Absolutely great sequel to Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday. This game is another one of the SSI Gold Box style RPGs, except it is set in the future.
The game play is just like CtD, and you can even bring over any characters you had from that game into this one. The game will allow you to load up your save from CtD if you have one present on your machine. Matrix Cubed has the same graphics and the storyline basically continues over from the last game.
Absolutely great sequel to Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday. This game is another one of the SSI Gold Box style RPGs, except it is set in the future.
The game play is just like CtD, and you can even bring over any characters you had from that game into this one. The game will allow you to load up your save from CtD if you have one present on your machine. Matrix Cubed has the same graphics and the storyline basically continues over from the last game. There are a few more places to visit, and you can access planets you could not go to in CtD, but they are extremely similar. Matrix Cubed is definitely a little harder, as many of the fights require the
heavy weapons that were relatively rare in CtD, but are very frequently found in Matrix Cubed. The amount and difficulty of random battles can be tiresome though, as is difficult, even on medium settings, to keep fighting over and over without getting people knocked out of combat.
Once you have people "comatose", they cannot fight until you get back to a medical bay or your ship, which can get tiresome if you are deep in a planet and cannot go back to your ship. This can lead to situations where you need a certain character's skills to advance past a certain point, but that person is unconscious. I have personally had that situation come to pass a few times, so it is recommended that you save often and in different spots to avoid getting stuck.
The storyline is interesting and involved various twists and enemies, as you are fighting against more than 1 group in the game, so you do not have just one adversary. The ship combat is identical to CtD, except for the fact that there are a few other types of ships you can run into. The battle system and items are identical, and nothing new has been added from the first game, other than you can find more higher end items that you could not get in the first game. For example, the game adds racial bonuses to gear by which planet it comes from, i.e. +1 to hit from Martian stuff, up to +4 for Lunarian, but in CtD you could find very few Lunarian items, and to the best of my knowledge you could only find 2 or 3 items of any type in Lunarian.
All in all, a fairly long game with a TON of skills and character development, as you have to develop your own team from several races and classes to succeed. Well worth playing, and worth playing the first one before this one so you can appreciate them as a pair.
