Zombie Carnage in: Dead Pixels

The Basics: Retro Art zombie survival with RPG elements

Previous Time Spent: 10 minutes

Expectation of learning Curve: low

Why I bought this: 2011 zombie craze?

First Impressions: This game is in love with a sort of grindhouse aesthetic, and opens with a film-grainy, retro looking production company logo, before settling into a sort of top down, zombie shooting/beating action rpg. This was clearly released at the height of the low-res/retro indie craze of the early 2010s, so all of the zombies and the main character have a blocky vibe remniscent of something from the NES. And my first 10 minutes gave me a sense of comforting, gory and fairly stupid fun.  

My 3 hours: I played through the intro campaign for my 3 hour test-run with the game, consisting of 20 levels in a forgotten and zombie plagued US city in the 80s or 90s. It opens with a standard-issue b-movie explanation for the zombie apocalypse and gives the main character a clear goal, reaching an encampment of survivors who are 20 streets away. In the parlance of the game, a street is a level, which appears to take up some 5 or 6 city blocks , and includes a slowly escalating zombie threat, houses to loot, and a trader who sells weapons, ammo and medical supplies. Additionally, the trader seems to be the only place you can save, so reaching the trader in each level feels like a bit of a milestone.

The main challenge in the game comes from resource management and crisis aversion. Much of the time, you'll be encountering small groups of zombies, but as levels go on, they form larger and more dangerous mobs. Knowing when to slowly take them out with melee attacks, and when to use firearms to take out larger groups more quickly seems to be the key to success here, and it provides a pretty satisfying sense of continuity to the longer campaign. I found myself constantly tempted to use melee, and by the end of the game had a crazy stockpile of ammunition (but had taken a pretty large number of hits). I think there are probably other legitimate strategies to be used. 

Character advancement adds an additional layer here, and allows you to figure out styles that work fairly well for you over time. Based on my playthrough, a player earns enough points to upgrade several, but not all skills up to their maximum. The upgrades that I took early on significantly changed the way I played the game, allowing me to be quicker, and better at melee takedowns. When I reached the waves of zombies in the final level, I felt like I had earned the ability to blast my way through hordes of zombies and reach my eventual goal. 

High

My Highlight: The game really came together for me when I had a huge stockpile of ammo, the ability to move quickly, and a shotgun with a high rate of fire. Being able to decide to shred my way through hordes of the undead and then mop up with melee felt pretty satisfying.  

My Verdict: This is pretty satisfying for mostly shutting down the brain and getting out some violent urges in a cutesy retro world, so I'd recommend it for a steam sale purchase.

Next post will be on September 4th, covering Divinity: Original Sin  

NYC Disaster Porn: Crysis 2

The Basics: Very pretty disaster porny first person shooter with a cyborg suit

Previous Time Spent: 27 minutes

Expectation of learning Curve: low

Why I bought this: Extremely cheap steam sale (long enough ago that I don't remember it)

First Impressions: This is a good looking game, but my first impressions were marred by expecting it to be fairly boring/boilerplate. I found myself frustrated by the long, live-action CNN/Fox News intro, and the standard tutorial which slowly unlocks controls. I did find the submarine escape in the beginning kind of thrilling, but I ultimately found it to be more annoying due to loss of control than anything else. For a game that seems to be really about a cool cyborg killing small squads of soldiers, it spends a lot of time pretending that the audience is interested in it's story.  

My 3 hours: I spent the entire 3 hour playthrough in the singleplayer campaign, figuring that a game this old would probably end up not well-supported on the multiplayer front. The game takes place in 2023 in NYC, with the main character as a marine who takes on the mantle of a crazy cyborg (nanosuit) suit of power armor. This power armor confers a bunch of special abilities to the player, including cloaking, resistance to damage, and seemingly extreme strength. In a lot of ways, it plays like a more violent, sprawling version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. 

Much of the gameplay is focused on advancing from checkpoint to checkpoint while dealing with environmental hazards and squads of soldiers. These challenges escalated in a pretty satisfying way during my 3 hours with the game, and did a fairly good job of introducing the player to new tactics/ideas in order to surpass them. The bread and butter of it is often finding cool places to hide/shoot soldiers from, while taking cover when appropriate, and sometimes turning invisible to feel like the Predator. The main character feels extremely powerful in the suit, bringing me back to old-school shooter games and the feeling of being a one man army. 

The story that's told in the game is one of an alien virus and a harsh crackdown, and much of it feels pretty standard issue, but some of the environmental storytelling great. The scene that immediately follows the opening, allows the player to slowly acclimate themselves to a New York city that appears to be under martial law, between audio records on laptops, and the horrible remains of living people. It then allows the player to slowly make their way from Battery Park and head north. The game is at it's best when it's providing interesting combat challenges, or allowing one to feel like a tourist in a believable near future New York.   

High

My Highlight: For me, the greatest joy I had with the game came fairly early, and is pictured above, a mix of combat and infiltration set in Castle Clinton, bringing me back to one of the early missions of my beloved Deus Ex. As you can see above, the historical marker is even legible, and the attention to detail shown in the environment conveys a clear sense of place. The game introduces the stealth mechanic there, which is pretty fun, and allowed me to feel like The Predator.  

My Verdict:I generally kinda liked this game, but much of the joy I got out of it, I think I got because it reminded me of things I liked better. It made me think of Deus Ex and Half Life 2 the most, between the sprawling levels, the near-superpowers given by nanites, and the environmental storytelling. I can't strongly recommend it, but I think it's a game that is good at what it intends to do . 

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

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

The Basics: 1st person detective/scariness simulator related to the works of H.P. Lovecraft

Previous Time Spent: none

Expectation of learning Curve: low

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

First Impressions: This game has ridiculous names for difficulty levels, having to do with detectives, so that's a win. Secondly, in the tradition of spooky older games, it asks you to go through some gamma correction in the beginning of the game to make sure that your screen is sufficiently dark. Between that and the silly detective monologue, I found myself drawn in immediately. Last final impression: this game is a bit too dark, and the lack of a flashlight was more frustrating than frightening. 

My 3 hours: So, as mentioned above, this game begins with the player choosing one of several silly detective themed difficulty settings, and then quickly moving into a prologue. The prologue involves the main character, a corny stock character detective, entering a house full of cultists who are under siege by the police. The cultists are expecting the main character, and the opening introduces the player to the bread and butter of this game, which involves walking around, talking to people, finding clues, and occasionally being subjected to fairly long cut-scenes involving creatures familiar to readers of Lovecraft. The main character talks to himself quite a bit, seemingly to act as a sort of hard boiled detective narrator, describing things that the game's writers decided were of interest, or simply grunting out "Nothing interesting here." 

I honestly love the game for how corny and trope-filled all the detective stuff is, and how much of the game feels like stepping into a familiar Lovecraftian cold bath. There are spooky northeastern houses (with strangely gigantic corridors), and creaky stairs, and an eventual dive into further mysteries. My time in the game propelled me from the prologue into a piece with strong similarities to "The Shadow over Innsmouth," even sharing the same setting from the short story. In the game, most of the challenge came from walking about, finding stuff and following up on clues, and due to a lack of in-game reminders, I often found myself actually writing down notes, etc., and thinking about how nice it is to not be coddled.

I found myself frustrated in certain parts when the game translated from spooky walking/clue grabbing to actual moments of challenge. The controls and systems involved felt fairly clumsy, and the main challenge I ran into, escaping from Innsmouthian murdermen in a hotel room were more challenging than I ever could have expected. The escape from the hotel-roomrequired multiple attempts, each of which taking 15-20 minutes, leading to at least an hour and 15 minutes being spent. What frustrated me about it was that it required the sort of precise control one might expect from a Mega-Man, Castlevania or other old-school pattern learning platformer. There was very much an exact right way to do it, which felt less like a frantic/quick thinking escape, and more like just memorizing exactly what each step would be. 

My Verdict: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a solid attempt at replicating the spookiness of H.P. Lovecraft (without any of exotification or racism that I remember from the actual stories) which is marred by bugs, a frustrating save point system, and extreme jumps in difficulty which are not telegraphed by the narrative. Ultimately, I'd give it a qualified recommendation for a fan of Lovecraft's work who is willing to deal with quite a bit of frustrating gameplay in order to inhabit the world. 

My next post will come in roughly 2 weeks, where I'll be covering Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land

Braid

The Basics: Platformer (and Indie darling with something to say about time/regret/relationships)

Previous Time Spent: 15 minutes

Expectation of learning Curve: low

Why I bought this: Mostly on the strength of positive reviews and other press

First Impressions: Braid is gorgeous, between the hand painted backgrounds and the soothing quasi-classical music, and my first impression gave me a sense of a relaxing, thoughtful experience.

My 3 hours: I began with a relaxing run through a few simple worlds, which overall felt very mario-esque, however. There were puzzle pieces to collect, and this suit-clad man needed to collect them by traveling through rolling hills, jumping on the heads of his foes, and solving jumping puzzles. Then, things got a bit more interesting, as the puzzles escalated in difficulty, and began to rely on the game's primary innovation, the ability to reverse time. It was at this point that I was fairly hooked, and found myself obsessively trying bits over and over and over again (in a very Next or Edge of Tomorrow-ish way) which was a nice contrast from the extremely beautiful and relaxing intro bits.

I explored 6 "worlds," throughout the course of my playthrough, involving a number of puzzles which escalated in difficulty, and were based around interesting exceptions and additions to the fairly simple rules that the game established. Some of these were far more challenging than others, but there was almost always the sense that I could keep moving and try other things, so I never felt terribly bogged down or frustrated. In my last half hour or so of playing, I reached a couple of worlds where the basic rules of play, especially regarding time, shifted greatly, matching the story the game was piecing together about a relationship. (which I'm not going to spoil, nor did I 100% follow). 

My Highlight: For me, the highlight of my playthrough was mastering the first fairly challenging jumping puzzle through crazy repetition. This involved having to time a jump exactly right so that I would land on the top of one of the many hapless hairy guys traveling these picturesque landscapes, and bounce from the top of his head to a nearby ledge, where a puzzle piece awaited me. I had to rewind and redo this bit some 30+ times, probably due to my inexperience with  timing heavy platformers, but reaching that ledge felt incredible.

  

My Verdict: Braid is a thoughtfully put together and intellectually stimulating experience, and the puzzles involved are well worth experiencing. Definitely worth picking up on a steam sale at some point.

My next post will come in roughly 2 weeks, where I'll be covering the presumably scary (and maybe problematic, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth) 

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.