretion is up to the player if they want to pursue completing these perks or not.

You can save your game at any time from the menu screen (or do a quick save) and auto saves do happen, but you don’t start where you saved your game. The saved game just saves your progress and when you load in you’ll find yourself in a safe house so don’t expect to save your game and instantly pick up at that very location you saved it.

Cars, there are a good variety of vehicles that you can “borrow”. All cars handle differently so don’t expect to hop into a truck and have it accelerate, brake or turn like a small car. Also, don’t think that every small car handles like the last one you were just driving, they too vary in terms of controllability and acceleration. You can collect nearly any vehicle that you drive, you simply need to bring it to a local mechanic garage (once you’ve unlocked them) and once there you just exit the vehicle and it’s yours! Just be aware that some vehicles do require certain perks to be unlocked before you can collect them. You’ll now have that vehicle in your collection and you can call any car you have collected from any garage. Another great thing about cars is that you can use them as an explosive device. You plant a bomb in it (default key is “Q”) and drive it at high speed towards a target and then bale out in time to watch the vehicle careen into your target and explode on impact!

You have the ability to use disguises in the game to make it easier to navigate off limit areas. You need to obtain the uniform of a guard that you kill, but you cannot shoot or blow them up, you need to beat them with your fists or do a stealth kill. As long as no other guards are nearby, you use F1 key to change into their clothes. Don’t do anything to draw attention, walk slow and don’t get too close to other guards or they’ll see through your disguise and you’ll be trying to shoot your way out.

You will run into invisible walls on the outskirts of the map once you’ve hit the edge. It’s a bit of a pain if you’re trying to elude the Nazis, but I find it better than being some random out of bounds area that somehow just gets you killed.

Finally, there are alert levels, much like you’d see in the Grand Theft Auto 3 game. The more mayhem you wreak, the higher the alert level becomes and the harder it becomes to escape by eluding the Nazis and leaving the alert area or by using a designated hiding spot. There are 5 alert levels so be sure to have fun!

Time to complete the game, if you stick just to the main story line is about 11 hours. If you wish to explore to see and do everything you could easily put in 45 hours.

Controls:

You can change all controls in the settings as you see fit and even have options for secondary keys. This is awesome. Some new games that come out don’t even have this functionality.

When you’re climbing you make use of the Jump key (default is the “Space” key) to climb up and if you want to climb down you press the “C” key once to drop to the next available handhold. If you wish to drop further, hold the “C” key down. If you want to drop off a ledge to start your climb down, simply walk (don’t run) off the edge and you’ll automatically turn and grab the ledge – the same thing works for ladders. You literally just walk off the ledge and you’ll automatically grab the ladder so you can slide down.

I find the lack of button for a direct pull up of the world map to be extremely irritating. There is no way to map the map to a key, either. I’m not staring at the map that often, but when I want to view it I find myself constantly pressing the M key (thinking M is for Map) and then getting annoyed nothing happens. The only way to view the map is by going into the game menu, choosing MAP and from there you then you need to click on “Full Map” at the bottom of the screen so you see where you are or find the closest garage and black market dealer. A slightly faster way is pressing ESC (to pull up the menu screen) and since MAP is the first option at the top, press ENTER and then ENTER again.

Driving is pretty smooth and shouldn't take more than a few minutes of being behind the wheel to get the hang of everything. You use your directional keys to steer the car and accelerate or break. The “Space Key” is for the e-brake to help drift. You can use the mouse to look around while you drive, but the camera will snap back in the direction you are moving. You don’t have to worry about orienting the camera at all, just use the left (A) and right (D) keys to turn, W to accelerate and S to break and the camera will pretty much take care of itself.

Sometimes small ledges or lips on edges and buildings can make your character kind of hitch up and not start his wall climb or let you make your jump up to a ledge above. You can also run into some minor issues with the camera angles at times, but they’re so far and few between it shouldn’t be much of an issue.

Story:

The game takes place in a Neo-Nazi World War II era as you’re in Paris helping fight back against the Nazis.

The protagonist is Sean Devlin, an Irishman, dragged into this war due to personal loss and wanting revenge. A bit of his backstory is a short playable section early in the game, designed to help give the player an understanding of his situation and why he’s willing to fight back. Sean is angry and clearly he wants revenge, but it’s not until Luc approaches him at a gentleman’s club that Sean even does anything about it. Luc has been keeping his eye on Sean for a while so it’s not just a happenchance he meets him. Luc helps set Sean on his way to Nazi killing, wall climbing, carjacking, blowing things up and being an all-around pain in the Nazi’s ass.

Along the way Sean will find other main storyline type characters that offer him missions to complete – from driving a getaway car, to infiltrating a Nazi compound, to blowing stuff up and even racing!

Replay Value:

Moderate to High.

With the game being open world you can go anywhere you want and climb to the top of nearly any building or structure that you see, yes, even the giant Ferris Wheel in the game. There are dozens of vehicles to find and collect, there are 10 different perks to level up and master, a slew of different weapons to obtain and an endless supply of Nazis to kill. On top of all that the story is pretty good and requires at least a solid 10+ hours to get through alone, not to mention the other side missions you can do. There are even 2 mini games you can find on your explorations to spend time playing.

Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:

You reach a point in the story where you can blow up a train bridge, after that there are a few other bridge locations throughout the map where you can blow up other train bridges. This requires the use of “bridge killer” explosives you purchase from the black market. Blowing up a bridge requires 5 charges to be placed. The first 4 are easy to place, no issues. However it is pretty difficult to place the 5th charge because when you’re prompted to press “Mouse 1” I find that I’m swinging my fists instead of placing the explosive. It usually takes half a dozen tries or more to get the camera just right so I’m prompted to press “Mouse 1” and eventually it works, it’s just a lot harder than it should be.

Cars float. Yes, that is correct. They float. It’s not often you might find yourself in a position to drive a car into the water, but if you do, they just float.

Speaking of water, be careful of where you jump in – do not jump into any fountain because you may not be able to escape it. I was forced to reload my game once due to jumping into a fountain as I was escaping a swarm of Nazis after me. I couldn’t climb up any part to get out.

Then speaking of vehicles, if you are able to find and collect any large vehicles or tanks, not all garage locations will be able to spawn these vehicles. It appears to be a space issue, not all of the garages have a proper location to accommodate the size of these large vehicles or tanks. It is a minor inconvenience, but something you should be aware of.

I’ve had a few times that Nazi soldiers would end up floating in the sky after platforms had been blown up that they were walking on, but it was a rare bug. I only encountered it twice.

Upon exiting the game through the menu and clicking on “Exit to Windows” the game has locked up on me a couple of times. Thankfully I am able to pull up the task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and put an end to the program to get back to the desktop.


Availability:

The game can be found on GoG or the EA Store if you would like a digital copy. If want a physical copy you can find physical copies of the game on places such as Ebay or Amazon for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.


Rating/Score:

• Graphics: 4
• Audio: 5
• Gameplay: 4
• Controls: 4
• Story: 4
• Replay Value: 4
• Technical Issues/Info: 3

Average Rating: 4 out of 5


Conclusion:

The game is fun. You get some aspects of GTA3, Mafia and Assassin’s Creed all rolled into one game that comes littered with Nazis you need to eliminate. I’ve played through the game before and I forgot how much I enjoyed it then and how much I'm enjoying it now as I play through it all again. At times when I play I can have a goal in mind – head to the next mission marker – but on my way I get side tracked because I spot a tank I can get in and drive or I see a car I don’t have yet or a giant fuel tank begging for me to make it explode or I’m carrying a sniper rifle and I just want to pick off as many Nazis as I can from a high perch before I get overwhelmed. I can play for an hour or two and not actually progress the storyline. I highly recommend this game to anyone that enjoys open world type games and enjoyed playing GTA3 and Mafia.

Replay value here, I find is moderate to high. The game is entertaining enough that it just begs you to play through multiple times unless you’re a completionist and do every single thing in one run. 11 hours to roughly play through just the main story, if that’s good enough for you, so be it. Maybe, though, just maybe the idea of blowing up Nazi scum will be enough to make you want to come back for more!

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(yes, I blew up cows because I could)

Thanks for these very well written reviews.
By the way, The Saboteur is on sale at GOG priced at only $4.99 (75% off), so I may give that a crack.
I have SOF and SOF II Helix originals on CD which I probably bought at PC World, UK back in the day and I remember at the time, the first game was surrounded by controversy due to the gore. There may even have been talk of a ban and we all know how that turns out
As far as I remember, I installed both games direct from the CDs and managed to get them running.
Will you be reviewing NOLF? That, I would love to read.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Thanks for these very well written reviews.
By the way, The Saboteur is on sale at GOG priced at only $4.99 (75% off), so I may give that a crack.
I have SOF and SOF II Helix originals on CD which I probably bought at PC World, UK back in the day and I remember at the time, the first game was surrounded by controversy due to the gore. There may even have been talk of a ban and we all know how that turns out
As far as I remember, I installed both games direct from the CDs and managed to get them running.
Will you be reviewing NOLF? That, I would love to read.

Never got a copy of NOLF. I do have NOLF2 and even Contract J.A.C.K, but I've never even played them much more than seeing if I could get them running. I'll eventually get to them. At the moment I've kind of been eyeing Company of Heroes, Diablo II or Titan Quest w/ Immortal Throne. Been playing a lot of FPS/TPS type games and looking to shift gears a little.

Love that game, The Saboteur. If you had any fun with the Mafia games or GTA 3 type games, it should be right up your alley.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Release Date: June 28, 2000
Developer(s): Blizzard North
Publisher(s): Blizzard Entertainment

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows NT 4.0, 95, 98, 2000
• CPU: Pentium 233 or equivalent
• GPU: DirectX compatible video card
• RAM: 32MB
• Storage: 650MB
• Other: internet connection for Battle.net on 28.8k or faster modem

Graphics:

The game is from 2000, but the limited resolution makes playing it hard to deal with. 640x480 is the max resolution for Diablo II (Lord of Destruction expansion raises the bar to a whopping 800x600!). The character models in game are pixilated, there is no way around it and it’s hard for me to look past it if I’m not putting in a good 20-30 minute sessions to play.

Thankfully some of the spell animations are interesting enough to look at to help offset some of the abysmal graphics the rest of the game has.

Also, the cutscenes are still fun to watch regardless of them being a low resolution. I’m still entertained with them even though I’ve seen them all a dozen times or more throughout my gaming life since the game has been out.

Audio:

Sound effects are pretty good. Spells/skills have good sound effects and creatures make their own sounds, nothing seems rehashed. Same with items when they spawn and hit the ground, you can tell the difference in sound of when a key drops, when a gem drops or even when a ring drops

Music is okay, it just plays quietly in the background for me. It is enough to add to some of the atmosphere as you’re trekking around the world.

Voice over work is pretty good for most characters. A few sound forced and a bit drab, but then again, you’re not here to idly chit chat with NPCs.

There are a handful of times I’ve noticed that not all audio cues come through when there is so much going on in the game when you’re in the thick of battle. Usually you can hear the high pitched pin-like drop sound that gems and keys make when they are dropped, but if you’re in the middle of a big fight these audio cues never happen. I would have walked past a lot of drops had I not been used to making use of the ALT key to see what’s constantly on the ground for looting.

Gameplay:

This is a hack’n’slash RPG. Hack and slash your way through the depths of hell! Well, we already knew that so on to aspects of the actual gameplay.

You pick from 5 different characters to play, all with different playstyles, skills and powers.

• Barbarian – using brute strength to smash everything in his way
• Amazon – skilled with spear and ranged attacks
• Necromancer – controller of minions (yeah! Skeletons!)
• Paladin – melee based warrior backed by auras to help destroy those that stand against him
• Sorcerer – magic; lightning, fire and ice are at your control

Each time you level up you gain 5 attribute points and 1 skill tree point. Use them as you see fit. For attributes, there are:

• Strength – boosts damage with melee weapons and allows you to wear heavier/stronger armors
• Dexterity – helps determine how likely you will hit your target with a physical weapon, allows you use of dexterity based weapons and increases the chance to block if you use a shield
• Vitality – boosts your life and stamina level
• Energy – boost your amount of mana

Inventory or the lack of; you have a very limited inventory space, especially since about 98% of items don’t stack. Be sure to keep what you need at all times to help you survive, the rest of your limited space will be for a small handful of items you will try to juggle as you’re bouncing back and forth between town to sell, sell, sell. The inventory problem compounds itself once you start finding green items for sets and you soon find out you have little to no room for keeping them.

Treasure comes in all sorts of variety. Gold for buying stuff at shops to various potions and all sorts of random weapons, armor, rings and amulets. These latter items come in a variety of rareness level:

• White – your basic items
• Grey – your socketed items (you can place gems to give bonuses to the item)
• Blue – magical items that can have a couple of special attributes
• Yellow – rare and can come with a handful of special attributes
• Green – set items. Collect them all in a set for extra bonus(es)
• Gold – Unique, named items. These are generally pretty rare.

Gems, you'll find a wide variety of them in terms of quality and type. Once you start to progress through Act 2 you get the Horadric Cube where you can transmute items in it. 3 of the same type and quality gems will make you a single gem of one step in higher quality. You use these gems to insert into socketed weapons/armors to help enhance your abilities.

Companions can be hired in town, but this only becomes available after doing a couple of quests in Act 1. Until then, you are on your own. In Act 1 you get to hire archers. The companions have their own one or two different skills and/or attacks. If your hireling dies, it can be sad, but you can easily replace them with another back in town. They do level up if they can stay alive long enough with you, so as you grow in power they do, too. While the companions can be useful in large combat fights or a good distraction to a boss character, I feel they die way too fast.
Act 2 you can hire spearmen.
Act 3 you get to hire battle mages.
Act4 you are on your own again because no hireling in their right mind wants to journey into hell to face off against Diablo.

Health, the big red sphere on your HUD, left side. Once it is empty, you dead. You do not naturally regenerate health. You have a variety of ways to get health back – most obvious is health potions – but you can get skull gems you can socket into armor or even find amulets/rings that have Life Replenish.

Mana, the big blue sphere on your HUD, right side. It dwindles down as you use your spells/skills. Mana does regenerate slowly on its own, but you can speed it up with items/skills.

Stamina - As you run around towns it doesn’t drop, but everywhere else you are it goes down. You can use stamina potions to help you out if needed. You can boost your stamina level by raising the Vitality stat. If you have low stamina and no pots you can stand still to let it regen fast or you can even press the “R” key to turn off run and you’ll slowly walk, but this allows stamina to regenerate at a slower rate and still allow you to move.

You’ll come across shrines as you explore the world. The shrines will give you beneficial boosts to things such as your armor, stamina, experience and so on. You will also find health and mana shrines and even small pools that’ll refill your health/mana. Be on the lookout for these shrines because they can help turn the tide at times.

Barrels, jugs and baskets – oh my! You know you want to break them, but after breaking a handful of them you come to find out that they sometimes blow up or are trapped. When they blow up sometimes you can take damage from them so be mindful. Other times, on rare occasions, a monster pops out of it! Now your conflicted, take damage from time to time to try and find goodies or maybe get a monster after you? It’s the little things that keep you wanting to break these things when you come across them.

Death is not the end for you. When you die your body drops in the spot you lost the last of your health and upon dropping dead all of your equipped items are left on the body. To recover those items you need to make your way to your dead body and pick it up. Once you do that you will automatically equip all your items as long as the inventory spot on your body is empty otherwise the items go into your inventory. The only thing you will have to do is place all the potions back in your belt. You also lose some gold upon death. In the end, sometimes you need to know when it’s time to retreat to try and heal up before you drop dead. Just because you’re a big bad barbarian with strong armor and high health, that doesn’t mean you stand in the fray forever. Learn your limitations.

Time for me to complete a normal run: 20 hours

Controls:

Nothing special, if you played one you’ve played them all – many controls for hack’n’slash games are similar. I’ll just outline the use of controls below:

TAB = map overlay, you can move the map when it is up with the ARROW keys
SHIFT (hold) to stay in one spot and attack
ALT (hold) to highlight treasure/items/gold on the ground
LMB moves and attacks with weapon
RMB attacks with equipped skill or spell
Assign skills/spells to F1 thru F8 keys
Mouse wheel to rotate through assigned skills/spells
I = inventory
T = skill tree
C = character sheet
B = skill/spell book (hold your mouse over whatever skill/spell and press F1 thru F8 to assign the function key you want to use)
1-4 = quick keys for potions you put in your belt
~ = show all belt slots so you can see what potions you have

The only downside is that there is no camera control, it is always stationary in the same spot – no rotating of the camera or zooming in/out. It just sits there static.

Story:

Diablo, the Lord of Terror, is on the rampage and working on freeing his brothers; Mephisto and Baal. It becomes the job of a nameless hero to take up arms and follow the path taken by the Dark Wanderer and try to cull the evil that’s on the rise.

Replay Value:

Moderate to High

The game may be old and dated, but that does not mean it doesn’t hold solid replay value. You have 5 character classes with multiple ways to build each one and tons and tons of loot to hunt for. On top of that the Battle.net is still active for this old game so you can go online and join others. The only real limiting factor to this game is your available free time to play.

One reason to replay the game, aside from trying out different characters is hoping you can farm those rare items for sets. Also, running through the Cow Level – that’s always for a good chuckle.

Perhaps a version of Diablo II that is graphically more appealing and has auto pickup for gold plus slightly increased inventory space would make this game a solid “High” for replay. You may want to look towards the updated and more recently released version of Diablo II Resurrected.

Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:

I’ve gotten this game to run from a physical version. All the latest patches bring the version up to 1.4d. Supposedly there is a third party “PlugY” program that can allow you to change the resolution of the game on version 1.4d, but I couldn’t get it work. This isn’t an issue with the actual game itself, I just wanted to put this info here should anyone else playing the original Diablo II from disc would like to try their hands at getting a third party program to allow resolution adjustment for the game.

Auto pickup for gold is not in the original version. I don’t mind having to use the ALT key to see loot on the ground and then decide if I want to pick it up, but it would be really nice if gold was auto looted. This is something that is addressed in the Resurrected release of Diablo II.

Companion issues:

• Pathing for companions is passable, but not by much. There are many times they can easily get left behind because you took a corner too fast or they haven’t walked through a doorway yet. Also, they’re not the best at attacking. I’d say they have a successful chance to actually engage about “60% of the time it works every time.” because they are either stuck behind you while trying to follow or they’re running back and forth, unable to figure out their next action. The only saving grace if your companion gets stuck somewhere is if you move far enough away from them they will respawn near you.
• Sometimes they can make a bad situation worse if they happen to open a closed door and aggro more bad guys.
• Usually when you get too far away from your companion they will respawn next to you, I’ve had a couple of times they wouldn’t respawn and would simply vanish on me if I got too far away from them. The only way to get them to come back was to teleport to another area or load into another area (like a cave/cellar/tomb) that requires the game to load.

Caskets for looting sometimes take multiple clicks to open when you’re standing right next to them or even requires you to move a step or two and try to click on it again to open.

Line of sight is something you’ll fight with when it comes to ranged weapons or spells. You can be standing and attacking directly at a creature that’s in a doorway or just on the other side and your attacks won’t go through, but theirs do. It is a fight to properly align yourself so your attacks hit the intended target. I’d say this is the biggest issue I have in the game, especially when you open a door and creatures are right there to greet you and you can’t hit them, but they’re kicking the crap out of you. I find myself backing up constantly to let creatures filter through the doorway, very, very irritating.

Two Graphical bugs:

1. sometimes when you click on a door you can open it doesn’t actually open visually and when mousing over the door it says it is still closed, but you can actually move through it as if it were open. If you open/close the door a handful of times the visual bug should go away and the door will appear open.
2. In act three there are bird that are part of the ambiance of the jungle life, they look like green parrots, they fly around and are of no importance to the player. However, they have a tendency to stop during mid flight and just sit there with their wings spread wide like they're frozen in mid-flight. Once you see it, you can unsee it.

Casting and ranged creatures can pummel you from off the screen. You can't see them, but they sure as heck can shoot you and if a large enough group of them are attacking you, you can be dead or critically low on health in the blink of an eye. You either need to close the gap quick and finish them off or work on your duck, dodge, dip, dive and dodge skills to survive. Also, you want to be good at being able to slam down health and possibly rejuvenation pots to keep you alive in these situations.

Here is a cheat that can be beneficially to a single player, but be warned that it can really ramp up the difficulty. While you are in the game press “ENTER” to type in the chat window and type in the following (without quotes) “/playersX” (where X is the number 1 thru 8). This increases the difficulty of the game by making it think there are more than 1 player, like you were playing online with multiple people. The increased difficulty of creatures means you also get an increase in the drop rate for better items and it also boosts the amount of experience you earn from killing creatures. I’ve been setting the game to 3 players on my play through because I’m a glutton for punishment. I find myself running out of companions faster this way, they’re not designed be tanking/fighting creatures boosted up for 3 players.

Availability:

Outside of tracking down a physical copy of the game for the PC on sites such as Ebay or Amazon you’re left with one option for a digital version of the original game. If the hassle of using a physical copy is too much for you then you can get a digital copy from the Blizzard store. If you want a version of Diablo II that has updated graphics and actual resolution support, then look for the Diablo II Resurrected on the Blizzard Store.

Rating/Score:

• Graphics: 1.5
• Audio: 3.5
• Gameplay: 3
• Controls: 4
• Story: 3
• Replay Value: 4
• Technical Issues/Info: 2.5

Average Rating: 3.07

Conclusion:

Even with the dated graphics and lack of graphic options, especially having none for the resolution, I still enjoy running through this game. In all honesty, I really do enjoy these types of games. I do, however, have problems with them sometimes. I get interested in a build and start over multiple times before I actually get through the game. I had that same problem with Grim Dawn and even at one point Neverwinter Nights 2; keep trying out new characters/builds and restarting over and over again. This time, however, I stuck it out with one character build - the sorceress - and defeated Diablo without letting myself get sidetracked with multiple character builds.

No matter how long I play the game I’m still irked by the lack of inventory and storage space. You have to be very picky on what you want to try and keep. It becomes irritating when you come across several set armor pieces that could be a great boon to your build, but these set pieces are for 2 or 3 different sets….now you have to try and decide which one to keep and hope you make the right choice due to the randomness of drops. I wish the storage and inventory space were doubled. I also wish that potions stacked, even if was 5 potions per stack. Something to help alleviate the lack of inventory woes you’ll feel while playing.

I personally spent about 20 hours to beat the game on normal. I’m sure it could take you less time if you knew what you were doing or it could take you many more hours if you’re farming. No matter how you cut it, it should be a solid 20+ hours for you to get through the normal difficulty.

If you are any kind of graphics nut and you never played the original Diablo 2, I’d suggest you stay away from it and get Diablo 2 Resurrected. If graphics aren’t going to hurt your feelings and you want a blast from the past to sink some hours into, then load up that old copy of Diablo 2 and enjoy!

 

[neatfeatguy]

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Release Date: September 2005
Developer(s): Lionhead Studios, Big Blue Box Studios, Feral Interactive, Robosoft Technologies
Publisher(s): Lionhead Studios, Microsoft Corporation, Xbox Game Studios, Feral Interactive, 1C Company

System Requirements:

• OS: Window XP
• CPU: 1.4GHz equivalent or faster
• GPU: 64MB shader-capable video card
• RAM: 256MB
• Storage: 3GB
• Other: DirectX 9 compatible sound

Graphics:

Upon launching the game and getting into the graphical settings I am surprised that the game allows you to cycle through so many resolution options and it even allows me to choose my native resolution of 2560x1440. The only downside to using my native resolution is that the HUD and menus are much smaller in game and there is no option to adjust the size of the HUD.

For a game that was released in 2004 and then had extra content added to it and re-released in 2005 as “The Lost Chapters”, the graphics are quiet impressive compared to other games during that same time. Character models look decent, facial expressions are stiff and some of the eyes on characters are kind of creepy looking, but overall looking nice for an almost 20 year old game.

Audio:

Voice acting is pretty good, most characters sound like they have a personality. Other than your character, he’s just the strong mute type.
Sounds for combat – melee, archery and magic are decent
Ambient sounds while you’re out in the world wandering or in a town are well done: bugs, water, sounds of a bustling town.
Music is a nice touch, it’s not something you’ll remember down the road, but it adds well to the atmosphere.

Gameplay:

You will find yourself transitioning through your child hood, teenage years and into your early adult hood during the intro gameplay for the world. Once you pass all your training you are free to start traveling the world to forge your own destiny – be it for good or for evil, that choice is up to you.

As you traverse the world, do deeds, gain renown and make moral choices, every one of these actions will result in good or evil alignment. If you start to become a goodie good shoe your features will start to appear more angelic. If you go the other route you will start to look more sinister, making your appearance more dark and menacing. Or you can try to keep your outer appearance as it is when you start into the world – neutral – as you work on balancing out good and evil deeds.

The world is broken up into many small area maps. As you move through one area to the next you will experience loading screens. Any kind of computer that can easily run this game today should not experience long load times, but it is annoying how many load screens you will see. Also, leaving a map and returning to it will respawn bad guys (in most areas). They are not always the same type you may have just killed, but you will have bad guys to mow down again. This could be good or bad, depending on how you look at it:

• Good because you can practice combat and farm experience.
• Bad because you just want to move through an area fast that you were just in and not have to worry about bad guys slowing you down.

As you fight and kill creatures/bad guys they will drop experience orbs. You want to collect to build up your General (green) experience pool. As you fight these creatures you will also build up experience points in three other categories depending on the combat method you use:

• Strength (red) is from melee combat
• Skill (yellow) is from ranged combat
• Will (blue) is from magical combat

You will use General experience points for any skill in any tree. The Strength, Skill and Will experience can only be used in their corresponding skill trees. For example you have 500 General experience and 100 Strength experience. If you go into the Strength skill tree and level up a skill in there that costs 500 experience you will first automatically apply the 100 Strength experience and then you will automatically apply 400 of your 500 General experience. The only way to level up is to visit the Heroes’ Guild, you use the green glowing looking portal in the map room. Thankfully you can teleport from anywhere using with your hero’s insignia (default is hold the “G” key).

As you fight creatures, without getting hit, you can build up your experience multiplier. The more you kill in a short period of time, the higher the multiple gets. Avoid getting hit and kill things fast to boost your experience gains.

Ranged (bow/crossbow) combat is kind of lacking if you ask me. You can pick off a bad guy or two before a group of them closes the distance, thus forcing you to switch to melee or rely on magic to help keep the bad guys down. The game’s combat feels more suited towards melee and magic, with ranged being a second class citizen. Don’t get me wrong, ranged does come in handy from time to time, but you’ll mostly be focusing on magic and melee…..just don’t completely neglect ranged.

Armor and clothing – you generally get to choose between a light or dark variation of them. Dark makes you scarier looking and light makes you appear more attractive. There are plain variations, too, that do not impact your scariness or attractiveness. You can mix and match all you want to make your own style.

As you progress through the game you can find appearance/feature cards that you can use to change your features/appearance. Depending on the feature (haircut, tattoo and so on) it could make you more likeable, more scary, more attractive. Mix and match to make your character as how you see fit!

Once you get through the intro part of the game you can start picking quests at the Heroes’ Guild. Upon picking a quest you have the option of doing said quest as is or you can do the quest with boasts. Each quest that allows boasts will offer a few varying options to pick from such as doing the quest without armor or trying to do the quest without taking damage and so on. Completing the boasts you claim you can do earns you extra gold, but if you fail a boast you lose some gold instead.

You not only get quest cards from the Heroes’ Guild, but you can also come across little side mission from talking to people or places you come across throughout the world. Normal, basic NPCs that are nothing more than fillers are highlighted in a purple hue when you target them, the ones that are highlighted in a green hue can be part of a little side mission or a merchant of some sorts. Main card missions appear as a gold icon on your map. Side card missions appear as a silver icon on your map and little side missions appear as a bronze icon on your map. Be sure to keep an on what mission you have available to you.

As you earn renown and you wow people you come across, you can even make them fall in love with you (a heart will grow above their head the more they’re infatuated with you). You can even marry people in the game, buy property to have as your own or rent it out for turning a profit. Speaking of profit, you can even buy and sell products between vendors to pad your pockets.

Throughout the game there are Demon Doors. When you speak to these doors they can either give you a riddle type reply or a straight forward answer on how you can get them to open up for you. You will also find silver keys stashed away throughout the game, collect them when you see them. They are required to open special Silver Chests and each silver chest requires a specific number of silver keys to open. So far I’ve seen chests requiring 5 through 30 keys in my play through. Keep your eyes peeled for these keys on your travels!

Controls:

So far as best I can tell, you can assign actions to any keys that you like. It’s always nice having that ability in a game.

Movement is handled with the WASD keys and the mouse handles the control for the camera. It took me a little while to get used to the quickness that the camera swings around, but about the time I finished the intro part of the game (took about 30-40 minutes) I had become accustomed to the speed it moved.

Combat is done by swinging your weapon (“Q” key to unsheathe or sheath it), shooting arrows with your bow (“E” key to equip or unequip it) and then there is magic that is set to be used only when you hold the SHIFT key and use the LMB or RMB to cast the spell you have assigned to those slots. While in combat you can lock on to a target with the SPACE key. If you hold the SPACE key this allows you to quickly turn the camera and lock on to another target without needing to disengage first, then turn the camera and then lock on to a new target.

As for shooting arrows you can lock on to a target (SPACE key, do note that you can use the lock on feature for any mode of combat you use) – this method allows you to move about while keeping your aim auto locked as you draw back and shoot. Or you can press the RMB once you start to pull back on the bow and this takes you into an over the shoulder camera angle that allows you to manually aim at targets. This method roots you in place, you cannot move about while aiming in this so called “zoom mode”. Magic works mostly the same, hold SHIFT to cast, lock on a target and attack, but you can move about while casting some spells.

Melee combat, you swing with your RMB and you can block with your middle mouse button. If you’re blocking you can dodge left, right or forward using the movement keys.

You get a row of hotkeys to use that correspond to the number keys 1 thru 9. To assign things to it, you access your inventory and then drag (click on the item, such as a health potion icon, and drag the icon to the location on your hotkey bar) it to your hotkey bar. Expressions you can do –emotes – can be put in the hotkey bar, too. Pretty much any item you can use or expression you can do can be set to the hotkey bar.

Story:

You start out as a young boy just living a normal life in the small village of Oakvale. As you run about and play and assist the town folk, your world suddenly becomes shattered as bandits raid the town. All the villagers are killed and your family, your father is killed and your mother and sister are taken for reasons unknown to you. Little did you know that the raiders were there looking for you! All seems lost until a mysterious figure comes in to save your life just in time and you soon find yourself following this stranger, who you come to know as Maze, to the Heroes’ Guild.

You will journey through the world trying to become a well-known hero or possibly villain, depending on the path you follow of good or evil. As you forage your own path in life you’re strung along by Maze trying to help you find out if your family is still alive after all these years.

What is the reasoning behind your childhood being shattered?
Who attacked your village?
Why were you and your family targeted?

Will you be able to find your family or have they already been lost to time? Now is your chance to take action, pick up your sword and show the world what kind of hero you are!

Replay Value:

Moderate to low.

The game offers you a good and evil aspect of playing the game. This allows you several ways to play through the game and with all the various methods of combat and ways you can make your character look you could do multiple play throughs that are all completely different.

Get married to one or more people or don’t.
Buy property or don’t.
Be evil and kill everything you can or be a Saint and save or help everyone you can.
There are many, many possibilities for mixing things up for multiple play throughs should the gameplay and story be enough to hold your interest.

Will this be enough for some people to do multiple play throughs? Perhaps.

Time to complete (for me) was 21.5 hours. You could probably get through the main story line in 15-16 hours.

Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:

A couple of noticeably long hang ups during a couple of transitions during talking with the head guild master as I was going through the intro aspect of the game. One hang up lasted almost 10 seconds and I thought the game had locked up. If this happens you, be patient, give it a few seconds and it should get back to normal operational status.

Loading into a black screen after starting a saved game, but don’t fret! This happens from time to time. Just be patient for a few moments and everything will eventually work itself out.

During combat I’ve had some bad guys clip into parts of the environment that you cannot get to them and you have to wait until they move out on their own – which can be irritating if they utilize ranged combat at all. If that happens, it’s generally best to leave the area.

Getting NPCs to follow you with your commands can be a bit tricky. You tell them to follow and they don’t always obey on the first try. Also, if you have someone following you do not tell them to wait when you’re right next to an exit (load) point. If you do this, the NPCs do tend to wander just a little bit and when that happens they can wander beyond the exit spot and you won’t be able to command them to follow you again because the game will transition to the next area as you try to approach them.

Cheap knock down tactics; you may find yourself on the receiving end of constant cheap knockdown attacks. It can be very frustrating, especially if you’re surrounded and have no way to escape because you can’t get an attack off before you’re knocked down again. This doesn’t happen often, but everyone will probably run into this issue at least once during the playthrough.

If you use an emote action by mistake during combat, you’re stuck doing that emote until it ends or until you get slapped around by the bad guys. So be careful not to accidently press any button that you have an emote linked to.

Possible bug: I’ve purchased a house in a town and I’ve even married a nice lady so her and I could live there. I returned to the town late at night and went to my house to find the door closed and locked (all residential houses seem to be closed and locked late a night to keep people out). I figure I should be able to enter my own home……makes me wonder what my wife is doing in there with the door locked without me… Another man? Another woman? I speak in jest, but still, I was locked out of my house for the night.

Sometimes you might come across multiple missions that start in the same place or within an area you are already on a mission. This can cause issues with said missions from starting properly. You may have to exit/enter the area from another entry point or even save and then re-load your game to get some missions to start.

Viewing the map, you cannot just admire the map and move around on it with the mouse. The only way to navigate around the map is to pick a location (on the left side) that you have visited/unlocked teleportation pad for. I personally do not like how the map is designed with how you can interact with it.

Bug (SPOILER ALERT):

Spoiler

The end battle with Jack, if you are playing the game in a widescreen resolution you will not notice the prompt you need to press if you wish to destroy the mask. To resolve this issue you need to do one of two things if you want to destroy the mask:

1. Spam the left mouse button because you won’t be able to see the prompt show up for when you need to press the mouse button to destroy the mask
2. Change the game resolution to 4:3, this way you will see when the prompt comes up

Availability:

You can acquire this game on Steam if you’re interested in a digital copy of it or you can visit sites such as Amazon or Ebay to find a physical copy of it for the PC, the Xbox, Xbox 360 and even for Mac.

My understanding is that the remastered version on Steam, called "Fable Anniversary", is a big more buggy. People have complained about game breaking bugs/issues. My advise, avoid it and stick to the original Fable: The Lost Chapters. The remastered one certainly looks a lot better graphic-wise, but I don't think it would be worth it if there are game breaking bugs/issues that never got fixed.

Rating/Score:

• Graphics: 4
• Audio: 4
• Gameplay: 3.5
• Controls: 3
• Story: 3
• Replay Value: 2
• Technical Issues/Info: 2.5

Average Rating: 3.14

Conclusion:

I really do enjoy how you can be as good or as evil as you like. There is a lot to this game and trying to cover every little thing you can do to make yourself liked or disliked in this review will take way too much time and make the read more boring than it might already be. Do as you like as you progress through the world, kill the innocent…..or save them!

Combat is pretty fluid when it comes to melee and magic. You can quickly change spells that you have set or switch to melee, they can easily complement each other. Sadly though, I haven’t found ranged combat with the bow or crossbow to be as useful. Too often the bad guys swarm you and you don’t get the time you need to rely on ranged combat to be your bread and butter unless you’re taking one just one or two guys. If you pick up the magic spell “Multi Shot” it can help with range’s lack luster damage, but in return you can chew through your mana pretty fast having to recast the spell when it ends. When I do use ranged it is usually to try and pick off one or two bad guys before the rest can engage me and this is about the only time I utilize the lock on feature (SPACE key) to snip targets from a long range off. Otherwise you will find ranged helpful for some areas, so don’t completely neglect it.

I greatly enjoy the teleportation part of traveling to and from locations you’ve discovered teleportation pads. Walking is nice and all, but it would be very grueling if you had to run back and forth to every location without a quick travel option.

Now it is your time to choose if you want to be the savior or suppressor of Albion!

 

[neatfeatguy]

​

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Release Date: (TQ) June 26th, 2006 / (IT) March 2nd, 2007
Developer(s): (TQ) Iron Lore Entertainment, Demiurge Studios / (IT) Iron Lore Entertainment
Publisher(s): (TQ) HandyGames, THQ Nordic, THQ / (IT) THQ, Buka Entertainment

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows 2000/XP
• CPU: 1.8GHz Pentium 4/AMD Athlon XP or equivalent
• GPU: 64MB GeForce 3/ATI Radeon 8500 or equivalent
• RAM: 512MB
• Storage: 5GB
• Other: DirectX 9.0c, internet required for online multiplayer

Graphics:

The game supports a wide range of resolutions from 800x600 up to my native resolution of 2560x1440. The only downside to running 1440p is that the HUD interface doesn’t scale up, leaving things looking a little undersized.

The graphics look very good for a game pushing 17 years. Zoomed in or all the way out, creatures and objects keep their details without becoming pixilated. When you do zoom in close NPCs, monsters and your player character, it can easily be seen that there are a lot of straight lines and more boxy polygons that make up the characters, but being zoomed all the way in is a very hard way to play game because your field of vision is extremely limited. You won’t be able to see more than a handful of meters around your character.

The environments are well detailed and reflections from water look very good. It would be hard to really nitpick anything bad when it comes to graphics and details in this game for the age it is. Overall things look pretty amazing.

Audio:

Sound effects are well done. All the various creatures have unique sounds, nothing comes off sounding recycled. The music helps add a bit to the atmosphere, but in the end the music just kind of blends into the background and is mostly forgettable.

Gameplay:

Starting a new game you can pick your sex, male or female. You can also pick one of five different tunic colors and that is the extent of your character creation. There are multiple difficulty levels for the game that you can eventually play for your character:

• Normal
• Epic (Unlocked after completing Normal)
• Legendary (Unlocked after completing Epic)

Finding equipment from killing creatures or opening chests, you will auto equip a piece of armor if you do not already have something equipped. Equipment comes in a handful of different levels ranging from basic items to legendary items. You will be able to tell the difference between them based on the color they are:

• White (common)
• Yellow (uncommon)
• Green (rare)
• Light Green (monster infrequents)
• Blue (unique)
• Purple (legendary)
• Sets – they can be found in blue or purple colors.

In the inventory screen, above your equipped weapon, you can click on the “I” or “II” circle button. Here you can have two different weapon types equipped. Maybe you have ranged equipped on one and melee equipped on the other. This way you can use the “W” key while running around to quickly swap between weapon types.

Check points/Restore points: You can find fountains throughout the game. Activating one will be a check/restore point for you should you leave the game or die.

As you progress through the game and kill creatures, you will sometimes come across pieces of charms or relics. These charms and relics can be used to enhance your weapons and armor. Monster charms require 5 charms of the same type to make a full charm.

Relics require 3 pieces of the same type to make a full relic. You can use them at any time, where it’s a single piece of a charm or a completed charm. The most complete a charm or relic is, the greater the benefits it will grant you.

As you gain experience you’ll level up and upon doing so you get to choose from one of nine classes.

• Storm
• Earth
• Warfare
• Spirit
• Dream
• Defense
• Nature
• Hunting
• Rogue

Once you hit level 8 you have the option to choose a second class if you so desire. Upon doing so opens up your training path to a multitude of skills and abilities. Along with earning skill points every level to put towards class skills you also get a couple of points to put towards your stats:

• Strength
• Intelligence
• Dexterity
• Health
• Mana

Armor and weapons you use are based on your stat levels. Melee weapons and heavy armors are more reliant on high Strength stat. Magic and lighter armors are more reliant on high Intelligence stat. Bows are reliant on high Dexterity stat and some armors are also reliant on high Dexterity.

As you maneuver through the world you will come across shrines. These shrines will provide you with some kind of aid or bonus to help you through your fights. These bonuses can be instantaneous or last a short duration. You can choose to use them or not, that is entirely up to you.

In the inventory screen you get a nice auto sort feature making it easy and quick to try and make extra room for treasure you find scattered across the ground after slaughtering enemies. You also have a traveling storage merchant that you find in city locations, here you can store important stuff that you may want to use later. You can even expand the storage space a couple of times if you have enough coins. The other bonus is that the caravan storage also has a Transfer spot where you can place items you want to transfer between any characters you have on your computer. One last nice thing is that potions, health and mana, stack in your inventory. Albeit only 5 potions per stack, but at least they stack. As you progress through the main story line you will eventually be rewarded with a few extra inventory bags so you can hold more goodies so you’re not having to constantly teleport back to a vendor to offload as often.

Collecting loot, you need to hold ALT so you can view the loot on the ground. With ALT being held you can click on items to pick up. This also applies to gold. There is no auto looting, it would be helpful a little if there were auto looting for at least the gold that gets dropped.

Through your journey you may come across formulas for artifacts. If you do find one that you want to craft you’ll need to find an Enchanter (identified by a lightning bolt icon above his head) in some of the cities. He will be able to assist you with crafting artifacts from formulas and separating charms or relics from items, should the need arise.

If you want to reset your skills, seek out a Mystic. There is one located in the city of Delphi, he can be identified with the large blue mystical looking orb above his head.

Time spent to complete the game, for me, was about 35 hours to get through Titan Quest and then through Immortal Throne. You could certainly spend many more hours in the game if you’re trying to farm items or looking to uncover every nook and cranny the game has to offer.

Controls:

Camera is static. You cannot spin it, but you can zoom in and out.

Below are some of the controls listed for the game. Many of these controls are kind of universal for most ARPG type games so I won’t list them all out:

Hold SHIFT to stand in place and attack freely.
Hold ALT to see items dropped.
Use “W” key to change between one of two weapon layouts in your inventory.
Space Bar will pause the game for you (or you can simply press ESC to pull up the game menu, this essentially pauses the game, too)
“S” key opens the Skill Menu
“C” key opens the Character Menu
“Q” key opens the Quest Menu
“L” key drops a teleport pad

The numeric keys across the top will let you use skills/items you assign to them.

Story:

There isn’t much to the story. Something bad happens and you right the wrong. To be a bit more specific:

You’re a traveler that takes up arms to pursue a Telkin (a powerful priest/sorcerer) that is determined to destroy mankind and the gods by releasing the Titan that has been bound for ages.

Once you play through and complete the original Titan Quest game, you get to partake in the expansion game “Immortal Throne”. After the Titan has been vanquished the Gods see this as a sign that humans can protect and defend themselves so they leave the humans to their own fate. Soon new creatures start to arise and it is your mission to find out where they are coming from and vanquish the threat.

Replay Value:

High.

You have so many combination of classes and skills you can replay this game countless times and never have the same experience twice. That is, if the gameplay is enough of a reason for you to keep coming back. I personally don’t feel the story is enough to make you come back, but it is kind of interesting to see what the non-important NPCs that you can listen to have to say. They do add a little depth to the story and world, making it feel like it’s actually populated and that all the characters are not just background pixels to look at.

Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:

Without being able to control the camera, the angled top-down perspective does bother me because any creatures coming from the southern direction (bottom portion of your screen) are very hard to see at times. If you could swing the camera around to adjust your point of view it would make traversing some areas so much better over hoping you’re not about to get swarmed by a group of bad guys.

Graphical anomalies – I’ve encountered these issues with the games ever since it released and out of all the times I’ve played it using various different computers and graphic drivers:

• Sometimes when creatures are walking through tall grass, the grass becomes elongated as it moves to the sides as the creature walks around in it. The grass becomes twice as long as it moves around making it look a bit comical.
• On occasion when some creatures when they die their limbs can become very long and it looks funny.
• Crows, when you kill them they are supposed to explode into a ball of feathers. The animation for this doesn’t always trigger. Sometimes nothing happens, sometimes it’s a small black ball that vanishes and other times it’s a big explosion of feathers that fall to the ground.
• Poison traps – specifically this version of trap almost never shows up when opening a sepulcher. The graphics for it rarely display on screen. I hear the hiss of the gas and I get poisoned if I stand in the immediate surrounding, but I cannot see it. Sometimes other traps are not visible, but it’s kind of rare.

Hang ups when attacking creatures – sometimes when I’m in the thick of combat and I’m clicking and attacking, after I kill a creature next to me my character will not move nor attack the next creature I put my cursor on. The issue only lasts about half a second or so, but it’s enough to be irritating because it can make or break you in some dire situations.

Personal take on combat speed – it feels slow, sluggish and the responsiveness of your actions feel delayed. The only time it starts to feel snappy is when you get a high boost to your attack speed. Maybe my take on this is because of all the hours I’ve put into Grim Dawn and I’m just drawing a mental comparison without trying.

Main quest, Act 2. When tasked with finding two artifacts to progress the story line I ran into an issue because story mission would not progress. To get the store to progress I had to discard the two artifacts, restart the game and collect the artifacts again. Once I did this the story moved along and I could continue again.

Not a bug, but I find this to be an issue simply based on personal preferences - you cannot add charms or relics to blue or purple equipment. I tend to find really nice green items, when paired with a relic or charm, makes them a lot more potent over what blue and/or purple items can provide. This makes the blue and purple items feel rather moot and mostly just a waste.

A personal gripe – armor stat requirements seem to be more heavily based on Strength or Intelligence stats and not so much on Dexterity. You will find most armor requiring high Strength or Intelligence and very few that take Dexterity into account. If you’re focusing heavy on a build to use Dexterity do be aware that your armor options may be limited if you’re not also working on building up Strength or Intelligence as a secondary stat.

I have experienced one crash to desktop while playing through the Immortal Throne portion of the game. Nothing special going on, just running around and attacking creatures and then just the desktop looking back at me.

Some of these issues I’ve listed above, it could be possible they’ve been fixed if you get the digital Anniversary Edition of the game. The issues listed above are strictly ones I’ve come across in the physical version.

Availability:

You can find physical PC copies of Titan Quest and Titan Quest Immortal Throne on sites such as Amazon or Ebay. If you wish to get a digital copy instead, you would want to look for the Titan Quest Anniversary Edition which can be found on GoG or Steam. The Anniversary Edition (AE) is both Titan Quest and Immortal Throne in one – the main differences between the physical copies and the AE digital copy is the fact that the AE is listed as having a lot of bug fixes, some quality of life fixes, improved enemy and pet AI, more monsters, armor sets and so on.

Rating/Score:

• Graphics: 4
• Audio: 4
• Gameplay: 4
• Controls: 4
• Story: 2
• Replay Value: 5
• Technical Issues/Info: 3

Overall rating: 3.71

Conclusion:

Trying out multiple builds was the main draw to this game for me when it first came out. I put a lot of hours into it over the years and I have to say that when this game first came out it was amazing in terms of fun, gameplay and mechanics. I’ve done a multitude of builds and I’ve made it through the Epic difficulty a couple of times on a couple of builds. However, coming back to the game today, I had issues with playing it again. My best guess would be simply from the fact that newer games, such as Grim Dawn (specifically Grim Dawn), have faster combat and fluidity and a better story line. Titan Quest just feels slow, from running to combat. Running feels like my character is trying to run through two feet of water constantly and the combat speed is horrifically slow, like I’m underwater and trying to fight.

It wasn’t until I started unlocking skills in the Hunter tree that boosted my run speed and some attack speed, but even then when using a bow my attack speed was still slow. Attack speed only getting around 90%, it was brutal. I was doing a lot of kiting early in the game until I was able to get stronger weapons or aid my attack speed a bit. Later in the game – specifically start of Act 3 – I found myself getting wrecked because I was heavy in Dexterity for my stats and I couldn’t use much in terms of better armor because a lot of it requires high Strength or Intelligence. Also I was still slow with my attack speed. I had to respec and picked up some Nature skills (Hunter + Nature = Ranger class) to help boost my attack speed a little and I just happened across a couple of better items (bow and couple of pieces of armor I could use). Coupled with the fact I was able to complete and add a few relics/charms to my stuff to get my attack speed just above 100%. Once I hit attack speed range things felt a bit better, but still too slow. I had to work on finding items that specifically boosted my attack speed and once I got to 115% that’s when things felt good and I could start to actually survive again without kiting every little creature I went up against.

I don’t think I’ll be back to replay this game anymore after this run through. It still holds a great nostalgic feeling for me and I will forever remember putting countless hours into this game when it first came out, but with better ARPG options out there these days I’d say this game, even with all the DLC that was released for it over years, fells lacking. I’m not saying to avoid this game, I’m just saying that my personal experience for it today…..well, I found it pretty boring.

In the end, if you are a big fan of ARPGs and you were or are a big fan of Grim Dawn and you’ve never played Titan Quest before it might be worthwhile to at least check this game out if you find it on sale. Who knows, maybe you’ll fall in love with it and pour countless hours into the game like I and many others have done years ago.

 

[Vayra86]

​

View attachment 342078

​

Release Date: (TQ) June 26th, 2006 / (IT) March 2nd, 2007
Developer(s): (TQ) Iron Lore Entertainment, Demiurge Studios / (IT) Iron Lore Entertainment
Publisher(s): (TQ) HandyGames, THQ Nordic, THQ / (IT) THQ, Buka Entertainment

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows 2000/XP
• CPU: 1.8GHz Pentium 4/AMD Athlon XP or equivalent
• GPU: 64MB GeForce 3/ATI Radeon 8500 or equivalent
• RAM: 512MB
• Storage: 5GB
• Other: DirectX 9.0c, internet required for online multiplayer

Graphics:

The game supports a wide range of resolutions from 800x600 up to my native resolution of 2560x1440. The only downside to running 1440p is that the HUD interface doesn’t scale up, leaving things looking a little undersized.

The graphics look very good for a game pushing 17 years. Zoomed in or all the way out, creatures and objects keep their details without becoming pixilated. When you do zoom in close NPCs, monsters and your player character, it can easily be seen that there are a lot of straight lines and more boxy polygons that make up the characters, but being zoomed all the way in is a very hard way to play game because your field of vision is extremely limited. You won’t be able to see more than a handful of meters around your character.

The environments are well detailed and reflections from water look very good. It would be hard to really nitpick anything bad when it comes to graphics and details in this game for the age it is. Overall things look pretty amazing.

Audio:

Sound effects are well done. All the various creatures have unique sounds, nothing comes off sounding recycled. The music helps add a bit to the atmosphere, but in the end the music just kind of blends into the background and is mostly forgettable.

Gameplay:

Starting a new game you can pick your sex, male or female. You can also pick one of five different tunic colors and that is the extent of your character creation. There are multiple difficulty levels for the game that you can eventually play for your character:

• Normal
• Epic (Unlocked after completing Normal)
• Legendary (Unlocked after completing Epic)

Finding equipment from killing creatures or opening chests, you will auto equip a piece of armor if you do not already have something equipped. Equipment comes in a handful of different levels ranging from basic items to legendary items. You will be able to tell the difference between them based on the color they are:

• White (common)
• Yellow (uncommon)
• Green (rare)
• Light Green (monster infrequents)
• Blue (unique)
• Purple (legendary)
• Sets – they can be found in blue or purple colors.

In the inventory screen, above your equipped weapon, you can click on the “I” or “II” circle button. Here you can have two different weapon types equipped. Maybe you have ranged equipped on one and melee equipped on the other. This way you can use the “W” key while running around to quickly swap between weapon types.

Check points/Restore points: You can find fountains throughout the game. Activating one will be a check/restore point for you should you leave the game or die.

As you progress through the game and kill creatures, you will sometimes come across pieces of charms or relics. These charms and relics can be used to enhance your weapons and armor. Monster charms require 5 charms of the same type to make a full charm.

Relics require 3 pieces of the same type to make a full relic. You can use them at any time, where it’s a single piece of a charm or a completed charm. The most complete a charm or relic is, the greater the benefits it will grant you.

As you gain experience you’ll level up and upon doing so you get to choose from one of nine classes.

• Storm
• Earth
• Warfare
• Spirit
• Dream
• Defense
• Nature
• Hunting
• Rogue

Once you hit level 8 you have the option to choose a second class if you so desire. Upon doing so opens up your training path to a multitude of skills and abilities. Along with earning skill points every level to put towards class skills you also get a couple of points to put towards your stats:

• Strength
• Intelligence
• Dexterity
• Health
• Mana

Armor and weapons you use are based on your stat levels. Melee weapons and heavy armors are more reliant on high Strength stat. Magic and lighter armors are more reliant on high Intelligence stat. Bows are reliant on high Dexterity stat and some armors are also reliant on high Dexterity.

As you maneuver through the world you will come across shrines. These shrines will provide you with some kind of aid or bonus to help you through your fights. These bonuses can be instantaneous or last a short duration. You can choose to use them or not, that is entirely up to you.

In the inventory screen you get a nice auto sort feature making it easy and quick to try and make extra room for treasure you find scattered across the ground after slaughtering enemies. You also have a traveling storage merchant that you find in city locations, here you can store important stuff that you may want to use later. You can even expand the storage space a couple of times if you have enough coins. The other bonus is that the caravan storage also has a Transfer spot where you can place items you want to transfer between any characters you have on your computer. One last nice thing is that potions, health and mana, stack in your inventory. Albeit only 5 potions per stack, but at least they stack. As you progress through the main story line you will eventually be rewarded with a few extra inventory bags so you can hold more goodies so you’re not having to constantly teleport back to a vendor to offload as often.

Collecting loot, you need to hold ALT so you can view the loot on the ground. With ALT being held you can click on items to pick up. This also applies to gold. There is no auto looting, it would be helpful a little if there were auto looting for at least the gold that gets dropped.

Through your journey you may come across formulas for artifacts. If you do find one that you want to craft you’ll need to find an Enchanter (identified by a lightning bolt icon above his head) in some of the cities. He will be able to assist you with crafting artifacts from formulas and separating charms or relics from items, should the need arise.

If you want to reset your skills, seek out a Mystic. There is one located in the city of Delphi, he can be identified with the large blue mystical looking orb above his head.

Time spent to complete the game, for me, was about 35 hours to get through Titan Quest and then through Immortal Throne. You could certainly spend many more hours in the game if you’re trying to farm items or looking to uncover every nook and cranny the game has to offer.

Controls:

Camera is static. You cannot spin it, but you can zoom in and out.

Below are some of the controls listed for the game. Many of these controls are kind of universal for most ARPG type games so I won’t list them all out:

Hold SHIFT to stand in place and attack freely.
Hold ALT to see items dropped.
Use “W” key to change between one of two weapon layouts in your inventory.
Space Bar will pause the game for you (or you can simply press ESC to pull up the game menu, this essentially pauses the game, too)
“S” key opens the Skill Menu
“C” key opens the Character Menu
“Q” key opens the Quest Menu
“L” key drops a teleport pad

The numeric keys across the top will let you use skills/items you assign to them.

Story:

There isn’t much to the story. Something bad happens and you right the wrong. To be a bit more specific:

You’re a traveler that takes up arms to pursue a Telkin (a powerful priest/sorcerer) that is determined to destroy mankind and the gods by releasing the Titan that has been bound for ages.

Once you play through and complete the original Titan Quest game, you get to partake in the expansion game “Immortal Throne”. After the Titan has been vanquished the Gods see this as a sign that humans can protect and defend themselves so they leave the humans to their own fate. Soon new creatures start to arise and it is your mission to find out where they are coming from and vanquish the threat.

Replay Value:

High.

You have so many combination of classes and skills you can replay this game countless times and never have the same experience twice. That is, if the gameplay is enough of a reason for you to keep coming back. I personally don’t feel the story is enough to make you come back, but it is kind of interesting to see what the non-important NPCs that you can listen to have to say. They do add a little depth to the story and world, making it feel like it’s actually populated and that all the characters are not just background pixels to look at.

Technical Info/Issues/Bugs:

Without being able to control the camera, the angled top-down perspective does bother me because any creatures coming from the southern direction (bottom portion of your screen) are very hard to see at times. If you could swing the camera around to adjust your point of view it would make traversing some areas so much better over hoping you’re not about to get swarmed by a group of bad guys.

Graphical anomalies – I’ve encountered these issues with the games ever since it released and out of all the times I’ve played it using various different computers and graphic drivers:

• Sometimes when creatures are walking through tall grass, the grass becomes elongated as it moves to the sides as the creature walks around in it. The grass becomes twice as long as it moves around making it look a bit comical.
• On occasion when some creatures when they die their limbs can become very long and it looks funny.
• Crows, when you kill them they are supposed to explode into a ball of feathers. The animation for this doesn’t always trigger. Sometimes nothing happens, sometimes it’s a small black ball that vanishes and other times it’s a big explosion of feathers that fall to the ground.
• Poison traps – specifically this version of trap almost never shows up when opening a sepulcher. The graphics for it rarely display on screen. I hear the hiss of the gas and I get poisoned if I stand in the immediate surrounding, but I cannot see it. Sometimes other traps are not visible, but it’s kind of rare.

Hang ups when attacking creatures – sometimes when I’m in the thick of combat and I’m clicking and attacking, after I kill a creature next to me my character will not move nor attack the next creature I put my cursor on. The issue only lasts about half a second or so, but it’s enough to be irritating because it can make or break you in some dire situations.

Personal take on combat speed – it feels slow, sluggish and the responsiveness of your actions feel delayed. The only time it starts to feel snappy is when you get a high boost to your attack speed. Maybe my take on this is because of all the hours I’ve put into Grim Dawn and I’m just drawing a mental comparison without trying.

Main quest, Act 2. When tasked with finding two artifacts to progress the story line I ran into an issue because story mission would not progress. To get the store to progress I had to discard the two artifacts, restart the game and collect the artifacts again. Once I did this the story moved along and I could continue again.

Not a bug, but I find this to be an issue simply based on personal preferences - you cannot add charms or relics to blue or purple equipment. I tend to find really nice green items, when paired with a relic or charm, makes them a lot more potent over what blue and/or purple items can provide. This makes the blue and purple items feel rather moot and mostly just a waste.

A personal gripe – armor stat requirements seem to be more heavily based on Strength or Intelligence stats and not so much on Dexterity. You will find most armor requiring high Strength or Intelligence and very few that take Dexterity into account. If you’re focusing heavy on a build to use Dexterity do be aware that your armor options may be limited if you’re not also working on building up Strength or Intelligence as a secondary stat.

I have experienced one crash to desktop while playing through the Immortal Throne portion of the game. Nothing special going on, just running around and attacking creatures and then just the desktop looking back at me.

Some of these issues I’ve listed above, it could be possible they’ve been fixed if you get the digital Anniversary Edition of the game. The issues listed above are strictly ones I’ve come across in the physical version.

Availability:

You can find physical PC copies of Titan Quest and Titan Quest Immortal Throne on sites such as Amazon or Ebay. If you wish to get a digital copy instead, you would want to look for the Titan Quest Anniversary Edition which can be found on GoG or Steam. The Anniversary Edition (AE) is both Titan Quest and Immortal Throne in one – the main differences between the physical copies and the AE digital copy is the fact that the AE is listed as having a lot of bug fixes, some quality of life fixes, improved enemy and pet AI, more monsters, armor sets and so on.

Rating/Score:

• Graphics: 4
• Audio: 4
• Gameplay: 4
• Controls: 4
• Story: 2
• Replay Value: 5
• Technical Issues/Info: 3

Overall rating: 3.71

Conclusion:

Trying out multiple builds was the main draw to this game for me when it first came out. I put a lot of hours into it over the years and I have to say that when this game first came out it was amazing in terms of fun, gameplay and mechanics. I’ve done a multitude of builds and I’ve made it through the Epic difficulty a couple of times on a couple of builds. However, coming back to the game today, I had issues with playing it again. My best guess would be simply from the fact that newer games, such as Grim Dawn (specifically Grim Dawn), have faster combat and fluidity and a better story line. Titan Quest just feels slow, from running to combat. Running feels like my character is trying to run through two feet of water constantly and the combat speed is horrifically slow, like I’m underwater and trying to fight.

It wasn’t until I started unlocking skills in the Hunter tree that boosted my run speed and some attack speed, but even then when using a bow my attack speed was still slow. Attack speed only getting around 90%, it was brutal. I was doing a lot of kiting early in the game until I was able to get stronger weapons or aid my attack speed a bit. Later in the game – specifically start of Act 3 – I found myself getting wrecked because I was heavy in Dexterity for my stats and I couldn’t use much in terms of better armor because a lot of it requires high Strength or Intelligence. Also I was still slow with my attack speed. I had to respec and picked up some Nature skills (Hunter + Nature = Ranger class) to help boost my attack speed a little and I just happened across a couple of better items (bow and couple of pieces of armor I could use). Coupled with the fact I was able to complete and add a few relics/charms to my stuff to get my attack speed just above 100%. Once I hit attack speed range things felt a bit better, but still too slow. I had to work on finding items that specifically boosted my attack speed and once I got to 115% that’s when things felt good and I could start to actually survive again without kiting every little creature I went up against.

I don’t think I’ll be back to replay this game anymore after this run through. It still holds a great nostalgic feeling for me and I will forever remember putting countless hours into this game when it first came out, but with better ARPG options out there these days I’d say this game, even with all the DLC that was released for it over years, fells lacking. I’m not saying to avoid this game, I’m just saying that my personal experience for it today…..well, I found it pretty boring.

In the end, if you are a big fan of ARPGs and you were or are a big fan of Grim Dawn and you’ve never played Titan Quest before it might be worthwhile to at least check this game out if you find it on sale. Who knows, maybe you’ll fall in love with it and pour countless hours into the game like I and many others have done years ago.

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Yeah. I had the exact same vibe as you going through this one. The quality of life features are lacking, but there's a LOT of game to be had.

 

[neatfeatguy]

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.