Unfinished Games:
For Awkward Mixture I attempt to finish a game before writing a review, even if it's a game I wouldn't recommend playing, like Domina, Star Tactics, Divinity: Original Sin, etc, etc, etc. A worthy goal, but not always worth the effort. I'd be remiss if I failed to mention the games I didn't complete. This article and the next will briefly examine eight games.
Unfinished Games of 2019: Part 1
Unfinished Games of 2019: Part 2
Unfinished Games of 2020: Part I
Unfinished Games of 2020: Part II
For Awkward Mixture I attempt to finish a game before writing a review, even if it's a game I wouldn't recommend playing, like Domina, Star Tactics, Divinity: Original Sin, etc, etc, etc. A worthy goal, but not always worth the effort. I'd be remiss if I failed to mention the games I didn't complete. This article and the next will briefly examine eight games.
Distrust: Polar Survival
Time Played: 2 Hours
Developed by Cheerdealers and Alawar,
creators of Beholder
(another game I didn't consider worth finishing), Distrust is
a survival game set at an arctic research center. Based on the 1982
horror movie, The Thing, the player controls the remnants of a rescue
team, sent to the base after it went silent. A helicopter leaves the
crew scattered and desperate as they seek to unravel the mystery
awaiting them.
The player controls two members of the
rescue party as they explore seven randomly generated areas. The
crew aims unlock the gate leading into the next area by finding the
necessary tools in their current location. In each area the rescue
team learns more about what caused the stations deterioration. Each
area contains a number of small buildings separated by wide swaths of
open, snowy terrain, which the characters run between to procure the
needed equipment. The first area or two are relatively safe, for it
appears as if the recent inhabitants have only recently vacated it.
Buildings still contain running furnaces, leftover food and medical
equipment, and working generators. As the characters venture deeper
into the darkness at the heart of the complex the areas turn
inhospitable, freezing wastelands of broken equipment and devoid of
food.
Because of the randomly generated
levels, each play-through is supposed to be unique, but the tasks
remain the same. The player must balance each rescuer's three
visible health bars to make sure they don't die: warmth, stamina, and
satiety. There is also a hidden health bar, mood, whose depletion
doesn't kill the character, but causes them to develop a disturbing
trait. While trying to survive by repairing broken furnaces, finding
enough food to eat, and locating a suitable location for a nap,
Distrust threatens the player with a final threat: the
anomalies. These glowing balls of light appear only when a character
is sleeping, but remain to sap the characters of their strength,
driving them mad.
In conclusion, Distrust (which
features no betrayal or paranoia mechanic) is a repetitive survival
horror game, which requires repeatedly repeating tasks just long
enough to stay alive in an arctic wilderness. The first three or
four area feels the same, as they don't contain NPCS or activatable
events to engage the player. It might be improved by playing with a
friend, but it doesn't include local split-screen nor should this
redeem the game.
Road Redemption
Time Played: 3 Hours
I remember playing an iteration of Road
Rash with my cousin back in the early '90s. The goal was to win
motorcycle race, while fighting off other racers with fists, chains,
and bats. Police intervened and avoiding them required extra
caution, as being knocked off a bike would lead to an arrest.
I regard the game nostalgically, which
is what developer EQ Games was banking on when released Road
Redemption in 2018. It is nearly an exact replica (as far as I
can remember from twenty-five years ago), and yet everything seems
off.
In Road Redemption the player
controls a member of a biker gang determined to catch an assassin
with a $15,000,000 reward on his head. Each race features one of
five objectives: Race to finish in the top three, kill a certain
number of enemies, kill a specific enemy, survive, or finish the race
in a certain amount of time. Completing the objective earns bonus
cash and experience, a crucial resource for advancing in the game.
For the story mode, each race has three
possible outcomes. Finish with the objective, finish without the
objective, or die. Road Redemption includes permadeath but
with a twist. After each race the player finishes alive they spend
their cash to buy upgrades for their current character. After dying,
the player spends their experience to purchase upgrades and unlocks
for their future races. Players can unlock better bikes, bonus
experience, and the ability to skip parts of the story they've
already completed. But the ability to unlock bonuses is incredibly
costly. The gathering of experience is a slow process requiring
many, many, many attempts to unlock bikes and levels.
Road Redemption shows hints of
fun occasionally, but most levels feel the same (exceptions: the one
where cars drop from the sky, and the level racing across rooftops).
Regardless of the goal, the player should always kill as many
opponents as possible, as each kill rewards the player with nitro,
money, experience, and (most importantly) health. The thrill of
blowing cars with C4 is as explosive as the results, but soon it
becomes as dull as beating up racers with bats.
In addition to tiresome repetition,
Road Redemption includes a host of small issues. The screen
for purchasing upgrades doesn't allow the player to deselect if they
click on something by accident. The game doesn't include a save
feature, which the developer says was intentional. According to EQ
games part of the feature of RR is the rogue-like, permadeath
style game. While racing there is no button to back up if the player
gets stuck. The visual effects don't improve the performance but
cover the whole scene in a muddy, dull color.
The one aspect worthy of credit is the
inclusion of a split screen mode for the PC, when most publishers
have abandoned this feature. Maybe, like Distrust, I would
have enjoyed the Road Redemption if I played with a
friend, but as a single player experience it's a grind.
In conclusion, Road Redemption
isn't a racing game, because enemies always accelerate to the
player's position and lock in place for a duel to the death. The
player can separate temporarily from a crowd with nitro, but the
enemy accelerates seconds later. But, the real problem is the games
repetitive nature, and the grind necessary to unlock the rewards to
reach the race's end.
Dota Underlords
Time Played: 2 Hours
Regular readers will know that Defense
of the Ancients is one of my favorite games. Dota came
into existence as a mod for WarCraft 3 on Blizzard's
Battlenet. Dota itself includes a custom game section, where
creators can build and display their modified games for free. In
January of 2019, a modding group released Dota Auto Chess, and
by mid-May over 8 million players were playing it in Dota.
The creator of Dota, Valve, and creator of Auto Chess, Drodo
Studio, supposedly tried to work out an arrangement for distributing
the game, but couldn't come to a deal. Instead the two went their
own ways, with Drodo forced to recreate their game as Auto Chess
without any Dota identifiers. Valve worked quickly to
capitalize on the new phenomenon, releasing their own version, Dota
Underlords, in June.
In spite of its beginnings Underlords
has nothing in common with Dota except for the visual effects.
Instead of a real time game where players control a single hero on a
team of five to destroy the enemy's ancient, Underlords is a
1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1 turn based game. Players purchase Dota heroes and
arrange them on a chess board. Then players are paired off to fight.
Each battle is completely out the player's control. Heroes attack
and use their special ability under without player input, until one
team remains standing. Players who lose a battle, lose an amount
from their health pool equal to the number of enemy heroes remaining.
A player is eliminated when their health drops to zero. The player
final standing wins the game.
There is certainly a game in Dota
Underlords, but as the original name implied, the game is largely
automated. The player chooses which heroes to purchase, how to
arrange them, and what items to equip, but battle are preprogrammed.
In conclusion, Dota Underlords
is nothing like Defense of the Ancients. It is a completely
different game which uses the skin of Dota, but without the
core elements of laning, farming, vision, and team fighting in real
time. Note: Underlords is also nothing like Chess.
Niche
Time Played: 2 Hours
Niche, by Stray
Fawn Studio, is a member of the small, but
popular, genre of turn-based game about evolution. The player
controls a fox-like creature separated by environmental disaster from
his parents. The animal's goal is to return to its parents, but the
read will shortly understand why that is absurd in the context of the
mechanics. Shortly after landing on an island, the fox creature
meets a female fox creature and produce offspring. The player must
advance to the next island by moving his animals to the opposite
shore. Each level the player can only bring a limited number of
creatures, though this number changes from island to island. Animals
die, leaving space for their offspring to grow up.
The core elements are collecting food,
creating nests, and choosing which pairs of the strange creatures to
breed. Niche brags that it includes over 100 genes to shape a
species, and this feels like a big part of the problem. With that
number of options they blur together. In a few hours, only one or
two genetic outcomes seemed particularly beneficial, while most genes
felt so incremental as to be ineffective. Like Road Redeption
and Distrust, one island feels the same as another, and
because they are so similar, and the tasks are so repetitive
(collect, breed, feed, die, go to next island) Niche lacks
momentum to encourage the player further.
In conclusion, Niche suffers
from too much information, and not enough to do with it. Though the
game may include a complicated genetic simulation, the outcomes are
too difficult to discern, and the player spends their entire time
surviving to travel to the next island, which is exactly like the one
they just left, in search of their great-great-great ancestor's
parents. If the game's goal was to demonstrate a realistic simulator
of how evolution takes eons to create differences, the developer
succeeded.
Next week, four more games I didn't
finish, but want to address.
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