Call of Duty: World at War has gotten a lot of flak before it’s even been released because it’s being developed by Treyarch, the satellite Activision company that developed the lesser Call of Duty 2: Big Red One and Call of Duty 3. Activision (and some of the games press) claimed that Call of Duty: World at War really won’t be the same.
Michael Walbridge
Too many RPG or strategy games of today suffer from the criticism that they are either too much about the game’s story and not enough about the game’s combat and gameplay, or that the combat and strategy suffers too much from balance issues. The solution to beating certain bosses and armies is usually one-size-fits-all, or at the very least the solutions offered are very lopsided. Examples: always cast shell to avoid certain death. Always use the fire-coating on your weapon maximize damage against the Ice King. This unit here, the black ogres? Always worthless, because the red ogres or black knights are always better for either purpose.
King’s Bounty: The Legend manages to blend new elements of role-playing worlds with an old ingenious combat system. Combat is a combination of RPG and strategy elements, with unit placement and movement on hexagonal squares and units having stats and health as if they were members of a party. Units come in measurements of members, so healing of some sort is mostly not part of the game; if you have 200 peasants with 5 health each that takes 200 damage, you can’t use a potion to heal them–40 of them are gone, and you have to restock at a castle that has more peasants. Also important to note is that each actual peasant also does damage, so fewer members doesn’t just mean the unit is closer to being wiped out, it also means it will do less damage. You can’t duplicate unit types and you always have 5 types at a time. There are some items that make new units but you can also garrison your troops at different castles and recruit them from castles, taverns, shops, and even laboratories. The point here is that as you lose units, you will need to recruit new ones, and you will usually have to replace one type with another. This point of design forces forces the player into creativity; as the number of, say, bears you have goes down, you must consider: do you replace the bears with wizards or with marauding bandits? What are the implications for strategy with each?
The unit system makes it so you can’t simply develop a strategy and keep using it, squashing units with the same spells or brute force you always do, which is faux-strategy. Instead, this is real, on-the-fly strategy that keeps you on your toes and tests your ability to be adaptive and creative. And King’s Bounty does it all without watering down the challenge or creating imbalance issues on either side. Random battefields for each fight also test on-the-spot decisions. Some battlefields have chests in the middle and some have dangerous obstacles or narrow corridors. This makes every battle, except for the rare boss fight, different. And even the boss fights are different–there are three very different
This room for creativity makes the game very fresh and unique; there is no pressure to change certain tactics just because the game mandates it; the only pressure comes from failure. There is plenty of encouragement to try something new as new units, moves, abilities, and bonuses pop up throughout the game both for you and your enemies. King’s Bounty keeps you on your toes by generating random battlefields with different layouts each time you enter combat; the battle system leaves victory or failure more up to skill rather than failure to deign the secrets from the game. This means King’s Bounty: The Legend appeals to both skill-based and exploratory gamer types alike, something few single-player games do, and even fewer strategy/RPG types of games do.
King’s Bounty has some poor translation issues to go with it, which really waters down the game world and storyline, since characters are only represented by text and face. As a budget title, it’s fair if there are no cutscenes or cinematics, but it’s still disappointing to have such a large world with a large variety of characters be completely reduced to nothing but text, and then to have that text be riddled with misplaced commas and misspelled words that will occasionally require self-translation.
The kind of English that’s at the official website displays some of the kinds of errors you’ll see. It’s a shame, too, because the story is very long, eventful, and creative. One part of the main questline has you searching for the king’s older brother, Carl, who gave up the throne to practice science and general hermitry. You must deliver to him the king’s seal; the king doesn’t know why, but decides to give it to him anyway. Is it for power? Does he want his throne back? No, the old man discovered he wants to get married after all upon reading some scholarly works written by a woman he’s never met. You then go to meet her, and she’s a hundred years old and as such curses his persistence (“I wrote that thing fifty years ago!”). Another side quest has a man asking you to kill a large carnivorous plant by the lake. The plant then talks to you, and if you choose the diplomacy route, the quest ends not with a battle but with you giving a cow to the plant so the plants will have a safer world to grow in. The wry, perhaps Russian sense of humor does not take over the fantasy world but permeates it, and it’s difficult to appreciate it with small, poorly translated text.
Other bizzare opportunities open up as well, including chances to marry and have children, the most interesting one being documented at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
The game’s music is about as generic as you can get for a fantasy outing, complete with synthesized sounds that imitate an orchestra that emphasizes a harpischord and glowing brass section, but it does not offend. It melds seamlessly with the world, though the few number of tunes may make them repeated so often you’ll want to turn them off. Sound effects for action and spells are bland, like any strategy game. The camera and animation is similar to Warcraft III, though the characters and some of the monsters have original or fresh interpretations. The controls and some of the game world will really get on your nerves. A left click is not to select something, but to move to something; looking around is used using a right-click. Not only is this extremely uncomfortable, but with an overhead view that looks like Warcraft III this will go against the sensibility of PC gamers who have played any type of strategy game. Mor
e than five hours in, I’d still click on an enemy with a left click and scramble to click away before I ran into an enemy much more powerful than I. Some of the first starting areas have overpowered enemies in the corner. There’s a wizard not one minute from the starting castle in some corner by a tent who can still slaughter me, and I’m level 6 (which is not like level 6 in an MMO). Really weak enemies can’t be auto-defeated–even if it will take 5 minutes and you’ll get basically no experience or gold, you still must continue the fight, though you have ability to see enemies and avoid them before hand.
Despite awkward navigation and dialogue, the game’s combat is addicting and endlessly different. There are three types of heroes you can be and all are vastly different. In fact, the world’s units that you fight are completely different based on which commander you are. Even if you play as a mage again, you’ll certainly have a different experience each time you play. If you’re looking for a strategy-based game that actively engages you and rarely feels like a grind, King’s Bounty is worth two run-throughs.
Some MMOs are extremely huge and multifaceted, such as World of Warcraft. Some are almost nothing but PVP, such as Guild Wars. And some MMOs are mainly about alliances and economics, such as EVE Online. In the big picture, some people would say Warhammer Online is a clone of World of Warcraft. These people haven’t played the game enough. To be sure, it’s very similar, especially as far as the user interface is concerned; WoW set simple standards. WAR stands tall because it stands on the shoulders of giants, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t stand tall by itself.
Warhammer is faithfully based on the Games Workshop world of the same name; the characters, the language, and even many of the “careers” (WAR’s word for classes) come straight from Warhammer lore and the world captures this lore well. The textures and backgrounds are standard: the water really looks like water, but only in the sense that graphics have come a long way in general, not that WAR is pushing any boundaries; still, for an MMO it’s pretty beefy. The tone of voice, color, and text all fit within the world. There is no breaking the fourth wall and very little irony in the quests or storyline, if any.
You play on either the side of Order or Destruction; their names speak for their intentions. The world is split up into 3 sections based on sectionalized conflicts: Greenskins vs. Dwarves, High Elves vs. Dark Elves, and the Empire vs. Chaos. The quests are mostly centered around this conflict. Countrysides, mountains, and towns are awash with NPCs of varying levels engaged in combat. Every single area your character goes to is full of characters on your side fighting people from the other side.
That’s what players will be doing with each other, too. One of the very first quests you receive is to do a “scenario”, an instanced RVR (PVP) zone. Simply doing one is a repeatable quest, worth experience points every time. You can also gain experience from killing enemy players and there is an award of experience based on your individual and team performance.
It’s here, in combat, that WAR really shines. There is no conflict between the PVE and RVR elements, here–the armor and weapons are best for healing and killing players and monsters alike, and so are the moves and class-design. There a great number of options, and the crowning feature of combat is that in WAR there are one-size-fits-all move sequences. In many other MMOs, if your class encounters another class, the best choice of sequence of moves you make is almost a science; always hit 1, 2, and 3. While the moves are simple, the number of moves is large–by rank 40, your character will have over 30 of them. An example: even the bright wizards and sorcerers, which in most MMOs spam endless fire and darkness, have unique situations and will have different types of decisions to make. They can do more damage as they build up power, but will also have a chance to have the magic backfire and hurt them. They can release the power, building it up over and over again, but if they have healers, they can afford the self-harm that comes with more powerful spells. Without a healer, they are choosing whether or not to make the gamble.
At any rate, most combat will be group-based and in these matters your skill and decisions matter more while your gear and class knowledge matter less (though they do still matter). Tanks, for example, have to choose whether to slow down those who flee, whether to protect a group or individual, whether to focus on buffs or debuffs, or whether to hold a choke point–there is no clipping in WAR, so you can block enemy and friendly players. The classes here have distinct purposes and differences. Order and Destruction are different, but complaints about imbalance have been few. WAR has gotten off to a smooth start.
One of WAR’s unique aspects is its grouping system; WoW and others may have set standards for screen layouts and item management, but WAR has set a new bar for groups. Groups form naturally and don’t require a lot of communication; people who aren’t the group leader can refer a player to the leader, making it easier for groups to form quickly. Players can also join without asking; by default, groups are open, and anyone can join them through a simple search.
Also unique is the much-heralded public quest, a quest chain with 3 quests that continually resets. Walk into the public quest’s area and you’ll see the quest requirements. It’s as if the very lands have souls: if there are 40 guards to kill and 4 tents to burn, anyone killing the guards in any group will ticker it down. When and if the quest requirements are completed, everyone in the area receives experience points.
WAR isn’t without its weaknesses, but these are curable in the future. There are still some glitches, though for a launch, they aren’t bad. I had a character get stuck inside a wall and have to log out, but this only happened once. Twice I’ve randomly teleported to mid-air and fallen, then taken a moderate amount of fall damage. Only once have I had a glitch completely ruin whatever it was that I was doing, and it was taken care of within a day.
Some public quest chains end with bosses are way too difficult for their areas, and as the number of characters passing through low-level areas decreases, this will only exascerbate the problem; this too is fixable, though. Also problematic is that the game depends on other players being on and on equal distribution of Order and Destruction sides. They have already offered some measures to prevent and cure this problem: when rolling on a server, even if that server is currently low, it will say if it has a high population. The queues for every single server on every single side are on the server list. Also, queues and population are listed by each side, not each server. They’ve even allowed 5 of the high-population servers to clone (not transfer) characters to other servers in order to alleviate server stress.
One last aspect to cover: the crafting system leaves a lot to be desired. The professions are simple, poorly explained, and unrewarding, though we haven’t fully seen them in action. The auction house and banking system haven’t really been experienced, either, and neither has end-game PVE, which could turn out to be a bore. Still, they have time to fix it and people aren’t playing this game for the crafting or PVE anyway. They’re playing it for a breath of fresh air, some fun combat and PVP action, and great, unique guild mechanics. WAR isn’t for everyone, but anyone who loves world PVP, team scenarios, territory control, or coordinated, roaming posses should take a look.
Another Tom Clancy game and I’m having difficulty remember which games this is. Let me check the box again. Oh yes: Rainbow Six Vegas 2.
Terrorists are on the loose, and there’s a bad cliffhanger waiting to be resolved. For those few who careA
The Spiderwick Chronicles is a game based on a movie based on a five-novel children’s fantasy series in which 3 kids discover a journal from a deceased relative that reveals the secrets to discovering the fantastic around us (goblins and fairies, etc.). Unlike the movie and perhaps the books, the game is best reserved for kids only. If your child is twelve or under, it’s okay to buy this game or rent it. If not, I recommend against it.
The game generally follows the movie, but that’s not a big deal as the movie cuts out much from the books. Cinematic cutscenes are included between levels. The most important question about this game is whether or not it captures the movie’s essence, and it basically does. The only exception is the voice acting by Freddie Highmore, who unfortunately plays the most frequently played character, Jared. He delivers in a deadpan voice: “A microwave is better.” “I’m not hungry right now.” “Better not wake mom up.” Still, the music and ambiance are appropriate and highly in character, though the chimes and xylophone may start to grate on your nerves.
The levels vary. The first one has slight RPG elements where Jared must discover the tiny character Thimbletack by figuring out what to do next. It’s not very hard; he discovers plaster and says “maybe I could break it with an object such as a broom.” Then, you must go and find a broom. And then break in the plaster. The Spiderwick Chronicles is filled with numerous such hand-holding mechanics. Other levels feature easy platforming and puzzles with obvious solutions. You even get a “quest book” that tells you exactly what to do next–ingenuity is not required here. You also get to play Thimbletack in some terrible levels that involved repeated rhymes by the Thimble-meister as he runs on boards and throws needles at cockroaches. The gameplay and the tacky level boundaries here are the quality of a bad Super Nintendo game. The combat in the other levels is simple jumping, whacking, shooting, and power-upping, but the mechanics and animations work better–more like a low-quality PS2 game.
Other presentational crimes include: The flowing leaves in the load screen. The captured fairies, who look like demons out of a Japanese RPG. Every single time you capture a fairy you must “paint” away some white to reveal the fairy on a card, not unlike scratching a lottery ticket. And every single powerup in this game is a fairy. Finally, with every single paint stroke (and you will be doing a lot of these), a synthesized flute toots a flowery, obnoxious chord.
There is nothing unpredictable here: the movie/book game is faithful to the presentation of the movie, but not so much to basic principles of good game design and presentation. If any kids want it, they should be fine with it–however, replay value is low and an unlockable minigame is the only available multiplayer mode, so be prepared for them to move on from it within a month.
For the rest of you: if you appreciate video games at any level, or are even allowed to play T-rated ones, skip The Spiderwick Chronicles.
