Armageddon Empires [Indiescene]

Some games require a huge buy-in. You need to invest a lot of time learning the system, understanding the interface and reading the documentation over and over. The problem with this, of course, is that the payoff may not be worth it. Beyond the learning curve could be great indie gems like Dwarf Fortress or Dominions 3, but you need to either find a walkthrough or commit to the self-education. Who wants to do that?

This is the dilemma facing Armageddon Empires, a new post-apocalyptic wargame from Cryptic Comet. It’s an old-fashioned game in many ways, most significantly in how you will need to read the freaking manual to get started. There’s not a lot of in-game help for you. There’s not a lot of clarity on when you need to right click and when you need to left click. The drag and drop tool is fussy, too.

But you’ll forget all of this once you master the system. Armageddon Empires is a game of exploration and area control. You explore hexes to uncover enemies and resources. As expected, you spend resources on bringing new units to field, but there’s an original twist here. You can also spend these resources on dice before each turn, high rolls determine who gets to go first. The person who goes first gets more action points. So do you save those green resources to move your hero from your hand or spend them on the chance of points you can use to buy more cards?

This either/or decision making is everywhere in the game, potentially turning the tide of battles by spending “fate points,” making an intimidating game quite intuitive once you get the basics in hand. It helps that the setting is familiar enough to not throw up too many barriers to understanding. Air, artillery, infantry, zombies, cyborgs, etc. Nothing that your standard geek can’t manage.

Armageddon Empires rises above the crowd, though, because it is a surprisingly sophisticated wargame. Your armies will start with a couple of units at most, but eventually you will need to manage their composition carefully. Air strikes will need to be timed to even the odds, all the while costing you precious resources which are rarely in high supply. Like the best strategy titles, Armageddon Empires expects you to balance the needs of the moment with the promises of the future, but it never makes you feel like everything is riding on an early turn or a single fateful decision.

Of course, a large number of you will just give up early in the demo. Those of you that stick around will be treated to one of the best new old strategy games in a while.

Two Worlds

Two Worlds has been billed as this year’s Oblivion, and there’s something to that. It has a huge world, teeming with side quests. There are different factions you can suck up to or annoy, depending on what you do and whom you do it to. It also provides more evidence that game designers are failing to keep the needs of console gamers in mind when they develop a role playing game for both the PC and a console.

Two Worlds has rich, detailed quest text and a wide range of weapons with different strengths. You can customize your character’s skills to emphasize whatever you find most interesting. The alchemy component is a real revelation – intuitive, intelligent, and necessary for success. However, it’s really hard to appreciate any of this stuff while sitting on a sofa seven feet from the television. The print is eye-strainingly small, made worse by the insistence on a font chosen more for character than readability. The minimap is even worse. None of these UI things pose a problem on a PC monitor.

The game itself is rewarding. The dialog is cheesy; forsooths and mayhaps fly like dragons from the mouths of the characters. The ridiculous limits on the look of your character are more than made up for by the flexibility in character design as you level up. Resurrection points (you’ll need those) are close enough to keep dying from being a pain, but far enough apart to make you watch your step. Traps, spells, and stores filled with stock will give you lots of combat options as you make your way from point to point.

Two Worlds isn’t easy, though. The default difficulty level is punishing even in the early going, and it only gets marginally easier as you level up. Your character will rarely take on a single opponent at a time, so you can’t do a strictly melee hero since you’ll need a way to weed out enemies before you close in. Archery is a powerful option, fireballs doubly so. Horseback travel takes a while to get used to, and may find yourself careening through the woods at breakneck speed if you miss the turn in the road. Good thing teleports provide an alternative mode of travel. The developers claim that the world around you changes because of your actions, but it’s too long a game to put to the test in a single review.

Two Worlds isn’t as good as an Elder Scrolls game, but it’s a fine stopgap measure. If you have patience, fortitude and better than average eyesight, it could be the role-playing game for you.

Overlord

Game evil isn’t the same as real evil. In Overlord, you only know that your character is evil because your deputy keeps telling you so. In role playing games, evil generally means being a sarcastic jerk. Murdering civilians in strategy or GTA games is not simply approved of, it’s encouraged. So it’s not really surprising that your evil-tyrant-wannabe is greeted as a liberator by the peasants, or that the “heroes” you battle are twisted parodies of fantasy archetypes. This theme still works in Overlord because your deputy’s protestations of your evilness are so over the top that they provide a neat counterpoint to all the peasants greeting you as a liberator. It’s easy to believe that maybe you are tricking them, that they will be lambs led to the slaughter once you’ve consolidated your power.

Your first enemies are Halflings whose lifestyle of partying and dancing is based on enslaving and extorting food from the neighboring humans. The Halfling boss is a grotesque bulbous king, fattened on his ill-gotten gains. He’d fit in fine as a villain in any Bioware epic. This storyline is so successful that it almost masks the simplistic gameplay. You control four types of “minions”, each with different strengths. In a Pikmin-like way, you direct them to complete basic tasks and solve minor puzzles. Like all evil foozles, you’ll rely on your underlings to get anything done, no matter how powerful you get. Sauron the Demon Herder might not sound intimidating by himself, but these little guys are beer swilling, home trashing, sheep burning, fire quenching machines.

Overlord is a testimony to the power of good art design. It has learned from World of Warcraft the lesson that an exaggerated cartoon world can be more convincing than a photorealistic one. There’s a Wile E. Coyote franticness to a lot of the action as your hyper-caffeinated minions toss obstacles aside or frightened villagers run away screaming. The game effectively marshals its resources to keep moving you ever onward to better spells, creepier heroes and more fantastical settings. The save points are far enough apart to induce caution but close enough to prevent frustration. A minimap would have helped, especially when the paths and levels get more elaborate.

Overlord is fast food, designed to amuse more than innovate. It’s likely that the theme came well before the design document, with the shepherd act being merely a means to move you from Evil Location A to Evil Location B. It’s a great gaming Happy Meal, though, with enough to delight the eyes that you can forgive how little of it is original.

Rock Legend

I never wanted to be a rock star. I always knew that the life of sex, drugs and concert tours could be gained only though many years of practice and obscurity and maybe a little soul selling. Kudos: Rock Legend makes no effort to hide the drudgery and tenuousness of a music career. Finding the right band mates, practice, rehearsals, hand-to-mouth existence and getting squeezed by your record company hardly seems the recipe for fun. Oh, but it is!

You take the role as lead singer and assemble your band. You then have five years to make your mark on the music industry, starting with small gigs in local bars and working your way up to larger venues. Your band will need to stay motivated and free from stress, otherwise they’ll turn on each other or just stop showing up. When your lead guitarist quits because he hates the drummer, your rise to fame may never recover.

Rock Legend is spiced up by a couple of minigames. The songwriting game is a straight color matching exercise, influenced by your “inspiration” level and how much experience you have. It’s not very hard, but it’s nice to see that quality meter go above 80 per cent. The “music practice” game is a memory test that is best handled by simply writing down whatever pops up. You need to “practice” to stay sharp, but there’s a lot of tedium in this part. Maybe that’s the point.

Rock Legend, like its predecessor Kudos, limits you to a single activity a day and keeps the money tight to keep you hungry. It’s a better game than Kudos because the limitation fits the starving artist setting so well. The tradeoffs are compelling all the way through. Should you spend that last thirty bucks for a night out to build buzz for your next gig? When do you invest in a manager or sound mixer? When someone becomes a drunk, can you afford to fire them?

None of these decisions on its own is particularly interesting, but as a series of now-or-later choices that may or may not pay off, a fascinating fiction is created, and all without having to play a note. Getting out of the local band gutter is actually difficult, and almost entirely free of chance. It’s a little idealistic (hard work is rewarded more than hype) but the combination of good humor and delicious options will keep you humming along for a while.

Monster Madness

Monster Madness involves four very different friends  being forced to fight all manner of undead and creatures of the night, learning along the way that together they can take on any challenge, even telling the cute Goth girl that you have a crush on her.

Your experience playing Monster Madness will be very similar.  You must fight the controls, fussy camera angles and unclear instructions, only to learn that this is the kind of game that works much better when you have friends you can count on.  If you try to stop the zombie menace on your own, you will almost certainly die.

This title has got a lot of character.  The four kids you can choose from are fine representatives of Stereotype High School, and the voiceovers are appropriate.  The nerd is excitable, the Goth annoyed, the cheerleader loudly inconvenienced.  Things blow up well, and the “bestiary” of beasties is diverse enough to provide a treat at every level.  It is readily apparent that the art design team at Southpeak games had a lot fun thinking up the cat-flinging zombie granny and the undead biker gang.

Of course, the only adult in sight is a refugee from American Chopper, ready to make a quick buck selling you weapons cobbled together from spare parts littering the landscape.  There are some neat weapons, but to get them you often need to jump from the ground to ledges to roofs, made difficult thanks to the overly fussy control scheme.  Driving a vehicle is even worse, trying to steer, accelerate and shoot at the same time.

This is where your friends come in, of course.  Add a couple of other slayers and all of a sudden things seem doable.  One can kill while another drives.  This is a game made for co-op, which is great if you have friends willing to at least give it a shot with you.

If you are on your own, you’re really on your own.  It can be frustrating to die over and over again, especially since you know that if you could just shanghai one person to dispatch the trash monsters, you could get through it.  Zombie killing is, I suppose, a social activity.  Find a pal to commit to the enterprise, and you’ll have a much better time.

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