Showing posts with label Strategy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Strategy. Show all posts

Helldorado

Posted by Sishu / at 11:50 AM / Labels: , / 0 comments

Helldorado Boxshot
Helldorado

Helldorado

Excruciating difficulty makes this latest addition to the Desperados family one frustrating trip back to the Wild West.

The Good

  • Missions are numerous and huge.

The Bad

  • Grueling difficulty
  • Out-of-date visuals with some frame rate problems
  • Not enough atmospheric audio or vocal cues from sentries.

Don't let Helldorado confuse you. Despite the snazzy new name sported by this real-time stealth strategy game set in the Wild West, this is actually the third release in the Desperados series from German developer Spellbound. As with many strategy sequels, don't expect to be treated kindly. Everything about this unbelievably hard tactical game assumes that you have logged serious hours with the previous two Desperados. If you haven't, then say howdy to big-time frustration. Every mission is so spectacularly grueling and the settings so thoroughly rigged against you that you feel like a guy with a broken hand drawing six-guns against Wyatt Earp. The extreme challenge is certain to drive away almost everyone but Desperados veterans itching for another fix and hardy Western aficionados willing to endure anything for a trip back in time.

Every member of your Wild West gang has some deadly talents, but they don't do much good when you're faced with sneaking past dozens of sentries.

The story, setting, and characters could have been pulled out of an old Gunsmoke episode. Everything is just as cliched as in the previous Desperados games: You control a team of Wild West stereotypes that includes gruff-but-lovable gunslinger John Cooper, sexy gambler Kate O'Hara, dimwitted Mexican thug Pablo Sanchez, slippery explosives expert Sam Williams, creepy old Doc McCoy, and a Native American tracker named--yes, seriously--Hawkeye. Just in case you don't immediately understand that these are all cornball rip-offs of stock characters featured in oat operas for the past century, each of these clowns underlines the point with goofy order acknowledgements, such as Pablo's expressions of love for tequila, Hawkeye's continual references to the "white devil" and buffalo, and Sam's "Yippee-yi-yay!"

As with most games of this type, each hero has a specific set of abilities. Cooper, for instance, is quick with his six-guns and can make silent kills with a throwing knife. Kate can seduce opponents into a stupor or knock them out with the special powder in her makeup compact. Hawkeye can shoot arrows and throw a tomahawk. Sanchez is a muscleman who can blow baddies away with a shotgun and leave bottles of tequila lying around to tempt guards into drinking themselves unconscious. Gee, a stupid, drunken Mexican bandit. It couldn't be any more of a racist stereotype unless he were constantly wandering off to take siestas in the noonday sun.

Hawkeye bites the dust for the 407th time. In this level.

All of the characters are drawn up along the same lines as those in the prototypical tactical stealth game, Pyro Studios' Commandos. You go into missions with a team and have to work together to get out of whatever scrape you find yourselves in. The overall story is sketched out roughly and is kind of hard to understand. Not that it matters much. You don't need to know a whole lot about being blackmailed by a mysterious femme fatale into committing various dastardly deeds, because the objectives of the multipart missions are cut-and-dried. Basically, you need to make it from point A to point B in each of the 12 single-player-only missions without attracting the attention of the guards who are between you and the goal. And that ain't easy.

You know how most tactical stealth games tend to place a handful of sentries at key points in levels? How they structure maps like puzzles, with a few guards walking patrol routes with vision cones regularly overlapping so that you need to watch for patterns and sneak on through only when the time is right? Well, that same design pattern is followed here, but with the addition of dozens of enemies wandering around, hanging out having a smoke, waving guns for no particular reason, taking a whiz in the bushes, manning guard towers, and so forth. So as you might expect, the difficulty level in Helldorado is beyond belief, no matter what difficulty setting you choose. If you make a single mistake, a pack of enemies instantly leaps into action to gun you down. Instead of tracking one, two, or three sentries at any given moment, you have to keep an eye on the vision cones of at least half a dozen.

The missions are more tedious than tense. You need to methodically eliminate the opposition one by one to open up a passage through the many, many guards. For instance, in one chapter of the second level, you need to guide Pablo and Sam around a train depot guarded by more US cavalry soldiers than Custer had at Little Big Horn. These troops are scattered across the map in groups of five or six, with all of their vision cones intersecting in such complicated ways that you simply cannot sneak past them. Instead, you need to knock them out, but in a very careful fashion that doesn't alert the whole train station.

Open up this screen and count the sentries guarding this train in a tiny part of the third level for an idea of how hard Helldorado is.

First you have to come up with a plan of attack, which requires you to treat each mob of baddies like a logic puzzle and set a pecking order. Then you need to start luring victims off to a quiet spot where you can conk them over the head without raising an alarm. Generally this is done with Pablo's ability to distract enemies with conveniently located bottles of tequila. You need to get close to a vision cone, drop a bottle, retreat posthaste, and then either club the soldier over the head when he wanders over for the free booze or wait for him to chug it down and pass out. Finally, you have to tie up the unconscious enemy with Sam and use Pablo to carry him off to an out-of-the-way spot. Sound like fun? It sort of is at first, but you need to repeat this same formula over and over again to make progress through the level. Just about every enemy along the route you choose to reach the end goal has to be eliminated, because there are few seams to exploit and almost no shortcuts to take.

Actions also sometimes have to be coordinated with multiple team members by using the game's quick action feature. This lets you script attacks and then set them off concurrently, but it can be tough to script everything so that guards are gooned simultaneously. One slight slip is all that's needed for a baddie to get off a gunshot and bring the whole level down on your head. And even when you do pull off some derring-do that would have impressed Sergio Leone (which you can watch in a close-up cinematic camera), chances are good that you will still wind up spotted by a guard you missed. It's just about impossible to see every sentry in a first run-through, because there are so many of them hanging out in the shadows. Most don't say anything unless they spot you, either, so you don't get any audio tip-offs to a nearby enemy presence. Aside from an odd whistle and an even rarer conversation, you're stuck using your eyes, not your ears.

Unfortunately, these convenient hiding rocks can't be found in most levels.

The game quickly turns into one of those immensely annoying "experiment, die, and try again" cycles where you spend more time loading saves than you do plying your sneaky trade. This might be enjoyable for hardcore types who have mastered the previous Desperados games, but most players are going to quickly become discouraged. By the time you hit the fourth mission, you're starting levels up against too many enemies to count, with your team spread out in starting positions all over the map. It's so daunting to look over what's to come that it can be hard to suck up the courage to even start these levels. Missions are massive. The maps consist of sprawling towns, train depots, saloons, and so forth, and they're covered with dusty streets, staggering drunks, water towers, wooden sidewalks, and all and all sorts of other Wild West accoutrement. Every location looks great, too, although the graphics are dated, the characters are a tad pixelated, and the levels are often so packed with enemies that the frame rate gears down until you're in single-digit territory, making progress so choppy that the game verges on the unplayable with the camera zoomed out. Each of the 13 missions takes a good two to three hours to finish, and given the current sub-$20 price of the game, you're getting a good bang for the buck. Still, it's hard to count this as much of a plus when you might be spending those many hours tearing your hair out from frustration.

Challenging strategy games are always appreciated, but Helldorado takes a good thing too far. The difficulty is so extreme that just the act of starting a new level can be depressing, especially after you pan the camera over the landscape to reveal the dozens of enemies that need to be sneaked past or knocked out. Only players who have experience with the Desperados franchise or its inspirations, such as the Commandos franchise, need apply here.

 

Stalin vs. Martians

Posted by Sishu / at 11:46 AM / Labels: , / 0 comments

Stalin vs. Martians Boxshot
Stalin vs. Martians

Stalin vs. Martians

Do not play, look at, or even think about this mangled wreck of a strategy game.

The Good

  • Dancing Stalin.

The Bad

  • It isn't fun, and it isn't funny
  • No strategy involved
  • Frustrating, broken missions
  • Excruciating sound design
  • Loads of technical problems.

Don't be offended by Stalin vs. Martians' subject matter. The genocidal communist leader may figure heavily in this budget-priced real-time strategy game, but it's hard to be outraged when he's gyrating his hips to the beat of Russian dance pop, or signing off his written missives with "xxooxx." No, be offended because Stalin vs. Martians is an abysmal game that represents the dregs of game design. It isn't strategic, it isn't fun, and as hard as it tries, it isn't even remotely funny. This is perhaps the worst RTS game ever created, worth neither the 1s and 0s that were used to program it nor the mental exertions expended on this creatively bankrupt waste of hard-drive space.

Actually, calling Stalin vs. Martians a strategy game is a bit of a stretch, though to its credit, you do control units in real time, so at least it gets that part right. You start each of the 12 missions with a given supply of units, and you generally move them all en masse across the map, killing a bunch of aliens while completing the oft-broken mission objectives. When Martians die, they frequently drop gold and power-ups; you spend gold on reinforcements or on special powers, whereas power-ups enhance a unit's armor or attack damage, or perhaps replenish the unit's health. It sounds like an interesting idea designed to keep the action moving. In actuality, it's an absolute mess. Power-ups disappear if you don't maneuver a unit over them, but moving forward toward a sorely needed gold drop may bring you closer to a deadly, goo-spewing greenie. Poor enemy placement and bad pathfinding make the whole process a lame, frustrating war of attrition as you slowly whittle enemy numbers down while summoning replacements for your lost units. And just as the "S" is missing from "RTS," there is no "I" in the AI; your foes either wait for your attack in their assigned position or follow scripted paths, but in no way do they ever require you to think strategically.

Premission briefings from Stalin give context to the proceedings: Martians are invading 1940s Siberia! The concept had potential, but the missions themselves are a complete disaster. A few are so easy and straightforward that you can complete them within 10 minutes or so. Others drag on endlessly, forcing you to move your sluggish tanks from one corner of the map to the other. It's anyone's guess why they move so slowly when you issue a move order but develop a sense of urgency when you issue an attack order. But even when you manage to get your units to their destination, you'll be banging your head on your computer desk out of pure frustration. In one mission, you can lose if Martian units invade a village. The final objective in the same mission involves killing a roaming, buglike alien, which might be near the village center when the objective is triggered, and thus can count as an invasion. This abysmal mission structure can lead to a loss not based on your actions, but rather on thoughtless game design.

Similar issues plague several missions, such as those in which units clip into level geometry and jitter around trying to extricate themselves, but even the functional ones are beyond irritating. Poor balancing and cheap attacks lead to numerous annoyances, such as in one mission in which you must use only infantry units to destroy enemy artillery that can wipe away almost all of your soldiers in one hit. This leads to a lot of trial and error, forcing reloads of your saved games until you know exactly what the game expects of you. But mission design aside, Stalin vs. Martians doesn't even get the basics right. Trying to drag a selection box around units can be nigh impossible if the mouse pointer is near the edge of the screen; the absence of significant visual and audio feedback makes it hard to tell if you've activated a special power, or whether you're actually firing at an enemy; and infantry units will go wandering off in some direction other than where you commanded the control group to go.

A few ear-splitting musical videos break up the putrid gameplay, and they offer the only seconds of so-bad-it's-good amusement that Stalin vs. Martians provides. You won't be inclined to laugh at scenes of zombified communists and be-bopping aliens, though, as much as you'll stare with your mouth agape. The game clearly aims for broad satire. Three-eyed Martians are ripped directly from Pixar's classic animated film Toy Story, and swarms of tiny ETs resemble the charming creatures from the acclaimed Pikmin games. Selected units bleat out such gems as "I am like Bolshevik on bicycle!" and the apparently homoerotic "My name's Ivan, I like you." But every lame grab for chuckles falls totally flat. (What image is a Bolshevik on a bicycle meant to convey anyway?) The forced humor lacks charm and wit, and though it aims for the tragically ludicrous mentality of a camp classic, it's just plain tragic.

It just never seems to end.

The production values struggle with similar attempts at energy, but their exertions will exhaust both you and your system. The sound design deserves special mention for its limited selection of awful house music and tinny array of Martian bloops and beeps. Some onscreen activities don't even produce noise, which is a rather welcome glitch, given that your ears will need a break from the excruciatingly aggressive soundtrack and overlapping, nonsensical chatter of selected units. The environmental visuals are at least colorful, though all of the maps look the same until you reach the final missions. Some of the Martians are cute, though the art design displays absolutely no creativity; for a game featuring alien lizards and Russian tanks on the same battlefield, Stalin vs. Martians looks completely generic. That's a shame, considering that a clever visual slant could have helped veil the decrepit technology powering this dud. There are no graphics options whatsoever in the game menus--no antialiasing or anisotropic filtering, not even an option to change the resolution. How unusual, then, that the frame rate takes occasional dips, and that the game crashed multiple times on multiple systems during our testing. The mouse pointer disappeared after every musical interlude, forcing a restart each time. Changing the "Do you like cats?" menu option from "yes" to "no" had no apparent effects on these issues.

You can play only as the communist forces, and there is no multiplayer, but why on Earth, or on Mars for that matter, would you want to extend an experience like this? Don't play Stalin vs. Martians, even if you are a big fan of communism or Martians--or even both.

 

Hinterland: Orc Lords

Posted by Sishu / at 11:40 AM / Labels: , / 0 comments

Hinterland: Orc Lords Boxshot
Hinterland: Orc Lords

Hinterland: Orc Lords Review

Hinterland: Orc Lords plays like a remake of a very old game, but for once, that's mostly a good thing.

The Good

  • Inventive hybrid design crossing up RPG and RTS genres
  • Appealing, fast-flowing game matches
  • Cuts out the mindless, monotonous combat that afflicts other action RPGs.

The Bad

  • Totally randomized game events
  • Low production values and no tutorial.

Hinterland: Orc Lords may be one of the best games never released for the Commodore 64. OK, that doesn't sound complimentary in 2009, given that the computer system in question is a Cyndi Lauper contemporary. But this mash-up of a hack-and-slash role-playing game and a base-building real-time strategy has a refreshing old-time feel about it. Indie developer Tilted Mill (best known for 2006's Caesar IV) has put together a likable, fast-flowing hybrid that manages to feel like a remake of a golden oldie but also brand new. While the game isn't entirely successful, due to inconsistent difficulty, poor production values, and the lack of a tutorial, it delivers some appealing action for a bargain price of just $20.

Hacking and slashing--not the most genteel way to build a medieval fantasy town, but a pretty effective one.

At first, however, Hinterland is a tad frustrating. The game does not come with a paper manual or an in-game tutorial. An Adobe manual is automatically installed with the game, and the main menu tries to lure you to the official Web site with the promise of information in the forums; but, really, you shouldn't have to hunt around to uncover basic information on how to play a game you just bought. Thankfully, it isn't that complex. Aside from a few irritating early moments while you figure out the interface and maps, there aren't many stumbling blocks. Still, some sort of training mission should have been included.

Still, chances are good that you've seen all of this before, even if you haven't seen it all crammed into a single game. You play a typical RTS/RPG hero tasked with both building a medieval settlement into a full-fledged town and hacking the countryside to bits. A couple of dozen D&D archetypes are offered for the choosing as your alter ego, including such been-there, done-that sorts as an elven archer, a goblin thief, and an undead warrior. Oddly, there are actually only a few orc options. Regardless of skin color or pointed ears, the heroes are pretty much interchangeable. Each comes with skill bonuses that affect characteristics relating to settlement development and battle bonuses, but they otherwise could have rolled off of a Gygaxian production line. This sameness is further emphasized by generic visuals and sound. Buildings are typical medieval structures; maps are dull stretches of flowery grassland dotted with rare unique features, such as ruins and mushroom fields; and the music is a collection of triumphal odes that could have been clipped out of any RPG released in the past decade.

Your time is divided between managing a town as in a traditional Age of Empires-style RTS and roaming the wilderness looking for fights as in a traditional hack-and-slash RPG, such as Diablo. You begin in control of one location on the map with the goal of expanding your village while branching out to conquer neighboring territories randomly generated for each game. Victory is achieved by killing all enemies over the entire map, which varies between 20 and 50 enemy territories, depending on the size option you choose in the beginning. But fighting isn't all that interesting, even though you can do some nifty things, such as recruiting and outfitting town residents into makeshift adventuring parties.

Town development is really where it's at because settlements grow organically in a way not seen in a typical RTS. Instead of cranking out peasants, you rely on tourists. Every few days, your settlement attracts visitors with skills in such areas as farming, trapping, growing herbs, praying, selling stuff, and playing soldier. The catch is that they only stick around if you meet strict conditions. First, you need coins to build them their digs. Second, you need to fulfill a range of prerequisites, such as settlement quality and access to items; these include crystal balls and dragon eggs. Finally, you need to be famous. Even a bottom-rung sharecropper won't sign on to a lord without a high enough fame score, which is built through killing enemies and taking over territories on the map.

And this is where things get tough. While it is pretty easy to boost your fame in the beginning by killing the goblins, skeletons, spiders, dogmen, orcs, and other fantasy villains that populate the maps, penalties can cripple you. Getting killed, for instance, knocks a whopping 30 points off your fame, while failing a quest assigned by your monarch takes off an even more formidable 40 points. As peasants ask for a fair bit of fame to set up shop in your town, this can quickly put you behind the eight ball. A lot of the game is also random. Peasants of varying levels can seemingly show up at any time. When you've got 15 fame, you might see farmers and merchants popping by with demands of 50 or more. When you're loaded and looking for experienced help, you might see useless grunts arriving who ask for fame under 20. Monarch quests seem totally arbitrary, too. The big guy can ask for something impossible right off the bat, such as access to human souls when the only location on the map with a graveyard is guarded by ninth-level minotaurs that you can barely scratch. Later on, though, when you can offer up the big stuff, that same monarch might just ask for tiny donations of food and gold. At least you can turn off monarch requests.

Low fame? Forget about recruiting a guard. Heck, good luck even convincing a lousy farmer to stick around.

The difficulty can seriously vary from one game to the next depending on your luck. There is only a single save slot, too, and games can only be saved when exiting, which prevents you from even trying again if you get killed at an inopportune time. Still, it's damn near impossible to stop playing. Although the random elements may feel a little unfair, there is something compelling about being kept on your toes by so many unforgiving surprises. Combining such a challenge with catchy, easy-to-play mechanics is another plus. This approach will be familiar to anyone who played strategy games a couple of decades ago because they were similarly built around simple hooks accentuated with brutal, haphazard difficulty. Games also fly by. Territories are guarded by no more than 10 or so enemies apiece, which keeps you from getting bogged down in too much monotonous clickfest combat. You can wrap up a match on the small map in about an hour or so, and even games on the medium and large maps tend to take no more than a single sitting of three-to-five hours to finish.

Although an old-school attitude makes Hinterland: Orc Lords a hard sell to the masses, the game is well suited to dedicated strategy and old-school gamers looking for a challenge. A few more options to ease the randomness would have been appreciated, but there's fun to be had here regardless.

 

R.U.S.E.

Posted by Sishu / at 11:27 AM / Labels: , / 0 comments

R.U.S.E. Boxshot
R.U.S.E.

R.U.S.E. Multiplayer Hands-On

We took part in the Battle of Normandy in another hands-on with this exciting strategy game.

Ubisoft was showing a new mission for R.U.S.E. at GamesCom, and we were lucky enough to try it out for ourselves. The new mission is based on Operation Dragoon, part of the Normandy invasion in World War II. Located in the south of France around the areas between the towns of Peillon and Gorbino, the map featured steady rain, dark clouds, and lightning, which certainly helped to create a sense of dread. We played as the British, whose speciality is air superiority. Germany, on the other hand, specialises in tanks and artillery, whereas the USA is an all-rounder. This mission was Britain versus Germany, but others will let you play as France, Italy, Russia, or the US.

Ruse cards give you access to special abilities and make up a large part of the game's strategy. On this map, we relied on the blitz card, which speeds up your units in one of the map sectors. The map had around 23 sectors, and we used the card on the sector where our base was located, allowing our resource-collecting trucks to earn us money twice as quickly as usual. We also used the spy card, which exposes an enemy decoy card in any one sector. As its name suggests, the decoy card is used to create a decoy of fake units, which is useful when trying to mask genuine units. You earn one ruse point each minute to spend on any card you have, and you can reuse the same cards in a mission. The points accumulate too, so you might prefer to wait until later in the game and use the spy card on every sector of the map, for instance, before planning a mass assault.

Since the British specialise in air superiority, our plan involved building several air bases, with each supporting up to seven air units. An added bonus of the air superiority bonus is that air units are cheaper to build, and this made our job a bit easier. After the airfields were complete, we built an Avro Anson reconnaissance plane, to scout for enemy troops, and several Hawker Typhoon and Lancaster bombers. We also built some AA guns to take care of enemy planes, and some tanks to guard the road into our base.

Rather than destroy the enemy's base, this particular game mode requires you to reach a certain score before your opponent by destroying as many units as possible. With a formidable squadron of bombers at our disposal, we set about destroying any convoys or troops we found and also used our recon plane to verify as many as possible. About 20 minutes into our mission, we finally defeated our enemy. (We later discovered that his strategy of amassing a large tank force had taken longer than he thought it would.)

From what we've seen, R.U.S.E. is looking like a very solid and addictive strategy game, and we're looking forward to playing it again in the future. R.U.S.E. is heading to the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC later in the year.

 

Tom Clancy's EndWar

Posted by Sishu / at 12:27 PM / Labels: , / 0 comments

Tom Clancy's EndWar Boxshot
Tom Clancy's EndWar

Tom Clancy's EndWar

While the console versions are solid, the PC version of this unique strategy game is too stripped to stand out.

The Good

  • Innovative voice command mechanic makes you feel powerful
  • Persistent online campaign makes matches meaningful
  • Different match types make good use of uplink capture mechanic.

The Bad

  • Single-player campaign has no story to speak of
  • All three factions play the same way
  • Limited unit types make for simple rock-paper-scissors skirmishes
  • Success of voice recognition varies depending on player's headset.

Tom Clancy's EndWar is a real-time strategy game created for consoles that has now found its way to the PC. How's that for a twist? With its innovative voice controls and strong production values, EndWar was an enjoyable experience on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, granting armchair commanders a sense of high-tech supremacy. Yet on a platform overflowing with quality RTS options, its core simplicity is far more obvious. Its three near-future factions all play the same way, the rock-paper-scissors relationships between units are incredibly straightforward, and the single-player campaign doesn't tell any story to speak of, which is a blatant missed opportunity. Nevertheless, a novel multiplayer mode and persistent units that carry from one mission to the next keep things interesting, and on the whole, EndWar is a mildly enjoyable game, even if it never feels like a comfortable fit on the PC.

Scissors beats paper. Or in this case, transports beat gunships.

To get the most out of the experience, you'll need to plug in a headset. To order your units about, you issue a series of preset commands by holding down the space bar and speaking your directive into the microphone. This runs the gamut from attacking enemy squads ("Unit two, attack hostile four") and bringing in reinforcements when they are available ("Deploy gunships") to centering your view on a particular group ("Unit three, camera") and ordering special attacks ("Air strike, hostile six"). There are limited possibilities, so don't expect to plan out multiple waypoints or set up tank patrols. Nor can you rely completely on the microphone--at least, not if you intend to be competitive. Actions like garrisoning infantry in a building or ordering your units to unleash special attacks require some key presses, so there is a bit of light micromanagement in this regard.

If you'd rather take a traditional approach, you can use a mouse and keyboard, but doing so makes EndWar more frustrating than fun. Because the camera must be focused on a particular unit, you can't scroll across the map and issue orders with ease. You can enter a "sitrep" view, assuming your command vehicle hasn't been destroyed, which makes issuing orders with a mouse more feasible but is visually unappealing. Should you decide to use a headset (which you should, if you want to experience EndWar at its best), you may need to mess around with settings in Windows and within the game menus to get your hardware to work properly. A standard Logitech headset recognized most voice commands, while others were less successful (or completely unsuccessful) in consistently recognizing instructions.

The units themselves are products of EndWar's World War III setting. In the game's version of near-future events, The United States, Russia, and a unified Europe have become superpowers, and the US plans to launch a military space station to tip the worldwide balance of power in its favor. Unfortunately, terrorists destroy the station upon liftoff, thereby igniting global conflict. Yet as interesting and far-fetched as the setting is, it's mostly backdrop. The campaign is just a series of battles against the AI that emulates EndWar's main multiplayer mode, so don't expect much exposition, larger-than-life personalities, or political intricacies. You can play as any of the three factions, but while your own commander (and his or her blatant accent) will change, there's no story to involve you, aside from mission updates and news blurbs. Thus, there's no reason to play the campaign with another faction if you've finished it once already. This lack of narrative is a big disappointment, given Tom Clancy's pedigree of political page-turners.

Capturing every uplink leads to the sweetest kind of victory.

Nevertheless, EndWar has a way of drawing you in, not just because of the unique control mechanism, but because it lets you closely follow your squads into battle. Regardless of your faction, the basic units are the same: Infantry comprises riflemen and engineers; tanks and artillery have the armored advantage; gunships take to the skies; and transports not only whisk your infantry about the battlefield, but offer necessary antiair support. Most of the time, you'll be switching your view from squad to squad, and the camera's close-up vantage point has quite an impact when you're engaged in combat. Bullets fly, gunships fall from the sky, and artillery fire rains from above, and some visual glitches aside, it's all exciting and cinematic in a way that most other strategy games just can't accomplish. Using sitrep view lets you get a quick overview of the battlefield, which is useful but not particularly dramatic. The rapid zoom of the camera when you move in and out of this mode and from one unit to the next, however, is slick.

While it may be authentic to have so few unit types and no striking difference between factions given the setting, it doesn't make any side worth playing more than another. The relationship between units is always the same--tanks beat transports, gunships beat tanks, and so on--so there's little subtlety to the gameplay. Instead, strategy is delivered on a broader level, starting with the mission objectives. There are four main mission types: assault, conquest, siege, and raid. Assault is the simplest (kill your enemy), while in Raid, you must either destroy or defend certain buildings on the map to achieve victory. Conquest is the most interesting mode, taking its cues from the Battlefield games in addition to EndWar's closest RTS cousin, World in Conflict. Here, you must use infantry to capture control points, called uplinks, scattered across the map while fending off the enemy and sabotaging their attempts to do the same. Siege battles are much less common than other types and involve an assaulting player attempting to capture a critical uplink while the defending player struggles to maintain control of it.

Tactics are generally obvious in all of these situations, but they can still generate a tense tug-of-war between players as each jockeys for position. Uplinks are present in all modes, and they are a critical part of the gameplay. Most importantly, they help you earn command points, which you need in order to call in reinforcements and perform other actions. However, uplinks can be taken only by infantry, so even if you aren't playing a conquest map, you'll still want some riflemen or engineers in the field. Uplinks also hold a second key to victory: upgrades that allow you to engage support powers like air strikes and electronic attacks. These powers are invaluable in a sticky situation but also cost command points, so you'll need to weigh the advantage of bringing in another transport to defeat your gunship-heavy opponent against a quick strike that could do immediate damage. There are even short-range nukes to deploy in certain circumstances that can immediately turn the tide of battle and produce a spectacular explosion.

Why is Russia always the bad guy?

All of these battles are given context within a larger turn-based map called the Theater of War. The offline theater is good for practice, but it's the online theater that provides the meat of the experience. This semiglobal map is persistent, so as opposing players engage one another, the results of an entire day's matches represent a single turn within the theater. Once the day's turn is complete, new battles open up as each faction spreads its dominion. This is a great idea that may remind you of a similar mode in the mech action game Chromehounds. But while the sameness of each faction makes it hard to feel particularly loyal, it's involving to watch your faction's color spread across the map, whether that means establishing your presence in Florida or burning Paris to the ground. A few days after the game's release, however, relatively few players seem to be participating in the theater, making EndWar's long-term viability unclear.

Your battle prowess has global consequences, but success brings more than a victory for your faction. You'll also earn a supply of credits after each battle that you can then spend on upgrades for your units. Surviving units gain levels, which gives them access to purchased enhancements, which could mean faster movement speed, new support powers (being able to designate a new drop point for reinforcements is ever so helpful), or additional attacks that can be triggered when you are following the unit that can perform them. Like the Theater of War, this feature seems like it's supposed to make you feel emotionally attached to your faction's success, and it works to an extent, giving you an incentive that functions on a more personal level. While new attacks open up some minor micromanagement options, they don't bring drastic changes, because most battles are still won or lost with quick uplink securing and a basic understanding of rock-beats-scissors dynamics.

While EndWar's tactics were designed on a broader scale, its presentation attempts to throw you into the midst of battle. When firefights get heavy, the screen fills with units and explosions, and it's fun to watch the destruction on the ground from the vantage point of a gunship squad firing at tanks or engineers from above. Some smaller touches make an impact, such as the authentic-looking behavior of engineer squads as they enter a building or a transport. However, the PC version looks much less impressive than its console counterparts. Textures are bland, while lighting, shadows, and other aspects are simply average, so even with all settings turned up, the quality of the visuals doesn't seem to justify the relatively high system requirements. EndWar also suffers from occasional performance problems, which affect not only the frame rate, but the speed of the entire game, which can suddenly start chugging for no obvious reason.

EndWar looks like your prom backup date: pleasing, if not quite beautiful.

The sound design does a better job of immersing you in battle. This is partially due to the din of combat--perfectly appropriate for World War III. However, it's the constant radio chatter and responses of your units that have the greatest impact, making you feel as though you really are in the role of a military commander. The sound effects aren't just cosmetic, however: EndWar's constant feedback is an important tactical tool, letting you make split-second decisions that could mean life or death for your squad. Unfortunately, there are too many times when crucial feedback ("Check unit nine") comes far too late for it to do any good.

EndWar's voice command mechanic makes it unique among strategy games, and it's this innovation that stands out above all of its other features. Strip it away, and you'll find an RTS game that can be fun but is ultimately too simple to stand out in a crowded genre. But even if strategy veterans won't find all the complexities they'd expect, there's something to be said for EndWar's smart match types and persistent campaign. Hopefully as its community grows, so too will the game's long-term possibilities.

 

Kohan II: Kings of War

Posted by Sishu / at 10:45 AM / Labels: , / 0 comments

Kohan II: Kings of War Boxshot
Kohan II: Kings of War

Kohan II: Kings of War

Kohan II retains its predecessor's unique gameplay while also making key changes that distinguish it both from the original and from any other real-time strategy games in the intervening years.


Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns was released in 2001, and though it wasn't a blockbuster success, many of those who actually played it loved it. Its particular take on real-time strategy focused on the strategic control of companies of troops and on eliminating much of the tedious micromanagement often associated with the genre. As such, the game proved to be an innovative change of pace from the conventions of real-time strategy. The sequel, Kohan II: Kings of War, retains its predecessor's unique gameplay while also making key changes that distinguish it both from the original and from any other RTS games in the intervening years. And while some of the changes streamline a slickly designed RTS model even further, they don't detract from this great game's own winning formula.

Kohan heroes round up followers to save the world.

Kohan II's fantasy setting takes place long after the events of the first Kohan game. Naava Daishan is chasing after the remains of the Ceyah faction, who were the aggressors and losers of the first game. Led by Sebak, the Ceyah survivors escape from Naava's grasp and unleash a dark power upon Khaldun. The forces of humanity are on the brink of annihilation, and it's up to Naava and Jonas Teramun, a recently awakened Kohan with no memories, to unite the races of the land. The storyline is a little unoriginal for a fantasy setting, but it is enjoyable nonetheless, thanks to a few well-placed plot twists. The last mission is also quite fun and suitably climactic, although the game's ending is rather dull and disappointing. The single-player campaign spans 25 missions and should take anywhere from 15 hours to twice that long to complete, depending on your strategies and if you complete optional secondary objectives. At any rate, like its predecessor, the campaign in Kohan II is too scripted and suffers from weak artificial intelligence. Also, it'll be an absolute breeze for experienced RTS players at the default difficulty, and even hard difficulty won't be much of a challenge for the first half of the game. The missions are varied, though, and you'll get to play as each of the game's races at various parts in the campaign. You may or may not enjoy this aspect, because even though this lends some variety to the gameplay, you don't really get attached to any particular characters or their causes.

Kohan II features six playable races: human, haroun, drauga, gauri, undead, and shadow. Each race has its own unique units, buildings, and economic factors, such as reliances on particular types of resources over other types. These economic twists turn out to be what most differentiates the races from each other, because the respective military units are basically functional equivalents despite their aesthetic differences. Each race can also belong to a particular faction. There are five factions total (although not every race can choose from all of the factions) and each of these confers certain benefits. For example, the council faction reduces the cost of buildings by 10 percent. These factions allow you to further tailor the game to your play style, although the factions mainly come into play in skirmish or multiplayer matches since you can't choose your faction in the campaign. Overall, though the game's races and factions don't have a ton of personality to them, the various combinations can make for significant and interesting gameplay differences.

Former enemies join your cause for their own reasons.

The Kohan series differs from traditional RTS games in both economic and military terms, and Kohan II continues this tradition. For one thing, you don't gather resources in Kohan II. Instead, buildings and mines will provide an income rate for the resources. Gold is the only resource that you actually accumulate. The other resources--stone, wood, iron, and mana crystals--are quantified only by a positive or negative flow. Gold is the bottom line, so if you have a negative flow of the latter resources, you can still recruit units requiring these resources by paying an additional cost in gold. A positive flow of these other resources won't automatically grant you more gold, but some of your structures (or all of them, depending on your race) can be upgraded into exporters where you can exchange surplus resource income for gold. This rather elegant system actually still requires you to spend just as much of your attention on resource management as you would in a traditional RTS game. You can easily find yourself overspending and bringing your gold income down to a trickle. And since gold is required to buy units, buildings, and upgrades, you won't get very far without it. You'll have to carefully manage your income flows by converting buildings to exporters or producers, depending on your needs, in order to maximize your gold.

In Kohan II, military units are handled differently from other real-time strategy games. Units are organized into companies, and you directly control these companies rather than all the individual forces that comprise the companies. Companies have three formation options--combat, skirmish, and column--which bestow certain effects on the company. For example, combat formation decreases the company's movement rate but offers complete combat effectiveness, while column formation gives a boost to speed but cuts combat effectiveness in half. When to switch between different formations tends to be pretty obvious. One issue with the game is that units in combat formation are too eager to fight anything, and they tend to stick to a target once engaged unless they are ordered to run. As such, in larger battles, it's common to see members of your companies automatically attacking buildings, walls, or other low-priority targets when there are more immediate threats in the area. You'll need to micromanage them more than you might expect in a game that alleviates a lot of other micromanagement issues.

Walls of wood won't stop this invading army.

A company is destroyed only if every last member of the company is destroyed, but if you manage to keep just one member alive, you can retreat back to a town or fort. These installations have a supply zone where your members will be automatically healed and replenished. It's hard to wipe out a company in Kohan II. Retreating companies will automatically move at their highest speed, so you will have to chase down your opponents to permanently get rid of them. In fact, you'll usually have to spend a lot of time chasing retreating companies, so you have to decide if it's worthwhile to press the attack or to focus your energies elsewhere. Be wary if you let your enemy live to fight another day--companies replenish their health much more quickly in Kohan II than in the previous game, which quickens the pace and has a way of making battles quite interesting. We fought battle after battle over just one city in a multiplayer game because both sides were able to quickly replenish their forces.

Companies in Kohan II include four frontline units, two flanking units, two support units, and one captain. You can mix and match any of your available units, and you're encouraged to do so. An example of this would be a frontline of four swordsmen, a flank of two archers, and a healer and mage as your two support units. Your swordsmen would engage the enemy melee combatants, your archers and mage would shoot from afar, and your healer would keep your swordsmen at full health. However, in practice, it's not necessarily this neat--you may viably swarm your opponent with greater numbers for good results. We finished the campaign by simply recruiting companies with the strongest infantry in the frontline and flank, and using the healers as support. With a couple of pure archer companies in the mix, we were able to mow through any opposition. This is rather unfortunate for the campaign, because it means about half the units in the game are either optional or useless, depending on how you look at it. Of course, multiplayer games do require you to be more careful in your company composition, especially when you factor in heroes and experienced companies.

The immortal Kohan heroes of Khaldun return in Kohan II. Like companies, the heroes gain experience and level up to become stronger. They provide extra bonuses to the company, such as protective shields or healing. Unlike its predecessor, dead heroes in Kohan II do not require gold to revive. Instead, they will automatically revive inside a city's supply zone like an ordinary unit; however, they will lose all experience and start from ground zero--so there's a big incentive to keep your hero-led companies from getting wiped out. Heroes seem more powerful in the sequel. A veteran company with a Kohan hero and a healer can trample multiple foes at once. Our three swordsmen companies, along with Kohan heroes, held off a force three times its size due to their veteran status. We experienced similar results in a multiplayer game, so you definitely want to keep your experienced units alive.

Spells are as devastating as they look.

The cities in Kohan II are also handled differently from the first game, and they represent the key locations on each map. First of all, you can only build cities in predetermined settlement spots, which has several impacts on the gameplay. The limited cities, along with the resource mines scattered across the map, cap the income you can generate. Resource generators become much more valuable. You don't have to worry about defenseless or unproductive mines, though; they no longer need to be in a supply zone to generate income, and you can build forts to protect mines and other key points on the map. Forts, like cities, have garrisons of militia that will automatically run out and attack anyone who ventures too close to the strongpoint. They are a welcome addition to the Kohan series, because they buy you time so you can get to a besieged city before it falls. The limited cities also let you know where points of contention will be for the entire game, and it also stops players from building cities to postpone an inevitable defeat at the end of a game. In spite of the fixed settlement spots, you still need to scout the map. Not only can your opponents build on settlement spots, but they also can build forts to block your movement. A few well-placed forts can delay and wound your reinforcements from getting to a besieged city, for example.


Cities are also built differently in Kohan II. Like the first game, you construct auxiliary buildings in order to upgrade your town. These buildings generate resource income and allow you to recruit new units. However, unlike in Kohan, these buildings actually appear on the map as selectable structures. Also, upgraded cities automatically gain defensive walls, so when a city is besieged, attackers must first breach the wall before they deal with the city's militia and other defenders. You can only capture a city by reducing the main citadel's hit points to zero. Auxiliary buildings can sometimes block opponents and can be attacked and destroyed, but in fact, their physical presence serves no real strategic purpose in the game, which is disappointing. It would have been nice to be able to disrupt your opponent's economy by using hit-and-run tactics, but that's not possible thanks to walls. And if you have free reign to destroy buildings, you might as well go straight for the citadel, since the ancillary buildings aren't worth the time. Even if you take a city, all the existing buildings are sold back to the original owner and you'll need to rebuild them yourself. Therefore, the buildings end up being completely worthless from a tactical standpoint, because it doesn't matter if you destroy them and it doesn't matter if you leave them standing.

Going after the main building is the best route in a siege.

As with most real-time strategy games, Kohan II offers a skirmish mode for single-player and multiplayer games on LAN and Internet. In multiplayer, you can choose from any of the game's races and assign an appropriate faction. You have a ton of options when starting a game, including volume of settlement spots, bandit camps containing computer-controlled enemies, and even trees. The AI for computer opponents in the skirmish mode is much more of a challenge than in the campaign. The computer will often attack you in multiple locations at once, and it will use diversionary tactics to draw your attention away from key locations. Multiplayer games can be especially fun because of the changes in the gameplay. Battles can go back and forth as you retreat companies and send in reinforcements. If you're playing a team game, teammates can give units and even buildings to each other. This places even more emphasis on race/faction combinations, because if you have a race with a strong resource income, you can give buildings to your teammates to supplement their income. Internet play features a built-in game-server browser. You can check for games and look at community stats for race/faction wins, though a quick-match option of some sort would have been welcomed. Kohan II also features a scenario editor for those who want to create their own maps.

Kohan II's presentation is very nicely done. The fully 3D graphics look great; units look distinctive and animate well, although combat is cluttered and the campaign's cutscenes using the 3D engine can be bad at times. Some of the spell effects, especially the archmage's meteor, are quite impressive. The maps are well populated with environmental scenery and wildlife. All together, it's a pleasing game to look at. Likewise, the game's audio lives up to the quality of the visuals. The voice work is better than in the first Kohan game, and the various sounds of combat appropriately fit the action.

A handful of veteran units can tear through overwhelming odds.

Kohan II: Kings or War had quite a reputation to uphold. Many of those who played the original would agree that Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns and its follow-up, Ahriman's Gift, took a tired genre and did something new and refreshing with it. Kohan II could have simply recycled that formula, but instead, developer TimeGate Studios changed around the gameplay just enough so that it plays similarly to the original yet has so much more to it that makes it unquestionably different. The resulting game has a great design, and it offers plenty of depth and complexity.

 

King's Bounty: The Legend

Posted by Sishu / at 10:36 AM / Labels: , , / 0 comments

King's Bounty: The Legend Boxshot Enlarge the boxshot
King's Bounty: The Legend

King's Bounty: The Legend

King's Bounty is a great modern rendition of an old-fashioned formula.

The Good

  • Solid gameplay based on a traditional tactical RPG formula
  • Good turn-based tactical depth
  • Strong RPG flavor and storyline
  • Colorful graphics evocative of old-time role-playing.

The Bad

  • Not much in the way of innovation
  • No multiplayer.

One thing you can say for King's Bounty: The Legend is that it fares a lot better than most resurrections of old games. While these digitalized archaeological digs generally reveal that you wouldn't want to go home again even if you could (Defender of the Crown, anyone?), the revival of New World Computing's fondly remembered role-playing/strategy hybrid is a vast improvement upon its 1990 predecessor. While King’s Bounty may not be the most revolutionary game of 2008, its refined gameplay makes it a treasure worth hoarding.

Actually, about the only fair negative comment you could make about King's Bounty is that there isn't really anything new here. Just about everything feels like a rip-off of Heroes of Might and Magic. As with that long-lived Ubisoft franchise, the core of this game is all about taking on the role of a hero in a solo campaign (there is no multiplayer option) and guiding parties of mercenaries across a real-time map to fight turn-based battles on hex grids. A strong RPG flavor is granted through character creation, which allows you to choose from warrior, paladin, and mage classes and then trick out your avatar with skills, artifacts, weapons, armor, spells, and assorted other Gygaxian accoutrements. You then explore the huge medieval fantasy world of Darion in the service of King Mark the Wise, plying the trade of a treasure hunter. A story slowly develops regarding the king's older brother and the standard evil threat to the continued existence of, well, everything, although you don't have to pay much attention to it. Essentially, you just wander around doing good deeds, guiding an icon of your hero through the usual D&D-inspired landscape to slay monsters, loot treasure, scoop up skill runes, mana crystals, and leadership banners, and solve quests handed out by your king and various passersby.

Throwing the book--er, spellbook--is just one way to get rid of a pesky undead enemy.

Despite that description, this isn't a hack-and-slasher. Instead of whaling on monsters with a small party of adventurers as in the typical RPG, you wage tactical battles with veritable armies of troops on turn-based battlefields. Mages, priests, knights, archers, monsters, and the like are hired at special buildings such as the king's castle for use as shock troops in your hero's party. You start off with a paltry handful of these goons, but soon wind up at the head of a tremendous force of killer Renaissance fair refugees. Stuff enough gold into your pantaloons and increase your hero's leadership skill as you increase in level and you'll be able to afford the services of loads of hirelings. The scale of battles always remains manageable, however, as each unit type is depicted by just a single character model on the battlefield no matter how many of those units you actually command. This keeps the focus on pure tactics and allows you to whip through battles lickety-split, while still letting you make use of each unit's special abilities. As just about every unit comes with some sort of skill involving spells or bonus attacks, cutting to the chase without dealing with hordes of units is vital to keeping the game straightforward and simple.

This should sound familiar if you have any experience playing a tactical RPG. The only real difference between King's Bounty and Heroes of Might and Magic or Disciples is a greater emphasis on role-playing. Story is brought to the fore here in a much more overt way, thanks to a sarcastic sense of humor and a ton of quests to be solved. True, most of these quests have been scooped out of the big bag of RPG cliches (find stolen property, remove a curse, kill the big bad whatever that's plaguing our village, and so on). But many come with multiple parts that force you to venture all over the map to solve them, along with a great deal of personality conveyed through idiosyncratic characters and a lot of text. You can't just skip around like you're filling in blanks; do so and you're liable to get caught not paying attention, as with the quest where you're given the words to a spell solving a peasant's zombie problem and then have to pick the actual phrase out in a multiple choice menu when casting the spell a little later. So even though these various tasks might not break any new ground, completing them is more involving than the map-clearing busywork that dominates the usual tactical RPG.

Difficulty is also scaled well. Starting off on easy knocks down monster hit points to something quite manageable, and cranks up the amount of gold awarded so that you never seem to run out of the coin needed to hire reinforcements. It's gratifying to see newbies getting let in on the action like this; too many games of this ilk seem to want to punish players, or at least present such a grueling level of difficulty that only veterans of the genre need apply. With that said, moving to normal difficulty is one heck of a leap. Enemy hit points take a huge jump and your gold gets slashed to practically nothing, turning what was a pretty fast-moving game into what can be a grueling slog through battles of attrition.

King's Bounty isn't the most modern-looking game out there, although you can't quibble with its creepy, bombastic spell effects.

Visual design is impressive, if not cutting-edge. The game is a couple of years out of date, although the use of bright color and loads of details on maps means that everything still looks great in a Disney kind of way. Areas are intricately drawn and laid out in such a way as to increase the fantasy atmosphere. Every nook and cranny is filled with something D&D-ish, from urns and skulls in catacomb corners to webs and giant mushrooms in forest clearings. Spell effects are spooky and imaginative, too. Magic is generally underlined with special effects like clouds of brimstone, puffs of green gas, and even leering skull faces. All of these added details sometimes gets in the way of your simply playing the game, though. Pathways through maps are very twisty-turny and often obscured with foliage or other terrain obstacles. It can be tough to locate a way forward without rotating the map or zooming in. Failing to at least pan the camera around before galloping into an S-curve can also see you trot right into a killer encounter with powerhouse monsters hidden just out of sight. Audio, on the other hand, is similarly secreted away. The score is a generic triumphal blast that repeats so often during tactical engagements you will almost immediately tune it out, while battle sounds are tinny and there is virtually no voice acting in the game.

Forget about looking at King's Bounty: The Legend as a sequel to an oldie-but-goodie and take it on its own merits. Anyone with the nostalgia gene who played the original might get a special thrill out of this sequel coming along almost 20 years later, but you don't need a connection to this classic to enjoy this impressive take on the traditional tactical RPG.

 

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