It's our job to review games but it doesn't always feel like a job. We love games. But titles like Maelstrom make it feel like a job. Like a crappy job. Like I'd rather be scrubbing toilets or cleaning bedpans or something. Maelstrom isn't the worst game I've played in my seven years at IGN, but it's one of the lamest. Whether it's the shoddy pathfinding or horrific voice-work, ill-planned action mode, or the insanely boring campaign, it doesn't really matter, you'll hate this game as much as I do.
Maelstrom finds the Earth ravaged by an apocalyptic flooding leaving most of the Earth underwater. What's left is scraps being fought over by the powerful Ascension corporation and scrappy Remnants who are mainly comprised of ex-military from the world's former governments. As you might expect, since most RTSs since StarCraft feel like they need at least three factions, a third alien faction falls to Earth and starts their own brand of trouble. Unfortunately, none of that trouble results in fun at any point during the game thanks to horrific controls and terrifyingly boring mission design.
Want to mass up as big an army as possible of semi-brain dead units and send it across the map while not giving a crap if you give the tactics a passing thought because there's no way in hell you won't succeed against woeful enemy AI? Maelstrom's got that.
One bright point is that the three factions have big enough differences to require at least a little thought, but the potential was there for so much more. The campaign just doesn't offer any missions to really highlight the advantages each side provides as should be the case when preparing players for skirmish and multiplayer.
If you need any other reasons to stay away, pathfinding is a good one. I'm going to guess that you're tired of the ridiculous pathfinding issues from the RTS games from early '00s. Prepare to have nightmarish flashbacks. Getting units to do anything properly is a chore and it's pretty clear that it's no fun when AI fights you every step of the way. I probably haven't seen pathfinding AI this bad since Real War came out in 2001. It's hard not laugh and cry at the same time when you see some of the in-game custcenes where the pathfinding AI can't get around itself.
Malestrom is a vortex of discarded dreams and hopeless imagination. While there are ideas having to do with terraforming and use of water that are intriguing at first, actually getting them to work efficiently or even properly is confounding. Considering the relative ease of terraforming in KD's last game Perimeter, this total lack of control or precision is kind of shocking. They're "innovative" use of the direct-control over heroes is more laughable than useable. While their shot range increases dramatically in third person, which makes taking down enemy units easier, there's nothing fun to mention. Heroes somehow manage to be both ponderous and twitchy at the same time while and having some of the lamest special abilities in the hero world to date.
The only thing that's barely above average in this game is the graphics engine, which when put up against recent games like Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes, or even War Front: Turning Point, still leaves a lot to be desired. The water found everywhere in this game is actually pretty decent. The world itself isn't horrific either but when more than a few units make it on screen or all of the effects have been turned up to their highest, the engine's lack of power comes crashing to the forefront as frame rates begin to fall.
What's even worse is that what is there for the engine hasn't been used to any great effect in the art style or animation. The art is basically non-style. It's that dumb mix between cartoony and realistic that never reaches greatness no matter how you look at it. Unit and weapon visual design is about as outrageously boring as the campaign missions. Yeah, some of the units transform into other units, but who cares when neither of those units looks particularly cool. Take the transforming mechs in particular. Watching them lumber around the field (when they're not bumping into each other) demonstrates what a sad state of affairs this game is really in. If you're going to put mechs in your game, they had better be animated cool enough to look powerful. Shake the ground when they walk. Settle for firing a powerful weapon. Kick up dust. Squash soldiers under their feet. Crash to the ground dramatically. Do something cool with them instead of a half-assed walk mixed with pew-pew lasers.
The pew-pew lasers aren't the only sad issue with the sound either. Just about every other battle sound shouts small budget. Units don't sound impressive when they move, don't have cool engine noises, weapons noises, or anything. Even worse are the voice-overs which have to be some of the worst in recent memory. It's not a good sign when you need to turn off the sound to stop ear bleeding. I should probably sue for physical and emotional damage after having to play Maelstrom for so many hours.
I've never met the guys from Ascaron Entertainment, but when I picture them in my head, they're all wearing eye patches and carrying parrots on their shoulders. That's because Ascaron's managed to create a mini-niche as pirates - err -- "free traders," through well-regarded games like the Patrician series and the pirate-themed Port Royale games. In recent days, Ascaron has tried to branch out from the hard-core strategy game world with fare like DarkStar One. That brings us to Tortuga: Two Treasures, a pirate-flavored action title that that barely keeps its head above water.
Tortuga: Two Treasures is the story of Captain Thomas "Hawk" Blythe, an 18th century pirate who (along with his girlfriend, a voodoo priestess named Sangua) sails under the flag of legendary pirate Edward "Blackbeard" Teach. When Hawk and Sangua embark on a quest for the legendary treasure of Henry Morgan, things rapidly go from bad to worse as Hawk endures the betrayal of his commander, the wrath of the British Navy, the attention of a lovely Governor's daughter with a ferocious temper and an ancient curse that involves a ghost ship chasing his ship to steal away the souls of his crew.
It's this storyline and the game's atmosphere that mark the title's greatest strength. Ascaron's spent a lot of virtual time in the 18th century while creating their previous games and their experience really shows in Tortuga: Two Treasures. The story and graphics were obviously heavily influenced by Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean movies (Hawk even bears a resemblance to Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow), but Tortuga manages to carve out its own place simply by throwing every venerable pirate movie trope they could find into the mix. Voodoo, zombies, flashing cutlasses, single-shot pistols, flaming rum, ships on fire, cursed treasures, stolen ships-of-the-line, ghost vessels, hidden maps and dueling femme fatales, they're all in here. If there's a pirate-movie clich� that Ascaron missed, it certainly wasn't from lack of trying.
The atmosphere is ably supported through good voice-work and music. While not the best voice-overs I've ever heard in a videogame, the voice talent for Hawk, Sangua, and Blackbeard all do excellent jobs reciting dialogue that is admittedly over the top. The game even manages to not butcher a New Orleans-style Voodoo priestess accent, something I've seen done on numerous occasions. Like the story itself, the music is reminiscent of the Disney films but is nonetheless an appealing and sprightly collection of hornpipe and accordion-heavy jigs and reels punctuated by more bombastic brass pieces during ship combat.
At first glance, Tortuga is graphically impressive. The game's ships are remarkably detailed with beautifully animated sails that the player can raise and lower and billow in the breeze. Sunsets and skies are breathtaking. Fire effects are cool and the crunching wood sounds during the destruction and sinking of an enemy vessel is very satisfying. There are even little crew members walking around on deck and during combat they can actually be blown into the water where they'll struggle until they're rescued or a cute little shark leaps out of the water and eats them, leaving only a red stain. The land graphics aren't quite up to the level of the naval stuff, but they're certainly attractive enough.
It isn't until one takes the helm of their first vessel that the game begins to break down, although it takes some time to realize this. Naval combat isn't terribly complicated and I genuinely had a good time for a while trying to get into the perfect position to blast enemies with a broadside. The game's ship combat has been sped up a lot when compared to its historical inspiration with impossibly agile ships bobbing and weaving around each other. As the game moves on, however, all the game's naval combat missions start to take on a depressing sameness. The game's AI isn't terribly smart and tends to run over reefs a lot. There are a few different types of ammunition that can be fired for different effects, but in practice all a player has to do is stock up on hull repair kits to be assured of victory.
Once in a while a so-called "stealth" mission will come up in which Hawk must navigate a tiny one-man skiff through narrow mine-infested waters or sneak by an enemy vessel. Unfortunately, decent stealth missions require the possibility of actually sneaking past somebody. In my experience, enemy ships have a circle of awareness around them that's unaffected by things like light and shadow. Cross over an arbitrary line and you're spotted which kind of takes all the fun out of sneaking around.
More problematic is the game's land-based combat. While I understand the difficulty in creating a decent sword-fighting system, the, Tortuga is button-mashing at its worst -- and not even multiple buttons! I went through the entire game doing nothing but spamming "attack" and occasionally using a healing potion or Voodoo sleeping powder, Movement control is atrocious and it's almost impossible to retreat because the player's attack direction is controlled by the camera facing. Soldiers also seem to have the same circle of enemy awareness as ships. Running away is almost completely useless in this game since you're guaranteed to add more enemies than you can handle.
Here's the weird thing, though -- the lousy sword fighting system isn't the game's worst sin. One of the reasons that pirates are so appealing is because they represent the fantasy of freedom from rules and strictures. A pirate vessel is a license to travel where you will and live life on your own terms. Why then would anyone choose to create a pirate game whose very structure is a straitjacket? Gameplay in Tortuga consists of simply finishing one pre-set mission after another in order to get to the next plot-point. You can sail wherever you want to go during a mission, but that's not going to accomplish anything. There are no towns to land in, no NPCs to talk to, no secrets to discover, no trade to engage in and until you sink the two frigates (or finish whatever the mission goal is) that the mission designers have designated, you're not going anywhere buccaneer. The only reason to pick up cargo from destroyed vessels at all is to use the gold in a between-mission "trade" store where you can buy healing potions, hull patches, ammo and a few other things that aren't very useful.
In the end Tortuga: Two Treasures isn't completely without value, but what makes it so disappointing is that it's from Ascaron. These are the developers who cut their teeth making trading games like Port Royale 2 and Patrician that defined the player's ability to carve their own destiny. For it to completely jettison everything that made it an interesting development house for a mediocre action-title-on-rails is just a shame.
Abandoning creativity and originality faster than Blackbeard apparently abandoned moral decency, Tortuga—Two Treasures instead wallows unapologetically in virtually every hackneyed pirate-ism to ever walk a gangplank. All the swordplay, all the gravely voiced "Avasts," all the looting and the pillaging and the rum-soaked yet somehow romanticized no-goodniks, all the peg legs and the ghostly references and the voodoo and the cannon battles. Even the main character, one Thomas "Hawk" Blythe, wears and bears all the typical swashbuckling-rapscallion-with-an-underlying-heart-of-gold traits and garb that have adorned most every pirate hero throughout the ages. That the action-adventure game around these oh-so-stereotypical trappings is structured to leave very little room for actual adventure outside the hand-holding linear storyboard somehow doesn't seem surprising.
Yet despite its obvious shortcomings, Tortuga does not completely suck. Though it certainly won't satisfy hardcore action or adventure veterans, newcomers to either genre and those who simply aren't as serious about the whole thing or just need a "gaming lite" diversion every now and then may well find it delivers just enough immersion and just enough fun to make its quasi-discounted price point palatable.
As with any adventure game, Tortuga features a plotline that's supposed to keep players pushing ever forward and onward to eventual conquest. Problem is, the nature of that plot remains a bit of a mystery throughout. If there's an all-encompassing goal to be found anywhere here, it's muddled amongst a ton of triviality that continually sidetracks any momentum that may have previously been built.
In fact, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that developer Ascaron Entertainment (also responsible for the much classier Dark Star One) appears to have added several seemingly disconnected after-the-fact missions here and there just to give the player more stuff to do on his way to the conclusion. And, ultimately, that's actually a good thing given the context, because the Tortuga script is otherwise so funneled and so structured—and so short—that you need all the play time you can get.
In Tortuga, there is no coloring outside the lines. Like a book, the game takes you along the route it charts, unceremoniously stopping you if you sail a ship or walk the hero outside the mildly confining and invisible physical boundaries, and forcing you to adhere strictly to the each new objective. Missions are generally quite limited—some less than a few minutes—and each is prefaced with a non-interactive FMV scene wherein the voice acting takes a backseat to the written script.
There are two distinct elements and environments to the game. Inarguably the most enjoyable and most sophisticated are those that involve sailing and ship-to-ship combat. It's hard to say Tortuga excels at aquatic endeavors because so many games do it better and with much greater complexity, but most will find life on the these not-so-high seas to be at least temporarily involving.
The key is in the visual details. Each ship—and there are an impressive variety of circa-1830 nautical vessels on display—is a beautiful little recreation that truly seems to be built of individual planks, billowing sails, and hundreds or thousands of feet of rigging. The sails are particularly cool—casting real time shadows across the deck and the other sails, fluttering about in the wind, and ready to be lowered or raised whenever you feel so inclined. A single button press raises some of the sails, and additional button presses raise more, eventually getting the ship to top speed.
On the decks, little seamen and seawomen scurry about hither and thither like they really have some job to do and some place to get to. Granted, their scurrying never really takes them anywhere, and their actions don't change whether their ship is under fine or merely calmly sailing from one port to another. Moreover, they won't climb the rigging, perch themselves in the crowsnest, or even sit behind a cannon when that cannon is fired. However, they do fly through the air nicely when the nearby vicinity is blown asunder, only to land in the translucent water as potential shark bait. And the sharks do come when humans are bobbing in the water, ready to gulp down those you don't rescue. When several crewmen are chomped at once, the resulting blood smear can grow quite large.
Indeed, the translucency of the water is a welcome perk. Through it, you can see reefs and high points in the ocean bottom that can damage a ship—an important facet considering you'll occasionally need to use these reefs as weapons to inflict harm upon the keels and rudders of trailing enemy vessels. The clarity of the water is so great in fact that you can usually view every spooky line of even previously sunken ships under the waves.
Spookier still are Tortuga's obligatory ghost ships. All clad in back and sporting tattered sails that drag in the wind, ghost ships are the seemingly unstoppable enemy from beyond the grave that literally sucks the souls out of your crewmen. A few too many sucked souls, and it's game over. You'll know when a ghost ship approaches because the music grows dark and horribly sinister and you'll see the accompanying gray-black fog bank. The first few times you encounter one of these schooners from hell, the effect is really quite chilling.
But you'll spend most of your time at sea battling human enemies. Sometimes it'll be ship-to-ship, sometimes your boat is pitted against an entire fleet, and still other times you'll be asked to pilot your speedy and maneuverable but frighteningly small skiff against whatever the game throws at you.
The most important weapon at your disposal is usually your own craftiness. For instance, by appearing as if you're fleeing, you can drag your rivals over hull-damaging reefs or into collisions with one of the many explosive barrels than float about like seaweed.
Even when you're duking it out mano-a-mano, you need to keep you wits. Your side-mounted cannons won't even hit the intended target unless you line yourself up broadside. Of course, your opponent is trying to do the same thing, so you really need to be careful that he doesn't take direct aim at you at the same time. Moreover, though regular cannonballs are inexhaustible, the most effective weapons—which are purchased via trading the gold you've recovered—are not. Thusly, you need to monitor your supply of explosive barrels and "plate breakers." One of the niftiest weapons isn't a weapon at all—it's giant octopus bait. Drop a little of this in the water, and you'll soon see enormous tentacles rising out of the water, surrounding the closest foe and keeping him helplessly lodged in one spot until you move in for the kill. Nice.
The game's damage modeling is impressive. Once a ship has taken a few hits, it becomes pockmarked with little holes across its hull and deck and even on a sail or two. With more punishment, it emits flames and smoke and looks considerably more disheveled. Near the end of its time, it's a flaming, scarred hulk just waiting to be put out of it misery. Nevertheless, after you've seen yourself through a few battles, it all becomes just a bit too easy. Simply, the weapon system design just doesn't offer enough manual control or realism for advanced players. Instead, the game ups the difficulty by throwing an increasing number of ships at you. And that's not a good way to keep the interest level high.
Perhaps even more irritating is the physics engine. If you've ever watched one of today's "tall ships" in action, you know how much work is involved and how much time it takes just to turn one of these babies around. Yet here, you can do a full 180, propel yourself from a standing start to top speed, or come to a complete stop with almost the same efficiency and proficiency of a jet-ski. And you can forget about waves or swells or wind speed or wind direction influencing anything, because none of it matters.
Tortuga's second element takes you completely away from the sea and plunks you instead on land, walking about and talking with various characters but mostly gutting virtually everyone you see. You'll find most of the cutscenes here, and you'll occasionally need to do something interesting that doesn't involve drawing your sword, such as garnering information or picking up a treasure chest and the power-ups it harbors. But it's mostly a ridiculously repetitive hack and slash fest.
Despite the fact that you'll learn new fighting moves as you go on, and despite the fact that you can perform defensive maneuvers as well as offensive, it matters not in the heat of battle. This is straight-up click-o-rama, and it just isn't a whole lot of fun. Indeed, you may find yourself in certain scenerios when you have a dozen or more baddies surrounding you and packing in so tightly that you can't even move. Still, you can claw yourself free of most of these just by sitting there, bored and uninterested, clicking your mouse button until it breaks.
The Tortuga environments and backdrops, for the most part, look pretty enough. At sea, some of the best moments are during the early evening, when the orange-hued clouds and landmasses look nothing short of dazzling. On land, the towns and villages you visit are satisfactorily ornate in their construction. Granted, you can't open doors or shatter windows or really have any sort of impact or interaction with the scenery, but that's the life of a bargain basement pirate.
As we alluded earlier, the voice acting throughout the many cutscenes is verging on criminally bad. The script is well-written enough, but there's very little enthusiasm in its delivery. The music is symphonic—as it should be—and it does tend to rise and fall along with the current level of drama. Ascaron clearly believes in the human voice as a key sound effect, and you'll hear lots of assorted bits of conversation, commands, and shrieks of terror throughout. And yes, with the exception of foppish Brit soldiers, almost everyone sounds like a scurvy dog.
A lot of action-RPGs that try to capitalize on successful Blizzard titles tend to trot out claims like "made by three guys who worked on the goatmen's running animation from Diablo II!" as a selling point. So it was a pleasant surprise that Titan Quest, a game that made no claim whatsoever in using anyone previously employed by Blizzard, turned out to be one of the better Diablo II clones in recent years. After a solid nine months of crafting, Iron Lore and THQ have just released the new expansion, Titan Quest: Immortal Throne. It might feel like a short bit of time to crank another product out, but it's actually one of those worthy expansions that doles out good content for newbies and veterans alike.
Tonight, We Dine In Hell!
TQ: IT adds an Act IV to the original game, so if you finished off the Titan Typhon, then your finished game is now at the city of Rhodes, where you're told by the ghost of Tiresias to seek out Medea (of Jason and the Argonauts fame). Thus begins your quest to take on Hades, who decided that the Underworld wasn't enough and he wants to run everything up top as well. Act IV consists of about eight areas, which took me around thirty to forty-five minutes apiece, depending on how many sidequests I did. All told, you should get a good ten-hour chunk of gameplay out of it.
Since it is Act IV, if you bought this together with the previous game, it'll be a while before you see the new content. TQ: IT is one of those expansions that has made numerous changes to the overall game, so while it may take you a while to finally go cross the river Styx and take on weird melinoes and spiders down below, Iron Lore has added a significant amount of stuff that affects the core game. This includes stuff like the new Dream Mastery (which, when paired with the eight Masteries in vanilla TQ, effectively makes for eight new character classes).
Iron Lore did a pretty darn good job in making Dream Mastery fun to use. While most of the original Masteries are pretty focused (i.e. Defense is for tanking, Earth is for nuking), Dream Mastery goes for the "does a little bit of everything, and kicks ass" line of thought. Notable Dream skills are the psionic burn, which adds a significant damage boost to your normal attack; Trances (Titan Quest speak for the Auras from Diablo II's Paladin) that can either boost healing, inflict damage, or even convert damage into health; a slick area-effect attack called Phantom Strike, and a pretty awesome pet (the Nightmare, a floating eye that can confuse monsters and give bonuses to all of your other pets).
Another boost to the Dream Mastery is its really, really pretty; the Distortion Wave has a great ripple effect in its wake and the waves of psionic energy that flow from your body during the Trance of Wrath are sublime. In short, Dream is a great companion Mastery to any of the original eight; the "problem" is that it's often too good. Some of the most powerful player characters are essentially "Dream Master with some points in another Mastery tree." I won't be surprised if Iron Lore ends up releasing a patch that tones down Dream's awesomeness.
Midas' Fat Wallet
One of the more noticeable "flaws" of TQ is the abundance of money. Going through the original game, it wouldn't be unusual to have millions of gold in your robe and nothing to spend it on. Well, now you've got two major classes of items to save for: Artifacts and Scrolls. Artifacts are new items that confer a whole lot of buffs and effects when equipped; an example of a "Greater Artifact" is the Eye of the Heavens, which grants cold and lightning resistances, adds cold and lightning damage, and a devastating tidal wave attack to go along with your normal one. Yea, that sounds awesome, but now you need to gather the appropriate reagents (usually three complete charms or relics) and then pay about 300,000 gold to craft it. Lesser Artifacts hurt the wallet less at around 75,000 each, and I haven't even seen a Divine Artifact, as those only show up on Epic or Legendary difficulty.
Scrolls are your tactical nukes: immensely powerful one-shot spells that also sell for a hefty price (80,000 is considered low-end). These range from fields of vampiric energy that sap any baddies for your benefit to a massive lightning storm that tears baddies apart to a giant Cyclops who plays Cash to your Tango for thirty seconds. On the flipside, it seems that Iron Lore optimized the boss battles for scroll usage, as many times I'd be fighting one of the new bosses (like Cerberus, the huge three-headed dog in Hades) and I'd need to use a scroll to put a dent in him. It felt like Iron Lore made boss difficulty a bit higher than it should've in order to justify the need for such powerful scrolls.
The rest of the changes include a bunch of little tweaks that make the original game significantly more playable. Trying to juggle potions, charms, and weapons around to fit some new loot was a total pain in the original TQ, so the new inventory auto-sort button is a godsend. Another big help in loot management is the new Caravan NPC, which is TQ-speak for Diablo II's item stash. What makes the Caravan superior to his DII ancestor is that not only does he carry your loot from town to town, but he has a separate compartment that all of your characters can access. So if you're playing a Conqueror and you find a totally sweet but flimsy robe, you can chuck it into the shared part of the Caravan and have your Evoker snap it up. While there are other tweaks such as an Attribute Undo and more Quick Slots for spells/skills/items, the final big change is the ability to just right-click on something to equip it. Yay!
Clashing Online
On its base level, online is an enjoyable romp, but the choice of an open (use characters from your hard drive), rather than closed (server-stored characters) system translates into scores of people using hacked characters and items (which isn't too bad in co-op play, but tends to make PvP an exercise in frustration). The community is pretty active, as there were a lot of servers with 4-player parties; the games I played tended to descend into contests of "who can spot the green (rare) item first and click it." The hacked characters plus the general negativity translated into me playing online only with buddies or to power-level (jumping into Act I with a level two character with other party members being levels 11, 14, and 48 got me up to level 12 in less than an hour).
While Titan Quest is still a pretty shameless clone of the Diablo II formula, it's a pretty good one, and this new expansion is one of those smart ones that add new content both for high-level and newer players. It might not feel wholly original, but it's a fine pastiche of comfortable formula fare (Greek mythology plus Diablo II), and hey, we're just happy to have a great Diablo-style clickfest that runs at a higher resolution than 800x600.
It takes a game like Titan Quest to make you not care very much that Blizzard still hasn't gotten around to making a new Diablo. C'est la vie. Take your time, Blizzard. We're having a great time with Titan Quest. And now we've got the Immortal Throne expansion, which doesn't just add new content after what used to be the final boss. It also gives us an incentive to start over from the beginning.
One of the first things you'll want to try after you install Immortal Throne is the new Dream mastery. This new "class", if you will, is a powerful jack-of-all-trades, with skills for all occasions. There's crowd control, a healing aura, melee attacks, and even mage-style long-range nuking powers. Most of them are accompanied with some nifty visuals that make use of transparency effects. Nothing says sleep and reality-bending powers like clear rippling shockwaves and bright blue sparks.
You can even make use of a rather unassuming little pet. The Nightmare may look like nothing more than a winged eyeball with a tail, but he's got considerable kick once you put a few skill points into him. There's a whole set of improvements for the Nightmare and even a buff for your other pets if you're a dual class with a wolf, lich, or earth elemental. Thematically, the dream mastery doesn't make much sense. But it's got enough power and flexibility to make anyone want to roll up a new character.
The problem with rolling up a new character is that you're going to have to play through all three acts of Titan Quest before you get to any of Immortal Throne's new areas. The new areas pick up right where Titan Quest left off. Once you've reached the end of Olympus, you step through a portal and you're back in...Greece. You're still only in Greece.
You'll begin in Rhodes. Say 'hi' if you see Kratos, who also starts God of War 2 in Rhodes. But this is the Rhodes to hell, at least eventually. It takes a while to get to the underworld, and there's a fair bit of mundane Greek filler before you get to the cool new stuff. Apparently, the road to Hades is paved with a lot of artwork that doesn't look that different from what you played in the original game. But about a third of the way in, you'll come to a shade-infested ruined town with a stairway behind it that leads conveniently to the underworld. Here, you'll find some of the expected trappings: the ferryman, Cerberus, and Orpheus, for instance.
But down here there are also some new demons, some impressive effects, and lots of harmless dead people aimlessly wandering around. You'll eventually get to some really funky locations and special effects. Immortal Throne starts out pretty mundane, but it eventually turns out to be quite a trip.
The core game has a few important changes. There are new money sinks, so you won't have that an extra million gold pieces weighing down your pockets any more. New artifacts are made from recipes, but for a steep cost in gold. These recipes also require some pretty esoteric ingredients, such as completed relics or charms. Some artifacts are even made from lesser artifacts. The result is an even more robust collecting game, partly maddening for how hard it is to complete anything worthwhile, but partly addicting for how easy it is to just keep playing in the hopes that you'll come across what you need. There are also expensive one-shot scrolls that are particularly useful during some of Titan Quest's boss battles at the harder levels. As far as money sinks go, these feel a bit tacked on, but they do the job. Overall, it's nice that money is useful again.
To help you with the collecting you'll inevitably be doing, there's a new caravan shopkeeper. He gives you considerably more storage space, which makes it feasible to play packrat in hopes of collecting the ingredients for artifact recipes. It also means you can keep collecting charms and relics without eating up precious backpack space, and therefore making trips back to town more frequent. The caravan shopkeeper also has the ability to store items and transfer them to your other characters. You no longer have to jump through hoops to get that sweet staff from your character who can't use it to your character who can.
Inventory management is also made easier with a new sort button that instantly repacks your inventory a few different ways. You won't have to tax your Tetris skills while you're playing Titan Quest. Remember trying to squeeze that 1x4 bow next to that 2x2 helmet and the 2x4 chest piece with a smattering of tiny potions and relics crammed into the gap? No more. The new loot sorting options lock out any inadvertent pick-ups when you're gathering treasure, so you won't accidentally trawl junk that you don't want. These two relatively minor features go a long way to making Titan Quest less tedious.
A new multiplayer lobby makes it easier to know what you're getting into when you join a multiplayer game. Unfortunately, there's still no provision for secure character storage, so Titan Quest is rife with cheating and maxed out characters. THQ has given us a great game, but it's too bad they haven't taken steps to protect it for those of us who want to play fair.
But at least they've given us enough new stuff to warrant another playthrough, plus the ten or so hours it'll take to go through hell. Not to mention the extra time you'll spend collecting ingredients for your artifacts. And then there's the time it'll take to level up a new character with Dream mastery. Plus the new characters you'll want to make to use the great loot you found that you can't use. Diablo 3? Never heard of it. We're too busy playing Titan Quest.
Iron Lore offers a number of cool new improvements and an exciting new act to their action RPG.
Last year's Titan Quest received many favorable comparisons to Diablo II and rightly so. With the title's emphasis on loads of enemies, loads of loot and loads of click-happy combat, Titan Quest was an excellent modern take on the format popularized by Blizzard's action RPG. Now the team at Iron Lore has graced us with an enjoyable expansion pack that adds tons of content and smoothes out some of the original. It still won't win over anyone who isn't a fan of the basic design but it's a great expansion for fans of the original.
Though we can hardly claim that Titan Quest was too short, Immortal Throne adds a rather sizeable chapter to the game. After the end of the original game, players will find the doorways to Hades open to them. There are several new large areas here, each of which is full of interesting quests and terrifying monsters. While many of the areas are basically dark caves, there are some bright spots here and there, particularly in Elysium, and some truly memorable vistas.
One of the coolest new additions is the new Dream mastery skill set. This is a very versatile set of skills that permits players to dish out lots of damage to groups of enemies. The Psionic attack is a great boost to your basic weapon attacks and the Distortion power is an awesome ranged attack that can hit multiple enemies at once. Teleportation powers add lots of mobility options and a range of new trance effects act as running buffs that can hurt your enemies and heal you.
The Dream master also gains access to a flying eye pet called the Nightmare that can be used in combat and can also boost the effectiveness of your other pets. (Some new pet targeting commands and stances for your pets give you additional control over large groups of pets.) Even better, the new skills come with plenty of great visuals: loads of smoky purple energy effects and flying crystals.
To balance out the increased challenge of the monsters and bosses you'll meet, there are a handful of new items that you can use. There's a new equipment slot on your character sheet that you can use to equip artifacts. These artifacts are immensely powerful items that you'll have to build yourself. You'll find recipes to make these items throughout the game. Each requires a number of completed charms to fabricate. Fortunately, there are now enchanters in many of the towns that allow you to pay to reclaim charms that you've installed on your items.
There are also a number of one-time use scrolls that basically act as super powers for the boss fights. Some are simple bombs that you can drop on enemies; others take the form of massive monsters that you can summon to fight for you for a short time. Though you'll find these scrolls and artifact recipes as loot from destroyed monsters, there are a number you can buy from the vendors in the towns.
The original game suffered quite a bit from poor inventory management. Characters frequently became burdened by the vast number of items picked up on the battlefield. This time around, you can turn off automatic item pick up. Pressing different keys allow you to see items filtered based on whether they're broken or magical. It adds an extra step to looting, but it sure cuts down on the trips back to the merchant to sell a sword for 3 gold.
Additionally, there are some cool inventory management options. The basic character inventory has an auto sort option so you can make more room for your loot as you make your way through the levels. There are now also caravans in most of the towns that act as safe deposit boxes for items you want to keep but aren't ready to use yet. Any item you place in a caravan will be available at any caravan throughout the game. What's even cooler is that you can transfer items from one of your characters to another through these caravans so, if you find an item that doesn't suit one of your characters but works for another you can switch them freely.
There are some minor multiplayer improvements in the game, mostly designed to make it easier to join games. There's still no fix unfortunately for the client side hacking that plagues many of the matches.
Whatever they're putting in the drinks at Telltale Games, we want some. Bearing in mind the rattling pace at which they're turning out hilarious, surreal Sam and Max episodes, it must be some killer cocktail of caffeine and hallucinogens. Episode 4 sees the series continuing with one of their best efforts so far: our dynamic duo of intrepid crimefighters make it all the way to the White House -- where Max gets elected president.
Improbable? You bet. This is Sam and Max, after all -- one's a six-foot talking dog and the other's a deranged, psychopathic lagomorph. Ideal presidential material, to be sure. In typical style, Max's campaign relies on character assassination, wanton destruction, entrapment and all manner of underhanded skullduggery, and if that sounds like a) fun and b) not so very different from real-life politicking, you've got the idea.
Abe Lincoln Must Die represents something of a new direction for this successful series. Max's journey to the Oval Office is accompanied by a generous helping of lightweight political satire. It's not overbearing or overly partisan -- unless, perhaps, you're a fan of the late (or, as it transpires, not so late) Abe Lincoln himself.
Not to say, though, that some familiar characters and concepts don't reappear. Yes, job-hopping Sybil has a new vocation. Two, in fact. Bosco, proprietor of Sam and Max's local grocery store, is now pretending to be Russian, and a major plot point involves acquiring enough cash to buy his latest invention. Again.
Adventure game veterans won't have too much difficulty with the puzzles. Simply choosing the options that lead to the greatest potential for mayhem, violence, and/or embarrassment of political figures generally leads to the right results. And no, it's not especially long, at about four hours, and only adds three new locations to the familiar street where Sam and Max's office is to be found.
But a special mention should go to the music, which complements the on-screen satire in a way previous episodes haven't done. Its lighthearted interpretations of stirring patriotic themes work a treat, and there's an absolutely hilarious, almost Pythonesque song and dance interlude that rates as one of the best sequences of the series to date.
Is it sinking into a rut? Sure -- but then, it's not a problem when Lost features the same characters week in, week out, is it? It's practically in the nature of episodic content to sink into ruts. This is only a problem when taken to excess, and if Sam and Max was really churning out the same old jokes over and over again, we'd mark it down more harshly. That's not the case, though. Episode 4's brand of observational satire is new territory for the series, and the game's anthropomorphic stars are very much at home with it.
Let's be clear up front… The Sims: Life Stories is not an expansion pack. The next one is The Sims 2: Seasons, which should ship to stores today.
Until now, we've only had two core Sims games on the PC: The Sims and The Sims 2. The Sims: Life Stories is a new, stand-alone game, and brand, that does not interact in any way with either of the other core games. The question, of course, is whether you need this one if you've got the others?
Life Stories is billed as "PC Laptop Friendly" on the front cover of the case. Indeed, The Sims has historically been one of the worst resource hogs outside of first-person shooters, especially when you throw in all the aforementioned expansion packs. The idea here is that Life Stories can be played on laptops and under-the-gaming-curve PCs, which ordinarily would be unable to handle the game.
Largely, this is true. We tried the game on a couple low-caliber machines, one laptop and one desktop, that barely met the minimum requirements. Even with full graphics options enabled, the game ran well, with only a few hitches here and there when many Sims were on the screen at once. This still holds even if you want to run the game in windowed mode (which is actually the default), allowing you to play the game while doing anything else on your computer, such as using instant messaging programs or writing something in MS Word (not that we'd ever encourage blowing off homework or office work for a game, of course).
Life Stories was built on the Sims 2 engine, which means a major performance boost is no small feat. Every object and character in the game is three-dimensional, unlike The Sims 1, where only the Sims themselves were three-dimensional (everything else was a two-dimensional sprite). Lighting has color to it, and emanates from the sources they should; that is, lamps seem to give off light, rather than rooms being magically bright just because a lamp object is there. Mirrors can reflect what's actually in the room, and shadows are more than serviceable. Free Will, the option that turns on artificial intelligence for your own Sims, actually seems improved over the core game. Yet, no slow down.
Gameplay wise, this the same Sims 2 you know and love. You'll control your Sims' every action, from washing dishes and watching TV to going to work and going to the toilet when appropriate. Adult Sims can have kids, and all Sims age, grow, and eventually die. You can trigger all sorts of nasty things to them in the process, with fires and the like, if your tendencies are more destructive than constructive. There is an array of objects and decorations to buy, and you can build your Sims' houses with a variety of wallpaper and carpet options. In this, nothing has changed between Life Stories and the core titles.
So far, so good. Once you get into the game itself and explore its depths, however, you'll notice the price paid for the performance boost. You can only have the default "Four Corners" neighborhood, whereas in The Sims 2, you can have literally infinite neighborhoods. The Four Corners neighborhood is quite a bit smaller than anything in The Sims 2, and the house lots are significantly smaller as well. (The largest Life Stories lot is roughly one-fourth the size of the largest Sims 2 lot.) You also only have a maximum of four family members, which is half the cap in Sims 2.
Options in Buy Mode and Build Mode are also limited. There is a selection of beds, tables, chairs, and so on that you can buy, but you'll run through them pretty quickly. It's tougher to make distinctive styles, and nearly impossible to open community lots (shops and parks) that have any variety in them whatsoever.
Life Stories derives its name from the fact that it features a mode similar to the console versions of The Sims. There are two "Life Stories," where you'll be in control of a single Sim and guide him or her through their time in Four Corners. Their stories are pulled right out of a typical afternoon soap opera; whether that's good or bad is up to you, but both have their share of plot twists and humor.
These stories function as extended tutorials, teaching you how to play by giving you simple goals. For example, as you control Riley in the first life story, you'll start by being told to get a job and start dating some of the guys around town. Eventually, you'll find that one of the guys has an ulterior motive; this leads to heartbreak and reconciliation, and eventually a husband with whom a child is brought into the Sim world. Along the way, the game will be there to advise you on how to complete goals; i.e., it will tell you to raise the relationship meter if you want to be able to successfully give a kiss to someone.
The stories are all right and function correctly. However, while they prove to be a nice distraction (and will take you the better part of a weekend to finish), there's just something intangible missing from the fact that you aren't making your own stories with your own characters. This means the Freeform play is definitely the main draw, but again, with the limited family and house sizes, it feels lacking.
The sounds of the game, from the trademark "Simlish" voices of the characters to the music on the radio, is the same as you've heard all along. If you have some MP3s on you computer, you can have the game play those instead. While the sounds are sufficient, you'll be wanting your own collection pretty quickly.
The Sims 2: Seasons is yet another expansion pack for The Sims 2, adding content and cost to Electronic Arts' wildly successful game about life. It includes weather, gardening, fishing, and a few new career paths. These features may not sound like much, but they're enough to make this one of the best expansion packs in the series.
The best of The Sims 2's expansion packs were the ones that changed life for all your sims. For instance, University added a new life phase, setting aside a stage of youth for sims to go to college. It was optional, but it was a great coming-of-age subgame. And even for sims who didn't go to college, University added a system of influence. Particularly charismatic sims were able to sway their friends and enemies.
But the weaker expansion packs only catered to specific sims. For instance, if you didn't want a sim who ran a business on the side, Open for Business didn't change much. If you didn't want your sim to invest in the considerable time sink of feeding and training a pet, the Pets expansion was superfluous. Somewhere in between was Night Life, which added an unnecessary layer to romantic interactions.
Fortunately, Seasons is one of the better expansion packs for The Sims 2, second only to University. By adding weather, the world around your sims comes alive. It's hard to appreciate until you see it in action, but the new weather is a thing of beauty. Rain, sun, and snow are such a significant part of the human condition that it's hard to imagine going back to the perpetual bland springtime of the previous Sims. What used to be a static outdoor plot is now a showcase for rain and snow.
Winters are spectacular, characterized by the lonely sound of cold wind and occasional, almost magical snowfalls. Sims churn up snow as they walk around outdoors. Snowballs and snow angels and snowmen abound. It's impossible not to be charmed by a visiting penguin having a conversation with a snowman you just made. And when spring arrives with its explosion of green and blooming flowers, Seasons really comes into its own. The Sims 2 has never looked better.
The weather is thoroughly integrated into the rest of The Sims 2. You can revisit your favorite locations -- the frat house in University, the clubs in Night Life, or just the community lots in the original game - and you'll see spring rain and winter snow. Watch your sims trudge off to class through deep snow or stop to play in the puddles during a storm. Whereas many of the expansion packs felt like side lots you might never visit, Seasons touches every part of the game.
The seasons aren't just cosmetic. Each sim has a little thermometer to show whether he's too hot or cold. During cold weather, your sims keep warm with a new outerwear costume. You can kit them out with scarves and heavy coats. They'll automatically put them on before they go outside or take them off before they come in. This does a great job of reinforcing the distinction between indoors and outdoors, something that's often minimized in The Sims 2, where you might as well keep your furniture outside if there's no room in your house.
Weather has other effects beyond temperature. Lighting might strike trees and burn them. Seasonal activities like catching fireflies in a jar let you add mood lighting to your houses. A snowman on the front lawn adds to the environmental appeal. You won't be able to fish in frozen ponds during the winter. What's more, the seasons reinforce one of the central concepts of The Sims 2: passing time. The addition of aging was one of the greatest innovations that The Sims 2 added, and now Seasons gives that process a powerful visual backdrop.
The new neighborhood of Riverblossom Hills will let you jump into several pre-made families. One family introduces you to the alternative lifestyle of PlantSims, which are Seasons' counterpart to the vampires in Nightlife and the alien hybrids in Strangetown. You can take control of Leod McGreggor if you want to immediately try an experienced gardener and fisherman.
Drawing from the talent system added in Open for Business, the Seasons expansion pack lets you earn talent badges for fishing and gardening. Think of these as special skills; unlike your sims' normal skills, such as cleaning, cooking, and logic, your talents unlock special abilities.
The fishing is a bit disappointing. Your sim just stands around at the side of a pond and eventually earns a fish that can be eaten or mounted as a trophy. But the gardening is a full-featured subgame. From the house building interface, you can plot out a garden, and even close it up in a greenhouse if you want to garden during the winter. Then, based on your sim's skill level, you can plant different crops. You can even earn feedback and cash awards by calling in a representative of the local gardening club.
With watering and weeding your plants, gardening is a real time sink. If you have the money, you can install sprinklers and hire a gardener. But it's one of the more gratifying time sinks thanks to the way the plants grow and your sims learn to produce new crops. In addition to improving your talent level, the payoff for gardening is the money you earn from selling crops and winning awards. You can also use the crops you grow and the fish you catch for cooking, which is one of the most fully developed crafting subgames in The Sims 2. By further fleshing out the cooking, gardening and fishing tie neatly into the rest of the game.
Finally, there are four new career paths with their own commuter vehicles, special events, and career rewards. There's nothing quite so tantalizing as seeing that magical idol in the career rewards screen. Maybe it's time to send a sim along the Adventurer career path to see what it does?
The main drawback to The Sims 2: Seasons is the price. Electronic Arts is hitting you up for another $30 for this new content. It's a bit ridiculous that playing The Complete Sims 2 will cost you about $200, but that's what happens when a big publisher stumbles onto a cash cow like The Sims. To get the most bang for your buck, we recommend The Sims 2 with University and Seasons. It's still not cheap, but it's the best way to see The Sims at its best.
Through rain, sleet, or snow, this latest expansion delivers.
I wonder what the record is for the most number of games of a given subject. Mega Man certainly had a lot of them, but if we count expansion packs, I think we've got a new record. The Sims 2: Seasons makes the fifth expansion to The Sims 2, and the twelfth overall including the original Sims. Throw in three core games and three stuff packs, you're up to eighteen separate titles for The Sims on the PC alone.
Last time around, we got pets added to the mix. The greatest problem with the Pets expansion pack was the lack of any core gameplay additions, instead focusing on the four-legged critters that really didn't add that much to your little Sims' lives. Electronic Arts has greatly (and we can't stress "greatly" enough) made up for that with Seasons. This is, indeed, a true expansion pack, successful in every sense of the word.
The Sims - the original - had its Sims in perpetual time, never aging. The Sims 2 introduced time, as Sims age and die of natural causes. However, this time passing went largely unnoticed, because aside from the sun setting at the appropriate time, nothing changed.
The biggest addition Seasons gives to your families is the passage of time, and almost everything else in the game relates to it. Sims now suffer temperatures, which can cause sunburns if it's too hot or illness if it's too cold. Sims now, when they change clothes, change their temperature tolerances. A Sim in his underwear or swimwear whilst in the dead of winter will not be happy for very long. Leave a Sim kid out there in the same situation, and social services will come along and haul him away. A new clothing type, Outerwear, protects your Sims from the elements.
In addition to temperature, you'll see visual indications as well. Weather is finally a part of the game, and you'll see rain and snow fall in their appropriate seasons. Snow actually sticks to the ground and, in the case of a house without roofs, furniture and objects. Download the tree, kinara, and menorah from the official Sims 2 website, and you'll really be able to set up some Christmas, Kwanza, and Chanukah memories.
Speaking of objects, there are plenty of new ones, both for homes and the community. You can set up skating rinks, both of the ice and roller variety; if you have Open for Business as well, you can have a family own one of these places as well.
As always, the game is very customizable. You can set the seasons and in what order they occur. If you just hate autumn for some reason, you can trade it out for something else. You must have four, but you can have two periods of winter and two periods of spring, for example. This works well for neighborhoods that are in the desert, for example, which wouldn't see anything but summer all year round.
EA added farming and fishing, which can turn into money or food. Farming is pretty deep in and of itself, as you can have your Sims join the new Garden Club. Sims can turn into Leaf Sims if they garden enough, which gives them odd farming-type abilities and a slick green skin tone. They can be cured of this if it's not easy being green, but a little variety in the neighborhood never hurt. Greenhouses let you farm all year, as well as giving the lot a cool look. Produce can be blended together to make potions that can give your Sims a bit of a boost as well.
As if this all wasn't enough, there's a ton of little additions that would go unnoticed by anyone but longtime Sim fans. Six new careers have been added, giving your Sims the ability to dip into journalism, law, music, adventuring, education, or - our personal favorite - professional gamer. (The first time I saw that the starting level of the Gamer Career Track was "Noob," I smiled.) Other little things, like new social activities and the ability to put away leftovers in the fridge, deepen the experience further.
Everything new in Seasons is easy to grasp right out of the box. Numerically, Seasons doesn't add a tremendous number of objects; however, it will take you many hours to see and do everything, and even then, you'll want more.
The graphics and sound are largely unchanged, but that's not surprising. If you've used your MP3 collection for the Sim radio, you won't have any reason to give it up. Graphically, while the enhanced weather effects are slick, nothing has been overhauled. Par for the course, really: the gameplay additions are tremendous, but everything else? Not so much.
Borrowing heavily from games like Counter-Strike and the Battlefield series, K2 Networks' War Rock delivers an online first person shooter that's hampered by unfortunate technical issues. Across its three game modes, players will split into two teams, either the Derbaran Military or NIU forces. Neither side has any real differences in terms of weapon loadout, but they do have differently colored uniforms and, depending on the game mode, different objectives. Though War Rock isn't coated in the most polished graphical luster and can't boast the best sound effects, there's a decent amount of game here, as well as a persistent online statistic system.
The game's five character classes all have their own uses, though their effectiveness largely depends on what mode you're playing. Medics, for instance, are well suited for the Counter-Strike style Close Quarters Combat mode, since they can heal themselves and teammates. Though they can't use the heavier, more powerful guns in the game, they can hold their own with MP5s. It's unfortunate that the developers decided to go with a syringe type health booster, since it requires you to be right next to a teammate to perform a heal and often results in an unintended self-heal. Had a health pack system like that in Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory been used, this awkwardness could have been avoided.
Then there's an engineer who carries around a repair wrench, most useful in the Battlefield-style Battle Group mode, or the slightly smaller scale Urban Ops mode in which vehicles and turrets are occasionally present. The heavy troopers, who can carry mines along with heavy machine guns and rocket launches, also tend to be more effective when vehicles are running around. The two remaining classes, snipers and assault soldiers, are effective across all game modes, one providing accurate fire from long distances and the other capable of charging into battle with assault rifles.
All classes have a standard set of starting weapons and items. Generally, you'll get a primary weapon, sidearm, grenade, bare fists, and a class-specific item. By competing in online matches, you'll earn experience to level up your profile and earn War Rock's form of currency, called Dinar. Eventually, you'll be able to use Dinar in the game's Item Shop to "lease" new, more powerful weaponry and items like a Desert Eagle, FAMAS, AWM Sniper Rifle, Winchester Shotgun, and M134 Minigun. For the more deadly weapon models, you'll need to meet a level requirement as well as a Dinar total. Even after dumping a ton of cash into leasing a new weapon, you can't retain them for more than 30 days, which is a strange design decision. Pumping in all that time to grind enough Dinar and experience for that shiny new Colt M4 only to have it taken away a month later seems unfair, but that's how it is in War Rock.
Once you're happy with your loadout and hop into a game, you'll see it handles itself slightly differently from a lot of other shooters out there. First off, you can roll forward, back, or to the side, accomplished by hitting Shift. This, in combination with sprinting, can help to keep your fragile self from getting punctured by too many lead pieces, and is regulated by a stamina bar. War Rock also gives you the ability to, like in Battlefield, quickly drop to a prone position, resulting in many firefights being decided by who can fall down and center their fire on their opponent the fastest. Since your character can't absorb all that much damage and headshots are pretty easy to pull off, toe to toe battles tend to be quick. In that sense, the game demands a solid set of twitch skills for players to be successful and top the server lists.
Each of the game's three modes offer one sub-mode. In Close Quarters Combat, up to 16 players can compete in "explosive" mode, where one side tries to plant and detonate a bomb while the other must defuse it. Urban Ops and Battle Group, which have player caps of 24 and 32 respectively, offer deathmatch modes, though in Battle Group a Battlefield-style flag captures is implemented to open up more convenient spawn points. In each mode there are a good number of maps available, though people seem to prefer specific ones. Marien seems to be the "de_dust" of War Rock's Close Quarters Combat right now, mostly because it offers a nice mix of cover spots and choke points through which players coagulate, filter, and fight.
Borrowing heavily from games like Counter-Strike and the Battlefield series, K2 Networks' War Rock delivers an online first person shooter that's hampered by unfortunate technical issues. Across its three game modes, players will split into two teams, either the Derbaran Military or NIU forces. Neither side has any real differences in terms of weapon loadout, but they do have differently colored uniforms and, depending on the game mode, different objectives. Though War Rock isn't coated in the most polished graphical luster and can't boast the best sound effects, there's a decent amount of game here, as well as a persistent online statistic system.
The game's five character classes all have their own uses, though their effectiveness largely depends on what mode you're playing. Medics, for instance, are well suited for the Counter-Strike style Close Quarters Combat mode, since they can heal themselves and teammates. Though they can't use the heavier, more powerful guns in the game, they can hold their own with MP5s. It's unfortunate that the developers decided to go with a syringe type health booster, since it requires you to be right next to a teammate to perform a heal and often results in an unintended self-heal. Had a health pack system like that in Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory been used, this awkwardness could have been avoided.
Then there's an engineer who carries around a repair wrench, most useful in the Battlefield-style Battle Group mode, or the slightly smaller scale Urban Ops mode in which vehicles and turrets are occasionally present. The heavy troopers, who can carry mines along with heavy machine guns and rocket launches, also tend to be more effective when vehicles are running around. The two remaining classes, snipers and assault soldiers, are effective across all game modes, one providing accurate fire from long distances and the other capable of charging into battle with assault rifles.
All classes have a standard set of starting weapons and items. Generally, you'll get a primary weapon, sidearm, grenade, bare fists, and a class-specific item. By competing in online matches, you'll earn experience to level up your profile and earn War Rock's form of currency, called Dinar. Eventually, you'll be able to use Dinar in the game's Item Shop to "lease" new, more powerful weaponry and items like a Desert Eagle, FAMAS, AWM Sniper Rifle, Winchester Shotgun, and M134 Minigun. For the more deadly weapon models, you'll need to meet a level requirement as well as a Dinar total. Even after dumping a ton of cash into leasing a new weapon, you can't retain them for more than 30 days, which is a strange design decision. Pumping in all that time to grind enough Dinar and experience for that shiny new Colt M4 only to have it taken away a month later seems unfair, but that's how it is in War Rock.
Once you're happy with your loadout and hop into a game, you'll see it handles itself slightly differently from a lot of other shooters out there. First off, you can roll forward, back, or to the side, accomplished by hitting Shift. This, in combination with sprinting, can help to keep your fragile self from getting punctured by too many lead pieces, and is regulated by a stamina bar. War Rock also gives you the ability to, like in Battlefield, quickly drop to a prone position, resulting in many firefights being decided by who can fall down and center their fire on their opponent the fastest. Since your character can't absorb all that much damage and headshots are pretty easy to pull off, toe to toe battles tend to be quick. In that sense, the game demands a solid set of twitch skills for players to be successful and top the server lists.
Each of the game's three modes offer one sub-mode. In Close Quarters Combat, up to 16 players can compete in "explosive" mode, where one side tries to plant and detonate a bomb while the other must defuse it. Urban Ops and Battle Group, which have player caps of 24 and 32 respectively, offer deathmatch modes, though in Battle Group a Battlefield-style flag captures is implemented to open up more convenient spawn points. In each mode there are a good number of maps available, though people seem to prefer specific ones. Marien seems to be the "de_dust" of War Rock's Close Quarters Combat right now, mostly because it offers a nice mix of cover spots and choke points through which players coagulate, filter, and fight.
At first glance, you might figure War Front for another one of those sleepy World War II real time strategy games. They usually have a German word in the title, because many of them were made by Germans. But don't be fooled. First of all, these are Hungarians. Second of all, what you're getting here is a surprisingly spirited entry into the genre of Command & Conquer: Generals clones.
It's got all the necessary ingredients: splashy graphics, hearty sound, lots of showy effects, trees that get knocked over by tanks, explodable buildings, and a lively over-the-top sensibility. It follows the three rules of any good action RTS: destruction, destruction, destruction. Don't get too attached to anything, because it's going to be easily countered by something else, and the odds are it's going to blow up real good.
And just to show that this isn't a sleepy WWII game, War Front is set in an alternate history. The point of this concept isn't just that the de-Hitler-ized Germans and Allies banded together to beat the evil Soviets. The more relevant historical twist is that everyone in World War II invented some wacky weapons. The Allies invented earthquake bombs and shield generators, the Soviets invented underground personnel carriers and freeze rays, and the Germans invented mechs and battle zeppelins. That last part bears repeating: battle zeppelins. Not since Red Alert 2 have you seen such glorious battle zeppelins. These sorts of silly toys give War Front a sense of character, even if it does feel freely borrowed.
Given that it plays so fast and loose, it's a bit disappointing that the three sides aren't more distinct. There is, of course, unique artwork for everyone's soldiers and vehicles, including renditions of iconic hardware like the Me-262 jet, Tiger tanks, Shermans, and Katyusha rocket launchers. And there are a few broad differences among the sides. The Allies don't need power, the Soviets specialize in infantry, and the Germans have the heavy tanks. Plus, in case you've forgotten, the Germans get battle zeppelins.
But aside from the occasional unique units, War Front's three sides have a lot in common. Everyone gets light, medium, and heavy tanks; everyone has some sort of ambush infantry ability; everyone has a few similar superpowers. Everyone tends to play alike. Mine your ore, build your power stations, crank out a bunch of units, throw them at the enemy, and enjoy the fireworks. And what fireworks they are. This is a lovely graphics engine, doing day, night, rain, snow, and nukes.
Each side also has heroes with special powers you can level for a touch of Warcraft III styled RPGing. A few units have special powers. There are tech upgrades to boost damage or increase armor. A tech center lets everyone choose among three "war plans". But these sorts of nuances are easily lost in the shuffle. In many ways, the pace in War Front is too hectic to appreciate what's going on. You're just watching the delicate infantry, paper tanks, and balsa wood planes killing and being killed.
A system of effective counters keeps the action fast and constantly changing. You might have a swarm of infantry suddenly killed by rockets, so you build a few tanks to take out his rockets, so he builds AT emplacements to stop your tanks, so you bomb them with aircraft, so he builds fighters to shoot your strike planes down, so you send in anti-aircraft trucks to take out his fighters, and so on. It's a lot of back-and-forth that doesn't necessarily come down to which player is making the most money. Again, the three rules of an action RTS: destruction, destruction, destruction.
There are a few interface problems. For instance, the units don't stand out very well on the minimap, which makes it hard to keep an eye on the rest of the battle outside your immediate view. Many important features and commands are undocumented. The developers seemed to want you to jump into gun emplacements and actually shoot at the enemy (Could this have anything to do with the fact that one of their upcoming projects, Field Ops, is an RTS/shooter combo?). This is hardly worth the bother and the graphics and frame rate don't seem to hold up at this level.
But for the most part, it seems like the developers have learned from the mistakes made by similarly fast and loose RTSs. War Front gives you helpful aids like being able to set units into formations, shift-queuing orders, and production loops that let you automate your factories. You can even assign a number to a factory so that every unit produced there will be selected when you press that key. You can see exactly how many of which units you have selected, and you can easily tab your way through them to activate special powers or separate them out.
There's a pair of goofy campaigns, which keep you engaged by letting you cultivate and keep "core units". There are also skirmishes against a challenging AI, made a bit more manageable by a variable speed (it's undocumented, but you can change the speed by pressing the + and - keys on the keypad).
Like most RTSs, the multiplayer support is where War Front really comes into its own. There is a wide variety of settings for different matches, including options for random goodie crates dropping around the map, random weather effects that shut down certain superpowers, and a day/night cycle. You can play a standard match to wipe out the other players, but there's also a conquest mode you can win by occupying multiple capture zones at once.
A secret objective mode throws unpredictability into the victory conditions. As soon as the game begins, everyone is given a secret objective. These are things like 'Earn x dollars', 'Destroy all of player x's buildings', or 'Send x number of specific units into the center of the map all at once'. When a player gets half way towards his secret objective, everyone else gets a message that essentially clues them into what that player is trying to do. This is a great change of pace that more games should emulate.
It's a shame that War Front is being released simultaneous with Supreme Commander, and barely a month before Command and Conquer 3. This is a worthwhile RTS that deserves more than to be upstaged by higher profile games, neither of which has battle zeppelins.
Though BioWare managed to set the standard for PC RPGs with their amazing Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights series, the Canadian developer has, over the last few years, been drawn towards the Xbox as the platform of choice for their efforts. And just as they raised the bar for PC RPG developers, the studio has broken new ground in the console world with Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire and the upcoming Mass Effect. While PC gamers might be understandably bitter about BioWare's new console focus, we can take some consolation in the fact that the games eventually make their way back to the platform that started it all, the PC.
The PC version of Jade Empire is almost exactly identical to the Xbox version, which is to say, it's pretty awesome. The same great story and great action have been preserved here and it's all rendered with BioWare's signature polish and sophistication. The PC version does have a few new additions. To begin with, high end PCs will allow for much better graphics and considerably shorter load times. (The twenty or so loading screens that you encounter in the Arena will definitely make this apparent.) Two extra combat styles have also been included, allowing the player even more options when those pesky horse demons just won't listen to reason.
Jade Empire plays out over the course of some 20-24 hours and embraces a wide variety of themes and types from Asian history and mythology. Starting as a young but promising student in a provincial martial arts school (complete with a wise old master and numerous other characters from martial arts movies), the player will be thrown into a story involving a mysterious drought, imperial bureaucracy, palace intrigue, drunken masters, stray ghosts and dozens of other amazing elements. We don't want to give any of the specifics away, but the story is instantly captivating with enough twists and surprises to sustain your interest all the way through to the end.
Unlike a "go where you will" game like Oblivion, Jade Empire has a very linear and focused story. Players are taken from point A to point B with very little opportunity for side trips or a shuffling of destinations. While it can feel somewhat restrained, particularly for Elder Scrolls fans, it allows the designers to script a story that focuses more on the main character than on the world around them. As such, players of Jade Empire will feel like much more of a part of the story; they just won't feel like they have any narrative freedom.
Happily, they will have a fair degree of moral freedom. As with Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire continually asks the player to weight their actions and conversations towards one of two ethical extremes. Players who believe in helping the NPCs of Jade Empire will embrace the Open Palm philosophy while those who prefer to let these NPCs fend for themselves (or worse yet, actually take advantage of the helpless) will drift more towards the Closed Fist side of the spectrum. Though not technically presented as "good" or "evil" in the context of the game, it pretty much amounts to the same thing. Adherence to one alignment over the other rewards the player not only with practical rewards like money but also with new story elements and fighting styles.
It's a very satisfying system because the choices for either side are usually reasonable and compelling. We'll admit that the Closed Fist choices are a bit obnoxious at times (or openly repugnant) but that's part of the fun of roleplaying. It is, in fact, pretty much the entirety of the game's roleplaying element. There are so many of these ethical decisions throughout the game that it's very easy for a player to switch from one extreme to the other during the course of the game. Similarly, it's entirely possible for a player to occasionally make decisions contrary to their overall philosophy without completely compromising their identity.
Though the ethical choices are the main thrust of the actual roleplaying you'll find in this game, there are a few other touches that add to the RPG feel. Characters will level up and earn points to spend on their basic attributes and combat styles. The attributes are remarkably simple. Body determines your health, Chi powers certain magic abilities and Focus lets you use weapon styles or enter slow motion. These three contribute to derived stats that can occasionally influence certain conversations but it's still a very stripped down version of the system used in other RPGs.
On the other side, leveling up combat styles allows for more customization of your character and helps define who they are in the world. Whether you decide to focus on a spectacular weapon style, fling fireballs from your hands or transform into a giant demon and start ripping arms off, Jade Empire has a combat style that's just right for you. And since some styles use Chi and some use Focus and since some enemies are resistant to a whole general category of styles, you'll want to focus on at least two or three different styles if you want to stay competitive.
Unfortunately, you'll have to make that decision relatively early and you won't have a chance to pull your upgrade points out and spend them elsewhere (like you can in Marvel Ultimate Alliance). It's not a huge problem because all of the fighting styles seem equally effective. Still, it makes sense to maximize the potential of a few fighting styles rather than opting for a minor boost to several.
The two new styles in the game, Viper and Iron Palm, are well designed and fit in well with the existing styles. Personally, we found the Iron Palm style to be a bit slow when fighting against spellcasters or enemies who used rapid attacks, but it certainly does a lot of damage. The Viper style is almost the exact opposite, letting players launch a flurry of weaker blows that do poison damage over time. Of course, having two extra styles among the dozens of existing styles isn't really that exciting, but it's worth checking the two new ones out. Unfortunately, they're not available until near the end of Act 3 and are exclusive to your alignment at that time. If you're good, you get the Iron Palm, if you're bad, you get the Viper.
It's a good thing that the different styles exist because, individually, they don't offer much variety. Each has a fast attack, a heavy attack and an area attack but there are no complicated grabs or counters to use here. Even with switching back and forth between the styles, the moves can start to get a bit repetitious. There is the option to use support styles to initiate dramatic harmonic combos to help break things up a bit -- sometimes literally. On the plus side, the mouse and keyboard controls make it much easier than it is on a gamepad to switch back and forth from one style to another.
In fact, this is one of the rare cases where the mouse and keyboard controls are actually better than those on the Xbox's gamepad. Using the mouse to move the camera and the WASD setup to move, the game is remarkably easy to control. A simple targeting system lets you stay focused on your enemy in combat, letting you move easily from side to side as you fight. The mouse cursor works beautifully in the interface as well, letting you navigate menus and conversations with ease. If you happen to prefer using a gamepad, the game's support is, not surprisingly, flawless.
The AI's a bit better this time around but, still, the game doesn't provide much of a challenge at the standard difficulty level. If you're diligent in seeking out missions and maximize your experience points, you'll find it easy enough to keep up with the enemies. It's true that boss fights will require a bit more finesse but the rank and file enemies can usually be dispatched with a simple (but satisfying) round of button mashing.
We saw more enemies in the PC version than we remember from the Xbox version but, in keeping with the classic martial arts movie tradition, they still prefer to attack you in groups, so things don't get too overwhelming. In addition to the pirates, ghosts, monks and giant frogs you'll also get to fight the Rhino Demon, an entirely new creature designed just for the PC version. He looks amazing and, quite frankly, much tougher than he is.
The final piece of the gameplay puzzle is the strange little flying sequences between missions. As you move from one location to another, you'll have the option to take part in 1942-style scrolling shooter. While it makes a nice diversion from the story, it's just that -- a diversion. After building up this highly detailed, atmospheric world of Chinese myths and martial arts, the developers send you off on an arcade shooter mission. For us, it really kills the mood and just reminds you that you're just playing a video game. At least they're not as long as the Gummi Ship sequences in Kingdom Hearts.
Unrestrained by the Xbox's graphical capabilities, Jade Empire looks freaking amazing. The character models are full of life and personality, from the way their faces move when they speak to the cinematic fight choreography. Combat moves are all fluid and give a real sense of contact between opponents. Glowing trails, fancy particles and a host of other effects add an element of fantasy to the fights here and really ratchet up the excitement. The camera manages to capture the action fairly well. We had some issues where the camera would bump into objects from time to time but there were relatively rare.
The environments are no less impressive. While the overall design of the levels was good in the Xbox version, there are so many more detailed textures here and so many great atmospheric effects that the whole world seems to come to life before you. Sun-dappled forests, colorful city streets, shadowy caves and a host of other locations provide a thrilling backdrop to your exploits and help to give the game a strong sense of place.
Unfortunately, the game also makes use of some strangely grainy FMV cutscenes. Meant to highlight dramatic moments in the narrative, they just look awkward when placed next to the in-engine sequences. They don't spring up all that often but when they do they're really quite jarring.
The sounds are almost as good as the visuals. The authentic music and weighty combat effects are definitely solid and support the action of the game wonderfully. Most impressive however, is the great amount and vast quantity of voice acting. There's a lot of dialogue in this game and it's all done wonderfully, making it one of the few RPGs where you'll actually want to turn off the subtitles just so you can appreciate the acting. The few small cameos by well known actors are a nice touch as well.
The long anticipated unofficial follow up to Cavedog's Total Annihilation is finally upon us, and it turns out to be a truly mammoth real-time strategy experience. We've had the final build in the office for a few weeks now, and have been regularly eschewing normal work duties to get in just one more skirmish. Along with Supreme Commander's dizzying depth and balancing comes a significant learning curve, something that may unfortunately turn away the casual gamer. If you're an RTS fan at all, you really owe it to yourself to check out the strategic juggernaut Gas Powered Games has created. Though its single player campaign is far from spectacular, the multiplayer and skirmish modes in Supreme Commander deliver some of the deepest, most refined RTS gameplay in recent memory.
If you've played the demo released a few weeks back, you'll know what you're in for. Gas Powered Games created a mob of units for each of the game's three factions, the Cybran, United Earth Federation, and Aeon. Though each may seem similar at the lowest technology levels, there still exist a number of differences. As players proceed through up to the maximum tech level 3 (T3) and beyond to the experimental units, more variety becomes apparent. A few Aeon units can hover, for instance, letting them traverse the watery canals snaking through many of Supreme Commander's maps. The Cybran get T2 naval units that can sprout legs and march across land, albeit extremely slowly. The UEF get one of the most powerful non-experimental units, the T3 gunships, which boast devastating air-to-ground attacks as well as anti-air defenses. Despite their ferocity on the battlefield, can easily be wiped out by a force of T3 air superiority fighters or a battery of SAM launchers.
Even though there's an effective defense for every attack, including against nukes, the only way you're going to make proper use of them is to gather intelligence. A victory in Supreme Commander isn't all about massing giant forces to toss at your enemy, it's much more about precise reconnaissance and intelligent strategic planning. Given the staggering scope of the abilities of units, artillery batteries, point defenses, missile launchers, naval units, and experimental monstrosities, knowing exactly where your opponent is and what he or she is up to is of much more importance than in less sophisticated RTS games.
That being said, it's not like creating a sprawling troupe of units to mount an attack is a bad idea. It's actually highly entertaining, and one of the great payoffs of this game to see the fruits of all your technology upgrades, delicate resource management, and build queuing mature into a rumbling mass of robotic assault bots, boats, and planes moving with the singular purpose of obliterating your enemy. Getting to that point is a beast of a process, however, something the hardcore strategy gamers will be sure to appreciate, whereas more casual players might not be willing to invest the time.
Resource management, for instance, approaches near scientific heights when trying to balance rates of mass and energy accumulation, along with adjusting your storage capacity for each. At a game's outset you'll be striving to capture as many mass extraction points as possible, while setting up a big energy surplus. As T3 is reached, your advanced engineer units can set up power plants that yield much more significant energy bonuses, and can also construct what are known as mass fabricators that convert energy to mass. Since each unit in the game requires energy to run and mass to construct, keeping your resource reserves properly stocked is vital for producing your attack and defense forces in a timely fashion. It means nothing if you've pumped all your resources into erecting a T3 artillery station when it causes everything else in your base to build five times more slowly.
With such a focus on base building and handling resources, you're going to need some especially utilitarian construction units. Supreme Commander's engineers fill that role very well. Available in T1, T2, and T3 versions, every engineer has a vast range of abilities and build options. They can reclaim trees or other debris littered around maps, repair your forces, capture enemy structures and units, speed up build times at the expense of extra resources, and accelerate the rate of tactical and strategic missile construction and technology upgrades. Given such a broad functionality, these units would be unmanageable without an intuitive, dynamic interface to govern their actions. Again, Supreme Commander does not disappoint.
Effectively controlling the battlefield is achieved chiefly through the all-powerful Shift key. By pressing and holding, players can queue up unit movements, build orders, patrol waypoints, and combine move and attack orders. Should you decide to change movement patterns or build locations while the action is already underway, hitting shift again brings up an interface where you can drag around the waypoints as you see fit. Every unit construction factory can be given build order while it's still being built. Even after telling it to upgrade to the next technology level, you'll be presented with the next set of build options so you don't have to keep checking back in. Different types and amounts of units can be queued in the same construction facility, and a repeat build order function lets you move on to something else once you're happy with a factory's production pattern. Since you'll find a significant amount of water and hilly terrain across the game's many maps, there's an unusual emphasis on air transports. Thankfully these units can be set along ferry routes, where they'll automatically scoop up waiting units and drop them off wherever you so designate. If you set a factory waypoint to the starting point of the ferry route, units will automatically be ferried as soon as they roll or crawl off the production line.
These kinds of accommodations for unit production and defense construction automation become increasingly important as the map size increases. Since you can build a base anywhere on a map, which you should certainly be doing with a lot of available terrain, you'll need to keep track of a near overwhelming amount of information. For anyone thinking Supreme Commander's scale and powerful experimental units are the finale of any game experience, you're wrong. An Aeon Czar, a giant flying saucer with a devastating air to ground laser, can be taken out in seconds with adequate SAM defenses. With proper base shielding, T2 point defenses, and a supporting force of T3 assault bots and artillery, nearly any ground based attack can be pushed back, assuming the Cybran Monkeylord or Aeon Colossus doesn't get close enough to disintegrate everything with their sweeping energy beams. Since base construction and defense is just as important as what kind of assault units you're building, a multi-pronged attack is often most effective. This means sending in the land force only to distract your opponent from the massive battleships moving into the other side. It can mean sending in a squadron of interceptor planes to divert SAM defenses from your T3 bombers arriving to rip up resource production farms. It's a game that forces you to consider nearly every unit available, which is in large part why this game's learning curve is so high, assuming you never experienced Total Annihilation.
Playing skirmishes against the AI and multiplayer matches on large maps can easily take over two hours, assuming you know what you're doing. With eight players on the game's largest battlefields, you could very well be in for a four hour long or more experience. In case the notion of frantically strategizing for such an extended period of time makes you want to take a nap, it's entirely possible to pull off a game in between a half and full hour on the smaller maps, so Supreme Commander in that sense offers something for everyone.
As excellent as Supreme Commander online is, the single player campaigns suffer. In short, it takes too long to get to the entertaining missions, and the narrative is nowhere near compelling. With six lengthy missions for each of the game's three factions, you're in for around a 20 to 30 hour single player experience. Since you're limited to only T1 and T2 units for the first few missions, the experience grows stale rather quickly. Unlike Company of Heroes' emphasis on highly versatile handfuls of units, Supreme Commander's focus on large-scale combat means the units don't have all that much flexibility. Tanks shell ground units. Artillery attacks from afar. Bombers bomb. Missile launchers launch missiles from long range. At higher levels the units' individual functions start to diversify by more significant amounts, but at lower levels most units are strictly straightforward in their abilities. When you're limited to mounting an attack force restricted T1 and T2 during the course of a mission lasting more than an hour, it gets boring, plain and simple. The single player campaigns only really pick up during missions five and six, when significantly more powerful T3 options finally open up and you can amass more interesting assault forces and construct better base defenses. Had the story been less derivative and contained sympathetic, rounded characters that elicited more of an emotional response on the player's part, these early campaign doldrums could have been alleviated to a degree.
A few more issues pervade the game, specifically when trying to issue formation orders, and especially when dealing with naval units. By pressing and holding the right mouse button with units selected, you can scroll through a number of unit formations by clicking the left mouse button. When released, the units seem to get confused, and move much more slowly than they would with a standard move order. If they happen to pass through other parts of your forces while attempting to properly orient themselves, this confusion seems to be exacerbated slightly. Though it's only a mild irritation with land units, naval units seem to be utterly perplexed by formation move orders. On numerous occasions we discovered groups of frigates and battleships that were ordered to line up along shore for base bombardment had turned around and actually started moving in the opposite direction, back towards our base. In a game like Supreme Commander where your mind is occupied with so many variables, having to take the time out from base management to baby-sit your boats is an unfortunate source of aggravation.
If you're turned off by the single player yet too timid to experience the intensity of online play, the game offers up a substantial skirmish mode. With variable unit caps, win conditions, 40 well designed maps, and the ability to load in mods, the skirmish mode is highly customizable and entertaining. After a while you'll find a single Supreme AI (the most difficult AI setting) opponent is toppled easily enough, but drop in four or more and you'll be engaged for hours. Once in a while we noticed the Supreme AI had a strange tendency to march their commander unit out into the midst of our forces, seemingly on a suicide run. This didn't make all that much sense a few times, since they still had significant resources on hand as well as numerous factory setups. During longer games AI experimental units became stuck next to structures, like Monkeylords stalling underneath naval bases, at which point they were quickly wiped out by torpedo defenses. For online play, you can either compete over LAN/IP or match up with others through Gas Powered Games' feature heavy but somewhat clunky server list and chat program, where lifetime statistics are tracked for each player.
It certainly helps the overall package that Supreme Commander is gorgeous game, though you'll spend curiously little time admiring its beauty. The strategic zoom is responsible for this, which quickly allows players to dart in and out of the action at any point of the map. It's one of the game's best features by far, greatly facilitating battlefield management, though it has the unfortunate side effect of hiding all the wonderful explosions and intricate unit designs. When fully zoomed out, all the units in the game take on the aspect of small geometric shapes. After spending some time with the game, you'll notice each shape corresponds to a specific unit type. For instance, a diamond with a dot in the middle is artillery. A diamond with a curved line is an anti-air unit. A triangle with a curved line is an interceptor. If you see a circle, you'd better shore up your defenses because an experimental unit is headed your way.
Though some may argue the robot designs are generic, zooming in close enough reveals an excellent attention to detail on the units, structures, landscape, and water. You'll see trees pass a fire along to each other if there's been an explosion nearby, boats slowly sink below the waves, and all sorts of moving parts activate on units as they enter battle. The user interface itself may be larger than most are used to, but you'll eventually get used to it and appreciate all it has to offer. Even if you don't own two monitors, you can split a single screen in half with the Home key to gain even more control over the battlefield, and widescreen monitors will be able to move the interface to the side of the screen, opening up more screen space for gameplay. Taking advantage of all this graphical beauty is going to require a powerful rig unfortunately. Though anything built within the last few years or so should be able to handle Supreme Commander, even the most powerful computers will likely have issues with eight player online battles. We ran the game on max settings with a Pentium 4 3.40 GHz processor, 2 GB RAM, and a 512MB Radeon X1900, and had a generally smooth experience, though it really started to bog down as more participants jumped into the fray.
The music tracks you'll find in Supreme Commander are top notch, really driving home the notion of an epic conflict. In addition you'll get crisp mechanical creaks and squeals, slick laser blast effects, and absolutely booming explosions. The only aural drawback is the voice acting, which definitely falls into the category of cheesy and overblown. That can be overlooked, however, with such an otherwise striking science fiction soundscape.
You are not ready for Supreme Commander. That statement is both a challenge and a warning. This real time strategy game is a hardcore exercise in scaling a steep learning curve and then finally being able to enjoy a spectacular view and a deep strategy game. But it's going to take a while to get up here, and it's not a climb for the faint of heart, much less the average non-committal RTS dabbler.
Supreme Commander was created by the same developer who made the 1997 classic Total Annihilation, and the connection shows. Both games are about queuing up build orders to create a booming economy based on mass mined from the ground and energy produced at generators. These aren't accumulated and spent like you do in a typical RTS. Instead, they're maintained as a careful balance between income and expenditure. If you don't know what you're doing, you're liable to stall your economy faster than George W. Bush with a budget surplus (don't worry, we'll take a stab at the Democrats later in the review).
You then use this economy to amass dozens, if not hundreds, of the robots, tanks, planes, and ships that Supreme Commander offers. Perhaps you'll also build fearsome artillery or missile silos to pound the enemy base from a distance. There are even powerful game-busting experimental units, which are generally giant robots that shrug off damage with their thousands of hit points. All the while, you're building defenses to protect your base and radar to keep an eye on your enemy. You might even dabble with setting up shields or hiding under a stealth generator. In Supreme Commander, knowing is half the battle.
It's an epic game, and it's a strange combination of complexity and streamlining. The mandate behind the interface seems to be automation. You can chain together complex series of orders and then leave a unit alone to fulfill them, whether you're pre-building a base, setting up a patrol, or coordinating two separate groups to attack a single target at the same time. You can tell units to help other units with an all-purpose "assist" command. You can lay out formations and automate air transport routes. For the most part, this works wonderfully, and it creates the feel that you're laying out plans instead of holding hands. This is a game about being a commander, and it feels more like managing a command center than playing with toy soldiers.
There are times when the interface breaks down, and hopefully the developers will be able to patch these shortcomings. But even worse, Supreme Commander does a terrible job of teaching you how to play. The tutorial consists of extended and dull non-interactive videos that play over a sandbox set up with nothing to do. It's almost as if they forgot to actually put in a real tutorial. In a game so complicated, and one that relies so heavily on know how to use the interface, this is particularly disappointing. Woe to the poor newbie who jumps in without doing his homework. At least the campaign (speaking of extended and dull) gradually introduces you to new units and buildings as it progresses.
Unfortunately, the three different sides don't differ much. Next to the difficulty level, this is one of the biggest shortcomings of Supreme Commander. There's no hook here, no personality, nothing beyond swarms of little robots, each side almost exactly like the other. At a time when real time strategy games are brimming with personality and character, Supreme Commander is a bland and sometimes boring throwback.
At least that's how most players will feel about it. The truly hardcore will see the subtle differences among the sides. The United Earth Forces, for instance, gets a heavy tank with a lot of hit points, but the Aeon get a heavy tank with shields. The Cybrans have mobile stealth generators, while everyone else gets mobile shields. But these things will have almost no impact on how the average person plays each side. Instead, there's going to be a lot of drag selecting and throwing swarms of armies around just to see what sticks. There's almost zero feedback in the game about why some units are better than others. At a time when the favorite buzzword for real time strategy is "visceral", Supreme Commander opts for "cerebral".
Furthermore, there are all sorts of esoteric economic tricks that the average player will miss. For instance, an adjacency bonus means you'll want to put mass storage next to all your mass extractors, and generators next to all your factories. Or is it mass storage next to your factories, and generators next to your extractors? Time to flip through the manual, although you won't find it all in there. Time to rewatch the tutorial videos. At a time when real time strategy games are getting more intuitive, Supreme Commander has decided to play by its own esoteric rules.
The size of the battles is such that the game actually lets you zoom all the way out, converting the elaborate graphics into a swarm of tiny strategic icons. It's easy to go back and forth with a flick of the mousewheel, but sadly, there's almost never any reason to actually see the graphics, which look wonderful. All this artwork and all these effects of shimmering shields and exploding artillery shells and arcing plasma blasts and burning trees for nothing. They're almost completely beside the point. At a time when real time strategy games are pushing visuals, Supreme Commander makes them superfluous.
What's more, the game's performance is as erratic as John Kerry's stance on the war in Iraq (there you go: equal opportunity political jabs). Even the most powerful computers can't keep up with the epic battles without the framerate taking a nose dive faster than a scout plane overflying a bank of flak guns. It's ironic that, for many people, the best way to enjoy the size and scope of Supreme Commander is zoomed all the way out, with the detail cranked way down.
But the bottom line is that there's no other real time strategy game that creates as grand and broad an experience as Supreme Commander. There's a wonderful amount of choice among different types of units, and buildings, and economic options, and map sizes. Do you focus on air power? Do you swarm with lower tech units? Do you build up your economy or upgrade your units? Do you bother with a navy? Should you get started on one of the experimental units? Do you grow your economy by spreading out and controlling the map, or do you hunker down and invest in mass fabricators?
The answers to these questions are compared to the answers given by the other side (or sides, given that you can have up to 8 players, human or AI, in a game) to create many different types of games. In some games, you'll be overrun by little assault bots. In others, you'll be swallowed in a grand nuclear fire. In yet others, you'll crush the opponent's base with your enormous mechanical spider bot.
In the final analysis, the climb to enjoy the game at this level is well worth the effort. At a time when real time strategy games are often appealing to the lower common denominators with streamlined interfaces, simple gameplay, and elaborate graphics, Supreme Commander is doing something deep, complex, and uniquely rewarding. Are you ready?
