Out of Eight PC Game Reviews

Oil Rush Review

2012-01-26T14:54:00.000-05:00

Oil Rush, developed and published by Unigine Corp.
The Good: Easy control of forces, strategic base capturing with automated unit production, good interface, research tree supports varied tactics, challenging campaign, multiplatform, nice graphics
The Not So Good: Few units and defensive towers
What say you? This fast-paced streamlined real time strategy game features little micromanagement, focusing on larger tactical decisions: 7/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
As a precious limited natural resource, oil is constantly being fought over around the globe. Whether through peaceful diplomatic means or more hostile methods, he who controls the oil controls the world, at least until alternative energy sources become more profitable. Oil Rush is a real-time strategy game that centers on naval battles for black gold, as ships and planes fight over oil platforms scattered throughout the ocean. This game hopes to differentiate itself through more streamlined controls and strategy centered on capturing the aforementioned oil platforms to produce defenses and new units. Does this novel approach still provide strategic depth?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
The graphics of Oil Rush are impressive. Being a naval title, you would expect the maritime graphics to be pretty good, and Oil Rush delivers with choppy waves and translucent water where you can see the drowned land below. The few areas that are still above sea level are also quite detailed, with varied environments (desert, arctic) poking out of the water. Bases are animated, with little workers shuttling boxes back and forth for no discernable reason, and the units have a good level of detail when you are zoomed in close. Battle effects are decent enough, although the same death explosion animations are used every time. The sound design is less remarkable: while the combat effects are good, the forced voice acting and occasionally annoying music selections aren’t so stellar. Still, the beautiful graphics carry the high-quality presentation of Oil Rush.

ET AL.
In the future, the Earth is drowned and everyone is fighting over oil. I blame Al Gore. The single player campaign consists of around twenty missions; usually these involve a generic “capture everything” objective, but some time-based defensive or alternative objectives are sporadically offered. The campaign missions can be quite challenging: it occasionally took me a couple of tries before I formulated a successful strategy, thanks to some unbalanced starting conditions and a competent AI opponent. The tutorial is integrated into the campaign, explaining a couple of new units, bases, and abilities with each new mission. Beyond the campaign lies a skirmish mode against the AI: fifteen maps supporting two to four players. You can also play those maps online, using the game’s browser to search for opponents. Finally, it should be noted that Oil Rush works on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems, so all PC users can enjoy the unbridled mayhem.

One of the most important aspects of any strategy game is the interface, and Oil Rush mostly delivers on this count. The technology tree and researched abilities are easy to access, and purchasing and upgrading towers is accomplished by double-clicking on a base. You can send all of your units, a percentage of the available forces, or specific units to an enemy (or friendly) base. Most of the game is actually played from the minimap (where units are moved), and while this method is straightforward, I’d like the minimap to be a bit larger and have icons for different unit types (triangles for planes, squares for heavy ships, et cetera). Because units can only be ordered to other bases, it can be impossible to intercept enemy units, but you can guess where they are headed as units will always travel in a straight line. Oil Rush also features a good number of hotkeys, where you can select your weakest platform or all platforms to send a massive attack. Overall, while there is some small room for improvement, the interface for Oil Rush is solid and implemented well.

Units are automatically produced at your bases, removing one tedious aspect of strategy games (you’re going to build as many units as you can anyway, right?). There are only five types of units in the game: light, medium, and heavy naval units, and light and heavy air units. While this limited variety doesn’t compete with other strategy games that feature more units with nuanced differences, researched upgrades can expand your tactical options. The population cap is determined by the number of bases you have captured, so the side with the most platforms will produce the most units. Units can only be ordered to move to other bases; while some might argue this reduces tactical flexibility, it works well within the confines of the game’s fast-paced, streamlined mechanics. Those bases produce the variety of units, and while it takes some time to capture an enemy or neutral base, a single unit can do it (assuming there are no defenses constructed), so devious tacticians have some choices. Each base should be surrounded by turrets for defense, since you’ll never have enough forces to cover all of your bases and still assault the enemy. The options here are even more limited than the unit selection: one tower for light units, one tower for medium and heavy units, and one tower for air units. However, you can upgrade existing towers to increase damage output and engage more varied units. Towers are constructed using oil, collected at oil platforms that offer no defenses and must be covered by military units alone. Oil can also be spent using special abilities, which are researched using points earned from attacking the enemy. There are several branches on the technology tree you can unlock, including unit and tower upgrades, increased or decreased damage, speeding up production, raising population cap, radar, mine fields, and nukes. Some upgrades have several levels that multiply the effects of the ability. The abilities help to break the mid-game stalemates that are so common in RTS games, and are a welcome addition that offer more strategic options.

Oil Rush features fast-paced, Galcon-style gameplay where bases swap quickly and units die swiftly. The simple unit and turret balance makes it easy (potentially) to counter the enemy: machine guns beat jet skis, and SAMs beat helicopters. Of course, it takes some time to construct these defenses, but you can see the types of bases the enemy owns and then make an educated guess at which units they will use. It is almost impossible to defend everything, which makes the games more interesting overall, as there is almost always a place you can attack your enemy, giving those who are trailing a chance to come back if they attack where their opponents are not defending (especially on larger maps with lengthy transit times). The streamlined nature of Oil Rush makes maneuvering and constructing defenses important, with the use of the right ability at the right time able to tip the balance. The AI opponent is usually quite good: they will routinely attack vulnerable bases where you forgot (or could not afford) to construct bases, crippling your production. There are some oddities when units are attack (running into each other or not engaging enemies immediately), but units do organize and move in formation automatically.

IN CLOSING
You would think that automating production and individual unit movement would lead to a boring game, but the fast pace of Oil Rush means you’re always busy doing something. You will need to constantly shuttle forces between your bases, engaging incoming threats and taking new objectives. Panic is common in the game because of the ease at which undefended bases can be captured by only a couple of units. This can lead to a cascading effect where the enemy will prevent you from producing new units for a counter-attack by easily capturing undefended unit-producing bases. Towers must be constructed at each newly acquired base, since the enemy could sneak around your heavily fortified front lines and attack from the rear. These towers require oil, and since oil platforms cannot be defended with towers, the most intense conflicts usually involve these structures. The bases you hold produce a variety of units automatically: light, medium, and heavy naval units, plus a couple of flying units. These isn’t much variety here (same with the towers), but it does follow the simplified nature of the game. Units can only be ordered to move to other bases, which greatly reduces confusion during the hectic skirmishes. Researched abilities break stalemates, reducing mid-game tedium and quickening the overall pace of the game. The AI opponent is very competent, repeatedly going after vulnerable bases, and the interface allows you to manage your forces efficiently. The campaign is tough, and skirmish and multiplayer games extend replay value. Finally, Oil Rush looks nice, which is always a final selling point. Oil Rush takes the ideas of real time strategy games, cuts out the fluff, and produces an intriguing streamlined title.

Steel Armor: Blaze of War Review

2012-01-22T08:14:00.000-05:00

Steel Armor: Blaze of War, developed by Graviteam and published by UIG Entertainment.
The Good: Includes direct tank control with tactical battles and strategic campaign movement
The Not So Good: Confusing interface, vague tactical orders, questionable AI pathfinding, very insufficient tutorial, only two controllable tanks, no multiplayer
What say you? This strategic tank simulation has good ideas that could have been executed better: 5/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
The military technology of the 70’s and 80’s is largely ignored in strategy and simulation gaming. If it’s not from World War II or modern military hardware, finding an in-depth computerized dissertation is tough. There have been the occasional title that spans these decades (Strike Fighters and The Star and the Crescent come to mind), but these are rare indeed. Hoping to fill this historical gap is Steel Armor: Blaze of War, the latest title from Achtung Panzer developer Graviteam. This combination of direct tank control from inside the metal beasts with dynamic strategic campaigns highlights the Soviet T-62 tank and American M60A1 that were utilized during the Iran-Iraq, Afghanistan, and Angola Wars of the 1980’s. Does this simulation drive towards victory, or explode in a blaze of war?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
The graphics of Steel Armor: Blaze of War start with the two tanks, which are modeled well. The interiors are 3-D, offering more than just viewpoints, allowing you to look around at the other positions in the tank and subsequently immersing you into the game more. Passengers also bounce up and down as the tank travels over uneven terrain, which actually makes me a little motion sick (especially when looking down weapon sights). The exteriors could use slightly higher texture resolutions, but the models are detailed and the tracks travel convincingly over the ground. The landscapes for the battles include varied foliage and buildings that act as obstacles to engaging the enemy tanks, and the terrain is also a factor. Damage is appropriate: tanks billowing smoke and flames will soon dot the landscape, and buildings collapse when an errant shells impacts their walls. Steel Armor: Blaze of War does have some clipping problems with tanks and the terrain, but overall the graphics are passable. The sound design highlights the fact that tanks are very noisy, as your ears will be pummeled by the constant whine of engines running and turrets rotating. The game also features occasional voice acting (for the Russian tank positions) and really out-of-place music when a battle is loaded. Overall, the graphics and sound aren’t spectacular, but they do not detract from the overall experience either.

ET AL.
Steel Armor: Blaze of War covers three wars from the 1980’s in Iran-Iraq, Afghanistan, and Angola. Each war has its own campaign where you lead your battalions against those of the opposition, taking place in maps that are indicative of the terrain seen in each theatre. The game seems to love to place water-filled trenches in the maps, causing tanks to get stuck more frequently. In addition to the campaigns, you can set up quick battles using the game’s terrible options menu. Steel Armor: Blaze of War also includes a scenario editor (although all of the documentation is in Russian). You can only directly control two tanks in the game, the Russian T-62 and American M60A1, and the game auto-resolves battles involving other units. The features could be more rounded overall: Steel Armor: Blaze of War lacks multiplayer of any kind and the tutorial (which pops up information on each screen) and manual are woefully deficient, increasing the learning curve.

Rather than featuring scripted scenarios in specific locations, Steel Armor: Blaze of War has a dynamic campaign where you move units around a sectioned map and engage the enemy. The first thing to keep in mind is that you are red and the enemy is blue, contrary to Western-developed games. There isn’t really that much strategy to the campaign mode: just move units and attack the enemy. Further decreasing the strategy is the obscene fog of war implemented in the campaign mode: most units cannot see what’s in the next square (just that there may be an enemy), so you usually have to attack simply to see who the enemy might be. Of course, this makes the game more unpredictable since you rarely know what types of units you’ll encounter when the battle begins. The campaign AI is very aggressive and will attack most anything in an adjacent square. I like the dynamic, user-directed manner of the campaign mode, but more strategic decisions would be nice.

Once two units attempt to occupy the same space, a tactical battle is born…if the battle involves one of the two player-controlled tanks, that is. The goal of the tactical battle is to control a majority of the flags, which will give you command of the square on the main campaign map. The first task is to deploy your units, and the game gives you a lot of freedom in choosing the best area to start from. Although you can only directly control two tanks in the game, other types of units may be involved in the battle: anti-tank guns, APCs, infantry, and mortars, to name a few. You can then issue all units simple orders, usually telling them to attack or defend an objective location. There are additional options where you can customize the formation (line or column), unit density, movement rate, and target priorities, but overall the command options are not specific enough. The game fails to display orders on the map, so coordinating your units can be tough. The lack of waypoints also makes coordination difficult, so more options in this area would be appreciated.

As I mentioned several times, you can take direct control of two types of tanks in the game. You can freely switch between any allied tank that can be controlled directly at any time (you can also issue generic movement orders to other tanks in your squad), assuming one of four positions: commander, gunner, loader, and driver. The commander is responsible for spotting targets using his binoculars and range finder (which is hard to use), and can also issue orders to make simple repairs on the tank. The gunner shoots, with the ranges calculated by the commander, using the gun sights and specifying the ammunition type to the loader. The loader is also responsible for manning the exterior machine gun when the tank is opened, and the driver drives. Manning each of these positions is pretty fun, although the mouse-based interface is awkward. You must hold down “control” to select things on the interface or use obscure hotkeys, like “L” for dismount, in order to do stuff with the tank. Add to it the uninformative manual and tutorials and there is a significant learning curve to overcome. That said, the tank aspects of Steel Armor: Blaze of War are done well, with seemingly accurate weapon attributes and damage modeling. The AI is very inconsistent: while it is very good at spotting and engaging enemy targets (it will routinely destroy tanks I can’t even see), the pathfinding is atrocious: the AI driver will go right through trees, houses, and get stuck in ditches unless specifically ordered to stick to the roads (and even then results may vary). This ruins some of the immersion of the sim, as the computer drivers will haphazardly navigate the terrain. It’s a better option to take the wheel yourself and assume the driver role in the tank, since the AI is very competent at engaging the enemy on its own.

IN CLOSING
I like the idea of Steel Armor: Blaze of War, but the product is lacking in some key areas. The game as a whole is fairly unfriendly to new users, thanks in large part to the unwieldy interface used in each aspect of the game: driving a tank and commanding your troops is much more complicated than necessary. The campaign offers dynamic battles as you maneuver your platoons around the map, capturing objectives and clearing the map; this results in much more replay value in the game’s three wars, plus quick battles for added flexibility. Sadly, you can’t take the fight online, so it’s just you and the computer. The tactical mode allows you to deploy and give basic commands to your troops, but there isn’t enough direct feedback to keep track of all of your units and their orders on the battlefield. The tank simulation aspect of Steel Armor: Blaze of War is decent enough, with accurate weapon characteristics and fully modeled interiors that put you right into the action. However, that interface gets in the way of fluid control and the AI makes some really bad navigational decisions. The learning curve caused by the obtuse interface and lack of comprehensive tutorials will ensure that Steel Armor: Blaze of War will remain a niche entry into the tank strategy and simulation genres.

The Wreckless Review

2012-01-17T19:27:00.000-05:00

The Wreckless, developed and published by Duct Tape Games.
The Good: Massive large scale battles, challenging Newtonian physics, custom skirmish mode
The Not So Good: Usually unfairly outnumbered, limited variety of ships, very brief campaign, lacks multiplayer, lacks polish in some areas
What say you? This combat space flight simulation delivers impressive arcade battles, but is a bit rough around the edges: 5/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
One of the most renowned space combat flight simulations was TIE Fighter, a pleasing mix of stirring battles and movie licensing. Many (well, at least several) games have tried to recapture that spirit, but nothing approaching universal acclaim in the PC gaming world. Leave it up to the independent developers to fill a niche: Duct Tape Games have produced The Wreckless, a space combat game that focuses on large scale battles where you gently influence the outcome with subtle means. You know, by using big freaking lasers. Does this combat-heavy simulation obliterate the competition, or is it simply stuck in drydock?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
The Wreckless has opted for cell-shaded graphics, using thick borders for ships (and bright red for enemy vessels for easier identification) and bland textures otherwise. While the choice does make for a distinctive look, it's not that visually impressive as the ship models could have used better textures than the monochrome gray and occasional line of paint. The weapons consist of dots with glowing tracers that do look impressive during large battles, common in the title. Explosions, however, are impressive, with most ships disappearing into a fireball and the larger capital ships breaking up into two or three pieces that disappear soon thereafter. Scenario locations involve the occasional asteroid field and space port with backgrounds that include planets and stars; nothing too notable here. The sound design is fairly standard: understated sound effects and electronic background music accompany the mayhem. The Wreckless does include voice introductions to each level, somewhat impressive for an indie game. Still, The Wreckless delivers an appropriate amount of graphics and sound quality for the $10 price tag.

ET AL.
The Wreckless has you protecting the titular capital ship around the universe of the course of around fifteen campaign missions. While the missions have different objectives, most boil down to attacking all the enemy ships while defending all the friendly capital ships. Being a combat-only title obviously limits the variety The Wreckless has to offer, since there are no mining or exploration elements to be found (though asteroids are commonly present as obstacles). The missions are also very short (on the order of five minutes or so) and you can’t save mid-mission, but since most of the scenarios are so short, it really doesn't matter too much. The game could also supply some better instructions in some scenarios, as I am sometimes on the attack too early or too late, leading to early defeat by not fulfilling occasionally vague objectives. You can customize the difficulty by adjusting friendly and enemy ship populations…to an extent. Even when setting the enemies at the minimum and friendlies at the maximum value, you can still be greatly outnumbered. If you’re going to give the player the ability to adjust the number of enemy and friendly ships, make it so they can change it to completely unfair populations in either direction, instead of restricting them within small windows. Your ships include fighters and bombers; although most scenarios have capital ships present, you cannot directly control them, which is a bit disappointing. “Research” can be conducted between missions, but it is simply unlocking a new ship class for the next scenario. The Wreckless also offers a skirmish battle simulator for campaign-free combat. You can customize four different ship squads and one capital ship type, with up to eight vessels in each squad, but while having more ships leads to more impressive battles, it also makes for more chaos, as the default (and unchangeable) initial spacing is clearly not designed for so many ships, with most vessels running into each other for the first seconds of a skirmish battle. You can’t have better results online, as The Wreckless lacks multiplayer of any kind.

The Wreckless relies on tradition first person shooter controls: the WASD keys, plus boosting (using shift) and braking using the spacebar. Given the chaotic nature of the game’s battles, this method works well and is intuitive. Ships are equipped with shields, which regenerate very slowly, and the hull. It only takes a couple of direct hits to destroy a vessel, and capital ships have a surprisingly low amount of health and can be easily defeated by a squadron of fighters (which is part of the reason why it's so easy to fail the missions, since your capital ship also has low health). When your ship is destroyed, you can thankfully continue the scenario in any ship from your squad. Ships are equipped with cannons, missiles, and bombs; a lead indicator is provided to assist in targeting, and a missile lock is eventually granted if enemy ships are kept in the crosshairs. You can press the “R” key to target the closest enemy unit, useful in the heat of battle. Because most combat involves guns (due to limited supplies of missiles and lengthy lock-on times), The Wreckless emphasizes strafing during battles to avoid the incoming hail of bullets, a tactic employed most commonly in first person shooters. The Wreckless employs a physics model that preserves momentum; although you can apply brakes (which fire rockets in the opposite direction), you’ll keep moving even when you let off the gas. The result is interesting flight combat with plenty of ships and bullets screaming past your view. While the AI holds its own during battles, producing a spectacular array of lasers and missiles, the computer-controlled ships aren't quite as adept at holding position or avoiding environmental objects when they have been given strict scripted commands by the scenario designer, constantly running into each other or asteroids until they become spaced out. The AI also seems to attack the closest enemy ship, rather than prioritizing the current objective. Because of this, success in most missions is highly dependent on your actions, which can be difficult to complete due to the typically high number of enemy ships to contend with.

IN CLOSING
The highlight of The Wreckless, the battles, are done well, but the rest of the package lags behind. Utilizing a physics-based momentum system, the battles are large and dogfight-heavy, using guns more than missiles, producing delightful combat. The first person shooter control scheme works well in this context, and it's my preferred method of engaging the enemy. The Wreckless includes fighters and bombers that the player can control, and large capital ships that are less than formidable. The AI, while it attacks well, does a poor job prioritizing targets based on current objectives, leading to a lot of failed missions as you simply can't engage and defend every important target simultaneously. Shortcomings in the AI are also evident when enemies are not present, with the various ships running into each other and flying out of formation in strange directions. The campaign is short and repetitive, offering up the same “attack everyone while defending” objectives each time out. You can customize the difficult by increasing the number of friendly ships while decreasing the enemy's, but in some cases it's not enough to offset unfair odds or poor instructions. The skirmish mode is a bit limited and multiplayer is not present. Still, I think fans of action-packed space flight sims will overlook the unrefined aspects of the game and instead will focus on the pleasing combat, which, for $10, does deliver some space-bound thrills.

FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction Review

2012-01-13T15:20:00.000-05:00

FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction, developed by Team 6 Game Studios and published by Strategy First.
The Good: Multiple game modes
The Not So Good: Unpredictable physics with inconsistent damage and poor car handling, annoyingly stupid AI drivers, most innovative stunt modes removed, uninspired track design, nearly impossible to place first and unlock new content
What say you? The latest entry in the arcade racing series is a sad shadow of its former self thanks to truly atrocious racing: 2/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
One of the better arcade car racing game series of the past was FlatOut. The combination of fast speeds, lots of environmental destruction, online multiplayer, and highly entertaining physics-based minigames (my personal favorite was the poker game where you had to eject your driver through the windshield towards playing cards to make the best hand; curling is a close second) produced a unique title. Well, the series is back, under the direction of a different developer, in FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction. Well, the game certainly promises both chaos and destruction; let’s see if it delivers on both counts.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction manages to have worse graphics than Ultimate Carnage, which came out three years ago. Overall, this entry lacks the crispness seen previous games in the series, through the overuse of bloom, imbuing all of the tracks and cars with a soft fuzziness that doesn’t work well. The car models are quite poor, especially when damaged, lacking crisp textures and decent effects when crashing begins. The repetitive explosion effects become tiresome, and the bland track designs lacks the varied trackside detail of before and are also inundated with inadequately detailed texturing in some cases (although some locations, such as Rome, don't look too bad). The sound design is along the same lines: grating, repetitive sound effects and forgettable music accompany the on-screen mayhem. The switch to a different developer certainly didn’t keep the graphical fidelity of the previous games intact.

ET AL.
Following in the footsteps of its ancestors, FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction is an arcade racing game with fast speeds and destruction a-plenty. While the game lacks a career mode following a single character, there are plenty of game modes to choose from: the standard race, a series of specific challenges, a damage-based offroad mode, nightshifts (a one-on-one mode in rain that makes the handling even worse, if that was ever possible), speed (fast cars without a handbrake, where you go just as fast in the sand as on the track), monstertrucks (all one word), demolition derby, and a stunt mode that removes all of the entertaining minigames found in the previous games. There are six locations (in exotic locations like “Vienna” and “Detroit”), usually with two tracks and two reverses of those two tracks each. The tracks are nothing special: layouts occasionally feature crossovers like a figure eight race (a great idea in a game such as this), but then require you to drive a car up stairs (a terrible idea in any situation), so it all balances out in the end. Unfortunately, you have to finish first to unlock the next race, something that is next to impossible (unless you put the game on easy with four AI opponents) given the number of cars per race and the propensity of the AI drivers to continually run into you. You can join and host races online, which is easy to do thanks to the game browser, but (not surprisingly) the online population is quite low and thus races are tough to come by.

Racing games would be quite boring without cars, and FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction has some, divided into several classes and rated according to handling, acceleration, speed, and strength, although I did not see any noticeable differences between cars in the same class. You can also automatically tune your car for added speed or strength, further customizing your ride. One significant problem for FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction is that the cars are not fun to drive. At all. The problem is cornering: every single car in the game grips the ground at all times (except when airborne, of course), requiring you to go really slow or use the handbrake when turning. There is absolutely no drifting (unless you equip the "drift" tuning kit, and then the cars are impossible to control) without manually pressing the handbrake button, and even then it’s pretty understated. This goes for any of the game options: the slower "classic" mode, the fast "chaos and destruction," and the setting in the middle. I realize it’s an arcade game, but when I crank a wheel all the way to the left when going 150 miles per hour, I might spin out just a bit. Or actually turn. So much for going “flat out”.

The physics engine is just as bad. Running into things (a goal of the FlatOut series) is not recommended, as it might send you spinning or crashing in some seemingly random direction. Jumps are also inconsistent: sometimes landing will be fine, but most of the time you'll fly off at some insane angle. It used to be fun running into stuff along the track. Now, you'll probably flip over or go airborne, so it's best to avoid everything you see. Boost now is mainly gained by passing checkpoints rather than causing damage to the environment: boring. You’ll probably want to avoid running into other cars, too. In previous FlatOut games, the car that was traveling faster would deliver more damage: very predictable. Here, it seems to be completely random: you might broadside a stationary car and deliver 1% damage while getting 30%, or gently scrape another vehicle and completely destroy it. The woeful AI doesn’t help matters: the first thing the computer drivers do at the start of any race is head towards the closest car and instantly explode. Seriously: I started a “speed” race and half the field blew up three seconds into the race in a gigantic heap at the center of the track. The AI would rather run into each other than actually drive towards the finish line, which is not the best tactic during a race. Demolition derbies become a mass of cars in the center of the track, running into each other in a gigantic heap, causing randomized damage to each other. In the objective-based monstertrucks mode, your teammates have no idea what an "objective" is and would rather run into you the entire time. When AI cars are away from one another, they are competent drivers, staying on the track and driving at appropriate speeds. However, get two cars near each other and all bets are off. You really have to see this stuff to believe it. It borders on comical how inept the AI drivers are in FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction.

IN CLOSING
When a racing game has poor AI and random driving physics, what are you left with? A whole lot of nothing, that's what. First off, the AI is terrible: they would rather ram into each other than actually race to the finish, which is detrimental in a racing game. You can very easily get stuck against an AI car or any number of alleys by the track side, plummeting your position in the race. The physics are unpredictable; I certainly don’t mind over-the-top jumps and flips common in arcade racing games, but the results have to be consistent or the game loses all validity. FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction actually discourages chaos and destruction, as the consequences of running into exploding barrels and other objects are random at best: you might be fine, or you might flip over and have to respawn. One of the best aspects of the series, environment damage, has been essentially removed. And since the game requires you to finish in first place to unlock the next event, it's better to simply avoid everything instead of having fun making a mess, part of what the series was all about. Damage is woefully inconsistent: slight crashes may cause little damage or completely total your car, and slamming into the competition seemingly involves random dice rolls to determine who gets destroyed, instead of relying on predictable methods like who was traveling faster. Car handling is weak, as high grip makes cornering impossible without constant use of the handbrake. Cars will never break loose when taking a corner, and staying glued to the track means each car in the game is outrageously painful to drive as you must take each corner very slowly. In addition, FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction actually looks worse than its predecessor. It’s not all bad news: FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction comes with eight racing modes, some of which aren’t direct copies from the previous games (although my favorite stunt modes are curiously absent). Also, online racing is handled well, if there were more people to race against. But, in the end, there is absolutely no reason to get FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction instead of FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage, as it adds nothing new and actually offers significantly worse racing. In short, FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction does not deserve the once-proud moniker of the series.

X-Plane 10 Review

2012-01-09T15:01:00.000-05:00

X-Plane 10, developed and published by Laminar Research.
The Good: Impressive clouds and terrain with accurate roads and fully 3-D buildings, authentic implementation of air traffic control, improved flight model features for plane designers, human-voiced AI planes
The Not So Good: No new planes, some AI plane issues, expensive, erratic performance, steep learning curve for newcomers
What say you? A better version in a solid flight simulation series, but a very hard sell for casual users of previous versions.
For owners of X-Plane 9: 5/8
For newcomers to the series: 7/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
It’s been 3 ½ years since X-Plane 9 was released, which still stands as my preferred flight simulator. Why, you ask? First, it uses actual physics to determine how the planes perform (instead of pre-set values in a text file), allowing actual aeronautical engineers to test fly their designs before actually building them. This also allows for a wide range of aircraft to be developed by the community using the game’s design tools, behaving as it should in the sky. As with most things, improvements can also be made, so now it’s time for X-Plane 10 to taxi to the runway. Earmarked at a pricey $80, the newest version promises better scenery, more frightening weather, improved air traffic control, an improved flight model, and the ability to use multi-core processors. Grab your joysticks and let’s see if the new version has enough to offer.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
As in most flight simulation sequels, the majority of improvements in X-Plane 10 are visual. Most apparent is the use of full 3-D scenery, not just the ugly-looking occasional building seen in X-Plane 9, that follows the roads as they snake through the landscape. The result is very plausible cities: it's really neat to fly over fully 3-D houses in residential areas, and generated skyscrapers in more urban locales. X-Plane 10 also includes real roads, culled from the Open Street Map Project, that look a whole lot better than those previously offered in the simulation. Included are overpasses at expressway intersections, bridges, and traffic that careen down the highways and byways. It looks pretty great, although it seems similar surface textures are used, which look good from a distance but lose some of their crispness up close. In addition, airports still lack terminals (even when on the maximum settings), which reduces some of the immersion (except for Seattle, the location of the demo, of course). Also improved are the clouds, which are now made up of individual puffs of smoke to create some fantastic looking visuals. All of these impressive visuals come at a price, however, as I found performance to be all over the place. While the game doesn’t run as fast as I would have liked (it never does), the disparity between rural locations and urban environments in terms of frame rates is quite high; you need a pretty monstrous machine to crank X-Plane 10 at the highest settings. And I don't know what “asynchronous loading” is, but it sure takes a long time to finish. The sound design is mostly the same, except for the ATC and AI plane voices, which are actual humans this time around. Sure, there are only about two different voices used, but it sounds a lot better than the stock text-to-voice computer.

ET AL.
So, what else is new? Ironically, one area of X-Plane 10 that seems to be untouched is the actual planes themselves: I did not find one new airplane model that was not present in X-Plane 9. While the game still offers an eclectic, well-rounded selection of thirty planes, they are the same thirty planes as before, lacking even subtle improvements to the instrument panels or textures. Even though the scenery got marked improvements, the interiors and exteriors of the planes in the game sadly remain the same. I guess the developer is now relying on the community to design content to expand the game. Speaking of, I had about a 75% success rate importing planes from X-Plane 9 using the included Plane Maker. And speaking of, the editing software do have some improvements for aspiring airplane designers: features describing the weight balance, landing gear angles, and other flight statistics are now included to produce more accurate models.

And speaking of (the flight model), X-Plane 10 has a lot of technical stuff that casual users won’t even notice, but plane designers will like as it will result in more authentic creations. What types of things, you say? Noticeable wing deflection, improved jet engines, an enhanced hydraulic system, and more detailed electrical systems, among others. So that’s nice.

The other major feature of X-Plane 10 is much improved air traffic control. Instead of using computerized voices and offering only occasional clearance and landing instructions, the system has undergone a complete overhaul. Now, you have to dial to the correct frequency (which you can look up by clicking on an airport on the local map), file your flight plan, and request clearance. Then, ground control will give you directions to the active runway (complete with arrows superimposed onto the ground) and hand you off to the tower when you approach the runway. The tower will then had you off to center, and they will give you vectors when landing at the airport of your choice. Sure, this is all stuff that was present in Microsoft’s Flight Simulator series eight years ago, but it’s a welcome addition here. The ATC is not without its problems: some of the gates and ramps used on the ground are bugged (showing programming code instead of calling them by name), occasionally the runways switch and the clearance controller forgets to approve your flight plan, and the air traffic controller is very impatient if you don’t descend immediately when instructed. Still, overall the system works.

The addition of AI planes with their own flight plans makes interacting with air traffic control even better, since you will routinely have to wait for other planes to land and take off. It goes a long way towards making X-Plane 10 more authentic, even with only a handful of other planes in the air. The AI planes undergo the same physics calculations as your plane does, handled on different processors. I don’t know if that’s really necessary, but it does mean that they will be subject to the same windy conditions you are when appropriate. The AI planes can be bad at holding altitude or staying on course, and they will be subject to constant reminders from the air traffic controllers, spamming the radio frequencies and becoming annoying to listen to rather quickly.

IN CLOSING
X-Plane 10 has two big features: improved scenery and air traffic control with AI planes. The use of 3-D buildings, accurate roads, and detailed clouds offers a definite visual improvement over X-Plane 9. Despite that, the planes remain untouched, and hopefully new designs using the improved editing tools will be uploaded shortly by the extensive community. Performance can always be better and more consistent; most flight simulators significantly push hardware, and X-Plane 10 is no exception. The enhanced air traffic control makes for a more genuine experience, requiring you to manually dial in to the correct frequencies. The addition of AI planes also makes for a more interesting game, as you must wait for and fly past computer-controlled aircraft. There are some issues with the AI planes (constantly being corrected by the air traffic controller, for one), but these are minor and should hopefully be eliminated in future patches. Is X-Plane 10 a better product? Certainly. Is it $80 better? Not for most users. While dedicated virtual pilots can justify investing $80 into a new version every three and a half years, the improvements are really not that significant for casual users. X-Plane 10 isn’t the most novice-friendly flight simulation, lacking explicit tutorials and in-game flight planning instructions, but it is the most flexible. While new scenery and ATC alone might not validate an $80 investment, the product as a whole is still my preferred choice for virtual piloting due to its flight model and overall feature set.

Time of Fury Review

2012-01-05T14:50:00.001-05:00

Time of Fury, developed by Wastelands Interactive and published by Slitherine and Matrix Games.
The Good: Streamlined approach better for novices, interesting events, can control multiple countries of your choosing, some alternative scenarios, central play by e-mail server
The Not So Good: Excruciating slow pace with long turn resolutions, tedious unit movement and combat, inefficient interface, oversimplified diplomatic and research options
What say you? This World War II turn-based grand strategy game is simplified, sluggish, and sometimes unwieldy: 5/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
World War II, it seems, is still hot property. While the first person shooter has turned its attention towards Modern Battlefield Warfare, strategy games still cling to the 70-year-old global conflict. Whether it is familiarity, or the fact that there simply hasn’t been an interesting-enough war since then, World War II is here to stay, at least until World War III. Whereas some strategy games lets you control individual units in small battles, the grand strategy featured in Time of Fury focuses on the larger picture: guiding your country towards ultimate victory. By maneuvering units, researching technologies, and conducting diplomacy, each nation hopes to be on top at the end. Does Time of Fury stand out in the grand strategy class?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Time of Fury features one of the better looking maps for a grand strategy game. The hex tiles are nicely varied in appearance, with forested locations blending well into the rest of the landscape. Even the more barren tiles are still textured, instead of being painted with a single color. Although you can tell the map is hex-based (especially around the coast), it's not as obvious as in some other hex-based titles that consist of flat edges and single painted-on icons for terrain. The unit sprites also look good; although they are not in 3-D, they are easily identified based on appearance. There are subtle differences between divisions and corps and units of different experience levels. There are no combat animations, however, as defeated units simply disappear, which is a bit disappointing. The interface isn't the slickest thing on the market (icons seem to be haphazardly placed along the side and top of the screen, sometimes overlapping), but it gives instant access to all of the pertinent game screens. Finding units is a bit tough: you are given a large list of all your military units, which is nice but basically unusable; I'd like to have a “next unit” button to cycle as well. Also, most of the screen displays unnecessarily obscure the game map, especially because most of them have a lot of empty space that could have reduced the size of the windowed overlay. Still, Time of Fury keeps most information only one click away. The sound design is pretty basic stuff: some generic battle effects and orchestral background music to accompany your domination of Europe. Overall, Time of Fury gives an above average presentation for the genre.

ET AL.
The grand campaign of Time of Fury starts at the onset of World War II, when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. The game is turn-based, featuring week-long turns that are resolved one country at a time. Victory points are earned for holding strategic cities, and the game ends when time runs out or only one alliance is left standing. Not only does Time of Fury feature a historical grand campaign, but a number of variants and smaller (but still huge, 300-turn adventures) scenarios are available. For example, one setup places Germany's forces next to France instead of Poland, or you can join the action later in the war in 1940, 1942, 1944, or during Operation Barbarossa, with a choice of placing Germany's plan in northern or southern Russia. There are also two small scenarios that just concern the invasion of Poland or Operation Overlord in Normandy. All of the campaigns are inherently unbalanced: the German units are much more powerful at the start of each front (thanks to extreme bonuses in efficiency), so the strategy for the Allies and the Comintern is the same: delay. While it might not be historically accurate, I think a more evenly-matched game would be more interesting (and certainly more fair online). What is interesting, however, is the ability to control one or several of the thirty nations in the game. This means you can control, say, Finland and Sweden, or Bulgaria, Serbia, and Hungary, giving you more to do as minor nations helping the major powers. While Time of Fury is fairly basic in terms of mechanics, the tutorials only offer a very brief glimpse into the game and could have been more comprehensive. Multiplayer uses the same system as Battlefield Academy: play by e-mail hosted on a central server. It works quite well for a turn-based game such as Time of Fury, and makes it so that the players don't have to worry about e-mails saved turn files, as it's all handled internally. Overall, Time of Fury offers generally well-rounded features for a grand strategy game.

Taking place at such a large scale, Time of Fury features only divisions and corps of units, divided into infantry, motorized, and armored types. Air fighters, strategic bombers, and tactical bombers, along with a host of naval craft (carriers, battleships, cruisers, subs, transports, and landing craft) are also included. Even with things kept at this level, you still have a lot of units to deal with spread out over a large area. Each unit is rated in overall strength, derived from experience and efficiency. A commander can be placed in charge of important corps, although their affect is very minimal and only make a difference in really close battles. Production points earned by holding cities are used to purchase new units (deployed at any friendly city after a lengthy construction time), repair existing units, or upgrade the type (from basic infantry to a motorized division, for example) or level (increasing the strength) of a unit. While Time of Fury does not allow you to customize or mix unit types (you cannot stack units, either), the simplified approach makes it easier to get a handle on your army's capabilities.

Time of Fury features fog of war, preventing you from scouting units beyond a couple of hexes from your borders. You might see gigantic question marks marching around the map, but you won't know what they are until an attack is made. Weather and supply can also affect your troops. Supply isn't anything to normally worry about: just keep an open path from each unit to a city and things will hum along nicely. Things are more complicated for nations that rely on goods from overseas (namely Great Britain), as convoys can be raided by naval units. The three alliances will be vying for additional international friends, and the crux of the diplomatic game is spending points persuading nations to join your cause. This, sadly, is the limit of diplomacy in Time of Fury: you can delay or hasten your own entry into an alliance, and the same for other countries, but that's about it. Research is equally limited: you can invest production points to accelerate research in a specific area (infantry, tanks, aircraft, subs, navy, and nuclear), but gaining levels to unlock better units is all automatic and ultimately not that interesting. Countering these limited features are events, which are great. Usually every turn, one or several decisions will happen, and you must decide on a choice. The nice thing is that most choices have tradeoffs (more defenses in exchange for less production points, for example), so events aren't always “you get an extra unit”-type outcomes. This is a solid and enjoyable part of the game.

Because of the limited nature of the diplomacy and technology, most of your time in Time of Fury is spent moving units and ordering new ones. Each unit has a number of action points that can be spent on movement and attacks; units can only attack after moving if they traverse a short distance. The copious amounts of rail lines can be used to move units instantly to any other rail-connected location, limited by the number of transport points available. Transport is also available over the ocean, but it takes an extra turn to load and unload units. In land combat, units in surrounding hexes can engage a single foe, and since you need an overwhelming force for a successful attack (at least 5:1 odds), you have to surround enemy units on multiple sides to execute a successful attack. This means you have to plan out your attacks, even if you have a vastly superior force. Sea battles are not automated, allowing you to move, attack, or withdraw with any of the ships in your fleet on a set of ocean hexes. The AI in Time of Fury is good at picking appropriate places to attack and going after important cities, using the game rules to go after victory. I did not observe any questionable behavior during my time in Europe.

IN CLOSING
Time of Fury tries to take a somewhat more simplified approach to the grand strategy game and the result is a mixed bag. The huge game map features large-scale division- and corps-sized units, but you still have a lot to keep track of in larger countries. Adding in air and naval combat and things get even more complex. This is simply the nature of the beast, as a game at this scale must feature lots of units to recreate the historical battle lines. It's not on the same mammoth scale as, say, War in the East, but it is still a lot to absorb and the interface does no favors in locating units in peril. The units themselves are rated in strength, experience, and efficiency, and production points earned from key cities can be used to order new units, call in reinforcements, or upgrade existing ones. Success in combat needs almost overwhelming (5:1) odds, reducing the effectiveness of non-Axis nations until the German war machine simply gets ground down by constant battles and marching. Turns take a while to resolve, several minutes per in-game week, as the AI attacks vulnerable flanks of your army with decent efficiency. Diplomatic and research options are quite underwhelming, exchanging depth for simple alliance-based coercion and money-based technology acceleration. Time of Fury gives you a number of starting dates and alternative setups for the war, from Germany invading France first to a more northerly attack on Russia. Interestingly, you can choose more than one nation to command (even from opposing alliances), allowing you to control several minor nations and influence the war in more subtle ways without being completely bored. Events are, I think, the most intriguing part of Time of Fury, giving you important decisions with no “right” choice, so the game can develop ahistorically if you so choose. While the tutorials are too brief, play by e-mail is hosted on a central server to eliminate any manual file swapping, a continuation of the brilliant feature seen in other Slitherine titles. While Time of Fury is approachable, the user-friendly nature of the game is offset by the large scale, slow pace, and some oversimplified features.

Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon Review

2011-12-29T09:42:00.000-05:00

Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon, developed by Vicious Cycle and published by D3Publisher.
The Good: Constant action, a number of different weapons, online cooperative play
The Not So Good: Extremely repetitive, limited enemy variety, linear level design, no online match browser, can't save progress mid-mission
What say you? This cooperative shoot-em-up is limited by its lack of variety: 5/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Bugs are gross. In fact, there is an entire industry dedicated to their extermination (I think they are called…“bug squashing guys”). Thankfully, most bugs are small, so their level of annoyance is relatively minimal. However, as evidenced in the scientific documentary Starship Troopers, large bugs could be a problem, especially if they were to invade our home planet (Earth). The Earth Defense Force has repelled the alien invasion in Japan and on consoles for quite some time, but now it’s time for Insect Armageddon and we PC gamers must join the fight.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon has a decidedly bland presentation that fits the budget-level price of the game. It starts with the level design, which places the protagonists in an urban location of repeated buildings with weak, monochromatic textures. The enemies are a mixed bag: while the designs and models are quite nice, instead of exploding in a gory act of violence, enemies simply fade out when killed. The weapons are pretty generic, with small tracer lines and some explosions when appropriate. Subtle damage (other than entire buildings collapsing) is shown on-screen when enemies are shot, giving few visual clues to indicate when you are landing shots. Overall, I was unimpressed with the graphics Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon has to offer. The sound design is also pretty ho-hum, with (purposely?) exaggerated voice acting and generic weapon sounds. Taken as a whole, Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon delivers nothing visually beyond its budget price.

ET AL.
The bugs are coming, and it’s up to the Earth Defense Force to stop the Insect Armageddon. A campaign of fifteen levels must be unlocked in order, protecting a new section of town from the insect threat. The levels are checkpoint-based and all missions follow the same general trend: walk to the next waypoint, kill everything, walk to the next waypoint, kill everything, lather, rinse, repeat. The linear presentation requires you to fully complete each section before progressing, leaving you no room for innovation or advanced tactics (or enemy avoidance, for that matter). Some of the levels use the same locations more than once, sending you around in circles on the urban streets. Each mission lasts about twice as long as it should (and you can't save your progress at any time), usually throwing a large number of enemies at you near the end in several waves to slow the pace of the game down considerably. Typically, there will be an enemy spawner (like an ant hive or ship carrier) with high health that you'll need to destroy (only when opened, of course) while contending with the enemies it creates; this can take a while. A higher difficulty setting adds health to the enemies, making for a more challenging mission. If more direct action is desired, you can play a survival mode in four locations, where the bugs won’t stop until everyone is cold and dead. However, the survival mode doesn't appear to scale according to how many people are playing, making the mode a tough go in single player. Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon is meant to be played online with the help of other human-like creatures, and you can easily host a match if desired. However, finding other games is difficult: the matchmaking provides no way to see a list of joinable matches, and since you usually will choose a specific unlocked level to play, there may or may not be other people playing that particular chapter. Of course, you can choose to play “any” level, but then you might be stuck playing an earlier mission you’ve already beaten. A simple list of servers would go a long way towards making the online games easier to join.

Approaching a ten-foot-tall spider with only your bare hands would be a tricky proposition, so it’s a good thing Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon gives you a variety of weapons to assist in disposing of those pesky bugs. Assault rifles, rocket launchers, missile launchers, grenade launchers, shotguns, and sniper rifles are all included, separated into tiers that are unlocked with experience and cash earned during the campaign based on your score. While there are certainly a lot of guns included in the game, most of the differences are very minor, adding increased damage, fire rate, or ammunition capacities. In addition to the weapons choices, you can also pick a class of soldier: the regular trooper, the sniper-and-turret-based tactical, the scout-like jetpack, or the heavy battle. Each class can carry most weapons, allowing you to more fully customize your role on the battlefield. However, you can only equip two weapons at a time, so choices must be made carefully. Both of your weapons have unlimited ammunition, which is good considering you can only carry two into battle. You'll also gain access to the occasional fixed turret, tank, or mech to add some firepower to the defense.

Not surprisingly, Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon features insects as your enemies. These include ants, ticks, and spiders, which make up a majority of the antagonists. You will also encounter metallic gunships frequently, a strange choice when a gigantic mosquito or dragonfly would have made a lot more sense given the setting (there are wasps, but they are more rare). Bosses include really large bugs and robots, but the tactics remain the same: point and shoot. The number of enemies you encounter simultaneously aren’t too overwhelming (especially when compared to Serious Sam 3), but I did get inundated on a number of occasions. There are plenty of health packs to pick up, dropped by enemy units, and a fallen soldier can be revived to full health by an ally, so the level is never over until every partner dies. I was disappointed with the lack of enemy variety: essentially every insect just runs straight towards you (though the robotic adversaries have distinctive, slightly more advanced patterns), and considering the sheer number of insect species there are, I was expecting a more diverse selection of foes. The friendly AI is better than I expected: other soldiers keep pace with you and actively engage enemies, even if there is a pesky solid building in the way. I never felt like the AI soldiers were a detriment to the team, and I rarely had to rely solely on my skills to complete missions.

IN CLOSING
Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon delivers similar action-packed gameplay against overwhelming odds to titles such as Left 4 Dead 2 and Serious Sam 3, but with more restrictions. First off, the repetitive and linear combat becomes monotonous quickly, as the game provides only a small handful of enemies (ants, spiders, and the airships) with the occasional boss around similar urban locations. The game purports hundreds of different weapons, but more advanced items within the same category (rifles, rocket launchers) simply provide better damage or a faster firing rate instead of offering more complex strategic choices. Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon is intended to be played cooperatively online, but without a server browser, finding people to play against is hit-or-miss. The somewhat brief campaign and never-ending survival mode present a lot of bugs to shoot, but lack the choices and diversity necessary for extended long-term enjoyment.

SkyDrift Review

2011-12-25T09:28:00.000-05:00

SkyDrift, developed and published by Digital Reality.
The Good: Challenging track layouts, stunts earn engine boost, slightly stackable weapons, looks nice, good AI pilots, inexpensive
The Not So Good: Insignificant penalty for dying, annoying flight correction for going “off track”, lacks a server browser
What say you? This airborne combat racing game delivers solid action with tricky circuits: 6/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Now that the world’s major racing series have drawn to a close for this year, it’s time to reflect on the action. Namely, the sheer boredom of watching cars go around and around and around and around and FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY WOULD SOMETHING PLEASE HAPPEN. If only those metal beasts were equipped with some kind of weapon to dispose of their rivals in a quick, overly violent manner. Like a flaming car from a Jason Statham movie, combat racing titles have filled the niche for those looking for more action-oriented track-based mayhem. Extending the hostility into the atmosphere is SkyDrift, where planes are now equipped with rockets and machine guns. Well, I guess they are in real life, but now they are racing while shooting each other. It’s win-win!

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
I was fairly impressed with the graphics in SkyDrift, especially for a game offered at a low price point. The game is highlighted by the excellent detailed terrain, with easily identifiable race tracks (the lava one, the tanker one, et cetera) and high-resolution textures adorning the cliffs as you speed past. It all looks great on a large PC display, and I was hard-pressed to find an area where corners were cut with the level design. The plane models are nicely detailed as well, although the damage is underwhelming (a trail of smoke followed by an explosion). Some of the weapon effects are well done (the shockwave comes to mind), rounding out a solid graphical presentation. As for the sound design, the effects are appropriate and the bombastic music fits the over-the-top nature of the game. The voice acting shows the game's non-English roots (the narrator exclaims “you are the first!” instead of “you are in first!”), however. Still, SkyDrift far exceeds its $10 price tag in terms of graphics.

ET AL.
The airplane racing of SkyDrift takes place in a seven-stage (plus an informative tutorial) campaign, where you must place in the top three of most events to unlock the next stage. The standard race (“power”) scatters weapon pickups across the track layouts, allowing you to take out enemy planes. “Speed” races involve no weapons, but offer rings you should fly through to drastically increase your speed. Finally, a “survivor” mode eliminates the last place driver every thirty seconds. The difficulty can be adjusted at any time before a race; you don’t need to complete the entire campaign on “hard,” for example. The difficulty seems to gradually increase with each unlocked stage (even on the same level), with the AI drivers crashing less and using their weapons more.

SkyDrift only has six tracks to race on (though each is finely crafted), though I suspect more is on the way in the form of DLC. While you race, things collapse (rockslides, buildings), seemingly at random, that can kill you, so keep an eye out. Despite being a flying game, you can fly outside the track. Going too high will pull your plane back towards the ground, sometimes into an object (like the ground), killing you in the process. The bigger problem is that there is no indication of where the “roof” of each track is, so it's complete guesswork as to whether the next obstacle can be flown over or if the game will throw you into the roof without warning. It’s not all about single player in SkyDrift, as online competition is available. You can choose between starting a quick match (recommended because of the seemingly low player counts) or more customized options. SkyDrift does not have a server browser so you can pick and choose which game to play, though, so you’ll have to resort to fate unless you host a match yourself.

There are eight planes in SkyDrift that vary according to top speed, boost potential, acceleration, maneuvering, and armor. The aircraft are nicely balanced, as each option has drawbacks to counter each advantage. Controls are slightly more advanced than a typical arcade flight game: in addition to the typical 2-D maneuvering (up, down, left, right), you can also use the arrow keys (or the right trigger on a gaming pad) to bank the plane dramatically and cut severe corners. Turning is slower than I had expected, requiring more foresight in navigating the game’s tricky layouts, so a coordinated use of the speed controls and both direction inputs is needed.

Being a combat racing game, there are six weapons that can be picked up on the racetrack. These include a machine gun cannon (which auto-aims slightly if an enemy plane is in your reticule), missiles, mines, and a proximity shockwave. You can also pick up shields and repair kits to lessen enemy attacks. You can only carry two weapons at a time, so you must choose which items are best for the current race situation. You can stack items once to gain extra power (like picking up another machine gun to add more ammunition), which increases the tactical decisions even further. However, there is not a significant enough penalty for being killed: you respawn a fraction of a second later in the exact same spot, making kills a mere annoyance rather than a race-changing event. This, of course, makes it easier for the back of the pack to challenge up front, which leads to more exciting, closer racing. Still, carefully landing a rocket attack should come with more reward.

Engine boost (for increased acceleration and top speed) can be earned through a variety of methods: flying low or near obstacles, drafting behind other plants, passing opponents, killing your rivals, or using items effectively. This gives an advantage to those who are more skilled pilots and allow for the pack to catch up to the leader, without feeling overpowered. Unlike, say, Split/Second, this is not a racing game where you can mash the gas the entire race, as you must content with the track layouts strewn with obstacles and those pesky AI drivers. Speaking of, the AI drivers are quite good, never feeling robotic. They utilize varied paths through each track and make the occasional mistake.

IN CLOSING
For only $10, SkyDrift is a capable arcade combat flight simulation. The planes are sluggish (by design, I think), requiring pilots to adjust their speed before navigating through the game's tricky layouts, full of obstacles and changes in elevation designed to cause you to crash repeatedly. In addition to the challenging track designs, you'll have to worry about other pilots that will be shooting missiles, bullets, and shockwaves in your general direction. You can only carry two weapons at a time, but a single item can be upgraded, giving you some tactical decisions to make while in the air: which weapons shall I take? Increasing the interest is the use of stunts to provide boost: flying in dangerous locations (close to the ground, near enemy pilots) and blowing people up will let you move more quickly towards the front. The combination of stunt-based boosting and the various weapons give players not in the lead a chance for the front, while not feeling too unfair or imbalanced. The penalty for death is negligible, as you are almost instantly respawned with weapons intact after being destroyed; while this does get you in to the action faster, I'd like there to be some more meaningful consequence for getting blown up. The AI pilots certainly hold their own, flying plausibly, mixing it up, and being the nuisance they should be. The campaign is a bit repetitive, offering races in three modes over the same six tracks, and multiplayer doesn't allow you to browse prospective games, although quick matchmaking is offered. Finally, the graphics are impressive with varied, detailed environments. The added dimension of flight, and a solid overall package, makes SkyDrift an intriguing choice for fans of combat racing games.

Tigers Unleashed Review

2011-12-20T07:24:00.000-05:00

Tigers Unleashed, developed by Scott Hamilton and Jeff Lapkoff and published by HPS Simulations.
The Good: Authentic enemy targeting with complex calculations of weapon effects, realistic communication and command structure, detailed military units, varied difficulty levels can simplify most actions, powerful and easy-to-use quick mission and map builders, competent tactical AI, group formation movement, supports PBEM
The Not So Good: Immediate engagement reduces tactical flexibility, lengthy turn resolution during large battles, level of automation leaves little to do, archaic graphics
What say you? An extreme attention to realistic detail makes this turn-based World War II wargame a notable simulation but less an actual game: 5/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
You can understand why I was initially hesitant to review this game, considering the subject matter: who wants to be mauled by large cats? But then I found out that the “Tigers” being “Unleashed” are actually German tanks…although that might actually be more frightening, as Germans can’t be tamed as easily with a piece of raw steak as their feline counterparts (sausage, maybe). This continuation of the Tactical Studies Series, first encountered in Point of Attack, takes its realistic take on modern combat back to the Eastern Front of World War II, a time of Germans, Russians, and lots of snow. Tigers Unleashed strives for the ultimate level of detail, from unit attributes to communication to weapons. Does this realism come at a cumbersome price?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
The graphics of Tigers Unleashed are decidedly minimal, utilizing simple 2-D NATO icons lain on top of 2-D tile-based map graphics. It’s pretty underwhelming stuff, which is as expected in a game that favors under-the-hood realism over authentic graphics. The most advanced effect in the game is dust, which is still a 2-D sprite superimposed on top of the terrain tile. The game does use some historical photographs for unit descriptions, but the majority of Tigers Unleashed is driven by simple displays. More important for any strategy game is the interface, and the one featured in Tigers Unleashed is generally decent enough. The game is driven by menus, where you can access options regarding unit movement, targeting, air missions, assigning maneuver groups, altering display options, and accessing reports. Most of these options can also be accessed by right-clicking on any unit, giving terrain information, detailed unit attributes, and the ability to give orders, create detatchments, target enemies, and blow up bridges. Your staff officers also give detailed information regarding both friendly and enemy units, including current orders, unit strength, morale, ammunition levels, and objectives. The order of battle is always displayed along the right side of the screen for easy access as well. My main complaint about the interface is that it’s hard to quickly find ranges to enemy units so you can tweak your unit combat settings to prevent the AI from firing from long distances; you can use the detailed line of sight tool, but it involves more steps than I’d like to see. Like the graphics, the sound is very minimal: there are some weapon-specific effects while combat is being calculated, but no music to put you in the mood for military domination. Still, I found Tigers Unleashed to be easy enough to navigate once you learn where everything is placed.

ET AL.
Tigers Unleashed is a turn-based (with minute-long turns) tactical wargame that covers the Eastern Front of World War II, as the Germans marched towards Moscow. The first tip is to install the game to the default directory; not doing so (as I quickly learned) brings all sorts of issues since files are not where the game thinks they should be. While Tigers Unleashed does not feature any campaigns, there are thirty-five scenarios of varying sizes (company to division) and complexities that cover some highlights of the conflict. Some of the smaller battles feature some really bland maps, and the scenario design leaves a lot to be desired: you usually start out so close to the enemy that some units end up dying on the first turn before you can do anything about it. While I appreciate not having to wait three or four (or more) turns to encounter the enemy, it is annoying to lose a number of your units through no fault of your own. The scenario designers can also include pre-scripted events to surprise human tacticians.

Tigers Unleashed features four difficulty levels that change the amount of minutiae the AI controls; this serves as a good way to ease into the game, as you can allow the AI to specify artillery ammunition, for example. The game also has a series of very simple tutorials, where you read what to do in the scenario briefing and then attempt to execute, with no additional feedback. It’s a small step up from reading along in a manual. Tigers Unleashed does feature play by e-mail multiplayer, so some of the more balanced scenarios can be enjoyed with friends. A notable feature is the mission builder, a comprehensive tool that allows you to quickly make full battles in a matter of minutes. Depending on the level of human interaction chosen (the computer can adjust most of the options automatically if you’d like), each scenario can have the weather conditions, fog of war, number of civilians, army attributes, and victory conditions customized. The computer can also pick the units involved (you can choose the number and size, such as three battalions), although it does a poor job naming them, which leads to confusion later on. Objectives, units, and obstacles are then placed on the map. Speaking of, the quick map builder is equally impressive, using pre-designed sets of terrain you can place next to each to make a complete map. The mission options should keep the replay value of Tigers Unleashed high.

Tigers Unleashed features units typical for the theatre, organized into their seemingly historically accurate hierarchies. Each individual unit is rated in many different areas: strength, ammunition, light emission discipline, radio discipline, training level, camouflage level, morale, information processing time, shoot and scoot ability, and the amount of ammunition that’s likely to be duds. Over the course of the battle, a single unit may experience changes in morale, fatigue, suppression, damage, and speed, all of which affect a unit’s capabilities during warfare. To ease in handling large numbers of units, a single movement order may be issued to a leader unit, which will then move its subordinate units in formation towards the waypoint. This is quite handy and is much better than having to move individual units around one at a time. To simplify things even further, units in the same hex may be stacked at the beginning of the scenario, acting as a single attacking force for the duration of the battle. Specialized units can also load (or unload) other units, or undertake engineering operations like placing mines, blowing up bridges, or constructing trenches.

Tigers Unleashed features a realistic communications system that models how long messages take to propagate through the army chain of command. As the task force commander, you might be receiving out of date or completely incorrect information on both enemy and friendly units, depending on what fog of war level you have chosen. Situation reports, move orders, and artillery requests must all be sent in real-time as each turn is processed. Even the transmission rates are authentic: for example, a 2,000-bit message will take twenty seconds to send by radio, adding to the delay time. The result is more calculated outcomes, as opposed to using an arbitrary fixed number for message delays.

Targeting enemy units is meant to be handled by your AI subordinate officers, but you can also manually choose important targets if you don’t trust the computer. The most direct form of targeting is called “direct fire” (surprise!), where parameters including rate of fire and ammunition (complete with kill, damage, and suppression probabilities) can be chosen. You can also right-click any enemy unit and the game will list the best units you can engage with. Again, the units will automatically engage enemy units as long as they fall within their maximum range of engagement, even if their chance of success is low; you’ll need to go in and tweak range values manually to get the most out of your assets. Artillery units can fire specific ammunition at set times towards a specific unit or over an area, even shifting their barrage over time (to continually bombard a moving tank column, for example). Before the scenario begins, target reference points can be designated to improve artillery accuracy as well. Air support is done in the same fashion: choosing a plane squadron and a target to hit, and the specific flight path is automatically calculated. Overall, I found targeting to be fairly intuitive, although those looking for more direct control over their units will feel disconnected as your tanks and infantry open fire automatically when a target presents itself. Unless you go in and manually change weapon engagement ranges and unit behavior, it can feel like Tigers Unleashed is playing itself. Of course, I'm sure that's what it's like for commanders in the field, watching their subordinate leaders poorly execute their orders.

A lot of work goes into determining whether or not an attack is successful. All rounds, whether they are kinetic, high explosive, anti-personnel, incendiary, or otherwise, undergo intense computations involving projectile flight path, air drag, deformation, blast effects like cratering, range, cloud cover, sun shadow effects, armor angles, and atmospheric radiation attenuation. With all of this fidelity, turns can take several minutes to resolve (the game only uses one processing core, slowing down the process), but the results are seemingly ultra-realistic. Of course, despite all of these fancy calculations, it still boils down to a percentage chance of success and things blowing up, just like all strategy games. But it’s the thought that counts.

Coupled with the weapons modeling is fog of war, which goes hand-in-hand with the communications system outlined earlier. Fog of war can vary in opacity, from “I see everyone all the time” to “are my units really located there?” Enemy units can be sighted using visual clues, noise, light, or radar, and increasingly accurate information is gained over time concerning their quantity, model, facing, and movement. The terrain can also affect spotting enemy units, with line of sight, dust, and the weather affecting your ability to see the enemy. If the opposition does sneak up on you and tries to blow up your tanks, reaction orders can be specified, which are automated orders for movement, targeting, and rate of fire when being shot at. The complex fog of war system modeled in Tigers Unleashed really makes scouting important, which makes the constricted scenario design even more troublesome.

What happens when units are attacked? They panic and die (in my case), according to their morale ratings and the lethality of the incoming rounds. The detailed text reports of each turn’s action clues you in to the robust calculations that were done to blow up half of your units on the first turn before you move anybody. The AI provides a capable foe, generally conservative as it rather stay put while racking up the kills: the computer is quite adept at picking out vulnerable targets. On the more strategic side, the AI likes to use the more direct path towards an objective, which can make defense a bit easier, but since where they start can be somewhat unpredictable (especially in generated scenarios), all possibilities must be covered.

IN CLOSING
Despite the inherent complexity, I actually found Tigers Unleashed not to be that difficult to learn, because you can place some (or most) of the more minute details (armor type, artillery rate of fire) under the control of the subordinate AI officers, subject to engagement values you specify in the game. Of course, those who want more direct control can increase the expert level of the simulation and tweak values as they see fit. And tweak you can, with options available to govern the range at which different types of enemies are engaged for all of your units and the behavior units will (hopefully) exhibit when under attack. Comprehensive stats are also given, from radio discipline to fatigue to the likelihood that rounds will be duds. Movement is straightforward enough, and subordinate units can be ordered to travel in formation with their leader, which makes controlling large numbers easier. Of course, you’ll have to contend with the realistic communication delays and detailed fog of war while on the battlefield. Tigers Unleashed also uses some impressively complex calculations for damage, using the flight path, atmospheric drag, and armor angles to determine how successful a barrage will be. Of course, these complex battle calculations mean minutes-long turn resolutions, so that’s the price you pay for ultimate simulated realism. Also, it can feel at times like the game is too automated; the real task force commander does not tell individual tanks whom to shoot, so while handing off these details to the AI is accurate, it's not necessarily fun. The scenario designs, though, place units way too close to the enemy initially, giving you little room to maneuver at the start before things start getting destroyed. In general, the tactical AI handles things well, engaging appropriate enemies, although it would rather sit and shoot than get closer and engage more accurately (kills seem to happen at range anyway, at least to me). The interface is good enough albeit outdated, and the mission and map builders make it very, very easy to expand the game’s content. Overall, fans of detail in authentic tactical games might enjoy what Tigers Unleashed has to offer, but the title is more of an exercise in simulation than an engrossing wargame.

Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Leipzig Review

2011-12-15T15:02:00.000-05:00

Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Leipzig, developed and published by John Tiller Software.
The Good: Many scenarios of various sizes, numerous optional game rules, AI can finish tedious turns for you, branching campaign, scenario and map editors, play by e-mail
The Not So Good: Slow pace with many units to move individually, lacks in-game tutorials, ugly useless 3-D graphics
What say you? This historical turn-based wargame should appeal to fans of the genre: 6/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
The French weren’t always the butt of international jokes about surrender. Just ask Europe during the early 1800’s, when Napoleon Bonaparte conquered pretty much the entire continent with an outnumbered army. The battles that took place during this tumultuous time is fertile ground for strategy gaming, as exemplified by Waterloo, Crown of Glory, Napoleon's Campaigns, and Napoleon's Ambition. Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Leipzig specifically concerns Napoleon’s assault on Germany and the allied forces he encountered there. How will this turn-based wargame stack up?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Leipzig, as you might expect from a hardcore wargame, features some very archaic graphics. Save yourself from potential blindness by never enabling the 3-D mode, as it is simply ugly to look at. Two-dimensional sprites and repeated textures and buildings are very outdated and simply look terrible. Not only is it downright hideous, but it’s also much less useful than the more simplified 2-D icons: it’s hard to simply tell unit type because they look so bad. I simply played the entire game using the 2-D mode and was just fine with that. This makes the terrain easier to deal with as well, and you aren’t missing any special effects, as the 3-D mode only features some token weapon fire with few animations. Still, I don’t think many gamers who enjoy wargames care that much about the graphics, but the interface is important.

The interface of Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Leipzig is driven by menus (remember those?) and the top toolbar of icons. Menus give access to all of the game’s commands: turning units, formations, deploying skirmishers, resolving melee attacks, viewing the reinforcement schedule, checking objectives, and evaluating supply. You can also display some alternative data, like objective locations, terrain, command range, and fatigued units, adjust the AI, or enable features for multiplayer. It is initially confusing that most of the options are toggled (like switching formations and rotating units) instead of picking a specific item from a list. The top toolbar gives you the same options that are quicker to access once you learn where they are located. In general, you click to select a hex, double-click to select units in a hex (that took some getting used to), and right-click to move and attack. You have to manually toggle between movement and attack; it seems counterintuitive that the game can’t figure out what you want to do, especially since you can only move one hex at a time, so clicking any further than that would be an attack anyway. Overall, it’s not the most streamlined approach, as you have to hunt down commands to change facing or formations or find superior units instead of having all of that information along the bottom of the screen, but you can learn and adapt.

The sound design is very minimal: some small effects and no music to speak of. That’s all I have to say about that.

ET AL.
In the fall of 1813, Napoleon said (this is a direct quote), “Germany? Let’s blow it the hell up.” The Battle of Leipzig, if Wikipedia is to be believed, pitted the French Army against Russia, Austria, Prussia, Sweden, and Justin Bieber. Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Leipzig features five campaigns that break up the battles into sizable bites. Interestingly, the campaigns are not simple linear collections of scenarios: instead, you get to make decisions regarding where to attack next, and random events determine the armies involved and where the fighting will take place. This is far more appealing than simply moving to the next battle in a gigantic list. You can also fight in standalone scenarios of your choosing. The official website purports “over four hundred scenarios,” which sounds really impressive, but in reality it’s sixty scenarios with different variations (head-to-head versus AI, ten versus fifteen minute turns, cavalry regiments). Now, sixty scenarios will still keep you busy for quite a while and using historically accurate orders of battle is impressive, but it’s nowhere near what was advertised. The battles surround the cities of Dennewitz, Dresden, Katzbach, Kulm, and Leipzig, featuring different lengths (from eight to five hundred (!) turns) and sizes (brigades to entire armies). Each battle can be customized with optional rules, such as limited routs, melee terrain modifiers, partial retreats, flank morale modifier, and multiple melee attacks. These alternatives let you customize the game as you wish, which is always preferred over having no choice whatsoever. Not only can you play against the AI, but direct play over the Internet, play by e-mail, and hot seat games are available. Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Leipzig has a tutorial, sort of: you read along in a PDF file while executing moves in a beginner scenario. While this is better than giving no guidance, I would rather have a more directed in-game experience. Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Leipzig does come with an assortment of planning documents, providing maps of the region, offering strategies for each scenario, and documenting weapon ranges and terrain effects. You can also build your own scenarios using the scenario and campaign editors, so that should extend the life of the title past the initial sixty scenarios.

The armies of the early 1800’s primarily featured infantry, cavalry, and artillery units engaged in an epic contest of battlefield dominance. Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Leipzig also features the military leaders involved in these battles, in addition to more specific unit types like skirmishers, supply wagons, militia, Cossacks, pioneers, and dragoons. Each unit is rated according to quality, and fatigue and morale can affect their performance. Leaders are also rated based on their command and leadership abilities, so pitting your best units and commanders against the best the enemy has to offer is important for success. Units can be organized in a couple of formations (line, column, and square), each appropriate for different tactical situations. Artillery can also be limbered for movement to a better position, and cavalry units are mounted for the assault.

Depending on the scenario, Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Leipzig consists of ten or fifteen minute turns, and each unit can do a limited number of actions based on their available number of movement points. Because of the turn time scale, progress in Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Leipzig proceeds very, very slowly: typically, units can only move a couple of hexes per turn and make a single attack, which usually results in only a few enemy deaths. When units comprise of five hundred soldiers, it can take a large number of turns to resolve battles. Most battles take place on large maps as well, so it can take many tedious turns to advance your units towards the enemy. In addition, with large armies involved, it is very time consuming to move every unit one stack at a time. Unlike personal wargame favorite Command Ops: Battles from the Bulge, Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Leipzig doesn’t allow you to issue a single order to superior units and have the command filter down to the subordinates, so it’s up to you to move every single unit every single turn. Units in line formation can’t be stacked and attack, so even if you can save some time moving units by stacking them together, you’ll have to move them individually once you encounter the enemy. You’ll also have to initiate cavalry charges and melee attacks manually, by toggling the correct option in the game’s interface. Defensive fire, however, can be done automatically if you enable the option in the game rules.

Overall, I found the AI to have good command of the game rules and general strategies. The computer will attack vulnerable, isolated units, cutting them off from supply by encircling them. The AI also uses cavalry and artillery effectively, and uses terrain in an intelligent manner, moving efficiently by using roads and taking the high ground. One interesting feature is the ability to activate the AI at any time, letting the computer play the remainder of your turn. This is useful if you don’t want to spend the time moving all of the stragglers up to the front of the battle, which helps to counter a little bit of the tedious movement that Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Leipzig entails.

IN CLOSING
What makes Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Leipzig different from all the other historical wargames already on the market? Nothing, really, but it is a solid product honed from years of series development. The game gives you sixty scenarios (plus variants) to choose from, from small skirmishes to large-scale behemoths, satisfying those who like more intimate battles (me) or love to take hours to complete a single turn (the criminally insane). The units are detailed enough, with attributes to determine their effectiveness on the battlefield and combat results use fatigue, morale, and supply to determine a victor. The game’s slow pace means the appeal of Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Leipzig isn’t as broad, since you must individually move each unit on the map; stacking units for more efficient movement is only a temporary solution, as you must divide your troops when the battle lines are drawn. While the early 19th century combat focused on lines of musket-equipped soldiers, there is some variety with melee attacks, cavalry charges, and artillery bombardment. You can also enable some optional rules to customize the realism of the game engine, removing abstraction where you see fit. The AI seems capable enough, providing an intelligent foe to battle across the fields of Germany. Of course, you can opt for e-mail or hot seat competition as well. In addition, the campaign mode adds interesting player-directed choices of where to attack, giving you different battle scenarios each time you play. The interface has a bit of a learning curve and the graphics are decidedly outdated, however. Ultimately, the tedious movement of units in Napoleonic Battles: Campaign Leipzig will confine the title to niche status, but wargamers might find an appealing title.

Jurassic Park: The Game Review

2011-12-10T08:16:00.000-05:00

Jurassic Park: The Game, developed and published by Telltale Games.
The Good: Some nice dinosaurs
The Not So Good: Annoying quick time events, “puzzles” require an excessive amount of trial and error for specific solutions, dialogue choices never impact the story, slow pace, performance issues, checkpoint-only saves
What say you? A dull, tedious adaptation with repetitive, limited interaction coupled with a lack of choice: 2/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
I think we can all agree that dinosaurs are cool, and the best platform for them is the big screen, as seen in the blockbuster movie Carnosaur 3: Primal Species. Oh, and also some little independent film called Jurassic Park. There has been the occasional misguided attempt at a computer game based on the franchise, and now it's Telltale's turn at the helm, authors of the Back to the Future revival and the Sam & Max games. Attempting to bring their style to Isla Nublar, does Jurassic Park: The Game inject both action and adventure into an action-adventure?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Jurassic Park: The Game delivers a mixed bag of graphics. On the bright side, the dinosaurs are very detailed and animated quite well, coming to life in their tropical paradise. The humans are less effective: while the facial animations are done well, things get worse as you travel further down, ending with poor ground textures and blurry low-resolution backgrounds. Rain also looks poor, and stiff animations are noticeable in a number of the game's scenes. Still, it was a bit impressed at how much content there was: you get a five-hour movie, essentially (plus alternative dialogue), which obviously took a lot of time and energy to create. However, there are noticeable performance issues (at least for me): the game hangs during the most inopportune times, seemingly loading in the middle of a quick time event when you are supposed to be pressing buttons. I guess this is the trade-off for having essentially no loading times, but I'd rather stare at a title screen for ten seconds than suffer through a slideshow during the middle of an action scene. In addition, I had to change the screen resolution one choice at a time, accepting each new step on the way to the optimal choice. That wasted a good four minutes of my life watching my monitor reset through all of the available resolutions. It's a small thing to complain about in the end, but it speaks of the lack of polish Jurassic Park: The Game suffers from in some areas. The sound design is OK, I suppose, with decent enough voice acting (although the teenage daughter was terribly cast). The music was underwhelming: I guess Telltale couldn't get the rights to the full theme. While uneven, the presentation of Jurassic Park: The Game fits its $30 price tag.

ET AL.
Jurassic Park: The Game consists of four episodes (five to six hours) of around twelve chapters each, set up kind of like a DVD (for good reason, with the lack of meaningful interaction). As you progress through the linear story, you can earn medals based on how many times you screwed up the quick time events. You get a death count and (thankfully) restart the button pressing sequence quickly. The game progresses very slowly, and it's an odd combination of generally rapid quick time events and arduous scene hunting. Jurassic Park: The Game also has checkpoint-only saves, which are infrequent enough to annoy when you'd like to exit the game on your terms.

Jurassic Park: The Game consists of two main things: clicking that masquerades as puzzles and quick time events, which, I think it's safe to say, nobody thinks are fun anymore. Occasionally, scenes are presented that you must search for objects to click on. These areas of interest are clearly displayed with gigantic question marks and magnifying glasses, and it's simply a matter of clicking things in the “right” order, as determined by the developer. For example, clicking on that tree might not do anything, but clicking on the jeep first and then the tree will move on to the next scene. Another example: I know where that shaving cream can is from the movie. Can I click on the dirt? Of course not. I have to aim the jeep lights around and investigate various places where I know the can is not located, then find a soda can in the back of the jeep to trigger the discover scene. Talk about intuitive! While a few of the puzzle sequences make sense, most are illogical in their static design. I wasted a significant amount of time just trying to figure out the prerequisites to advance the scene.

Quick time events! Unfortunately, they are a big part PRESS LEFT NOW of the Jurassic Park: The Game experience, as the game relies heavily on sequences where PRESS UP AND DOWN you have to press specific keys at seemingly random times. Some cutscenes come with quick time events, and some do not, so you always PRESS LEFT AND LEFT AND RIGHT have to keep one hand on the arrow keys just in case. They also seem to appear at the weirdest times, interrupting the PRESS UP UP UP UP flow of the story. There is really no skill involved in the game, and if you die by missing a combination, the same sequence will appear the next time, so rote memorization can be the key to PRESS UP AND DOWN AND UP AGAIN success. I don't think that pressing four buttons at specific times to walk around or reload a tranquilizer rifle actually qualifies as UP UP UP LEFT DOWN “gameplay”. Additional options include brief mouse-driven minigames where you have to navigate a fake computer interface or guide a circle inside of another moving circle, plus some choices in dialogue, but your selection never actually changes the story in any way, giving the player the illusion of choice when there really is none. Those who like to push random buttons and watch what prize comes out might be entertained by Jurassic Park: The Game, but everyone else will be left wanting much, much more interaction.

IN CLOSING
In Jurassic Park: The Game, you occasionally press buttons and click the mouse while watching a movie. “The Game” is quite a misnomer, as there isn't much of a game to be had. There are certainly no decisions to make on your own: you must press the right buttons when the game tells you to, and you must click the scenery in a predetermined order. The player is really unnecessary; in an age of procedurally generated content and multiple endings, the restrictive nature of Jurassic Park: The Game is simply archaic. You get quick time events, where you must press arrow keys in succession, a tedious process that wore out its welcome years ago. You get searching puzzles, where you must click on the right question marks hidden on multiple screens in the correct order. You get dialogue choices that don't actually do anything different. There's even the irregular mini-game using the mouse. None of these things are fun, and the story is only passably interesting. Jurassic Park: The Game suffers from significant enough performance problems (stuttering during quick time events) to negatively impact the gameplay, and the checkpoint-only saves restricts your ability to exit the game when you wish. So what are we left with? Basically a movie where you have to press the right buttons to advance to the next scene. That's not the level of sophistication I was looking for. Simply put, fans of the movies will be very disappointed that more wasn't done to further the inherent appeal of the franchise.

Serious Sam 3: BFE Review

2011-12-04T07:21:00.000-05:00

Serious Sam 3: BFE, developed by Croteam and published by Devolver Digital.
The Good: Constant action against tons of unique and memorable enemies, actually challenging, insane sixteen person cooperative play, tactically interesting weapons
The Not So Good: Starts out slow and restrictive, poorly balanced for many co-op players, few competitive multiplayer maps
What say you? A massive, chaotic, mindless arcade first person shooter, in a good way: 7/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Serious Sam exploded onto the gaming scene in 2001 with one purpose: to throw a large number of really weird enemies at you at one time. And it succeeded, providing ultimate chaos and engrossing tech for the period. Ten years later, we are inundated with contemporary military shooters featuring the same guns in the same grey urban settings. Booooooring! I dare say it’s time for the screaming headless kamikazes to make a return. After a successful and innovative campaign of pre-release indie games, the mothership has arrived. Does Serious Sam 3 offer an entertaining alternative to reality?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Serious Sam 3: BFE features a modified version of the engine used in their previous games and their HD re-releases. Overall, it works well, delivering some detailed Egyptian environments with decent texturing on buildings (not so much on the sandy ground) and some destructible level elements. The enemy models are impressive, delivering some detailed aliens with fluid animations; talking animations could be better, but thankfully there is little blabber to listen to. The graphics engine of Serious Sam 3: BFE is certainly good at rendering tons of enemies on the screen at once time without a hiccup. Killing those enemies is good fun thanks to significant amounts of blood splattering across the screen. Weapon animations are basic (the double-barreled shotgun is specifically underwhelming) and I have noticed some blurriness (our good friend bloom, I suspect) and some texture pop-in crops up every once in a while, but overall the graphical features are effective. The sound design is fairly average: distinctive cries from each enemy type assist in identifying them before you see them (AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!) and weapons are convincing in their destructivity. Serious Sam 3: BFE has some pretty hokey voice acting (probably on purpose) and the music becomes too loud when enemies are coming, but nothing was too annoying to deal with. Overall, I was satisfied with the presentation Serious Sam 3: BFE brings to the table.

ET AL.
Serious Sam 3: BFE consists of twelve levels of alien-infested Egypt, where you as the titular Sam must basically shoot everything in order to get some artifact or something. You can skip the cut scenes that precede and follow each level, so the story is never forced down your throat. When you can take on the space invaders by yourself, the game is quite challenging, especially on the higher difficulty settings; it’s quite refreshing not to have the game hold your hand or play for you as you walk behind allies to the next checkpoint. In the first few levels, auto-saves are quite frequent, but later on, your progress is not saved after every set of encounters, which is disappointing. While Serious Sam 3: BFE is perfectly playable solo, it is highly recommended to join some friends (or complete strangers) by using four-player split screen or sixteen-player online co-op. Both of these options are quite fun and amp up the inherently chaotic nature of Serious Sam 3: BFE considerably. Online, you can choose between any campaign level, a survival mode, or a beast hunt in search of the highest body count. Completing a level online also unlocks it in the single player campaign, and finding a match is pretty easy using the included server browser. However, the browser does lack helpful filters (like removing empty or full servers) and you can’t sort by ping; hopefully, these relatively small issues will be improved soon. While online cooperative play is popular, Serious Sam 3: BFE also features competitive game modes like deathmatch, capture the flag, last team standing, my burden (kind of like king of the hill), and a one-shot-one-kill mode. These aren’t terribly innovative and don’t work quite as well given the weapon selection. In addition, there are only four competitive maps (plus two for survival), so the competitive side of Serious Sam 3: BFE seems like more of an afterthought.

The gameplay of Serious Sam 3 is highlighted in this helpful official strategy guide: no quick time events, no scripted sequences, no overwrought cut scenes (just Sam telling whoever is in charge to shut up as he destroys another Egyptian artifact), and no crap getting in the way of shooting many, many things. With what, you ask? Weapons in Serious Sam 3: BFE include a sledgehammer, pistol, various shotguns (traditional, double barreled, and explosive shells), assault rifle, sniper rifle, C4, a cannon, laser gun, minigun, rocket launcher, and a lightning thing that destroys multiple enemies at once. It’s somewhat sad that I have to note this, but Serious Sam 3: BFE lets you carry all of the guns at once. Where does Sam keep all of those weapons? In your candy ass! Despite the suggestions to constantly hold down the trigger, I actually found myself switching weapons often based on who I was encountering, what weapons they were carrying, and how much ammunition I had in store. Another option is melee: these attacks kill anything in one go, so if you have isolated and enemy and you are in close range, it’s a good tactical choice. Even with a decidedly arcade tilt, Serious Sam 3: BFE does have strategy.

If you have become tired of killing faceless army guys, Serious Sam 3: BFE delivers an alternative: an exotic selection of alien foes to shoot in the face. Such as the iconic beheaded kamikaze (the screaming guys with bombs for hands), spiders, one-eyed charging gnaar, flying topless bird girls, the kleer skeleton, a giant rhino, some guy that says “hello” before shooting you, octopus helicopters, flying monkeys, and some even weirder stuff, if you can believe it. It’s nice to encounter something other than the military or elves (or military elves). Enemies have predictable behaviors: while most will either (a) run towards you or (b) stop and shoot at you, some will jump (the skeletons) or charge (the rhinos), requiring slightly more thinking (like moving to the side). Indeed, there are actual tactics to use in dealing with each of the game’s unique enemies, as some weapons are best reserved for specific aliens. To assist in your extraterrestrial domination, the cursor color indicates how much health the currently targeted enemy has, so you can switch weapons and save a rocket for a more deserving opponent. You will also have to conserve ammunition, health, and armor; whenever Serious Sam 3: BFE gives you a bunch of rounds and health right before a gigantic open space, you know you are in trouble. Some of the early levels are limited with occasional enemies, and these are much less interesting because of their more traditional design. Like the previous games in the series, Serious Sam 3 thrives when you are presented with tens, nay, hundreds of enemies at once, running backwards with guns blazing. The game, as a whole, is a wonderful throwback to a simpler time of constant action and mayhem, but it still delivers a solid presentation for today’s modern shooter genre.

IN CLOSING
Serious Sam 3: BFE delivers what it promises: lots of shooting lots of enemies all the time. While the game starts out too conventional, with restrictive hallways and a handful of enemies, when Serious Sam 3 expands to large, open battlefields and hundreds of enemies on-screen at one time, the chaos really works, harkening back to the days where actual shooting reigned over carefully scripted, linear level design. The open nature of the levels allows you to strafe (remember that?) and run backwards to avoid the foes charging relentlessly towards you. The various weapons of Serious Sam 3: BFE, along with the unique enemies the title offers, combine for varied strategies: some guns are more appropriate for specific targets, while using others will simply be a waste of precious ammunition. While Serious Sam 3: BFE is a very tough challenge by yourself, its even better online where sixteen (!) people can work cooperatively at turning aliens into bloody messes: it’s insane chaotic fun. There are also competitive deathmatch modes, but only on a couple of maps. The graphics are a mix of lots of unique enemies, some varied environments, soft focus, and buckets of blood. Overall, Serious Sam 3: BFE offers some excellent old school gaming brought to the present for $40.

Minecraft Review

2011-11-28T10:27:00.001-05:00

Minecraft, developed and published by Mojang AB.
The Good: Randomly generated worlds to explore, destructible blocks can be mined and placed to construct almost anything, impressive array of items to make and improve with experience, online multiplayer
The Not So Good: No in-game help, lacks an automated server browser and competitive modes, poor mod support
What say you? A fantastic randomly generated world to explore and alter, greatly hindered by an extreme lack of documentation: 7/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Minecraft has held the banner for indie development ever since it burst onto the scene during the summer of 2009. Allowing users to explore randomly generated worlds, mine and collect blocks, and then place those blocks to make whatever crazy designs they desired, the game has proven that a good idea can flourish on the vast expanses of the Internet. Over four million people have purchased the game before the actual release, carefully tracking its progress through alpha and beta versions and scouring each version for new features. Now that the game is no longer a “beta” product, we can now evaluate it fully and see if Minecraft has made a successful transition from inventive demo to full-fledged computer game.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Minecraft has a truly distinctive visual style. Displayed in a window, you can resize the screen to display a larger game world, although the textures will retain their low-resolution attributes. The blocks and items are made of large pixels that give Minecraft a decidedly old-school look (and makes it easier to design in-game items). The biomes are varied and give different areas diverse appearances. Enemies are memorable as well, and their animations are a bit stiff but it works in the low fidelity theme that permeates throughout the game. The sound effects are basic but effective, giving all of the weapons, enemies, and other creatures unique sounds that helps you identify them even if you can’t see them; hearing monsters outside of your house at night is very creepy. The music is a pleasant arrangement of tonal sounds, reminiscent of MIDI, that, again, works well within the confines of Minecraft’s theme. While Minecraft certainly won’t win any awards for cutting-edge graphics, it certainly does have an easily recognizable style.

ET AL.
Minecraft is a sandbox role-playing game where you collect resources, build and make items, and defeat enemies on your way to the dragon boss. The game comes in three flavors: the more traditional survival mode, a hardcore mode where a single death ends the game, and a creative mode that lets you build anything with no threat of death. Minecraft can be played by yourself or online, joining a server by using…other websites to find IP addresses. Yes, Minecraft lacks an automated server browser, so you must resort to outside assistance to find online games and then input the IP addresses yourself (the game then stores the servers you provided for future reference). The game may look like it’s from 1994, but that doesn’t mean the features have to be. That said, the online worlds people have created are very impressive, and everything is more fun with friends (or complete strangers) involved (and less lonely).

Minecraft is very open-ended: there are no quests, but an end-game is present for those who survive long enough. In fact, the game is a bit too open-ended, as the game is bereft of any help. You are thrown into the randomly generated world with no instructions, either inside the game or in provided documentation. While allowing the user to discover things is an argument for exploration, Minecraft is such a large game with many things to do that a complete lack of assistance is inexcusable. Want to know how to make a bed? The game won’t tell you. Want to know how to enchant things? The game won’t tell you. Want to know how circuits work? The game won’t tell you. I don’t want an in-your-face tutorial system, but a series of optional notes or an in-game help system (using F1, for example) would ease new players into the game and allow veterans to remember crafting recipes without resorting to the Internet. I would have never figured out that you could tame wolves if I didn’t visit the wiki to see what bones are used for. Minecraft has relied on the Internet for tutorials during its lengthy beta period, but that simply isn’t enough in a fully released commercial product. Another area that needed attention but did not receive it was mod support: Minecraft has been fertile ground for user-created modifications, but the game lacks an easy way to import them. Texture packs can be added easily, so why not mods? This is yet another feature you would expect to be completed in a released game.

All right, enough complaining about ancillary features, as the remainder of Minecraft is brilliant stuff. One highlight of the game is the semi-random, essentially infinite, destructible environment consisting of blocks that can be mined and then placed elsewhere (or smelted for resources). Part of the fun in Minecraft is exploration: discovering new islands, mountains, deserts, and caves that are generated on the fly while you walk around. There are many blocks to find: wood (used to craft basic items), stone (primarily used to build things), iron (for better weapons and armor), coal (for lighted torches), dirt (which takes up space in your inventory), water, lava, gold, glass (made from sand), redstone (for circuits), diamond (the best and more rare resource), and many more. The better stuff is located deep underground, so a common activity in Minecraft is digging deeper to find underground caverns where it is easier to search for valuable blocks. The use of blocks makes it really easy to make massive structures: houses, towers, castles, and anything else that can be assembled with cubes. The world of Minecraft consists of different biomes that offer distinct visuals: forest, taiga, swamp, mountains, desert, plains, ocean, and tundra all provide different benefits. You might also encounter NPC villages, dungeons, strongholds, and mineshafts, although these things are quite rare. You can also experience rain, thunderstorms, snow, and the day-night cycle. Minecraft capitalizes on the creative fun of Legos, and the blocky environments work quite well and allow for high imagination.

Blocks are used to create many items in the game that are used to harvest more blocks and defeat enemies that appear during the night. Basic tools include pickaxes, shovels, hoes (the farming kind), shears, axes, fishing rods, and buckets. More advanced objects consist of clocks, compasses, maps, beds, bowls, doors, paintings, signs, ladders, jukeboxes, pistons, fencing, and bookshelves. Various vehicles can also be fashioned: boats and minecarts (that travel along tracks and can be powered) make travel faster. You’ll also need to grow or find food: pork, beef, chicken, fish, and bread will fulfill your need to eat. As I stated before, the game never says how to actually make any of these things, so you’ll need to consult the the wiki or stumble upon them with blind luck.

Your weapons to combat enemies are pretty limited, although I suppose all weapons either fall under melee (the sword) and ranged (the bow and arrow) categories. You can improvise some traps using TNT, pressure plate triggers, doors, and redstone circuits, but having more straightforward mines and grenades would be easier to deal with more imposing foes. Sturdier resources (leather, iron, and diamond) can be used to make armor: helmets, chestplates, leggings, and boots can protect you from the bad guys. These bad guys come out at night (or dark places in caves) and include spiders, skeletons, zombies, “endermen” (which move blocks and teleport, attacking you if you make direct eye contact) and the iconic exploding creeper. There isn’t much variety here and you’ll tire of encountering the same handful of enemies every night, so hopefully more will be added in the future. Having a full stomach from eating (pork, beef, bread, cake, cookies, melon, milk, mushrooms, apples, or fish) will automatically regenerate your health diminished by attacks. There are also more friendly animals to encounter: chickens, cows, pigs, sheep, squid, and the wolf, who can be tamed (using bones) to accompany you and attack enemies. You can also breed animals (using wheat), forming a farm-like community. Minecraft certainly gives you enough to do, if you can figure out how to do it.

An exciting part of the game is enchanting items: experience earned through combat can be spent adding attributes to any weapon or piece of armor by using an enchantment table (which requires both diamonds and obsidian to build, both rare materials located deep in the ground, unfortunately) surrounded by bookshelves. For example, a diamond sword can be enchanted with smite (extra damage to zombies and skeletons) and knockback, or you can create a metal shovel with increased durability. Using more points will result in a more powerful enchantment, so you’ll have to decide whether to save up for more powerful attributes. This gives the player a reason to kill enemies (instead of simply avoiding them every night), since you use the experience to better your inventory. You can also brew potions to restore health, increase attacks, or move faster (plus negative effects you can throw at enemies). Obsidian can be used to enter The Nether, a fire world with unique enemies and blocks that are required to reach The End of the game. While there is a conclusion to Minecraft, exploring the randomly generated terrain, collecting blocks, making buildings, crafting and enchanting items, and fighting enemies will keep most people busy for quite a long time.

IN CLOSING
Minecraft excels because of the use of randomly generated terrain, easy-to-manipulate blocks that can be used to create almost anything, and plenty of items to make and enemies to encounter along your way to making the world your own. The use of cubes is genius: you can easily excavate and place blocks in any arrangement your mind can think of, creating houses, castles, towers, and gigantic Pikachu. You can make a variety of tools to gather blocks to make more tools, including axes, buckets, doors, dynamite, fencing, bowls, beds, and many, many more. You’ll also need to eat food (chicken, pork, bread), make weapons (swords, bows and arrows), and craft armor (helmets, boots) to survive the nightly attacks from a mixture of distinctive enemies (spiders, skeletons, zombies, and the iconic creeper). While the ongoing development of Minecraft has seen many new items introduced to the game to give the player even more things to experience and explore, little in the way of actually helping players figure out how they work, without the assistance of the Internet, has been provided. I’m sure there are features I am missing simply because there is no documentation for them. Allowing the user to explore at their own pace is one thing, but providing absolutely no assistance in figuring out how things work is another. Another area needing improvement is multiplayer: while witnessing (and helping to build) the amazing creations made by others online is a great feature, Minecraft lacks an automated server browser, and competitive modes that could have capitalized on the game’s destructible block world. The addictive nature of Minecraft cannot be denied, as exploring, manipulating, and constructing your world is a fascinating experience. However, common features expected in a released product are missing, such as extensive in-game help and more rounded online components.

Real Warfare 2: Northern Crusades Review

2011-11-24T08:14:00.000-05:00

Real Warfare 2: Northern Crusades, developed by Unicorn Games Studio and published by 1C Company.
The Good: Outstanding unit detail with very exhaustive attributes, strong AI uses varied tactics, somewhat dynamic campaign with mobile enemy units and straightforward trade and diplomacy, unit and hero upgrades, large skirmish and online tactical battles with generated maps
The Not So Good: Few low-level enemies in campaign, little experience gained outside of main missions
What say you? This medieval combination of tactical battles and campaign strategy delivers detailed, challenging gameplay: 7/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
The unbridled success of the Total War series of games no doubt sprung several imitators. From the fantasy world of King Arthur to the crusades-based Lionheart, we’ve seen several series try to capitalize on the popularity of the popularity of combining strategic and tactical gameplay. Another, relatively overlooked (at least by me), series comes from Russia (I assume…Unicorn Games Studio is scant on the details), a fertile ground for PC development, highlighting the medieval time period and the violence contained therein. Starting with XIII Century and continuing with Real Warfare 1242, Real Warfare 2: Northern Crusades relies on a dynamic campaign game world and accurate tactical battles to stand out from the pack.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Real Warfare 2: Northern Crusades holds its own when compared against similar large-scale tactical warfare titles. The game features lots of units that will eventually evolve into lots of dead bodies that exhibit decent (not great) animations while fighting it out over domination of the battlefield. The terrain is varied, with forests and hills of different settings serving as a nice backdrop to the chaos of combat. The grass and trees look nice up close when you choose to zoom in on the carnage. Real Warfare 2 does apply way too much bloom, however, rending almost everything on-screen blurry from a distance. However, overall the graphics are quite solid. The sound design delivers as expected: appropriate battle effects and music that seems to be specific to different nations, which is a nice touch. Overall, Real Warfare 2 fulfills its sub-$40 price tag in terms of the game’s presentation.

ET AL.
It is up to the Teutonic Knights to rid Prussia of its pagan scourge, and the campaign of Real Warfare 2: Northern Crusades tells this epic tale of epic epicness (caution: epicness may cause vomiting). The campaign’s structure borrows heavily from Mount & Blade: you are given an army and allowed to roam the lands in search of enemy troops and towns to invade, missions to undertake, and trade to profit from. The missions are unoriginal, as most of them simply involve engaging a specific unit on the map; thankfully, you can also choose your own adventure and take on any threat you see in the dynamic game world, as neutral and enemy units move around Prussia as you do. It is harder to gain experience through skirmish battles alone, however, as a significant XP bonus is granted to completing the main story missions. The game displays the relative strength of the enemy as you mouse over them, so you can assess whether the peasants, merchants, brigands, patrols, and lords offer a fair challenge. It can be difficult to target enemy units in real time (since everybody moves), and there are few easy “cannon fodder” units to rank up your initial paltry army. Once you discover how to make significant amounts of money through trade, however, the campaign becomes a lot easier.

The world of Real Warfare 2: Northern Crusades is populated with towns, villages, and castles, all of which can be invaded. However, you don’t actually get control of conquered villages, and the goods you reap from victorious battles aren’t aligned with the goods that the village actually produces (a hunting village does not give you lots of meat upon victory, for example). In friendly settlements, you are given options to talk to the mayor for no reason whatsoever, trade resources, and recruit or upgrade troops. Real Warfare 2 features over forty goods that are produced and consumer in villages across the map; there is a production chain buried within the game world (a village produces bread from wheat) and you can take advantage of buying what a village produces and then selling it to the village that needs that particular item. The interface does a fantastic job highlighting the best goods, with clear “thumbs up” icons and a map view that highlights where goods are needed and produced the most. There’s no writing down prices in Real Warfare 2, which is a great thing indeed. Simple diplomatic options are also present: changing stances with a rival nation (alliance, friendship, wary, hated, war) and having negotiations (gifts, trade, alliances, insults, or demanding money) are all part of the game. Experience on the battlefield can be spent upgrading your troops, either by raising their attributes (strength, weapon ratings, morale) or morphing them into a higher-class unit. The hero (that’s you) gains experience as well, and leveling up grants points that can be spend improving sixteen skills: higher trade income, greater spear attack, or more loot from battles), to name a few. Veteran heroes can also field larger armies of more advanced units, allowing you to take on more threats as the campaign progresses. Overall, the campaign is entertaining and the free-form (to a point) nature is far more interesting than the more restrictive or totally linear campaigns of Lionheart or King Arthur.

Beyond the entertaining campaign mode lies comprehensive skirmish battles. Six players can duke it out on a number of maps, or you can utilize the map generator to produce seemingly random battlefields. The AI behavior can be adjusted (attack, defend, or a mix), and units are selected based on a budget. Multiplayer games over the Internet also support six players in tactical battles; competitive campaigns would be a fun feature as well. Finally, Real Warfare 2 comes with an editor so you can edit maps and create scenarios.

Real Warfare 2 is highlighted by its astounding attention to unit detail. The typical range of medieval military options is present: cavalry, archers, swords, spears, and assorted castle storming equipment. However, the game goes into great detail calculating and showing unit performance during battle, using fifteen attributes to determine attack, morale, and firing values. Weapons, armor, morale, fatigue, formation, terrain, discipline, speed, and whether the front, flanks, and rear are under attack are all used to gauge how effective a unit is in combat, and all of these numbers are shown clear as day to the player. Now, maybe there is just as much detail in other games of this ilk, just hidden from the user, but Real Warfare 2 makes the smart move and presents all of its data directly and transparently to the player. The result is that you can figure out why a unit is panicking (it’s under fire from archers, it has low-level armor, and is being attacked from behind) and move support units into position instead of just guessing and blindly throwing more forces at the enemy. It’s detail that strategy gamers crave, and Real Warfare 2 delivers.

Commands are typical for a tactical game: move and attack are what you’ll be using the most. You can customize unit behavior (aggressive or avoidance) and set formation (line, column, wedge, circle) and density. You can also utilize the very handy army formations, which organize everybody in one of eight configurations, such as archers in front, infantry behind, and cavalry on left. It’s nice you can choose the overall formation for your army, instead of the game magically selecting one based on where you order your troops to move. Battles can also be accelerated, to cut down on transit time between your spawn location and that of the enemy. Combat itself is interesting enough: the key is to engage the enemy from the front, but keep units in reserve (especially cavalry) to flank the enemy from the sides or (even better) the rear. Add in varied terrain in each battlefield and Real Warfare 2 can be an intriguing medieval warfare simulation. I noticed early on that, during combat, units like to stand around and ignore nearby enemies. I then discovered that this is working as designed, as each unit is given a “self-control” rating that determines how much the AI will guide your unit and how much you need to micromanage it. This makes battles less certain and requires more personal attention, which is more appealing that just selecting everyone once and ordering a single attack on the nearest enemy and then taking a nap while the battle plays out for you. The AI is very strong, using the terrain to hide units and sneaking cavalry behind your army to spring the trap. It gets to the point where the AI does this pretty much every battle so you learn to expect it (and protect archers with pikemen), but it’s so much better than the usual tactical AI of simply heading right towards you and whoever has the larger army wins.

IN CLOSING
I’ll be honest: I wasn’t expecting much from Real Warfare 2: Northern Crusades. I figured it would be just another cheap rip-off of Total War, hoping to cash in on yet another unoriginal replica. How wrong I was. This game excels thanks in part to its detailed unit attributes: clear data, from armor ratings to attacks on the flanks, is used to determine when units will rout, resulting in more authentic battle results and interesting tactical gaming. All of these variables are displayed directly to the player, allowing for appropriate action to be made with predictable results. The medieval style combat emphasizes engaging the enemy directly with low-level fighters while using cavalry, ranged, and experienced units to flank and subsequently panic the enemy. While this does produce some predictable, repetitive conflicts, the rapid, devastating cavalry units and mixed unit attributes does make the tactical battles as captivating as possible for what was available during the time period. The user interface allows for easy control of large numbers of units by listing all of your forces along the bottom of the screen and providing several formation options to easily organize an entire army. The AI is impressive: it routinely hides units out of range, using the terrain to its advantage, and then flanks vulnerable troops (archers, namely) with fast mounted cavalry or other appropriate counters. The campaign allows you to undertake missions against scripted enemy foes or engage any opponent in the living, dynamic world where battles take place and goods are transferred without your direct intervention. Trading for profit, recruiting and upgrading units, and checking out the current diplomatic situation is easy, and the campaign makes it seem like you are taking part in a medieval setting, rather than checking off the next mission on the way to the end. There aren’t enough “easy” units to engage in the beginning and I’d like the game to reward you with more XP for taking on enemies of your choosing, but overall the campaign is a good envelope for the tactical battles. You can also engage the AI or online opponents in massive tactical battles, and only a multiplayer campaign would add more value. In all, Real Warfare 2: Northern Crusades is a great combination of a notable campaign and meaty tactical battles suitable for any strategy gamer.

Dungeon Defenders Review

2011-11-19T10:30:00.000-05:00

Dungeon Defenders, developed and published by Trendy Entertainment.
The Good: Enjoyable local and online co-op with distinct classes, upgradable items can be equipped, unique challenges and rules
The Not So Good: Limited arsenal of weapons and traps must be unlocked, repetitive combat with insufficient strategic options, offline character can’t be used in ranked multiplayer matches, can’t save progress mid-level
What say you? A tower defense role-playing game with fun cooperative play but restricted weaponry: 6/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Tower defense games have certainly taken on a life of their own. What started out as a niche extension of the strategy games has blossomed into a full-fledged genre. Now that the basic tenants of tower defense games have been laid out in conventional titles like Defense Grid, more experimentation has been injected into the formula by adding competitive features (as in Rock of Ages), reversing the game mechanics (like Anomaly: Warzone Earth), or taking inspiration from other genres. We’ve seen the first person shooter adaptation Sanctum and the third person shooter take in Orcs Must Die, but now it’s time for some role-playing. Dungeon Defenders has finally been released, adding experience, loot, and classes to the typical tower defense game. Does this mixture work?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Powered by the Unreal engine, Dungeon Defenders has an interesting art style that trends towards the “cartoon” side of role-playing tropes. The cell-shaded graphics look nice and work well with the theme of the game, giving you some fanciful environments to fight in and exaggerated enemies to fight against. There is also no shortage of bright colors in the game. The levels and characters could use a bit more texture detail and smoother models, though. The effects are suitable for the game, with minor amounts of blood accompanying numbers displaying damage like a traditional RPG. The level designs are a bit repetitive (you are defending dungeons, after all), but they exhibit some unique elements to differentiate each map. On the sound front, things are kept quite basic: combat is chaotic with slashes and magical powers abounding, but there are few instances of voice acting (mostly restricted to the tutorial) for immersive purposes. The music is fitting but not memorable. Overall, Dungeon Defenders delivers average results for your monetary investment when compared against an increasingly competitive indie classification.

ET AL.
Although Dungeon Defenders is primarily designed as a four-person online cooperative game, you can play the game offline. However, this is strongly discouraged as the game is extremely difficult for one person and your single player character cannot be used in ranked online matches. Dungeon Defenders features thirteen campaign missions where you must defend crystals from the incoming horde. Additional rules are available for more variety: a survival mode, where waves will keep coming until you die, a pure strategy mode where you can’t attack, and a mixed mode that spawns random enemies. The game also features over ten challenges that introduce some unique, interesting rules, such as a constantly moving crystal, specific enemies, or putting you on the offensive. All of these features add up to more replay value, despite the fact that the missions on a single map play out the same way as you utilize the same chokepoints. Joining a multiplayer game is easy using a quick match system or the host browser; you can also join matches in progress during the build phase, which is neat. A difficulty setting is available to increase the enemy count for more experienced foes, although the number of enemies does not seem to adjust based on the number of players. Your progress cannot be saved in the middle of a game, which can be a problem when a single level lasts upwards of thirty minutes, deleting all of your hard fought progress. Finally, the tutorial serves as an extensive but laborious introduction to the game.

Like most role-playing-type games, Dungeon Defenders features classes of varying abilities. Each class gets two standard attacks (usually either melee or ranged), two special attacks that typically affect an area, and five traps that are gradually unlocked with experience. Each class starts out with only one trap, which makes the first handful of missions very, very boring as you are greatly limited in what you can do. A variety of items can be found and equipped (helmets, weapons, armor, gloves, and boots); these are dropped by enemy units, and boost attack and defense ratings against fire, lightning, poison, or in general. Classes are pretty standard: the apprentice is the magic ranged guy equipped with tower traps, the squire is the melee guy with blockades, the huntress is the ranged girl with proximity traps, and the monk is the support guy who can boost nearby allies. During each battle, you can earn experience that is spent to improve your abilities: health, damage, attack rate, and movement speed. You can also choose to expand the capabilities of your turrets, increasing their health, damage, attack rate, or area of effect. New traps are also unlocked as you level up, and if you play enough, and you’ll have access to all of the traps, and there will be little reason to go back and use weaker options. Additional options include the ability to purchase really expensive pets to accompany you into battle or trade in useless weapons for mana used to upgrade better items in your inventory.

Each map throws waves of enemies at you, and you can build defenses and trade in items between each wave (you can also building things during invasion, but it’s a lot slower). There is a hard limit to how many structures you can place in a map, even if you have the mana to afford more (killed enemies provide a constant supply of mana), although you can upgrade existing defenses. Dungeon Defenders features repetitive combat: you start out with only a primary and secondary attack, and even when you level up and unlock two additional abilities, your strategies remain very limited. Your role on the battlefield is to repair structures and eliminate the stragglers that have wandered past your stout defenses. Traps are quite effective, and intervention is only needed to remedy places of the map that were overwhelmed with enemy forces. The slow default movement speed makes this an arduous, tedious process, and the maps are just large enough to make walking from one side to the other a chore. The enemies consist of basic, ranged, magic, flying, exploding, and boss variations to require slightly different tactics (blocking, slowing down, or attacking at range). Still, if you clog the pathways with enough things, most enemies will meet untimely death. Dungeon Defenders also clearly displays how many enemies of each type will spawn at every location, so there is little guesswork involved in placing your defenses in the “correct” locations. Still, taking on a huge number of enemies with your friends is undeniably fun, despite the minimal tactical options available to you.

IN CLOSING
Dungeon Defenders is a solid combination of role-playing and tower defense that suffers from too much repetition through the limited means with which you can engage the enemy. Giving each class only five total traps and two special powers really reduce your strategic options, making each scenario play out the same. Add in the fact that you only start out with one of the five traps, and things can get boring. However, Dungeon Defenders is good fun online, where you can enjoy the game’s chaotic cooperative action with other human players (hopefully) using each class effectively. However, your single player avatar cannot be used in ranked matches online, so you must start over with limited options. The game’s four distinct classes each play a role on the battlefield: the melee squire, the ranged huntress, the magical apprentice, and the support monk. You can see the possibilities for great teamwork online, and battling it out alongside your friends is a blast. While items can be upgraded over time, I’d like to see a lot more variety in the traps, spells, animals, and items. The enemies are also very basic variations (melee, ranged, magic, flying, and powerful bosses) on common themes. Dungeon Defenders has a fair number of levels with varied layouts, and some of the challenges have interesting rule restrictions while the alternative game modes are welcome. While Dungeon Defenders is an admirable attempt at a happy marriage of role-playing and tower defense, more content is needed to completely round out the package.

Sword of the Stars II: Lords of Winter Review

2011-11-14T14:56:00.000-05:00

Sword of the Stars II: Lords of Winter, developed by Kerberos Productions and published by Paradox Interactive.
The Good: Ships must be organized into fleets for (theoretically) easier management, semi-random technology tree, government type based on player actions, a manageable economy, distinct races, multiplayer
The Not So Good: Terribly limited interface in many aspects of empire management, budget ignores ship construction costs, unnecessarily confusing ship design, tedious research tree, no list for fleet locations and tasks, shallow and abrupt tactical battles, unpolished with poor performance and missing features like diplomacy and objective-based scenarios, very slow pace, no tutorial, lacks truly random maps, only one victory condition per game
What say you? This 4X turn-based strategy game is far from a finished product: 3/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Originally, I had a traditional introduction written for this review, referencing the original Sword of the Stars, its pitfalls, and its place among other 4X strategy games. But then Release Day Armageddon happened: first, an old beta version of the game was released on Steam, and then the “proper” version was released with a lengthy list of its own troubling issues. Clearly, the game wasn’t ready to be released on its designated date, and improvements have been slowly trickling in from the development team to hopefully subdue the angry, angry Internet. Has Sword of the Stars II returned to its hyped and desired status of a 4X game to be reckoned with?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Strategy games start and end with the interface, and the one featured in Sword of the Stars II is frustrating to deal with. The unimpressive 3-D map is loaded with shortcomings: surveyed systems are not indicated, ships sometimes can’t be clicked on directly during a mission, the view doesn’t zoom towards the cursor position, and the escape key does not open the menu. Also, I’m not sure why the game has a list of all your planets and stations but does not have a list of all your ship fleets. The 3-D interfaces for ship design and research do more harm than good, making each process more arduous than needed because ship components aren’t listed in an intuitive manner and endless scrolling is required to view each research path. While the tactical battles have very nice ships with detailed textures and impressive weapon effects, the bland backgrounds are filled with low-res stars. Overall, Sword of the Stars II has very poor performance: the game lags when you access and close any full-screen display, which is pretty much all you do in a strategy game such as this. Additionally, the game occasionally crashes and throws up error messages. The sound design is subpar, with the same voice acting as the original game and forgettable, subtle background music. While I don’t expect the graphics in a niche strategy game to be top-notch, I do expect some semblance of efficient functionality in the interface.

ET AL.
Sword of the Stars II: Lords of Winter (not to be confused with the Dukes of Autumn or Kings of Leon) is a 4X strategy game, the 4 “X”s being “Nina,” “Pinta,” “Santa Maria”, and “eXterminate”. The game consists of the main turn-based mode where you manage your empire, and real-time battles against the foes you will encounter around the universe. There are six distinct races that move differently throughout the universe: the Humans are confined to linear nodes, the Hivers use gates, the Tarka warp, the Liir move small distances very quickly, the Zuul use temporary nodes, and the Moorigi move fastest as a group (like migrating birds). Sword of the Stars II features sixteen non-random maps (the planet resources are changed around, I think, but the star locations are not), and you can choose a single victory condition such as conquering all of your foes or being the first race to build a specific number of special objects. However, you cannot have two (or more) simultaneous objectives in the same game, which is an odd limitation. You can, however, customize the planet size, turn time, and economy and research rates. There are also goal-oriented scenarios that have yet to be added to the game (the first of many things promised that are not actually present). Sword of the Stars II does feature multiplayer if you like that sort of thing, and the AI can play your role when you leave and use one of three strategies (maintain, defend, or expand) until you return. Sword of the Stars II does not feature a tutorial (yet), so everyone will have to read the manual to figure out what’s going on.

Space has stars and stars have planets, and it’s your job to find the most hospitable worlds for your race and then befoul nature for valuable resources. Development is budget-based, adjusting the amount of terraforming and infrastructure expansion done on new colonies. Although the cost of transforming new worlds into fully-functional parts of your empire can be expensive based on the climate, there’s little reason not to colonize everything within range (especially since other races will be trying to do the same). You can discover neutral, independent worlds and bring them into your empire by promoting good relationships. Beyond simple tax and production income, various stations can be constructed around each planet, supplementing research, trade, diplomatic, or naval attributes. Systems can also be organized into a province, which provides increased trade revenue but is accomplished through (like most things in this game) a cumbersome interface.

Running your economy is pretty easy. First, you designate how much of your income will be used for research, and then rest is divided among government operations: security (operations against corruption, intelligence, and counter-intelligence), stimulus (mining, colonization, and trade in your empire), and adding more funds to your savings to purchase ships and stations. Expenses include colony development, fleet and station maintenance, loan debt, and corruption resulting from insufficient security funding. Poor funding could result in low morale and rebels taking over your fringe colonies. Your research investment can be split between your current project, “special projects” (which, no doubt, are special), and salvaging research. Neither the game nor the manual actually describe what the latter two options are for, but I funded them anyway!

Ships in Sword of the Stars II are comprised of three hull modules that can be swapped out to form new vessel types. Each module contains a number of places where weapons or vague components (what does a “Hannibal” do, exactly?) can be attached. This is all done in a 3-D interface that works quite poorly; it would have been a lot easier to swap things from a list and see the changes in the background instead of having to hunt around the ship for icons. The starting ship types are not intuitive (did you know the Revenge and Teacher are colony vessels?), which adds to the confusion that permeates throughout ship design.

Individual ships must be organized into fleets, and each fleet must contain a command ship (this took me a while to figure out) for an admiral. This makes controlling large numbers of ship easier, at least in theory. Fleets are issued missions instead of simple “move” commands common in most strategy games: survey, colonize, build, transfer, patrol, intercept, strike, and invade. While I do like the idea of organizing ships together and giving concrete commands to your fleets, Sword of the Stars II does not provide a list of all your fleets, so finding idle ships or busy admirals is nearly impossible. What's the point of organizing things into fleets if you have to hunt for them on the 3-D map? Even if you find them, you might not be able to select them to change their orders if a more pressing need arises. Ships must also return home after a mission, which can extend a simple survey mission to a distant star into a long undertaking. Admirals must be assigned to each fleet, and they contain both good and bad traits and are rated according to loyalty, reaction, and evasion, which would seemingly affect their performance in the tactical battles, although I haven’t seen any dramatic differences in capabilities.

While reading through the manual, I was looking forward to using the many diplomatic actions described: varied relationships, requesting resources, demanding slaves, signing non-aggression treaties, limiting the use of weapons, and spinning diplomatic actions to avoid penalties. Imagine my surprise when I come to find out that none of things are actually in the game yet. Yes, potentially the strongest aspect of the game is nowhere to be found. However, government types are in there: one of nine stances (socialism, anarchism, junta) is automatically assigned based on the player’s decisions regarding morale, money, growth, and production. That’s a much better system that manually choosing one from a list and gaining its bonuses. Another thing that’s actually in the game is research, which is essentially a carbon copy (with one enhancement) of the system used in the original game. Technologies are randomly given a percentage of success, so you’ll end up having to vary your strategy if your favorite tech is not available in the current game. You have to undertake a feasibility study to determine the percentage of success, which adds another step to the process that isn’t indicated from the main interface (the research icon still says you aren’t researching anything during a feasibility study). The 3-D interface used in the research screen also takes too long to cycle through the different types, which slows down an already slow-paced game even more.

Unlike a majority of 4X games, Sword of the Stars II features tactical battles involving ships of warring factions residing in the same sector. You can choose to fight out the conflicts yourself, or allow the computer to simulate the result. Battles are only five minutes long, which is far too short for any type of meaningful resolution involving large fleets of ships. Thus, most battles will take several to many turns to resolve. You are given access to very simple orders: move or attack. You can adjust the stance (attack, defend), movement speed, combat plane, or roll the ship, but these options are quite limited in depth. Shields for the ships are, if the interface is any indication, actually fairly sophisticated, breaking down the three parts of each ship into many small portions that can be damaged individually. Still, most battles in Sword of the Stars II simply involve moving ships within range and waiting until somebody blows up. Units also occasionally forget which enemy ship they are targeting (especially if the enemy ship moves), so you have to keep and eye on your navy and make sure they are actually returning fire.

The AI in Sword of the Stars II seems to be up to the task. The computer develops their colonies well, forms formidable fleets of ships, and attacks vulnerable parts of your sprawling empire. I did not experience any significant shortcomings in the AI for the parts of the game that are currently included. The slow pace of Sword of the Stars II is a real turn off, though, as most everything simply takes too long to complete: research, moving, colonization, ship construction, and battles could all be shorter and contribute to a more action-oriented game. There is really no reason why things need to take so long; I was frequently advancing to the next turn with no input, as all of my fleets had missions, my budget was set, and I was waiting for shipbuilding and research to finish their lengthy durations. This may be partially due to the fact that Sword of the Stars II is currently an incomplete game, but I suspect that even with diplomacy added to the game, things will still advance at a sluggish rate.

IN CLOSING
It’s a shame that Sword of the Stars II was released in this state. Much like Star Ruler before it, this 4X game comes with half-baked ideas and unrealized potential, which is surprising considering it’s a sequel. The interface is a mess: the 3-D ship design and research trees are difficult to navigate and the lack of a master fleet list makes finding ships too difficult. Plus, slow game performance makes using the full-screen menus a tedious chore. Expanding your empire is simple: just colonize every hospitable planet while keeping an eye on the colonial management part of your budget. The rest of the economy is fairly easy to manage (assuming you remember how much your ship construction costs are), thanks to intuitive sliders to adjust the distribution of funding. Diplomacy could be a strong part of the game, if it ever gets implemented. The semi-random technology tree makes things less predictable, but having to investigate a tech before actually researching it just adds an unnecessary step of management. Modular ship design would be intriguing if the game made finding and swapping out parts easier. Likewise, placing ships into fleets is a great idea held back by the difficulty in actually finding those fleets. The tactical battles are very simplified and too brief to determine a victor. The AI seems to handle the game well, putting together effective fleets and invading weak parts of your empire. However, the slow pace of the game makes everything (from surveys to research) take too long, arbitrarily lengthening the game and leading to one “end turn” button press after another. Multiplayer is available for those who desire it, but the lack of a tutorial makes learning the game difficult, especially as you try to wrestle with the occasionally informative interface. Could all of these problems become fixed in the future? Maybe: patches are planned to slowly add in all of the missing features and functionality you would expect at release. But all we can evaluate is what lies in front of us, and Sword of the Stars II is currently a broken, incomplete game that offers nothing over the original version but problems.

Cities XL 2012 Review

2011-11-09T15:03:00.000-05:00

Cities XL 2012, developed and published by Focus Home Interactive.
The Good: New buildings and maps
The Not So Good: Zero gameplay improvements, 3-D building import utility requires expensive 3ds Max 2008 program
What say you? A modification tool and new maps do not make this edition of the city building series worth it with no major changes
For owners of any Cities XL game: 2/8
For newcomers to the series: 5/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Cities XL tried to combine the online features of a MMO with a city builder, and it failed miserably. Its simplicity blended with a $10-a-month fee for a chat room spelt early doom, and doom it was. The pieces were picked up by Focus Home Interactive, which bundled a handful of new features in a 2011 version (while removing multiplayer), and the series returns with Cities XL 2012. This newest iteration adds even more buildings and maps with modding tools for the aspiring tinkerer. In addition, owners of Cities XL 2011 won’t feel completely ripped off, as they can get the game at a discounted expansion. New maps and buildings are nice and all (I guess), but has the fundamental gameplay been enhanced enough to make this a notable city builder series?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Cities XL 2012 uses the same engine as previous Cities XL games, which still holds up after two years. The varied maps consist of different environments that look impressive from afar and up close. You can still see significant pop-in (especially with traffic, turning from brown boxes into cars as you zoom in) as you come closer to the ground, but the street-level view is still immersive. The 2012 edition adds 300 new buildings to existing types for an overall total of 1,000, making your city appear more varied as the same building models are recycled less frequently. Performance leaves a lot to be desired: significant pausing when placing newly zoned areas is common. The reason for this is that Cities XL 2012 (like its predecessor) uses only one core, which is insane in an age of multi-core processors. The sound effects and music appear to be identical, if similar, to previous offerings, bringing your city to life in an appropriate manner. While the buildings add more diversity to your town landscape, the rest of the visuals remains the same, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

ET AL.
So, what do you get in Cities XL 2012? First: fifteen new maps, for a total of sixty. While I would like to see randomly generated maps or at least a map editor, sixty large maps should keep you busy for a while. Next: the aforementioned 300 new buildings that make your cities look more diverse. Finally: “mod tools.” Now, when I heard this, I envisioned an in-game (or executable) program that allows you to edit maps and create your own buildings. Imagine my disappointment when I found out that it’s just PDF instructions and an importer tool that allows you to bring in 3-D models from 3ds Max 2008, a $3,500 modeling program. In addition, the mod tool is free, anyway. Seriously, go ahead and download it right now. I'll wait. Crazy, right? Suffice it to say that this tool (plus the maps and buildings) is not worth a $15 expansion upgrade price.

The remainder of Cities XL 2012 is identical to previous iterations of the game, for better and for worse. The subpar (for a subscription-based service) MMO aspect of the game has been removed completely; now, you trade with phantom AI cities instead of human-run towns that will always have every good available to purchase and sell. Other than simply building a massive city, there is no objective in Cities XL 2012, as the game does not give you intermediate goals to shoot for. Cities XL 2012 continues to make it easy to zone large non-square areas for a more European layout, but I’ve been seeing more empty zones than previously. The citizens complain about the lack of houses or jobs when I already have them zoned: is this added complexity or simply a bug? You decide. The interface does a nice job telling you what people of each class need, and helpful color overlays are available to graphically highlight any available data. Cities XL 2012 continues to be a trivially easy game thanks to the uninteresting economy: service buildings have a fixed maximum cost, so you simply wait until you have that amount of cash coming in monthly before placing that hospital or police station. Cities XL 2012 never offers resistance to continual expansion. There is a complex economy buried within the game, where specific goods are required to run different buildings, but it’s mostly hidden from the user and completely automated, and any deficit can be easily traded for.

IN CLOSING
I think the most telling piece of evidence against Cities XL 2012 is the fact that there isn’t really a true developer for the game: Focus Home Interactive (a publisher) picked up the rights to the game after Monte Cristo folded, but all they have done is added new maps and buildings, leaving the basic gameplay alone. While the new maps and buildings are nice, and the mod support is potentially helpful (although I suspect the “new” tool is just the importer used by the original developer released into the wild), this isn’t a new game, and it barely qualifies as an expansion. This is the reason that owners of Cities XL 2011 can get 2012 for $15, but even that price is steep for what you get. The mod tools are much less comprehensive than I anticipated, only offering the ability to import 3-D buildings made in a third party program by using a free downloaded utility. Certainly this, new buildings, and maps do not qualify for a $15 price tag. Areas of the game that needed improvement (the trivial economy, absence of objectives, lack of multi-core support) are simply untouched. This exact trend happened with City Life, releasing eerily similar mediocre content masquerading as a yearly update. If you have avoided the Cities XL franchise until now, Cities XL 2012 offers OK value for $40, but I would simply suggest getting the original game for a fraction of the cost.

Battlefield 3 Multiplayer Review

2011-11-04T14:55:00.000-04:00

Battlefield 3, developed by Digital Illusions CE and published by Electronic Arts.
The Good: 64-player frantic action in destructible environments, streamlined classes, multiple game modes, variety of vehicles that can be disabled, several ways to earn experience, spawn on squad or aircraft, scope glint a great balance for annoying snipers, delay or refuse revives, machine guns deploy for increased accuracy, prone behind cover and mantling over objects, outstanding visual and sound design
The Not So Good: Smaller maps compared to Battlefield 2, basic items shouldn’t need to be unlocked, terrible minimap, regenerating vehicle and player health devalues suppression and repair, no commander role
What say you? The noted series returns with a very enjoyable multiplayer experience: 8/8

Care about the single player campaign? You are silly. Here is why.

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
The first person shooter series I’ve probably spent the most time with is Battlefield (other personal time sinks on the shooter front include Wolfenstein 3-D, Quake, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars). Its combination of not-forced-but-important coordinated team play, large maps with multiple objectives, and numerous vehicles anyone can control proved innovative and addictive from the first title in the series. The Battlefield games have seen their ups (Battlefield 2) and downs (2142), but have returned in glory to its home on the PC after a hiatus to console-focused drudgery. 64-player maps? Check. Destructible scenery? Check. Tanks and helicopters and jets? Check check check. Unlocks? Sigh.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Battlefield 3 uses a revamped version of the Frostbite engine implemented in the Bad Company series of games, and it is impressive. Each of the game’s maps show off a detailed environment, complete with diverse terrain, high-resolution textures, plenty of vegetation, flowing water, buildings, and animated backgrounds. I also like how trees sway in response to a nearby explosion: an excellent, immersive touch. Buildings could have some more detail in the interior (the majority are mostly empty concrete boxes), but overall the maps seem authentic enough. The much promoted destruction engine works well: almost all walls can be taken out with tank rounds, rocket-propelled grenades, or C4, and a whole building can collapse when enough structural damage has been wrought. Machine guns can also chip away at concrete barricades, giving you a nifty hiding place to snipe at enemy units. Soldier models are equipped with all of their real-world gear intact, and vehicles are detailed as well. There are also some special effects: being near fire turns the screen a reddish tint, and your view blurs while being suppressed. For all of this eye candy, Battlefield 3 runs well on relatively modest hardware at widescreen resolutions (1920 x 1080) on “high” settings. The sound design continues DICE’s strong pedigree in this area: immersive gunfire, explosions, and radio chatter fill the air as jets scream overhead. It’s not as groundbreaking as Bad Company 2 (maybe because we’re used to it by now), but it still works quite well. Overall, Battlefield 3 has a strong presentation that easily competes with and likely exceeds any game on the market.

ET AL.
As you are probably well aware, Battlefield 3 requires the use of EA’s proprietary download service, Origin. It offers more use than, say, Rockstar Games Social Club, and it’s about on par with the much maligned Games for Windows Live. I will say that I haven’t experienced any issues attributed directly to Origin (unlike those other two services): so far, so good. Also used for Battlefield 3 on the PC is the Battlelog, a browser-based service used to track stats, find friends, and join games. You now join games outside of the program, looking through a list in your Internet browser and the game starts up in the background once a free slot is found. This process doesn’t make joining a game any slower than before, although it’s more difficult to switch servers since you have to exit the game and then start it up again. I really like the plethora of stats that’s available to peruse from any device that can access the Internet, but Battlelog isn’t perfect: I don’t know if I completely believe all of the server pings and hardcore servers aren’t correctly identified. Still, it’s a much better browser than anything that’s been in a Battlefield title previously. There is a comprehensive amount of server customization options: bullet damage, player health, respawn time, 3-D and minimap spotting, regenerating health, and the kill cam can all be adjusted by the admin. However, I have experienced some crashes while joining a server (usually the first time I attempt to connect), the inability to join when the map is changing, the sporadic hacker, and the occasional overload of EA’s servers, but overall the process is tolerable.

Battlefield 3 features three main game modes: conquest, rush, and deathmatch. Conquest is familiar to Battlefield veteran players: flags are scattered around the map, and you can choose which one to conquer next. Rush only offers two objectives at a time that must be blown up by the attackers before their reinforcements expire. Personally, I prefer the more open conquest mode, where you can take multiple avenues to each objective. In Rush, you are forced down two or three linear paths towards a couple of close objectives, which concentrates the action but reduces tactical freedom. It can be tough to balance a Rush map, with the defensive side always gaining the inherent advantage of going prone and waiting for attackers, so most matches end with zero or one MCOM stations detonated. Deathmatch is, well, deathmatch, which doesn’t really fit too well in Battlefield 3’s open map design: spawn points seem to be scattered too far apart, instead of concentrating on one corner of the map to ensure constant action. Squad-based modes are also available for rush and deathmatch, pitting teams of four against each other. And you can’t forget about hardcore mode, which reduces player health by about half and removes some elements of the HUD (like the ammunition display). Although conquest is clearly the most popular game mode online, I’ll commend the developers for adding different options for different players.

Battlefield 3 takes place in Paris and Iran, and the game’s nine maps vary from small infantry-based urban locations to slightly larger, more open terrain. Every map can be used in every game mode. The two largest maps, Caspian Border and Kharg Island, are the closest to approaching Battlefield 2’s expansive nature with a complete selection of vehicles, while Operation Métro and Grand Bazaar are hallway-driven infantry battles (the remainder of the maps are in between in terms of scale). Overall, the maps are certainly not as terribly tiny and linear as the ones featured in Bad Company 2, but the scale of Battlefield 2 has all but been eliminated: even the largest maps in this version are roughly about two-thirds the size as before. A couple of the designs have judicious use of funneling chokepoints (I’m looking at you, subway and tunnel) and they are clearly designed for the consoles’ limitations rather than full-scale sixty-four player battles. We’ll see if the expansion maps from Battlefield 2 retain their original layouts. However, the smaller map size certainly does one thing: combat in Battlefield 3 is constant, as all of the players are in closer proximity to each other. This does make for some chaotic conflicts and removes the relaxed (boring?) transit time of Battlefield 2. The more I play, the more I am used to the contracted map layouts and I do enjoy the more frantic gameplay that results. Finding your way around the maps can be difficult as the minimap is appalling: everything is either blue or light blue, making it difficult to ascertain the terrain. There also isn’t a usable larger version of the layout when you are alive, and the spawn map can get cramped and is too subtle in indicating the selected spawn point. You really have to rely upon the 3-D map icons to figure out where to go. 3-D spotting has returned, which works fine: if the target ducks out of view, the red triangle of death disappears, giving potential victims a chance to avoid the expected incoming enemy fire. Icons are also displayed to indicate people who need ammunition, repair, or medical assistance, though the difference between a deployed ammo or healing pack (a circle) and someone who needs ammo or healing (a square) is a bit understated.

You’ll quickly notice that the classes of Battlefield 2 have undergone an overhaul and simplification, with the medic and assault classes and the anti-tank soldier and engineer combined. This is fine with me as it leads to more flexibility: you’re no longer stuck with a useless RPG and submachine gun if the tank you were hunting blows up right after you respawn. You can’t change classes during a single life, though, which is a bit disappointing: I’d like to be able to alter my strategy if I stay alive long enough (you can, however, pick up a dead soldier’s kit). In addition, you can run out of ammunition if you survive long enough, so being near support soldiers and your other teammates is recommended. You’ll also notice that there is not a commander; instead, all of those abilities have been moved to the evil recon class in the form of unlocks. Overall, I like the balance that has been struck with the classes, and each has its role on the battlefield. Each class gets a primary weapon, sidearm, two gadgets, and a specialization like faster sprint speed, more grenades, or reduced suppression. The combat medic gets an assault rifle, medic kit, and a choice of the defibrillator or grenade launcher when you unlock them. The engineer gets a carbine, rocket launcher, and repair tool. The support class gains access to sub and full machine guns, ammunition supplies, and C4 explosive (which is great fun to use when you unlock it, making your own doors into buildings). Finally, the recon class gets a sniper rifle and unlockable items like a motion sensor, artillery marker, and UAV. You are placed into four-person squads, and you can spawn near any squad member (or a plane, which should, in theory, reduce the people waiting on the runway for the next jet) to get to the frontlines faster. The Battlelog lets you voice chat with friends (but not members of your squad), and the game includes a half-assed command rose clearly added in at the last minute; where are my “need ammo” and “need medic” and “bail out” orders? Finally, Battlefield 3 includes an array of vehicles: jeeps, APCs, tanks, anti-air vehicles, helicopters, and jets are all found on the battlefield in their specific roles. The vehicles control well enough and are fun to drive, but the mouse sensitivity for machine gun positions (but, oddly, not main turrets) is really low and cannot be adjusted. The availability of vehicles leaves a bit to be desired: while there are enough tanks, more jeeps would be nice at the home base and intermediate control points, especially when sixty-four players are in a game. Of course, most of the maps are small enough where you can simply run to the next objective, which takes some of the epic feel (and, conversely, tedium) out of the game by removing the requirement to mount up and use motorized transportation between capture points.

To say that there are a lot of unlocks in Battlefield 3 is a vast understatement. While you play, you gain experience for all sorts of things: kills, reviving, repairing, resupplying, spotting, suppression, and kill assists. You get the same number of points for a kill than reviving an ally, which is nice, and more points are earned for helping out squad members. Weapon-specific attachments (a sight and two additional items) must be earned only with kills, however. What types of things can you unlock? Additional weapons, the aforementioned defibrillator paddles, plus scopes of varying magnifications (3X to 12X), holographic sights, and the soon-to-be-infamous infrared scope. The IR attachment highlights enemy soldiers in bright yellow, allowing you to see through foliage; it’s a terrible cheat given to players who have one hundred kills with a specific weapon. Less offensive attachments include foregrips, bipods, tactical lights (useful indoors to blind enemies but not so nice for friendly soldiers), laser sights, suppressors, and extended magazines. Vehicle upgrades are also present: smoke, additional machine guns, visual zoom, radar scan, laser guided missiles, and jammers. Having unlocks are OK: I have no problem with extra guns or unlocks that offer tradeoffs (like increased accuracy for decreased damage, for example). But I do have a problem with having to unlock basic class items (like the defibrillator paddles for the combat medic) and the scopes that are required for the medium-to-long distance engagements common on the larger maps. Granted, you only need ten kills to unlock the first rifle scope, but that’s still ten kills you have to get using the iron sights while everyone else is using a scope. Brink had it right: give newcomers all the basic tools for each class from the start.

Battlefield 3 features less soldier health than previous titles in the series: typically, three decent shots are enough for a kill this time around (less on a “hardcore” server). To counter this, soldiers are given essentially infinite sprint and prone. While obviously not realistic, sprint does make it easier to traverse the larger maps, and it’s more difficult for camping snipers (and other classes) to hit you, so it’s not all bad news. Prone is a welcome feature after playing far too many shooters (past Battlefields included) without it; used in combination with the abundant foliage present on most of the levels, you can sneak undetected into a base, assuming the enemy is not equipped with an infrared scope. In general, cautious, planned movement between cover is usually a recipe for success. Mantling over low walls is also present, but it’s not really any different than jumping (you just get to see your legs). Going prone and then immediately being able to shoot has been removed with the addition of a pause through additional frames of animation, which is nice. Grenade spam has also been reduced as soldiers can only carry one (until upgrades are unlocked) initially.

It can be annoying to be revived by a medic and immediately killed. Because of this, Battlefield 3 (like Brink) allows you to refuse or slightly delay a revive, so you are not immediately in harm's way. The support class gets an enhanced role in Battlefield 3 thanks to suppression. If you constantly fire towards an enemy position, their view blurs. Red Orchestra 2’s black-and-white effect is much better, and it’s usually easier to just kill them, but suppression does play a significant enough role when your teammates are smart enough to flank the enemy who is under fire. Machine guns can also be deployed on the ground, low walls, and windows, which improves accuracy (but obviously decreases mobility). Other minor features include a white scope glint so you can pick out snipers (really appreciated), significant RPG drop where it’s harder to hit tanks at a distance, and regenerating health. Ah, yes, regenerating health is in for both soldiers and vehicles: stay still for long enough and your health will slowly creep back up. However, you can disable a tank and prevent it from moving while it can still fire and kill you dead. Still, this makes the medics and engineers less important, and the overall experience seems less plausible (because jumping out of a moving tank uninjured is totally realistic). If you knife someone from behind, you get a canned animation and their dog tags, which I suppose shows the world how l33t you are. Lastly, default servers include a killcam that shows where your assailant is for future reference: handy to find campers.

IN CLOSING
Battlefield 3 is a great addition to the proud series, a combination of past themes and current innovations in the first person shooter genre. My primary complaints are two-fold: unlocks and the reduced size of the maps. The unlocks inherently make the game unfair to newcomers, as people who bought the game day-one will have access to more powerful scopes (including the hated infrared attachment) and extra tools to dominate the battlefield with. Much-needed items come quickly, but you still have to suffer through a number of rounds where you can’t do much to help your team. The maps are smaller than Battlefield 2 (but much larger than Bad Company 2), a couple of the designs rely too heavily on clogged chokepoints, and the minimap is awful, but the more concentrated design does put you in the action faster. The gameplay is quite entertaining: the guns are deadly and battles are quick, while the reduced player health makes going prone near cover and advancing with your squad members very important. The ability to deploy machine guns for added accuracy, suppress enemy units, locate snipers based on their scope glint, and delay or refuse medic revives add to the more polished and rewarding gameplay experience. The ability to sprint for long distances makes traversing the maps on foot plausible, especially when the availability of basic transit vehicles might not meet demand. The tanks, helicopters, jets, jeeps, and anti-air vehicles that are included are all fun to play and a worry to opposing infantry, but they can be countered by RPGs or C4. Four-person squads can spawn on any member or in a newly built aircraft, but coordination is reduced with the inability to communicate with squad members through voice coupled with the crippled command rose. Origin and Battlelog are experiencing some growing pains, but finding servers and perusing stats through a web browser works well overall. The three game modes have something for everyone, and the graphics are outstanding. Simply put, any fan of online first person shooters should ensure Battlefield 3 is installed on their hard drive.

Stronghold 3 Review

2011-10-30T09:19:00.001-04:00

Stronghold 3, developed by Firefly Studios and published by 7Sixty.
The Good: Multifaceted economy and production, robust castle construction, two campaigns, multiplayer, map editor, online leaderboards, you can make candles!
The Not So Good: Very few innovations, atrociously challenging and no difficulty settings, excruciating slow pace, imprecise mouse input, repetitive mission objectives, occasional bugs, light on content
What say you? Little more than a visual update of the classic series with many new issues: 4/8

This review also appears at

UPDATE, 11/23/11: Patches have fixed the mouse input issue, added difficulty settings, and allowed the user to adjust the game speed. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
While most strategy games has you go on the offensive, sometimes it’s fun to play the defender, carefully preparing your protection to fend off the unwelcome visitors. The ever-growing tower defense game cashes in on this concept, but I would argue that its origin was seen in the original Stronghold, an entertaining combination of harvesting resources, building castles, and dumping hot oil on unsuspecting enemies (I still remember the game addressing you by name, and reminding you when it was getting late). This solid first outing was followed by a series of increasingly disappointing sequels, but the “reset” button has been pressed in the newest iteration: Stronghold 3. Hoping to add more polished gameplay with updated graphics, does Stronghold 3 revive a series on the defensive?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Stronghold 3 transitions to 3-D with mixed results. The highlight of the graphics is the physics-driven destruction: castle walls plausibly fall towards the ground, which is much more effective than scripted degradation. This goes a long way to making some impressive combat where chaos reigns supreme. The buildings aren't the best thanks to some bland, low-resolution textures, and the terrain features too much green terrain and not enough detail. Animations are obviously repetitive but effective enough, while the units themselves are small but distinctive. Stronghold 3 features pop-in (namely grass and shadows) when zooming in, even when set to “ultra,” and objects clipping through each other (namely massed military units) is much too common. The interface hasn't changed much in ten years (in fact, the build menu is identical): while I like the concrete breakdown of your approval rating, the minimap is terribly uninformative. In addition, the using the mouse for orders is inconsistent: sometimes you need to point below a unit, sometimes above, and sometimes directly on them in order to attack, which allows units to completely ignore nearby enemies simply because you can’t figure out where to point (this adds significantly to the game difficulty). Stronghold 3 also suffers from the occasional crash to the desktop and oddity, like the inability to change the screen resolution from the main menu (it must be done while playing a mission). The sound design is nothing spectacular: appropriate battle sound effects with over-the-top and repetitive voice acting when units are selected. The music is appropriate and entertaining, however. While some aspects of Stronghold 3's graphics shine, most is a assortment of highs and lows.

ET AL.
Like previous titles in the series, Stronghold 3 features both military and economic campaigns to fulfill both sides of the castle management equation. In the eight economic scenarios, you must collect a specific number of goods within a time limit. In the seventeen military missions, you must take over enemy castles (or defend your own) within a time limit (usually). The variety leaves a lot to be desired, and the story isn't interesting enough to pay attention to. You are supplied some optional hints before you begin, which are recommended because the scenarios are outrageously difficult, typically involving extremely high resource requirements, brief time limits, and magically spawning AI at the most inopportune times. Of course, you are not offered any difficulty settings to tailor the game towards your experience level. Hey developer: who are you to say how good I will be at your game? Does everyone have the same level of skill? I would think not. And the developers seem to have completely missed the mark for me, as I was unable to beat any of the scenarios except for the first one (luckily, I edited the profile XML file so that I could play all of the missions without having to beat the previous one). In addition, Stronghold 3 does not feature time acceleration; not only does resource collection take a really long time (thanks to multi-step processes that are each executed at a snail’s pace), but you could be wasting your time since you might not pass the scenario anyway. Stronghold 3 does feature a neat online leaderboard, complete with a map displaying where each score originated around the globe, for the lucky few that have experienced success.

Beyond the twenty-five campaign scenarios lie (only) two free build maps with no objectives, (only) five historic sieges where you can attack or defend, and the ability to create your own custom maps using the editor (buried in the Steam install directory) and then play them. Stronghold 3 also comes with multiplayer for four player deathmatch; a patch expected soon will add additional game modes (king of the hill and capture the flag) and more maps (beyond the four current offerings) for up to eight players. Finally, Stronghold 3 has a decent tutorial to teach the basics of the game to newcomers.

The key to success in Stronghold 3 is to have a thriving economy. It takes lots of work to make an imposing castle! Raw materials (wood, stone, iron, and oil) must be gathered (very slowly) by peasant workers and carried back to your stockpile. Additionally, everyone must be fed, so apples, cheese, meat, and bread must be grown and processed (wheat makes flour makes bread) at different buildings. It can be difficult to determine exactly how much food is being produced and consumed, as the numbers change in real-time as items are produced; there is no access to long-term average to figure out whether you can increase the rations. Any resource deficiency can be traded for using the market (at a huge expense, though), and estates that (rarely) dot the landscape can be captured for supplemental goods. Peasants must be housed, and the game determines which house you want to construct based on (I think) the distance from the keep. Peasants cannot be reassigned in their jobs, so if you need more stone than wood, you have to completely shut down the woodcutter and hope the peasants choose the quarry instead. Upgrades are earned by having banquets, and those require even more specialized goods like venison, vegetables, honey, wine, and clothes. Tax income in the form of gold is used to purchase troops (you must also produce each weapon at a specific building from the raw goods).

In order for people to move in to your quaint castle in the woods, you should make a happy little village by supplying food, beer, and church (the three pillars of medieval society). Churches now require candles (produced by a chandler), so that’s something new to worry about. Of course, you can choose to be a total jerk and adorn your castle with torture devices and severed heads. Why? Even though the cheerfulness will obviously suffer, your minions will work harder. If you can afford the happiness hit (by lowering taxes or providing more food), you can get those peasants to produce faster. Occasional events (rain, sun, wolves, bears) can also have a daily impact on the happiness of your settlement; these are nice touches that make you scramble just when your economy is balanced. It is difficult to keep things flowing smoothly, as it’s very easy to “crash” your economy by not producing enough of something, causing people to leave, preventing you from producing that particular good even more. If all this sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it was all in Stronghold 1, outside of the candles, vegetables, and estates. I wish Stronghold 3 brought more innovation than that to the table.

Stronghold 3 gives you all the tools needed to construct your temple of solitude while storming others. Walls, gates, towers, bastions, traps, moats, ditch, oil, logs, and flaming arrows are all there, and you are given a good amount of freedom in constructing your castle, and connecting walls, gates, and towers is straightforward. Military units are created by manufacturing the weapons and then outfitting spare peasants with those tools of death. Typical medieval choices are present: bows, crossbows, spears, pikes, maces, swords, and armor. Units are controlled using typical RTS-style commands: group selection, stances (aggressive, defensive, and stand ground), and movement orders (attack, move, dig moats, use ladders, and, of course, launch cows). Formations are poorly implemented: square and line groups will not move at the same speed, negating the point of placing units in formation in the first place. Your AI opponents are good enough, attacking vulnerable portions of a castle and then using appropriate units most (but not all) of the time. You’ll mostly be battling the clock and resource requirements, though.

IN CLOSING
Unfortunately, Stronghold 3 doesn’t add anything significant to the series. Candles are required for churches, honor is needed for upgrades, and estates can be captured (when they are rarely placed) around the map to secure some additional resources, but the remainder of the game is virtually identical to previous efforts. While this will appease fans of the series, you would also like to see something dramatic and pioneering in a sequel beyond a simple graphical upgrade. Stronghold 3 centers on collecting raw materials so you can make food, buildings, defenses, and weapons to repel enemy attacks while keeping your population happy. The relationships consist of several steps (like wheat to flour to bread) produced in different buildings, but they are easy enough to grasp. A variety of defensive structures and military units are available, and the open-ended nature of castle design is appreciated. The direct relationship between your economy and military makes providing a solid fiscal footing important, which is generally impossible given the high, unwavering difficulty of the game coupled with the ease at which you can completely destroy your economy. The multiple campaigns highlight either the production or combative portions of the game, and the objectives are repetitive and, frankly, insane. You can't adjust the difficulty to your liking, and thus you must obey the stringent, unrealistic requirements bestowed upon you by the developers. If you are not completely efficient, you'll have to retry missions time and time again. The ancillary features are brief: two free-build maps, five historic sieges, and multiplayer that may feature non-deathmatch modes in the future. The game is also rife with curiosities such as infrequent crashes and imprecise mouse-driven attack orders that really compound the difficulty. Personally, I'd just rather spend $6 on Stronghold than pay eight times that for disturbingly similar content and difficulty issues.

Air Conflicts - Secret Wars Review

2011-10-24T15:16:00.000-04:00

Air Conflicts - Secret Wars, developed by 3DIVISION and Games Farm and published by bitComposer Games and Kalypso Media.
The Good: Accessible controls, robust multiplayer modes
The Not So Good: Brief missions with repetitive mission objectives, subpar AI, lacks realistic simulation options, no dynamic campaign
What say you? This thoroughly arcade flight simulation has a disappointing campaign but decent multiplayer: 5/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Once a hallmark of PC development, the flight simulation has seen better days. Since Microsoft shut down their development house, few notable titles have been released, and those that have (such as Cliffs of Dover) have failed to live up to expectations. Enter Air Conflicts - Secret Wars from developers 3DIVISION and Games Farm, the former being the author of arcade flight simulation Attack on Pearl Harbor (a game that, not surprisingly, Air Conflicts - Secret Wars has a lot of similarities to). The game is primarily set during World War II, but introduces some planes from The Great War, jet aircraft, and rockets, so that you know for sure it’s not trying to be totally authentic. Will Air Conflicts - Secret Wars soar like the majestic eagle, or stay grounded like the stinky ostrich?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
The graphics of Air Conflicts - Secret Wars are mixed. This game will inevitable gain comparisons to IL-2 Sturmovik, a game that’s (can you believe it?) ten years old. Sadly, Air Conflicts - Secret Wars pales in comparison to that historic, ancient title on the graphics front. The plane models are detailed and authentic, as expected in any flight simulation, though damage is less precise: smoke and little bits flying off the body when shot, but nothing too meticulous. Machine gun fire have pleasing tracers that fill the sky, though the explosions are only passable. The biggest area that needs improvement is the terrain: bland desert, forest, and snowy environments have poor textures with cookie-cutter urban environments dotting the landscape. Weather effects are underwhelming, and flying into the sun causes a really annoying red tint to fill the screen. On the sound front, the weapon effects are appropriate and dramatic music fills the air as you aim your sights at the enemy. Air Conflicts - Secret Wars lacks radio chatter and the voice acting is forced. Overall, the presentation of Air Conflicts - Secret Wars is below the $30 asking price.

ET AL.
You are a mercenary pilot, daughter of a famous flying ace, soaring through World War II for fun and/or profit. Flashbacks to your father’s Word War I escapades makes things slightly more varied as you traverse through the game’s seven locations, each containing seven missions each. This might sound like a lengthy campaign, but each mission typically takes less than ten minutes to complete and your objectives are repeated over and over again: fly here, kill these units, find this place, escort him for a while. Some of the missions in the campaign are stealth-based, where you must avoid white circles indicated on your radar display; these are more annoying than challenging. I quickly lost interest in finding out where the campaign went next. The missions are very easy on any difficulty setting, even when you are commonly outnumbered. In addition, you unlock the next mission in a set order: Air Conflicts - Secret Wars lacks a dynamic campaign that would make it feel like you were contributing to a larger conflict. You cannot save your progress mid-mission (although there are occasional checkpoints if you die), but since the missions are never very long, it’s not really that big of an issue. If you encounter an especially annoying mission, you can skip two scenarios during the campaign.

In addition to the repetitive campaign, Air Conflicts - Secret Wars features a skirmish dogfighting mode where you can take on the enemy AI by yourself, attaining a specific number of kills or surviving for a period of time. Far more interesting is multiplayer, which is the most complete feature of Air Conflicts - Secret Wars. There are four games modes (deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, and a mode where you try to destroy ten enemy tanks while protecting your own) in twenty-four locations, all of which are fairly entertaining. The game host can set a time limit, types of permitted aircraft, and weather conditions. You can only have up to eight pilots at a time, which is probably why I found multiplayer to be almost entirely lag-free, if you can connect to the player-hosted servers. You can also join a game in progress, a welcome feature that means less waiting for online flight combat. However, the pervasive high plane health that plagues the campaign also impacts multiplayer: getting one or two kills in a five-minute session is usually the best score.

Several control methods are available for piloting your winged craft of doom. I prefer using the mouse for more precise aiming, but you can also use the keyboard (yuck), a gamepad, or a joystick. Controls are what you would expect for an arcade flight simulator: a non-complicated method with no dials to fiddle with, just movement and speed options. Your weapons include traditional machine guns and bombs with more exotic rockets (an important part of World War II?). The machine guns do overheat, but do so slowly: unless you continually hold down the “fire” button for thirty seconds, you’ll never have to worry about it. You are also given adrenaline, which slows down time so that you can aim more carefully, and a radio-based location thing that pulses faster when you get closer to an objective. The heads-up display (which you can disable) gives you a lead indicator for enemy planes to make engaging the opposition easier, and lower difficulty levels actually include automatic aiming: get anywhere near the lead indicator with your reticule and your guns snap to the correct position. Air Conflicts - Secret Wars is clearly aimed at a novice crowd, at least until you amp up the difficult and disable the visual help.

Air Conflicts - Secret Wars features sixteen planes from World War I, World War II, and beyond. The fighters, bombers, fighter-bombers, and jets are differentiated according to firepower, speed, agility, and endurance (health, I think). The arcade flight model makes any of the planes very easy to fly: while you can see differences in turning radius and speed, I never found any a challenge to operate, and it’s impossible to stall unless you decrease the throttle significantly or fly straight up in the air. There is a small amount of red-out when pulling G’s, but nothing to significantly obscure your view. While Air Conflicts - Secret Wars does offer a “simulation” mode, I’d be hard-pressed to say what, exactly, it does, other than making you stall more. In either case, your plane takes an incredible amount of damage, even on the toughest setting. This might be a good thing, however, as the enemy anti-air guns are insanely accurate. The AI is poor on any difficulty setting: while they will engage you on occasion, they fly slowly and rarely perform evasive maneuvers as you fill them with led. The allied units aren’t any better and provide little assistance; for example, escorted units simply fly in circles (instead of fleeing towards base, as the objectives clearly state), waiting for you to destroy all of the enemy aircraft yourself.

IN CLOSING
Air Conflicts - Secret Wars is an average arcade combat flight title, and that's all it is. Those whom crave more accuracy in their flight sims will be very disappointed that no options exist to tailor to their specific desires. I would rather have the game appeal to both crowds by offering accessible controls, or more realistic handling if desired. There is a “simulation” control option, but the only thing I think it does is make you stall more. As it stands, you get planes that can withstand a tremendous amount of damage, simplified flight physics, and unintelligent AI opponents that love to fly slowly so you can destroy them easily. This is independent of the difficulty setting: even on ace, the game never makes things even close to being challenging. Artistic freedom is also employed in the weapons: World War II planes are outfitted with rockets and jet engines, plus adrenaline that slows time down so you can pinpoint your attacks. Despite consisting of almost 50 missions, the campaign features short, repetitive missions that get tiresome very quickly. However, I was pleasantly surprised at the comprehensive multiplayer features: there are multiple game modes on twenty-four maps, and you can join a match in progress at any time. While Air Conflicts - Secret Wars will definitely not appeal to the simulation crowd, the relaxed aeronautics finds a niche in the arcade realm of flight simulations if you love online action.

Orcs Must Die! Review

2011-10-20T15:14:00.000-04:00

Orcs Must Die!, developed and published by Robot Entertainment.
The Good: Significant number of traps, item use restriction requires planning, challenging map layouts with multiple paths and trap placement freedom, small penalty for death
The Not So Good: Becomes repetitive, inconsistent difficulty, no cooperative play, can't save progress mid-level, more varied personal weapons would be nice
What say you? This third-person tower defense game thrives on its item variety and strategy: 6/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
A popular fantasy antagonist is the orc: stinky, green, ugly creatures bent on the destruction of humanity. Oh who will defend the women and children against the incoming horde? Some wimpy elves and midgets with a magic ring? Hardly. The orcs must die, and it's up to you, equipped with a healthy collection of traps strewn about your castle, to dispose of them on a personal level. The title “Orcs Must Die!” leaves little to vague interpretation: place the traps and shoot the orcs in the head. How does this third-person take on the tower defense genre stack up?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Orcs Must Die! features some nice graphics for an indie game. The character models are quite detailed and animated nicely, from your hero to the roster of enemy units. The game is bloody without being overly gory, striking a nice balance. The levels are a little bland, as all of the maps take place in gray castles differentiated only by slight ambient color changes and the occasional vat of fire or acid. Your weapons and items are easy to discern based on visuals, and they are also animated well (burning orcs when using the fire crossbow is a nice visual...not for them, of course). The game features a fitting soundtrack and sound effects, though it tries too hard to be funny with the various lines the main character and enemy say (though I did find a couple of them humorous). Overall, I found the presentation of Orcs Must Die! to be quite solid with little room for improvement.

ET AL.
In Orcs Must Die!, you are defending rifts to the human world that are conveniently placed in maze-like castles. The game consists of nearly twenty-five levels, and each successful completion unlocks a new weapon or device, a good carrot to dangle in front of players. Uneven difficulty is present: commonly, there are hard levels followed by much easier ones. A single level takes about ten minutes to complete, depending on the number of waves of enemies that will try to enter the rift. Unfortunately, you can’t save your progress in the middle of a level, a problem for people who tend to be interrupted during play time. Orcs Must Die! lacks cooperative play, but it does offer online scoreboards as motivation to go back and improve your plans in previous levels.

Orcs Must Die! works like a tower defense game, except you are also present in the level, able to assist your items in eliminating the orc threat with third-person shooting. Your arsenal is a bit limited: you are given ranged and melee weapons of various kinds (arrows, fire, electricity), but the game lacks interesting magic spells to vary your strategy much. You can push enemies into vats of lava or acid using the wind spell, but more diverse options are not present. You can spend points to upgrade certain abilities during each map, and each weapon has a primary and secondary ability, but I would like a little more variety borrowed from your favorite role-playing game.

Your primary role is to pick off orcs that sneak by your defenses, but you can also use your abilities in tandem with the innovative and varied selection of traps you can place in your castles. There are many items to choose from (once you unlock them during the campaign): explosives, close-range spikes, longer-range arrows, speed modifiers, things that get orcs airborne, crushing devices, and so on, that attach to the ground, walls, or ceiling. Points given at the beginning of each map and earned for killing orcs are spent on placing more traps, and you can also upgrade traps between maps using points derived from your score. You'll quickly find your favorite items (the arrow wall, for me) and use them every level while completely ignoring other items that are either useless or more expensive. Interestingly, Orcs Must Die! restricts how many items you can use at a time, so you really have to think about which traps work together the best on each map layout based on environmental items and hallway width. Orcs Must Die! is also one of the least restrictive tower defense games, letting you place things pretty much anywhere. A poorly executed plan will quickly become apparent as you panic to shoot the orcs that have made it way too close to the rift.

Orcs Must Die! is challenging without being too unfair, although, as I mentioned earlier, the game suffers from an inconsistent ramping up of difficulty. There are plenty of enemy types you will encounter: the basic melee unit, ranged fighters, flying monsters, large bosses, and fast (annoying) crawlers. The AI is obviously not too smart (on purpose), running over traps where they could easily go around them, but the map design allows for them to take multiple paths to the rift, so you must divide your attention, leaving other areas of the map open to assault. You can't sit back and let your traps do all of your work, so you'll constantly be taking shots at the enemy as they march through your fortress. The minimap helps in identifying areas of concern as you attempt to destroy everyone. Your character does take damage, but the penalty for death is thankfully small: you lose some cash and respawn instantly at the rift. This isn’t enough to lose a level for you, which is a smart design decision. You can reheal at the rift, but the penalty for death is small enough where it’s almost better just to die and take the small resource hit instead of walking all the way back there. While Orcs Must Die! does throw new items at you every new level, you've seen pretty much all of the game's tricks after the first set of levels, and only true fans of the genre will stick through until the end.

IN CLOSING
Orcs Must Die! is a nice variation on the tower defense genre. The game is highlighted by its varied arsenal of destruction: there is an impressive number of traps to place around each castle level, and the design of the fortress plays a large role in determining which traps you'll take in to battle. Since you are restricted in how many items you can use during each level, forethought is required before you even start placing things: which objects work best together on this level? Orcs Must Die! also gives you a good amount of freedom in placing your items as well, letting the player make the call. I would like to see more magic introduced into the player's arsenal, however, as you're only given basic ranged and melee combat options. The enemies require different approaches, with the flying, fast, and big types being the most problematic. The game's twenty-five levels suffer from some imbalance, as a really difficult level is followed by an exceedingly easy one. Still, the layouts are quite varied and usually offer multiple paths towards the goal that demand some advanced thinking and quick reactions to defend. I do prefer Orcs Must Die! over its direct competition Sanctum, thanks to its more varied arsenal of items and more complex map layouts. The repetitive nature of the genre does creep in after the first set of levels, even though you earn a new toy after every completion to keep you motivated. You can aim for the high score list and attempt to create the most efficient death creations, so Orcs Must Die! does have some replay value for fans of the tower defense genre. In the end, Orcs Must Die! is a slick combination of tower defense and shooting that falls victim to the repetitive shortcomings of the genre.

Off-Road Drive Review

2011-10-18T15:09:00.000-04:00

Off-Road Drive, developed by 1C-Avalon and published by 1C Company.
The Good: Unique realistic take on off-road navigation, tough tracks with frequent obstacles, numerous locations and cars with minor tuning options
The Not So Good: Complex control scheme, tutorial gives incorrect instructions, no difficulty settings, iffy multiplayer hosting
What say you? This challenging and authentic off-road racing game offers realistic, measured driving: 6/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
In addition to popular track-based racing like F1, a whole different world of off-road adventures exist, highlighted in games like the DiRT series. However, even then the races take place on roads and never really venture “off road.” To rectify this injustice, Off-Road Drive features off-road driving. Weird, I know! But now, it’s deep water, loose mud, and gigantic rocks, substances that were never really meant to be driven over. So it’s just you, your trusty 4x4, and the clock in a race to scale the highest mountain, wettest sand, and that spectator that’s looking at you funny.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
The graphics of Off-Road Drive are pretty good. First, the various tracks look like real-world environments, complete with plenty of detail: trees, rocks, hills, and high-resolution ground textures. There are some nice effects as well: mud gets squashed down by your tires (which changes the properties of the track) and thrown up on the screen, covering your vehicle in the process. Each of the cars are nicely detailed as well, with accurate (for fake cars) exteriors and interiors and animated drivers trying their best to navigate through the hazardous landscape. I will say that the default camera angle, because of the rough terrain, made me a little motion sick with how much it was bouncing around. The crowd that is standing dangerously close to an out-of-control motor vehicle cheers you on as you run head-on into another rock, completing the satisfying racing environment. The sound effects are decent, dominated by the generic and borderline-annoying music. Also included are seemingly accurate engine effects, environmental sounds, and some voiced instructions for the tutorial. Based on the strength of the graphics design, Off-Road Drive holds up to its $35 price tag with the presentation.

ET AL.
Off-Road Drive has you traversing the world’s most rocks/wet/hilly terrain in search for the fastest time to the finish. The career mode is quite extensive: six locations contain three or four championships of three races each, so you can spend a considerable amount of time checking off all the events. There are three types of races: timed sprints, points-based trophy runs, and sectional trials. In addition to the career mode, multiplayer is also present in Off-Road Drive, offering ten or so maps for each race type. You can adjust the number of laps, types of cars allowed, collisions, and number of players (up to four). I should report that I was not able to host any games, getting instantly kicked back to the main menu. As you will see, Off-Road Drive is a complex game, so there is a tutorial to teach you the basics. Unfortunately, the tutorial routinely says the wrong controls (like “LT” is accelerate, even when it’s “RT”), even on default settings. The on-screen prompts during the races are more helpful, but it’s difficult to recover when you start out on the wrong foot.

Off-Road Drive is far, far more than turn, accelerate, and brake. In fact, I’d wager to say Off-Road Drive is the most complex racing game I've ever encountered, playing more like a flight simulation than a traditional car-based title. In fact, Off-Road Drive is so complex that the game runs out of buttons on a gamepad, requiring the use of a modifier button to access some features. While you are carefully driving through the game, you’ll use more traditional options like four-wheel drive, lower gears, and the hand brake. However, you can also lock the wheel and axle differential, bleed or inflate the tire, and use the winch by selecting a tree and adjusting the power to prevent the tension from snapping the wire. One thing you should not use is automatic transmission: it does a terrible job shifting at the right times and using the correct gears. Figuring out when to use these tools is part of the challenge, made a little easier by on-screen suggestions at specific points in the race.

Off-Road Drive has twenty cars that unlock as you complete events, including sport utility vehicles, trucks, and buggies. They are distinguished according to torque, acceleration, handling, and off-road capability. You are given more tuning options to further tweak their attributes as well: different visual skins, suspensions to balance handling and off-road, and tires for hard, loose, or muddy terrain. The tracks throw all sorts of crazy challenges at you, from loose mud to deep water to sand to hills to rocks you are supposed to drive over. I assure you that you’ll get stuck. A lot. Heck, I got stuck in the tutorial. Since the races are timed events, you want to finish quickly, but not too quickly that you can’t drive over the barriers in your way. You must also stay on the racing line: there are time penalties, ironically, for going off the road. The AI is pretty slow (it's extrapolated from a single ghost car) and doesn’t mount a huge challenge unless you get stuck a lot; the lack of difficulty settings makes the track the only real obstacle.

IN CLOSING
If you’re looking for an authentic off-roading experience, look no further than Off-Road Drive. The advanced driving starts with the controls: you’ll need to handle four-wheel drive, wheel and axle differential, low gears, inflating tires, and when all else fails, the trusty winch. This is not a simple point-A-to-point-B racing game, that’s for sure: the challenging tracks feature a variety of tough conditions that you must navigate, introducing a strong element of strategy into your driving. The AI is pretty weak (the challenge comes from the tracks themselves), and since the game lacks difficulty settings, unless you get yourself stuck and rely on the winch too much, victory (or at least a good finish) is assured. The lengthy career mode takes place across the globe and features three different race types against the clock and AI ghost car. Twenty cars are gradually unlocked, offering different handling characteristics and minor tuning options. Multiplayer is also present, although I was never able to host a match. Learning the multifaceted control scheme is tough enough, but the tutorial constantly references the wrong commands (even on default settings), potentially confusing new drivers. Finally, the graphics are nice and put you in the mood for some off-road excitement. I think $35 is a bit steep for people who are only marginally interested in the game, but those looking for a different take on driving will find an appealing product.

Dawn of Fantasy Review

2011-10-15T14:49:00.000-04:00

Dawn of Fantasy, developed by Reverie World Studios and published by 505 Games.
The Good: Three game modes, can attack others online, large battles, competent AI, editor
The Not So Good: Unnecessarily drawn-out building and resource collection, shallow city management and diplomacy, generic fantasy units, bland quests, underdeveloped online features, terrible lack of thorough in-game documentation, bugs
What say you? An arduous pace and a lack of innovative strategy and city management makes this MMO one to forget: 3/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
When the Moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planets, and love with steer the stars. This is the Dawn of...Fantasy? Yes, as I await a lawsuit by the RIAA for unauthorized use of song lyrics, it's time to delve into a new real time strategy game set in a fantasy kingdom, complete with humans, ugly green humans, and pointy-eared humans with long, flowing hair. But what's this, Dawn of Fantasy has added the ever-expanding “MMO” tag to my RTS? Indeed, as you expand your kingdom online, you can engage other human-type folk in epic battles of epic epicness. Epic! Does this permutation of strategy gaming serve notice as an original product?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
The 3-D graphics of Dawn of Fantasy are decidedly mixed. The environments look great, with plenty of detail in the trees, grass, water, fog, snow, rocks, and forts that adorn the countryside. The units are worse off, with a mix of detailed models (notably horses) and blocks ones (the people riding the horses) with rough animations. Battles are large and can be impressive in their scale, with plenty of bloodshed to go around. The game doesn't zoom out far enough, however, so it can be hard to manage your troops. In addition, game performance is very inconsistent: it's usually smooth, but hiccups are common and definitely noticeable. The woes don't stop there: there is significant clipping between units (with your military moving right through each other), looping sound when loading a level, and various bugs, from randomly not saving quest progress to disappearing orders to your view not moving to where you clicked on the minimap. It all adds up to a unpolished experience that needs additional massaging in the future. The sound design is average: I found the voice acting to be better than I had expected, battle sounds to be repetitive, and music to be generically fitting to the fantasy setting. While Dawn of Fantasy does hit some high points in terms of graphical design, overall it falls short of true notoriety.

ET AL.
Dawn of Fantasy is a real-time strategy game taken online for massively multiplayer online enjoyment, featuring the ever-enduring struggle between Humans, Orcs, and Elves, three races that have never been featured in any fantasy game. Being an online game, you first have to initialize your client and check a list of files for integrity, a long process when patches must be downloaded. The main portion of the game takes place in the online kingdom, where you found a city and build new structures, hire troops, go on quests, and engage both human and AI enemy armies and towns. The first step is to pick two town traits, specializations that will accentuate the production of resources or troops in your village. Despite being online, a majority of the online kingdom is played solo: none of the quests can be completed cooperatively. While you can attack other players’ towns and troops, you can’t take control of their villages even if you successfully siege them, only receiving a token bonus of resources for all of your hard work. Thus, the persistent online world of Dawn of Fantasy remains static as nothing changes hands. The quests are repetitive attack or build tasks; just accept everything and you’ll slowly build up your town using the rewards for completing each quest.

There are two other game modes in Dawn of Fantasy. The first is kingdom wars, played offline against the AI, where you start with a city or two (depending on the size of the map you have selected) and must recruit troops, move armies, and take over hostile cities. In each city, you can tweak the production of the game’s resources, trade items, and heal or upgrade troops. Once you have a large enough army, you can march out into the wilderness and attack enemy towns, setting up camp outside the city limits to build siege weapons or recruit mercenaries. For neutral villages, shallow diplomatic options are available: monetary gifts, trade agreements, and alliances. The only real strategic decisions in this mode are how many troops to bring and where to bring them. The third game option is a skirmish mode that has you attack or defend a castle, given a set of troops you can partially choose before the assault begins. These encounters become repetitive after your first battle, since most castle sieges work the same way.

Dawn of Fantasy makes it exceedingly difficult to learn how to play. There is no manual and no tutorial, and the vague in-game documentation doesn't address half of the game mechanics. Despite the relatively straightforward nature of the game, I still expect a full explanation of how things work. The game does, however, include a scenario editor with scripting abilities so you can create your own maps and missions.

There are four main resources in Dawn of Fantasy: food, wood, gold, and stone. These are gathered by sending peasants to specific points on the map, and they will (very slowly) gather them up. Resource collection can be influenced by the weather: for example, crops aren’t gathered during the winter, so you must rely on hunting animals instead. While this might have been interesting in theory, in practice it just means more micromanagement. The buildings are generic and lack innovation: resource structures, unit producers, trade posts, and research facilities that are found in pretty much every strategy game. There are only superficial decisions to make regarding which building or upgrade to invest in next. The biggest problem with Dawn of Fantasy is time: it takes entirely too long to gather resources and build things. What is too long, you say? I’m gathering gold at the rate of 0.6 per minute, and it costs 412 gold to build a barracks. So, it will take around ten real hours to afford to build it, and then another eight real hours to actually construct it. That’s how long I’m waiting to get troops (not to mention the additional resource cost and build time for each squad of units). Who is going to tolerate that? Not me: I actually would like to play, instead of waiting almost an entire day for no reason. Does waiting make the game more strategic? No. Does waiting make the game more fun? No. Does waiting make the game more immersive? No. What it does is make me hit the “exit game” button more quickly, and play something else (or go on a vacation) while I wait for my workers to collect gold and build things. I doubt a lot of people will choose to go back. Dawn of Fantasy practically begs you to log in for a couple of minutes, queue up a building, go on one quest, and then leave for the rest of the day. You really need to have more than one kingdom running at a time to cut down on the boredom. There’s been many times I simply can’t do anything because I have to wait hours for resources and/or buildings that I need to make the armies to finish the quests. There’s a reason that we’ve never seen a strategy game where it takes half a week of real time to build a military unit.

Speaking of military units, Dawn of Fantasy does feature some massive battles thanks to the use of squad-based groups: a single goblin raider, for example, actually consists of 30 units on the screen, amplifying the amount of carnage seen during battle. There is hardly any difference between the three races, as everyone has access to the basic unit types: melee, cavalry, ranged, and siege. Dawn of Fantasy uses the classic melee-beats-cavalry-beats-ranged-beats-melee balancing (I hope I have that right), so it’s pretty easy to figure out whom to attack with what. Units gain experience over time, and their health or attack can be upgraded. You are given some basic options for formations, mainly spacing for your infantry units to lessen the impact of ranged fire. Combat has some issues, of course. It can take a couple of seconds to units to notice nearby enemy units before engaging them, a problem when so many units are in a gigantic group and it’s difficult to give specific attack instructions. Also, pathfinding is very inconsistent: you can have two units leave from the same location going to the same destination and take completely different routes. While the game does provide a handy listing of all your military groups along the left-hand side of the screen, peasants disappear occasionally for some reason and they cannot find resource locations that are out of their field of view (so you must move them near a gold mine before ordering them to mine gold). The AI seems to be OK, although it’s hard to tell when most of the land battles involve a huge mass of units clipping into each other and the sieges are equally as messy. Still, I found the AI to be competent in storming a castle and engaging my troops with appropriate counters, so there are no obvious shortcomings here.

IN CLOSING
Dawn of Fantasy plays like a poor-man’s version of Stronghold. The addition of online components is only mildly interesting: you can attack other armies and towns, but you can’t keep the towns and the game clearly focuses on single-player quests and town expansion. I can’t emphasize enough how slow the game is, with resource collection and building construction literally taking hours, if not days, of real time; I suppose you are meant to undertake quests (or sleep) while the house takes fifteen minutes, the blacksmith takes six hours, and wood is gathered at the rate of one log per minute. When it takes several real-world days to be able to afford your first units, people are certain to lose interest. Sure, this makes the game technically have more longevity, but that doesn’t make it better. The three races (Humans, Orcs, and Elves) are indistinct and vary little in their overall strategy: each side has access to the usual types of units (melee, ranged, cavalry, and siege) that gain experience over time. The AI seems decent enough and the battles are quite large, but lack complex strategy. The military-driven kingdom wars mode and siege-heavy skirmish games are both forgettable alternatives to the online kingdoms. Dawn of Fantasy is also hard on new players, as there is no tutorial, no manual, and poor in-game documentation that barely covers the game’s mechanics. The graphics are impressive when zoomed out, but the textures and model animations fall short when viewing the battle up close. In addition, Dawn of Fantasy suffers from an unpolished presentation, with performance issues and other assorted bugs. Dawn of Fantasy also lacks a unique feature to grab your attention: there is frankly no reason to join the war in Generic Fantasy World #322. The exceeding slow pace, common units and buildings, and superfluous online features hinder Dawn of Fantasy’s appeal in the strategy market.

A Game of Thrones: Genesis Review

2011-10-10T15:04:00.000-04:00

A Game of Thrones: Genesis, developed by Cyanide Studio and published by Focus Home Interactive.
The Good: Multiple victory conditions that rely on prestige, easy access to a number of fighting and peaceful units that allow for strategic variety, competent AI, helpful interface
The Not So Good: Unique mechanics are too numerous and largely confusing with a hectic pace that complicates unit management and town control, uninspired campaign, sub-par generic graphics
What say you? A real-time strategy game where war takes a back seat to covert actions and territory control, if you can manage all the options: 5/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Apparently, there is this really popular series of fantasy novels by author George R. R. R. R. R. Martin. I had, of course, never heard of it until it appeared on the cover of Entertainment Weekly seventy-three times (supplanting the usual cover rotation of Twilight, True Blood, and The Hunger Games), but it is popular enough to spawn an HBO series. Plus, if Sean Bean gets beheaded, it must not be all bad, right? Of course, it was just a matter of time before the series became adapted in computer form, and thus we have A Game of Thrones: Genesis. After a series of vague screenshots and really uninformative trailers, this strategy game hopes to do what strategy games do best: strategize! So come along with me, mount a dragon, and see what A Game of Thrones: Genesis has to offer.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
For a game with a well-known license, the graphics of A Game of Thrones: Genesis are bland and unimpressive. A distinctive fantasy setting does not come through, and it feels like A Game of Thrones: Genesis started as a generic fantasy strategy game and then acquired the license far along in development. Nobody walking by the game would say, “oh, that’s Game of Thrones, isn’t it?”. The terrain varies between green and brown, with some nice coastal and mountain features, but all of the towns and castles are identical in appearance. The units are very small and usually can’t be identified based on appearance (I have to rely on the icon flags); the game doesn’t allow you to zoom in very far, and all battles lack a majestic feel because of this. The combat itself is bland anyway, with sporadic animations when units engage each other. While the graphics fall short, the interface is good: all of your units are listed along the left-hand side of the screen, and right-clicking on an object always performs the appropriate action for that unit. The only thing I would add is a subtle indication of idle units, but other than that, it’s easy to find your units. Like the graphics, the sound design lacks the level of quality you’d expect from a licensed game: the voice acting and the music are both generic at best. I would have expected a better atmosphere in A Game of Thrones: Genesis, but the game certainly does not deliver.

ET AL.
A Game of Thrones: Genesis has you controlling one of the houses of…Genesis?...in an attempt to ascend to the most prestigious family in all the land. The single player campaign consists of twenty missions that serve as glorified skirmish games with the occasional objective (obtaining a specific number of alliances, for example). Usually, though, it’s the same as playing a skirmish game except the sides are unbalanced (usually against your favor) and there is the occasional scripted event. The story is uninteresting and lacks the literary fervor of the source material. In the skirmish mode (house vs. house), the first house to one hundred prestige wins (which will usually happen before you eliminate all of the enemy lords and heirs, unless you take a military-heavy approach). The game supports up to eight players on fifteen maps of varying sizes, and the map layouts are generally the same theme: towns and castles that radiate out from each home base. Multiplayer is also supported using the same features as the skirmish mode, and it’s easy to find and join match lobbies online. Finally, the tutorial teaches the basic use of each unit (the first couple of campaign missions mirror these instructions), although the manual gives more strategic information on how to win the game.

A game of A Game of Thrones: Genesis consists of three phases, like a boiled-down version of a 4X game (there are a lot of similarities). The first is expansion: you don’t build any structures, but send envoys out to towns and castles to align them with your side. This gives you more income so you can afford more units. Each town has a pre-set character that determines their likelihood of forming an alliance with you or other houses that fit certain conditions (like the family that has the lowest income or fewest allies). You’ll also have to send peasants to farms to make food for your troops, but merchants that travel between mines, towns, and your home castle are automated. Having units to these tasks allows you to cut-off enemy supply lines by killing merchants and peasants, which is pretty cool.

Diplomacy is a huge part of A Game of Thrones: Genesis, and the gist of it is to guard your towns and castles from the enemy while taking over theirs, earning prestige along the way. The first house to one hundred prestige wins the game, so you can win without actually declaring total war on anyone. You can earn through four methods: forming the most town and castle alliances, killing the most enemy units, earning the most income (which usually results from having the most alliances), and controlling the most religious buildings. You can also earn small amounts of prestige by completing small, randomized missions the game throws at you. You can also lose prestige by having bastard sons discovered, attacking while at peace, or breaking alliances. To do these actions, A Game of Thrones: Genesis gives you a lot of non-military units to do your dastardly deeds. The first is the envoy, whose sole purpose is to bring neutral towns and castles under your alliance. If there is an enemy envoy already stationed there, your envoy automatically retreats all the way back to your castle, so scouting beforehand is important. If you would rather not have enemy envoys stealing your towns, you can send a noble lady or your great lord to get married in the village and form a blood alliance, which cannot be broken using envoys. However, spies can be spent to towns to form a secret alliance, which will send the income to your castle instead; you can only discover secret alliances by sending a spy to inspect a village. Spies can also be disguised as enemy units by sending them to a castle; then, the spy will act as an envoy or assassin, but then pretend they did they action the enemy ordered them to do. Rogues can be sent to towns to incite a revolt, which will eliminate the town’s income, or bribe enemy units to join your side. Assassins can eliminate a single unit, useful for taking out pesky spies or nobles. Finally, a litany of military units are found: men-at-arms, bowmen, horsemen, pikemen, and knights follow traditional rock-paper-scissors countering methods to determine a victor in battle. While more powerful (and more expensive) army units are only available during times of war, mercenaries can be recruited at any time.

A Game of Thrones: Genesis somewhat reminds me of Galactic Civilizations, where there are multiple paths towards victory, not just military might. You can choose to focus on spies, or assassins, or military units, or rogues. However, it can be difficult to keep a handle on which strategy to use: there is a counter to every strategy, but there are almost too many options at your disposal. It’s like the developers didn’t know when to stop adding new features. And since you must unlock each new unit before actually purchasing it, you cannot afford all the options, so victory may be determined by whoever got “lucky” and picked the right units to use. There were many times that I had a hard time keeping track of what was going on, which may be part of the point: you cannot keep tabs on everything, so an overwhelmed feeling is quite common. In order to keep up, you’ll need every unit to be doing something all of the time, a tall task for novice players. The spies make things so terribly confusing: you don't know which units and towns are actually yours until you use a spy to inspect them all manually one by one, and then you have to inspect them again and again just in case the enemy entered any secret alliances in the past couple of minutes. That's tedium defined. The AI is quite good, as they can manage all of the different aspects of the game in an efficient manner. I was routinely bested by the computer simply because they executed some strategy (using assassins to take out envoys, for example) that I did not notice and did not have time to counter. At least one of us can keep track of the game.

IN CLOSING
I’m glad that the developer took a renowned license resisted the urge to produce a cookie-cutter real-time strategy game, instead producing something that has a more 4X approach with multiple avenues towards victory and unique units to control. That said, the exotic nature of the game’s strategy makes for a steep learning curve that definitely takes some work to overcome. The balance of capturing towns with envoys, killing units with assassins, and secretly capturing towns and units with spies could be really interesting, if the fast pace of the game actually let you keep up with all of the units and places you have to micromanage. Keeping control of your towns by marrying off your women, using spies to uncover enemy secret alliances and go undercover as enemy units, and raising mercenaries to kill merchants and peasants would work well in a turn-based game, but in real time it’s too much to handle. You don’t have to fight the best to win (although war is usually inevitable), as there are several ways of gaining prestige in the game: controlling the most towns, and subsequently earning the most income, will also lead to victory. The AI is very good at the game, able to handle the many options and providing a great challenge to newcomers. The graphics are disappointing for a game with a distinguished theme, though the interface makes it easy to keep track of all your units. The campaign is uninspired, though skirmish matches and online multiplayer offer some longevity. The unique aspects of A Game of Thrones: Genesis are appreciated in a sea of same-old RTS games, but the unusual nature of the game, replete with too many choices, works to its strategic detriment.

Nuclear Dawn Review

2011-10-05T15:06:00.000-04:00

Nuclear Dawn, developed and published by InterWave Studios.
The Good: Mix of shooting with light strategy, four classes with varied weaponry, neat HUD, multiplatform, balanced unlocks
The Not So Good: Very limited tactics for infantry assaulting enemy buildings, restrictive classes place you in a single role, shallow strategy component, unnecessarily drawn-out games, no AI bots (for now)
What say you? This first person shooter features a commander placing structures with a lack of flexibility and depth: 5/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Albert Einstein famously said, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but it shall be simulated in a first person shooter and real-time strategy hybrid called Nuclear Dawn.” That guy knew everything. Yes, Nuclear Dawn is another retail game born of a mod (another piece of evidence showing the importance of the mod community to PC gaming), following the path of the likes of Red Orchestra and Natural Selection. This particular title has most players shooting each other in the face, while one person on each time is the commander who can place structures to assist in destroying the enemy base. The computer gaming market is all about combining genres these days; I’m still waiting for my MMOFPSRTSRPG-adventure. Will Nuclear Dawn offer enough innovation to stand out in an ever-crowded shooter marketplace?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Nuclear Dawn features decent near-future graphics. All of the level designs are urban and maze-like, a necessity given the power-line-driven strategy model, and consist of generic metal buildings set in different climates. The characters are animated well enough but lack detail, with people encased in featureless armored suits. Both sides look identical from a distance, and I was only able to tell them apart using the game’s informative HUD. The HUD is probably the best part of the graphics, as it gives the impression of information superimposed onto your helmet’s visor, without being visually restrictive. The ammo counts are really helpful, appearing directly over your gun, and icons above friendly and spotted enemy soldiers show the interconnectivity of the future battlefield. The sound effects are commonplace: typical and forgettable weapon effects for each gun, little voice acting when units are spotted or buildings are under attack, and an annoying ear ringing when you die that gets plenty annoying. The game’s settings specifies a music volume, but I’d be hard-pressed to say when music was actually playing. Overall, Nuclear Dawn delivers a solid package for the price and indie-developer roots, highlighted by the futuristic heads-up display.

ET AL.
Nuclear Dawn features an eternal struggle between two factions, fighting over the urban outposts of the near future. The two sides are indistinguishable: they play the same, with the same classes and almost identical buildings, so it’s a matter of whether your favorite color is “red” or “blue.” Game modes. The “warfare” game mode involves destroying the enemy base by any means necessary (namely a rocket launcher), and there are plans to add team deathmatch in a future update. There are six maps in the game and all follow the same general pattern: a maze with resource points scattered throughout. The game supports thirty-two players online, but Nuclear Dawn currently lacks AI bots or a practice mode of any kind (there are plans to add them in a future patch). I think I would rather have terrible bots than no bots at all, so you can at least practice the game before jumping online. There are a series of tutorial videos that explain the basics, but newcomers will take some time learning the ins and outs of each class and weapon combination. Nuclear Dawn has unlocks in the form of gizmos: they provide more advanced ammunition, which is a small enough bonus not to impact the game, but still something for veteran players to enjoy. None of the advanced ammunition types are required to succeed, and you get access to all of the weapons and classes from the start. Finally, Nuclear Dawn works on both Windows and Macintosh thanks to its use of the Source engine.

Nuclear Dawn has four classes with ten loadouts total, so there are options for any type of player here. Weapons are tied to a specific loadout in each class, so there is no Brink-level flexibility here. The stealth class can cloak (for a fairly lengthy period of time) and comes in assassin (with a submachine gun) and sniper flavors. The assault class can spot cloaked enemies and can bring an assault rifle, grenade launcher, or sniper rifle. The support class has medics, engineers, and flamethrowers. Finally, the exo class has a chaingun or rocket launcher. The classes are very restrictive, and usually you are given a terrible secondary weapon to accentuate your primary role: medics get a machine pistol, engineers get a lowly shotgun, and the rocket launcher comes with a pistol. This lack of flexibility really forces you to work with your teammates, so there are definitely no lone wolves to be seen in Nuclear Dawn.

One commander per side can place buildings using resources collected from captured points. The most interesting aspect of the strategy half of Nuclear Dawn is the use of power: it is required for all buildings to function, and it must be distributed from your main base or remote power generators using power lines that obey line of sight (meaning they must “see” another pole to transfer energy). This means you can cut off a forward base by attacking the intermediate power lines: a fascinating option. The rest of the strategy game is disappointing, though: the commander can place forward spawn points, turrets, a research building that enables more advanced classes, and resupply depots, but that’s it. The basic strategy is to slowly expand towards the enemy base and cover chokepoints and spawn points with overly powerful turrets that have high health and high lethality (an annoying combination!). Buildings play such an important role in the game, especially defensive structures, but there are only two specific units (an exo equipped with a rocket launcher, or an assault with a grenade launcher) that can deal significant damage to them. This leads to a mid-game grind as neither side can dispose of the enemy structures in a timely manner, and the buildings are cheap and easy for the commander to construct. In addition, it takes too many shots to destroy a building, so it takes a considerable amount of time to slowly advance through the enemy structures, significantly and unnecessarily increasing the length of the game well past the point at which the victor is determined. Respawn times are also quick, so as long as you have the forward spawn base protected, reinforcements will always be ready to add to the deadlock. Soldier movement and health is varied according to their class, but death for any class except the slow-moving heavy exo is pretty quick. The use of forward spawn bases reduces the amount of running necessary to traverse the map and tends to concentrate the action more, at the expense of taking much longer to determine a winner. The maze-like, multi-story map layouts also keep you on your toes, and caution is suggested when nearing the next corner. Overall, Nuclear Dawn has a definite lack of balance because of the high building health and uselessness of the classes that can destroy structures in any other role. A tank has a machine gun to deal with infantry, but the exo in Nuclear Dawn gets a pistol? I realize why this decision was made: to make people work together. But that doesn’t make it a good decision.

IN CLOSING
There are two main issues I have with Nuclear Dawn: the lack of depth in the strategic game, and the narrow class restrictions. First, the commander has really limited options at his disposal: just expand outward using power lines to connect turrets, forward spawns, and research buildings that unlock a single new weapon per class. I wasn’t expecting an extremely detailed experience, but there are simply no interesting decisions for the commander to make, other than which of the maze-like paths to follow towards the enemy base. Nuclear Dawn has good variety of options in the game’s four classes, as each class has three weapon loadouts that perform a very specific role on the battlefield, from the siege exo that takes down enemy buildings to the assault medic that throws out health packs. That said, the role restrictions are severe, overemphasizing teamwork in the game. For example, the aforementioned siege exo (the best/only solution for enemy turrets and structures) equipped with a rocket launcher has a pistol as their other weapon. Hooray. Heck, the engineer in Battlefield 3 gets a carbine rifle to compliment their rocket launcher so they can at least do something if enemy units come near. Nuclear Dawn is all about placing buildings while removing the enemy’s, so it’s shocking that only two of the game’s ten loadouts can do any type of significant damage to enemy structures. This really kills the pace of the game and leads to a lot of stalemates in the center of the map until one side can break through. Even when one side has tipped the scale, there are so many buildings with so much health that it can take ten or twenty minutes of “clean up” to advance and destroy the enemy base: tedious. I will, however, compliment the game’s engrossing and informative heads-up display, the ability to play on both Macintosh and Windows machines thanks to the Source engine, and the low importance of gaining unlocks. Still, only coordinated teams will be able to conquer the world of Nuclear Dawn, and the strategy elements will leave tacticians wanting a lot more.

F1 2011 Review

2011-09-30T14:46:00.000-04:00

F1 2011, developed by Codemasters Birmingham and published by Codemasters.
The Good: Approachable handling, KERS and DRS make for more passing, cooperative online championships are neat, range of driving aids, race and season objectives appropriate for your team, AI tries to avoid accidents
The Not So Good: Not a simulation even with all assists disabled, unrealistic damage on any setting, online lag common with player hosts and high pings
What say you? A fine half-arcade, half-simulation adaptation of the world’s most popular racing series: 7/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
My first exposure to “realistic” PC racing was World Circuit, known as Formula One Grand Prix to the rest of the world. This game simulated Formula 1, the most European of all racing series (short races and few passes, much like soccer with short games and few scores), in all of its polygon glory, with detailed 3-D tracks and realistic handling and setups. It was pretty much awesome. Jump ahead several years and developers later, and the official F1 games are now handled by Codemasters, of
DiRT and GRID fame. Their initial outing (not reviewed here) was received positively, yet there is always room for improvements, notably in the AI and online aspects of the game. Let’s see what the (now) yearly racing game has to offer this lap around the track.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
F1 2011 looks like a nice racing game, because it is! It starts with the cars themselves, which look just like their real-life counterparts, down to the individual sponsor stickers that adorn the fast-moving billboards. That said, damage is poor: the bodies of the cars never receive a scratch, while the wings and tires take all of the harm. Also, some of the textures aren’t too crisp up close (even on the highest settings), especially on the driver suits and helmets, but overall the cars are impressive. The tracks are also detailed, with recognizable buildings to assist in driving, and seemingly accurate in their layouts. The rain effects are especially impressive, creating a wet environment where you can’t see a darn thing when trailing behind a pack of cars. Your pit crew is also animated, from inside the garage to pit stops. I was also pleased with the performance of the game, even in the rain, and only experienced the occasional hiccup, a definite plus in a game where the cars are moving so fast. The graphics go a long way towards immersing you in the world of F1. The sound effects are what you would expect: the high-pitch whine of the engines, sliding of the tires when grip is lost, and blunt hits when crashes occur. The very British engineer gives you the occasional advice during the race and a member of the press gives interviews, but this is the only voice work done in the game as there is no race commentary, even when spectating a race. There is only a small collection of voiced names to choose from, unlike previous Codemasters titles, so unless you happen to have the same name as a past F1 champion, you’ll have to stick with “iceman.” Still, F1 2011 delivers a very solid package overall.

ET AL.
The career mode of F1 2011 lets you start in one of the “lesser” teams and work your way up to international man of mystery. During your career, you’ll race the F1 calendar, conduct pointless interviews with the press, bump rivals into the wall, and (thankfully) skip repetitive cutscenes showing you dramatically climbing into your car. You are given specific objectives for each practice, qualifying, and race session, based on the capabilities of your team. Attaining these appropriate goals unlocks better equipment for your car; not exactly realistic, per se, but it gives bad teams something to shoot for. Apart from the career mode are customizable grand prix, where you pick a real driver and a race schedule of your own desire. You can choose from specific percentages for the race length (1 lap, 3 laps, 7 laps, 10%, 20%, 50%, or 100%) and opt for dynamic weather, which, I think, defaults to rain so often just to show off the graphics. You can also choose to enable rules, flags, and tire and fuel use. Further game modes include the proving grounds, where you can upload your fastest lap times to the Internet, or attempt to earn medals in specific track and weather challenges. F1 2011 also has multiplayer, the most notable feature of which is the new cooperative championships: you can a friend pick a team and then race for the constructors’ championship, while also trying to best each other and earn the #1 position on the team and get access to upgrades first. Additional options include quick matches, with qualifying-only, 3-lap, 7-lap, or 20% length events, or custom grand prix where you can decide the rules. F1 2011 uses the much maligned Games for Windows LIVE, which, honestly, is getting less noticeable and consequently less annoying: I input my multiplayer key once and it logs in automatically, no problem. Weird. The multiplayer games only support up to sixteen players and fill out the remainder of the field with AI drivers because a single player hosts the races. This user-induced lag results in the more-than-occasional hiccup in online performance, like the time I was disqualified when the safety car warped into my current position due to lag, or when cars float above the track (playing against drivers in Europe has its disadvantages). Finally, F1 2011 rounds out the package with some humorous achievements, like the one that suggests you play DiRT 3 if you slide the car too much.

F1 2011 puts a good amount of information on your screen: a track map (which can rotate based on your orientation), current running order, car status (damage, temperature, fuel), and arrows to indicate nearby cars. You can also adjust your strategy on the fly, opting for different fuel usage rates to balance horsepower and pit stop frequency or alternative tire compounds. The controls are very typical for a racing game, and force feedback is nothing special, as you get gentle feedback when tires are gripping and curbs are run over. The first thing I did (as a somewhat experienced virtual racer) was disable all of the driving aids (anti-lock brakes and traction control), except for the 3-D racing line as I learned the tracks. I found that the cars in F1 2011 are pretty easy to control, as long as you don’t floor it coming out of the corners: they have good grip and excellent acceleration and braking abilities, and the handling feels like you a controlling a heavier car that cannot simply be whipped around corners with fast, quick turning. This said, I don’t feel that F1 2011 falls on the simulation side of things (trying to appeal to a larger audience, no doubt), even if you turn off all of the aids, as the cars never felt as “twitchy” as I have experienced in similar vehicles in similar games. So as long as you’re willing to give up some realism in the name of drivability, then F1 2011 is a good effort.

A couple of new features have been added to the 2011 Formula 1 season. The first is KERS (yeah, it was used in 2009, but not in game form), which stores energy used during braking. It’s basically a turbo boost that can be used at any point on the track, for seven seconds each lap. The goal is to make passing easier, and I’d say it succeeds, as you can see a subtle yet noticeable increase in acceleration. At first, I thought it was very “gamey” that KERS recharges instantly right at the start-finish line instead of when you brake, but apparently that's how it works in real life: shows what I know. Less dramatic is DRS, which allows you to open your rear wing, therefore decreasing downforce and drag, at specified points along the track. This method of boosting your speed is much less dramatic and it’s restricted to certain places that are not clearly labeled, so I found it much less helpful. Also new is Pirelli, the tire manufacturer: apparently, this alters how the tire wear works in the game, although I did not see any huge difference. You are given the option of using soft “option” tires, hard “prime” tires, or wet tires during practice, qualifying, and the race. There are several color-coded types of each (like red super-soft tires and blue intermediate wet tires, for example) that can be equipped for different track conditions in a strategic manner.

You can opt for simplified or more detailed car setups. The basic version gives you five choices based on weather (from fully dry to fully wet), and I really appreciate the range of quick setups; I’m simply not good enough to need super-specific tweaks to how my car performs. You can, however, adjust around twenty specific values for things like front wing angle, brake balance, ride height, gear ratios, and camber. The damage model in F1 2011 is very unrealistic: while real F1 cars disintegrate with even the slightest contact with a butterfly, a head-on collision with a wall will only damage your wing and possibly a wheel, instead of transferring all that force to other parts of the car like the suspension or body. Even the results of putting the game on the “full” damage setting are disappointing: I rolled the car three times and received no damage whatsoever. Speaking of wrecks, the safety car is now included in the game, which bunches up the pack at a slow pace while debris is cleaned up. If you’d rather not crash, flashbacks have returned, so you can re-start from any point in an instant replay. However, the replays are very limited (only about ten seconds in length), so at lot of the time I forgot to use the flashback until it was too late.

The AI is apparently (didn’t play last year’s version) improved, and overall it provides good competition. The qualifying and race speeds seem to match, negating a problem I’ve seen in numerous racers where the AI is (usually) really fast in qualifying and terrible during a race. The AI tries to avoid accidents and will back off when you “accidently” cut them off as they attempt to pass; I never felt that the AI was ramming into me on purpose, or if they did, it was my fault. This is best seen at the beginning of the race, and their performance is certainly better than a lot of human drivers I've seen online. It is easiest to gain track position in the first thirty seconds of the race when the field is bunched up and the pack goes slowly through the first couple of turns. Typically, I gain a lot (ten or so) of positions on the first lap and then spend the rest of the race holding up the pack behind me while trying to block. You can tell the AI is artificial, as it adheres to the racing line almost all of the time and rarely makes mistakes. Though, one could argue, that the actual drivers in F1 are robotic in nature, too. You have to choose a difficulty setting (instead of the game dynamically adjusting the AI capabilities based on your performance), and I found the middle setting to be a bit too easy and the next highest setting to be a bit too difficult, a common problem when you only have five difficulty options at your disposal instead of a range of percentages. The difficulty setting basically changes when the AI cars brake: the lower the difficulty, the sooner they slow down. Hopefully, most drivers will be able to find an appropriate difficulty setting that’s challenging without being unfair. I’ve noticed some errant behavior, especially during practice or qualifying (slow cars in my way), but for the most part, the AI in F1 2011 is definitely capable.

IN CLOSING
F1 2011 is a pleasing adaptation of the racing series. This is no simulation as the simplified handling makes the fast cars more approachable to a wider audience, especially when you enable the driving assists. The handling is handled (ha ha!) well, if you don’t mind some concessions for user-friendliness, with a drivable car that never feels totally out of control unless you mash the gas exiting every turn. You are given the option to use one of the quick setups, which work great, or tweak specific aspects of your vehicle. The new additions of KERS and DRS make races more exciting thanks to more passing and an added strategic element regarding their use. The damage is entirely unrealistic and inadequate, even when set to “full”: the car body is always left unscathed and minor (and even some major) contact is never penalized. The use of flashbacks is appreciated to redo the occasional mistake, and the addition of the safety car that bunches up the field during large wrecks is welcome. The AI drivers are good enough, avoiding contact with you can each other, which can make them easy to pass at the beginning of each race. While I’d like to see either a dynamically adjusting difficulty or more options (like a percentage value) to tailor their abilities, they are generally smart and fun to race against. The career mode is interesting as you work your way up to the better teams, and the race objectives are nice goals that give even the terrible teams something to aim for. Multiplayer lets you race up to sixteen players online, but is subject to lag due to high pings and a single client host. The graphics and sound are generally impressive (though wrecks could look better), especially the rain effects. While I’m not sure if F1 2011 offers full value for owners of the first game in the series, it is a polished, enjoyable experience for those looking for a slightly relaxed take on open-wheel racing.

Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad Review

2011-09-25T06:18:00.000-04:00

Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad, developed and published by Tripwire Interactive.
The Good: Authentic weapons and ballistics emphasize cautious movement, intuitive cover system, useful suppression, range of realism settings, detailed environments and tanks
The Not So Good: Terrible AI, lack of polish, small maps and quick respawn times reduce tactical flexibility and increase stalemates, no accuracy penalty for aiming while standing, limited dynamic building destruction
What say you? This World War II first person shooter sequel retains most of the realism of the original with some tradeoffs to make it more approachable, but it is painful offline and not totally ready to be released: 6/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
World War II first person shooter. If that doesn’t make you quiver with excitement…well, that’s understandable. The glut of online shooters have moved into modern times, seemingly fed up with the grand wars of history and the untold millions of computer games covering the era. But, there is always room for one more, as Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad hopes to offer an update to the mod-derived hardcore shooter, where realism is chosen above the arcade concessions found in other shooters. Does this sequel deliver the goods for both the realism fanatic and newcomer?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Red Orchestra 2 uses the third version of the Unreal Engine with decent results. Its starts with the character models, which are detailed up close, complete with all of the objects real soldiers come into battle with (hanging grenades, shovels, etc). The soldiers of each side run differently, too, which makes them a bit easier to distinguish at range (Russians always grasp their weapons with both hands). However, there are some instances of clipping into objects and other soldiers that detract from the realism of the title. The gore effects are nice when grenades are in use (limbs go flying), but a bit understated when headshots are involved (no chunks of flesh). The weapons are detailed and seemingly realistic in their designs, and tank rounds glow as they soar through the air. Watching bullets impact a wall is also neat. Smoke is impenetrable, providing excellent cover for advancing troops. The maps are quite detailed, with plenty of objects in reach room and destruction already in place: holes in walls, piles bricks on the ground, trenches. You’ll rarely find an empty room, and this goes a long way into making Red Orchestra 2 feel like it’s taking place in a real location. The game supposedly features destructible buildings, but I’ve only seen tanks occasionally take out small chunks of walls; you can’t, for example, shoot out a wall or use explosives to create a new access point, which is pretty disappointing. Speaking of tanks, the full 3-D interiors are impressive and very immersive. The game’s HUD provides limited information on suppression and stamina, plus a small minimap and useful tactical overlay to get your bearings.

Red Orchestra 2 has solid sound design: you can pinpoint enemy locations (and which weapon they are using) using sound alone. The characters use accented English voice work, which is a bit disappointing in a game that purports authenticity, but at least they have some amusing things to say. In addition, cries during the throws of death are effective, if a bit over-the-top. Red Orchestra 2 advertises dynamic music, and it ends up being less varied than I would have thought: there’s a small piece of music that occurs when objectives are captured and a change in tempo when the countdown clock is low, but overall it’s the same songs over and over again. Still, I found nothing overwhelmingly offensive about the sound design in the game.

ET AL.
Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad features a series of battles over the city of Berlin. No, wait, Stalingrad. The single player game consists of two campaigns, one for the Germans and one for the Russians, that take place around the city of Stalingrad. The missions are unlocked in a specific order, and you must win a battle in order to move on to the next scenario. This includes the tutorials, which, while informative, do not change the on-screen directions if you reconfigure your commands (no, left-control is NOT used for cover anymore). All of the missions have you attacking or defending specific objectives (usually a sub-set of those used in the multiplayer portion of the game), and the unique feature is the ability to take over other allies when you die. However, you do not get a choice as to which soldier you get next, and the game seems to stick you with machine gunners while attacking and the assault class on defense. The scenario is only lost if everyone is eliminated, but reinforcements come every minute or two. So, if you are the last soldier left, you can just camp and wait for the next reinforcement wave, the timer for which is handily displayed on the tactical view. Exciting! The AI is absolutely awful, one of the worst I’ve seen in any recent first person shooter (Brink’s AI is almost scholarly be comparison). Granted, it’s difficult to make a decent AI in a team-based shooter, but things should be better than this. The AI is hopeless as an attacker: they never deploy smoke, charge out in the open, and don’t work together. As a defender they are more competent, but during assaults it’s you against the enemy while the rest of your teammates run around, failing to actually defend the objective. Red Orchestra 2 lets you see the next soldier you will control before you swap bodies, and this is where the shortcomings of the AI become most apparent: soldiers nowhere near the objective, using cover but aiming away from the enemy, being trapped in trenches, running back and forth in the open, and so on. The AI also seems oblivious as to what class they are, with machine gunners running around in the open and submachine gunners laying back behind cover. It’s a comedy of errors, except nobody is laughing. Using commands (once you get promoted) makes things slightly better, but the AI will still ignore your orders and avoid taking objectives until you clear out all the enemies yourself. In short, do not buy Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad for the single player campaign.

On the multiplayer side of things, Red Orchestra 2 has up to sixty-four players fighting it out over several game modes. The first is territory, where two or three objectives are given at a time and must be conquered before moving on to the next set, in order to concentrate the violence. Countdown is similar, but each person is limited to one life per objective: this makes the games more tense, but the short time limit reduces the tactical caution you can exercise. Finally, firefight is a team deathmatch mode that features spawning near friendly units (but not necessarily out of harm’s way) and some large maps not suitable for this kind of unorganized chaos. Each of the modes allow you to adjust the realism setting for the server, turning off the minimap and friendly soldier names for a more authentic experience if you prefer. Playing online can be fun, but not if the server has PunkBuster enabled: this easily doubles everyone’s ping, which results in less-than-smooth gameplay. I’m not sure why the developers opted for this antiquated anti-cheat program when VAC is already used by default, especially when it seems to cause significant performance issues. In addition, the server browser sometimes does not refresh if you quit an online game, it seems to display a random assortment of servers every time, spawning on the squad leader never seems to work, and I've experienced crashes often enough to become annoying. Plus, unlocks are not working. These types of annoying issues would be sorted out if the game has a couple of months more development time before widespread release.

The game’s ten maps each feature a mix of open areas, narrow streets, and multi-story buildings to sneak around. Machine gun nests are semi-randomly spawned before each game, so you never are quite sure where they will appear. The maps in Red Orchestra 2 are much smaller than their original counterparts, which leads to quicker fights but less tactical freedom and smaller engagement ranges. In addition, the short 20-second default spawn times means reinforcements reach the objectives way too quickly, leading to stalemates and tie games on most maps. Finally, being a derivative of a mod itself, Red Orchestra 2 features support for user modifications, so it’s fair to assume custom-made maps will appear quickly after release.

Red Orchestra 2 features a couple of enhancements to the typical first person shooter control scheme. The most noticeable is the new cover system, which I found to work well most of the time. When facing a wall or other object, an on-screen prompt suggests entering first-person cover by pressing a specific button. As you crouch behind an object, you can do several things. Looking down your iron sights will peek above cover (or around a corner if you are in that situation); leaving iron sights or pressing the reload button will duck back down. You can also blind fire your weapon or grenades from behind cover, and moving laterally behind cover is easy to do. It can get a little dicey when walls aren’t exactly the right height or objects are in front of windows, but generally cover works as it should. Other options include the ability to mantle (jump) over low objects; and sprinting while prone will return you to a prone position when you are done running.

Guns. Lots of guns. Well, at least the guns used during the Battle of Stalingrad. They generally fall into several categories based on class: submachine guns for the assault class, bolt-action rifles for the riflemen class, a sniper rifle, a semi-automatic rifle, and a machine gun. You also get grenades, squad leaders get smoke grenades, engineers get explosives, and anti-tank troops get rocket launchers. The game restricts how many people can be in each class at a time, to provide a realistic balance and stick all of the n00bs with bolt-action rifles. Red Orchestra 2 is one of the only games to compel you into playing your class: rifles are useless directly assaulting an objective, while submachine guns are more ineffective at range (but still too effective, in my opinion). This requires people to work together to achieve the next objective (and significantly more experience points are awarded for capturing objectives compared to kills). The game does not provide an on-screen aiming cursor, so you must use the iron sights (just like real life!). In another nod to realism, you must keep track of your ammunition manually, as there is no on-screen indication of how many rounds remain in your clip (though you can hold down the reload button and get an approximate count). Little touches like these make Red Orchestra 2 feel more authentic. You and hold your breath to zoom in a bit more (restricting your peripheral vision), or adjust your sights to the range of your enemy. Iron sights are also present on the sniper rifle, so marksmen can engage enemies that are close by. Machine guns use bipods (automatically deployed when behind cover or prone), and anybody can use cover (windows, low walls) for supposed added stability when firing. However, I have not seen a big difference between aiming accuracy while standing, crouching, prone, or using cover as support as there is no noticeable gun sway in any situation, even after sustained sprinting.

You can pick up weapons from killed soldiers, but you are limited (by weight) to how many objects you can carry at once. Being fired upon does two things: first, an indicator shows which direct the bullets came from (for friendly fire, too), and being suppressed by enemy fire makes your vision more blurry and monochromatic. It’s a successful effect: you can still fire, but you can’t see very well. You can also experience suppression if nearby allies get killed, which is neat and quite realistic, I would say. Bullets to the head or torso will result in instant death, which works well for the bolt-action weapons that don’t fire quickly. You can also receive damage to specific body parts (arms and legs) that can be bandaged: this isn’t very realistic (how many people can repair a bleeding leg themselves in three seconds?), but I guess it’s a concession to game must make to let inaccurate shots be less effective. Red Orchestra 2 also delays kill notifications, a nice touch that means you’re not really sure if the enemy is dead initially: better fire a couple more bullets to be sure. Bullet ballistics is seemingly accurate: high-speed rifle rounds can penetrate some walls and objects (wood, namely), so safety is not assured when behind cover.

While Red Orchestra 2 is mostly about the infantry, there are two tanks that are featured on two of the game’s ten maps. Each tank has a 3-D interior complete with crewmembers in their actual locations and working dials (a small thing, but good for immersion). The AI will do a decent job manning the vacant positions in the tank: the AI gunner isn’t so great, but you can order the tank around from either the commander or gunner position, so being the driver is unnecessary unless the tank is full of human players. The tanks in Red Orchestra 2 experience damage to individual systems and crew members: if the gunner is shot, you can scramble over (in real time) from another position and take his post. That’s pretty cool. Tanks also exhibit realistically limited visibility out into the world, and the weapon ballistics seem to be accurate in their difficulty. Finally, the commander can call in fire support onto the map, aerial reconnaissance, or force soldiers to respawn early: pleasing support options that all come with a time delay to prevent spamming.

IN CLOSING
Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad has a series of features that make it feel more authentic than a majority of first person shooters. The weapons require the use of iron sights, and you can adjust them for different ranges and deploy bipods automatically. However, submachine guns seem to effective at longer ranges, and there is no significant gun sway: go ahead and aim while standing, even after sprinting for large distances. Smaller urban maps means more action, but less flanking as most of the designs feature well-defined choke points and head-on engagements. Additionally, destructible buildings simply are not. The cover system is done well, allowing you to blind-fire your weapon or grenades and peek over walls with ease, assuming the object isn’t irregular or near an obstruction. The suppression system blurs your vision while under fire, making it more difficult to differentiate between friend and foe. One-shot kills (if aimed at an appropriate body part) force careful movement across the terrain, and lead to tense, slow navigation through the heavily damaged maps. The 3-D tactical display and minimap make it easy to find the next objective. Multiplayer is fun with a full sixty-four-player server, while the single player campaign should be avoided by everyone due to the horrific AI that likes to run in circles, avoid objectives, and get killed. The graphics are quite nice, effectively displaying a war-torn region. Tanks are neat as well, with fully detailed interiors. The game does suffer from a lack of polish, from laggy online servers due to (I think) the use of PunkBuster to graphical artifacts to random crashes to other things that add up to a less than smooth launch; I suspect things will improve with further development, but Red Orchestra 2 does feel like it was pushed out too early. Still, Red Orchestra 2 is a good, if somewhat simplified, sequel and a fine entry into the realm of realistic first person shooters.

Sengoku Review

2011-09-20T15:05:00.000-04:00

Sengoku, developed and published by Paradox Interactive.
The Good: Enjoyable political positioning with many people to interact with, extensive personal attributes and relationships, perpetual war keeps you busy, nice map and music
The Not So Good: Shallow province management, small clans are easy targets due to their military and income restrictions, generally useless plots, typically static inter-clan relationships, lacks missions, only one starting date
What say you? Highlighted by the character management, this grand strategy game gives you just enough to do: 6/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Japan, historically a tiny island that isolated itself from the rest of the world, has had its share of internal strife. Most notable was the Sengoku period, where clans from all corners of the land fought for the Shogun crown. The first major computer game to touch on this conflict was Shogun: Total War, which recently had an enjoyable sequel. Taking another crack at the period is Paradox Interactive, in an attempt to adapt their grand strategy gameplay to the management of a clan. Instead of focusing on the tactical battles that highlights Total War: Shogun 2, Sengoku resides solely in the strategic realm, as you move troops, interact with other characters, and manage your domain. Does Sengoku triumph in victory, or commit seppuku?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Sengoku starts with the map, and it’s a beauty: a pristine, 3-D, slightly exaggerated facsimile of Japan, completely with varied terrain and textures that bring the game world to life. Of course, I spent most of the time using the alternative map modes, so I didn’t really get to see the beautiful textures all that much. Units are very small and it’s hard to see their detail without zooming in to unhelpful levels; animations are repetitive (endless stabbing during assaults, for example), typical of Paradox grand strategy games. The character portraits do repeat themselves with so many people in the game, but for the most part you can identify people visually. The relatively small island of Japan means Sengoku loads and run much faster than some of Paradox's previous grand strategy games, which is nice. The sound effects are basic, with low, subtle notification volumes that you might miss. However, the music is great: it fits the theme well and I remember it after I’m done playing, always a positive sign. Overall, I was pleased with the graphics and sound of Sengoku.

ET AL.
Sengoku is a real-time grand strategy game where you attempt to control 50% of the islands of Japan, then fend everyone else off to become Shogun of the realm. The game features four scenarios…sort of. They are actually just four sets of suggestions for powerful or interesting starting clans, as you can only start on May 26th, 1467. Like to start later on in the campaign? Too bad. However, in a neat twist, you don't have to play as the clan leader: instead, you can choose any land-holding male and attempt to claw your way to the top. While a subordinate role gives you less to do, you can still raise some personal armies and engage with other characters. Sengoku features multiplayer in addition to the single player option, if you’d like to duke it out with other humans online. Instead of opting for a set of comprehensive tutorials (which were a fantastic part of Victoria II), Sengoku has pop-up messages that appear whenever you open a new menu; they work well enough. The interface is standard Paradox fare: all of your options on the left, notifications along the top, and the handy outliner along the right. Plentiful map modes are also present, the most useful showing clan borders, your demesne, and diplomatic relationships. New is message consolidation (into low and high priority groups) into two inboxes, instead of incessant pop-ups in the middle of the screen. This is a nice feature, but possibly important diplomatic offers are way too subtle, appearing at the lower corner of the screen. You also have to redo character searches too often, and the filters leave a lot to be desired: some of the sorting options (by clan or opinion, specifically) only work partially (you can sort by your opinion of them, but not their opinion of you) or not at all (it’s really hard to find members of specific clans, as the alphabetical sorting is inconsistent).

In Sengoku, you control one character (and later his first male heir…hopefully) in a quest for island dominance. There are three main resources in the game: wealth, demesne, and honor. Wealth is collected from monthly provincial taxes and spent to construct specialty buildings called manufactories and hire mercenary troops. Your income and expenses are vague (one of the rare times Sengoku skimps on the tooltips), but balancing your budget is simply a matter of having less troops and more land. Honor is used to perform any diplomatic action in the game and earned by conquering territory and slowly accrued during peacetime; characters with no honor should commit suicide. Your demense is the land you directly control; you are limited to only five provinces (owning more will cause revolts), so you must delegate additional land to other members of your clan (preferably your heir, to elevate their position within the clan). All of the characters in the game are also rated in several areas that can be improved based on the ratings of your wives: health, martial ability, diplomacy, and intrigue. In addition, characters can earn traits (both positive and negative) over time that further influence their abilities. The other members of your clan might become pretenders to the throne, automatically nominated by land-holding clansmen based on inter-personal relationship values (thus, it’s important to maintain positive relations with your clan’s high-ranking members). Of course, you can always form your own clan and ignite a civil war if your heir is not in position for clan leader.

Managing your provinces is accomplished through your court: you nominate three individuals (hopefully based on their skill ratings) from your clan to supervise your lands. It is a straightforward process: pick the court member, pick the action, and pick the province. The first is the master of arms, who can improve the castle, hire troops, or restore order. The master of ceremonies can improve the village, improve relations, or collect higher taxes. Finally, the master of the guard can improve guilds (allowing for another special manufactory to become construction), sow dissent (increasing the possibility of a revolt), or hire ninjas. The options here are all disappointingly limited. The castle, village, and guild improvements are all very linear: simply the next level opens up, providing better defense or higher taxes or another construction slot. Affecting relationships, either positive or negative, seems ineffective at best (and really slow) and a waste of time at worse. Plus, since you only have direct control over only five provinces, land management becomes very repetitive, performing the same actions in the same places over and over again. There is very little strategy here, which is sad for a strategy game.

Diplomacy was a bit different during the Sengoku period. In order to found a temporary alliance with another clan, you must exchange hostages (actual family members) for five years, which is slightly more interesting than simply increasing relationships to a certain value (and relationship values are pretty fixed, based mostly on attribute values). Sending gifts is still there, but since you never need to declare war, you don’t need to destroy relationships before launching an attack. Peace options include conceding defeat by offering a hostage, or becoming a vassal of another clan. Sengoku features plots, where you can plan to overthrow your clan or gang up on a common enemy, but it’s hard to recruit people (even if they have a good relationship) and you can just attack whomever you want at any time. Moreover, you can ignite a civil war with a single, instant action in the clan management screen instead of wasting time messing with plots. Marriage is required to produce heirs and keep playing the game. There is a handy button next to each character that will bring up bride choices (it’s the ancient Japanese match.com!), so pick one with good stats (just like real life!) and hopefully she will accept. You can choose spouses for yourself and any of your children, and arranging marriages (especially for your daughters) is a great way to increase relationships with neighboring clans. It's a good idea to pair up all of your kids while you still can, though, as the AI seems to be pretty lax in this area.

Religion plays a small role in the world of Sengoku: building a specific type of temple gives you different bonuses, which I’m sure is how it worked in real life (Look! A Buddhist temple! We must reinforce more quickly!). The game fails to give you missions (other than “kill everyone”) in the short-term, so new players can be directionless. In addition, decisions and events are rare enough to be ignored. But war is not, as the island of Japan is in a constant state of conflict. Troops are recruited directly from your provinces: the clan leader can raise military units instantly with the push of a button, so the largest clan owning the most land will always have the biggest army. However, you can also hire a limited number of retinue to act as personal guards in the army you lead, and ronin mercenaries can be hired to compliment the native province-based troops. Combat is the same as with other Paradox grand strategy games: automatically calculated based on the fire and shock phases of the units involved. You can tip the balance of warfare prematurely by placing ninja clans in provinces, where they can assassinate characters, take hostages, weaken defenses, burn buildings, or cause others to lose honor. Still, the largest clans will have the most troops and win the most battles, leading to an ultimate showdown between the biggest groups in the game. Constant war keeps things moving, and I was rarely just sitting there with nothing to do. The AI seems to be competent enough: they manage provinces and move troops well, attacking and defending in appropriate places. I did occasionally get annoyed while playing as a subordinate at the clan leader’s choices in assault locations, but in general I did not experience any completely boneheaded moves.

IN CLOSING
Sengoku is a character-based game, and in places it shines as a multifaceted political simulation of ancient Japan. There are lots of people to deal with in the game, and finding spouses, exploring family trees, scouting rivals, negotiating with other clans is almost fun. Plots aren’t effective, but the relentless state of war means you can attack anyone at any time. Raising a sizable army is easy and instantaneous, and you can compliment them with personal troops, mercenaries, and ninjas. However, since the military is recruited directly from all of your provinces immediately, small clans will always be easy targets simply because they can’t field as many troops (or support their maintenance with tax income). But there is certainly more to do here than in Victoria II: I like delegating lands and positioning your heir as the next choice for the clan leader. Province management is really disappointing, as your court actions are quite limited and you can only do things in five provinces. There’s only one scenario, and no missions or goals other than taking over everyone and everything. The graphics and interface are generally nice, and the AI provides decent competition. Overall, Sengoku provides a different, personal take on the grand strategy game, and its threat of war coupled with political activities keeps you active throughout your time in Japan.

Rock of Ages Review

2011-09-15T14:59:00.000-04:00

Rock of Ages, developed by ACE Team and published by ATLUS.
The Good: Simultaneous defense construction and platform gaming, quick matches in multiple game modes, interesting art themes, tense online matches, capable AI opponent, inexpensive
The Not So Good: Inconsequential damage and minor penalty for falling, skeeball score bonuses are too significant, split-screen requires two gamepads, annoying boss battles
What say you? This competitive tower defense game has a distinctive style and solid gameplay with some balance issues: 6/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
So, how do you follow weird (think “explosive parachuting squirrels”) melee combat game Zeno Clash? With a tower defense game, of course! While this genre has seen an explosion of popularity, ACE Team hopes to inject their own flavor of “strange” into the equation. How so, you ask? Imagine a huge, smiling boulder smashing through Renaissance and Greek art. This tower defense game takes a competitive edge, with both players constructing defenses and piloting their rock through the opponent’s carefully planned resistance simultaneously. Does Rock of Ages combine theme and gameplay well, or does it roll away to obscurity?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Rock of Ages grabs your attention with its awesome graphics. The game’s five artistic themes (Greek, Medieval, Renaissance, Rococo, and Romanticism) each come with stellar track designs and animated background images that make many references to their inspiration. The ground textures, track elements, and buildings are all fantastically designed and look wonderful in motion. There is some pop-in when approaching some parts of the map (no doubt a limitation of the consoles creeping in to the hardware-superior PC), but it’s rarely noticeable on the game’s usually twisty layouts. The game does not support 5:4 displays (like mine) and does not save resolution settings when you exit the game, so I had to tell the game to run in a window every time I started up: annoying. The sound is also excellent, with some great effects for weapons and pleasing background music to accompany your crushing. Overall, Rock of Ages clearly exceeds its $10 price tag in terms of graphics and sound design.

ET AL.
In Rock of Ages, the goal is to roll down a hill and smash through the doors of the enemy castle using a giant boulder (obviously). Along the way, your opponent constructs defenses meant to slow you down. The main single player feature is the story mode, which features a series of one-on-one battles against historical AI opponents. The levels themselves feature multiple paths with fixed obstacles and the occasional shortcut, accessible by skilled boulder pilots. Games are quick, clocking in just over five minutes, with three solid shots against the enemy castle doors enough to win the game. The mix of platform and tower defense gaming is peppered with tedious boss battles that are unnecessary and annoying: I hate them.

Rock of Ages is not just about the “war” mode, however. There is also a throwaway timed mode where you try to finish a level as quickly as possible (taking use of those shortcuts mentioned earlier), complete with online leaderboards. More interesting is the skeeball mode, where you must smash targets on the way down the map and then put your boulder in a scoring multiplier. While this is a nice twist on the game, getting the multiplier is far too important: whoever finishes first two out of the three matches will win, unless they completely missed all of the large targets on the way down. Rock of Ages also has comprehensive multiplayer features in both the “war” and “skeeball” modes: you can quickly search for a match or browse available options. Local split-screen is also available, although you must have two gamepads, as support for one person on the mouse/keyboard and another on a single gamepad is not available, much to the dismay of myself and my daughter. Finally, Rock of Ages is only $10, which is a great price.

The first thing you’ll want to do in the “war” mode is build some defenses. You’ll start out with some cash that you can spend placing objects in specific, highlighted areas of the map: towers, cows, catapults, explosives, and wind are all meant to slow down your opponent and/or push them off the map (incurring a small time penalty for a reset), and there are three types of each with increasing strength and cost. You can also place resource collection points and balloons to automatically fire your castle cannons (you can also manually target the opponent, but it’s very difficult to do). Money is also earned by smashing into things as you roll your boulder down your opponent’s maze. Clearly, the key to success is to find the chokepoints in each map and then place complimentary defenses; for example, towers to slow a boulder down, and wind to push it towards elephants, who will charge it off the map. You can rotate objects like trebuchets, but only in the four cardinal directions, which is problematic considering most of the maps feature angled sections. Not only are you restricted as to where objects can be placed (for no apparent reason), but things can only be placed on a particular square once, so make sure you plan ahead. You are also time-limited: once your next boulder is ready to roll, you must go to stay ahead of your opponent.

Controlling your boulder feels “right”: using the WASD keys in concert with the mouse-driven camera, you are given a level of precision while retaining a heavy feel with high momentum. Your boulder can jump over obstacles (just like real life?), and timing your controls is important. You can spend leftover funds on one-time rock upgrades, like increased armor or the ability to double jump. Unfortunately, Rock of Ages suffers from some balance issues. There is only a small time penalty for falling, and I’ve never had a boulder completely destroyed during a run. Since it always takes exactly three runs to destroy the other castle, no matter the health or speed of your boulder, whoever is fastest wins. While this does make for more exciting games (since both players are likely to be neck-and-neck), it doesn’t make the defensive game as important as simply not falling off the map. The AI is good: while it may get stuck against stout defenses every once in a while, it plays like a medium-skilled human, placing effective defenses and piloting well. I wonder how scripted the defenses are in advance, since they are well placed in almost every level. While I only lost to the AI once during the story mode, it did offer some close, entertaining games.

IN CLOSING
Rock of Ages features a nice mix of tower defense and platform gaming. Controlling your weighty boulder feels intuitive and works well on the PC, and navigating the terrain while avoiding your enemy’s defenses is challenging, tense, and enjoyable. The small downtime between rolling rounds is spent hastily placing a wide range of defenses: towers, dynamite, fans, and elephants. There are placement restrictions and natural checkpoints that should be taken advantage of. Multiple paths means that no defensive plan is foolproof, however, and you can always simply jump over poorly placed obstacles. It always takes the same number of hits to destroy the enemy game, no matter how fast you’re going or how much damage you’ve received, which is disappointing. While this does make defenses less important, it does make the games very close and amplifies the small penalty for falling off the track, since seconds do matter. The story mode features very competent AI but boss battles are tedious and out of place. The time trial mode isn’t very entertaining, but skeeball provides some good head-to-head racing, although being first is the key to victory due to high scoring bonuses. Online multiplayer is quite fun and finding opponents is easy; split-screen is also available, but you’ll need two gamepads to play it. And you can’t mention Rock of Ages without citing the unique art and music. In the end, Rock of Ages is a fun take on the tower defense genre.

Achron Review

2011-09-10T13:44:00.000-04:00

Achron, developed and published by Hazardous Software.
The Good: Time control leads to truly innovative strategies, commander-based unit control, three distinctive sides, multiplatform
The Not So Good: Lacks immediate feedback on past or future orders, tedious and linear single-player campaign, dreadful lack of documentation and instruction
What say you? Unique mechanics give way to confusion: 5/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
So you are playing your favorite real-time strategy game, and you make a really stupid move. Oh, how you wish you could go back in time and undo that errant command and save your troops! But, what if you could? Enter Achron, a RTS that centers around the theme of time manipulation: you can change past orders, or transport units to an earlier (or later) time and ambush the enemy. Obviously, this type of unique mechanic requires an easy way to remember what the heck you changed in the past while you’re in the future. Is Achron a landmark shift in strategy design, or a timeless mess under the weight of its own rules?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
The graphics of Achron are very simplistic, an artifact of its independent roots. The best visual aspect of the game is the unit design: they are nicely detailed and animated well enough to be believable. Explosions and combat effects are repetitive and generally unimpressive. The maps are very bland outdoor environments with commonly dark textures and little detail, save for the occasional tree or mountain, appearing mostly as stark desert-like settings. Some of the layouts, especially in the single-player campaign, are obviously scripted with unnatural ramps and walls to dictate your movement. A little more life added to the maps would go a long way. As for the sound design, things are typical: generic combat effects, decent background music, and acceptable voice acting that’s impressively throughout the entire campaign. Overall, Achron looks like an indie game.

ET AL.
Humans have discovered how to manipulate time, and use this awesome knowledge to blow things up. The single-player campaign is quite extensive: almost thirty lengthy levels covering all three major races in the game, complete with voiced dialogue. However, the missions fall under two categories: completely linear with specific objectives that must be met in succession, or vague objectives that require precise timing (avoiding enemy patrols, for example). Achron apparently thinks you can forgive trial-and-error mission design by allowing the user to go back in time and fix their numerous mistakes. Really, this just makes the game more tedious by requiring you to hit the right timing and surpass the next checkpoint. The campaign is not hard because it involves advanced tactics, it's difficult because it requires exact timing to survive many of the game's scripted encounters. Not helping are the occasionally vague objectives: while locations of interest are plainly indicated, units that must be preserved are not. In addition, Achron lacks difficulty settings of any kind. Now, balancing is tough, which is why you add difficulty levels to appeal to all skill levels. Of course, it might not matter, as most of the campaign missions are linear and scripted scenarios that require narrow solutions in order to advance. I didn’t find anything terribly innovative in the scenario design: the gimmick of going back in time to perfect your movements grew tiresome after the third or forth level, and the high difficulty became stifling on several occasions. Beyond the campaign is the skirmish and multiplayer modes, which support up to four players on seven maps; this is where the game’s unique strategies are more open to flexibility. Learning the game can be difficult: while the campaign features one or two new things to play with in each level with a short text introduction, Achron really needs a standalone tutorial for each race (plus one for the time elements) for those who want to try out skirmish battles and multiplayer first (or learn the races without having to complete the entire campaign). Finally, Achron supports Windows and 64-bit Macintosh and Linux, and mod support is strong.

Achron lets you tie units to a commander in a hierarchy, which makes controlling large numbers of units much easier. All you have to do is issue an order (move, attack, patrol, teleport) to the commander and all of its subordinate units will follow: pretty snazzy. Unfortunately, it can be a bit tough to find the commander when all of the units are bunched together, and I wish there was a list of all the commander units along the side of the screen for easy selection. Also potentially helpful is the ability for units to automatically perform useful tasks when idle (if the appropriate building is placed first), like repairing nearby units or moving towards ammunition or teleporters. This has the most use when you are observing another time period and units in the past/future need to do maintanance stuff on their own.

Achron features humans and two alien races that have drastically different technology trees for building essentially the same types of units (infantry, light vehicles, heavy vehicles, and air units). The two basic resources everybody uses are L-crystal for constructing basic units and Q-plasma for more advanced units; these are gathered automatically by each race’s worker unit. The humans are the most typical side: traditional building-based upgrades provide three levels of units. The squid-like Grekim rely on time travel, and can morph and combine into other units. Lastly, the insect-like Vecgir use teleportation and place infantry pilots into vehicles. The three races are different in their approaches to constructing units, but the results generally fall into the same categories.

Time for time. Achron allows you to control units into the past (around five minutes) and the future (around one minute), which allows for all sorts of strange tactics. The bottom of the screen indicates events taking place in the surrounding time period: attacks, resource levels, units being created, and chronoports (units being transported to another time). The way the game works is that changes in the past are slowly (about twice the normal time rate) propagated forward to the present by time waves (meaning that a change one minute ago will appear at the present in about thirty seconds), rather than all changes happening instantly. You can’t go all crazy issuing orders in the past, though, as each command uses up energy, and the further back you issue an order, the more energy is used up. This makes you a little more careful in selecting which orders to issue deep in the past. I’ve found that, while the time game makes “sense”, it’s still bewildering when you are dealing with orders. Confusingly, issuing orders in the past do not automatically cancel orders in the future from that point, so units can have conflicting instructions that won’t be resolved until the time wave sweeps through. You can, in essence, have the same unit doing five different things (one for each time sweep) at five different times during a game. The game does not project orders fast enough, in my opinion: you can issue orders, and jump one second later, and your units remain stationary until a time sweep moves through and resolves the order you issued a second ago. Any orders effectively “disappear” until they are picked up by a sweeping time wave, so you can easily forget what you did if you are quickly bouncing around viewing different time periods. I routinely had to sit there waiting for the orders to sweep through time so that I could remember what exactly I did.

Confusion aside, there is a lot of really cool things you can do with the time controls. For example, you can send a unit on a scouting run, see where the enemy is, and then go back in time and cancel that scouting run, sending the same unit on a different mission. You can also spend resources in the future, destroy buildings in the past (eliminating the units that were produced there in the process), or teleport units into the past to fight alongside themselves, effectively doubling your army size for a while. I’m sure there are plenty of other strategies I haven’t even thought about. You can imagine the various oddities that the game can produce when humans are involved on both sides: your enemy moving their army in the past so that the current battle they are losing never takes place, for example. Still, the potential of time manipulation is limited by just how confusing it can be to keep strategies straight when things are changing all the time at multiple times. Maybe there is a reason nobody has made a time-based strategy game before.

Actual combat is pretty traditional in nature: classic rock-paper-scissors counters to other units. There are some advanced abilities that units can be upgraded to possess, like jamming communications, controlling enemy units, cloaking, and invulnerability. Generally, the pace of Achron is quite slow: even though you can move around time, you still have to wait for units to slowly move and resources to slowly accumulate. You really need to invest in teleporters (for both space and time) to make the game more dynamic. I’ve found the skirmish AI opponents to be pretty good, especially when you consider how foreign the time mechanics are. I have experienced some pathfinding issues when moving friendly units in restrictive terrain (they like to block each other in a giant traffic jam), but otherwise the game is issue-free.

IN CLOSING
In theory, Achron is a very intriguing game. In practice, the difficulties of handling multiple timelines becomes readily apparent. Namely, issuing orders in the past or the future becomes an absolute mess as old (or is it new?) commands aren't automatically overwritten, and if you change times, your new (or is it old?) orders might not be executed yet. The confusion is a direct result of the game's primary draw, and I'm not sure of a way around it. While I certainly commend the game's ability to introduce new, novel strategies thanks to time manipulation, the act of issuing a simple move order in the past and then having to wait to see the results sweep to the present will frankly befuddle a lot of players, especially as you are trying to issue different orders at other times. Still, there’s a host of strategies that you’ll only find in Achron. For a game where you are able to move forwards and backwards through time, though, there is certainly a lot of waiting for troops to move, resources to accumulate, and orders to refresh down the timeline. The game's three races play differently, at least in terms of building units and structures (all have the same basic types of units). I like how Achron allows you to organize your units into a hierarchy by specifying a commander, but it doesn't provide a list of commanders in a handy location for quick reference. The single-player campaign is painful: specific, mandatory objectives and lots of scripted events are meant to make you manipulate the timeline, but usually they just require trial-and-error repetition to navigate past whatever tough obstacle comes next. Achron also has a dearth of documentation; the game really needs brief, to-the-point hands-on tutorials for all the races and the unique time mechanics of the game. Achron features skirmish and multiplayer battles that are more appealing, and I found the AI to be decent enough to substitute for human opponents if you can't find any. In the end, though, Achron is a bright idea that falls short of enjoyable execution.

Stellar Impact Review

2011-09-05T19:02:00.000-04:00

Stellar Impact, developed and published by Tindalos Interactive.
The Good: Several ship classes with a variety of skills and persistent upgrades, requires tactical positioning to orient weapons towards the enemy
The Not So Good: Lacks AI opponents, obtuse controls
What say you? DotA enters space with a solid foundation and room to grow: 5/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Defense of the Ancients, the exceedingly popular Warcraft 3 map, basically created a genre: action multiplayer strategy games where you control a single character and defeat towers and waves of enemies while upgrading your skills. This basic design has been adapted in a number of games, such as Demigod, League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth, Dota 2 by Valve, and Blizzard’s own sequel. More clones can be expected on the horizon, and Stellar Impact is one of them. Set in space instead of the typical fantasy setting, Stellar Impact features large ships invading the enemy base with automated allies instead of powerful wizards and mages. Does this somewhat unique take on the genre result in a compelling game?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Stellar Impact features acceptable graphics for an indie space strategy game. The ships are nicely detailed, although most of the time you’ll be zoomed out enough where you won’t notice. The game takes place on a 2-D plane with various objects scattered around the maps that have some pleasing animations. Missiles fly around the map and cause progressive damage on ships and turrets, with subtle but effective explosions. The backgrounds are colorful and provide good contrast to the action. The sound design is very subtle, with minor explosions accompanying the in-game action. In addition, the background music played during the menus doesn’t extend to the actual gameplay (or it’s so quiet that I can’t even hear it). Still, Stellar Impact provides good enough value for the game’s budget-level price in terms of graphics.

ET AL.
Stellar Impact pits two teams, the Allies and the Axis (how unoriginal), against each other in a game to defeat the other’s base. First, the intermediary turret emplacements must be taken care of, and the human-controlled ships are helped by automated computer escort ships. The game supports between four and twelve players; the conquest mode has nine maps that offer simple but decent variety in objectives and obstacles like gas clouds, asteroids, and plasma storms. There is also a battlefield king-of-the-hill mode, but it’s only available in practice mode and experience cannot be earned. The game is entirely 2-D, which is fine with me: the 3-D of space usually just results in more confusion rather than significantly more complex strategies anyway. Stellar Impact is online-only, which means you have to find human opponents online through the easy-to-use browser. This was a tall task, at least during the times that I tried (afternoon in the eastern U.S. seems best). Sadly, Stellar Impact provides no alternative, as the game does not include AI bots to play with or against. Even a poor computer opponent would have offered at least something to do when nobody else is online. As it stands, you simply have to stare at a game lobby and wait for other people who might not even show up.

There are five ships to choose from in Stellar Impact: the frigate, corvette, destroyer, cruiser, and dreadnought. Each ship has slightly different attributes (speed, hit points, weapons) and can equip four skills at once: there are twenty to choose from (all initially unlocked, thankfully), covering maneuvering, recon, attack, defense, and command. The big difference between each ship type is that there is a limit on how many skills of each type a ship can have, sort of like a hard-coded way of representing their classic strategic role. Now, you can still place any skill on any ship, but you can’t load up on skills that are inappropriate for your class. Still, the system gives you great freedom in customizing the ship to your play style. In addition to the skills, you win items at the end of each game (even if you lose) that can slightly improve your hull, ammunition, and weapons. Ships are limited to using seven of these at a time, so veteran players are restricted in using all of the loot they have earned after battle. In addition, medals can be redeemed to activate passive skills. I’ve found that these bonuses aren’t too significant (just small compliments to existing abilities) and don’t drastically skew the balance of the game.

The controls for Stellar Impact are…odd, and definitely take some practice to master. In some weird mix of strategy and shooter gaming, right-click sets a destination, but you need to move using the W and S keys, changing your speed from “full stop” to “full steam ahead”. Left-clicking chooses a target, and spacebar fires your weapons. It really takes some practice to get a handle on using the mouse and keyboard to move effectively in the game, adjusting your course while choosing targets and avoiding obstacles, all in real-time. Weapons must turn towards the enemy before they fire, and like any historic naval combat game, most of your guns are pointed out of the side of your ship, so you must navigate accordingly. The game projects helpful green and red lines towards your target to indicate when weapons are ready to fire, which takes some of the guesswork out of the equation. It definitely takes some practice to master the controls of Stellar Impact, and the lack of an AI opponent doesn’t help matters.

As with any good space-faring vessel, the ships of Stellar Impact feature shields and a hull, the latter of which takes damage in stages, and each additional stage disables another system on your ship: pretty cool. In order to tip the balance of the game, each map contains several objectives that can be captured: planets award more command points, singularities more research points, crystal fields double the number of automated escort ships, and vortexes can act as instant teleports. You can build a temporary force field around each objective to lock it down for a period of time. Command points are used to improve your ship or those of your automated escorts, improving the armor, shields, radar, damage, or firing rate. Research points are used to upgrade your skills; those who have more experience in the game receive more research points and can unlock more higher-level skills, the only significant bonus veterans receive in the game.

The overall gameplay is similar to other DotA games (obviously), but the naval-style combat adds an additional layer of complexity and tactics. Stellar Impact is still about working together with your teammates, using complimentary skills, and taking out turret after annoying turret. You usually don’t have enough health to take down a turret by yourself in one go, so teamwork is a must. This slows down the game a bit, but the time penalty for death is large enough where the other team can chip away at the defenses (or capture an additional objective) and turn the tide of battle. I do like that the combat in Stellar Impact is a bit more complex than a typical DotA game, since you have to be mindful of positioning your craft effectively. There are lots of turrets that must be dealt with on the way to the enemy base; since the winning side can usually be determined after about fifteen or twenty minutes of play, extending the game through the tedious destruction of turrets seems extraneous (although there is a “surrender” button available). Stellar Impact can be an interesting tactical exercise, but it needs more well-rounded features, namely AI opponents or a larger online player base, to stake a claim in the ever-expanding DotA marketplace.

IN CLOSING
Stellar Impact takes the now-familiar DotA game mechanic and adapts it to a different setting with decent results. Success requires more slightly talent than some other DotA games, since you must position yourself so the brunt of your weapons is facing the enemy. The control scheme makes this a little more difficult than it should be, with its mix of standard strategy and shooter mechanics, but you’ll become accustomed to it after a couple of matches. Skills are useful and nicely varied, and recharge times are long enough where battles don’t become unorganized chaos with tons of skills being used constantly. The skills also allow for a variety of strategies, from offensive juggernauts to support classes. Items earned after each match can be used to further customize your ships; although veteran players will obviously have access to more passive bonuses, the advantages are not too extreme. Stellar Impact features traditional DotA-style maps littered with objectives that grant small bonuses meant to break the mid-game stalemates. Unfortunately, the biggest slight against Stellar Impact is the lack of AI opponents to practice against: the relatively low online population of the game means it’s sometimes difficult to find a match, and playing against the computer would have provided at least some consolation. Still, Stellar Impact can be entertaining when you can find opponents of equal skill, providing an alternative in the DotA genre.

Bastion Review

2011-08-31T18:50:00.000-04:00

Bastion, developed by Supergiant Games and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.
The Good: Neat visuals and narration, cool abilities and weapon variety with upgrades
The Not So Good: No lowered difficulty settings, angled level design annoying for keyboard controls, imprecise aiming doesn't attack where you click, linear level design, arbitrarily limited inventory, lacks mid-mission saves
What say you? A uniquely colorful art style and memorable narration elevate an otherwise average role-playing game with an underwhelming PC port: 5/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Against my typical agenda, I’ve been playing or reviewing a disturbingly large number of action role-playing games lately (meaning one of them in the past six months). While standard fare in the genre doesn’t interest me, a unique hook will, like hilariously incompetent co-op or inspiration from a different genre. As another example, take Bastion, which has recently graced the PC after originally being released on something called an “XBOX”. This game features vibrant art and narration that describes everything you do. Do those unique features advance this action RPG beyond the typical?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Easily the best part of Bastion is the great artistic style. You've seen the screenshots, and they are a sight to behold. The PC allows the game to live in its high-resolution glory, and live it does. The hand-drawn, bright, and colorful world of Bastion shines through, creating a stark contrast to the typically dark and gloomy world of action RPGs. The ground fills in as you walk, creating a neat effect of exploration, and the fuzzy backgrounds provide a subtle backdrop to the floating island levels. The enemy design is also good, although I'd like to encounter more enemy types, and the animations are top-notch. Bastion truly is a beautiful game. Not to be outdone is the sound design, which notably includes narration as you progress through the game. It's not quite as dynamic as some would lead you to believe, as it repeats the same dialogue at the same points in each level (I would know, since the difficulty required me to, ahem, repeat several of the levels). The music fits the game well and the battle effects, though generic, round out the package. Nobody will fault Bastion for having a bland presentation, that's for sure.

ET AL.
Bastion tells the tale of The Kid, whose world has disappeared overnight and must be put back together again. The game features twenty levels in the story mode that are all on the short side: each clock in at around ten minutes each (you can do the math for total game time). While the game does give you the occasional choice regarding which level to do next and which building to construct, eventually you’ll have all the levels completed (hopefully) and all of the buildings constructed, so it really does not matter. The levels are very linear: there is little side exploration to be found, and triggered events occur at the same time every time. Bastion also lacks lowered difficulty settings: while you can increase the enemy skill through the shrine (which grants an experience bonus), you can’t decrease it below what the developers have considered to be the entry-level skill level. This isn’t a problem most of the time, but some of the boss fights are tough as you are learning the game. You are given one chance per level to continue when you die; otherwise, you must go back to the beginning of the level and tediously completely everything all over again. Bastion also lacks the ability of saving your game at any time: it only preserves your progress when you enter the bastion (your home base), but if you’d like to save and pick up the game later at any other point, you are out of luck. Thanks for dictating when I can quit your game, developer: sorry, the fire alarm must wait, as I am in the middle of a level. Aaaaaaaaahhhhh it burns!

The PC version of Bastion features keyboard and mouse controls in addition to using a gamepad. The WASD keys are used to move, but the angled, isometric level design means you’ll have to routinely hold down two of the keys simultaneously in order to navigate the terrain; obviously, the keyboard was an afterthought. There are a limited number of advanced moves available: evade, shield, and canceling the use of the special move. The mouse is used to fire your primary and secondary weapons, but Bastion has terribly imprecise aiming: if you place your mouse pointer directly on top of an enemy unit, it may or may not actually fire your ranged weapon there. Instead, you have to refer to the aiming line on the ground to figure out where you’ll shoot. With constant hints to use the “auto-aim” tool, it’s clear that Bastion was not designed with the PC in mind, nor was a lot of work put into making the controls better on the computer.

Bastion features two types of weapons: melee and ranged. Usually (but not always), the most recently unlocked weapon is the best, and in general things are varied according to firing rate and damage delivered. The weapons are pretty bland to be honest, and nothing innovative sticks out. Far more interesting are the almost thirty abilities you can find in the game. In addition to a suite of passive skills gained by drinking potions at a distillery, you are given choice of active skills: spinning attacks, multi-shots, fast attacks, grenades, blocking, and more. Each use consumes a black tonic, so they must be used only in special situations. For some reason, you are limited to only two weapons, one special ability, and three tonics of each type (health and black) at one time. Why? No idea.

Fragments scattered around each level (and dropped by enemies) are used to purchase weapon upgrades, which breathes a little life into the generic instruments of destruction. Experience earned during combat also increases your maximum health and unlocks one more passive ability of your choosing. Changes to your arsenal are limited to the bastion (your home base), where buildings are placed to change abilities, upgrade weapons, raise the difficulty, perform achievements, or buy additional items for weapon upgrades. The inability to change your loadout in the middle of a level has one annoying consequence, as the game auto-switches to any newly acquired weapon or ability whether you want it to or not: I really hate that. I guess the developers feel that anything new always fits your play style; this is typical of the host of arbitrary limitations that permeate throughout Bastion. The gameplay is typical RPG fare: attack things at range, attack things up close, and learn the talents of each new enemy you encounter. The AI is generally just there to smash into little bits, although there are occasionally some special attacks that get used by boss-type enemies.

IN CLOSING
The two hooks of Bastion, the art style and somewhat dynamic narration, are undeniably awesome, but the remainder of the game is just OK. First, the good news: the graphics are fantastic, from the hand-drawn levels to the characters and backgrounds. Secondly, the almost constant high-quality narration adds significantly to the overall game experience. Unfortunately, things are bland from there on out. I'm not a huge fan of the control scheme: the levels are designed for angled movement, something that the keyboard doesn't excel at, and the mouse aiming doesn't shoot exactly where you click, leading to a lot of misfires and untimely death. The ranged and melee weapons are pretty standard fare, which means combat is as well, although the upgrades that are slowly unlocked let you customize their abilities a bit. Experience earned from combat unlocks new special abilities, some of which are quite cool. Sadly, no amount of cool abilities can save you from the sometimes distressingly difficulty, which cannot be decreased; I don't like it when developers assume the skill level of their players. In addition, you can't save your progress in the middle of a level, making the game that much harder. The game's twenty levels are over too quickly, and their fixed solutions and lack of exploration reduces replay value immensely. Ardent fans of action role-playing games will get grabbed by the graphics and narration, but the rest of us will be underwhelmed by the limited PC port and linear level design.

King Arthur: Fallen Champions Review

2011-08-26T15:01:00.000-04:00

King Arthur: Fallen Champions, developed by Neocore and published by Paradox Interactive.
The Good: Three heroes gain experience and unlock unique skills, looks nice
The Not So Good: Short linear ten mission campaign with no strategic mode, tiresome story elements, lengthy and tough missions with vague objectives can’t be saved mid-battle, no skirmish options or multiplayer, same iffy AI
What say you? This standalone expansion treads the same ground with new limitations: 3/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
So how do you differentiate yourself from Total War? Add crazy ass fantasy units and spells, which is exactly what King Arthur did two years ago. The formula seemed to work quite well, and it was repeated in the ultimately-disappointing semi-sequel Lionheart. Neocore is back again with another standalone expansion-type game with King Arthur: Fallen Champions, which follows the tale of three fantasy leaders in their quest for…marshmallows? I’m not sure, I wasn’t really paying attention to the introductory movie. In any case, this title can serve as a consolation prize to hold you over until King Arthur 2 comes out next year. Does Fallen Champions fall, or succeed with its blend of real-time tactics and role-playing?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
King Arthur: Fallen Champions is, not surprisingly, graphically similar to the previous titles in the series, which is a good thing. The game thrives with great detail in almost every aspect, starting with the beautiful environments: England never looked so good, with majestic mountains, dark forests, and shimmering creeks present in every map. The terrain is varied in each location as well, giving you a different look at the countryside every time you play. The units look great as well, with good animations and detailed textures when viewed up close. The spell effects are a little cartoonish, but effective in their scope. The sound design is passable, with pleasing background music and appropriate battle effects. There is no voice acting for the story mode, however, which is somewhat of a disappointment. Still, overall the presentation of King Arthur: Fallen Champions is favorable within the strategy genre.

ET AL.
While using the same setting as the original game, King Arthur: Fallen Champions is a completely linear game where the strategic map is simply used to select your next mission from a wide selection of…only one choice. Each of the game’s three heroes has three missions that must be completed in order, although you can switch between heroes between battles. The game culminates in a final battle royale with everyone involved, using their skills and units earned along the way. You must be victorious in every mission, as there is no room for error. Each hero has varied skills and plays differently; the units under their command are also diverse in their abilities. Heroes gain skill points after each battle that can be used to improve several skills in their arsenal, giving the user a bit of customization freedom.

King Arthur: Fallen Champions also includes story elements in “adventure quests”: a very uninteresting mode where you click actions in a series of locations. While you might potentially meet different people and gain allies along the way, ultimately you’ll end up at the main battle, assuming you don’t get lost in the circular options: particularly disorienting are the directional movement options (go north, south, east, or west), where you can literally keep going in circles with no assistance from the game. The story is a very poor replacement for the strategic mode: I found the stories lacked engaging plots or anything else to keep me interested in what I was clicking. Frankly, after the first couple of stories, I simply wanted to get to the next battle as quickly as possible. Also removed are skirmish and multiplayer options: all you get in King Arthur: Fallen Champions are ten linear single-player battles, which drastically reduces the longevity of the game.

Most missions involve engaging the enemy one group at a time as you move across the map. While the overall objective might be slightly more complicated than that (like rescuing a specific unit, or defeating the enemy boss), King Arthur: Fallen Champions does a terrible job explaining this to you: the final objective is never indicated on the minimap, and you can’t refer to the mission goals in the middle of a game. Some missions do have some innovative special rules that make things a bit more interesting than “kill everyone,” but these are rare exceptions to linear level design. Most of the battles pits your tiny forces against numerous enemies, offsetting that imbalance with your magical abilities and tactical prowess. The scenarios are also very long, which makes the lack of a save game option distressing.

Units are interesting: although the fall into the standard categories of infantry, cavalry, and ranged, some come with special abilities (positive or negative) which makes you treat them a little bit differently. Each map is also dotted with victory locations that can grant bonuses to your army. Ordering your troops around is standard fare: formations, attacking, control-grouping, the usual. Different terrain is better for different types of units, and time acceleration is available to speed up the boring parts (which is most of the time). The AI continues to be a mixed bag: the scenario designers are partly to blame, never amassing them to become a real threat unless you charge directly towards the main base without picking up reinforcements along the way. The enemy AI does engage the appropriate opponent when available, but it never executes any sophisticated tactical strategies. The battles in King Arthur: Fallen Champions still suffer from the “large mass” problem, where most units just engage each other in a gigantic chaotic circle of death. The tactical AI does a poor job dealing with this: units will routinely just circle around the outside of the mass, scouting for a way in. It’s funny (in a sad way) to watch a powerful hero with a glowing sword walking around in circles trying to find the enemy to fight in the middle of the pack. Ultimately, any player of Neocore’s previous games will not see anything new or different when it comes to the tactical battles of King Arthur: Fallen Champions.

IN CLOSING
At $10, King Arthur: Fallen Champions is priced as a small standalone expansion for the original game, and it doesn’t even live up to those lowered expectations. First off, the game is short, consisting of only ten missions. Now, the missions are lengthy, but they usually involve the same tactics (engage groups of enemies one at a time with your outnumbered squad on the way to the objective) and you can’t save your progress in the middle of a mission. While time acceleration offsets some of this limitation, I’d still like to save my game after undertaking thirty minutes of challenging strategic work. The objectives in each battle are very unclear: your goal isn’t indicated on-screen, and you can’t access the mission briefing during the actual mission. The tactical battles are the same as before (with the same up-and-down AI), except you get fewer units and more enemies to deal with: not exactly fair, and a little tedious as you defeat wave after wave of inferior opponents. The role-playing elements are entertaining, if a bit limited, with several skills to choose from between missions. King Arthur: Fallen Champions doesn’t have a strategic mode, instead replacing it with tired “adventure quests”: choice-based text stories that are boring, repetitive, and overly lengthy. King Arthur: Fallen Champions also lacks skirmish battles and multiplayer that was present in previous titles, although the graphics remain intact. Because of the limited, linear content, I’d rather just pay twice the price and get the original King Arthur, or wait a couple of months for the true sequel, instead of settling for the Fallen Champions.

Mactabilis Review

2011-08-21T13:37:00.000-04:00

Mactabilis, developed and published by Blazing Bit Games.
The Good: Truly extensive weapon customization and editing, background/foreground mechanic leads to some clever level design, online multiplayer
The Not So Good: Lacks mid-mission checkpoints, sluggish default ship movement, limited interface, new weapons are very expensive which restricts experimentation and fun, lacks online matchmaking
What say you? A capable arcade shooter highlighted by its flexible weapon editor: 5/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
One of the oldest types of computer games is the arcade shooter. New independent titles always want to add something new to the classic formula of shooting everything in sight, from a polished game experience to innovative weapons and level design. Next up is Mactabilis, which attempts to shoot its way out of France and onto your monitor, featuring an impressive custom weapon editor and non-stop action. Is Mactabilis a must-shoot entry in the genre?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Mactabilis employs a 2-D, hand-drawn aesthetic that works well enough. The game falls behind modern arcade shooters that use fancy 3-D effects or appealing retro graphics, but there is a good variety in visuals between each level. In addition, the levels are extensive enough where the relatively simplistic nature of the graphics takes a back seat to the chaos of battle. The weapon effects are well done, with satisfyingly varied beams and bullets that fly across the screen. The enemies also exhibit a pleasing variety, and some distinctive designs are found. The sound design is typical, with the sound of bullets and destruction filling your ears. However, Mactabilis has one of the most annoying grating damage sounds I’ve encountered, and I quickly learned to avoid running into things simply so I would not have to hear it again. Mactabilis also graduated from the generic techno school of arcade game background music, which adds nothing but white noise to the proceedings. Overall, Mactabilis has a basic presentation that is elevated a bit by some enemy and level diversity.

ET AL.
Mactabilis is an arcade shooter where you shoot things, arcade style. There are two game modes most will encounter (plus a special mode for the hardcore player): the “regular” mode with temporary ship upgrades, and an “arcade” mode where you pick up weapons on the fly instead of purchasing them between levels. Each mode features the same ten levels and three difficulty levels: easy, normal, and hardcore (where one-shot-kills rule the day). The ten levels switch between top-down and side-view perspectives, and each map has some specific restrictions or rules like removing movement to the background or various obstacles to avoid. Once you finish the ten-level set, you can restart the series with harder enemies, retaining the weapons you have purchased along the way. I found Mactabilis to quite difficult on the “normal” setting, so the lack of mid-missions saves is quite distressing: you lose all of your progress and any cash you have earned, which makes purchasing the weapons you need to beat the levels that much more difficult. You don’t have to go it alone, however, as Mactabilis features online multiplayer for two players, including both cooperative and competitive modes, but only if you know the other player’s IP address, as the game doesn’t offer any in-game matchmaking to find opponents.

Controls are typical for the genre: movement in all four directions, a fire button, and one to switch between four weapons. Movement is really sluggish unless you gather temporary speed upgrades, which makes it really difficult to avoid the various obstacles the game throws at you and take out all of the enemies to maximize your points. Your ship has shields and hull health to absorb damage, energy used to fire, and stimulants to slow down time. The weapons in Mactabilis are exceptional, as you can choose from a roster of over forty or create your own using a straightforward menu system. You can customize firing direction, speed, aiming, spacing, movement, and appearance. For example, you could create a weapon that fires three decelerating bullets forward, two backwards, one up, and one down with a slight delay at an incrementing angle that explode in a wave pattern. Pretty sweet, right? You can even combine weapons so that they fire simultaneously. You can also test out any combination before buying it, which may be your only chance to see what it can do, since the prices for weapons are prohibitively expensive. It took me two full levels (that’s a fifth of the game) to get one measly additional bullet added to my arsenal, which is far too limited in my opinion. Still, the weapon editor is pretty impressive and a whole lot of fun to mess with.

Mactabilis really takes place in two parallel planes, as you can switch between the foreground and background to avoid enemies and other objects. While this is initially really confusing, you do get used to it after a couple of levels. The game highlights objects in your plane in red, while those in the background are blurred. Still, the interface does a really poor job telling you whether you are in the front or the back, and in the heat of battle, this may mean the difference between victory and untimely death. In addition to the various obstacles you must avoid, Mactabilis features a fine assortment of enemies with different behaviors; each level does feel like a slightly different experience. Destroying those enemies quickly will unlock combos that will grant energy regeneration and the occasional powerup. As I alluded to earlier, Mactabilis is very difficult: the combination of a lot of enemies and a lot of objects, coupled with significant damage for hitting large objects, means I spent all of my play time on “easy” (I couldn’t even beat the introductory level on “normal”). Maybe if the game was more generous with handing out cash and I could afford better weapons, then the difficulty would be more appropriate, but in general most people will want to stick to “easy”, I would think.

IN CLOSING
Mactabilis has two unique things going for it: the weapon editor and front/back movement. I really, really like the weapon editor, where you can tweak to your heart’s content, adjusting almost any value ever conceived for an arcade shooter weapon. You can come up with some really crazy, unique combinations, so it’s too bad that Mactabilis really limits your imagination by providing only a modest amount of funds for destroying enemies. Beyond the fun weapon customization, the foreground/background level design works well once you get beyond the initial learning curve (and overcome the interface), and the levels are designed with multi-level navigation in mind, presenting various obstacles and complex enemies to deal with. Beyond this, though, Mactabilis is pretty generic. Your ship moves very slowly, which makes clearing each level and avoiding incoming barriers almost impossible. The two main game modes are only marginally different, and while the ten levels do offer unique challenges, they are over quickly. I found the “normal” difficulty to be too, well, difficult, and spent all of my time on “easy”. You can join a friend in online battle, but only if you know their IP address in advance. I think fans of arcade shooters will appreciate the fantastic weapon editor and level design, but the full package has just enough limitations to deter less dedicated gamers.

Thunder Fleets Review

2011-08-16T14:51:00.000-04:00

Thunder Fleets, developed and published by Orator Games.
The Good: Straightforward regional control-based economy, online multiplayer supports Windows, Mac, and iPad players in the same game, variety of ships with different uses that gain experience, capable AI opponent
The Not So Good: Online play lacks matchmaking and has iffy real-world results, automated combat removes subtle tactics, only five skirmish maps, minimal interface and graphics
What say you? This casual World War II real time naval strategy game offers simplified territorial economics and cross-platform multiplayer: 5/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Naval warfare in the Pacific during World War II was a major aspect of the conflict that commonly takes a back seat to the land-based affairs in Europe. Large ships threw thick, metallic shells at each other while fighting over tiny islands in a huge sea. A few games have attempted to simulate this elegant ballet to the death, and the next in line is Thunder Fleets. This real-time game has a couple of notable features: conquest-like conflicts similar to the Battlefield series of first person shooters (where your primary mission is to capture territory rather than simply eliminate the enemy force), and cross-platform online multiplayer that can be played between Windows, Mac, and iPad devices. That’s enough to warrant a closer look, and that’s exactly what Thunder Fleets shall receive.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Thunder Fleets has very simple graphics designed to run on mobile platforms. The overhead 2-D perspective, however, works well enough to make the game functional, although none of the aspects of the graphics are outstanding or even average. The ships lack fluid movement while turning (they are clearly made up of eight rotated sprites), and while the smoke and fire while damaged looks decent enough, sinking a ship is very disappointing as the ships slowly turn more blue without any dramatic explosions to accompany your victory. The ocean is slightly animated, but the terrain is very bland and generally featureless. You also cannot play the game windowed, or alt-tab out of the game to the desktop without it crashing. The sound design is even more minimal, with a couple of effects for combat and just sporadic background noise as a replacement for music. The basic nature of the graphics and sound in Thunder Fleets will certainly not win any awards, but at least the game is playable.

ET AL.
Thunder Fleets lets you take to the seas and blast the stuffing out of the competition. The content starts with two campaigns for both the United States and Japan, although the same nine missions are experienced from either side; they consist of a tutorial of general strategy and essentially skirmish maps with some starting forces and (later on) unbalanced maps. The first couple of levels were difficult as I learned the game (I had to play the “tutorial” three times; hint: don’t use your torpedoes until you’re told to do so), but later levels were significantly easier, then harder as the deck got unfairly stacked against you. Beyond the generally uninteresting campaign are only five skirmish maps that can be played with two or four players; there are also no team options. The potentially awesome feature of Thunder Fleets is something that I haven’t gotten to work yet: cross-platform multiplayer. Yes, you can potentially play online against people using Windows, Mac, or something called an “iPad” (I think it’s some kind of menstrual apparatus) using any of those devices. However, the IP-only hosting leaves a lot to be desired, especially in an age of wireless routers and NAT nonsense that complicate things. What Thunder Fleets really needs is a server browser or other matchmaking utility inside the game. As it stands now, the host isn’t even shown their IP address, so you have to figure it out through other means and then tell the people who are going to join you (before you run the game, as alt-tabbing out of Thunder Fleets is a recipe for disaster). If you are going to have cross-platform multiplayer as a major selling point, you have to do better than IP-only hosting. This aspect of the game needs some additional work, but if it ever does function as intended, it would be an impressive feature.

The interface of Thunder Fleets, an important aspect of any real time strategy game, is generally designed for a smaller touch interface, but works decently enough for the mouse-driven computer systems. The sides of the screen are adorned with large icons for accessing groups (which can also be done using the number keys and control) and issuing orders to stop or cease-fire. There are no tool-tips for anything: just health bars and small colored icons (for weapon availability) on each ship that are hard to see when zoomed out at any useful level. The range circles are definitely helpful when trying to stay out of the reach of the enemy, and rally points for buildings cut down on some of the micromanagement. While I suspect the interface works well for a finger-driven device, a bit more information given to the player would be helpful.

The name of the game is territory control: each map is divided into several rectangular regions that, once captured, speed production of your units, leading to ultimate victory. Production in Thunder Fleets is continuous: ships will always be produced at each of your factories (additional ones can be captured), but it’s up to you to decide which ships. Larger, more powerful vessels will take longer, and you can decide to switch the production order at any time with no penalty: a helpful abstraction. There are basically three types of ships to choose from: small torpedo boats, medium destroyers that carry small guns and torpedoes, and large cruisers that lug the big guns. Each ship has a different construction time and armor rating against guns and torpedoes; it seems that every ship has the same attack rating, as it were, and damage is calculated based on the defensive ratings. Ships gain experience over time, which grants bonuses like faster reloading times.

The ships of Thunder Fleets move very slowly, and this allows for a couple of things: time to think (too much time in the beginning of a match, actually), and not enough time to avoid torpedoes. The general strategy is to hit the big ships with torpedoes and clean up with guns, while keeping your ships out of the range of the enemy. All of the attacks are automated: you never have to calculate torpedo firing angles or click on a specific spot for your ships to be effective. Personally, I’m on the fence regarding the automated attacks: it’s nice that your ships can take care of themselves, but you’d also like to direct the guns and torpedoes more accurately than your AI captains do on occasion. It’s kind of annoying that your torpedoes sometimes miss the target completely when both ships are stationary, especially when it takes so darn long for the torpedoes to reload. Still, the sight of torpedoes in the water is stressful as you slowly maneuver your ships (hopefully) around them. There is definitely some luck with torpedo and shell placement, but the long, drawn-out battles do allow for reinforcements to arrive, supplementing a battle. That said, your only real choices are positioning and when to use torpedoes, so people looking for a tactically deep strategy game will be disappointed. Thunder Fleets lacked mid-game stalemates for the most part: once somebody got over half of the territory, they were able to out-produce the enemy rather quickly. That’s not to say that comebacks aren’t impossible, however, as the map design usually allows for more than one path to centrally located bases. Finally, the AI was better than I expected: it’s not super-aggressive, but it does actively capture territory and usually moves ships in groups of two or more vessels, instead of a useless drip of single ships that I’ve encountered in too many strategy games. I can win if the AI isn’t given a production bonus on a higher difficulty level, but it’s certainly no pushover.

IN CLOSING
Thunder Fleets has some simplified strategy elements that I think will appeal to a more novice crowd. First, controlling territory leads to faster production and, ultimately, victory, so it’s clear this is your goal. Some regions also have buildings that can give additional construction points or research improving specific weapons or defenses. The three main ship types are balanced, and the combination of torpedoes to take down large, slow moving ships and guns to eliminate faster, smaller vessels works well. The slow, methodical movement of your ships makes torpedoes nerve-wracking, as you attempt to maneuver your fleet out of harm’s way. There is some luck involved in combat, as you have no direct control over where your ships fire; I have been on the end of a defeat to a smaller force on more than one occasion. The interface could be more PC friendly: while the basic options are there, the lack of tool-tips and small icons for each ship remove the amount of information we expect in a strategy game. The game has a challenging campaign and a skirmish mode against an adept AI opponent, although there are only five maps to choose from. The cross-platform multiplayer between Windows, Mac, and iPad is a definite selling point, but it has limited functionality at the moment (I was never able to successfully join or host a match), especially without in-game matchmaking tools provided; I can’t recommend a game where the most important feature doesn’t work for me. I’m not sure how much long-term appeal the game will have with possibly broken online features, but I think Thunder Fleets could potentially find an audience in the more casual crowd.

Pirates of Black Cove Review

2011-08-11T07:29:00.000-04:00

Pirates of Black Cove, developed by Nitro Games and published by Paradox Interactive.
The Good: Variety of character skills and ship abilities, some scripted item crafting, nice waves
The Not So Good: Land and naval battles lack tactics, tedious movement at sea and on land through sparse game worlds, superfluous town management, loot magically reappears in the same locations, repetitive quests, no difficulty settings, questionable enemy AI, little difference between starting character choices, some technical issues
What say you? This pirate adventure is boring and tiresome with little reward: 3/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Pirates have been undergoing a bit of a renaissance, kicked off by those Caribbean-themed movies in 2003. I guess there’s something alluring about diseased criminals fighting on large wooden boats. Whatever. Computer games have been touched by this strange fascination, with many games involving the scurvy dogs: Sid Meier’s Pirates!, Sea Dogs, Tortuga, Swashbucklers, Buccaneer, Age of Booty, the list goes on. Always up for a seafaring adventure, the latest attempt at capturing the rough and tumble nature of the time period is Pirates of Black Cove, where you and your loyal crew search the open sea for treasure, trinkets, and a bottle of rum.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
The best aspect of Pirates of Black Cove is the water (seriously): it looks very nice, with detailed, shimmering waves and plenty of sea life in the abundant seas: dolphins, whales, and birds that appear way too far off the coast. The lands that dot the Caribbean are just average, with palm trees and green hues in abundance. Ships, which are tiny unless you zoom uncomfortably close, exhibit visible damage (fire, torn sails) but aren’t overwhelmingly detailed. The towns use the same recycled designs for several locations, noticeable if you play the game for more than twenty minutes. The tiny land characters have decent battle animations and look lively enough. Sounds during battle are canned and don’t exhibit the chaos you would generally attribute to pirate attacks. The game features some extensive dialogue on occasion (more towards the beginning of the game), but the voice acting is terrible enough to make you skip past them quickly. The music selection is period-specific but forgettable. While the presentation of Pirates of Black Cove is generally appropriate for the $20 price tag, there are some highlights to be found.

ET AL.
Pirates of Black Cove is a single-player game where you assume the role of a newly-appointed pirate captain, and take to the Caribbean in search of riches. There are three characters to choose from, and the differences between them are miniscule: they are rated according to melee damage, speed, and toughness, but there aren’t any hard choices to make as every one of them is too well rounded. As you gain experience throughout the game, new skills and additional ability points are unlocked. The skills involve very basic things like increased damage, more health, improved range, decreased loading times, or faster speed: nothing too exciting or dramatic, but there is the potential to develop your character somewhat as you would like. There are three factions in the game (pirates, buccaneers, and corsairs), and your task is to unite them against the evil Pirates of Black Cove (it’s in the title, people!). You do this by completing missions that run the same course for each faction: go here (clearly indicated in the game world, thankfully) and shoot someone (though the occasional puzzle element does appear). While Pirates of Black Cove promotes itself as an open world game, the Caribbean is surprisingly empty: there is the occasional ship to fire upon a colonies on some island, but there are large stretches of uninhabited land and open sea that’s frankly boring to navigate. Pirates of Black Cove is not a vibrant world by any stretch of the imagination. The in-game tutorial is OK, explaining some basic mechanics of the game, but not great, and there are no difficulty settings for Pirates of Black Cove, making the early game entirely too easy. I have also experienced several bugs: crashes to the desktop (which, coupled with infrequent auto-saves, is a problem) and missions that break halfway through. I’ve also had my saved games crash the game upon load (both the manual save and the auto-save), losing all of my progress up to that point. Oops.

As a pirate with a boat, you’ll take to the seas in search of booty. Your starting ship isn’t the greatest, but each faction has two additional choices you can purchase. Money is earned by destroying ships and raiding colonial villages. You can attack any ship you see, as all nations are enemies, although no opposing ships will attack you first (I guess the gigantic pirate flag wasn’t enough of a hint of a threat). As soon as you fire upon a ship, combat begins on the main sea map. Ship combat in Pirates of Black Cove is a game of turn and shoot, where you must position your cannons to hit the enemy while avoiding their fire. You use the WASD keys to move, with Q and E used to fire; “E” is used to fire right-side cannons, even if you are sailing down the screen, so you have to mentally keep this straight during combat. You can alternatively use the mouse and right-click on the enemy ship to fire the appropriate cannons automatically, which I found to be a bit easier to handle. The combat is not terribly different from most of naval warfare games of the game period, but the faster pace of Pirates of Black Cove makes the combat less tactical than the competition. In addition, there is only one cannon ammunition type, so you’ll only do overall damage to a ship instead of targeting sails, crew, or the hull. You can use toolkits easily gathered from other ships or land areas to repair your damage instantly at any time: no tactics here. Each ship does have one special weapon, like rockets, mines, or mortars, which makes things a bit more interesting, but it’s not enough. Finally, while the AI does a decent job getting into good firing and defensive positions, it runs into things and gets stuck on islands far too often if combat occurs near the shore.

Not only can you engage in combat at sea, but you can take on all comers on land as well. This is done at colonial villages, where you will take members of your crew and right-click your way to victory. All you need to do is box-select everyone and right-click: there are no advanced formation options or any tactical or strategic depth here. Defenses are very modest, as few enemy soldiers seemingly appear out of thin air. There is also a building that can be destroyed (the only one that you can click on) for a fabulous cash prize. You can also dock at the stronghold for each of the game’s main factions. Here, you can get quests from the main building, or spend money to construct recruitment offices. You can lead your main character and up to three hired units into land-based battles, and having a full crew makes completing the missions trivially easy. Each faction has a melee, ranged, and artillery unit, such as the pirate scallywag, buccaneer marksman, and corsair stink bomber (really). There are few real choices to make in building up the strongholds: just earn money from sunken ships or destroyed colonies and unlock all of the buildings. There are also a lot of buildings you can’t interact with at all, so you spend a lot of time just moving your mouse over things to see if you can do something there. It also takes too long to walk around each village; it would have been easier (and less time-consuming) to just have things listed in a menu. Villages (as well as the open sea) also have loot that appears in random locations, ready for you to pick up without a fight. Thing is, if you leave a village or the ocean and instantly return, all of the loot will regenerate, meaning you can easily stock up on everything needed for combat for free. The loot includes artifacts (some special abilities), consumables (more health), collectables (for show, I guess), and ingredients that can be combined at an alchemist’s shop into consumables (pretty cool). I didn’t see any way to actually sell these things and their variety is fairly limited, though, so loot has narrow value and interest.

IN CLOSING
Pirates of Black Cove is a decent idea that’s executed poorly on all counts. Both the land and sea battles are simple, trivial affairs that lack depth. The game’s easy (and predetermined) difficulty makes the combat even less interesting. Movement around the Caribbean and through each settlement takes too long, lengthening the repetitive quests considerably, and the game world is surprisingly bare, with only the occasional town, enemy ship, or item spaced far apart. Plus, scouring the map for potions and artifacts is just plain dumb, since items spawn in the same locations as soon as you re-enter the same town or ocean locale. Buildings must be constructed using your spoils to hire units for land battles: hardly scintillating town management. The three characters are too similar in abilities, despite there being a nice selection of skills they can acquire over time. The AI offers no challenge, and bugs are frequent enough to notice. With strong historic competition from the likes of Pirates!, there is simply no reason to sail the seven seas with Pirates of Black Cove, a title that’s destined to walk the plank and spend eternity in Davy Jones’ Locker.

Six Gun Saga Review

2011-08-06T08:04:00.000-04:00

Six Gun Saga, developed and published by Cryptic Comet.
The Good: Many varied actions and choices for each card, poker-based combat fits theme well, quick games, several victory conditions
The Not So Good: No multiplayer, no tutorial to explain complex rules, uninformative interface, some balance issues exacerbated by chance, inconsistent AI
What say you? This single-player card game requires study, wrestling with the interface, and an acceptance of luck: 4/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
The Old West, a classic setting for movies, has been largely ignored by computer games. Instead, we enjoy shooting (virtually, I hope) Nazis in World War II, or casting spells in a mythical setting, or shooting terrorists (who are possibly also Nazis) in present day. Save for one notable recent non-PC game that, for that reason, shall remain nameless, the Old West in untapped territory ripe for expansion (possibly using railroads). Enter Six Gun Saga, a side project by Solium Infernum developer Cryptic Comet. This, like all of their titles, is a card-based game where you must accrue victory points without getting shot in the face.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Six Gun Saga is visually similar to and real-world card game, as the graphics consist of the cards themselves and the game board where the cards are played. The cards, like previous Cryptic Comet efforts, are a treat, featuring nice art that certainly contributes to the theme of the game. They also contain informative descriptions of special attributes and alternative actions that can be performed. Unfortunately, the interface as a whole is terrible. First, there are no tool-tips: all information is displayed in the same area to the left, so the information for the currently-selected item is removed when another item is placed under the mouse cursor. However, if a posse is selected, you cannot mouse-over anything else to see its properties (like, say, the combat value of the enemy posse you might attack): a questionable restriction. The posses themselves are represented on the game board by simple monochrome circles, giving no indication on relative strength unless you select them. Currently selected items are highlighted in a very subtle manner (a slightly brighter yellow outline, the same color as the cards themselves). The game also doesn't explain why you can't do certain things: if I have five cash, why can't I hire an outlaw that costs one cash? The interface certainly doesn’t help newcomers scale the learning difficulties presented by the game. The sound design is forgettable: the period-appropriate cowboy music is a nice touch, but there are hardly any effects (just selecting things) to make battles come alive. Overall, Six Gun Saga gets by with rudimentary graphics and a limited interface.

ET AL.
Six Gun Saga is a card game for two to four players where your posses attempt to accumulate the most victory points by being placed on story cards and eliminating enemy units. The game can also end when a predefined turn limit is reached or a specific number of units are killed. You can adjust all of these settings, in addition to starting cash, before the game begins. Six Gun Saga provides no difficulty settings to make the game more challenging. More significantly, it lacks multiplayer: there is no hotseat mode, no LAN play, no online play, nothing. For a card game that is inherently multiplayer, this is a major limitation.

There are four card types in Six Gun Saga. You’ll start out by choosing a boss (or have the game randomly choose one for you): he determines the number of cards you draw per turn, the maximum hand size, the maximum number of posses, the size of your bunkhouse, and any special restrictions (like the lawman can’t hire outlaws). Some of these limitations are more noteworthy than others, and can alter your overall strategy somewhat. “Dudes” are your units, organized into groups called “posses”: they have an initial cost, per-turn upkeep (which must be balanced before each turn), gunfight value, health, leadership ability (how many people can be in their posse), victory point value if killed, and subtype that determines which action cards their posse can enter. Townsfolk also come with a special ability that can provide an income bonus, bonuses for owning specific buildings, and drawing more cards per turn to offset their lack of combat value. “Deeds” are buildings that, like townsfolk, provide additional income or a special ability. “Ambushes” can be placed on enemy staging areas as a one-time attack against posses; these discourage sending out single-unit posses. Finally, story cards award significant victory points, but require a specific subtype in a posse to enter first.

Cards start out in your hand (dealt after each turn), and there are four things you can do with them initially. You can buy the card, which adds dudes to your bunkhouse (who can then be added to posses), activates deeds, or places ambushes. You can attach the poker card listed on the item to an existing posse, to (hopefully) produce a better hand in the poker combat part of the game. Each card also has one of seventy actions listed on it that can be applied if certain conditions are fulfilled; these include things that affect victory points, upkeep, and skill levels, such as “if you have at least one posse containing a gambler that has occupied a story card for at least one turn then select an opponent and
take a random deed card from their holdings.” And if you don’t need it, you can cash a card in for a specified value (a good option for offsetting dude upkeep).

Posses, which cost three money to form, start out in your boss’s card and then pass through a staging area (where ambushes are placed) on the way to entering a story card the following turn. This is where the majority of victory points are earned, but story cards can only be entered by a specific dude type (lawmen, outlaws, gambler, military, et cetera); this makes you focus on specific dude types based on what story cards are currently on the table. When two posses meet in the same story card, a gunfight ensues. The game uses a Texas hold ‘em poker game to add value to existing gunfighting ratings; this means the superior posse won’t always win (though they usually will), especially if specific poker cards have been introduced. Overall, it’s balanced well, giving a semi-random bonus to keep combat a bit unpredictable. Plus, it’s a neat way to handle combat, and certainly fits the theme of the game well. After combat, hits are assigned to enemy units manually, so you can take out the units worth the most victory points.

Six Gun Saga features great card variety and varied special abilities, which means strategy will be slightly different each time. The combination of your boss, the cards you get, and the story objectives on the table will determine which cards you’ll keep, which ones you’ll cash, and which abilities you’ll use. Six Gun Saga depends on more luck than I’d like to see, like getting specific cards at the right time (I was Wyatt Earp, which means you can't recruit outlaws, so, of course, I drew almost all outlaws for the entire game). Additionally, one action (which are free to place) can really screw you, especially ones that result in the loss of expensive cards or a significant boost in upkeep for a particular unit. Either of these actions occurring in the beginning of a match results in a lot of early quitting. I think the more powerful actions should cost some amount of cash (or some other kind of limit), as there aren’t any repercussions for their use. While the actions allow for the trailing players to catch up, they are still annoying and poorly balanced. The AI doesn’t provide a good enough competitor: while they are good at pestering you with actions and then attacking vulnerable units immediately after, they also engage in battles where they are clearly outnumbered. The AI also likes to occasionally sit and do nothing, giving the human the opportunity to extend their lead. The computer simply can’t keep up with a competent human player, and I was able to easily double the computer’s victory points on a consistent basis after three or four “practice” games.

IN CLOSING
Six Gun Saga is an interesting idea for a card game that suffers from a couple of shortcomings. I do applaud the variety of cards available in the game: while you will encounter the same items in multiple games, the different attributes lead to varied strategies. You can choose to reap cards for their special abilities, cash them in to balance your upkeep, use them to form posses, stock up on deeds to provide bonuses, or accentuate existing posses with bonuses during combat. Striking a balance between all of these actions while accumulating the victory points earned from the missions at the center of the table is an appealing dynamic. The poker gunfights add just a pinch of luck to vary the combat values just enough to make confrontations in objectives unpredictable. Overall, however, Six Gun Saga relies on a significant amount of luck: getting the right (or wrong) cards at the right (or wrong) time determines the winner more often than solid strategy. If there are victory locations only for outlaws and you don't have any, the other players will reap the early benefits of getting to the story cards first. Plus, when you get the precious outlaw, you can bet that the AI will use an overpowered free ability to render that dude useless. Generally, the lackluster AI simply cannot keep up with a decent human player: once the basic rules are learned, victory is usually assured (unless they keep eliminating your best units with cheap abilities). Because Six Gun Saga lacks multiplayer modes of any kind, this is a problem that significantly affects longevity. The final nail in the coffin on Boot Hill (or whatever cowboy analogy you'd like to use) is the horrendous interface, which makes Six Gun Saga generally inaccessible to newcomers. In the end, the reliance on luck and overpowered abilities, uncompetitive AI, lack of multiplayer, and poor interface makes Six Gun Saga destined to hang for its crimes instead of riding into the sunset.

A.I.M. Racing Review

2011-08-01T19:13:00.001-04:00

A.I.M. Racing, developed by SkyRiver Studios and published by 1C Company on Gamer’s Gate.
The Good: Sixteen tracks
The Not So Good: Extremely poor handling, overpowered AI opponents, LAN-only multiplayer, uninspired graphics, must unlock content, control assignment limitations, no alternative racing modes
What say you? This futuristic racing game lacks tight controls and notable features: 2/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Hey, remember those pod racers from the first (fourth?) Star Wars movie? Wouldn’t it be sweet if you could drive them? I wish there was a computer game that did that. Oh, wait, there was, but that was ten (seriously) years ago. Time for a shameless retread! Enter A.I.M. Racing, which surprisingly does not involve driving AOL’s Instant Messenger service. Apparently, this game is based on a series of role-playing games (I can see the obvious transition). Piloting hovercraft at unsafe speeds on foreign landscapes is enough to get my interest piqued, so how does the racing fare?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
A.I.M. Racing has decidedly outdated visuals. Most everything about the game is bland apart from the racer models. The environments are not detailed and only contain the scattered obstacle to impede your progress. The racing circuits fail in a couple of areas: both the layouts and the textures lack variety to make the game memorable. The special effects suffer from the same fate: boulders and other objects magically disappear when you run into them, and weapon damage is understated. This is not a game that pushes the limits of your hardware, and it shows. The music is also quite uninteresting: a generic mix of uninspired techno beats. The weapons also lack the punch you would expect. Everything about the presentation of A.I.M. Racing has a very generic and forgettable feel to it.

ET AL.
A.I.M. Racing features typical racing options: a four-tiered championship of increasing difficulty, quick races with unlocked tracks, and network play (but only over a LAN). There is nothing unique here, and the choices are actually quite limited once you examine the features more closely. First, you must unlock additional cars and tracks (boo!). While you can choose the number of laps and lives and opponents, you can only race in traditional circuit events. Also, you cannot assign an axis to the throttle and brake, eliminating the use of wheels or analogue gamepads. There are sixteen tracks to choose from, but, again, you have to unlock them in the championship mode. Boo!

Racing in A.I.M. Racing uses gliders that hover a couple of feet above the ground. While you might think that this would lend itself to some unique racing, it does not: other than being able to jump a short vertical distance over objects, it’s the same as any other arcade racing game and pretty disappointing. Each glider is rated in five attributes: strength, acceleration, max speed, maneuverability, firepower. A particular glider usually has one area of very high rating, while the others are significantly lower. You cannot customize your own racer: a disappointing missing feature. You can, however, earn modifiers after some races, but this is a small

The physics of A.I.M. Racing are quite terrible: most of the hovercrafts handle like they are moving through heavy syrup with no cornering ability at all. I realize the vehicles are hovering above the ground with no physical contact, but they should handle better than this, especially for an arcade racing game. Even turning the mouse sensitivity to full doesn’t result in the turning radius I desire. This wouldn’t be an issue of the AI drivers played by the same rules, but they can take corners at speed with ease, leaving you quickly in the dust. Making things worse is the seemingly random placement of objects designed to impede your progress, stuff that the AI never, ever runs in to. The only thing to even the playing field is the use of weapons, but even shooting at foes is a confusing affair. The game targets other cars automatically, but the game doesn’t explain when you are “locked on” and when you are no, as the reticule says green all of the time and there is no auditory cue to indicate when to fire. I don’t even think the “normal” weapons use the reticule, as you must be horizontally lined up with your enemy in order to score a hit. So why have the target marker in the first place? While the controls are not as complex as the other combat racing game, you still have to deal with the extraneous acceleration booster that must be applied every ten seconds after recharging. Tediousness does not have a place in a racing game. As you might expect, there are pickups to pick up that grand temporary bonuses for acceleration, shields, guns, and other assorted weaponry. You’ll need them, too, as the AI is too dexterous and never makes a mistake. The game tries to explain this as you racing against robots, but it still doesn’t make for exciting racing. You might as well make A.I.M. Racing a rally game since you are racing against a perfect foe influenced only by weapons, assuming you are in range, which you will not be.

IN CLOSING
A.I.M. Racing lacks that “hook” that you need to grab your attention and make the game stand out against the horde of racing titles. It's tough to say anything good about the game, as everything reeks of average to below average quality. The sixteen tracks seem like a lot, but they suffer from repetition of layout and setting. The cars handle quite poorly, not cornering as effectively as you would like. This would not be a problem if the AI played by the same rules, but your superior opponents take the turns with ease. This may be partially due to controller issues, but since A.I.M. Racing doesn't allow you to bind an axis to the throttle or brake and increasing the mouse sensitivity doesn't result in better maneuverability, then you must blame it on the game's physics. Add in limited multiplayer options, the requirement to unlock content, and only one race type, and we have a limited and ultimately uninteresting racing title. If you are looking for an arcade combat racing game, Death Track Resurrection is far superior to the bland driving of A.I.M. Racing.

Pro Cycling Manager 2011 Review

2011-07-28T17:00:00.000-04:00

Pro Cycling Manager 2011, developed by Cyanide Studio and published by Focus Home Interactive.
The Good: Tons of detailed content plus editors for even more, sponsor goals give direction, enjoyable multiplayer, time acceleration or fully simulated events speed things up, excellent graphics
The Not So Good: Overwhelmingly minor improvements, vague interface lacks tool-tips, no tutorials or strategy guide, poor sound design
What say you? The latest Tour de France tie-in is generally indistinguishable from its annual predecessors: 5/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
The Tour de France (or, in its native tongue, “L'État, c'est moi”) dominates obscure cable sports networks every July, bringing its special brand of doping-fueled pedal-to-pedal racing. As with most sports, a computer game adaptation is inevitable, and Pro Cycling Manager returns with its eleventh entry for 2011 (actually using the year it was released in the title…what a novel idea!). This particular sport is more strategic than action-oriented, as you must position your riders in the best place for their attributes and the course layout to win the race. I last played the series in 2008, so I say it’s time for an update, especially with the promise of 3-D riders, better AI, and an improved interface. Does Pro Cycling Manager 2011 capture the yellow jersey, or crash in a massive pileup?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
The most appealing aspect of Pro Cycling Manager 2011 is the graphics, which look spectacular. The riders are animated well and look almost photo-realistic, with identifiable team colors and superb textures. More significant are the tracks, which are filled to the brim with objects like trees, power lines, buildings, mountains, authentic distance markers, and all the other things you see along the Tour. The crowds come to life as you pass by, almost making you feel like you’re actually watching a real race. One complaint: riders seem to float around each other when passing, especially laterally, but other than that, the graphics are excellent. All of this 3-D splendor comes at a price, however, as load times for the races are a bit lengthy. The sound design is much less impressive, with sporadic, repetitive commentary that occasionally says rider names and terrible generic music doesn’t fit theme at all; I was pretty disappointed with this part of the game. Still, the graphics clearly offset any shortcomings involved with the sound design.

ET AL.
You can’t fault Pro Cycling Manager 2011 for a lack of content, although, to be fair, most of the content has been around for several years. The game is officially licensed, which means you are going to get the real riders and real teams on the real stages. There are several ways to cycle through the game (see what I did there?). The first is the career mode, where you are the general manager of a team of your choice, responsible with securing sponsorship, interacting with riders, balancing the checkbook, hiring staff, and scouting new cyclists. You sponsor has specific goals they want reached in every race (win, top five, points leader), which is great for figuring out what’s appropriate success for your organization; nobody expects you to win the Tour de France with the worst team in the game, so having realistic goals for each team is nice. The actual riders are rated in thirteen areas, from mountain performance to recovery and acceleration. These are used to determine rider type (fighter, climber, stage racer) and which contract type is most appropriate for their level of skill (from leader to youth). Training and healing your riders is done automatically, the quality of which is determined by the rating of your staff. Entering races and marching up the rankings while appeasing your sponsors can be fun.

Pro Cycling Manager 2011 doesn’t stop at the career mode, however. If you are in for a shorter experience, you can play single seasons where you can set the calendar and points system, one of sixty-five single tours (confusingly called stage races), a single stage from a stage race, of which there are over five hundred, eighty classic races, or seven track events with seven different modes where you control the rider directly. You can also alter the bike equipment used by your cyclists, if a particular stage is more in the mountains or flat. Multiplayer is a fun feature of the game, allowing you to play single stages or entire seasons online against human competition. You can even create your own riders, teams, and stages using the included editors. While Pro Cycling Manager 2011 has exhaustive features, one thing it lacks is a tutorial. Conspicuously absent (especially since there was a tutorial in the 2008 version of the game, the game offers no guidance to new players on how to play the game or what strategies to use. What is a competitive energy level? When should I sprint or attack? The game nor the manual never tell you, so unless you are a cycling aficionado, the strategic learning curve for Pro Cycling Manager 2011 is steep for newcomers.

Cycle time! You are given three options to simulate a stage: a quick simulation, a detailed simulation, or a 3-D race. For the simulation options, you can specify the race roles for each rider and specific instructions like ride in breakaways, sprint for the climber’s or points jersey, lead a teammate, or chase the breakaway. And then it’s just a matter of pressing the “next” button and scream at the terrible results for your team you had no influence on. The more hands-on approach is to play out the races in full 3-D glory. The interface is the same as before, with your riders listed along the left with icons to press to make orders, a side view of the route showing sprint locations and terrain, and times to the adjacent groups of riders. The interface needs some work, however, as there are hardly any tool-tips when you hover over things (what’s this yellow bar for?) and the pre-race strategies aren’t displayed for each rider. Remember who your sprinter was? You better, because the game isn’t going to tell you.

Basically, Pro Cycling Manager 2011 boils down to attacking at the right time (I think; again, no tutorial). Each rider has an overall energy level, plus ones for the extended efforts (so that’s what the yellow bar is for!) and attacks. You have to time when to attack, so you aren’t surrounded by riders who will impede your progress while having teammates help to keep you ahead. Each rider gets a semi-random in-game performance adjustment to make things a but more unpredictable, which I find to be an interesting feature. You don’t control any of the riders directly, but can adjust effort percentage and issue orders like keep position, relay, attack, counter-attack, sprint, follow, or protect. You’ll also need somebody to feed your teammates once or twice a stage. The race physics means you can’t go through other riders, so you’ll have to keep an eye out for blockers when starting to mount an attack. Time acceleration is available to speed through those dull portions of the race (some would argue that’s 100% of the time), and the AI plays the game well and attacks frequently and effectively. Still, there is a strong sense of déjà vu. Is Pro Cycling Manager 2011 a good cycling simulation? Yes. Was it a great cycling simulation already? Yes. And I can’t recommend spending money on almost entirely the same product we see year after year. I know I would have regretted paying for this newest version considering I have one of the predecessors.

IN CLOSING
Pro Cycling Manager 2011 is peppered with incremental changes that add up to a mediocre annual edition. The bottom line is that most of the content was already present three years ago, negating the need to spend $40 more on a supposedly new version. Just looking at the numbers from my previous review hits you with a lot of “the same”: the same number of races (though there are a ton of them), the same career mode, the same rider commands, the same multiplayer, the same editors. The interface is identical as well, and it still lacks tool-tips for most of the small icons and bars, in addition to leaving off important things like rider types and contract specifications during a race (so you could remember who the team leader and sprinters are, for example). The AI is apparently improved, although I couldn’t see a major difference, being a cycling novice. The tutorials have actually been removed completely, leaving new players befuddled as to proper cycling strategy. The lone bright spot of Pro Cycling Manager 2011 is the graphics, which are outstanding. Still, I would imagine few people would want to spend $40 on upgraded visuals when the rest of the game is exactly the same. In the end, Pro Cycling Manager 2011 falls into the pit that so many annual sports titles do: the changes (or lack thereof, in this particular case) do not justify a full price.

Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony Review

2011-07-25T07:16:00.000-04:00

Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony, developed and published by Final Form Games.
The Good: Constant action with simple controls, varied ships and enemies, well-adjusted range of difficulty, up to four players on the same computer, nice retro graphics and music
The Not So Good: Lacks online co-op, short five-mission story-based campaign, content locked from easier difficulty levels
What say you? This action shoot ‘em up has chaotic fun and retro charm, but it’s short and needs online play: 6/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Last Summer, I visited Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in North America. As a nearby resident of the oldest continuously occupied European-established city in the continental United States, it’s interesting how desolate and depressing these early settlements were, surrounded by disease and eventually unfriendly neighbors. History shall repeat itself as we colonize other planets, and that’s the premise of Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony: those hardy English, running out of places to colonize on Earth, reach out to Mars. In a scientifically accurate portrayal of solar system settlement, your task is to shoot the crap out of everything you see. See how much we’ve progressed in four hundred years?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
The graphics of Jamestown are decidedly retro, and I feel this works well with the game. While I would like to see the excellent art style at a higher, crisper resolution, the detail is impressive and distinctive, from the backgrounds to the ship and enemy designs. Each level has a characteristic setting and enemy roster that differentiates itself from the others well. The explosions and weapon effects look nice as well, and the overall bedlam is pleasing to the senses. The sound effects are much the same: while combat is surprisingly subtle (especially firing bullets, but that’s probably on purpose so not to annoy), the music is a wonderful orchestral arrangement. Overall, I was pleased with the detailed art that Jamestown has to offer in the design of both the graphics and sound.

ET AL.
Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony is a classic shmup (shoot ‘em up), where you and up to three friends can blast many an enemy. The game includes a very short story-based campaign consisting of only five levels, and each level takes only a couple of minutes to complete. That means you can breeze through the game in under thirty minutes, if you so choose. The thinking is that you’ll want to replay it at higher difficulty levels and with friends, but the lack of content is still undeniable. In addition, you have to beat previous levels at a specific difficulty level to unlock the later ones, so you might as well start out at the legendary level, then. Hey, when there are only five levels to choose from, at least let us play them at the difficulty we are most comfortable with. Speaking of difficulty, I found the five difficulty levels to cover the gamut from “trivially easy” to “insanely tough,” and everything in between. If you’ve chosen a level a bit too challenging, at least the game gives you partial points for completion. Those points can be spent to unlock things, like new ships, alternative game modes, and bonus levels. The twenty bonus levels are very difficult and usually quite short, involving a single objective like collecting rings or survival, so it’s ultimately just a minor distraction rather than a full-fledged gaming mode. Finally, Jamestown has co-op for four players, which would be fantastic except that you can’t play the game online. Online leaderboards are a small consolation for lacking online co-op, so the only people who will be able to enjoy this wonderful aspect of the game are those who have physical friends to play with.

Jamestown has four ship types that vary your primary and secondary weapons. I was most comfortable with the one you start out with, the beam ship, which has a good spread fire and secondary beam weapon for taking down large ships. The gunner ship lets you change the direction of the primary fire based on movement (and then keeps it aiming in that direction); this takes some practice, but it’s useful for powerful enemies placed on the sides. The charge ship (another personal favorite) shoots slow-moving torpedoes straight ahead, and the longer you wait between charge shots, the more powerful the torpedo. Finally, the bomber lets you detonate your bullets mid-flight; while the idea is nice, the basic fire is underpowered and I found that detonation took too much micromanaging to be worth the effort. All of the ships move pretty slow, making peripheral firing important. Overall, there’s something for everybody.

Jamestown can be controlled using the keyboard, mouse, or gamepad, allowing four people to crowd around the same computer screen. All methods have three buttons: fire, a special attack, and the vaunt. As enemies die, you should collect the coins they drop, which eventually allow you to enable vaunt mode. Here, you get a temporary shield, damage boost, and score multiplier. The vaunt mode is plenty useful when you are in a sticky situation, either with lots of incoming bullets or boss battles. I like the risk/reward of going for coins to earn the shield and damage bonuses as well.

There is a large range of enemy types encountered in Jamestown, all with varied attacks and behaviors that must be dealt with. The mixture keeps up throughout the five-mission campaign, keeping you on your toes as you deal with new opponents each level. Enemy bullets are usually easy to see, and Jamestown is simply a matter of killing enemies, collecting coins, and deftly avoiding incoming fire while using your secondary weapons and vaunt mode. You explode if you are hit in the middle of your ship, and you are given a couple of continues during each level before it’s game over. The chaos balance is done well: the action is frantic but it never feels overwhelming or unfair, and you can always tell what’s going on (and why you just died).

IN CLOSING
Jamestown is a polished, enjoyable shoot ‘em up that falls a couple of features short of excellence. The straightforward controls make the game easy to pick up and play, and the vaunt system, where collecting coins from destroyed enemy units triggers a shield and damage bonus. Using the vaunt at the right time can mean the difference between defeating a boss (or other tough area) and having to restart. The four ship types allow advanced players to try out some alternative strategies (although I always went back to the more straightforward beginner ship, though the torpedo charge ship was a close second), and the enemies are quite varied and require varied tactics. There are only five short levels in the story-based campaign, and the later missions require you to complete previous levels at a higher difficulty level, discouraging novices in the process. The twenty brief bonus levels offer varied challenges but limited replay value. Four-player co-op is undeniably fun, but since you can’t enjoy it online, it’s appeal is somewhat limited unless you have people called “friends” (I know, I’ve never heard of those either). Still, for $10, this retro game will provide a cost-appropriate amount of fun for shmup fans.

Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition Review

2011-07-21T12:59:00.000-04:00

Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, developed and published by Capcom.
The Good: Slick mechanics with assorted strategies and forgiving control input, many characters with varied special moves, lag-free online play with comprehensive modes, pleasing presentation runs very smoothly, competent AI with assorted difficulty levels
The Not So Good: Steep learning curve, level selection has no impact on fighting, no repercussions for players who quit online matches mid-game, Games for Windows Live required
What say you? The classic fighting franchise returns to the PC with an excellent, accessible package: 8/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
The two most famous fighting franchises in video gaming history are Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, and since Mortal Kombat routinely ignores the PC (with the fourth version being the last to appear on computers 14 years ago), screw it. My first/only exposure to Street Fighter was the second version on the Super Nintendo, where my friend routinely defeated me because I would just press random buttons. Now that I am older and wiser, I can perform more complex strategies like pressing random buttons more quickly. While the original Street Fighter IV was released on the PC in 2009, we missed out on the “Super” version thanks to pirates (because piracy never occurs on the consoles, right?). In any event, let’s get your hadouken on and see if the latest version of the venerable fighting series is worth your time and money.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition looks and sounds good. The character models are detailed with great, fluid animations when moving and fighting, exhibiting great reactions to a solid kick to the head. The textures could be a bit more detailed on a couple of the characters (especially the chests of the shirtless men…not that I look at…shirtless…men…moving on), but each character is easily identifiable by looks alone, which is good since people will be swapping positions early and often. The backgrounds are varied and vibrant without being distracting, and the special effects for the different combat moves are colorful and effective. Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition is not taxing on your system, either: I was able to crank everything up to the maximum levels and skill pull in 100 frames per second in the benchmark, although the game can drop frames if your system is struggling to keep up with the action. I can’t use my native screen resolution (1280 x 1024), though. The sound design is pleasing to the ear, complete with chaotic battle effects, good voice acting for each of the characters (including an appropriately over-the-top announcer), and suitable music for the intense fights. Overall, I was pleased but not overwhelmed by the graphics and sound in Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition.

ET AL.
Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition is a fighting game, where you fight fighters willing to fight. The matches are quick, fast-paced events that can be enjoyed a number of ways. First is the classic arcade mode, where you take one hearty warrior against a series of foes; you can customize the difficulty, number of rounds, time limit, and whether you want to get interrupted by fight requests from online players (pretty cool integration, and you will get constantly bombarded with challenges). There are also versus battles, where you can take on the computer or another person on the same PC in a single match. The twenty or so maps never impact the battle in any way. Beyond simply battles is the challenge mode, where you are offered over twenty trials for each character that teach basic moves and suggested combos while unlocking icons and titles you can display online (the time attack and survival modes from the original Street Fighter IV have been removed, oddly). Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition also features a training mode against dummy opponents (or ones that fight back, if you choose), where you can analyze your input and see why you can’t land that Illusion Spark. However, the training mode does not explain basic strategies or non-specific moves (like focus attacks or throws, for example). Finally, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition features an enhanced replay channel so you can marvel at people much better at the game than you.

Online play, obviously a huge draw for any fighting game, comes with plenty of tasty options in Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition. Regrettably, the game uses the always-annoying and patently unnecessary Games for Windows Live, but I must admit that I’ve had a relatively low number of problems (still more than zero, of course) with this use of the much-maligned software. The basic method of pummeling people online is through ranked matches, where you can engage people of similar skill levels. Thankfully, you can browse for opponents instead of having to rely on the always-terrible quick match system, and potential adversaries are displayed along with color-coded ping indicators and a computer system rating for maximum enjoyment. Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition also includes endless matches, where a lobby of up to eight people take turns fighting the winner of the last match, and team games, where the lobby is split into two sides. Finally, there are tournaments that utilize a bracket-style system. Winning a match will earn you experience points (both overall and per-character), but even if you barely lose each round, you gain no experience online at all for a loss. Of course, experience isn’t actually used for anything other than matchmaking, so I suppose it’s actually OK, since, if you keep losing, you’ll be matched up against people of similar terrible skill. Speaking of being matched up, I'm not the greatest Street Fighter player, but every time (not exaggerating, seriously 100% of the time) that I came close to victory, my opponent would quit the game (probably alt-tabbing out of it, my guess), losing the connection so he wouldn't be charged with a loss (and I wouldn't get the win). Jerks. I'd like to get at least a tie and some experience since this happens with disturbing regularity. A final note: you don’t see your opponent’s character until both have been selected, a great feature that prevents picking the “counter” for a particular fighter. In all, the online options of Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition are quite robust and enjoyable.

Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition has thirty-nine characters, and you can thankfully play them all right from the start (though you can easily unlock new outfits and sayings simply by playing). I used a gamepad to play the game, although you can use a keyboard or a six-button arcade stick, too; in any case, you'll need six inputs for the array of punches and kicks the game offers (light, medium, and hard of each). There are similar actions among characters: most fighters either use quarter circles (down, down-right, right for example) or back-and-forth motions for their special moves, so it’s just a matter of learning which movements are used with which kicks and punches for each character. Each combatant has three special moves, a super combo, and two ultra combos (you pick your favorite to bring into battle) to compliment their basic attacks. There is seemingly good balance between the characters, since there are endless discussions online on which “tier” each character belongs to. Generally, fighting becomes intuitive once you get the basics down, but the game still allows for some advanced tactics.

What kind of advanced tactics, you say? Things like combos, which require good timing to pull off two (or more) moves in a row. You can also dash (which can cancel some moves), jump, taunt, block high or low, counter incoming attacks, and throw your opponent using both “light” buttons. Pressing both “medium” buttons will start a focus attack, which will block one enemy move, and then immediately attack and knock down your foe; they are easy to pull off and helpful to swing momentum in your favor. You can also perform more powerful special moves by using a portion of your super combo bat and pressing two punch or two kick buttons simultaneously. As you can see, there are a lot of options at your disposal, and Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition strikes a great balance between accessibility and still having options for veteran players. The length of the battles is adjusted nicely: not too long, but not too short, and close contests with each player close to their demise are not uncommon. The AI is good without resorting to outright cheating (though they pull off super and ultra moves with near 100% accuracy, unlike a human opponent), and the game offers plenty of difficulty levels to provide a challenge at any skill level.

IN CLOSING
Fighting fans will be quite pleased with Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition. The game starts with lots of unlocked characters, so everyone should be able to find at least a handful of fighters who appeal to them. Each combatant has three punches, three kicks, three special moves, a super combo, and an ultra combo to differentiate themselves. Add in combos, blocking, dashing, throwing, and more advanced moves like countering, focus attacks, and EX moves, and you have a lot of options at your disposal. And once you learn how to do a quarter-circle (and especially two in quick succession), performing almost all of the in-game moves is simple. Of course, executing them in the right order is the key to victory, which separates the veteran from the novice, but the lenient controls still allow for beginners to get in to the game. Still, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition is a bit intimidating to newcomers, especially when you try to take on experienced players online who actually know how to “cross up with a jumping hard punch into a focus attack dash cancel” (whatever that means). The AI puts up a good fight, but easier options are available for those who struggle against competent opposition. The arcade and versus modes are the typical fare, while the challenges will keep people busy for a while earning new outfits and testing new characters in the training mode. The online game, despite using the pure evil that is Games for Windows Live, is well done, complete with ranked matches, endless “winner stays on” games, team events, and bracket-style tournaments. You can also browse for opponents to find the player with the best connection (although lag was never an issue), but I'd like to have some consolation for players who quit the game right before I defeat them. In short (too late!), even if you are only mildly interested in the genre, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition is a great choice as one of the best fighting games ever made.

Virtua Tennis 4 Review

2011-07-17T13:05:00.000-04:00

Virtua Tennis 4, developed and published by SEGA.
The Good: Enjoyable and approachable position-based gameplay, board game career mode with varied mini-games that earn experience, real-life players with many balanced play styles, competent AI opponents
The Not So Good: Simple controls lack depth and lead to few errant shots, online lag can significantly affect games, low replay value in career mode, can’t create a leveled-up custom player for exhibition or multiplayer matches
What say you? This arcade tennis sequel serves up satisfying content and gameplay for fans of the sport: 6/8

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Summer! And that can mean only one sport: NFL lockout! Wait, no, I mean: baseball! Well, yeah, but baseball is boring and the season is excruciatingly long. So it must be: NASCAR! Yeah, but NASCAR only comes in the form of subscription-based iRacing on the PC, so that’s out. How about: women’s world cup soccer! Well, I don’t think there’s a dedicated game for that (surprisingly). So, finally we arrive at: tennis (or, as the Europeans call it, “rugby”). Yes, the gentlemen’s (and ladies’) sport ripe with enough grunting to compliment a good adult movie makes for solid computer gaming. Arguably the most renowned tennis series, Virtua Tennis, makes its third appearance on the PC (the second iteration skipped our valiant platform, if Wikipedia is to be believed (and when has it ever lead us wrong?)) in Virtua Tennis 4, featuring top players in digital form, a revamped career mode, and enhanced online play. Despite the fact that Word’s spell checker clearly does not think “virtua” is a real word, does Virtua Tennis 4 provide compelling tennis action, or drop the ball in straight sets?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
The graphics and sound of Virtua Tennis 4 are good, but fall short of being great. The players look like their real-life counterparts, and the animations are generally done quite well, as you are never stuck in a movement. However, there are some noticeable transitions that lack fluidity when moving quickly across the court and lunging for the ball. The occasional slow motion effects are a little silly (bright green particles flying off the ball and lots of blurriness), but aren’t over the top. The courts and scoreboards are reasonable detailed, placing you in legal facsimiles (“London”, “New York”) of the world’s greatest stadiums. The camera allows you to choose the classic TV view or be perched over the shoulder of your player for a third-person playing perspective that’s quite immersive, if more difficult to use. The sound package is decent enough, with player-specific grunts and appropriate hitting sounds. Crowd reactions are also apt, and get your fired up for match point. The music is entirely generic and instantly forgettable. Overall, while Virtua Tennis 4 isn’t a graphical powerhouse, it gets the job done.

ET AL.
Virtua Tennis 4 is virtual tennis 4 you (see how that works?). You can start in practice mode, which offers bare tutorial instructions but less pressure than playing against the AI in a traditional match. Virtua Tennis 4 also includes an arcade mode where you encounter four professionals consecutively on four different courts (modeled after the major tennis events), and an exhibition mode where you can customize game length settings. Virtual Tennis 4 has pretty much all of the current tennis players you’ve heard of: Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray, Andy Roddick, Venus Williams (but not Serena), and Maria Sharapova, so no complaints here. Online play support is just OK: it starts with the evil that is Games for Windows Live, which offers both ranked and custom matches against human opponents. While you are waiting for the system to find you a challenger, you can play through the arcade mode: a nice feature that eliminates the boredom of waiting for others. Unfortunately, I had terrible problems with serious in-game lag, most likely caused by high ping between players (a consequence of a low player count, I would assume); it resulted in slow, 5 FPS games that made the matches unplayable. On top of this, you can’t quit a match to get away from a bad connection, so you simply have to suffer through it. Finally, any of the career mode’s mini-games are available to play against others on the same computer in party mode, but not online.

A big draw of Virtua Tennis 4 is the revamped world tour career mode. You create a young tennis novice, customize their appearance, and then make your way across a game board towards the region’s major event. You are given a set of tickets for each turn, like rolls of the dice, and choose one of them to dictate how many tiles to move across the board. This method is kind of cool and unique, and it’s much better than simply picking items from a menu. There is also a tiny bit of strategy planning your moves to land on the best tiles. What are on these tiles? Events (singles, doubles, special, tournament, and “fancy dress” that requires specific items of apparel to be worn) and eight training mini-games, mostly. The mini-games are varied and interesting, at least the first ten times you play them: you can shoot clay targets, score soccer goals, collect eggs, flip cards for poker hands, play in heavy wind, explode bombs, place walls, and collect coins. The mini-games do get a bit repetitive after a while, but it’s more entertaining than simply playing a long string of traditional tennis matches. Other tile options include resting to recuperate your condition (fatigue will negatively impact in-game performance) and a shop where you can buy tickets of a specific value or other special items. Over time, you’ll gain experience in five areas (condition, stroke, defending, tactical, and net play), earn money, gain ranking and publicity, and unlock new clothing options. I found the career mode to have appropriate rising difficulty that is paced well, though there is little reason to play again, as the progression is generally the same (although you’d land on different events the next time around). You also can’t start out with a good player to use in the other modes or online play. This limitation is disappointing since there are many play styles to choose from that the included real-world players do not use. Still, the world tour proved to be entertaining for a while, until the repetitive eight mini-games started duplicating themselves too much.

Like in most tennis games, the controls for Virtua Tennis 4 aren’t exactly complicated. This is a position-based game where you simply have to press-and-release the corresponding shot button before the ball arrives; the sooner you press it, the more powerful the shot will be. This method is much easier to learn but obviously lacks some of the depth found in other tennis simulations; shots rarely land out of bounds, so you usually have to rely on your opponent moving in the wrong direction to score a point. There are three basic shots to choose from: the high lob (used to go over your opponent), medium topspin (used most of the time), and low slice (used to buy some time to recover). You can also use a super shot, unlocked when you accumulate enough match momentum. Each player has a specific play style (there are twenty, such as strong forehand, solid defense, great return, or fast runner), and if you play in this style, you’ll unlock a super shot every couple of games. The play styles are balanced well and rewards you for playing the “right” way for your character; this also seems to be the only distinction between different players anyway. I found the AI opponents to be adjusted well at each difficulty level: “easy” opponents will flub on shots and create a lot of powerful return opportunities, while “hard” players will commonly land shots in hard-to-reach places. The AI serves as a good substitute for the iffy online play.

IN CLOSING
Virtua Tennis 4 delivers exactly what you’d want to see in a mass-market tennis game. While not the most technically challenging simulation on the market, the gameplay emphasizes being in the appropriate position rather than releasing the shot button at the right time, which makes the game very easy to grasp for newcomers. Of course, this also means that Virtua Tennis 4 lacks some depth, and it’s far too easy to land a majority of your shots between the lines even if you were out of position; those looking for a more sophisticated control scheme will be disappointed. Each player has a particular style that makes them perform differently, and playing in that style will earn momentum that will allow you to unleash powerful shots to win at critical moments. The AI and overall difficulty is balanced quite well: “easy” is “easy” while “hard” is “hard”: the computer will not hesitate capitalizing on your mistakes. The world tour career mode uses a board game mechanic of semi-random movement through tournaments and diverse mini-games; it’s a neat idea that works well while being much more interesting than choosing events yourself with no limitations. Even with the random elements, multiple career modes will still play out similarly, and you can’t start out as a high-level star and skip the trivially simply beginner’s events. Online play is typical fare, though a low player population means high ping lag will become a huge problem in a game that relies on quick inputs. Reasonably priced for a sports sequel at $30, Virtua Tennis 4 is recommended for fans of more casual tennis games.

Armoured and Dangerous Review

2011-07-13T15:16:00.000-04:00

Armoured and Dangerous, developed and published by Phantasm Games.
The Good: Varied classes with different weapons and abilities, only $7
The Not So Good: Predictable AI offers little challenge, tedious constant direct tank management required, linear campaign, lacks difficulty settings, no multiplayer, limited game mode options, slow camera controls makes spotting units almost impossible
What say you? This inexpensive light real-time tactical game with a turn-based feel has varied tanks but lacks features, automation, and a challenging computer opponent: 3/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Tanks are an imposing force on the battlefield. Covered in thick metallic armor, hauling really big guns, and crushing everything in their path, they dominate everything that isn’t carrying a rocket launcher. It’s no wonder, then, that they are the most popular weapon in the real time strategy genre, capable of engaging most enemy foes with a mix of firepower and maneuverability. While normally supported by mixed units, tank-only confrontations have been popularized by titles such as DropTeam and World of Tanks. Another entry in the exclusively metal strategy category is Armoured and Dangerous, which you can tell is unique because it has an extra “u” in the title. This game features a mix of real-time and turn-based mechanics, as they game progresses in real-time but only allows for control of a single unit at a time. Will this stripped-down strategy game feature pleasing tactical gameplay?

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Armoured and Dangerous features pedestrian graphics, typical for an indie game. The tank models are small but detailed and easily identifiable based on appearance. The weapons and subsequent explosions are understated and lack the “punch” typical of armored combat. The maps feature bland outdoor environments consisting of undulating terrain with the occasional tree and lake, and the ground textures are a plain mixture of green and brown colors. The game’s minimap doesn’t really show the true landscape, just displaying elevation rather than important tactical features like water or foliage. On the sound front, Armoured and Dangerous features a few repetitive sound effects and very subtle background music. While the graphics and sound aren’t, well, good, for $7 they are good enough.

ET AL.
Armoured and Dangerous offers a sixteen-mission campaign (no background story) featuring real-time combat. The scenarios (and other features) are unlocked in groups, and you must successfully complete every mission in each group in order to proceed to the next set. The game has three game modes: team deathmatch, “capture the flag” (which is really nothing like capture the flag at all: you simply blow up the three enemy oil rigs), and “search and destroy” (where you destroy a base instead of three oil rigs). Because there are no respawns, the tactics are the same for each game mode: find and kill all the enemies. The twenty-four maps offer little variety in tactics as well, as lakes and mountains rarely come in to play. Armoured and Dangerous also lacks difficulty settings, and later missions simply place more computer opponents on the other team. There is also a skirmish mode where you can choose a map along with the number of tanks and enemies you'll deal with, once you unlock those options by playing the campaign. Armoured and Dangerous lacks multiplayer of any kind, so you are stuck battling it out against the AI. The tutorial teaches the basics of the game well enough, and the low $7 price tag is appealing.

Controlling your units in Armoured and Dangerous is a bit different than most contemporary real-time strategy titles. Units are selected primarily using the mouse wheel (although the number keys can be used), left-click to perform an action, and right-click to switch between movement, primary, and secondary weapons. This method took some getting used to: I routinely forgot to switch to movement mode and accidently fired instead. In addition, Armoured and Dangerous doesn’t feature the amount of camera options I desire, as zooming and tilting are way too slow, making seeing what’s happening on the battlefield almost impossible. One strong aspect of Armoured and Dangerous is the suite of tanks at your disposal. The primary unit is the main battle tank, equipped with a long-range cannon and short-range machine gun. A secondary tank is also available that fires anti-tank rounds and grenades. The recon tank scouts for enemy units using its radar, and the support tank repairs and refuels your units. Finally, the minelayer both places and removes mines. There is certainly some strategy before each mission choosing which tanks to take into battle: the main tanks are good for engaging most threats, while the support units each have their roles. Since each unit must refuel very frequently, taking at least one support tank into battle is a definite requirement.

Armoured and Dangerous features a unique mix of real-time and turn-based mechanics. While the game progresses in real time, because each unit must be given manual orders, it plays out like a turn-based wargame where you must move each unit every turn. There is a maximum of five units which reduces the micromanagement slightly. It would be nice if your units would automatically return fire if fired upon, or would continue moving to a waypoint when you switch to a different tank. Tanks can do nothing on their own, which gives you complete control over your units, but requires constant babysitting. The game is a tactical one (there is no base building), where placing appropriate units in the right place and using the right weapons at the best time is the key for victory. There is a short spotting range for enemy units (except for bases, which are always displayed), which is realistic for tanks I suppose; enemy units will sneak up on you, as even the recon tank has a small window for spotting enemies. Playing the game is a tedious affair: since tanks will not fire or move on their own (even if you issued a target or waypoint), you must constantly switch between your forces. Since the game always defaults to the movement order when a new tank is selected, you can't quickly bombard the enemy by switching between available units, instead having to right-click to choose the most appropriate weapon first. It's simply not fun. In addition, tanks move fast, making it difficult to hit things on the go. Sadly, the AI will routinely sit in one spot, waiting to become target practice. The AI isn’t a good foe: it heads straight for objectives, occasionally ignores nearby units, fires at an slow rate, and is easily disposed of except when you face multiple computer opponents in the same level.

IN CLOSING
While Armoured and Dangerous offers a unique mix of real-time and turn-based tactics, your tanks lack the initiative to allow for more advanced strategies to be executed. Tanks will do nothing on their own: even movement orders are only completed while a unit is selected. Armoured and Dangerous, then, is quite high in micromanagement; even being limited to only five tanks results in constant hand-holding for all tasks, including firing on the enemy. There are no orders that will be carried out as you attend to other tanks: everything must be issued manually by you in real-time. This is a flabbergasting limitation that significantly reduces the appeal of the game: there's a reason why turn-based games are not played in real-time. The short sighting ranges make for quick, close battles using a variety of weapons and tank types, the high point of the title. That said, the combat is very tedious: frequent switching back and forth between tanks is very inefficient, so you'll usually just pound away with a single tank until it has died. Add in sluggish camera controls and Armoured and Dangerous is a constant battle against the game mechanics in addition to the computer opponents. Unfortunately for Armoured and Dangerous, the lack of multiplayer options means the game must rely on the substandard AI: it moves predictably and has trouble engaging your units effectively. The campaign and skirmish options are standard fare, the game modes all play out the same, and the map selection rarely alters your strategy. The price is right at $7, but Armoured and Dangerous simply fails to offer well-rounded gameplay and features to stand out in the strategy genre.

Solar 2 Review

2011-07-09T08:00:00.000-04:00

Solar 2, developed and published by Murudai.
The Good: Gravity-based puzzles and expansion are unique
The Not So Good: Tedious slow growth, difficult missions with imprecise keyboard controls, no direct combat interaction
What say you? Growing an asteroid into a black hole is more of a novelty than a full-fledged game even with outrageously challenging side missions: 4/8

This review also appears at

MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Coming straight from the dark of Uranus is Solar 2, a sequel to a game that was released on something called “Xbox LIVE Indie Games,” which I think is some sort of sterilized environment where a single corporate entity determines which games you can and cannot enjoy. Anyway, the sequel is out on the PC, so now we have a chance to check out this physics-based puzzle game where you control planets, starts, and other objects in a quest to combine with other objects and complete missions in an ever-expanding universe.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Solar 2 takes a minimalist approach to space and it works well. The game is played in a top-down 2-D perspective (full 3-D would have been way too confusing), and it features a variety of star and planet icons that give life to the universe. Solar 2 is low on the nebula scale, and the subtle backgrounds never clash with the more important foreground. There are some small effects with combat (lasers, explosions), and simple color-coded icons make ships easy to identify. The sound design follows similar lines: while there is no voice work and effects are simple at best, the atmospheric music does a great job fitting the setting of the game. Overall, I found no issue with the graphics and sound design of Solar 2.

ET AL.
The “goal” of Solar 2 is to complete missions while growing from an asteroid to a black hole. A randomly generated universe is your playground, where other asteroids, planets, and star systems exist to be conquered. Starting out as a little asteroid, you absorb nearby smaller asteroids Katamari Damacy-style to grow into a small planet. Then, asteroids are carefully caught in orbit to grow into a life planet, small star, medium star, large star, and black hole. This process is obviously very linear (just move and capture stuff) and quite slow: I would have liked to “level up” in about half (or a third) of the time it took. Thankfully, you can start a new game as any previously attained object, so you don’t have to completely start over.

The missions of Solar 2 are extremely challenging. To trigger a mission, you follow the on-screen directional icons to a dashed circle, which then activates a short, sometimes vague description of what you are to do. The missions usually involve movement, avoidance, defense, or offense, and they start immediately, a problem when you are not prepared for whatever lies ahead. You should make sure you are near the highest mass for each object type (there are separate missions for asteroids, planets, stars, and black holes) and, if you are a star, have life planets in order for defense just in case. Overall, I had a tough time successfully completing any of the missions at any object level, and since this is the overall goal of the game, this level of difficulty could discourage a lot of players.

Part of the blame for the outrageous mission difficult lies with the keyboard controls. While you can use a console gamepad if you choose (in which case we shall revoke your PC gaming membership card), the keyboard doesn’t offer the accuracy required to complete most of the missions. Some of this is due to the Newtonian physics employed by the game, with inertia preventing instantaneous changes in direction. The inclusion of some mouse-based scheme would make things easier, I would think. Still, I found hitting, capturing, and avoiding objects to be far more difficult and tiring than it should be.

The controls allow you to move, absorb asteroids or planets into yourself, or absorb asteroids into orbiting planets (so they can grow life). With the aforementioned control scheme, you end up running into planets (and especially asteroids) more often than you’d like (which reduces your mass, requiring you to capture even more asteroids and planets in retaliation). In addition, the gravitational forces often cause your orbiting planets to run into each other, destroying your hard work in a meaningless act of violence. Still, it is cool to have a star with several life planets in orbit, automatically defending themselves against incoming threats. However, you have no direct control over these ships and defenses, and when two systems are at war, the bigger threat with more life planets will always win. There is no room for strategy here, simply grow and add mass over time. In the end, I suspect there will be few players who will have the patience for tedious growth and frustrating missions.

IN CLOSING
There are basically two things to do in Solar 2: get bigger and complete missions. Getting bigger, advancing from asteroid to black hole, is a tedious, drawn-out process that involves running into or capturing lots of other objects into your orbit. However, capturing things, especially as a star, requires a level of finesse the keyboard control scheme lacks, making this aspect of the game monotonous and repetitive. The other half of Solar 2, the missions, is an assortment of demanding tasks that require careful movement for success: while as varied as you can expect, the lack of verbose instructions and high level of difficulty (especially if you tackle the tasks before fully leveling up and collecting many objects in orbit) leads to a lot of frustration. The automated system combat also means the one with more life planets will always win, leaving no chance for luck and skill. While the originality of Solar 2 is certainly appealing, the repetitive nature of stellar evolution and frustrating missions reduce the overall appeal of the game significantly.