This is one of my favourite games of all time. I fell in love with Grim Fandango when I first played it becuase it had an amazing concept, beautiful artwork, exceptionally memorable characters, incredible voice acting, stunning graphics (they were stunning at the time) and extraordinary gameplay. It's one of the best adventure games of all time and I was astounded by how good it was after having played Full Throttle, one of the other best adventure games of all time. It had more modern elements at the time, but retained the old school adventure game feel to it, which meant it was very challenging and everything wasn't so obvious. Some solutions also seemed down-right insane, which I loved. I lost one of my original game CD's and I couldn't find the game anywhere. It sort of just disappeared off the face of the Earth, which was very disappointing. I eventually did find a copy and couldn't get it to work, so I had to give up and it felt like putting and old friend to bed forever :( When I saw a few weeks ago that a remastered version was coming out I just about had a stroke from the excitement of seeing one of my all time favourite games, coming out with new graphics, control options, no need for install CD's and of course being compatible with Windows 7! I would have still been insanely happy even if they re-released the original, but just made it compatible with Windows, so it's a super bonus to have it remastered and for me to be able to use my Xbox controller! I do however think though that they may have gone a bit too far with the word "remastered". I would probably have used the words "updated" or "enchanced". Even though they have updated the characters and music and added dynamic lighting, they missed a huge part by not updating the scenes into 32 bit full HD with no borders. The scenes are still the original scenes with the grainy 16bit look. Surely they would still have the original artwork to be able to do this? Aside from this, I'm very, very happy to be playing through my old favourite and would recommend it in a heartbeat to anyone who's already played Grim Fandango and definitely to those who haven't!!!
Amazing and gritty sounds, ambiance, music and graphics that create an atmosphere that fits the storyline perfectly to compliment the exceptionally gripping gameplay that brings something new to an existing genre, pulled off with style. My only gripe would be that I would have loved to have played 10 times longer, but there was only so much to do in the game!
I played this for countless hundreds of hours for 6 years before the servers got too empty. It was one of the most fun games I ever played (bar Quake). It was more action orientated, unlike it's successors, which are more hide and seek orientated.
It's basically super corny and super fun. Easy to pick up and play straight away, yet very challenging. Well worth picking up and doing a play through... or two... or three...
This is an absolutely beautiful game crafted from love. It features incredible gameplay, outstanding animation, top notch character introductions and development, brilliant, brilliant music and excellent, convincing voice acting. The RPG elements in the game, while simple compared to many other ARPGs, are very well executed and complemented the game perfectly. About the only minor gripe I really had was that traveling could have been made easier by being able to choose a specific save location in an area from the world map when revisiting it to find secrets/treasures after learning new skills. Then again, the process of having to go from either the beginning of and area or the end of an area to get to these points enabled me to gather a lot of resources and do a lot of leveling that made me prepared for the difficulty at the end of the game. I would seriously suggest picking it up as this is worth every $$$ spent.
One of my all time favs. Why anyone would give this less than a 10 is beyond me. They must be **** or they've picked the wrong game by accident when reviewing. The game is so epic that even today people are still modding like mad, creating maps, making music covers and maintaining large communities. It's more like a religion than a game, like Jedi is to Star Wars fans.
I started playing this and couldn't figure out why the reviews put it in such poor light, but now that I've sunk a few hours into it, it's easy to see why the scores are so low. Basically it's a game with so much potential packaged with a greater level of disappointment. It was ported by very, very lazy people who were probably coding with one hand, while holding their junk with the other. This is one of the worst console ports I've seen on PC. It's worse than GTA IV and is trying to rival Viking: Battle for Asgard. There are a few reasons why it's such a bad port. The graphic optimisation for the game is terrible and should be running far smoother. Because the graphics aren't optimised, it also doesn't take advantage of many of the wonderful options available on PC to make a game look amazing. Users also can't choose these many options to optimise performance on their PC's, so many users are unable to play the game on their lower end systems. The controls are very clunky. Objects picked up and thrown with the force hardly ever seem to go in the right direction. Targeting is hit or miss and often the most random objects are selected, rather than the creature standing RIGHT IN FRONT of you currently slaughtering away. Momentum clearly doesn't exist and this makes jumping very hard. Double jumping sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. The menus are clunky and the game house NO mouse cursor for menu selection. Basic things like making sure the combo menu is easier to navigate to and read quickly aren't included. One of the biggest pissoff factors has to be the "even though you've changed your controls to suit your style of play, all of the messages throughout the game will show the original controls". This would be fine, except that all big creatures and bosses have finishing moves that require button mashing combos that show the original keys and make for tedious and difficult gameplay. Then there's also the combo menu, which shows all of the original keys. The camera is below average during normal gameplay and absolutely abysmal during boss fights. The camera works on console, but this is a PC PORT! All in all, this game leaves me constantly fighting through everything other than the actual enemies in game.
This game is simply amazing and should be rated one of the top games of all time. It has endless re-playability and is extremely fun with friends. I'm sure that if I counted up the time I've spent on this game, it would be longer than a month non-stop.
They've put a lot of thought into this one and these are some of the things I love about the game. The best damage calculators I've seen in any ARPG. Stats up there with the best of the best. Awesome looting system. Checkpoints are placed perfectly. Insanely huge number of hoards of monsters to attack (probably the most I've seen in an ARPG). Great skill choices for both active and passive skills. An assistant creature that isn't useless and provides awesome buffs. Perks are great. Great upgrade choices in towns for all sorts. I really love that resetting attributes and skill points always costs the same, unlike most RPGs where it gets more expensive each time, and it's not expensive either, which means that I can constantly revamp my character, giving me a lot more scope to try skills out and reclaim the skill points if I don't like the way my character build is going. Basically this is just the insane slaughter-fest I've been looking for and it would get a perfect 10 if it wasn't for 2 things. Firstly it would be better if it didn't have some obvious bugs that cause the game to crash, but these aren't deal breaking once you know how to get around them from searching on Google. Secondly, it's just ridiculously hard to get started in the game and it isn't really until level 8 where your character doesn't have to kite and die all the time that the game becomes fun. I would suggest keeping the insane hoards for later in the game from a Dev perspective, as this may put people off. I'm a die hard ARPG fan and this put me off the game and I didn't pick it up again for a few months. This time though I looked on the internet for other people having a similar experience and found that heaps of people found it hard to get started, but once they persevered by dying 50 times and doing lots of kiting to get to about level 8 - 10, they found the game much better to play once they got some good drops and some skills going. I found the same thing for myself and now that I'm a higher level, I'm caning it and REALLY, REALLY enjoying the game! I can't wait to play every day!!
I want to give this game more because it's addictive but there are a few things that make it too frustrating to play. Limited turns makes exploring an entire map hard and I'm the kind of person who likes to do that, especially in games where decisions made, loot found etc. on one map will count on subsequent maps. There isn't a way to make regular income other than from looting, so if you make mistakes early on in the game, you can't finish the higher level maps because you can't afford to hire enough troops or either your army is filled with low level units. Also, the loot often isn't enough for the losses sustained. The most frustrating thing though is that heroes don't do enough damage and die too easily. You basically have to protect your main hero from all sides at all times to prevent him from being rushed by the enemy and slain too easily by only 1 or 2 enemies, which leads to the game being lost. This makes him a liability instead of an asset and the main hero is supposed to be an asset!
I really wanted to like this game, I've given it a second chance and I've given it more time this time, but I just can't get into it. The graphics look great for a game that's nearly 7 years old, there's so much to do and the storyline looks great but unfortunately the mechanics of the game are so poorly executed that I can't play for longer than 5 minutes at a time without getting frustrated. The biggest detracting feature from the game is the clunky combat system that feels so counter intuitive. In most RPG's clicking the mouse means the weapon swings and damage is dealt, but not in this game. You have to click on an enemy and hold-click before anything happens, then let go and hold-click as fast as possible again and rinse and repeat until the same combo's are repeated over and over again before an enemy dies. Most of the time the enemy is just standing there like a **** while Geralt is holding the sword above his head and also standing there like a ****. Then there's a bit of bumping and grinding while no weapons are being swung... then some grunting and finally some combat that feels like the fighters are completely disconnected from each other as if they were swinging their weapons in thin air. Then there's having to change the fight style for each different enemy in a mob or just having the blanket swing and hit all fight style that still looks disconnected and clunky with no smooth combat flow. Finally there's the magical right click skill that also, like the combat, doesn't always fire off when the right mouse button is clicked. The voice acting is a bit of a mixed bag and sometimes conveys the emotion behind the words being said, but often doesn't and the character animations while speaking could have been done a lot better. The body language is just weird. Next, there is the inventory, which is also weird in that Geralt can only hold weapons that he can use, none of which he can carry in his backpack.
This is the first game I've tried in the series and after an hour of REALLY trying, I'm bitterly disappointed with it because it looks like it could be really awesome but the controls are so abysmally horrible. There is no flow and it's as if the main character has been doused in tree sap that solidifies more and more as the game goes on.
The game looks nice, the cinematics are ok, the story line and cut scenes are disjointed and all of this could be forgiven if the controls/camera weren't so abysmally, horribly awful. I'm not sure if they were making an FPS RPG, an RPG or an RTS. IT doesn't really matter which one because they screwed it up pretty badly either way. I tried the demo ages ago and couldn't remember why I stopped playing after 10 minutes. Now that I've given it a second go, I can remember why.
Everything about this game is perfect. It's beautiful, even 7 years after it came out. Many other RPG's don't look as good and only now they're starting to look better (Torchlight 2 and Diablo 3) The expansion made the gameplay go from really engrossing to insanely, awesomely engrossing! I played this game for nearly 200 hours and made a few high level characters, which I've never really done with any other similar RPG (Diablo series and Torchlight series). The Audio is also fantastic, especially the song in the Secret Passage. It's definitely the best RPG I've ever played. Every RPG I play I benchmark against this game. I'm playing Diablo 3 now and if it doesn't get better soon I'm gonna do another TQIT runthrough and even if it does get better I'm still going to do another TQIT runthrough!
I would love to give this game a perfect 10 but it has two glaringly obvious issues that detract too much from the game for it to get a perfect score. The issues that really stood out for me were the rubbish performance on a high end system and the very mediocre textures, which was a further insult to it running so poorly on a high end system. I have an i5 2500k Oc'd to 4.4Ghz with a 7970 Oc'd to 1.2Ghz core and 1.6Ghz mem and I can't play this at full settings without jerky gameplay. The blocky textures were also incredibly surprising, considering how mindblowingly awesome the artwork is and how they could not want to display this as best as possible at a smooth framerate has left me a bit stumped. What I also don't understand is that, from what I understand, both Darksiders games used the same engine, yet I could play DS1 on full settings with a 5750 and C2D-E8500 3.4Ghz and hardly get any FPS drops. I would give the game a 6 based on these things but the game deserves so much more because of its other elements. The gameplay was awesome and I couldn't stop playing. It caused me to lose sleep and not wait to get home from work to play more. It was definitely more intense then DS1 and it had a lot more RPG elements that were very well carried out. While we still don't need an aim mode as PC users, the controls were easy enough to use. I could kick infinite amounts of ass and thoroughly enjoyed this, especially in places like The Crucible and The Soul Arbiter's Maze. The combos were well thought out, easy to execute and were really, really cool. I also really enjoyed the Price of Persia style wall jumping and climbing and in a way this game really made up for the awful fighting in Prince of Persia. I did miss the double jump and glide that War had from DS1 and feel this could have been incorporated into this game. The level designs were really well thought out too and flowed really well. The open areas were easy to traverse. It would have been nice to use despair in more areas though for quicker traversing. I though the ability to teleport was integral though and also well executed. The loot was really good, the bosses were badass, the monsters were well executed (good AI), the other elements that war could interact with were very well done (such as the constructs) and the RPG element was very, very well done. At first I thought the RPG element seemed odd (in comparison to RPG games like Titan Quest and Torchlight) but once I got some skills and some possessed weapons, the whole thing made more sense than a traditional style RPG element. It ended up being a huge plus and I wouldn't want it any other way than it was implemented. The other element that I look for in a fantasy game like this is a good story and good voice acting. As I've come to expect in Darksiders games, the voice acting was amazing and they could not have done a better job casting. The music was also really, really good and normally when I play games I've got music playing in Windows because the game music gets tedious and repetitive, but I didn't do that in this game. The story was well carried out and while it feels like some elements weren't well explained enough or left out, it did feel like these would be developed more in further games, which just adds to the mystery. So all in all I'm up to a 9... down to a 6 from a 10 because of the performance issues and blocky textures but back up to 9 because of the incredibly addictive gameplay, fantastically well executed RPG elements, stunning artwork, great music, great level design and brilliant voice acting.
This is a really rubbish port. The engine runs horribly and there seems to be a particular issue with ATI cards (I have a 7970OC Edition). The FPS is crap and the game is incredibly jerky. I have many games with much better graphics that are smooth as silk. The controls are rubbish too. Niko runs like a spaz, the cars handle like crap and the camera is annoying. The only reason why I've come up to a 5 is because the environment is really well created, the game is extremely funny and the music tracks are really good. However, I am left not being able to play the game though because it's so jerky and the controls are so rubbish. If only the engine worked properly on PC and the gameplay was like GTA3 where the cars handled properly and the character moved around like a proper game character where left was strafe left, right was strafe right and backwards was back-peddle, not turn around and look at the camera like a ****. What do Rockstar care though? They got their money and made more than $1bn from the game.
I played this when it first came out and it barely ran on my machine. It looked gorgeous with the introductory pan over the island with the sun in the background and all the great sun flares. Then I played the game and it was absolutely sensational. It was a quirky, beautiful, unbelievably fun experience with great challenges and a game where an RTS and FPS combination was pulled off perfectly. I really don't understand why there was never a second one made.
This is my favourite game of all time. I've played it through countless times. The graphics at the time it came out were great, the gameplay was great, the characters were quirky, the narrator was beautifully sinister. I wish they would remake this with one of todays engines. It would still shine.
I never finished the single player version of the game but I played it online for 6 years of addictive fun. ID revolutionised multiplayer FPS with this game and Quakeworld was even better. The game was incredibly versitile with things like rocket jumping, speed jumping, custom binding scripts etc. Then there were the TF and CTF mods that I played extensively too. The game revolutionised 3D FPS games too and the GL versions were a thing of beauty when I first beheld them. This is one of my favourite games of all time and I can't understand why people would ever give this a negative score.
