Fantasy Football that I sort of cared about...Blood Bowl

The Basics: Old-School Fantasy themed Football boardgame brought to PC

Previous Time Spent: 10 minutes

Expectation of learning Curve: high 

Why I bought this: I'm a farily big Games Workshop nerd, having painted and collected Warhammer stuff in High School and a little bit in College, and the wackiness of this idea met a great steam sale, leading to an unwise purchase. 

First Impressions: The first things that jumped out at me were the irritating voices of the announcers and the fairly ugly UI design.

My 3 hours: I played through the tutorial, and a number of games as Dwarves, Orcs, Skaven, Chaos Dwarves and Demons of Nurgle, one of the Chaos Gods presented in game. I was expecting something along the lines of fantasy Madden, and was initially very frustrated with the difficulty of the game and the presentation. This is not a game that holds your hands outside of the brief tutorial, and based on my notes, I pretty consistently believed myself to be terrible at it. Over time though, I came to appreciate how much it felt like a boardgame, and the way that a more dedicated person could invest a lot of time in learning the systems and developing a team.

This game is great when it comes to variety and character. Each one of the races that I tried felt very different in play, and led to a lot of fun on the field. My favorite (which was not a surprise to me at all due to my history with the tabletop game) were the Skaven, the weirdo coward rat-men from Warhammer Fantasy. They handled very differently than the other races, and seemed to have an interesting mix of speed and mean-spirited play that suited me well. I also enjoyed the variety of cool arenas.

I found some elements frustrating, including the aforementioned announcers, and the bizarre level of challenge for activities that I would expect to be a near 100% chance of success. The announcers quickly became fairly repetitive, and I just never found them as funny or helpful as I think they were intended to be. Additionally, the chance of completing some tasks seemed hilariously low. For instance, picking up the football from the ground would frequently fail, leading me to wonder if my players were athletes or drunken toddlers in the bodies of adults. Nonetheless, I think a lot of my frustrations with the game would be resolved with taking more time to learn the systems involved.  

My highlight: Playing as the Skaven and playing a game to a tie, rather than a crushing defeat. After a high level of difficulty is established, a tie feels pretty good. 

My verdict: Blood Bowl is a fun and bizarre take on a classic board-game, but I think if it's skewing so close to the way the board game is played, I'd rather just take it to the table-top with friends. I also have to give it credit for making me halfway care about football for a few hours. 

Next post will come in roughly 2 weeks with the whimsy of Indie Darling Braid.

Back in Blackguards (well, for 3 hours anyway)

The Basics: X-Com meets Pathfinder/D&D

Previous Time Spent: 2 hours

Expectation of learning Curve: medium 

Why I bought this: I'm a big x-com fan, and have been a D&D nerd for years

First Impressions: I was initially put off by way the characters were developed, and the art direction. Also, the first 2 or 3 fights are sort of set up as tutorials, but are easy enough to become boring instead of real learning experiences.  

My 3 hours: I played through character creation, the story intro, a prison-break tutorial (in which the supporting characters are all introduced), and a couple hours of the main game. In general, I found that it was a tad linear, and didn't allow for much in the way of actual choices. Gameplay was segregated into top-down grid based combat that will be familiar to fans of X-Com, Final Fantasy Tactics, Pathfinder or 4th Edition D&D, and a strategic map in which you move between nodes, and improve your character . I loved the look of the strategic map, but I found that it didn't provide much in the way of meaningful choice. The strategic map is pictured below.

The meat of the game seemed to be in the battles, which made bizarre jumps between extremely simplistic, and challenging enough to require multiple tries. There wasn't much telegraphing of what would make for more challenging fights, so often the choices made felt meaningless. This translating to character development as well. There are a large number of seemingly interesting options for character development, but little guidance as to where to go with characters, so many of these choices felt random (because without knowing the math of the game, stats felt fairly flat and meaningless). 

My highlight: Running into a fairly challenging fight which came after being bloodied in another fight, and figuring out a way to control the battlefield and just barely come out on top in spite of being seriously outnumbered. (when this was followed up by another extremely challenging fight(with even more diminished resources and no meaningful way to retreat, I soured to the game a bit)) 

My verdict: Blackguards is a decent turn-based strategy game with RPG elements, but ulitmately I didn't find myself invested in the characters. When frustration set in (as it does with this sort of game) my lack of engagement to the characters or plot made me lose interest in pushing through. I don't strongly recommend this, but I can see the reasons why someone would like it (or why I would have loved it 5 years ago). 

3 hours of Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

The Basics: Roguelike top-down shooter

Previous Time Spent: 1-3 hours

Expectation of learning Curve: medium 

Why I bought this: Positive reviews, word of mouth

First Impressions: My first impressions of this game go back years. I remember finding it very unforgiving, challenging, and grotesque. From the get-go, I liked the simplicity and odd art-direction, and disliked the actual twitch shooting mechanic. I'm not great at that kind of old-school video-game control, and every previous foray led to me quitting out of frustration

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My 3 hours: I spent 3 hours going through a number of runs of the game. Each time you begin, a map is generated, including a number of rooms. These rooms seem to be fairly static, but the game randomly strings a bunch of rooms together to form a level. The random element is fun, and can be unforgiving, but sometimes really powerful. The meat of the game seems to be dealing with these individual rooms, each of which is filled with enemies that seem to behave in predictable, but varied manners. Fighting is accomplished by moving around and shooting tears out of your eyes to harm enemies, unless altered by a powerup. Every level ends with some kind of boss fight. From my experience, it seemed like the levels increased in difficulty, but the bossfights didn't necessarily follow suit. 

In my 3 hours, the furthest I ended up getting was to level 3 out of 6. Having some rogue-like elements, death leads to restarting from the very beginning in an entirely new world. I ran into a number of pretty cool enemies, and got the hang of the shooting elements a bit. I also learned a bit about what risks were acceptable to take, and started to figure out which powerups were worth taking, etc. All of the powerups seemed flavorful and odd. In the screenshot abover, the main character's face has been warped into a sort of death's masque, allowing him to fire "spectral tears," which pass through solid cover. 

Ultimately, I never got enough of the hang of the game to progress too far, but I could see digging in and really learning these systems. Playing any kind of roguelike, there is an initial learning curve and acceptance phase, and I think I got past that. 

My highlight: My real highlight was the first time I got a really decent powerup, and actually cared about my success. That was my first succesful foray into the lower levels of the game, and I came to appreciate the challenging enemies far more when I had more power to defeat them. 

My verdict: This is a challenging and odd roguelike. It's very good at what it does, and I think that's a measure of success.   

3 hours of trying to figure out if I'm the titular Betrayer

The Basics: 16th century First person mystery/exploration

Previous Time Spent: none

Expectation of learning Curve: low 

Why I bought this: I've read a decent number of reviews, and been told specifically to get into it by a close friend. Additionally, this seemed inspired by the lost Roanoke Colony, which seemed novel

First Impressions: Betrayer has a striking look achieved by the use of monochrome and red. It also is a great game to play with the headphones on, and just get blown away by the sensory experience. You definitely feel transported to a different place. Wind blows around, moving the trees, and terrifying apparitions attack. There's a sense of danger and a great mystery hook. 

 

My 3 Hours with the Game:You begin shipwrecked on the shores of the new world, wandering to a colony that has clearly failed. As mentioned previously, the use of color is great, and there's a very real sense of being in another time and place. There's great use of sound, such as rushing wind, and the combat is tense, frightening, and novel. Betrayer didn't need to be a first person shooter in order to accomplish the atmospheric storytelling,  but the combat wasn't unwelcome either. 

I hit some initial technical frustrations with the game, involving odd controls, but after a bit of internet digging, I was able to solve this. I appreciated the fact that in spite of being a game that leads you from waypoint to waypoint, I was able to actually get stuck in the plot early on, requiring some more sleuthing, and use of the listening power (which I had previously ignored). I spent most of my time seeking out clues, following them, talking to ghosts and uncovering tantalizing clues to the doom that fell over this colony, which seemed to have multiple factors, from the geopolitical to the fantastical.  

My highlight:The first time I rang the bell in the first fort, and found myself in the night world, able to speak to ghosts and presented with more fantastical enemies. The sounds were effective and quite frightening, and the realization that I could go through and deal with the corruption that had begun blighting the land was heartening. (Plus, who doesn't want to fight skeletons under black skies with a slowly reloading musket?)

My verdict: I'd strongly recommend giving this a shot(but maybe on a steam sale). The atmosphere is great, and the sense of danger inherent in fighting well armed monsters with a bow, musket or other 17th century weapon feels very real. There's a great frantic sense to reloading a musket while being charged by a squad of Spanish Soldiers (who seem like revenants or ghouls). Additionally, the story is fairly interesting, however I did get a bit of a sense of repetition after hitting hour 3, as much of the gameplay involves searching for waypoints on the map, clearing them, learning clues and talking to ghosts before preceding. 

-Jon

Avadon: The Black Fortress (in 3 hours)

The Basics: Isometric top-down RPG 

Previous Time Spent: 5 minutes

Expectation of learning Curve: Medium

Why I bought this: Gushing review from a writer at RockPaperShotgun followed by a steam sale.

First Impressions: This game feels a bit like Fallout 1/2 meets a simpler version of Baldur's Gate, with isometric 2d movement of characters through environments, dialogue, hording of stuff(standard videogame RPG kleptomania), and grid based combat. A lot of this felt fairly flat to me, which I'll cover a bit more in the later portions.

My 3 Hours with the Game: I began the game by choosing a name and class for my character. I went with Orrin Hatch for a name, and chose a class that I figured was basically a ninja/thief archetype. I was then treated to some basic info about the setting, and sent to a castle to begin my duties. Below is a screenshot showing my character, the inventory, and the approach to said Castle. 

Upon arriving in the castle, I was blown away by the ability to just wander around, pick up random junk, and engage in brief conversations with people throughout the sprawling grounds. Before long, I was assigned a sort of tutorial dungeon crawl, which entailed going into the castle dungeons, and looking for dangerous escaped prisoners. There, I got to see the way the systems of the game come together for combat, etc. Below is an image from Dungeon 1. 

As you can see above, this is an isometic, top down dungeon with tons of stuff. It was fairly fun up to a point, but I found it to break down into mindless backtracking, and easy to forget objectives. The dungeons sprawl a good deal, which is fun from an exploration standpoint, but gets to be a bit tiresome due to the map feature, which merely brings up an overlay. Additionally I found that there was a lot that just didn't land, including dialogue, and inventory management stuff. It took me until hour 2 or so to realize that stuff would fall on the ground, and the method for picking it up is opening the inventory and grabbing stuff from the ground. I'm used to other games, and was too lazy to actually read the manual, so this is on me. Additionally, I found that with dialogue, the writers often seemed to want to tell me things instead of showing me things with the writing. 

Combat was fairly fun, and felt like taking battles from 3.0/3.5 era D&D, grid and all. Early on, the battles seemed fairly flat and a bit too easy, but as the game progressed a bit, I found a decent variety of monster abilities and tactics that kept stuff interesting. All in all though, I think the combat from other games may have spolied me a bit too much. I kept wanting this to feel as dangerous as Darkest Dungeon or Wasteland 2, but only in one of the many battles I fought did I feel any sense of doom. The combat is pictured below. 

My highlight:I had the most fun with the game once I made my way out of the castle and it's immediate surroundings and took a portal to Kva, a desert region. There, I had the mission of chatting up a dragon, and dealing with it's goblin/whatever ugly intelligent being problem. There, I felt like I was starting to get a sense of the fairly interesting political situation of the game, and the way a world like this might actually work. Also, as an old Baldur's Gate fan, I definitely enjoyed the sort of adventuring that just comes from wandering around while you have actual missions to complete, stealing stuff, etc. Plus, I got to do some super-tropey D&D style stuff, like killing rats/goblins, and talking to a fairly tiny dragon who lives in a magma chamber, as pictured below.

The exploration was fun, and made it clear to me that there's a lot more to this game and story. If it hadn't been for that section, I probably would not be recommending it. But now I can see the potential.

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My verdict: I don't love this game due to some of the presentation issues and the flat feel, but I could see getting sucked in. I'd give it a qualified recommendation for folks who were very into BG, Fallout 1/2, etc., with the caveat that character creation is far simpler, and there is less of a sense of danger, at least in the portions that I tried. Another plus for this game is that I can imagine it would probably run really well on an older machine, or a laptop without a ton of resources. 

-Jon

PS: I won't be reviewing Avadon 2:The Corruption at this time, for fear of spoilers. As a result, the next game on my docket is Betrayer. 

Arma II: Day Z Mod

The Basics: Infamous zombie survival shooter

Previous Time Spent: 8 minutes

Expectation of learning Curve: Medium

Why I bought this: The infamy of the Day-Z mod, great previous writing about it

First Impressions: Similar feeling of really being in a place that I felt with ARMA II (which makes sense since it's the same engine and the same basic setting). Visuals are a bit dated since it was released roughly 5 year ago, but not so bad as to break immersion. This was immediately frightening and immersive. My first run in the game lasted roughly ten minutes, and involved running to a gas station, trying to commandeer a van, and being killed by zombies.  

 My 3 Hours with the Game: I signed into a Russian server to play this game, and spent my entire 3 hour evaluation period there. Over a number of runs, I found myself slowly learning the systems of the game, such as where to scavenge for things, how to sort of escape zombies, and general inventory management. Most of my time was spent walking or running through the zombie infested post-soviet countryside. That countryside, and all of the villages and towns were dotted with the undead, and salvageable  supplies. On a couple of runs, I found firearms and ammo, leading to overconfidence and extra danger. Actually hitting zombies and downing them was refreshingly challenging. I generally felt like a regular person dropped into a dangerous situation and trying to survive. And in a couple of instances, especially with human contact, this turned nightmarish.

My highlight: The first time I ran into another human player in the game, I was running down the coast road past a gas station, with the hope of finding a van. Zombies were close on my tail, and I could hear them grunting behind me. As I passed the gas station, I saw a man with a gun, standing on top of a building. I didn't stop, due to the horde of undead on my tail, and kept running down the road, spotting a factory in the distance, and hoping to lose the zombies inside. A short time after passing the gas station, I heard the report of a rifle going off, and I kept running

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I came upon an abandoned factory, and came inside, making my way up ladders, hoping to not be followed by the zombies. I climbed to a sort of catwalk, and heard gunshots again, and the sound of breaking glass and bullets whizzing by. So, I ran along the catwalk, making my way to a set of interior rooms, connected by stairwells. I saw a hatchet in one of the rooms, but the zombies caught up to me, causing me to retreat up the stairs again before grabbing it. From there, the human caught up to me as well, and I spent a short time trying to evade him, and the zombies in the ruined factory. Eventually I came out onto the catwalk again, and came to a point where he seemed to have a good shot at me, so I panicked and jumped, risking the fall. I landed hard, apparently breaking a leg. The screen faded and blurred, representing pain, but I was able to crawl out of the factory. I heard some more gunshots, but crawled through the long grass, escaping my tormentor, and eventually bleeding out alone outside the factory.  

My verdict: This is a game I like a lot, and expect to play beyond the three hours. The experience is terrifying and compelling, and allowed for some amazing emerging narratives. I would recommend this, but I'd also suggest checking if the standalone version of the mod is easier to get ahold of. 

-Jon

ARMA 2

The Basics: Military shooter with a focus on realism

Previous Time Spent: 46 minutes

Expectation of learning Curve: High

Why I bought this: The infamous Day-Z mod + a steam sale

My 3 Hours with the Game: After checking to see if any multiplayer servers were active, and finding them dead, I resigned myself to single player. I began with an intro scenario in which my compatriots and I were helicoptered in to an active battle zone, with the goal of moving about, shooting people, and holding territory. I played several other scenarios, and never gave the game the amount of effort or care needed to master it. 

First Impressions: This is a frightening game that alternates between somewhat boring movement, and extremely dangerous combat. Combat feels quite realistically dangerous, without any sort of health bar, or clear explanation of how injuries work. In my first firefight, I got lucky for a bit before taking a shot, and being brought down. I didn't die however, and spent some time waiting for first aid before returning to the fight. In other fights, I seemed to take injuries that caused me to bleed (at a hard to discern rate), die instantly, or be knocked down, presumably wounded. Not taking cover, or generally acting like an action hero/video game character were recipes for disaster and death. Additionally, combat tended to take place at such a long distance that it was difficult to tell where the enemy was firing from. 

My highlight: I eventually realized that the map covered an area much larger than my immediate combat zone, and in one of the missions decided to steal a pickup truck and leave. This actually worked, and I managed to make my way out of the combat zone (after taking a little bit of fire, resulting in a broken window). I followed the main dirt road out of the village we were supposed to be sweeping, and found myself in another village. This, and all subsequent villages were devoid of life, presumably ghost-towns fled due to the war I was taking part in. I drove some 3 km through farm villages before hitting a paved main road. From there, I drove through woods and mountains to the coast (stopping to swim in a pond). From the coast, I swam out to a small island and decided to end my 3 hour run as the unofficial lighthouse keeper of this empty country. 

My verdict: This game works really well at what it's trying to do, but that isn't exactly to my taste. So, I do not regret picking it up, but I can't see myself playing beyond 3 hours. Next time I'll be covering the Day-Z mod. 

-Jon

PS: Sorry for the long gap, I played a game called Amnesia that was more or less unplayable on my machine, and got frustrated and temporarily stopped the project.