Rebel, Inc is a mobile real time strategy game loosely based on the endless wars in the Middle East. It is very reminiscent of Plague, Inc. Not sure if they are made by the same company. Anywho, it offers a far more degree of control than Plague, Inc.
You pick a leader, which has advantages, and a headquarters, and try to stabilize the region by upgrading the civilian and government. You fight off insurgents with military that try to destabilize it.
The map is divided into sections or zones. Each zone is stabilized separately. A lot of upgrades are not instant. Some emanate from your headquarters outward to adjacent zones, eventually affecting other zones. So a road upgrade would first improve your roads at the headquarters, then the zones next to the headquarters, then the next ones, until all zones are upgraded.
You have to manage corruption and inflation as well, which increases for each upgrade you buy. Corruption increases because of inefficiencies. Inflation increases when you rapidly buy upgrades rapidly that are related to each other. I like the balancing act this gives.
Combat is simply drag and drop the military to a hostile area. Reinforcements are done by dropping military in adjacent areas. Upgrades unlock other weapons such as airstrikes and defenses such as garrisons. Insurgents must be cornered as they can flee to adjacent zones.
All in all, good balance of management and light combat, great for mobile.
At first, 8-Bit Armies do not look at all that much. But once you get into it, it feels a lot like the classic Command and Conquer. And for a good reason, too, the game was made by Petroglyph Studios, which is a descendant of the Westwood Studios.
You have two factions, the Renegades and the Guardians. Both factions are a mix of GDI and Nod units and powers. For example, the Renegades have nukes but also the military GDI-esque hardware, while the Renegades have a Nod vibe, yet with an ion cannon satellite.
Campaigns play and look like mobile missions, with a 3 star rating for completing objectives. With each mission, you unlock more units and structures for a loadout, which is surprisingly addictive.
As an RTS, 0 AD reminds me most of a cross between Age of Empires 3 and Age of Mythology. They have almost the same resources and seeming economic focus. I tried the Athenians, which were the first in alphabetical order for the historical factions.
The most obvious difference is that soldiers also have all worker/builder abilities. There are no male "villagers", all are soldiers. There are female villagers who actually speed up male unit work. I like that dynamic.
The game is incomplete and unfinished so far.
I would love an Israel/Hebrew civilization mod for it.
Art of War: Red Tides can probably be considered to be a really basic, stripped down real time strategy. Although it has more in common with MOBAs, but on a single lane. The game describes itself as a "tug of war" game, and a tug of war is what it actually does feel like.
And it is addicting. There are plenty of unit variety and commander powers for each faction. You pick several units from your arsenal to deploy into battle. Unit composition is important! Every wave sends out your units automatically. You can sell the units for half price and buy a different unit as you study the enemy's composition. And you regularly unlock new units as you level up, which is awesome, unlike other free-to-play fare. You do not pay for every wave's units, just when you buy said unit initially.
All the units, and future unlocks, are balanced against each other. For example, you can opt to unlock and use snipers instead of a rifleman. A sniper is not necessarily a lot better than a rifleman, as it just has a longer range and slower shot, but it fills the mass infantry slot. Each unlock is simply a variation of an existing unit with a special ability and a different, balanced weakness. There is no pay-to-win, a low level player can win against a higher level player.
The thing that makes the game great is that there are hard counters and a rhythm. Explosive suicide beetles do not work on shields, when they can usually make a mincemeat of your other units. Stealth detectors reveal cloaked enemies. Cloaked enemies can make short work of the tough units you have if you can't see them. You an either swarm many small units or save up for the big guns.
I only got to play the free-to-play Early Access/Open Beta version of the game. I would be playing it right now instead of writing this post if it wasn't for the Open Beta ending. It is that addictive.
Apparently, it was inspired by a Starcraft 2 mod called Desert Strike. The influence from Starcraft is definitely present. Three factions, one of them being the Terrans. The Atlac are Protoss. The Yaguiaoi or however you spell it is supposed to be the Zerg counterpart, but with a more zoo-like aesthetic.
The soul essence mine resource acquiring needs a bit of work. Resource gathering is a constant stream of increasing soul essence, which is fine. However, at higher waves, you need to upgrade said mine, which stops resource gathering for quite a bit. I was not a fan of holding off picking units which costs essence to upgrade mines. The resource gathering is passive except for those moments. I think resource gathering tied more to the game flow and play would be better.
As you destroy enemy units and crates, you gain some soul essence but mostly gold. Gold is used to be spent on commander powers such as bombing runs or special "epic" units.
One thing though, the menu music is terrible. Please, please change it. The cheery tone does not fit the game, except possibly ironically. I also would love to have the English translation done better. There are story lore still in Chinese(?) that needs to be translated.
Regardless to say, I'm waiting for the full release! I hope it still sticks to being free-to-play. Free-to-play actually works with this game, and I'm interested in how the developers will take Art of War: Red Tides.
Achron is a 4D RTS that uses time travel mechanics. I've always wanted to play this RTS as I love the concept time travel. So I got the demo from Steam to play around with.
The tutorial is a bit confusing, as expected. I get what the game wants me to do, but I just got lost after the timeline manipulator was introduced and the enemy started to attack me in the past. Information overload led me to quitting the tutorial early.
It might take awhile for me to figure the intricacy of the game. I have created a similar game before, just with simpler controls and smaller scale.
Tom Clancy's EndWar is unique in that one can use voice commands to lead units into battle. There are three modern factions going for a world war caused by terrorist attacks on an anti-nuclear shield: America, Europe, and Russia.
The voice command interface actually works a lot better than I expected it to. That said, there are some things that I felt were missing and had to correct with the mouse. Things like having no voice command to get your units, especially infantry, into nearby cover or to garrison buildings. However, those are minor grievances. Everything else seems to work well so far.
Prison Architect is more of a simulator than a traditional real time strategy, but it is still a ton of fun. You play as someone who owns a for-profit prison. It sounds a bit bleak, but the visuals give a somewhat cheery tone.
Things are confusing at first on what to actually do. The to-do list and CEO letter helps a little but not much. I had to go to a video tutorial on YouTube to actually help me get started on how the workflow actually works.
The game speed changers on the top right are a lot of help stopping, slowing, and speeding things up. Once you get going, it is addictive.
There's a problem with the smaller resolutions. As you can see, there are buttons that overlap on the GUI on the bottom of the screenshot. I like to have the game windowed while I multitask on other things.
If you want to try this game out, and support this blog, get it on Steam for a lower price through this link (Prison Architect).
Impossible Creatures is an RTS about creating your own units out of animal hybrids with a genetic combiner of some sort with what seems to be 1930's technology. I've always wanted to play it ever since I saw a copy at a friend's house about 10 years ago. And now I have!
I blazed through the tutorial. It had the usual camera controls, RTS basics of selecting and attacking and building and harvesting and research, and whatnot. The quick animal combining tutorial was cool. It gave me some constraints of just a few animals to use for the tutorial.
The presence of friendly fire surprised me. My artillery, which were ram-ape hybrids throwing rocks, were accidentally killing off my animal army as we bombard the enemy's structures. The enemy buildings also took longer than usual to destroy, which seems a bit annoying.
Check Impossible Creatures RTS out here from Amazon and support Faction Calculus in the process!
Where can you play through the entire storyline of the Lord of the Rings as the Fellowship... and then in the perspective of the bad guys? And not only the main characters and heroes, but also commanding whole armies in the process?
Battle For Middle-Earth! That's what.
I haven't read any of the books of the series except The Silmarillion, but watched the movies. While I'm not a die hard fan except the book I read, I enjoyed the story.
I first played with the Battle School, the tutorial for the game. They are all video tutorials, detailing the main concepts.
I then started the campaign for the Good guys. It's literally called the "Good campaign". No moral ambiguity, here, which I like. The game seems to follow the movie from when the Fellowship is first forged.
The first mission is to lead the Fellowship heroes into the mines of Moria. You encounter goblins and cave trolls along the way. It seems to be a buffer missions to upgrade your heroes.
Each hero unit has skills and abilities, which leads to some micromanagement. I used mostly Gandalf's skills as he is a wizard after all. Aragorn's healing ability also proved useful.
The mission is littered with cinematics and also triggered scripted voice acting, all from the movies. Some of it was not timed right, especially if you wanted to backtrack.
The minimap is hand drawn, like pencil. That was the most original rendering of a minimap I have ever seen.
One thing I didn't like was when using hero skills and abilities, one had to left click on the ability, and then right click. I am very used to left clicking for any button skills. Oh well.
Leading them through to the end leads to the fight with the Balrog. And in this case, as the Fellowship flees, you play as Gandalf to finish the Balrog, which is not shown in the movies. Pretty cool, huh?
And thus is my first impression of the game. I will add more along as I play more.
I bought the Humble Bundle for the 10th anniversary of Company of Heroes. It cost me about $10. I don't usually do World War 2 games unless there's an alternate history component, like Red Alert or the Cuban Missile Crisis game. However, I couldn't pass it up knowing it is critically acclaimed.
I started the tutorial and it was standard fare. It had keyboard controls to replace the mouse wheel for laptop users like me.
At first, I thought the factions would play the same, just different units. Not at all! The British play differently with squads to American engineer and platoons and the German Panzer Elite vehicles are very important to their function.
The gameplay is reminiscent of Dawn of War, particularly the second one.
I have the complete collection of Company of Heroes, so I will do some campaigns.
If you want to try it out and support Faction Calculus while at it, here are the games:
I have heard about this game for awhile now. It's supposedly rare and a runaway cult classic.
A bit disappointed when trying it out for the first time. There was no obvious tutorial. I started with a base and many small infantry units.
Perimeter uses a "perimenter" gameplay mechanic where one needs to connect the power source to structures, and the power source is usually the main structure headquarters where you buy units.
I was wiped out by a squad of alien-looking units from the environment after I sent out all my weak infantry units after it.
I did find a manual online on the Steam page, however. I will retry again and update this blog entry whenever I get a better grasp of the game. The manual speaks about how terraforming is important to the game. That's probably what I was missing.
I have played DoW I and II, but haven't loaded up my copy of Retribution yet. I am so glad for the additional factions included as DLC: Imperial Guard, Chaos Marine, Tyranid, Ork, and Eldar.
I started with the Eldar on Normal Mode and played through the first mission. It looks pretty cool. Individual Eldar hero units seem more overpowered than normal Spae Marine ones, or I could just be confusing the long ago plays.
The Ork boss was easier to handle this time, but it was because of the couple Shuriken units I got and distanced them away.
Also, the Orks were Pirate-themed. Which I found campy. I also was wishing for more Space Marine variants, but maybe that's just for multiplayer mode? I haven't checked the game enough to see an actual skirmish mode on there.
Usually, when starting to play RTSes, I either start with the Tutorial, Campaign, or Skirmish to test out all the unit combinations. Since I didn't find a skirmish mode, if it is in there, I did not experiment with unit combinations.
I still miss the base building of the first here, but that was a bit alleviated by the capturable Webways in the game. The Webways allowed units to reinforce my squads with Guardian units and Shurikens.
I did enjoy the first mission, but it wasn't too compelling for me to continue to the next one without a break.
My recent purchase of Company of Honor reminds me a lot of the gameplay of the Dawn of War 2: the focus on squads and cover system. I will cover Company of Honor games in a later post.
in Amazon!
in Amazon!
on Amazon!