Posted April 12, 2009
I really want to like this game. It's in a genre that could do with some more love, and the designers really went out of their way to innovate, in the setting, in the mechanics, in the way the battles are put together... but it's hard to look past its flaws. The 3D graphics have not aged gracefully and far from making you feel an atmosphere of terror or foreboding, it just makes you wish you could see what the hell is going on. There are serious bugs which have effects ranging from visual glitches on the screen to preventing the game from starting at all on some computers.
Worse yet, though, is the fact that the difficulty and the design have been engineered in such a way that many battles can only be "solved" by one specific approach. This means that effectively each of these battles is a "puzzle" which must be tried again and again until you hit on the "correct" way to do it. It's this repetition which ultimately makes the game lose the crucial "fun factor" for me, at least.
Nonetheless, if you're really hankering for a game in the mould of Jagged Alliance... well, there aren't many around, and this is one.
Worse yet, though, is the fact that the difficulty and the design have been engineered in such a way that many battles can only be "solved" by one specific approach. This means that effectively each of these battles is a "puzzle" which must be tried again and again until you hit on the "correct" way to do it. It's this repetition which ultimately makes the game lose the crucial "fun factor" for me, at least.
Nonetheless, if you're really hankering for a game in the mould of Jagged Alliance... well, there aren't many around, and this is one.