Old Man Mordaith
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Based out of Bulgaria, Haemimont Games has made the last three Tropico outings, Omerta – City of Gangsters, and 2015’s Victor Vran. Their experience with city builders in a dangerous setting – as with Tropico – show in this speculative colonization game. While the dangers are less political and more dust tornado shaped in Surviving Mars, one danger stood above the rest. Like a lab-created black hole completely out of control, I was sucked in. Hours of my stream seemed to vanish before my eyes as I struggled convincing colonists not to abandon me to the strange red landscape, with only peppy radio host to keep me company.
After playing my review copy of the game for an hour, I sat back with a sour expression on my face. “What the hell is this?” I wondered. Is this what I was excited for? I was mostly confused because whatever the expectations I had built up about the game, and I couldn’t remember them, there was a nagging feeling deep inside telling me something wasn’t right.
Mechwarriors and the Battlemechs are separate beasts. You can swap them around, one can get messed up pretty bad and the other survive an engagement without a scratch. You need to watch everything. Facing, elevation, turn order, sensor range, and way more information that I could elegantly lay out in this review. Rest assured it is a tactical players dream come true.
Anyone familiar with my reviews knows my greatest fear for some sequels is messing up a perfectly fine system just because they can. Innovation for its own sake is not only dumb, but it’s also dangerous. It can be a series murderer. However, I am happy to report that Deadfire doesn’t fall prey to that scenario. It leans hard on its old mechanics, the CRPG roots that made it great and refines qualms about the previous iteration of the game.
Let’s imagine you have a stick. A stick from space. You’d be hard-pressed to take that stick and shake it at all the new anomalies that are added with distant stars. With the reworks of the Niven update in hunting and interacting with anomalies, I found that the cusp of the endgame was knocking on our door before we knew it. Among those exciting things lurking around to explore an analyze there is the L-Gate. A mysterious network of gates that apparently lead to a cluster of stars outside the known galaxy, sealed away for whatever reason. Ominous or profitable? While the Chairperson of the Compact of Shor ul Khal was absolutely confident that they would be rewarded for their curiosity, Old Man Mordaith was a bit skeptical and figured his first Distant Stars game was going to crash and burn in a flurry of space tears and megabucks.
And so it was in the middle of one of the hottest summers to record, that the Old Man felt a chill down his back. It gripped him, cracked his skin, and caused him to slump over his post for hours. His hands were shaking, his eyes bleary, he knew that the Beast of Winter had come for him. And he knew not how this would end.
The ability to lay waste to complete strangers or engage with friends in private will be a boon to the game. I really think that this game will shine in the multiplayer aspect, and if you are a fan of this universe, this board game (or board games in general) and don’t give a single flying fig about the single-player campaign, or playing against AI, then pick it up. You’ll like it.
I’ll tell ya kids, the list of new features that Holy Fury promises to bring in is so extensive that it would be several paragraphs all unto itself. We’ll cover the highlights section by section, but rest assured that the claims that it has a little something for everyone are true. With previous DLC there was a clear focus, and while one would say that the big ol’ Crusade shield would be the main meat of this outing, they would be wrong. This is so jam-packed with stuff that every style of play barely escapes unaffected. So, raise your levies, and lets march on through this prepared invasion of content. (Ugh, ok, arrest me, banish me, and seize my lands, that was terrible.)
Every game of Imperator: Rome may have you winning or suffering defeat in the Punic wars as the titular Rome. But how many of those games did you have your rival, the leader of Carthage, tossed into an arena, and forced him to duel his son to the death? Of course, when he won, you granted him full rights of a citizen and brought his surviving family members into the fold, and a generation later, they were your most staunch supporters.
Ancient Relics is the latest Story Pack for the space strategy game, Stellaris. Now, a lot of folks hear story pack and think something that is mighty high in fluff but low in crunch. Many times they’d be correct, and honestly, there isn’t a blessed thing wrong with high fluff content. But in this particular case, they would be very wrong. Like, “finding a sample of the Javorian Pox” wrong.
Like many of the best strategy games, the complexity of the systems isn’t dumbed down. Instead, the player can customize their experience. You can alter the difficulty, disable some victory goals, alter resource distribution and much more. I love when games do this. It allows a person to ease into the game in a way that leads to mastery and comprehension without frustration. Options and playing your way seem to be a common theme in Planetfall. This customization allows one to sit back and enjoy the tropes presented in this wild game.
It’s a very transparent system. I think too many games try to dazzle us with an overwhelmingly complicated system of upgrades. Not this one, and that’s a good thing. There’s a whole bunch of stuff going on in Remnant, and an overly complicated game loop for upgrades and leveling would detract from it. The game wants you to be a rooting-shooting (or is that just root shooting?), hacking-slashing badass and doesn’t want you too hung up on learning how to build this character optimally or how to min-max.
Made by an indie studio out of Turkey by the name of Cultic Games, Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones has a lot going for it. It promises to be a CRPG with high replayability, meaningful choices and one heck of a creepy vibe. Stygian draws upon lots of the classical work from the Mythos but also tries to set itself apart and do its own thing.
I’m going to tell you if you are a fan of the CRPG genre, with a heavy focus on storytelling, replayability, and roleplay – buy this game. You don’t need anything else, don’t watch videos, don’t read reviews, just go buy it. It’ll be the best 45.49 Cannuck bucks you ever spent.