Game 86 - Emily is Away Too - Week 168 - Mar 23

mily is Away Too

There’s something about this series that is so masterful in its ability to transport me 20 years back to my youth and immerse me in its MSN messenger style conversations to the level that I feel real emotion toward the NPCs I’m talking to. The first game did all this and had a devasating story, investing you in Emily and then giving no option except for your relationship with her to end in tatters. Life is that way sometimes and beyond the nostalgic purview at it’s heart this is what the story was about – but also how you conduct yourself as person – through lies or honesty in a setting that is all the more easy when you’re not speaking face to face.

Of course you can't show the mid 2000s without our boy Rick Astley. I remember this dominating WoW and other vids at the time. 

This time around the format remains the same. The game mostly taks place in a chat window with several characters. You can set your profile image and bio, read others and then chat with people. This time however there’s a few key difference namely in its external links. Throughout the game characters will send you links to music videos on “Youtoob” or have links on their profile that link to Newground, Steam or Facenook. Many of which you can interact with, browsing videos on YouToob, playing games on Newgrounds or cyber-stalking on Facenook. All in all it expands on the Emily is Away experience by giving you plenty of nostalgic content to immerse you in the story it has to tell you. I love that they give you an 8-bit wallpaper to round out the entire experience on your computer. It's perfect. The presentation and references are on point AF. Rise Against, MCR, World of Warcraft Burning Crusade, Oblivion… just FKN amazing. The game will even save stuff to your desktop as your love interest writes a poem for you or a girl sends you chatlogs to ask you if she was a bitch with her begrudged ex.

To my surprise the game doesn’t open up with Emily, but instead Evelyn is Online (otherwise known as punk4eve). It’s pretty clear from the start that you’re going to have to choose and well Eve is a girl after my heart with her love of punk music. But at the same time Emily is into video games and so lovely. This won’t be easy. Like the first game it’s set over four seasons but unlike that it’s set over the final year of high school instead of graduation leading into college. Questions shift from “will we keep in touch” to “do our plans align after graduating?”. The chatting between these two girls goes back and fourth. Both end up dating douchebags and you’re their closest gay guy friend with a shoulder to cry on. Which if you think about it is a clever premise in itself because that’s something the audience itself, pale, nerdy, socially awkward would have likely experienced. So it goes right for the jugular.

Something that the first game did that was extremely clever was you’d choose an option, and the character would forcibly backspace chickening out. It did this until the end and you ended with a saddening result regardless of what you do. It was clever in its accuracy of the time in how scared we were as teens to say how we really felt. So this time around your character does it and I’m like “oh shit, here we go again”. But then Emily responds “hey, what did you just delete?”. Fucking chills. The game took our expectations from the first game and completely flipped it on its head. It gives you 3 options – 2 for the cowards and 1 for the “fuck it, I’m gonna say it” approach. I did the latter of course and to my surprise it actually lets you do it! What a nice twist.

As you go back and fourth all this reaches a head. Both NEED to talk to you and are clearly neurotic. They need you to respond right away and the game drops a time bar on you out of nowhere. Bouncing between the two becomes increasingly harder and eventually you just have to choose whether you want to or not. Whether subconsciously or not I ended up going with punk4eva over emerz35. Maybe it was the punk style, but I don’t know because I’m equally attracted to the girl next door. But I guess Eve just had the punk with a bit of girl next door vibe. I continued to talk to Eva and give her good counsel (I think) but Em wasn't happy at all. 

Some time passes and Emily is Away. Eva thanks me for the useful advice and things get a little cute and flirty. From that point on things flourish, you ask her on a date and she likes you to, you go to prom, have an amazing time and she writes poems about you. I’m fully invested at this point and I’m 13 again. I can’t stress just how well written this is for the time to the degree that I’m fully enveloped in these characters.

Speaking of poetry, guess who else is in this class? Emily. The final chapter and they get to talking. Em apologises for being a massive psycho and you become friends again. I tell her how Eve is great and you can’t help but feel she’s got massive FOMO. But that could have gone a lot worse and I’ve got a prom to go to… Prom passes with flying colours but Eve is concerned as we’re going to different colleges and doesn’t know what to do. I tell her we should stay together and she agrees – ending the story with “I love your stupid ass". 

Awwwwww

Boy was I wrong about this game. Like the first I expected a sad ending, but nope it got all fucking nice and genuine. For me, when I was a teen I always wanted a companion and even though I don’t believe in it any spiritual or fatalistic sense - I wanted a soulmate. And so in my head cannon it was meant to be. I imagined myself throughout that college and was there hiccups? Absolutely. But Dan told her "College is only a few years, we have a lifetime ahead of us".

All this got me thinking: What happened to that romantic in me? When did it die? Did the failure of a first relationship make me more pragmatic about relationships (which I am in all other aspects in my life)? Then repeated failures? Or was it when I first put on a tie (i.e. got a job) and became that way inclined? How can I get this back how? Is it even possible? It’s fucking phenomenal that this game could make me even think and feel this way. An absolute masterpiece in nostalgia that had me remembering parts of me that I forgot even existed – the naïve romantic, the shy kid, the IM master of sarcasm – tapping into the deepest parts of my memory and emotion.

Not only that but chatting away while listening to banging AF punk music made me experience a side of myself that I feel like I missed out on. The punk emo goth version of Dan that never existed? All in all it was nostalgic in every sense of the word. That being the true German meaning of painful memory – like I missed out on a part of me I’ll never get to experience. A true reminder to enjoy and find joy in every single day and not block myself to different experiences.

Game 85 - Anno 2070 - Week 167 - March 23

nno 2070 is a game that has been on my radar for almost 10 years. I picked it up while at uni and played a little with an old friend Brenden but never came back to it. 55 hours later I can see this game is addictive AF. The premise is quite simple: Due to climate change sea levels have risen and much of previously inhabited land masses have flooded. With the new waters and volcanic reactions new land has developed and as a ARK agent you need to find new lands to inhabit to help relocate humans as the pressure for land and resources continues to rise. Gives the game a sci-fi Atlantis vibe that reminds me of BioShock in it’s own way (oh god that’d be an amazing game). Putting yourself in the mindset of these people also adds an extra level of pressure to the cause when disaster strikes. There are three main factions in the world (or at least this part of it) competing for your attention. The right-wing Tycoon’s who are business production and pay high taxes, the left-wing Eco’s who have pollution reduction tech and the moderate Tech’s who are focused on researching new technologies.  

Speaking of managing disasters, the campaign is fun and serves as a great tutorial and it’s well paced. A stark contrast to the previous city-builder sim Railroad Tycoon 3. But it’s also full of drama and catastrophe in a drowning world. You own a mobile base of operations designed to be a response unit for struggling new coastal cities. Your first “superior” Thor Strindberg is a condescending prick. So when he !@#$s up a dam and floods a city, it's all the more gratifying when you come in to clean up his mess. Earning the praise from Mr. Thorne and the corporation.

That was part 1 of the campaign, the rest of the story is pretty run of the mill. F.A.T.H.E.R. is executed well as an AI overlord, but inevitably he goes rogue spreading viruses and nuking islands. So it’s up to you to establish a dominant island and unite the other factions against him by gathering evidence. At the end of the day its only function is a tutorial and this is the best to piecemeal the player different mechanics. Even if some of them aren’t very well explained – like being able to build certain structures on open water, faction buildings requiring certain works, homes being your income source (so go nuts) or eco workers increasing your max fleet cap – it’s still a great way to introduce gameplay. Also about the Tycoons giving you smack talk at the start, Yana and the Ecos aren’t much better. After helping them clean up oil spills, smog, many many natural disasters and cleaning up nuclear fallout! What’s my reward you ask? “The organisation still doesn’t trust you…” WTF get that shit outta here. Jokes aside I do like how the cities carry over between missions. It’s a unique take on a campaign compared to the one and done missions such as Startcraft who often want to move you to different interesting maps. It’d be cool to see more campaign maps that evolve over time as you go through the story, perhaps unravelling over years in a medieval city builder like Stronghold.

Art wise this is a beautiful game with a lot of detail. Especially when you get your island cities humming and see all your “children” roaming around. Zooming in will show citizens going about daily life, flying cars to work and walking prams into the heavily polluted and “safe” industrial area (lol). At first I thought moving the hero unit around would get old fast but then I realised this was just a regular unit and can be destroyed and replaced. Soloing a single unit was mostly for the story and tutorial to get you use to moving. Your navy is made up of many ships as your main mode of transport. Part of the strategy is managing different islands via cargo trade routes as they all have a limited amount of resources that must export to another. Typically I’d choose the biggest city for my island and have a few production islands around this. Battleships and Cruisers are cool especially when you get a fleet going but it’s the cargo ships and submarines that really makes these units shine. The game truly shines when it opens up between multiple islands (your own, allies and enemies) this because a much more fun feature to manage trade routes and build warships that can defend themselves. Although combat is quite limited at first and reminds me of F2P web browser resource management games like Vega Conflict it has some depth to it when you start to develop your tech workers and discover EMPs, cloaking tech, shields and even nuclear missiles. Not only is it cool to sink enemy fleets but if you have the Tech faction unlocked you can explore the depths and build underwater bases. The game already felt unique with it’s hydro-focus planet, then it (almost) went full Rapture. Sadly these buildings are industrial only so no underwater living quarters (sorry Andrew Ryan). While it is awesome to see the underwater remnants from the lost civilisations of today’s world it would have been cooler yet if you could repurpose these and build a true underwater city with all the risks that would entail.

The focus for most of the game is economic management and how that servers your growing cities. The progression loop is as follows:

• Choose eco or tycoon
• Settle an island
• Build housing and foster immigration
• Extract natural resources
• Build factories & farms
• Satisfy citizens desires & upgrade housing
• Unlock a new buildings from upgraded housing and skilled immigration
• Repeat the above
• Plus some trade routes to synergise differing resources between islands
• Eventually unlock tech, repeat above
• Eventually unlock eco/tycoon (that you didn’t choose), repeat above

It can be stressful at times to manage so many resources but once you do you can appreciate the joys of  running an efficient city, then sit back and watch your island paradise flourish. Especially when you zoom in and look at the flying cars move from the upgraded glass towers at the centre of your megacity, off to the worker residences i.e. the suburbs. The civilised ecosystem is an absolute joy to behold and much of it is automatic and melds together so organically. 

My pride and joy (pre-typhoon)

Industrial area keeps the main city alive and running. 

Each faction has their own requirements which I like – Eco’s like sushi and Tycoon’s like hamburgers. One likes technology and the other likes jewellery. One likes classical amphitheatres and the other likes casinos… you get the idea. What I find interesting about the Triumvirate is that the most efficient way to run a society is in harmony, not competing. Eco’s are effective at agriculture and anti-pollution, while Tycoon’s are more productive and produce more income. The Ecos can build wind farms and generators that are more effective in population centres, which are more environmentally friendly than the Tycoon’s coal. While the Tycoon’s can build trash compactors, also effective in population centres to bring up the Eco cities Ecobalance. The tech's can use their technology to enhance various areas of both groups. The synergy is best through balanced cooperation – just as it is in real life. With that in mind I realised it might not be the best idea to build them on opposite ends of the island like I did in the finale of the campaign. So in the next scenario I tried creating a coexisting city. Only problem with that is they both enjoy different activities (even when you get your headquarters). So I think its best to have cities with eco/tycoon districts or just keep them separate. Maybe I could try same city but Tycoons in the CBD and Eco at the edge towards forest and parklands? That’d make the most thematic sense. I also enjoyed building a beautiful parkland but no one used it. Would be cool to have stuff like this not only add eco balance (more trees) but provide points of interest that citizens would stroll down, have picnics, etc. Perhaps the fountains could be this? Also I wish there was an easier way to manage income. It’s so hard to see what costs what. Everything else has a strategy map to oversee your cities – why doesn’t this? A balance sheet or heatmap – something, anything. Like I didn’t know fountains cost -30 income to maintain jesus… Eventually you figure out what costs what but the game doesn’t do a very good job explaining taxes and income.

No one used my beautiful parks :(

At the end of the day this is a world very much still suffering from climate change and you will be struck with typhoons and the black sea (mass oil spills). The game has a pollution mechanic and I’m still unsure if this causes those events or they’re completely random. In one instance a typhoon tore through my beautiful capital metropolis, destroying skyscrapers before ending at my power grid. It wiped out my nuclear power and then of course I ran out of uranium. The mass power crisis that ensued caused years of protests and emigration from the island. I still haven’t recovered in that play through going from a humming 3k in credits per turn and 600k in surplus to a measly 150k in surplus and a few hundred credits per turn. Events like this have a cascading effect – destroying your production and thus exports to other islands. Luckily I had a surplus of credits in this playthrough but I could very much see myself forgetting to setup firestations or a hospital only to lose a cities production – which in turn disrupts an export and causes another city to become increasingly dissatisfied and leave the island because they have no food or drink. Centralising your population on one island is good if the maps islands allow for it but it also puts those cities at risk during natural disasters! There is a lot to weigh up, balance and adapt to in this game – just as you’d expect in when your mission is to turn a flooded dystopia into a tropical utopia.

Lastly it’s worth mentioning that the menu is pretty rad. The first RTS where I’ve created an avatar and the main menu has acted as my “world overview”. I just wish it fully committed by letting me customize my avatar and arc instead of recycling assets from the campaign where I’ll see my character in the wild. From the menu or my ARK control panel I can launch:

• Campaign – basically the tutorial
• Single Missions – different scenarios and missions 
• World Events – single missions towards a global objective. Helps make the world feel more alive.
• Continuous – ongoing game where you can build up your city. Each difficulty is essentially its own mode with easy being free build, medium being normal and hard adding an extra layer of difficulty.
• Multiplayer – above but with friends.

The campaign was quite long and after playing it felt like I experienced everything I could. If the game had more indepth underwater cities for the tech faction (hell make them their own starting faction if there’s ever an Anno 2080) I’d stay for sure. I might go back and play if I get the itch for Anno again. I’d like to see the final tiers of all three factions all upgraded in one campaign, working together and in harmony and perhaps research everything… which will require a continuous campaign of 30+ hours. But after doing a full Tycoon and Eco playthrough to the final tier I feel satisfied in putting this game to rest. I have to say, it’s certainly peaked my interest for other games in the series such as Anno 1800; which has very positive reviews!

Game 84 - Warhammer 40:000 - Darktide - Week 166 - Mar 23

arktide 

Let’s get down to the brass tax. This is one of the best Warhammer 40:000 games I’ve ever played and hands down the most immersive and best FPS 40k game I’ve ever played. But overall that’s a low bar – set by a string of low-mid quality games especially in the last decade. The fact that people argue the best Warhammer 40k games are from over a decade ago and a single developer (R.I.P. Relic – Dawn of War I & II, Space Marine) should say it all. The game absolutely nails three areas, but fails in many other areas that ultimately stopped me from coming back.

The visuals are on point. Walking through the desolate industrial halls and roads of Hive Tertium you can’t help but look up. Your attention is constantly drawn up and above the foreground into the towering backdrops whether that be a grand standing cathedral or towering spires. It’s so good in fact that it feels detrimental in some ways – lacking the variety of prior FatShark games. The adherence to a Hive and only a Hive interior removes from the replayability as you eventually get sick of seeing the same levels over and over. More on that later however. As a 40k fan – the hive itself is phenomenal and I really wish the developer would make a Half-Life style single player shooter.

The gameplay – my god does it feel good. They nailed that moment to moment gameplay mowing down hordes as they run into your hail of gunfire or wide sweep never stopped being satisfying. The eviscerator chainsword does exactly that, cleaving off multiple cultist heads or revving up to dig its teeth into an armoured Plague Ogryn. The flamer oozes pure petroleum of death that is oh so addictive and makes you feel like a pyromaniac with an urge to burst out in laughter sending the enemies of the Emperor to their fiery doom. I’ve never seen a flame thrower in a game done so right. Like dropping  a keg of oil on a hallway it covers entire areas creating choke points and obliterating foes. All other games should take note. The lasgun feels weak but plentiful, accurate and deadly if you hit the right spot, just like it should. Finally the Bolter. From Godwyn himself the holy weapon of Mankind rips people apart, limb from limb exploding into the dust it came through. My god its glorious wrath makes you feel like the emperor's fury himself incarnate as you send out mini rockets to smite cultists. It'll outright stop many of the special infected in their tracks (such as the dreaded hounds). It’s easily the best bolter in a game yet and I would LOVE to see a Deathwatch game from FatShark (perhaps for Darktide 2?)

Bolter. Chainsword. Flamer.

The sound track is fucking phenomenal. Jesper Kyd has done for Darktide, no Warhammer, what Mick Gordon did for DOOM. This is the definitive Warhammer 40:000 sound. Industrial, synth but with gothic orchestra and organs playing. It’s unique, it’s phenomenal, it’s grim dark. There’s nothing like an incoming horde ramping up to organs blaring and holy piano keys smashing to the sound of the Imortal Imperium as deliver justice to the enemies of the Imperium with Flamer in one hand and Chainsword in the other. Disposal Unit is another highlight with it’s cult like chanting and tempo, which feels like I’m performing a ritual dance to a neon lit bonfire. Darktide Main Theme and Data Interference are also bangers worth shouting out.

The soundtrack captures the glory of man perfectly from its humming industrial worlds to its god inspiring cathedrals - man truly is god in this universe. 

Now for the bad. For starters the game was buggy as hell at release and should not have been dropped in that state. Especially with a perfectly functioning cash shop (no bugs there). Secondly the progression loop is terrible. The loop is as follows. Do a mission – get a bunch of meaningless resources (because they’re not explained) and maybe get some loot. Go to the random shop and hope a good weapon is there. Nothing? Repeat. Sure, they updated it later so you could get whatever gun you want at its base level. That’s nice and needed especially for beginner players but there’s next to no end game incentive or progression loop. No clear path towards legendary gear or even gear sets. I have no idea why they scrapped the Vermintide 2 dice system. Not only was it amazing to push through with the grimoire (which now feel meaningless) for that extra dice roll, but the loot you got seemed much better in V2 even at launch. Others will tell your even V2 took a while to get off the ground – but it was no where near this bad – a clear step back for FatShark. Also why armour doesn’t have stats beats me – it could have easily replaced curious and had set effects. Which leads to the other point – all the armour sucks and there’s barely any. You have a paid cash shop with amazing armour in a buggy unfinished full priced game from day one. Scummy AF and anyone review bombing or boycotting this game is more than justified considering FatShark has learnt nothing from the last two games or industry mistakes in general. 40k is so rich for potential cosmetics and they have less than Deep Rock Galactic which is limited in its creative scope by both size of its staunchy characters and facial hair, but still manages to outperform this game in that department. Challenges also suck. They’re quite difficult and unreasonable such as pickup 12 grimoires (which I’m still not sure works). Not only this but you need to finish them all in a week. So if you have a life they'll all reset before you can finish them. And I still don’t know what the resources are used for because the game explains nothing. In other words they're useless.

Lastly the story and writing is dreadful. The plot shows promise at the start with an absolutely stunning intro cinematic. Your characters starts in a classic prison break scenario (Vermintide 2 had this as the tutorial too) showing off some nice voice acting and a threatening gang of renegades here to free their leader who would of course be a boss later on. So you manage to escape, save an acolyte and are now a criminal ready to repent as part of an enigmatic and masked Inquisitor’s legion of acolytes on their quest to retake the hive. Sounds pretty cool right? Well the plot is as follows. You gain trust by completing missions, inevitably talk to a retinue member who now respects you, repeat steps 1 and 2. Eventually you’ll hear about a rat and traitor. Towards the end this culminates in you getting called to the Interrogator’s chamber among many other unknown (supposedly the people I’ve played with) acolytes. The Interrogator waves around a gun at you and the guy next to you who you’ve never seen but looks nervous. Am I meant to feel threatened? I never did anything remotely traitorous? Is this meant to feel like a witch hunt – the wrongful persecution that happens in the Imperium oh so often? If so it did no such thing with zero agency and the game did a terrible job setting it up. The ending like the story overall falls flat. 

It would have been a little more interesting if they put the characters you played with, seeing your best friends among the crowd as you’re judged would have been nice. But not by much.

Like the story the character creator is about the same. Cool at first but the dialogue is just mid and I found myself ignoring it completely by the 10^th level. Compare this to the zany mix of characters from Vermintide 2 that were always interesting to listen to. A clear indication of the strength of written characters vs. non-linear ones. Also why does your character never speak in cutscenes? She/he speaks in-game so there is no reason not to do it. Is he silent protagonist or a spoken one? It’s just awkward and feels stiff with your character just standing their getting monologued. The mission selector is a hub in the centre of your HQ and is way too random. The map pool is already limited but it caters to certain difficulties as well so you’ll play the same maps over and over and over and over and over…. Normally I’d love this if the maps are will designed (think Dust 2) but they all blur together which hurts replayability. I know a hive is meant to be this way but they should have done something to add more variety. Maybe an Arcade with botanic gardens rotting to nurgle I the Noble district? Or a trudge through the sewer systems ala Resident Evil. One other thing that's sorely missed is the scoreboard. All in the name of "promoting cooperation over toxicity". For me personally this is a ridiculous justification. The scoreboard pushes me to perform the best and work with my team more, not the opposite - these games have never been Call of Duty and a lack of cooperation and skill at harder difficulties will send players hurling back to Challenge 1 and 2 missions where they belong. Removing scoreboard won't solve that...

Aesthetically pleasing, functionally useless.

All these issues and lack of features than both the spiritual predecessor Vermintide 2 and the trailers and gameplay previews culminates in an overall unsatisfied feeling and made me long to go back and play V2. And the fact that the cash shop is here day 1 in a fully paid game with full functionality makes the meta game feel like its designed to push you into the paid store. It’s a shame because the core gameplay is so much fun – it just has no meta-game to keep you coming back especially after you hit level 30. The game creates a marvel unique to 40k like no other in its core gameplay, Hive and soundtrack to accompany it. I really do hope they make a story shooter because if you disregard the bad non-linear writing in favour of Vermintide 2’s intentional characters and story, they have all the hallmarks of a great game. Maybe in a year or so they’ll have something to come back to by then.  

Allsorts 5 - CCGs and Tacticus

llsorts 5

Warhammer 40000: Tacticus

Every so often I see a mobile game that peaks my interest enough to give it a go. But 9/10 I’m instantly turned off by that “mobile” feel. It’s hard to describe, but it’s most prominent characteristics are a blatant paywall only acceptable on the mobile market, cartoony art style and streamlined and shallow gameplay. Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus is that game and ultimately feels like a shallow XCOM. The battlefield is about 50 or so hexes and enemies come at you, take damage, you trade, and repeat. There’s no real depth in rock-paper-scissors-etc combos or weapons. At least not at the start enough to keep me interested. Especially considering I’m eager to go back to XCOM2 and yet to play the (apparently) fantastic DLC. Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters also came out around the same time and if I’m going to play a squad game tactics game that doesn’t jerk of all over the Primaris range.

Warhammer Combat Cards

Forgettable and uninspired are the two words that come to mind. Not only is the gameplay lacking any kind of depth a good CCG needs, the cart art is literally just the miniatures slapped on a card. Compare this to Horus Heresy Legion where the card art is so good it expands the setting of HH more than any other medium to date. So much so that the wiki uses the card art.

Horus Heresy: Legions

Rounding out at 2700 words I was going to make Horus Heresy Legion its own game entry. But considering it’s neither a paid game nor originally on my backlog or wishlist I’ll leave it among the rest of my latest CCG phase. When I had the itch to play a new Warhammer 40k game, I never could have imagined that I would become so smitten with this game. This game is everything Combat Cards isn’t. The card art brings the the 30k world to life like no other media I've experienced. The over the top voice acting and fluff feels accurate to the books and the synergy/mechanics is extremely clever in capturing the personality of each warlord (Primarch) and their faction. The game expands out the Imperial Guard, Dark/Mechanicus, Cultists and Solar Auxila – some of the biggest factions of this universe that have no presence on the tabletop in 30k. It even ties them back to the Legions in interesting ways. Salamanders can buff infantry while Word Bearers can ritually sacrifice them. The gameplay plays very similar to Hearthstone, with the key difference being your Warlord is a card on the table and partakes in combat, in addition to having a passive and active ability. Seems simple but has huge repercussions on the gameplay with entire deck strategy built around solo warlords like the beasts Raum, Angron, Sevatar and of course the classic dualists Corswain, Lucius and Sigismund. I gravitated toward the Dark Angels naturally and was not disappointed. To my surprise literally my first Dark Angels crate had the rarest card in the game Lion fucking el Johnson… I thought this was a beginner crate mechanic or perhaps the Primarch’s weren’t rare but I wouldn’t get another Primarch warlord until 100 hours and 1000 Exterminatus crates later when I was graced with the glory of Perturabo. But who am I to question RNGesus... 

The Dark Angels have two main mechanics – Hexagrammaton (or Trigrammaton) where the angels of death are split into Raven, Death and Dread wings. On top of this many troops have a quest. Which you choose from one of three – attack warlord, destroy a troop, be targeted by a tactic – which if completed activates an effect. Not only does this feel ‘Knights of the Round Table’ AF but adds an element of strategy that the Lion was known for. You need to pre-empt what the enemy will do next. Tactics removal solo warlord deck? Choose be targeted by a tactic. They have board control? Choose destroy a troop. You have board control? Warlord. It is amazing. It's many layers of strategy before you even get into the many many cards such as Hexagrammaton (summon 3 cards that died), or a shielded dreadnought that deals 4 damage to all enemies upon completing its quest. The Lion’s ability of drawing a wing of his choice is fittingly tacitcal - as you can focus on one or two wings to synergise and then if you have a card or two in other wings you can draw those cards whenever you need it. For example Onyx is a Ravenwing card that deals 5 damage if you have a Dreadwing on the table. So wait until you do and then draw Onyx. Surprisingly however it was Aloceri that I fell in love with. His ability is give a random troop flank. Now combine this with some of my favourite cards like Astrovel who gives all Astartes +1/+1 on play (rally) and when destroying an enemy – with flank is amazing. Double-down on this with Knights Cenobium who gives +2/+2 to all Astartes in your hand, play and deck when finishing a quest and oh boy – flank is absolutely terrifying. There are plenty of other cards that have amazing synergy like Prisoner Custody, Deathwing Protocol, Praetor Rhamiel and too many more to list. 

The best Dark Angels card - pair it with Always on Duty to gain frontline and another quest for +4/+4 and he becomes an absolute beast! 

Each crate is paired with three factions and neutrals. Dark Angels had titans (gross) and Defenders of Caliban (cool but not Astartes). What surprised me was how much this game made me fall in love with factions I cared very little about. The main example of this was the factions of the Exterminatus crate; Alpha Legion, Night Lords and Iron Warriors. Originally I liked the Night Lords but couldn’t care less about the other two – now they’re among my favourite 30k factions. Alpha Legion focuses on putting many many traps in your opponents deck and stunning/sabotaging their troops to delay until the inevitable RNG chaos ensue <3 with synergy around your opponents card draws causing damage and buffing your own troops – it’s fucking amazing. Iron Warriors have a fun siege mechanic (load one turn, destroy enemies the next) while Night Lords are all about terror and forcing the enemies to not attack. After playing them I want to read about the attrition of the Iron Warriors and their brutal utilitarian methods or how the Alpha Legion operate as masters of subterfuge and explore the nuances of their We Are Legion culture.

Traps stun, destroy and damage the enemy Warlords. Secret orders have troops act for you. Such as in this case (attack your own warlord instead of the targeted player). Whoops.

Iron Warriors siege abilities can have some nasty buffs.

I loved almost every faction I played (and the ones I didn’t play but fought) from the overpowered Custodes who first strike you (enemy can’t retaliate of it’s a finishing blow) but can’t draw cards so essentially are a deck of one man army as per the lore. Or the Mechanicus warlord who can summon two automatons per turn, buff it 1+/1+ automatically and then give everything Blessings of Chaos for three Marks of Chaos or the Space Wolves with their pack attack mechanic. The game had me so obsessed that I was ready to jump right into their upcoming 40k CCG Warpforge. That was until the updated released a month ago. Oh boy… I'm glad I waited on this one to write it up - because the overhaul update has ruined what was not only the best CCG game I've ever played, but one of the very best Warhammer 40k games. A few months ago I was recommending this game to every friend who had a remote interest in 40k. Now I wouldn't wish this upon the worst people I know as too harsh a punishment. But in all seriousness the update has destroyed this game. The three daily crates have been replaced by a shallow "gamified" battle pass (gross). Previously you could choose which faction to focus your challenge crate on and build up cards. But along with 250 gold crates (up from 100 gold) for new expansion cards it appears they've removed this challenge crate to funnel people into the store to pay money. All in all the expansion feels like a final cash grab to soak up any microtransactions before they jump ship to their new game Warpforge. Not only will I be uninstalling Horus Heresy: Legions, it's ruined all the hype I had for their new card game.

The Rewards use to be so enjoyable as your daily routine. A classic example of what isn't broken, shouldn't be fixed. 

They made a few changes (free crate, free event, which I of course abused with 0-3 runs) that made me decide to play more. But I burnt out hard. In one day I used 60 tickets. It started with a reasonable 3 10x runs. But after going 3-3 (1 off a green chest) and then two 1-3 runs I just said fuck it and went all in. Told myself if I didn't get a single red I was done. I got two greens - one of which was a 7-3 that was 1 win off a red. Normally this would be fine if it was a skill issue - but almost every loss was to the new EC cards and Fulgrim or Lucius - a blatant power shift to push people to buy more cards. Opening the chests I did still get about 10 legendries and 10-20 epics. But that's out of 60+ chests. So what's my point? First we need to speak on the meta game. The game has crates, grouping factions that you might not enjoy for starters. There is no crafting system to protect you from duplicates of which give you gems. Those gems can be spent in the shop and are worth a certain amount based on rarity. 

To sell/buy cards is:

• 5/20 common
• 20/100 rare 
• 100/400 epic 
• 400/1600 legendary

So you grind a chest to complete a collection which could take hundreds of hours depending on your luck. If you need on average lets say 5 epics and legendries to round out a collection that’ll cost you 10,000 gems – that’s 2000 common or 500 rare cards…. Then you need to hope those cards are in the rotating shop of the 40+ factions that can show up every day and the cards you need are in that shop… The only way to explain it is downright predatory.

The business practices are rotting a once great game inside out.

After opening over 70 chests and seeing 300 cards back to back it's clear that the update wasn't the beginning but an escalation of a cancerous business model that's always hovered over the game. Out of 300 cards so many were duplicates to the point that I earnt 3000+ gems. If you went off commons only that's 600 duplicate cards… and with no way to craft or earn cards other than really stingy controlled shop it's hard to keep playing a game designed to grind you out of your hard earned cash. That aside I would have totally paid up if I saw anything of value. But $30 sub a month for a bunch of cards is ridiculous. Spotify and Netflix is $16. You're saying your service is of more value than all the music, movies and television one could want on the planet? What a joke.

Business tactics are as duplicitous as Alpha Legion!

After seeing duplicate after duplicate in this event binge I realised how numbing this game is. It's a fun game but my god the metagame is awful and they've done themselves a real disservice. Now with the battle pass doubling down on this no new players will get out and only the sweaty whales and hardcore players will be left - which I felt like I got a taste for in the recent event. It's a real shame because at its core this is an amazing game. And even now I want to go craft new decks for Sevatar, Perturabo and "Alpharius". Or get back into my favourite faction: The Lion and build a Hexagrammaton and Invicible Reason deck along with my new legendary Knight-Praetor Rhamiel and hunt down that final Deathwing Champion legendary card to round out my collection! But I can't bring myself to continue supporting the game - even just as a F2P player adding to the player pool to encourage people to pay for this game. I did my dash, used up my resources and now it's time to close the chapter on a game I never would have imagined I'd play and enjoy as much as I did. I had one last hurrah and tried DG. Poison is fun but OP with no way to counter stacking up to 30 DMG by mid game. Literally no card will counter this… it’s another blatant example of release it OP for the moniezz and then nerf it later. I opened 7 crates in a row and every card was a duplicate – all in all reaffirming my issue above. RIP.  I have a love hate relationship with this game. It’s hard to give up and I keep returning. Despite it’s issues this is an amazing game with so much depth and fun to be had, with a lot of love for the source material that that is overshadowed and let down by greedy business practice. 

The campaigns are a lot of fun. It’s a real shame. I might come back to play the campaigns and open a free crate every now and then. 

 GWENT: The Witcher Card Game

After playing more than my fair share of Gwent in The Witcher 3 the official card game is something I’d been meaning to get to for a long time. HHL put me in the mood for CCGs so I decided to jump in. At first glance it was still the same old Gwent i.e. win the first game, bait the second round, win the last, generate cards if you can. But it’s anything but. The spies have been reworked so you can't spam for extra cards and instead focus on debuffing the enemies. In general card draw is from minimal to non-existent beyond a balanced hand draw. Instead you have a resource cap for your deck and cards are worth a certain amount and you can combine any number of cards as long as the total falls below this cap. I choose my initial faction perfectly – the Dryads are a lot of fun with mechanics around symbiosis (summon a treant when you use a spell card) and vitality letting you add temporary health that boosts a unit each turn. Which you can stack and synergise with other abilities that proc of it like one card of a Dryad and Human lover that lets you summon a Dryard Youth every turn. This is reduced by its Vitality so keep it at 4 and you'll be summoning a Youth every turn. It’s a lot of fun when you can stack some powerful cards turn 1, saving your best cards, bait them turn 2 and destroy them turn 3.

It took a fraction of the time to develop your faction in Gwent compare to HHL. I actually bought cards as they seemed like decent value.

I dipped before I explored the other factions but Nilfgard, Vampires and Criminals (the new faction) look like a lot of fun. They did an amazing job expanding the existing factions into sub-factions. For example Scoia'tael have dwarves, elves and Dryads and you can focus on any of the three or create a hybrid. Monsters have Insectoids/swarm decks, Wild Hunt which are A LOT of fun, and Vampires/Ghouls with devour mechanics, etc. As fun as it is Gwent can't shake the feeling of a game made inside a game, that’s been expanded on. There’s a crazy amount of depth in the cards, but not in how you can play/attack in the game as they all funnel back to an arbitrary power score. It’d be amazing to see a Hearthstone/HHL warlord style game in the Witcher universe. Like Horus Heresy the card art in Gwent is absolutely phenomenal bringing the world to life in a new way. The games did this very well but here there's more depth given to the different cultures like Dryads, Dwarves, Criminals, Nilfgaard, etc in a way that the games don’t do. Bringing many factions from the books to life in the same way HHL did better than the tabletop. The metagame on the other hand is far better than HHL with an amazing crafting system where you can use destroy cards for dust and craft literally any card in the game. Overall it’s a fun game but there wasn’t anything to keep me coming back. I suspect I’ll return to this one after finishing the books and/or Season 3 of the show. But who knows, maybe I’ll just play the apparently phenomenal Thronebreaker instead.

Game 83 - Railroad Tycoon 3 - Week 161 - Jan 23

ailroad Tycoon 3 is not a game I ever thought I'd even try. But after playing Stronghold I still felt the city-building itch. I've had my eye on Banished for a while but somehow that still evades my library. So I delved into my games and I pulled out Tropico 4, Anno 2070 (expect to see those soon) and this. To my surprise, I did and I enjoyed it by a surprising degree. First things first however. The tutorial isn’t very good. At the start there is so much info around investing in other companies, riding the stock market, issuing bonds, etc that it feels like you can play the entire game without building a rail road empire. It felt like I would be running an actual business with managing shareholders dividends, inflation, pay rises, stock crashes (which can be manipulated during recessions) and actual book keeping. And so I thought "this is not my type of Tycoon - I'll stick to Roller Coasters where I can build them and watch people pay to throw up".

I think you could use this simulator to teach business students!

But actually, once you get your head around it its pretty fun. Learning to issue bonds, sell shares, balance and buy back debt and improve your credit rating to get better interest rates, etc etc, the game opens up a lot. All this business mumbo jumbo instead becomes a supporting part of your railway empire that you can ignore for the most part - instead becoming an optional function of min maxing. The kicker however is once you learn the flow of goods. Clicking on any station will show what goods it has and what's the most profitable. Seeing that New York has a lot of Iron and Providence wants it at 5x the rate of anywhere had me setting up an express line between the stations with a train that performs better with cargo over passengers... or doing the same with express passengers from Boston to New York and reaping the rewards, to then invest further into your railroad expansion. It's those nuances that make the game very enjoyable. If you have an overabundance of resources in one town, you can even create business in another town. For example one town might have a lot of alcohol, so create taverns in a town with high population and watch consumption boom!

Boston had plenty of passengers wanting to go West to Buffalo!

Combine the goods management with other competing monopolies that you can invest in, crash their stock, merge with, do hostile takeovers, superseded or share their tracks or just overall compete with through sheer rail way experience there is a definitive element of tycoon building strategy. Then throw in ‘railway crafting’ which is really its own art form as you have to manage the cheapest way to build a track across various elements of topography – bridges and tunnels are expensive, hills cost fuel, etc. Balance this with the speed of a straight track over time and the consistent revenue this will bring. Now you have many layers of logistics strategy to explore. At the end of that’s exactly what it is, logistics, and considering that’s my job the feels too close to home. I think I was one and done with this one – I finished the first campaign, enjoyed it, now it’s time to move on… Or so I thought. There’s just something about this game that comes me coming back. The country harmonic(a) soundtrack, starring at a map as you balance all the logistical contingencies to set out your railroad empire. ]

Althought clearly outdated. It is a charming game..