Unfinished Games:
Unfinished Games of 2020: Part IIUnfinished Games of 2021: Part I
Unfinished Games of 2021: Part II
As December approaches it's time to clean out the queue of games I tried, but will never finish.
Door Kickers: Action Squad
Gunfire Reborn
Time Played: 3 HoursWargroove
Time Played: 5.9 HoursThe combat is mostly a solid clash of ideas. Units have ten hits. Units inflict damage based on a number of factors. First, the more health of the attacking unit, the more damage. If a unit is at full health, it does 10 damage, before modifiers. The damage is modified by the attacking and defending unit types. Right clicking on a unit opens up an informational display. Each unit is Effective or Vulnerable to most other types (or in certain cases, can't inflict damage at all). For example Knights are effective against Mages, dealing 115% damage. They are also effective against Dogs (125%), Archers (105%), Soldiers (95%), Ballista (90%), and Trebuchet (85%). The display warns the player that among other weaknesses, Knights are vulnerable to Dragons and Spearmen. For vulnerabilities it tells the player how much other unit types will do to them. Dragons strike with 105% against Knights (Spearmen inflict 75%). Strangely, it doesn't tell how much damage a unit will inflict on units it is vulnerable to. It seems that a unit will cause between 10% - 60% against units it is vulnerable to. Since this is such a wide disparity, careful review of the damage matrix is necessary, at least until the player has a general feel for relationships between units. The damage matrix is included in Wargroove, but isn't readily displayed. Fortunately, when preparing an attack, the game displays the range of damage inflicted against both the attacker and defender. Like Advance Wars, the attacker deals damage. The surviving defenders return fire.
Wargroove innovates with its villages, changing aspects from the classic Advance Wars capture formula. Capturing a neutral village is easy, move over to it and capture. A captured building starts with half the health of its capturer (the occupier does not lose health). Buildings gain one health a turn. Enemy occupied buildings defend themselves, inflicting damage on their attacker. To heal an injured unit, place it next to a building. This reduces the health of the building and costs the player some cash.
The strangest quirk is its dialogue. Conversations between characters are marked with a word bubble, and sounds. Sometimes sounds are mere mumbling, but other times they are actual words. But the audio doesn't match the words in the bubbles! After one battle the enemy commander says in text, “So you won … who cares!” But the player hears, “Whatever.” In reply the player's commander says, “I care. And I won't stop until my kingdom is safe,” but the sound of the game is, “I won't hold back.” This divergence is astonishing and confusing. Why bother to record audio, if it doesn't match the text? The design choice is even more absurd, because sometimes the two match, like when the enemy says, both in sound and text, “I'll crush you myself.” And yes, the dialogue is all as trite as the example above.
Another odd design decision is the visual effects. Wargroove contains four factions, each with 22 units. Unlike Advance Wars they look very different. For example, the Kingdom has swordsmen, emberwings, and knights. The undead Legion fields dreadswords, fellbats, and dreadknights. The forest Tribes deploy slashers, bloom dragons, and greenguards. While the desert Empire hires lionblades, ryuu, and tigerlancers. But would it surprise you to learn that these units are all exactly the same? There is no difference between a swordsman and a slasher, a fellbat and an emberwings, or a knight and a tigerlancer. The only distinctions are in appearance and name. It seemed a waste to create such visual differentiation, without any mechanical difference.
What really sank Wargroove? The level design. The levels required grinding down the enemy, as they often had parity in resources and position. Combined with a bleh plot, it wasn't worth seeing the quest to its completion.
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About Wargroove, multiplayer also has to resort to suffocating map design to check Trebuchets because apparently Crit balance was not worth looking into despite a lot of Crit conditions just asking for lame play as I attempted to call out BEFORE the game was released. I will cite that Custom Wars Tactics, which has been doing a fan project for Advance Wars, had posted about Wargroove's balance issues here: https://cwtactics.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-weekly-dev-june-into-groove.html
ReplyDeleteAnd yep, I had my own 2 cents about the mess there as well. Suffice to say that developer arrogance is a thing and needs to be called out. I'm glad that you're doing your part to call it out even before considering how Chucklefish (the company behind Wargroove) tried to get away with unpaid labor exploitation.
I didn't know about the unpaid labor issue. Thanks for the info!
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