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by Movie announcer guy, played by FABS 08/24/2004, 11:13pm PDT

curst wrote:

Why is Kohan so revered by the twenty people who played it? (Well, aside from me.) (And IIRC Fabio hates it too.) (Not that that's a surprise, but this is one of those instances where I agree with him wholeheartedly.)

There's apparently a Kohan 2 looming over the horizon, and I've seen message boards and even my ICQ messages get inundated with "BEST RTS EVER!" squeals of delight. What the shit?

Puzzled, I decided to once again (third time now) install Ahriman's Gift to try to discover what it is I'm missing, to try to fall in love with the elements that make this game so much better than every other game it looks like (while looking far, far worse thanks to the barely-Warcraft-2-quality graphics and animation), to suddenly realize why I should be tripping over myself in a rush to buy Kohan 2 when it hits shelves.

Like the first two times, I uninstalled Kohan:AG after about one hour of sheer boredom.

For real, why should I love this game? What frame of mind should I be in that'll allow me to say "forget Total War, forget Sacrifice, forget Starcraft, forget Warlords Battlecry 2, forget Battle Realms, forget Command & Conquer: Anything, forget Warcraft 2-3, forget Majesty, forget Homeworld, IT'S ALL ABOUT KOHAN!"? Each of those games immediately strikes me as either better or infinitely better. Even fucking Warcraft 3, which I don't like very much.

I'm guessing that, in a world where giant megacongolmorate corporate publishers dictate what is and isn't published based entirely on focus groups and graph charts, one man daring to say no to the system, and stand up for his labor of love against all odds, so that this summer, we can get ready for the greatest action feel good comedy of the year, automatically assigns "indie cred" to a game which immediately makes in un-chic for reviewers and intellectuals to hate it.

Indie cred is what makes otherwise mediocre or worthless games transform into objects of critical praise. It can be gained mostly on the sole fact that almost no one played it, automatically giving snobish goateed gamers something that only THEY "get". In Kohan's case, it's probably a mix of that and the fact that it was made by like 3 people in their garage for $500 (allowing the 30 people who bought it generate a large profit ratio).

Indie games created on a shoestring can be a great thing, as long as the limitations in graphics and production values arent a problem, which is probably why most good indie games are text adventures, rpgs, or simple shooters. With RTS's however, it's a pretty big problem unless you're game is mindblowingly fun, which Kohan most certainly isn't.

Here's the whole game.

-Order up a regiment of half a dozen units. Wait 5 minutes until they're all fully formed and healed outside your town. It really doesn't matter which units, just choose the best at fighting. Everyone lauds the strategic depth with all the unit types, but the deepest I ever saw was "choose unit with bonuses against shadow units when fighting shadow units".

-Set a formation for your unit. Formations affect movement speed and battle effectiveness, which are inversly proportional to each other. Choose high movement formations when you have a large distance to cross over safe ground, choose high combat effectiveness formations when you're about to go into battle.

-Get into a battle, then watch and wait for the entirely automated 2 minute process to conclude.

That's it! Happy hunting!

Just remember, when designing your RTS, only one thing matters to professional reviewers: does it contain supply lines? It worked for the critically acclaimed Seven Kingdoms (even worse than Kohan), and it worked for Kohan. The only thing I remembered about Seven Kingdoms was 85% of the game was trying to keep your economy afloat by trading clay pots with everyone. Kohan is BARELY more fun than that.