Caltrops - Gamerasutra - multiplayer review! (it sucks)

Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

by FABIO 07/13/2006, 7:28pm PDT

Multiplayer map designer: fired. He can go join the town screen "revisionist" guy.

Way way WAY too many damn neutral creatures on the multiplayer map. Spend the first two HOURS simply moving around building up so you can clean up all the neutral monsters just so you can fucking move around the map and maybe someday find another player to fight. I said someday because after 90 minutes, I still hadn't encountered my opponent and was still trying to clear all the neutral monsters blocking my immediate area.

Maybe other maps are better? Should be easy to find out, there are only 10 of them. That 90 minute game without encountering other players was on one of the smaller maps.

Turn based games really need to take a cue from Alpha Centauri and Civ4: make the turns simultaneous. Sure once in a while you'll have a situation where someone dies because they didnt move fast enough before the other person, but honestly it's the only way to make these games playable multiplayer without being some queer diehard gamer with a living room taken up by a Starfleet battles and Eastern Front wargame that's running into its eighth month of play by mail.

Honest to god, 90 minutes and not a single encounter with my opponent. Fucking Civ4 runs ten times faster than that. CIV4! Here's an idea, don't have any neutral monster at all in multiplayer, that way you can get on with finding and fighting your opponent and everybody doesnt have to sit around and wait while you play out battles with neutral peasents and imps.

Map editor due at the end of the month! Wow!

So many features of multiplayer feel tacked on: only 10 maps, no option to turn off neutral monsters, no map editor, no option for simultaneous turns (how hard is that, really), and "ghost mode".

Ghost mode sounded cool. During your opponents' tun you get to move around a ghost (invisible to others). Based on how long your opponents took with their turns, your ghost got more energy to do things like haunt enemy mines or curse enemy heroes or fight other players' ghosts. The reality is that ghost mode is incomplete and broken. Half of the features listed in the manual are missing or wrong. Ghosts get the same amount of energy every turn regardless of how long turns take. Levelling up his abilities seem to have no effect on his actions. The in game help hints for ghost features have so many misspellings and incomprehensible grammar that you get the impression they outsourced that part to the Final Fantasy Tactics tutorial team. There is no limit to the number of creatures, heroes, or mines that ghosts can curse. Move all over the map and curse ten per turn, curse everything. Does curse actually do anything? I could barely tell. You can supposedly dispel curses with your ghost, except it doesn't work. Neither does guard mode. Nothing works.

Bottom line: If you want to spend hours on a turn based multiplayer game, Civ4 and Alpha Centauri are infinately more satisfying than this sloppy turd. Hell, just go play a game of HoMM 3.