The series is excellent (Hammer and Sickle included) and if you knew were to look, you could find the Win7 fix made by the fans. But, well, you still can't beat a GOG release.

Hopefully, more of old Nival games will come out. Like the original Blitzkrieg series, or the Rage of Mages series.

or Evil Islands...

this!

Oh, good game. Any chance of the Nightwatch RTS games? Same dev, I think.

Instabuy!

I'm discovering the game and, YES, it's excellent and addicting! :))

I just wanted to point out a minor problem with anti-aliasing (Geforce GT 240):
The function anti-aliasing did not work when set on "controlled by the application".
I have to bypass it and chose "replace all application's parameters" in the card configuration for having it to work.

Beside that, everything runs like a charm !

(Sorry if this subject has already been talked about, I don't have time to browse the 111 previous posts...)

Evil islands is Rage of Mages 3. the russian name for the series is Allods.

Rage of Mages 1 was Allods: Sealed Mistery (Аллоды. Печать тайны), Rage of Mages 2 was Allods 2: Master of Souls (Аллоды 2. Повелитель душ), Evil Islands was Аллоды: Проклятые земли. There was a fourth game that wasn't developed by Nival called Allods: Lost in Astral which didn't had much success in Russia. Can't remember the developer, though and didn't play the game because, well, i can read cyrillics, i don't know one bit of russian.

There's also Allods Online, a MMORPG.

It HAS very discouraging aspects. I love that game but I understand why one would hate it. It' an open campaign, where you can select the next zone you want to go, or what mission to undertake next, or where to investigate. And it's timed : there's a calendar running, and events taking place whether you found a way to witness them or not. And it's hard (if not impossible without trial-and-error) to make the right choices. And if you don't, you won't realise it... the story will continue without telling you that the global situation has totally slipped out of your control, and that you're heading towards a bad ending (in the form of a sudden and almost unwinnable battle) whatever you have been doing since that mistake.

It is a bad thing. it means that you need either to replay it a few times to the end, trying different "invisible branchings", or check bits of walkthrough. This is a serious flaw in my eyes. And there are other unclear unfair instants, where an infiltration fails and turns to a shootout for not-well-determined reasons (wrong uniform? wrong paper? wrong weapon nationality?). But the tactical fights, the atmosphere, the "spy" aspect of it, make up for it.

So, there. Pros and cons. Judgement is subjective. Maybe Silent Storm provides everything I love in Hammer & Sickle, without this flawed open investigation concept. Maybe there's still, in this freedom (badly impemented), in the story, and in the cold war investigation aspect of Hammer & Sickle something that I would find lacking in Silent Storm. Hammer & Sicle is hard to judge objectively. But I would personally buy it on GoG, while I hesitate about Silent Storm.

Don't know if it helps you make yourself an opinion...

A thousand times this. If you haven't thrown a grenade or fired a bazooka into a building such that you can't complete the level, much less continue the campaign, you're one of the gamers who played S2 for ten hours and then wandered off to wash the dog, or something else.

Also, if the game doesn't include S3, that's just sad. If it does, it's well hidden in the ad copy.

File under: lose patience, look up FAQ and walkthrough in favor of wiping off hard drive and spreading poison about it ever after.

-- SPOILER!! --

You what? Engineers are useful because of what? Nazis with power armor? Sad.

Love this game, but it's brutal as hell. Solved the original and just about pulled my hair out with the expansion. Having said that, I'd recommend this to anyone, and IMO is one of the best things on GoG.

Wishted

Does this include the 1.1 patch for Sentinels? If not, is the patch compatible with the "more ram" fixes?