While it borrows heavily from the "Baldur's Gate" bag of tricks and has a few rough edges, it's still worth a look.

If nothing else, you get your twenty bucks worth.

Elaborate story, dialogue, and characterization draw you into one of the most believable role-playing game worlds ever created.

It's simple and initially somewhat fun, but after a while it grows pretty monotonous.

If you are looking for a diverse lot of cars and some stunningly beautiful roads to drive them on, then Rally Trophy is squarely at the front of the rallying pack.

The team that developed Soul Reaver 2 took an intriguing saga and weighed it down with so much dialogue and so many confusing plot points that even David Lynch would be hard-pressed to wade through it.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein has all the right pieces to become an online classic.

Some games—AquaNox, for example—seem like they were made up of leftover game parts and assembled in total darkness by a team of deranged, acid-dropping monkeys...What's really crazy is that, oddly enough, it ain't half bad.

One of the most interesting gameplay experiences in recent memory. If you enjoy freeform play in a universe where you're just one of many players, it's worth a look.

Likely the best WWII flight action you'll see for some time, and with user made missions and aircraft in the offing, it doesn't get any better than this.

The game could have been stellar, but it falls flat in one critical area. You never, ever hit a ball out.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the game lies in crafting and later developing your party.

Takeda's strength lies in its handling of the nuances of combat. Leadership, morale, training, tactics, and other factors all come into play.

The missions, while varied, are wildly uneven in difficulty, and many are totally unsuited for the sort of unit that you're ostensibly commanding...It is, however, extremely good-looking, great sounding, and very entertaining.

The campaigns are exceedingly difficult—so difficult they diminish the attraction of the game's solid mechanics.

Given the epic scope and the gorgeous visuals, it's a shame that so much extra micromanagement was thrown in and so much of the balance and Trek-ness was crowded out.

It appeals to a man's primal (well, juvenile, at any rate) need to blow stuff up, that part of the pre-adolescent male psyche that puts fireworks in model airplanes, melts GI Joes, and burns down popsicle stick cabins.

It sounds stupid, and in many ways it is, but it's pulled off with so much style and flair it's impossible not to be seduced by its charms.

It tries almost nothing new. It's like a K-Tel greatest hits album. Yeah, sure, you've heard these songs a million times, but they're all good and it's nice to have them in one place.

One of the results of all the additional options is that Europa Universalis isn't as straight jacketed by history as it used to be.

Hamstringing Jedi and spaceships to accommodate a medieval, land-based combat system was the easy way out—a capitulation.

Outstanding 3D graphics and unit animations combine with excellent music and sharp interfaces to create a compelling medieval Japanese setting filled with magic and mysticism.

All the missions are canned—there are no random missions thrown into the mix. If you fail the main objective of the mission, you get to repeat it again and again until you complete it.

More content for a brilliant strategy game.

Luckily, the frustrations can't outweigh the sheer fun of this expansion pack.

A retread suitable only for hardcore Tom Clancy completists.

Compelling yet demanding, Conflict Zone is best reserved for grizzled recruits who demand a rugged challenge.

Better yet, find the cigarette burn-covered machine buried in the corner of your local arcade.

The graphics engine just isn't up to the task. Clipping errors abound, the animation quality is generally poor, and you'll see weird things like floating dogs or soldiers firing their machine gun from two feet away.

A superior game in every way—action, design, graphics and overall presentation—and is one of the best (and bloodiest) pure action games of the year.

The racing is at best mediocre and at worst awful, so it's a good thing they included missions you can complete for cash. While they're a terrific idea (more variety is a very good thing), they're also completely brain dead.

Even though the Steve Saleen Styling Studio is a disappointment, there's enough entertaining racing to make a few nights fly by.

Perfectly captures the epic sweep of the previous games but adds a bunch of new features that improve upon an already brilliant concept. It's superior in every way to "Civilization II"—and for that matter, any game of this type in recent memory.

This game mostly adds more of the same… unless you count the bugs, broken features, and unpolished gameplay. Those are all new to the series.

New passing and tackling models are nice, but soccer fans deserve the same features—career mode, AI sliders, computer trade AI, detailed stat tracking, and so on—that nearly every other EA Sports game possesses.

While it functions properly, Motor City Online simply doesn't have anything that makes it worthwhile as an online game... All of the things that make it "online" add up to fluff.

The plot isn't thick enough to block candlelight, and the cut scenes that litter each mission are somewhat problematic...Thankfully, the strategic elements are far more engaging.

If you have been wondering why so many South Koreans are so excited about this game...well, you'll still be wondering after you play it.

Breezy, lightweight entertainment at best. As a quick coffee break-style diversion, the product succeeds well enough.

Ballistics is, without a doubt, the fastest racer ever made. The game is all about speed. Make that insane speed. Reaching velocities that pop the sound barrier, this is a racing game for adrenaline freaks.

It's almost more fun to watch than it is to play.

It's hard to think of anything that you might want to do in civilian flight that you can't do here...an incredible piece of software.

It's a benchmark for finely tuned balance, interface, and polish. It has nearly all the little features we cry out for in these types of games but never overwhelms or frustrates.

With all the "StarCraft" and "Age of Empires" wannabes clogging store shelves, it's rewarding to find a real-time strategy game that does its own thing and does it pretty well.

It's certainly not intuitive and it's not always streamlined, but there's a unique sense of satisfaction when you've won not by out-harvesting the other guy (which still happens far too often), but by throwing a rock when he threw scissors.

Most certainly the online role-playing game of the hour and quite possibly the year.

You are apt to play the same segments over and over, ad nauseam. Perhaps a more appropriate title might have been Groundhog Day II.

Couple this sort of tension with the cerebral challenge of building a hacking career and you've got a game that makes crime pay. [July 2003, p.87]

The uninitiated will find the game monstrously intimidating, and it takes a bit of playing before you really start to engage. In order to get the most out of it, you need to sit down, learn its ins and outs, and suffer a lot of early setbacks while you get familiar with the game's complex mechanics.

While everything doesn't quite pull together as well as it should, there is enough here to interest anyone that enjoys cunning design and challenging puzzles.

CrossCut Games needs to find a good exterminator, because Runesword II is infested with bugs. Swarms of them.

A terrific program to keep around for dabbling purposes—load up a design, tinker with it, put it away for a while. More obsessive types will probably tweak their rides infinitely.

The rules are poorly applied, the interface is clumsy, and the pacing is very, very slow.

Jumpgate is a huge exception to the unofficial rule for online-only games. It is stable, solid, and virtually lag free even over a dial-up connection.

It's about as realistic as an episode of Hogan's Heroes. Add poor path finding and sub-par combat AI, and you have a sure fire recipe for real-time strategy blandness.

Imagine a murky graphics engine that blurs as it moves, is way too dark and missing a gamma setting, and gets frequently swallowed up by flashy spell effects.

An honest-to-god, deep, rewarding strategy game that is easy to play and fun to watch. They finally put the "Tycoon" name on something that deserves it.

The Typing of the Dead really shows how anything can be improved by adding "…of the Dead" to it. Just think of "Windows XP of the Dead," or "Civilization III of the Dead."

The difficulty is daunting, the missions feel like intricate puzzles, and the frustration factor is high. Still, nothing compares to the moment when you finally get it right.

It has truly original game mechanics, sharp artwork, an exciting multiplayer dynamic, an addictive quality, and enough flexibility to keep you coming back for more.

It's a lot of clicking, looking at things, tweaking routes, and clicking a little more, and as with most of these types of games, is oddly compelling in an Excel spreadsheet kind of way.

While some features are better, the most important part—the AI—has received little attention. While it's still a fun game, it's not much of an improvement over last year's edition.

This game takes about as much time as reading a few twenty-page comics...There aren't many superhero games that have even come close to the sheer reverence this game holds for its lead character.

It has the setup, but its drab, by-the-numbers execution lacks any flair.

The game is short and simplistic, but it provides quick-moving action that suits the game's pulp novel feel—likely just what the game's designers had in mind.

It's an underwater chess match that builds up to maybe only one chance to shoot. Some missions don't even allow you that...[It's] polished and thoroughly engaging, and the real audience for this game—you know who you are—won't be disappointed.

Far Gate, while it lasts, is a highly entertaining game.

With multiplayer, a full editor, and a growing user community, this is a game that every fan of military shooters should have. It looks great, plays great, and most of all feels right.

One of the most difficult, frustrating, and maddening space sims you'll ever play. In that sense it's brilliant, because you will play it, even while you bang your head against your monitor glass.

A slowly seductive game, a deep and demanding affair with a steep learning curve and a voracious appetite for your spare time. It's all the more impressive that the more time you devote to the game.

It's better to have not played a game that teases you such as this than to have played it and pulled your hair out in frustration.

It's a respectable johnny-come-lately, rough edges tempered by its newness and straight-arrow Leave It To Beaver charm. It's beach reading, basically.

Only for blindly hardcore fans of Anne McCaffrey...Everyone else will find the entire experience tired and uninspiring.

Adds so much additional meat to the original design that going back to the old game seems unthinkable.

Majestic doesn't really need you. It's all about watching and waiting while other characters do stuff.

The ease with which you can jump into Typhoon makes it intriguing at first, but the simplicity of combat and repetitiveness of the campaign makes the excitement short-lived.

The problems [including the lack of an intermission save feature] are a shame, because they tend to overshadow what is really a very good game.

Achieves exactly what many series games usually don't: it really gives you a feel for this much different theater and the combat that occurred there.

It features a rag-tag special forces group of misfits in Vietnam, rather than the rag-tag fantasy misfits the game was built for, and as a result, Green Berets doesn't stand well on its own.

While it's impossible to overlook the game's unforgiving level of difficulty, it is often very entertaining.

A beautiful game full of memorable moments, suffering only from a clumsy attempt to mimic the writing style of old detective novels.

Good, and worth the time of BattleTech fans, but unless Microsoft fixes the performance issues it will never be a great game.

More control of your units is necessary for a strategy title, and more impressive graphics and more complex tasks are important for a city builder. As it stands, this game gets neither right and has little to offer aside from a great concept.

With a better interface and a more explicit manual, The Corporate Machine would be one of those thankfully rare and accessible strategy games that you can't tear yourself away from.

The perfect arcade classic package for hardcore retro gamers, parents looking for something simpler and less disturbing for kids and, of course, thirty-somethings looking to recapture a little of their past glory.

It's so deep that is simulates nearly every facet of college football, right down to telling you whether a player has a girlfriend or not.

Offers entertaining and strategically larcenous gameplay with a fun sense of humor.

A perfect launching point for anyone new to the series, but it simply isn't worth the steep $30 price tag for anyone who already owns "Starfleet Command Volume II."

Brief moments of brilliance speak of the fantastic game that Anachronox could have been, but it never quite makes it up to anything more than slightly above average.

You're really getting an amazingly reworked masterpiece and not just "a few more levels."

It features great graphics, a slightly modified version of "EverQuest's" gameplay model, and lots of frustrating problems. True to its theme, you should only consider playing it in the future.

Though none of Poseidon's new features changes Zeus' core gameplay in any meaningful way, there is an awful lot of new content here.

The difficulty is mostly artificial—each mission has an arbitrary time limit—but despite this, the missions are oddly... entertaining.

A feeling of been there, done that, with some poor game design choices that limit the fun.

Quite simply, this is a game that just doesn't work.

It's about as thrilling as watching The English Patient on Valium.

If you found the original game lacking, this add-on isn't going to change your mind.

Drop-dead gorgeous graphics, excellent story, talented actors, brilliant orchestral score.