Recent reviews by Elder Statesman Irmc

So I'm not yet done with the game, but I'm already tired of the utter lack of cloud support for this game.

I play on both a desktop and a gaming laptop. Most of my games, including ones years older than this one, have built-in or Steam-supported cloud save syncing. This? Nope. Nothing. I got tired of only being able to play it on my laptop, where I initially played for a few hours, and then couldn't play on my desktop because the saves didn't transfer. Eventually, after getting about six hours in, I gave up and transferred the save files across to the desktop.

Guess what? Perks aren't part of your save. They're not part of anything you would expect. All the perks I've gained at this point have been lost.

I know most people aren't going to look to play something ten years old, anyway, but I want to further recommend against it when there are games at least eight years older than it that do a far better job for cloud save syncing.

As for the gameplay itself, it's mediocre at best, but what can you expect from Bethesda? Their strength is world-building, and the levels in this are so tight and largely one-way that you don't even get to experience that. This isn't the Wolfenstein I remember from younger days. It didn't pretend to be, but it's far worse than you might have expected, with quick action events and other lazy additions to make cutscenes "interactive" by forcing people to hammer away at a single key in order to not die in what's really a cutscene instead of just showing what you want to happen.

It's not for me. If I want an action game - especially of this age - I'd rather play something like Mass Effect. Look elsewhere unless you REALLY want to play Wolfenstein and you find it for 90% or more off.

If you're a fan of the Saints Row series, you might be tempted to try this game out.

Don't.

I write this as I quit after entering the world to continue a mission and finding out that despite getting rewards for mission completion (or so I thought) and completing an objective TWICE (because the first didn't count for some reason) I had not been given credit for beating it.

I wanted to like this game, but with that on top of the idiotic design for adjusting graphics settings, the stupid way the interface works (who really thinks "if I press M I won't go to the map, I'll go to the squad editing screen and then I can press R to get to the map from there"?) that just screams "CONSOLE DESIGN!" I'm done trying to wrangle the problems with it.

Don't even get this on sale. It isn't canon, it isn't part of the story, it's not worth any time whatsoever. I can't get back those eleven hours I already wasted on this (and most of that has been fiddling with settings).

I really enjoyed this game when it came out. Going back to it today, it hasn't aged terribly well, but it's still enjoyable (I'm playing it instead of one of the other twelve MMOs currently installed on my PC).

Sadly, I hear it's going to get shut down...but the bonus to that is the reason is they're putting it into a new engine, so I'll be able to enjoy it without some of the glitches currently going on. Keep an eye on its development!

It's been two years since I tried this on a free weekend, so I don't remember many details other than this:

I created a new category for it called "GAME SUCKS, DO NOT BUY!!!"

Thought that was worth throwing out in case people are curious. I'm pretty sure I remember issues with the tutorial not telling you how to do basic things like use the travel system.

Everything is great beyond a 22-23 fps cap in cutscenes that I don't remember being present in the original. I've got it maxed on settings, and that's how the game SETS them when I auto scan my computer, yet I'm capped at 22 usually, and sometimes it pops up to 23 if I turn off a few things like AA, even though in gameplay I'm rocking a solid 60 fps explosions and everything. I'm seriously considering a refund already.

Edit: Redownloaded the original. Cutscenes in it do also appear to be locked at 22 fps. Still, the fact this wasn't fixed, for a "remastered" version, means I want my money back. I'm not asking for 144 fps, I'm not even asking for smooth 60 fps, I just don't want janky sub-TV 24 fps crap that tears across my screen whether I have AA or V-sync or whatever else enabled. A remastered version of a game should improve upon it, and leaving cutscenes at a framerate below what TVs would display, even, means no matter what you play on this will look like crap in the cutscenes, no matter how the textures are improved.

Refund request incoming.

Eh...it's got some great ideas, for the most part love the army composition. Doesn't have an air analog, unfortunately, so air forces suck relatively, and armies turn their heading based on relative direction from the army to last placed point. Means when you retreat, you can't do a shooting retreat and your support units are in the back getting hit directly while your entire army swivels to go where you told it to, and they stay in the back getting hit even though they should be your first units heading away while you're moving while in contact with the enemy.

Wanted to like it enough to recommend it. Unfortunately, it's mostly a campaign justifying their maps/scenarios instead of the other way around, so the writing is mostly nonexistent, and the Genesis campaign flipflops on even the easiest difficulty to sometimes be utterly impossible for multidecade strategy enthusiasts. Known issue, the devs even have posted that they "fixed it", but it's not. Lookin' at you, mission 5.

So I haven't even completed it. It's not worth the headaches or the time. I've already put in several hours to just that mission, even playing it at the slowest speed and pausing any time I need to give orders, watching videos for hints. This isn't a ragequit. I've tried it with every variant strategy I know and ones I have never used because I dislike them and still can't survive ten minutes. On the easiest difficulty.

Uninstalled. Not many games I say that about anymore before I beat them.

First things first: this game hasn't been updated since 2017 and probably never will be again.

This game was on my wishlist for years before I finally knuckled down and bought it, and then I stupidly didn't play it right away. If I had, I could've gotten my money back.

Truly inspiring idea, and that it was made by a single guy is pretty impressive. Graphics aren't anything to shout about in 2021, but again, being done by one guy? Cannot complain too much.

Why the negative review, then?

I am no stranger to strategy games. I've been playing them since C&C in '95. Despite that I cannot figure out how to defeat the first mission in this game on the easiest difficulty. The tutorials were far easier, which makes sense, but the difficulty curve skyrockets when you go to actual missions. You have an avatar drone to control; so does the enemy. You can apparently both level them up, and maybe I made mistakes doing so by making it as tough as possible, but...

Despite making it as tough as possible and playing on the easiest difficulty, the enemy avatar can destroy my own avatar, and an entire outpost's defenses, AND an army of ranged units, all supporting each other, at one time and only be brought down to half health. It does this using MELEE weapons; it manages to close through a hail of ranged weapons and take out everything with melee.

The dreadnought, which is described as a "heavy battleship designed for bombing the planet's surface and assault operations" and is apparently supposed to be so powerful you're limited to a single launch platform, which can only have a single dreadnought linked to it and is also the only way to rebuild it if it's destroyed, can be nearly destroyed by three of the enemy's anti-air interceptors, even though it carries its own anti-air interceptor and has anti-air capabilities of its own. By the time you finish off those three, there are another three coming in.

Base expansion: I started out in the only place I could, and rapidly expanded my defenses out about two or three outposts around both sides of the ring around the island for the first mission. The enemy avatar began showing up and destroying everything as soon as I rebuilt it. It quickly degenerated to I rebuild an outpost, the avatar comes in and wrecks my outpost, my entire army I've built up in the time it was repairing, and my avatar (which has a continually increasing cooldown before it can be resummoned after it's destroyed), and then retreats at half health to repair. I rebuild my outpost, resummon my avatar, and rebuild my army, and they return to the outpost at the same time as the enemy avatar returns to wreak havoc again. It went this way for about three hours, sometimes without my avatar as it got up to I think six minutes to resummon it, before I finally gave up and admitted something to myself:

Earlier reviews were right. This game is a great concept, but it's poorly implemented, and it's been abandoned by its creator. I really wish it had been fun, and I really wish I could recommend it, but I can't. Flawed, unfortunately...

As for the short playtime at review compared to whenever you see this...I played this game offline at work over the winter. Steam gave me achievements for it but failed to recognize the time spent playing, so I coudln't write a review until I had it run for five minutes. So I redownloaded the game and left it running and in the course of doing so discovered it has trading cards, so while I can't get a refund for this I can at least get SOME of my money back.

Pro: Free, continues Spellforce.

Con: Requires you to select a permanent faction choice before letting you do anything in-game including look at the factions beyond a one sentence blurb describing them. Can't even adjust video settings. Have to Alt-F4 to close it. Oh, but you can pay to unlock more factions! Which completely negates the point of it being free to try it out and see if it's worth buying.

Don't get tricked. This is free but it's basically an attempt to get people to nickel and dime themselves into the full PvP experience. Since I'm not into PvP at all, myself, and just wanted to try out the combat to see if this was going to be at least as fun as Spellforce 2, which I enjoyed, this is not what I thought I was getting. I don't doubt it'll be fine for some people, but I cannot recommend a free product that requires you to pay to experience things other people can get for free in it.

Other: Have to create an account to "level up your profile". I'm guessing that's a way to get more in-game rewards like customizations. Also a way to get your info to sell you more. Offline play, the only way to play without creating a profile, is extremely limiting from the sounds of it.

Definitely not a bad fighting game. It's also unusual to find a game with collectibles that makes me want to find them all, and this one succeeded. It's a major downer, so if you were hoping for some redemptive story after the world dies, look elsewhere (you weren't, were you? if so, you may need to rethink your selection criteria).

Also, Chumbucket's voice performance is spectacular.

Pros: Eh, it's a quasi-historical fighting game that will introduce you to some names you might otherwise be unfamiliar with. The graphics aren't bad for a game seven, eight years old.

Cons: Camera controls suck. They're hardly there and the camera will bounce around on you without warning and for no perceptible reason, sometimes causing your combat cues to be missed, like during an execution. Bosses have specific patterns for beating that as soon as you figure them out you just repeat endlessly until the boss is dead. The story isn't great.

Other thoughts: I quit playing this for years because I reached a spot where I could no longer progress. Traps were repeatedly killing me in one specific spot. I figured it was a bugged trap and researched it but found nothing. Ragequit and left.

After a few years at this point of trying to get through my Steam backlog, I'm at the point of going through games based on install size and Ryse finally came up. Not really wanting to replay it but wanting to finish the story, I gave it a try, but I had to relearn the controls.

Turns out the problem before was my controls got changed on me MID GAME SESSION. Specifically, the button that destroys the traps when they spring so they don't insta-kill me. After realizing this the game was a breeze to finish.

Further con, though: I don't remember what I played the game on before or how well it ran but I'm using a GTX 2060, with 32 GB of DDR4 and it's on an NVMe SSD. Framerates are janky as hell when I've got it on MINIMUM settings, anywhere from 27-60 FPS (capped) while the camera is not moving and I'm looking at soldiers standing at attention. Compare that to the same system running Max Max, which came out two years later: 60 FPS solid, max everything. Old games shouldn't run worse on new hardware that's years beyond what was available at launch.