Steam Sales Review #75: Robin Hood The Legend of Sherwood Park

The story of Robin Hood is a popular one…. but definitely an odd one at its routes.  Robin Hood in the original lore only told of two bandits, Little John and Will Scarlett.  Every single hundred years someone has retold the story of Robin Hood in a new way to the point in which the version we know today is presumed to be the official story.

This game is based off of the popularized story in which Robin Hood returns from the Crusades and has his land stripped from him.

The game is an real time strategy game which is a bit closer to Splinter Cell in some ways than to an RTS game.

You have to sneak around and knock out guards instead of engaging them.  You are rewarded for “saving” people instead of killing them.  The major goal of the campaign is to save as many people as possible, get as much gold as possible, while still doing the goals of the mission.

Fair warning the game was made in 2002 so nothing in this is beautiful at all.

There’s a lot of clumsy awkward game controls that do not lend themselves to what they’re asking you to do.  The entire thing is point and click in which you have to click on the bottom right pane’s commands and then click on the guard to use them on.

If this were to be modern re-made the first thing that they’d probably consider is adding in some sort of fast command structure that is easy to learn… you know similar to DOTA or LoL.

The game does offer a lot of innovative elements that simply did not take off.  The idea that you gain more by killing fewer is a major win for games that glorify killing over saving lives.

Unfortunately the gameplay shortfalls of the game are very massive and hard to over come.

Unfortunately there is no price tag short of free that would make this game worth buying.  Unfortunately the game suffers many FPS issues and resolution problems that just stop it from being a great game.

It’s unfortunate but I think there  might have been a real reason this game wasn’t mega popular back in the day.

Steam Sales Review #74: Prince of Persia

Ten years ago Ubisoft bought the rights to the Prince of Persia franchise.  They hired on the original developer of the game and got to work on a master re-imaging of the series.  The result was overwhelming praise from everyone.  Everyone who played the game loved it and bragged about how great it was.

Despite this, the market reported something really different.  Despite being one of the greatest games ever made, it only saw 3.5M sales.  To compare Halo: Combat Evolved saw 6.5M sales.

When Halo 2 came out their sales doubled.  When Prince of Persia: Warrior Within saw almost half as many sales as the original game.

The Prince of Persia “Sands” franchise saw roughly 1,000,000 devoted fans which was enough to keep pushing out titles, but not enough to improve the series.

Eventually they decided that they would “refresh” the series again and in 2007 we saw a re-imagining with a brand new art style.

I have to say this new art style is absolutely breathtaking.

So why did this game overwhelmingly do so poorly?

This review is a list of gaming defects that stop the game from being the greatest puzzler that ever lived.

#1 Difficulty

One of the major design elements of this game that has made massive waves in the industry is the idea that death was a mechanic designed to get children to throw quarters at an arcade machine.

So this game removed the sand dagger that would give you one chance to re-do what you just screwed up and gave you Elika, a Princess who had magical powers that would save you every single time you died.

This mechanic is excellent.  Ever played I Wanna be the Guy or I Wanna Be the Boshy?  These are really cheap looking indie titles that are hyper difficult but always set you to automatically re-appear every single time you die.

By having no death it means you can scale up that difficulty to ridiculous ways.

But Prince of Persia (whose franchise is known for hard games) didn’t scale up the difficulty one bit.  The whole game you were being slow pitched and when you get to the difficult part of the game… it is very very short.

This was a huge lost opportunity here.

#2: Non-Linear Puzzle Game

Ask yourself this question, how many non-linear puzzle games are there out there.

If you’re left scratching your head the answer is, none.  There are none… at least not successful ones.

The reason why puzzle games are linear is because they are supposed to scale up in difficulty over time allowing you to sequentially make things more complicated and make the solutions that much harder to get to.

But when you have a game that isn’t linear it means you have to slow ball pitch all the content to the player.  It means there is no reasonable point for you to adjust that difficulty rating until you get to the end of the game.

There is a hipster gamer boogie man that cries how bad linear games are.  In truth, many game formats just fit as being linear.

What can be non-linear is puzzle design and puzzle solutions.  It is possible to have possibles that have multiple solutions.

HOWEVER, puzzles with multiple solutions tend to be easier and thus less fun for a puzzler.

#3: Lacking Puzzles

A puzzle game should have puzzles.

At first looks it would appear this is a jumping puzzle game.  Almost all puzzle platformers involve getting in somewhere or getting out of somewhere.  This game at its core should be a puzzle platformer in which you have to get somewhere.  But it’s not.  When you hit your magic button a path is revealed to you telling you exactly what path you have to use to get somewhere.

The pathing indicator was REALLY cool and really well implemented… but it took away from the solving bit.  It meant that the actual puzzles which involved moving parts became the only puzzles.

And this game had three puzzles total.  It just needed to have more puzzles and more stuff for people o try and solve.

Just having three puzzles wouldn’t have been so bad… if it didn’t only take me 2 minutes to solve each one.

#4: Dat Story

The most notorious thing about this game on PC is the story.  If you play on console you get all this lovely DLC that makes the story better and expands it.

But if you played the game on PC, you are likely to just hate the story.

The game runs about 10 hours long.  The story goes like this, 30 minutes in you find a man with his donkey named Farah (a throwback because Farah was the name of the woman from the original reboot).  The man runs into the princess, saves her, and is enthralled in an adventure to stop an evil god.

9 hours take place in which nothing is really happening except for random shots of what is happening and a few back story elements to some villains.

And then you get to the end of the game in which the awful ending explains away everything in seconds.

It was just really really bad.  On top of that… you are very likely going to be upset about the ending which was designed entirely to make DLC viable…. and there’s no DLC.

#5: No DLC

One of my biggest complaints about this game is… it’s actually a great game.

Yeah you didn’t see that one coming, did ya Internet

No it’s a really spectacular game that has no bugs, is really smooth, and the parkor and art style is amazing.

But with that being said the fact that there is no DLC on PC is very bad.  The single DLC pack on console was really unpopular because of how difficult it was.

But had that DLC pack been tagged on to the game or given for free, the main game would have been far more worth playing.

But without the DLC available on PC, it’s not worth the time.  If the entire game can be solved in less time than it takes to solve an average puzzle in another game… there’s a serious problem.

It’s a real shame that so many great game mechanics are gone to waste and that there couldn’t be another 30-40 hours worth of DLC available.

But that just ends up being the case.

Steam Sales Review #73: Warlock – Master of the Arcane

It’s happening people

Yes it’s finally an official end to the Paradox Interactive boycott.

A little over a year ago (maybe even closer than a year and a half) I was buying every single game that came out and game after game Paradox was giving us unfinished filth that wasn’t worth anyone’s time.  Most of these games were eventually taken off of Steam for being so bad and most had their servers shut down with no opportunity ever for a refund.

So I decided to officially boycott, buying no games from them under any circumstances.  But after keeping in the no we’re at about a year and a half of solid quality releases with the filth being removed.  Their reputation is still in question and so I’ll be buying their games on sale.

So the first game being back on  is Warlock!

This opening loading screen was amazing.

Righto ff the bat I’m yelling “WHY DOESN’T CIVILIZATION 5 HAVE THIS!?!?!”

Yes it’s another Civilization clone.  It doesn’t quite have the polish of Civilization and you’re still best off getting Civilization if you don’t already own it.

But I think Warlock does a lot of stuff that is great, different, and worth noting.

First and foremost is how they handle barbarians… or as they call them monsters.  Monsters are giant, they are massive, they are able to take over towns and rule them.  There are tones of “brown” towns (the color of monsters) because they are so powerful.

Even the computer AI has problems dealing with these guys.  They are an annoyance and the payoff for them is not very high.  Which makes them perfect, they are a counter balance in the game.

At one point I ran into an elite element who had range 3 (everything else in the game has range 2).  He was able to one shot a unit per t urn.  It didn’t even seem like it was possible to kill them.

They were very much a permanent part of the game and most definitely changed how you deployed your armies on the map.

The second part of the game would be the equivalent to Civilization’s city-states… the neutrals.

The neutrals are seemingly all undead and are seemingly all at war with you.  I did eventually find some trolls and goblins conquered by the monsters, but most of the neutrals start off with a single defensive tower and are seemingly weak enough (on the non-towered flank) to get easily taken over by the monsters.

One of the “funny” things is that once you conquer a city you don’t just get a brand new city like in every other game of this genre.  No you get their people.  If you conquer an undead city you get undead residents in your empire.  You build undead buildings and you build undead armies.  So what evil buildings can I build?

A bank!  What’s more evil than a bank!  Yes we will become an evil undead capitalist empire! mwahaha… but seriously…. it’s kinda cool that I can amass an army of humans, undead, goblins, trolls, and elves to take on whoever I want.

The game is worth the sale value but a lot of things keep it from being worthwhile full value.

One of the major issues with the game is the artificial intelligence is pretty terrible.  In every game I played it seemed impossible for there to be a peaceful outcome.

It just seems like this binary option doesn’t work too well.  Realistically you shouldn’t have to declare war if you don’t give in to their demands.  There should be at least some option to ask for things nicely.

Instead every single computer is always asking you to go to war with them if you don’t give them a resource of which you have tones of.  Then you decimate all but one of their cities and they offer you a peace treaty which of course… you never accept.

Unlike Civilization which is all about how you interact with other civilizations this game is really missing that diplomatic niche that everyone knows and loves in Civilization.

There’s something about the algorithm which is just a little off.

In a lot of ways it feels closer to Lords of Magic than to Civilization.

The only downside is that there is already a game like this out there that unfortunately for Warlock… does a better job at it.  That game is Fallen Enchantress.  Unfortunately the games also have a similar price point.

So it goes like this.  If you want a piece for piece copy of Civilization that is fantasy themed, Warlock is your game and you’ll save a few dollars.  It doesn’t have the polish of Civilization, but at this price point… who was really expecting it?

Steam Sales Review #72: Making History: The Calm & the Storm

Happy Halloween people.  Nothing says Halloween like World War 2?

I think the one sub-genre of games I hate the most is the grand strategy game  Yet despite this and the severe lack of people who like these games, they keep making them.

The grand strategy game has become a grand niche and unfortunately as games have evolved, these ones have not.

So a basic break down.  You have so much real territory.  There are two or more sides vying for control of all or most of the territory.

In order to do this you have to build armies.  Armies require resources.

The majority of the game focuses around managing and developing resources.  Each grand strategy game has its own set of distinct resources.  As an example in Nobunga’s Ambition you had food, weapons, conscripts, horses, various weaponry, and gold.  If you ever were missing any of these resources the game imposed penalties.

This means the grand strategy games tended to be a little more realistic in that you couldn’t just continuously push with your armies without having to deal with some consequences, nor could you build too big of an army without eventually finding yourself so far in debt that you can’t support that army.

Everything is turn based so there’s no real time elements.  You make all of your economic and political decisions during a decision phase and execute those orders after you end your turn.

These games started off rather simple, but as the fans of them become more and more niche they became increasingly complex and eventually shied away newer players.  Over the years they’ve tried to make ones that are less and less complicated but it all still seems more and more complicated to newer players.

Europa Universalis is probably going to be the best selling game of this sub-genre of all time and honestly no one wants to even review it.  IGN had their Italian division review it but never looked at it themselves.

So now I have to review this game, Making History: The Calm & The Storm.

This is a World War 2 themed grand strategy game.  Unlike most games of this type you can play as almost 50 nations…. insane considering most you play as 4-5 nations tops.  Hell some even only let you play as one.

Your map is the entire world and it is the world as it was in 1932 to every exact margin.  Every single independent country established up to this point is completely playable… it doesn’t mean you want to though.  The chances of winning the game as say, South Africa, is nearly impossible.  A lot of the fun here is less about winning and more about seeing what you could do if you ruled such a ridiculously small country.

The time frame for the game is very spread, there are six scenarios all of which run between 2-5 hours long.  The longest one runs from 1932 to 1945.  The first scenario is the most interesting because it starts you at a period when everyone has low to medium productive powers and have small to medium sized armies.

Where you go from here is entirely up to you.  The only thing of course is seeing as they are scenarios certain things are scripted to happen.  Guaranteed you will see Germany try and expand its borders around Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia and you are guaranteed to eventually see Britain and America declare war on Germany.  The other side of the world doesn’t seem to work so hot though.  It takes a really long time for anyone to declare war on Japan because there’s absolutely no guarantee in this game that Germany, Japan, and Italy will form an alliance.

The fact that this part is devoid of history is excellent, it means every time you play you can actually play a completely different game… something lacking from most of this genre.  The game does try to ‘force’ certain factions together by giving ideology bonuses.  As an example Republican Spain was a republic like France and because of this I was able to ally with them and help them kick the Fascists out of Spain.

I think the beauty of this game is its simplicity.  The tutorial for the game is total 30 minutes long (which isn’t long for this kind of game).  All of the units are simple, there’s only a hand full of resources and if you can’t make enough, you can buy them from other AI players.

The game is not without its weaknesses.  The biggest one of course is the graphics.  In a genre that sees little evolution it seems weird that there are no combat animations in the game.  Instead you get a “POW” logo appear over a battle and you are told your power and their power in the battle.

As well the UI for the game is pretty awful.  There are tones of menus to go through  and not everything is easily accessible.  Even figuring out where locations on the map are is kind of ridiculous… when they list every single province in the entire world.  It’s a little bit odd when Germany creates the independent country is Danzig…. and you have no idea where that is.

A completely missing part of the game is alliance management.  You should be able to vote on your whole alliance going to war.  Instead you vote on adding alliance members who are already at war to go to war.  If you go to war without voting members just leave.

It would have also been nice to see a League of Nations.  In the least war should have a reason.  If Germany only wants the Sudtenland I think Czechoslovakia should be allowed to freely give up one territory to avoid war.

The thing about this game is that it goes on sale for a measly $2 and is currently available for $5.

To me this game has a great place in the industry, it’s simple enough that newer players will just “get” it.  It is also an inexpensive way for a person to figure out whether or not they actually enjoy the grand strategy genre.

Steam Sales Review #71: Dragon Age Origins

I really felt like I needed to play a great game, so I installed the one that everyone was talking about…. years ago.  Dragon Age Origins gets some really weird mixed reactions.

On the one side you have conservative media who was upset that the video game featured sex… and then went on to feature gay sex.  You had people who were excited about an RPG with so many options.

And when it released everyone thought either the game was really stupid, or really amazing.

So I decided I’d buy Dragon Age: Ultimate for an extra $5 (sale price was $15).  I can say with some sort of honesty that I’ve been burned in the past by not getting all of the DLC.  That extra $5 could easily become a $40 purchase.  Ironically if you don’t buy ultimate you don’t even have a chance to buy DLC…. it’s all bundled in Ultimate.

How messed up is that?

So the game starts off with one of nine possible stories in which the first hour of your game is different and the remainder of the game is roughly the same…. so that means you get a whopping nine hours of extra gameplay from different introductions.  I made nine saves and got through every single starting area.  I was most impressed by the Male Dwarf Warrior… so that’s what I played as.

One of the problems with the game is actually the story telling at these introductions (and not so much beyond that).  A good story will use coincidences to get the hero in trouble, but not use coincidences to get him out of trouble.  This is just the case.  There is always a need to invent a reason for your hero to jump in on the journey.  It’s like trying to fit a round peg into a square works fine if you make the circle small enough.

This game is REALLY dialogue heavy.  You’ll spend most of your time talking to people.  Even purchasing and selling items brings up a round if dialogue.  Oddly everyone in the game speaks except for you.  It’s as if having a protagonist who actually speaks would just be weird.

Another odd thing is blood splatter.

If you are engaged in a fight and talk to someone closely after your army and face get this really odd pattern of blood on them.  I know it’s intended to be realistic… but why oh why 5 seconds later does this happen:

Magically clean, all is fine!  This blood splatter especially takes away from the dialogue when you have four adventures who all have blood on their face simultaneously.  It becomes really difficult to pay attention to dialogue being given from a guy who has blood just above his lips… I mean shouldn’t that blood have moved down into his mouth at some point…. that is if we’re trying to be realistic.

I’m pretty sure no game has ever done this and I’m pretty sure no game ever will.  It’s just really weird.

So eventually you will get a dog.  Of course as an owner of two dogs I know it doesn’t matter what I call him his name will always be…

It’s a weird part of this universe in which there are these war attack dogs.  It’s kind of similar in tone to the American dogs in Red Alert or the zombie hunting wiener dogs in World War Z (the book, not the movie).  There is one giant epic scene in which the first wave of the defense plan is to send a bunch of dogs at the enemy zombie like things.  It’s cool to watch

The game tries to hybridize RTS game play and RPG elements together.  You control four players who each have somewhere between 10-20 abilities.  So you’re constantly microing back and forth between various heroes trying to get as many abilities as possible.

The combat is fun, how the encounters happen is not.

Combat will engage and a bunch of people will mob you.

It all just happens so fast and having played this on the hardest difficulty, I can say it just isn’t very fun dying to random encounters.

I mean honestly Bioware, this is how it works.  The boss fights are super hard and challenging.  We’re all willing to re-load saves for that.  But a random encounter with a bunch of bandits…. that shouldn’t break the bank.

Unlike most people who’ve played this game… I just didn’t find it all that enjoyable.

The dialogue was good… but there just seemed to be too much… even for a Bioware game.  The combat was fun…. but harder difficulties make playing skillful pointless and depends on more random factors.

Having said that on easy difficulty the game is enjoyable and very playable.  The game is 60 hours of gameplay with all of the DLC and expansions adding another 60 hours.

Unfortunately it feels as though easy is the only really enjoyable difficulty and anyone who reviewed this game clearly only played it on easy.

If you’re looking for an easy game to playthrough this is your game… but anything higher in difficulty is just completely unplayable.