Desert Law

A nice single-player only strategy game. Desert Law will differently appeal to Mad Max fans and fans of post-apocalyptic fiction. There is no base building, resource gathering or micro-management. It is a budget game and it shows, but it is a great little distraction for just $5. The graphics, although out-of-date are still very nicely detailed. They are 2D isometric with 3D vehicles and they also have very nice weather effects. Even without any multiplayer you are still getting a lot of content for just $5 as Desert law has a long campaign of around 30 missions of different varieties. Gameplay is good but the only big major problem I had was that if a story character dies, it is an automatic mission failure. This can be sometimes frustrating because enemies can take out your vehicles and characters pretty quickly if they all target one in your group. So sending out your non-character units to the front of your convey is a must for success, which can be annoying because there is no option to change the types formations of your units like there are in other strategy games. Despite that issue the gameplay is still fun if you are able to overlook those major faults.

If you're into the Blitzkrieg or Sudden Strike series you might take a look at this one. [b]Desert Law[/b] is pretty much Blitzkrieg set in a post-apocalyptic world with all those crazy vehicles minus the strategic factor of the previous Blitzkrieg games. In every one of these 29 missions you basically control a bunch of armored dune buggies, Hot Rods or armed trucks and let them charge into hordes of wasteland punks. A handful of the stages are stealth missions, where you guide a story character through deserted ruins. All in all quite a good mission and level design if you ask me, especially the desert maps with all the details look pretty nice. Gameplay on the other hand is always relatively straight-forward and not too demanding. Instead of Blitzkrieg-typical briefings, the missions are interrupted by cheesy comic cutscenes that illustrate the quite shallow story. But still the story lacks sympathetic characters or interesting twists, so don't expect too much. What also differs Desert Law from the other Enigma engine games is the use of hero units. If only one guy from your bunch of "heroes" dies during combat, it immediately leads to failure. This can be quite frustrating, as your heroes bite the dust pretty often in hectic firefights. The Good: + Detailed maps + Atmospheric soundtrack + Cool vehicles and units + Pretty good mission design + About 10 to 13 hours of gameplay + Upgradable hero skills + Comic cutscenes The Bad: - No support for resolutions higher than 1280x1024! - Heroes die too fast and lead to failure of mission - Not really interesting story or characters - No multiplayer The Ugly: -- Nothing really... To put it in a nutshell, I especially recommend this game to fans of the Blitzkrieg/Sudden Strike family. If in addition you like the post-apocalyptic setting too and if you forgive Desert Law's minor problems, you'll have a pretty good time with this game. [b]7/10[/b]

[b][i]Desert Law[/i][/b] is a post-apocalyptic real-time strategy adventure. You are Brad, an easy-going road warrior whose life gets turned upside down when your village is attacked by gangsters while you and your friends were away on an escort mission. [b]Pros[/b]: The setting is obviously inspired by the [i]Mad Max[/i] universe as your characters drive metal plate-reinforced, machine-gun mounted cars, trucks and dune buggies, gameplay being an instantly-recognizable [i]Command & Conquer[/i] style for moving your units and attacking other units. You control a set amount of characters, which can dismount their cars to enter buildings, turrets or other vehicles you encounter. Your main character and a wacky assortment of other "heroes" will level up as they acquire experience from battle. Missions will usually have multiple objectives, and exploring the map of any given mission may uncover sidequests. In-mission story is told through series of dialog, while cut-scenes in-between missions will take the form of comic book panels. The story isn't too bad if perhaps cliché, but it's covered with humor about how sex and alcohol runs the degenerate lives of some of the characters. [b]Cons[/b]: Control is pretty awful and void of any fluidity, pathfinding is a total mess, and vehicles will constantly bump into each other, stop for no reason, get stuck in obstacles such as terrain or blown up enemy cars, drive backwards, and lose any semblance of formation whenever you give orders to multiple vehicles. This makes the gameplay excruciatingly frustrating, testing your patience as you painstakingly try to progress from one mission to another. I cannot stress enough how the unresponsiveness can ruin an RTS. While the story was ok, the writing itself is pretty terrible, filled with typos, misspelling and the worst cheese you can imagine dialogs to have. Graphics show their age, lacking any modern resolution. Yet, even with the lack of high resolutions, the minimap is so small that it's barely usable in any tactical way. [b]Verdict[/b]: ★★☆☆☆ - Forget it The setting really interested me, and I can tolerate the older graphics, but the gameplay totally killed the fun out of the game for me. I get that the game is dated 2005, but that's just it: we're not in 2005 anymore, and [i]Desert Law[/i] doesn't stand the test of time. ————————————————————————— [i][b]This was just my opinion.[/b] If you found this review helpful, please consider giving it a thumbs up, and feel free to check out more of my (purely opinionated) [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/CJsOpinions/]reviews[/url].[/i]

The story, the gameplay and the RTS aspects are terrible. I enjoyed the comic book art that pushes the story forward, but that's about it. As a kid I loved 1C's games, but for me this is definitely their worst title, even when this game is set in my most favorite setting - the post apocalyptic world. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=792119811 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=793254106 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3661371696

For whatever weird reason out there, a few years ago, before Russian government didn't destroy Russian gaming industry completely (like pretty much everything else in that poor, poor country), we've got ourselves a lot of Sci-Fi games with cars being a main motif. There was a series called [b]Hard Truck Apocalypse[/b] (AKA [b]Ex-Machina[/b]), there was a game called [b]Sledgehammer[/b] (AKA [b]Gear Grinder[/b]), there was [b]Death Track: Resurrection[/b] and so on. [b]Desert Law[/b] is one of those games and this time I really, [i]really[/i] wanted to like it. Just because this time it's an [b]RTS[/b] game and I always had a very special place in my heart for that genre. Unfortunately... yeah, yeah, you know the drill. A lot of Mother Russia happens here. But as usual, I'm getting ahead of myself. First of all, what is [b]Desert Law[/b]? Like I've said, it's an [b]RTS[/b] game. Surprisingly old-school in a way, since it doesn't look / feel nearly like something from [b]2005[/b]. More like something from mid-nineties. Which isn't a bad thing, though. Isn't bad at all. Quite the opposite, that's actually the exact reason why I've decided to buy it (it's hard to argue with the fact that nineties were the best time period for many genres on personal computers and [b]RTS[/b] is one of those). Don't expect any base building here either. Not even on [b]Company of Heroes[/b] level. The entire game is like one long [b]Tanya Adams[/b] mission. If you know what I mean (I hope you do, because if you don't, I don't want to talk to you). But since it's a story-oriented game with thirty-missions-long campaign, our main characters can level up and we're able to carry them from mission to mission, the same exact formula worked well enough in games like [b]Sudden Strike[/b] and [b]Blitzkrieg[/b], while your characters can even exit the vehicles and find themselves the new ones here... it also sounds pretty fun. Add the cult of cars and [b]Fallout[/b]-like setting to all that and you'll get something that many people would probably like to be a part of. So, what's wrong here? Why's the thumb down? Well, as usual with Russian games, there are two things. First – the story is terrible (the bandits and Cuban army are bad, our guys are good, guess who'll win and get some babes at the end like a [b]Didck[/b] freakin' [b]Dukem[/b]?), while writing is full of stupid things and cheap jokes. And second – it's terribly, [i]terribly[/i] made. And I'm not talking about the dated visuals. I'm talking about gameplay and gameplay only. The most basic features (like the option to quickly center camera on units) aren't there, the AI is [i]painfully[/i] dumb and fails to find the right path all the time (no, seriously, the very first [b]WarCraft[/b], which was released eleven years before this “masterpiece”, didn't feel nearly as bad in that matter), the missions are dumb and shallow, but very confusing (the worst combo you can ever imagine), the critical points for the tasks are invisible and very often won't even trigger right away, which may even lead to your defeat (when you need to escape from a huge army, for example), the entire thing is full of stupid decisions (like infinite hordes of enemies), and, of course, the game is pretty unstable. Guess, it's more than enough to give it a thumb down, huh? I must say, though, [b]Desert Law[/b] is far from being the worst game you can ever imagine. It's not nearly as bad as many other Russian disasters I've played (some things still give me nightmares) and about five years before its actual release it'll even have a chance to be counted as somewhat competitive product for those [b]RTS[/b] enthusiasts (there was a lot of those back in the days, before everybody started to play those repetitive [b]MOBA[/b]... things). But honestly, it's really hard to enjoy this game in a proper way. And not only because it was [b]2005[/b], which brought us games like [b]Empire Earth II[/b], [b]Black & White 2[/b] and [b]Age of Empires III[/b]. There was just way too much cheap aftertaste and way too much things that will lead you to cheap and unfair deaths. And since missions here are really dull and not interesting at all... you've got the idea. [b]Desert Law[/b] is only for those ultra-hardcore [b]RTS[/b] enthusiasts that already played and finished pretty much everything else there is. If you have any other option? You'll probably want to skip this... experience. Dixi.

as many reviews on many games state, it would be a lot bnetter to have some sort of numerical (1-10) sysem or something. I like the setyup of the game, it is older but acceptable graphics. Has a lot of content actually. Devs really should come back and add a card set and achievements to make the purchase a bit more "worth it". But if you can catch it on sale it's a nice litle game. I don't like giving a Neg to a "medium" game. So I always opt for the UP vote. Again, it's alright, nothing to eb overly dissapointed with.

[h1] Издатель набрал какое-то космическое количество отечественной классики и при этом уже не хочет доводить эти игры до ума. Ну хоть облачное сохранение есть, но из-за писка видяхи по причине отсутствия вертикальной синхронизации играть невозможно. Изменение настроек не помогли [/h1] А игра конечно любопытная... Как впрочем и другие игры от 1С. Столько игровых компаний было в 2000-х - Акелла, Бука, Фаргус и т.д., но до сегодняшнего времени похоже никто не дожил...

I bought this a long time ago, but finally tried it out recently. I love post-apocalyptic stuff, and I can do with rough edges. But the pathfinding and formations are utter garbage. That's a deal-breaker for an RTS in my opinion.

Desert Law is a RTS game released in 2005. As such the graphics are dated and the engine is not the most robust around so this should be taken into consideration. It is an isometric game, with single-player mode only, a funny (sometimes overdone) story, in a post-apocalyptic setting. Fallout meets Mad Max, kind of thing. Gameplay: Contrary to most RTS games around, since the inception of the genre, this one does not feature base-building. What has come to be a key component of the genre. That in itself, at least to me, is refreshing. The game plays in typical RTS fashion controls with the exception of not having the ability to add units one by one to a group using a modifier key (usually shift). Everything else as far as controls go is like every other RTS. What is new on the table is the use of vehicles. Your units can enter and exit vehicles (and buildings) and can survive if their vehicle gets blown up. A unit switches their active actions menu depending on if they're on foot or in a vehicle. The game has a funny backstory that you get to watch in between chapters, in the form of a comic book and there are funny, sometimes to the point of absurd, dialogues inside the campaign missions as well. The story, as far as I've seen, is full of cliche and sexual innuendo. It is funny enough though that it works for me. Worthy of note is that the engine feels quite clunky. One may think that it's only reasonable in this time and age, the game is 17 years old, by the time I write this, but there have been older games of the same genre with more responsive engines (a wink to Dune here). The pathfinding AI routines are also not very advanced. Prepare to micromanage and use the pause button a lot. Not only to think about your strategy but to correct pathing as well. Graphics: The game is dated 2005. With that in mind, the graphics are not bad at all. Notice though that there is no support for resolutions higher than 1280x1024 and although there are widescreen resolutions available, the game is not really made with widescreen in mind. Music/Sound Design: On this department it is doing ok. The music sounds good and so do the effects. Nothing special though and always minding the fact that it is a game released in 2005. Pros: -Interesting twists on the genre. -Nice comic style story. -Funny. Neutral: -Humour may appear sexist to some. If you are easily offended by sexist stereotypes you may want to avoid it. Also it is quite wacky. -It is an older game and it shows. -Single-player only. Some may like that, some may not. -No base building. Same as above. Cons: -Engine and interface feels a bit clunky. -Pathfind could be A LOT better. Conclusion: It is a decent game which perhaps did not age very well. If you are a fan of RTS games, wacky humour, or refreshing twists on the genre, go for it! Score: Gameplay: 6/10 Graphics: 6/10 Music/Sound: 6/10 Concept/Story: 8/10 More game reviews @ https://cassus.org

Диск с этой игрой был первым в моей жизни, я купил его в 2006 и вот сейчас, спустя 15 лет я снова запускаю ее, дикая ностальгия, тогда эта игра мне понравилась. В начале игры обучение, говорят что зелёные это свои, а красные противники, что такое левая кнопка мыши, что такое правая, а ведь тогда я реально их путал и не знал что это такое. Для чувака который только недавно научился читать это было сложно. Это были мои первые часы пользования компьютером. Спасибо разработчикам за крутые воспоминания) За саунд разработчикам тоже +