Unfinished Games of 2021: Part II

Unfinished Games:

Unfinished Games of 2020: Part II

Unfinished 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

Time Played: 45 Minutes I loved Killhouse's 2014 Door Kickers, a real time strategy game where the player controls a SWAT team to infiltrate various strongholds. The player controlled a team from an overhead perspective, issuing commands to their team. Each member had unique skills and attributes, designed for specific roles. Door Kickers: Action Squad doesn't resemble any aspect of its predecessor. The player controls a single unit, viewing them from the side. The player opens doors, fires the same weapon against the same enemies dozens of times per level. The only change, from level to level, is the size. Later levels are larger with more of the same enemies to kill again, and again, and again. There is no redeeming aspect of this game.

Gunfire Reborn

Time Played: 3 HoursLike Due Process (From Unfinished Games of 2021: Part I) Gunfire Reborn was another Early Access misfire. The same friends that play Dota 2, Phasmophobia, and Deep Rock Galactic bought Gunfire in 2020. They seemed to enjoy it. I recollect that they played at least a few dozen hours. My first attempt left me underwhelmed for this four person team shooter. So I never asked to play it again, and steered conversation toward other games. It felt like any other generic four person FPS against hordes of enemies. The battles were chaotic, with different colored projectiles bouncing around cavernous temples or arid deserts. Gunfire Reborn offered numerous customizables; minor boosts to damage type, ammo amount, clip size, explosion radius. It reminded me of Gearbox's Borderland, or Nioh. I do not appreciate the developer shoveling mountains of trash weapons in my direction. I do not appreciate sifting through mounds of guns to determine which offers the minuscule benefit over the others. And I didn't feel the combat felt responsive to the player. The enemy suffered damage without reacting to it. Enemies absorbed many shots before falling. It doesn't matter how many weapon types or enemies the developer deploys if I have to sort through piles of useless equipment only for the best stuff to barely harm the foes.

Wargroove

Time Played: 5.9 Hours When I first saw Wargroove I imagined it was a fusion of Advance Wars and Fire Emblem. It vacillated between the two styles, eventually transitioning into something mechanically akin to Advance Wars, with visual effects similar to Fire Emblem. The player controls units on a square grid, fighting across terrain and defeating enemy units. It offers minor alterations to the genre, but major setbacks. It also contains a number of oddities.

The 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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Unfinished Games of 2021: Part I

Unfinished Games of 2019: Part 2