Unfinished Games:
Unfinished Games of 2020: Part II
Unfinished Games of 2021: Part I
Unfinished Games of 2021: Part II
Another year, another series of games not worth finishing.
In order of time played, from least to most:
Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds:
Time Played: 2 Hours
And the action is ridiculously slow paced. Units move slowly. Units attack slowly. Units barely do any damage. Combat is tedious enough, but sieging in the early missions of the campaign is a chore. Buildings have too much health to be destroyed by a blaster. Every time the player orders a group of moving units to move to a new location they shuffle around, reorganizing in place, moving backwards, performing some sort of intricate dance that wastes half a minute before they make forward progress. These complaints may reflect the designs of 2001. Like maybe StarCraft and Age of Empires had these problems at the time as well, but I don't think so. Either way, this game has not aged well.
Mindustry:
Time Played: 6.1 Hour
I'm not sure why I purchased Mindustry.
I enjoy tower defenses (though I did try CreeperWorld spin off
Particle
Fleet: Emergence), and I've never tried a
resource, construction, and management simulation game, like
Factorio. I guess the latter reason is why I tried Mindustry.
It appeared simpler than Factorio, but I quickly realized how
wrong I was. The main gameplay mechanics are mining resources,
transporting resources along conveyor belts, processing resources,
and building defenses. Controlling a flying bot, the player zooms
around the map laying down buildings; turrets, conveyor belts with
augmentations, mines, energy production and relay, and
factories/refineries. With these buildings the player turns raw
elements into energy, metal, resources, and liquids, transporting
them to their center. Resources at the base are stored in a bank,
which are spent to build new buildings. Some objects need to be
transported directly to the weapons, such as ammunition. Watching a
massive construction of interweaving conveyor belts transporting
multicolored resources is delightfully memorizing.
Every few minutes a wave of enemies attack. They move toward the center of the base, fire weapons at whatever they see. They don't stop to fight, but push on relentlessly. Player turrets fire back. The player can use their flying robot to fight, but it doesn't do much damage, and dies easily. But it comes back to life quickly with no penalty to the player. If the enemy wave destroys the center of the base the level is lost. The player can restart the level, and if they do, some of their buildings from the previous attempt remain. If the player successfully defends against a wave the screen indicates where they had buildings that were destroyed. After every attack the player should review their conveyor belts, turrets, and other defenses to ensure future success. While it is nice of Mindustry to indicate broken sections, I think it should have a button to automate repair. I don't think this would help the player much, and it would reduce the boredom in repeatedly repairing sections. While there is significant lag before the first wave, the time between waves is short. The player needs to expand while under threat. I read a review advising the player to start with their defenses all the way up to the enemy spawn points and build backwards in permanent retreat. The only time I tried that I had a problem; anything built in the enemy spawn area is destroyed at the start of the first wave. But it isn't easy to see the full area of the enemy spawn.
Mindustry has a tech tree. The player learns of new technology when they add new resources to their base for the first time. When the player accumulates enough resources they spend them to activate new technology; unlocking new buildings.
While I didn't enjoy Mindustry, it seems like a strong game. The intricate interweaving of the conveyor belts is enjoyable, and the complex mining and refining process of different materials is ingenious. But I found the tower defense element too frustrating, because I had to restart a number of times when my base was destroyed. I think Factorio might be a better match for me, because as I understand it, there is no, or limited, combat.
Troy: A Total War Saga
Time Played: 17 Hours
Troy offers some minor innovations. It has three modes offering different amounts of realism to a mythical event. The player can choose Historic, Behind the Myth, or Mythological game play. The first removes all cosmological powers from the Trojan War, including reducing the heroes to only slightly above average warriors. I played Behind the Myth, which allows heroes like Achilles (or in my case Hector) to retain their mythological prowess, but all monsters are just well trained humans. For example, the harpies are elite warrior women with an effect that causes despair in the enemy, presumably because of their terrifying costumes. Mythological, which requires a $25 expansion, introduces all the mythological powers, one would assume.
I expected something different because this Total War game has the word Saga added to it. Some players may claim it makes a difference, but in actually, it's essentially like any other Total War games but with one or two small additional features. As Hector, the player is assigned a game goal, a number of escalating missions, and two significant agendas. As a member of the Trojans, he is tasked with building the Assuwan League. The League grows as nations join and conquer territory. This requires the use of the substandard diplomacy system. It's nearly impossible to shift other nations diplomatically. Every nation is part of one of eight cultural factions. It's only possible to convince members of the player's own faction to join them. And it's difficult to tell which nations are part of which factions. Additionally, many nations waste the player's time with numerous, dubious trade offers. As the League grows, the members receive military bonuses.
The other agenda is as Priam's Heir. Hector competes with his brother, Paris, for their father's kingdom. Various actions increase or decrease Priam's favor. The first to reach a certain value receive the city of Troy and the other brother's territory.
Combat is the same as it's ever been. But the battlefields felt small in size. The computer is very foolish, and I was able to make use of terrain (narrow choke points, forests, and hills – if they were available) to defeat much stronger armies. The series has abandoned the naval battles of Empire. If two armies, transported by boats, meet in the middle of the Aegean, they fight a normal battle with ground, grass, and greenery, before returning to their ships. The battle review screen ends with a surprisingly brutal reenactment between the two leaders, though there is no blood. Since so many battles are one sided, in that one team brings a significantly larger army, I regularly used the auto resolve feature. Even if the player massively overpowers the enemy, and loses 500 units of a total of 2,200, the game prefers to stack all the damage onto one or two divisions, wiping them out. This is unrealistic, and frustrating, because the point of auto-resolve is to bypass an easy battle. Instead I had to play these unnecessary additions of time to avoid losing an experienced elite unit. Also auto-resolve is not random, and if the player reloads a save and tries the auto-resolve again, they will receive the same result.
But the real problem of Troy: A Total War Saga, is that it didn't feel like I was fighting the Trojan War. It didn't feel personal, or story based, like I expected of the Saga title. Instead the map is covered in dozens of tiny nations. The player starts with only two or three cities. They need to expand, as everyone else does simultaneously. Most of my time wasn't spent fighting the Acheans (the Greeks who attacked Troy), but other Greeks and non-Greeks, like the Ionians, Leleges, Amazons, Phrygians, and other Pelasgians like myself. After this early period, the game remains the same. The player continues to expand, conquering more enemies, convincing more members of their ethnic faction to join the alliance. At some point I ended up at war with the Acheans. But it was mostly a cold war where sometimes, someone would send a boat across the Aegean to lose to the team on the other side. At no point was there a massive battle worthy of the title of Trojan War, nor any combat at the gates of Troy, no epic conflict of heroes. Tired of being bogged down in this long running conflict, I had enough of the game.
The Saga series would be better if it was more like the Alexander Expansion to the Original Rome: Total War, a series of well designed battles to create the feeling of the epic war, with only a minor strategic element.
Rome Imperator:
Time Played: 30 Hours
In the first year of Awkward Mixture, I
wrote a series on Europa Universalis. At the time
I had just started EU: IV. But I felt a
proper understanding of the game required knowledge of EU: III and
even Europa Universalis: Rome. I've played 99 hours of EU:R. In
2019, the same developer/publisher combo, Paradox Interactive,
released a new version, Imperator: Rome. I played one complete game
with a friend. Of all the most generic, vanilla versions of any
Paradox game, this is the most bland. This is so vanilla, it's like
eating vanilla ice cream that tastes just like cream. It's
an inferior rehash of the 2008 Europa Universalis: Rome. It has
too many systems, but all those systems offer only tiny bonuses, so
they feel insignificant. The tech tree is large, but each technology
doesn't add anything except a 1% bonus to a tiny part of the game,
like slave happiness. As a larger country (I played Macedon) it's
too easy to bully other powers and expand. The AI performs
atrociously both in strategy and tactics. Carthage, with fewer ships
and less men, attacked me. They sent over only small armies one at a
time. I defeated them, defeated their navy, and then sacked their
capital. This outcome was obvious based on our relative strengths.
The goals for each nation are fun, and they try to teach the player different elements of the games, but this is not enough to make it playable.
And while it might seem to make sense to have the game end in 27 BCE, the year when Augustus declared himself the first Roman Empire, it feels anticlimactic (EU:R also ends on this date, so I can't claim it is superior here). This game needs to go another three hundred (or even six hundred years), so the player could play the downfall of the empire they built. Some may find this unenjoyable, but this sounds unique, a thing no other Paradox game allows.
Unlike most Paradox games this has no paid DLC, though it does have content packs.
Any hope of improvements were squashed in February 2021, when Paradox announced a reorganization. The team working on Imperator was reassigned to reinforce other Paradox titles, like Stellaris, EU IV, Hearts of Iron IV, and Crusader Kings III. This notice came with a significant patch, which supposedly greatly improved the game (I only played it after the patch, so I can't compare). Paradox hasn't officially abandoned the game, in their statement, they claimed it was a pause, with a plan to update the game in the future, but most players aren't buying it.
With the game as it is, it's difficult to recommend its bland mechanics over the likes of other Paradox games.
Recent:
Pillars of Eternity, Deadfire: Ain't Nothin' But the Gods' Hound DogRelevant:
Unfinished Games of 2021: Part I
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