Annals of Rome
As with others here, I played this intensively when it originally came out. Back then the interface was nothing particularly unusual, and even today it isn’t difficult, just clumsy - it takes about 5 minutes to get used to it. There are certainly a few issues with it, primarily related to the display of information at appropriate times - it’s hard to play without making any separate notes (you pretty much have to keep track of the loyalty values of your available commanders, as that is only visible on the screen before you make decisions about who to assign where). But that isn’t anywhere near enough to outweigh the cleverness of the design and the fun value of trying to shepherd your Republic through dictatorship and the inevitable empire, trying to keep it alive through the ups and downs of barbarian migrations and rival nations waxing and waning. An amazing game considering the technical limitations it was created under.
– Real player with 51.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Classic Historical Games.
Great classic game!
– Real player with 10.0 hrs in game
Metal Wolf Chaos XD
tl;dr: Arcade Armored Core. Fast, furious mech action with a ton of customization, lots of hidden depth, and a focus on old school arcade-style high score chasing and replayability.
Yeah, yeah, President of the United States in a giant robot, blow up America for great justice. If you’re looking at this store page, you already know the bonkers pitch, and you probably know that the tone of the game really is as ridiculous as it sounds. But how does it play?
You control an ultra-agile mech running, jumping, boosting and flying around to complete objectives that are all fundamentally “blow up something or other.” Early levels may have you blow up all the enemy encampments in an area, but later levels can involve racing through a timed sequence to blow up a reactor, or playing hide and seek with a giant spider mech to blow up its power station (and then blow up the mech itself), or fighting against a group of enemy mechs in order to blow them up. Though all this might seem repetitive, the level designs and subtle differences in how you’re expected to blow things up really do give each level a distinct feel, and the sheer act of blowing things up never stops feeling great.
– Real player with 39.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Classic America Games.
A bare-bones re-release and remaster of the game with a few issues (including a locked frame-rate due to its console origins) but aside from that, it should run on a toaster and is perhaps one of the craziest, most nonsensical and downright ridiculous mecha games around, done by From Software nonetheless. The story is pure unadulterated insanity or how Japan views or thinks the US works. Dialogue here is above the proverbial “so bad it’s good”: this is voiced, people SPOKE those lines. You just don’t get this level of madness anymore and I applaud them for it.
– Real player with 36.7 hrs in game
BioShock™
As someone who doesn’t typically enjoy shooters, and someone who has no nostalgia for the title, I can safely say this game is legitimately worthy of it’s praise as a classic.
The Good:
- Beautiful environments and a wonderful overall aesthetic. The immersive undersea late 1950-60s city that you find yourself exploring is not only a very unique location for a game, but it’s also just masterfully crafted. They really blew me away with just how interesting they were able to make every area. It was the kind of location I seriously would love to see in real life, a sort of dream environment as it were.
– Real player with 67.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Classic Story Rich Games.
Bioshock is one of the most expertly made games I have ever played. The game takes place in a ciy called Rapture, a city under the sea created by Andre Ryan to be a utopia, where people’s dreams would not be limited by things such as government or morality. You play as Jack, a man in a plane crash that landed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, who finds a Lighthouse that leads to Rapture, now ruined and destroyed due to a war created by Atlas, a man who leads a rebellion group against Andrew Ryan, and wants to help you survive as you fight Splicers (genetic mutants created by splicing up on something called ADAM; a substance found at the bottom of the ocean that can be used for a variety of purpose. Medical, entertainment, or even getting powers called Plasmids) and Big Daddies, protecters of the Little Sisters, who hold sea slugs in their stomachs that produce loads of ADAM.
– Real player with 62.9 hrs in game
Black The Fall
PROS
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The game’s symbolism covers almost all of communism’s stupidity and cruelty. Death slave labour camps that killed countless innocent people, dysfunctional ghetto cities, pointless industrialization that destroyed people’s health and nature, mandatory communist rituals and propaganda - you have it all.
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Very strong ending section of the game, perfect emotional storytelling through gameplay, powerful atmosphere.
! DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED THE GAME. One of the few games that made me cry - in fact, the only game that made me cry like a child while still pressing keys on the controller. I don’t want to get your expectations too high, though, so I’m marking this as a spoiler. But God, what a cathartic ending.
– Real player with 17.4 hrs in game
I’m a big fan of these types of games. The very first one like this I played was “Out of this World” (called Another World in Europe). It was nice to see an homage to Out of this World towards the end of this game. Overall however, this is a poor game in this genre.
- The Good -
Theme: I always love a good exaggerated portrayal of the horrors of communism.
Scenery: The 3D landscapes are beautiful.
Visual Polish: It’s there.
Puzzles: There are a decent amount of clever ones.
- The Bad -
Overall, this game lacks variety in almost every aspect.
– Real player with 7.8 hrs in game
Counter Terrorist Agency
This is my revised and final review now that I’ve had a fair bit more time with it.
CTA is a game I’ve wanted for a long time, which is why it comes as such a disappointment that so little thought was put into its design. I love the idea of tracking terrorist groups, deciding how and when to strike, collecting intelligence, and ultimately trying to prevent attacks. Unfortunately, it’s let down by shallow and often unclear mechanics. The devs were active in the beginning, responding to criticism and quickly putting out an update that greatly increased the quantity of scenarios in the game, and more have been added since. However, they seem to have been silent for just over a month now, and the Steam forums have been completely dead for over a week. They claim to be working on a pair of updates that would add a sort of “free mode”, as well as a much-requested re-work of the case file system. Unfortunately, I’m not convinced these will be enough to solve the fundamental problems this game suffers from.
– Real player with 18.8 hrs in game
Overview
Counter Terrorist Agency is what the old game Covert Action would have been if the player were in a higher-up position, not every troublemaker had a name of a Spanish or Arabic origin, and relations and resources of nations were an issue. Things usually start out with suspicious behavior making the news, threats made to reporters, or just an intercepted phone call in which two people may say something suspicious, and from there, the player orders agents to go to work by having a suspect’s phone tapped and their social media accounts hacked, then waiting for more conversations in which the suspect’s role within an organization can be verified depending on the contents of the conversation. (The player may be able to guess at the role of the person they’re speaking to if that person infers they have any authority over the person the player tapped/hacked.) Once enough suspects have been identified, it’s time to stop the terrorists from acting by either arresting or killing (preferably) confirmed members. Arrested terrorists can possibly be interrogated revealing more people involved in their plot. (Interrogation can possibly even reveal a leader’s identity.)
– Real player with 9.1 hrs in game