tl;dr Amazing game, but flawed in both aspects. Too short and too simple.

Imagine a game if you will that's half castlevania platforming fun, and half sim city early ancient rome. You get act raiser.
In this game you play as a god helping the civilians fight back evil monsters and create a small village AFTER you play a castlevania level complete with bossfight and special abilities that you gain during the sim city gameplay.
That sums the game up right there, but the biggest problems I have with it is that both aspects can be seen as mediocre. The combat is simplistic and there's no moves, movement upgrades, or differing strategies other then simply moving left or right and fighting the stiff jump.
As fun as it is playing the platforming segments and all the enemies you'll face and encounter, almost none of these segments are even remotely challenging if your an experienced gamer. The bosses themselves leave more to be desired and although I like a lot of there designs could be a lot better.
The sim city proportions are also underdeveloped and require some more depth to them. You really only tell the workers to build in x location, use a miracle to solve a problem, and shoot monsters that are attempting to fuck with your villagers. There's some hidden depth to it like the score for that platform segment = the population cap that village can have, but nothing that's groundbreaking honestly.
With that being said honestly both sides are perfectly satisfying and I wish there was more content, because I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing it. The gameplay loop is astoundingly good, and keeps you engage wondering to yourself "What's the next platform segment going to look like" or "What the new village going to hold?". The game itself has plenty of secrets and unlockable items that make either gameplay loop easier. You kinda want to just explore a sim city map and expand every nook and cranny just to see your little people spread out the whole map and walk around. Making more farms or houses for there people. It truly is a special game and I think even though I have been a bit harsh on this title, that there just no game like act raiser. Many people will point to hinterland, but yeah that's a completely different game and honestly hinterland is much more complex then act raiser. One of those games I'll never forget honestly and one of the few I played earlier.

What a piece of fucking shit there's your fucking tl:dr!

Because I'm very fucking weird, I have an in-joke with my friends with the song one little slip and the movie in general. To this day we still laugh, and have fun talking about the decent little film that honestly got shafted by hollywood shenanigans. Many movie titles had decent games such as Lion king or Lawnmower man(even though the movie fucking sucks ass)

This fucking piece of shit ruined the in-joke and now I bring it up just a ltitle less now. Boy oh fucking boy did I have the least amount of fun playing this god dam thing.

First off there's maybe 5 ish levels (I don't even know if that's true and I don't fucking care enough to double check) and man do those levels suck. Linear, boring, and have to do repetitive tasks over and over again. Glitchy piece of fucking shit, with awful designs and terrible side missions. From the stupid baseball game that's just bust a groove to that awful pig runner game that was a glitchy piece of trash.

Reusing segments, levels, and even parts of levels. One of the worse fucking driving segment I ever played and made simpsons hit and run feel like god dam gran turismo.

Good luck getting this to look decent on any modern windows and i'm sure you'll have fun limiting your framerate and fucking around with a hex editor to get it to run at modern fucking resolutions. Just so then you can play a forgotten title for a movie that should of stayed with the original screen play instead of letting hollywood fuck it up like it always love to do.

tl:dr Yeah it's average, but splitting the game into 3 may leave some fuming. Luckily it's pretty easy to get your hands on all 3 eps, and hey you could definitely play worse. I had a good time, but i'm sure others might find it too bland to continue.

Alien breed original title in 1991 was originally on the amiga but was later on ported to MS-DOS. I actually never had an an Amiga or an MS-DOS, but I have played on them in my youth. In my school we had some of these donated in and I got to play the OG doom and a couple of other older titles.

That being said this version has some of the elements of the original title, but it really is different from the original title. This ones has an actual narrative told in comic form. As well as a Coop mode (That I didn't get to try out). An upgrade system that's a bit confusing, and a high score system.

If the original title plays like sci fi gauntlet this plays more like top down dead space. Exploring a ship going through an alien attack that wants to rip your face off while shooting the ever loving shit out of them. Save civilians, shoot the ayys that are totally not zerg.

Really it hits the dopamine spot for me quite well. There are very few things in the world I like more then shooting the ever loving shit out of different alien species we've come up with. With that being said the level design kinda meh, the weapon designs not too crazy and pretty standard, the ayy designs pretty bland, and boy oh boy do the environment feel samey.

That being said there isn't really a part in this game that I hate. The level design is just solid all around and you'll probably never really get angry at any encounter. You'll tell when shits going down the second you step within the room, and hey there are some interesting environments that change things up a little bit. Just not much.

Really if you skipped this game i'd shrug and say " Yeah I understand", but for me I had to finish this title. I got this a while ago on a bundle and I played it in highschool and I NEEDED to finish this title. Luckily the game itself is not fucking bad and hey I enjoyed my time shooting the bugs. Maybe the sequels improve on the formula (will update this if do)

tl:dr If your a harvest moon then you'll probably like this title once you download some mods to make it feel like home. If your not familiar with harvest moon at all you'll love it even more.

Harvest moon series is a weird roller coaster in terms of quality. As soon as the actual devs of the series moved on to make stories of seasons is the second the series dropped in quality in immeasurable ways. This left a huge gap in the farming sim/Life sim market.

Stardew valley attempts to fill in that gap and I'd argue it's done an impressive job and does even better then certain natsume titles. Socializing with the townsfolk, crop management, mining, and super natural elements are all here with a different shade. Some features have been streamlined for the better like buying upgrades for the home and crop placement. New additions like sprinklers and scarecrow management have been added along with a slew of other things. Mining borrows some aspects of runefactory in the shape of combat.

Overall the towns folks are the least interesting aspect of the game. They tend to be very bland, and have less interesting dynamics and personality. You won't get popuri dying mother or a prier boy who's an orphan living with the pastor. Instead you'll get Sebastian's lifestyle of smoking, being an edgy boi, and step dad that just doesn't get him. Sam father being a military man who's often not around his family. Dynamics certainly, but honestly many of the cast are not as relatable in there struggle as the classic harvest moon titles.

Rivalry not a thing in these titles despite the fact that it seems the dev might have had it in mind when designing the relationship the towns folks had. The combat is honestly not good, and should be removed anyways. It is harvest moon after all not runefactory. Options for crops looks varied, but you'll soon find that there's only 1 real viable way to get as much income as possible.

Walk speed is way too fucking slow and the overall village is way too large and needed to be more condensed. Plus another normal feature in harvest moon was the fact that in building time stops moving all together allowing you to essentially do whatever task you had in whatever building without worrying about the shops or events shutting down. A feature that honestly doesn't change much in it's removal, but feels weird to not add it anyways.

Alot of my issues can be modded out of the game and because it's so easy to mod the crap out of this title you can actually just create an entirely different game. Or even add sudo expansion that expand the city, and add more townsfolks. Replay-ability is endless and it's not uncommon for someones title to look completely different from others.

tl;dr Improvement and makes the vanilla unnecessary. The definition of what an expansion should be. Adds some of the coolest shit ever in any Xcom, and shows what firaxis could possibly do with there style of Xcom.

Enemy within adds meld. Meld can be used to make 2 of the following. Mech units which are soilders that have been amputed to fit into big robots that dominate the battlefield. The other thing meld can be used for is modifying your Xcom units with biological enhancements that make them have even more abilities.

These two additions just add so much more variety to everything alone yet it's not the only things this expansion adds. It also creates the interesting faction that offer more mission variety and possibilities to the formula. Exalt which are arguably based off the original idea of adding a opposing faction in the original title named Men in Black.

Exalt missions add a breath of fresh air honestly and although some of them can be a bit unfair, they offer great resources to help you out in your campaign such as weapons and more meld. Exalt tend to steal resources from you time to time making them a huge pain until you can find and nuke there base.

Overall a great experience and honestly playing both vanilla and Enemy within an extensive amount of time I have to say it's almost impossible for me to go back to the OG Enemy unknown.

tl:dr close to the original title, but dumbs things down too much. Not perfect, but definitely a great title.

Firaxis title definitely did several things right, but there were major issues with this title that separate it from the classic games. If the original title was a wargame this one is certainly a board game.

Base building, Aircraft management, and tactical gameplay make a return as expected. A new class system and some new friends to fight make it exciting at first, but if you put a good amount of time into the original you can start to see the cracks.

The new pod system is frustrating as all hell and basically force you to alert 1 pod, fall back and deal with whatever pod you happened to alert. Unlike the older titles where your trying your best to stay out of sight and cover every corner of the approach because the enemy can and will flank you, instead it's more about managing and taking your chances with dice rolls and putting your men into adequate cover so there chances of being hit are very minimal.

Another annoying thing firaxis thought was neccessary to bring into xcom was more narrative focus. Personally I fucking hate this. Replaying this title is rather irritating knowing that named, and visible npc's will chatter about "no commander don't throw de explosive grenade very bad. I shall now tell the fuhrer". I DARE you to put in as much time as I did and not be irritated everytime vahlen, shen, or bradford utter a phrase you've already heard before.
The expansion really adds alot of great content so I would suggest you play that instead of the vanilla experience since it still plays the same just gives you more toys and enemies to face.

I like this installment more then it's sequel since yes it does remove vital things like creating weapons factories, multiple bases, base defense(technically in the expansion there's a single base defense mission but that is totally not the same.), comprehensive and grid base inventory, ap system, etc etc. AT LEAST it still manages to feel like an xcom title and have most of the important features that the original title had and just makes it easier to understand for modern audiences who have never picked up a microprose game and would be intimidated by it's massive girth of depth.

1 step forward 2 steps back.
Modding is king is this title, and I'd argue can go toe to toe with open xcom.
Everything else is a step backwards. Pods are still a thing and are just a pain in the ass to deal with. Game can also be cheesed even easier then in previous title, and good lord the mission timers.
They demand that you do almost every mission as fast as possible. Probably because the devs knew there game was cheesed easily by overwatch spammers. Now there forcing you to be more agile, but doing so can really punish you. I'd suggest you blue move all your forces towards whatever objective you have first and then yellow move them.
The start is really fucking rocky in this one. I'd argue it's the hardest it's been since terror from the deep. Xcom titles normally throw softballs and ramp up rapidly. Here i'd argue that the sectoid buff, annoying units like lancers, and mec units are just flat out too difficult for most players. Then again the lower difficulties usually makes it doable, and hardest difficulty isn't impossible. If your a veteran you should be fine.
Base buildings been dumbed down even more so then prior title, and aircraft are just flat out removed. Which is sad because these 2 elements are fundamental to the experience and other titles managed to include them and even enhanced some of them from even the original game.
Overall Like I said in the tl:dr it does some things 10x better then Xcom unknown but I think it loses alot of the dna of OG xcom to were it's basically it's own title wearing the skin of xcom. Sad really I still like it just wish it was more like Unknown and just improved on that formula rather then going down this path.