Fallen Haven

The Good
The basic idea of a strategy game with a detailed tactical battle subgame has always intrigued me, and especially at the time this was not commonly done. The backstory was more interesting than the norm for non-RPG games, with a bit of irony.

The Bad
The actual play was tedious, primarily because the response time was just too darn slow. Also, the tech tree was extremely bland - at no point would a new invention actually change the tactics or strategy of the game. My overall impression was that the initial game concepts had been written up by a strategy gamer describing his or her dream game, but the game design and the entire implementation effort had been taken over by people who didn't understand what would make the game fun for the intended audience.

The Bottom Line
At the time, it was a big disappointment to me. The strategic tier was OK, the tactical game was OK too, but the slow response time and the overall lack of excitement or variety made it lose all appeal after only a few hours of play.

(If you watched the installation carefully, you could tell that the entire game was implemented as an MS Access database plus a graphical front end. I suspect that the horrible play speed was because every action had to be resolved using database scripting.)