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| More first impressions: by Mischief Maker 08/09/2013, 9:42am PDT | ||||
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| I openly admit I've been playing story mode on casual, in part because this game doesn't come with a manual and I'm learning piecemeal from tutorial popups as I go along. Turns out there is a big disadvantage to solid state hard drives for gamerz, as the very important gameplay hints on the loading screens disappear before I have a chance to finish reading them.
The jetpack dragon may be what sold me on the game, but the court intrigue is clearly what the game revolves around. Decisions you make at court will always tilt your popularity with the various species, represented as a percentage that starts at a base 50%. On the risk map, this popularity percentage modifies the gold and unit production ability of provinces populated by those species (no, you can't ethnically cleanse provinces age-of-wonders-style). The RTS portions are single-resource affairs, the resource being recruits. You increase your recruit income by capping resource points and building recruitment centers, but there's also a global modifier based on your popularity. If you're at 100% popularity with the species that occupies that province, you get double income in RTS mode. "Are games art?" fags will love this game because it tests your beliefs in a way movies and books cannot. The vast majority of political dilemmas are thinly veiled fantasy versions of hotbutton topics from real life. You can find yourself gearing up to invade a fortified undead province, need your popularity with the undead as high as possible to even the odds, when all of a sudden the elven ambassador asks you to legalize gay marriage, something that would totally piss off the religious fundamentalist undead. Where's your firmly held belief system now, Mr. Libertarian? What's more, every turn begins with a newspaper that explodes your most innocent dialogue choices wildly out of proportion. I'm beginning to suspect this game is a gigantic Obama apology. The court intrigue parts are where the art, dialogue, and characters are all at their best. The courtiers really are first rate sycophant assholes in the most entertaining way. Even your xenophobic snob lizardman general becomes endearing after a while. I love the steampunk character design. I'm especially impressed with how they managed to create a sexy dwarf princess. The risk map is my least favorite portion of the game. You're supposed to be viewing a world map on some futuristic holo-display, but it looks like a faded old map and your units are displayed as board game markers that you must physically click and drag to their destination. What's worse, the singular unit markers represent stacks, so first you drag to destination, then you pull a slider to determine how many actually move. What's more, the markers are so tiny, you really can only make them out at maximum zoom, so you're constantly switching between too close and too far. Other than that, you build units, move units, and every province can house one building. The provinces provide income in gold and research. Special resources to grab in neutral provinces include units and buildings that have already been built. The RTS portion fares better, but as a standalone game I wouldn't recommend it. The strategy here, thanks in part to the popularity system, is rush. Take the starting units you placed here in the Risk portion and grab the static resource points before they do. Units cap points so quickly you can have enemy defensive turrets getting built in your home base before you know what hit you. Screenshots indicate that the steampunk units are interestingly designed and cool looking, but you wouldn't know because they're covered in garishly bright colors to indicate their side, probably so you have an easier time telling friend from foe zooming around in dragon mode. Unfortunately there isn't an option to change the highlighting or at least tone it down a bit, so the RTS battles look less steampunk and more Tron. When you're in basic overhead mode, you have complete functionality to build, order units, set them into groups and so on, and the best strategy at the start seems to be to play at maximum zoom out where your units are reduced to icons, supreme commander-style, to orchestrate capping resource points. There's actually a timer at the start of the round that prevents you from immediately turning into a dragon and wiping out their starter recon troops, and once unlocked, actually becoming a dragon costs 20 resources a pop. Once you have a decent army built, you change into dragon mode where you trade your strategic control (all you can order as a dragon is "select all" and "attack my target") for various dragon spells that boost your troops and weaken the enemy. Survival isn't hard as a dragon, just do a RMB dodge when a slow moving homing missile closes in on you, but your straight damage output alone won't wipe out the enemy so you can't win battles with action skills alone. I'm also very disappointed that once again someone has made a "play as a dragon" game and missed the quintessential dragon combat "move" of swooping over an army and napalming them with a wall of flame. So Fabio, if you're looking for the next great strategy game, move on. If you're willing to put up with a weak strategy game for the sake of being entertained by the court in a game that feels like a microprose game out of the 90s, you'll find this game more than the sum of its parts. |
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