PC

Civilization V

September 26, 2010

PC / Reviews / by Graham Russell Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Games have long simulated certain activities or facets of human life, but the Civilization series has been the only one to successfully simulate the entirety of human existence. In the first four entries in the series, the same core ideas were refined and expanded to various degrees, but the original’s balance was painstakingly preserved. Civilization V was not so conservative with its changes, and surprisingly there’s very little that went wrong with the adjustments.

For those who haven’t played a Civilization game, it follows a path from settling your first ancient city to the modern era, with expansion, scientific advancements and military conflict. Players can win one of five ways: besides simply having the most points when time runs out, victory is claimed by eliminating the other players, by advancing culturally, by gaining majority support of the United Nations or by building a space shuttle. Getting there, though, is an epic task that takes thousands of years in-game and only slightly less time out of it.

The first major change is that everything is based on a hexagonal grid, rather than squares. This is a huge (and welcome) change from every other Civ game. The format leads to much more realistic maps and combat. Combined with the one-military-unit-per-tile rule, this makes for much more strategic, even-handed combat. 

Economics have been revamped as well. There are no more sliders for you to divide up your commerce as you see fit. Instead, science, culture and gold have been separated almost entirely. Science is now produced by citizens and learning institutions, while gold is harvested from working tiles and constructing buildings, and is used to upkeep everything in your empire from your roads to your armies. Culture has been detached entirely from your economy and is now based entirely on structures.

Diplomacy is now less about calculating how much a country likes you based on various point modifiers, and more about deciding how long it should wait before stabbing players in the back. The A.I. plays to win now, rather than just to survive. Not only that, but each ruler has his or her own victory stratagem. Napoleon will try to amass a land army. Elizabeth will build more than her share of naval vessels. It doesn’t pigeonhole them either, as they’ll adapt if their primary goals are harder to reach.

The diplomatic process gets a little more complicated, too, with the addition of city-states. City-states are small nations that don’t try to win the game. Instead, they’re there to be allies in times of war, obstructions on the path of expansion or just another foe to take down. Gaining their support is as simple as handing them some gold, though they’ll ask for other things as well. Sometimes they’ll ask for military aid against an enemy, and other times they’ll just ask you to build a Wonder. Getting their support is crucial to a diplomatic victory, as each city-state has a vote in the United Nations.

The cultural system has, inevitably, also gotten a revamp. Instead of the old system of adopting Civics, players purchase Social Policies with culture points. They can shape their societies in this way, focusing on a large empire, strong soldiers or maritime commerce. What’s more, you can mix and match the various policies somewhat and use a little of each. (If you completely purchase five of the ten trees, you can build the Utopia Project and secure victory.)

Visually, the game impresses more than it ever has. The landscapes look much more realistic and less algorithmically-generated, allowing for extra realism. Leaders are fully-animated and in their element, rather than just heads in a window, and they express emotions in a much more believable way. Detailed unit battles look nice up-close, as actual shots are fired and real hits take down foes. All of this would be painful to lower-end systems, except Firaxis has made sure that settings levels allow all players to get the most out of their hardware. 

The multiplayer system is a new one as well. Based entirely on Steam (the main reason why all players must use it to play the game at all), there has been a concerted effort to streamline the experience. It takes a few cues from the console Civilization Revolution, and the changes make things much more pleasant. There are still a few hiccups here and there, but it’s an impressive mode for a turn-based game.

Civ V is not Civ IV. It’s different, and in ways that make things much more painless. The result is a game that keeps you playing for way longer than you ever meant to.

Pros: Streamlined system, tactical battles, graphical upgrades

Cons: Multiplayer hiccups, some elements removed in streamlining effort, if you need to leave the house in the next few weeks this may not be the game for you

Staff writer Shawn Vermette contributed to this review.

Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale

September 20, 2010

PC / Reviews / by Shawn Vermette Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale reminds me of the Rune Factory series. It takes two completely disparate genres of games, an item shop sim and a dungeon crawler, and blends them together in a way that not only makes sense, but is also fun and enjoyable to play.

As you might expect, being an indie title localized from Japan, the story is delightfully quirky and unusual. You will play as Recette, a young girl who is forced into running an item shop when your father takes out a loan from a fairy finance company then skips town to become an adventurer. As you are the sole inheritor of your father, the finance company has come to you, requiring you to work to pay off his debts.

The tycoon aspects of the game are very thorough. You must manually purchase, make, or find everything you sell in your shop; you get to haggle over the prices you buy and sell items for; you can take advance orders for items; even customize the look of your shop. There are even economic fluctuations where items change in value, scarcity, and want. This adds more strategy to the game as well, as you’ll want to stockpile when things are cheap, and sell when they are expensive. Everything in the game can be bought or sold, just not immediately. Did I forget to mention that this is an RPG as well? Like all RPG’s, you must level up your merchant level, through successful bargaining and haggling, in order to gain access to everything there is to do in Recettear. Want to buy items from customers? You have to be level 2, tired of that drab wallpaper? Reach level 3 and you can change it. Advance orders? Level 8 will allow you to accept those.

The dungeon crawling is simpler than the item shop management, and for good reason- it isn’t the focus of the game. Dungeon crawling is simply a means to an end, finding new items that you can sell for 100% profit. It also features a leveling system where the adventurers you hire level up as they fight and kill more enemies. As they level up, they can fight longer and harder and make it deeper into the various dungeons, allowing you access to more and better loot.

Technically, the game looks solid. The graphics won’t blow you away, but they aren’t meant to. Everything is bright, cheery, and charming, and the music supports this feeling. The music reminded me of the Harvest Moon music as well. It is bright and cheery, but after awhile it gets very repetitive. 

Recettear is a very hard game as well. The loan payments you must make come weekly, and the amount increases staggeringly. Knowing this, however, the developers made it so that you don’t have to start over from the beginning if you fail to make a payment. You can keep all the items you’ve got in inventory, 1,000 pix (the game’s currency), and start over from Day 2. The game will keep track of how many times you have to restart though. This provides plenty of incentive to try to reach those loan payments without fail, but you’ll also never feel that it is impossible, just very difficult. Once you beat the game, you’ll also gain access to more game modes, giving you a number of ways to continue playing the game even after you’ve beaten it.

I’m usually not a fan of indie games, but Recettear has won me over. The quirky story, the mild RPG elements, and the deep and enjoyable item shop management make this a worthwhile game. And for just $20, it is a great value for PC gamers as well.

Pros: Item shop management is engaging; Difficulty keeps you engaged; Dungeon crawling gives a nice change of pace; Multiple game modes extend the replayability

Cons: Music can get repetitive

 

Worms Reloaded

August 29, 2010

PC / Reviews / by Graham Russell Make a comment! / Tweet it!

The Worms series hasn’t changed much since the original released in 1995. Wait. Actually, it has, but the deviations into 3D were so bad that the gaming community as a whole has blocked them from its memory. So it’s understandable, then, that Worms Reloaded doesn’t try anything risky.  

Reloaded, the first two-dimensional Worms on the PC in almost a decade, is full of nostalgia. Everything you remember is here: teams of up to four worms each duke it out on two-dimensional battlefields, taking turns sniping at each other and causing mayhem with exploding sheep. Series veterans will be happy to learn that most of the fan-favorite weapons are back, from the Monty Python-inspired Holy Hand Grenade to the incredibly destructive Armageddon.

The entire thing is based on the engine used for the console Worms titles, so it’ll look familiar to those who’ve played that version. Everything is simplified and slick to be optimized for small screens as well as spacious plasmas. Team17 has added some new environments, but they’re purely aesthetic.

There’s a single-player campaign, but it serves largely as an extended tutorial, showing off techniques as well as the game’s new modes and weapons. There are increasingly difficult team battles, as well as timed or turn-limited challenges that show off advanced tactics. Everything ramps up to the multiplayer component, which is obviously the focus of the Steam-exclusive release. (There’s a second campaign mode with particularly maddening challenges as well.)

To bring itself into the current gaming climate, Reloaded introduces many customizable elements, from worm color to hats to user interface themes. Your worms now stick out in multiplayer, and not just because of the colored names floating above their heads. In addition, the level editor has much more detail than previous versions, as bridges have returned and start positions and item drops are customizable.

Ultimately, though, it’s still just Worms. The gameplay’s just not that much different from the originals. If that bothers you, then walk away. But that really won’t bother most people, and now that there’s a modern online system through Steam, expect a lot of multiplayer support. 

 

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty

August 4, 2010

PC / Reviews / by Michael Walbridge Make a comment! / Tweet it!

I’m sure you want to know if StarCraft II is as good as the first, and if the multiplayer is balanced, and if the campaign is like, cool and everything, and if the game is wholly new. The answer to all of those things is a strictly technical yes. 

Hype and anticipation are inseparable from certain games, though, and the way StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty turned out is a fantastic microcosm of the how video games are different today from ten or even five years ago.

Reports on the multiplayer have been around a while because of the beta, so the first order of business is the campaign. The simple linear progression of Mission 1 to Mission 10 is a thing long-gone. The first StarCraft had a plot that, for its day, actually had you interested in the characters and the events. You were the accompanying commander/cerebrate/judicator guy whose job was simply to be awesome at mobilizing units and follow orders. You watched passively as the people you served made tragic choices, cut off alliances, backstabbed, politicked, and swore oaths of vengeance like it was a sci-fi version of a Greek tragedy. Many characters had zippy one-liners (“Clearly Tassadar has failed us…you must not,” “He’s our snake now”).

That’s all different now. You follow Jim Raynor as he attempts to overthrow Arcturus Mengsk, running into various friends and hostiles along the way. In between missions there are newscasts to watch, a jukebox to play with, and characters to talk to. Those characters are very generic and archetypal, and they fill the campaign with  predictable plot twists. Achievements (in multiplayer also), easter eggs, and mission order choice are all part of the mix too. Completing levels and finding hidden items give you access to upgrades and new units. The campaign will feel a little more like a quest this way compared to the first Stacraft’s, which felt like a multiplayer tutorial and movie.

The curious thing about the game as a whole is the divergence between the single player and multiplayer. For one thing, StarCraft II will have three parts. The campaign here is all Terran, all 26 missions, and we won’t even see the next campaign, the zerg, for about two years. The campaign will only teach you about one of the three races (a lot of players in multiplayer pick terran), and even there some of the upgrades and units don’t exist in multiplayer. The fact that the firebat and medic return for the campaign yet don’t in the multiplayer is a curious choice. Was the balancing not complete, or did they keep them just for nostalgia’s sake?

Regardless, the missions are creative and the objectives interesting enough that it won’t feel like a grind of base-stomping just to get to the next audio file, and for that the campaign is to be commended. Polish and volume of content were the main goals in mind. The graphics of the missions are more varied and intense here too. 12 years is a long time, and the sounds and graphics are appropriately new, though in the case of the the graphics not remarkable–that’s fine though, as scenery is not what strategy games are about.

For most, the multiplayer will be the most important part as that is where the majority of the time will be spent. The graphics here are actually a little simpler, presumably to keep the competition friendly. The game is the same–workers on minerals and gas, build order, base expansion, map knowledge, the whole formula is unchanged. Warcraft III was a very experimental game. StarCraft II takes no chances.

Most people didn’t want it to, either. But here are changes that are large, subtle, and more telling: it’s easier to add a friend by Facebook than it is by username. An Internet connection is absolutely required for single player, as is an email address connected to a Battle.net account. There are no channels to go to like in StarCraft or any of the Warcraft games. Custom games requires lots of uncomfortable hoops (though there are already some admirable tower defense creations in place) and the ladders are split up into tiny groups, none of which can be seen online anywhere, the way it can in World of Warcraft or Warcraft III. You can see the stats of 100 players at a time, all about your skill level, randomly assigned.

It’s cold and anonymous and encouraging you to play with your real friends. People do this anyway. Some people want the online culture, and it’s gone. The balance is fine and the looks are fine and the changes are nice but the channels and visible ladders are gone. What gives? 

Ultimately, StarCraft II gets perfect technical marks and worthy artistic ones. I won’t kid anyone: we all want to see and play this game, and if there is disappointment, it’s not enough to warrant a regret in purchasing it. The real question is whether the story or the culture makes you feel the way the first did, whether the consolized style of Battle.net is going to matter to you. 

 

Disciples III: Renaissance

July 25, 2010

PC / Reviews / by Graham Russell Make a comment! / Tweet it!

For anyone who’s played the Heroes of Might and Magic or King’s Bounty games, Disciples III will be very familiar. More familiar than, say, Disciples II. While the original games kept the combat simple in contrast to the genre’s typical hex-grid tactics-fests, the latest one gives in to peer pressure. 

Which is unfortunate, since those games are very good, and that makes for tough competition.

Disciples III: Renaissance puts you in control of a fantasy hero, moving via a turn-based interface over the land, collecting resources and treasures and weapons. If you run into an enemy, though, you’re put in control of a fantasy hero, moving via a turn-based interface over the land. Except this time you’re usually hitting monsters in the face.

You do have help, though, and that’s where the battles are interesting. You raise a team of archers, mages, giants and such, and these guys also get to hit monsters in the face. (Usually. Not all monsters have faces, after all.) All the while you’re taking over castle cities, building structures to enhance your team and recruiting up to two other heroes to raise their own face-hitting armies.

If you’ve played games in the genre, you should have a pretty good idea how this goes. Renaissance does have its differences, though. Unlike most games in the genre, you level up your team RPG-style. Rather than collecting a stack of 62 archers, you shape and improve your one archer with stat boosts and abilities. It’s quite intricate, and you’ll need a high tolerance for micromanagement to take care of everything.

Disciples III is a good-looking game — though the team certainly knows it and shows it off just a bit too much. Many interfaces are dominated by carefully-rendered creature art. It looks nice, but with a game this complex, the extra screen real estate could have made things clearer and more intuitive. With a title like this, though, you’ll play long enough to get used to everything. The sound, on the other hand, is just painful. You’ll want to turn off the unit talking, as they say the same thing every turn and you have about four or five units at once. (Heck, the goblin just says “Goblin” when it’s his turn. Seriously, guys?)

The game includes multiple single-player campaigns and online play, as well as a limited hot-seat mode. The campaigns focus on the game’s three factions: the humans, the elves and the nebulous evil faction of hellfire and brimstone. There are some subtle differences between the three, but it’s not a large change in strategy between the three. Each has their back-line casters and their front-line beaters. The difference comes in upgrading the units through branching paths, but most can be shaped similarly to suit one playstyle if that’s what you want.

Disciples III is not simple. It takes real commitment to grasp the game’s many controls and systems, but it’s eventually a rewarding experience for those who’ve exhausted the latest King’s Bounty. Part-time gamers stay away: this is one for the true believers.

Pros: Full of strategic depth, lush worlds

Cons: Just not as tight as King’s Bounty

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