Chivalry: Medieval Warfare

The Basics: 1st Person Medieval Hack and Slash
Previous Time Spent : 1 Hour
Expected Learning Curve: High
Why did I buy this: Deep discount on a steam sale

First Impressions: At first, this appears to be a chaotic mess of a game, with armored men charging at each other's flanks and hacking eachother to death with giant swords. It felt very loose, and senselessly challenging.

My Three Hours: I spent my three hours with the game playing multiplayer on public servers with strangers. I also spent a lot of that time very sweaty from moving, and increasingly tipsy from cheap wine. With that said, my opinion of the game rose considerably during my time with it.

Most of the game consists of team or free for all multiplayer melees, using Medieval arms and armor. This is a challenging game to master, as there are many different ways to attack and parry based on movement and a number of alternate attacks.

However, in spite of the possibility of complex, dance-like melees of feints, parries and counter attacks, the most effective strategy is often to flank an opponent and hit them a bunch with a sword. (This was what I tended to do).

Reach and weapon speed also matter quite a bit, so my alternate favorite strategy became running in very close, then engaging with a dagger at a range where my opponents had trouble hitting me with a sword or spear.

My highlight: Playing at 1 or 2 am, running around with a spear, listening to Hamilton and playing as a mean spirited opportunist, but imagining myself to be a dashing and brave knight while I stabbed people in the side with a spear.

The verdict: This is a fairly dumb, fun game with a deep and well thought out approach to melee combat, which typically falls away in the face of armored men cutting eachother in half with claymores from behind or the flanks.

It's a great silly use of time, and worth purchasing if you see it deeply discounted on a steam sale.

Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land

The Basics: 3rd person tactical rpg (think X-Com or Final Fantasy Tactics meets WWI + Monsters)

Previous Time Spent: none

Expectation of learning Curve: medium

Why I bought this: Extremely cheap steam sale + decent reviews and Lovecraft focus

First Impressions: Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land, looks and feels a bit clunky at first. The graphics are a bit dated and ugly (which is fair, considering that the popular imagination of World War I is fairly drab/ugly). It immediately introduces fun stock characters, and the idea of a trench based tactical role-playing game with tons in common with Chaosium's table-top roleplaying game. The biggest frustration I had when I started was that I couldn't figure out how to look around the map further than the immediate area my characters inhabited, but this was later resolved. 

My 3 hours: Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is divided into a number of missions, following the story of a British Company working alongside a professor of antiquities(or whatever Lovecraftian professor stock character he was) fighting against the evils of a German Cult. The missions are somewhat challenging, and often involve shifting circumstances, but basically break down into the same rhythm that X-Com players may remember. Moving from cover to to cover, setting up overwatch, covering advances, flanking, etc. This is all made more interesting by  the specificity of the setting , and the challenges of trench warfare.

Between missions, there is an interface for advancing characters, which are broken down between redshirt types and mission-critical characters, all of which can die. Their stats and skills were very familiar to me, being based on what appears to be a simplified version of Chaosium's venerable and popular Call of Cthulhu tabletop roleplaying system. (All skills are based on percentages, which stats are similar enough to how they work in D&D for most people to be able to parse it without breaking too much of a sweat.) The characters have a varied skillset, and the story that I played through seemed interesting enough. When I hit my three hour mark, I found myself honestly wishing for more.  

High

My Highlight: For me, the highlight of my experience was a challenging mission that took up most of my 3rd hour of play. In this mission, my band of troops and assorted weirdos (including a psycho-analyst, professor, and martial artist(beefy white guy with mutton chops and a club) had to fight their way through trenches, poison gas, zombies and machine-gun armed Germans to a church, which we had to defend from Germans and Zombies while our professor figured something out inside. It was tense, and consistently felt like I was being pushed to the limits of the resouces I had available. Just a really well designed(and fairly challenging mission)

My Verdict: I strongly recommend this for x-com/final fantasy tactics/Lovecraft nerds like myself. For others, your mileage may vary, as the corniness or the rough edges might be a bit overwhelming. 

My next post will come in roughly 2 weeks, where I'll be covering Chivalry:Medieval Warfare