Category Archives: Strategy Reviews

Reviews relating specifically to the Strategy genre including strategy simulators, real time strategy, and turn based strategy.

Steam Sales Review #54: XCOM Enemy Unknown

Posted on June 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

First before starting I should note a disdain for turn based combat games such as the Men of War series and Omerta City of Gangsters.

I find these games to be silly, a waste of time, and too over complicated for anyone to ever understand what it is exactly you’re supposed to do.  Despite this these games have millions of fans around the world… something I’ll never understand.

So when XCOM Enemy Unknown was released I wasn’t all that excited.  After all this is the B-release for the XCOM series.  The actual AAA title was going to be a first person shooter which is still not out.  This was supposed to be the thing they released as a warm up.  People actually demanded for this game upset that XCOM was becoming a shooter franchise and Firaxis made this game (rather hastily).

Pew pew lasers! Okay.... I'll stop

Pew pew lasers! Okay…. I’ll stop

So when it released and everyone was like ZOMG XCOM ENEMY UNKNOWN IZ SOOOO GOOOOD…. I just didn’t care.

I honestly did not want to believe anyone.  People always tell me that Men of War games are really good and I play them and they end up being so complicated and poorly explained that I just quit them before I can get “deep” into the gameplay.

So I waited for it to go on sale and then I bought it.

And then I didn’t play it for six months.

Really, I don’t even know why I bought it.  It’s not a game I was excited about and it just wasn’t a priority in my life.

So I’m on a cross Canada vacation with no access to the Internet and I decide HAY NOW IZ THA TIME!!!

So I do.

I plop this game in and see what happens.

So I load it up and I find a heavily scripted Men of War type game.  Wait… heavily scripted?  Dear God, someone figured it out.  One of the biggest weaknesses of this genre is that it’s just so bloody hard to figure them out.  This one actually lays it out very easily.

God I hate these kind of games!

God I hate these kind of games!

I followed through the heavily scripted opening when I completely screwed up and was losing very slowly.  Instead of reaching a defeat screen I thought I’d do the painful thing, restart.

To my surprise the tutorial was gone.  It just threw you right in there knowing full well you completed some or all tutorial information. I was honestly kind of impressed.

So as I’m playing through my second attempt at it I get to the Alien Command and lose every single one of my highly vetted units without completing the mission.  I begin to swear and realize I didn’t save….. for a long time.

So I start the game up a third time and this time I’m saving more often than not.  When I get to the ship I’m saving almost every single turn.

By this point I realize that I have spent 20 hours playing this game and I’m not likely to stop.

By God, Firaxis has done it again.  They did it with Civilization and they’ve done it with XCOM: Enemy Unknown… they’ve made a game I can’t put down.

Just like Civilization it’s not exactly the addiction factor.  Yes there is the “Just one more term” syndrome going on there, but it’s also an enjoyable game to play in which you care for the survival and growth of your people.

This odd council is always showing up unannounced

This odd council is always showing up unannounced

The first step to make you care is by having your squads have ranks and levels.  This means your perfect squad (composing at least one support, one assault, one sniper, and one heavy) it is important to maintain at least one of each type throughout the game.  When you lose all of your supports, or assaults, or snipers, or heavies it becomes absolutely brutal to finish anything.  To this extent you really care strategically about keeping them alive in every mission as death is perma death.

This can be compared to Omerta City of Gangsters in which after your gangster dies he is either arrested or goes to a hospital and gets better.

Each hero evolves throughout the campaign in a very meaningful way.  Trees are bi-laterally designed so that you choose one thing or another.  Science and research is very important in the game and you have to carefully balance progressing your forces with progressing the storyline.

To make this have a larger meta story you have to balance off relations with nations.  It is disastrous to the long term to lose a group of countries and immediately you feel the consequences.

There’s also this kind of on going battle between funding your science and getting those advanced techs and funding your engineering and being able to build them.

I was insanely surprised by just how good this game was.  It was definitely a game that beyond the post launch hype… was better than the hype.

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Steam Sales Review #53: Patrician IV

Posted on June 5, 2013 | Leave a comment

I’m starting to think that Tropico 4 was a fluke.  I loved Tropico 4 so much that I purchased and played the entire Modern Times expansion.  So why is it that Kalypso Media has not made a single other good game since?  Omerta was a disaster.  Port Royale 4 was just awful.  And yet all of these awful games still have DLC produced for them in hopes that people will return to these games (which they won’t).

To say that Kalypso built a solid reputation off of just one game is an understatement.  Why before Tropico 4 there was, Patrician IV.

Patrician4 2013-05-10 11-36-58-52

Now admittedly I did not play this game on launch day.  I mean why would I when I had Dawn of Discovery from Bluebyte Studios to play with.  But I got this game on sale so that immediately means I have to try it… eventually.

So Patrician IV is primarily a trading game.  You purchase goods from a market place and sell them at a neighboring city.  The goal is supply and demand, places that have high enough supply will sell goods very cheaply, and places that have very low supply will buy them highly.

Wait a minute, this sounds familiar.

By God, the Patrician series is just a carbon copy of the Port Royale series!

Yeah it seems they’re roughly the same game with Port Royale 4 having some better design choices.  The big difference is going to be resource types and a different continent, but they are functionally the same.

So if you’re new to this type of game you start off with a trading game.  You go from port to port buying and selling until you have enough money to buy more ships.  With more ships you can buy more goods.

Each city has a friendship bar in which they will go up if you provide them with the resources they want and go down if you take too many of the resources they have.

In a way this is similar to the economics of Waterworld.  As you may remember the fishman shows up at a friendly port with soil and is given a currency for it.  He goes around to buy every single thing.  The people were very happy to take his soil… but the second he bought all of their stuff they lost their minds.  You’d think they’d just NOT sell it to you… but that’s not how it works.

Campaign complete at 6 hours of play

Campaign complete at 6 hours of play

Once your friendliness picks up you can build storehouses in the towns.  Storehouses allow you to manage local resources and interactions.  On top of this you can create automatic trade routes in which it is advantageous to organize buying and selling directly from these storehouses.

The game comes down to getting more storehouses up and expanding trade.  To make things interesting you can purchase the production yourself as well as build and rent homes to expand the population and increase demand.

On top of this you can also create your own towns in which you get to be the governor to even further add in a longer game.

There are random problems that can hit the towns and effect progression.  There are also pirates floating around that only seem to attack armed caravans (so never arm your caravans duh!).  As a mini game you can hunt down the pirates with warships.  This ends up being the least fun part of the game and you just end up auto battling most battles.

There is also an ability to go grab spices with another ship, which just ends up being another way to min/max out your civilization.

Possibly the most atrocious ship battles in gaming

Possibly the most atrocious ship battles in gaming

The campaign simply teaches you how to play the game and then it leaves you off to progress on your own.  The game features a political system in which through trading, having ships, and having storehouses you an be promoted up the ladder.  The highest rank isn’t mayor but head of the guild.

I was able to hit maximum rank after about 14 hours of play.  The game would continue on until I felt I min/maxed out the map after about 25 hours.

This features a problem for simulator gamers because that’s really not a lot of hours of play.  A good simulator will offer about 40-50 hours of play before min/maxing has occurred…. but ones like Anno 2070 just keep you playing forever.

I feel like the biggest hit on this game isn’t even this game… it’s the fact that I’ve already played it via Port Royale and didn’t like it.

The name Patrician refers to the top rank of citizen that live in a town.  It is nothing like Anno and if you enjoy that kind of game… stay away from this one.

It’s really just not worth the time if you can’t play it for over 200 hours.  Unfortunately this game is one that simply sucks.

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Steam Sales Review #51: Disciple 3 Renaissance

Posted on May 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

Without knowing what Disciple 1 or 2 was or reading any review or even bothering to look at the images on the Steam page I for whatever reason purchased this game.

As it turns out Disciple 3 Renaissance is a turn based 4x type game with turn based combat with middle earth (high elf) type armies.

In fact it’s not even remotely close to what I thought it might be (an RPG) it turns out to be a part of the one genre I can’t stand to play.

If this game is like one it is like the incredibly popular Heroes of Might and Magic series which as of writing this is on their sixth installment (over 30 years keep in mind).

So these games work like this.  In an overworld you get resources to build up armies.  Your armies move around the map taking over territories that will give more resources.  You face off against in a hexablock based battlefield in which you need to use the roles of your units to beat out your opponent.

Each block can be hit from six directions.  So it becomes important to create flanks and protect weaker heroes.  As well there is a cover system in which your heroes will take reduced damage from ranged attacks if behind someone.

This kind of game features overworld magic in which you can use a magic resource to damage an enemy army before you engage them.  This is used to give serious advantages in combat.

In the overworld management often you are building structures to help boost the gathering of some sort of resource or creating structures to build various units.

The game feature your leaders who often play some epic role like a rogue, warrior, healer, or mage leading a band of various class types.  Each hero class unit gains experience which they can sink into attributes of their choice.

This game features four campaigns.  A short tutorial campaign, an Empire (human) campaign, a dark lords type campaign, and an elven campaign.  The four campaigns combined will amount to about 40 hours of gameplay, not too shabby.

On the plus side this series does have a fairly good story.  Obviously if you hate high fantasy you will hate this.  But it does make an effort to tell the events of a single story from three different view points.  This is a very strong feature for this genre.

But like I said, I really don’t like this genre period.

I’m not entirely sure why this game was called “Renaissance” when it has little or nothing to do with the Renaissance period.  There was nothing in this game to hook you in, it’s sort of just the same stuff.

Make sure to not add this game to your bucket list because it simply doesn’t do enough to attract people to this genre.

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Terrible Games #11: Leviathan: Warships

Posted on May 8, 2013 | Leave a comment

So upon loading up this game I get a little menu that pops up.  I decide to click on input and see what the controls are:

levaithaninput

Well it turns out they are blank…. this probably won’t go well.

Next on the list of OMFG THIS GAME SUCKS I get to see this:

paradoxinteractive

How could I be so foolish, you ask.  How could I not know this game was created by the single worst publisher on the face of the Earth, Paradox Interactive.

Paradox has their army of Euro nerds constantly defending them because some of their games are playable.  My response is Sword of the Stars 2, Gettysburg: Armored Warfare,

But this game is developed by Pisces Interactive, a studio I have never heard about.  So maybe I’ll give them one shot and then never play again.  They also made a pretty sexy trailer for this game.

So after getting past this I get to a user login screen…

Leviathan 2013-04-30 08-45-36-61

Now maybe someone can explain why a $10 game needs a user login screen to me.  On top of that they want to register my email so they can send it off to all the hackers.  More than likely it is for future Paradox product information that I have no interest in. AND they want me to confirm with a validation code.  There is no copy and paste feature here so I have to alt tab constantly in order to get this thing inserted.

Okay so none of this has to do with core gameplay, it has to do with dodgey DRM related practices that make this whole process as obtuse for gamers as humanly possible, thanks Paradox.

You start off being prompted do you wish to play the tutorial, the answer for this kind of game is always, NO, I don’t… but I will anyway… in case it’s actually complicated… but it won’t be.

So upon clicking on tutorial it leads me to this screen:

Leviathan 2013-04-30 08-49-46-00

Unfortunately all the buttons are greyed out and nothing can be selected…. I restart the game hoping I’ll actually get to play.  So I load it up and it gets stuck on here:

paradoxinteractive

And it gets stuck here.  Yes Paradox we are aware you make shitty games.

So 30 minutes into gameplay and I haven’t played a game yet.  It continues to freeze up at various phases.

So after this is all done I can finally play the game, yay.

So you control a fleet (one ship is a fleet!) of ships.  Each ship when you click on it will display it weapons.  Each weapon has an aiming direction.  So the portside guns can only fire portside, the broadside guns only fire broadside, the forward guns only fire forward and the aft (rear) guns only fire behind you.  This means that in combat you will need to rotate your ship around a bit to fire off multiple guns.  Alternatively if your opponent moves around you, you will fire off guns.

The guns do fire off automatically and the only point in choosing what to fire upon might be so that you hit one ship over another. But since you are fire to a region instead of at a ship you are most likely almost always going to miss because except for AI, no one just sits in position… unless their rotor is down.

For funzies you’ve been given a force field you can deploy on one of the four flanks of your ship.  It lasts one turn and can soak all the damage.  It has a cooldown and can be used about every three turns, once again for funzies.

Other funzie features include invisible mines and stealth.

Navigation is controlled by dragging a green arrow to go forward or a orange arrow to go backwards.

Both players do their turns simultaneously.  This can be compared to a turn based game like Civilization in which both players go one after the other.  This format wouldn’t work well because it would mean whoever goes first gains a serious advantage… except they don’t since guns all fire automatically anyway.  The downside is that the actual strategic elements of turn based combat get ruined and truthfully this game could have just been done in real time combat.

So the game has a 3 mission tutorial in which you go through the painstakingly simple gameplay and a 9-mission campaign.

The 9-mission campaign is really hard.  I mean really really hard.

Turn based games are known for having insanely hard campaigns, but this one is super hard.  It almost feels like you need a second player there because of how hard it is.  Which you can do, co-op campaigns.  Unfortunately just not enough people play this game to do this.

On the plus side the game is cross-platform between iOS, cellphones, and PC.  On the downside the games actually take too long to be a very good iOS game.  The multiplayer lobby must be confusing on the iOS side because any time I get in one I sit there with Ready clicked for about 30 minutes and then nothing ever happens.

Turn based combat just got sexy

Turn based combat just got sexy

There’s also something REALLY weird about the actual lobbies.  I was able to start up no less than 14 lobbies simultaneously until I realized that I had to individually “Discard” each game.  Once again I think this is something for the app side but it just doesn’t make sense on the PC side of things.

I think this is another terrible Paradox Interactive game and no one should buy it on the PC.

As for the tablet and smartphone.

I wanted to see if this game was available on Blackberry and it is in fact not.  Overwhelmingly smart phone and tablet apps are super expensive for what you get.  Angry Pigs (that’s all Blackberry has) cost about $10.

Unfortunately one of the odd features of the game is an always on DRM.  This normally doesn’t have any effect on me because I have great Internet but I could see how this might be a problem for tablet and cellphone owners who pay tooth and nail for bandwidth.

But like I said, had I not had great Internet… I wouldn’t have noticed it.

So one day my Internet was particularly slow, my provider was doing an upgrade on my service and strapped me with low quality Internet.  Boy was it ever noticeable.  Everything was slow.  Turns took forever because they had to be recorded online first (in single player). Shields seem to work forever or never.  There was even a weird glitch in which shields would block all four sides.

So I’m playing the campaign and suddenly this pops up:

Leviathan 2013-05-04 15-29-25-49

So no I do not recommend this game for PC, and I suspect it won’t work that much better on a tablet.

THE PARADOX BOYCOTT IS STILL ON!!!

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Steam Sales Review #50: Fallen Enchantress

Posted on April 23, 2013 | Leave a comment

Originally this game was called “Elemental Fallen Enchantress.”  But for some reason (probably marketing) it was changed to simply Fallen Enchantress.

You will find a lot of parallels between this game and Civilization 4.  This is because a Civ4 designer who made a fantasy based mod for Civ 4, was the lead developer for Fallen Enchantress.

So upon loading up the game and before even playing the game I click on options.  The game has more options and customization than any game I’ve ever played.  There are no less than 9 different sound configurations… most games offer 3.

For this reason you will find  the sound quality is amazing in this game.  You will love the music and love the sound effects.

The story of the game is largely unimportant.  But as the story goes there are good guys and bad guys each trying to vye for control of everything.  The good guys often band together but sometimes attack each other to try and unify power.  Sometimes the good guys will ally with bad guys to move up in the world.

There is one giant evil that has surmised the world that if you defeat you will win.

The game borrows from so many different games it’s not fit.  By doing this it creates a brand new game worth talking about.

From Lords of Magic or Heroes and Might and Magic you have the idea of hero units within armies.  Each hero unit can level up gaining specialized traits.  Each hero specializes into one of eight hero jobs including beggar, soldier, and mage

After you gain so many levels you can specialize in a different kind of path including warrior, assassin, mage, and rogue.

Each city can also specialize.  Each city with specialize in either money, army, or research.  Over time as the cities level they will further specialize in these in different ways.

So like Civilization you build cities which build buildings that boost stuff and you get armies and the ability to build more cities.

However unlike Civilization you tie your military units into 3-9 man parties that will go to war together.

With your military you can move around the map.  There are treasures that are either rewards or punishments.  Upon clicking on one of the treasures on the map you might get gildar (the currency in the game), equipment or get ambushed.

The game also has a very unique and chaotic point in which you can do quests.  These quests are offered by NPCs around the map that will tell you to go kill something.  It gets chaotic because often your quests will have you go into enemy territory in which case you can get declared war upon.

Diplomacy pretty much works the same as Civilization.  People declare war on you at the drop of a dime and only make peace with you after you have caused devastation upon them.

In every single one of these games there is a distinct defenders advantage.  In this game it’s not really that big.  Upon attacking a city there are a few extra civilian units pushed forward who don’t really do much.

As well there are constantly aggressive barbarian type mobs spawning throughout the game that you will have to deal with.  Of course you want to engage them because they can level your heroes up.

The game is INSANELY customizable.  The game has Steam Workshop as well.  You can design your own units (based on research you have found).  You can create your own hero (including type, stats, looks, and abilities).

All of this is uploadable to the Steam Workshop… except people don’t seem to be doing it.  Despite all things there isn’t a giant mod community around for this game.  Don’t expect to see any full Warcraft mods or Mario world mods because they just won’t exist (unless you make them yourself).

There are a few clear negatives to this game.

The first is some really odd UI options.  My most hated is how units hide in cities.  I spent about 2 hours missing two full armies having no idea where they were.  The army manager screen vanishes these armies once they enter cities.

Once inside the cities you have to click a + button to individually move them out.  Fine for one character but six is just tedious.

Another major problem is that the game has stablization issues.  Some people report the game crashes.    I had this odd problem where some kind of prompt kept running in the background and disturbing my gameplay.

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