As the penultimate article before the 2023 Awkward Mixture rankings, I'd like to wrap up four unfinished games, placing a bow on top.
I normally couch my Unfinished articles in terms “barely played,” or “a quick look,” and ask the reader to “please take my time played into consideration”.
That isn't true today. I played over a dozen hours of each of the following games. It would be more proper to call this an Almost Finished list. Yet, for each of them, I never managed to “complete” them to my satisfaction. A brief explanation follows.
Time Played: 14 Hours
My friends and I played this at the end of 2022, yet here I am finally writing about the experience. Omega Strikers was a 3v3 online pvp game, with the players playing a fusion of soccer and hockey. Each player controlled one of the dozen or so characters, with play occurring on a rectangular field. Each team had one goalie, while the other two players positioned themselves as offense and defense. Despite these official positions, none of the players were confined to any specific location. They could roam the field at will. The players kicked the puck which glided like it was on ice. Each Striker kicked with the right click, but also had two regular abilities and an ultimate ability. These abilities included ranged attacks, stronger attacks, multiple attacks at once, or stranger abilities like invisibility, creating a barrier, or healing an ally.
Viewed from an isometric perspective, players tried to put the puck in the opposing team's net, while defending their own. The two main distinguishing features of Omega Strikers was a modular map and the ability to fight. The map, while always rectangular, had barriers placed in the middle and edges. In late 2022 there were six different configurations, determined randomly. One arraignment had a diamond shaped barrier in the middle, while another contained four squares, one in each corner of the field. In combat, the players, in addition to striking the puck, could hit strikers, but only with abilities. Taking too much damage in too short a time staggered the striker. Staggered strikers could be punched off the map. After a short delay they respawned on the pitch, but meanwhile the opposing team played with a one person advantage.
My friends and I stopped playing Omega Strikers because the beta closed at the end of 2022. By the time the full game released in the spring of 2023, we had already moved on. The consensus, I recollect, was that Omega Strikers was fun, but too simple to invest time in.
The developer, Odyssey Interactive, has
since announced that it plans to abandon the game by the end of 2023.
Old World
Time Played: 22 Hours
Old World, developed by Mohawk Games, is a 4X strategy game that aims to replicate the success of the Civilization series. Founded by former Firaxis employees, Old World is Civilization, but limited to the Ancient and Classical eras. It adds elements from other games, like Crusader Kings, giving personalities to leaders. Each nation builds its cities, settlers, workers, buildings, and armies like in a Civilization game. Nations research technology. They fight barbarians and conduct diplomacy. Unlike Civilization, where time seems to pass due to technological development, time passes in Old World as leaders age and pass away. Children rise to succeed their parents. Other nobles form factions, pressuring the ruler to complete specific objectives. Another significant development is the limit on actions. In Civilization players can move every unit and build in every city. Old World gives the player a limited number of actions determined by the nation's number of cities, the skill of leaders, and the value of technologies.
I played Old World for one and a half nations with a friend. My friend and I stopped playing to try Crusader Kings III. I don't think we will return. Old World feels too similar to Civilization with minor tweaks. I'm currently not a fan of the Civilization series, and prefer Paradox's style of historical strategy games.
Time Played: 29 Hours
I wrote pages of notes for Dancing Dragon Games' Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga, but I can't cover every aspect in this truncated review. This Ogre Battle/Fire Emblem mash up impressed critics when it released in 2022, but I found little to appreciate. It's a fantasy game set in a generic fantasy realm. The player controls a promising imperial officer who supports his superiors, despite witnessing their cruelty. He both decides, and is forced by circumstance, to rebel against them. There's a mire of backstory about past conflicts and how the countries of the region came to be how they are.
Each battle is played on a square grid. The player controls an army made up of squads. Each squad is composed of a leader, and three to six additional soldiers. The organization screen for Symphony of War is tragically terrible. It shows the army with its many squads. The player can take almost no action on this screen except to choose a squad to look at. Almost all actions, like upgrading a character or attaching an artifact, have to be taken at the squad level. I recently replayed Ogre Battle 64, and many (not all, but many) actions can be taken from the army view. It is tiresome how much back and forth between the army perspective and the squad perspective is required to to perform simple tasks.
Battle begins and the player moves all their squads. Then it's the computer's turn. The computer is idiotic, and therefore, Symphony of War is easy. Enemy units attack even if they will inflict no damage and then die. Some non-ranged units will stand in place regardless of their situation, allowing the player to destroy them over multiple turns with ranged attackers. The maps are open, with only minor terrain elements. Symphony of War includes a host of different units. Like Ogre Battle 64, when two squads clash the units attack automatically for two rounds. Unlike Ogre Battle, Symphony of War doesn't tell the player in advance what attack units perform.
Units are made stranger by the settings. One option is Permadeath. This is a separate option from difficulty. With Permadeath off, every unit that dies revives at the end of a mission. With the Permadeath box checked, plot characters revive, but not other units. Permadeath is an assumed feature of Ogre Battle or Fire Emblem, and it's strange to start the game with it off. During the course of the game the player acquires at least a dozen plot characters. Even with Permadeath on, these can never die, rendering the system absurd.
Visually, the game doesn't compare to Fire Emblem or Ogre Battle. It's fine except for the disconcerting character portraits. The figures on the map are drawn with an anime style, but the portraits of speaking characters share a style similar to modern Final Fantasy characters.
The story of Symphony of War is complete chaos. It's a generic story packed with random story beats. It features references to the Nephilim from the bible, magical assassins, an absurd theology with resurrecting saints, deaths that are not deaths, people being turned into magical giants, inexplicable betrayals and alliances, and mountains of fluff.
By the time I stopped playing I was the authoritarian leader of a fanatical religious cult, willing to murder all non-believers. The protagonist becomes an avenging angel. He claims to know he is“good,” while attacking innocent neutral nations. I didn't arrive at this predicament through a series of choices, but a predetermined path. The story is communicated by an overabundance of cut scenes that serve no purpose. Characters spout drivel to each other in winding casual conversations, that occasionally push the boulder of a plot forward.
I've replayed Ogre Battle 64, Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis, Fire Emblem: Blazing Blade, and Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones all within the last two years. Despite their age, each of them outperforms Symphony of War.
Rimworld
Time Played: 37 Hours
For some games, thirty-seven hours would be enough time to finish, but not in Ludeon Studio's Dwarf Fortress adaptation. It evokes similar feelings to my time with Oxygen Not Included. They are both simulation games that seemed like a good fit with my preferences. Unlike Oxygen Not Included, which emphasized technical skill in building an electrical grid, a ventilation system, and a wastewater system (and I found this difficult), Rimworld required minimal effort. I built a powerful electrical grid with ease, hunted and gathered an abundance of food, and bounded forward in technological attainment.
In Rimworld the player starts with a handful of colonizers on a dangerous planet. Under the player's direction they build a home to protect themselves against the dangers of nature and other humans. They develop a settlement, grow their own food, and defend against invaders. I did this, with a few hiccups, but even on my first playthrough of medium difficulty my civilization flourished. I explored, I traded, and I crafted weapons and armor to protect my people. I think, and I could be wrong, that to win the game, the player is supposed to have their colonists escape the planet.
I defended successfully against an ever increasing difficulty of enemies. Despite Rimworld's attempts to threaten me, I dispatched the tedious assaults with my well trained and well equipped soldiers.
What bothered me most was the lack of expansion. Unlike other games in the genre, Rimworld limits the number of colonists. If the settlement has ten residents, the players find it difficult to acquire more. I was treading water at the peak of power, uncertain how to finish, and unable to expand. If I was missing anything, that's my fault, but I couldn't commit to a conclusion.
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