Tag: Strategy

XCOM: Chimera Squad (PC)

This was a game that I didn’t know even existed until A few months ago. If you’d like to cast your minds back to my XCOM: Enemy Unknown Review you’ll know that I found it to be an excellent play with a difficulty curve that resembles a brick wall if you don’t know what your doing. XCOM 2 I also enjoyed despite the fact that it was nearly a copy-paste of the original, warts and all. So lets see if lightning can strike not just twice but three times.

XCOM Chimera Squad takes place 5 years after the end of XCOM 2, where ADVENT (the alien-led government of Earth) has been overthrown and left earth. Taking place in the fictional city of City 31 (after writing that I asked myself if I could come up with a better city name, it took me 6 seconds to come up with the name “Cohort”) where humans, aliens and hybrids live together. You play as XCOM’s new Chimera Squad, a multi-species peace keeping special task force tasked with keeping the peace of City 31 and bringing down organised crime within the region.

I’ve heard it mentioned that the game feels like an XCOM Saturday morning children’s TV show and I have to say that it’s a very apt description, the game feels very safe like it’s trying too hard to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Instead of being able to recruit randomly generated recruits whenever you can afford them, the game has a handful of personalised characters air lifted from whatever B-list kids TV shows they could get their hands on. This means that there’s no permadeath, so if a squad member is downed in battle they get a attribute penalty until they spend a couple of days in training to put themselves to rights. The battle sequences too feel a lot like “Baby’s First XCOM”, they are split into several smaller battles with breach sequences between them, allowing you the opportunity to take out a few enemies before the battle begins in earnest. Both of these changes flatten the difficulty curb with a bulldozer. Although saying that, I had to change my normal XCOM approach in this game because the developers have done away with both the sniper and the demo classes. Given all the above I found myself getting quite bored, quite quickly.

It wouldn’t be much of an XCOM game without our base and in true XCOM style we have our base but in true Chimera Squad style that has also been simplified. All rooms are available from the word “GO”, all you have to do is assign people to rooms in order to utilise them. This was a problem at the start of the game, since I only had 1 team member spare I would have to halt my R&D when a squad member needed healing. Deployment is similar to the previous XCOMs but instead of countries you deploy in city districts, each district having it’s own unrest meter. If a district fills it’s unrest meter, the city anarchy meter will start filling, when that meter is full the game is lost.

Another thing that really annoyed me were the alien members of the team, they felt far too human, some of them felt more human than some of the human characters. There wasn’t any kind of a culture clash within the team. Again going back to the kids tv show analogy, they felt like the arbitrary alien sidekick who’s only reason for existing is because it scored well with the 7 to 11 year old demographic. The whole nicey-nicey feel good frictionless vibe within the squad feels artificial and staged which rubs me up the wrong way.

Overall the game feels like someone had the great idea of a SWAT-esque XCOM game (XCOPs if you will) but then marketing got their hands on it and thought it would sell better if they diluted the game to appeal to the 7-11 age range; However, In doing this they have removed the appeal of the core demographic of the series since there isn’t really any kids TV shows that appeal to adult gamers, with the exception of Ducktales.

by Individuo

Command and Conquer Remastered (PC)

What is it with the sheer number of remakes that are coming out this year? I’ve so far yet to play a game released this year that wasn’t a remake or a remastering with the exception of Fall Guys (and anyone who’s read my review on it will know my feelings about it) and Endzone. So here’s another one to throw onto the pile. Command and Conquer Remastered gives us a revamped version of the first 2 games in the series (Command and Conquer, and Command and Conquer: Red Alert).

Anyone who hasn’t heard of Command and Conquer obviously never played video games in the mid to late 90’s. So for those of you who were too young to remember or didn’t care for them at the time let me catch you up. Command and Conquer is a military strategy game set in an alternate history where in the early 90’s a meteor crashes near the Tiber river in Italy, on that meteorite was a substance called Tiberium (named after the crash site) which absorbed and crystallised precious metals from the surrounding soil, but in doing so terraforms the immediate area making it lethal to anyone unprotected. The coming of the meteorite was predicted by the mysterious, messianic leader of the cult The Brotherhood of Nod (Nod for short) known only as Kane, who’s followers proceed to harvest the crystals to fund the cult. By 1995 Tiberium has spread all across the planet and Nod forces control about half the worlds supply and through it’s sale amassed a global army. This rapid growth and power grab causes the UN to establish the Global Defence Initiative (GDI), a global military tasked with controlling the spread of Tiberium and to oppose the actions of Nod. Red Alert takes place in an alternate alternate history when experimenting at the Trinity site, New Mexico in 1946, Albert Einstein manages to successfully travel backwards through spacetime, arriving at Landsberg Prison, Germany in 1922 where a young Adolf Hitler was just release from prison. Einstein erases Hitler from the time line and returns to 1946. This causes the growth of the Soviet Union to go unchecked leading to global conflict with the allied forces of western Europe.

Both of these games were solid staples of my early video gaming life. I spoke briefly in my Dynasty Warriors post that I used to really enjoy linking our 2 Playstations together and playing Red Alert co-op. I also remember going to my friends house some times afterschool where we would play 1 of 3 games, Final Fantasy VII, Resident Evil and Command & Conquer. So it’s safe to say that there is a fair amount of nostalgia floating about when I write this review.

On the subject of nostalgia, that seems to be the games biggest selling point given that they are exactly the same games with optional graphic upgrades as pressing the space bar switches between original and remastered graphics; However, I can’t imagine why you’d want to keep playing the game set on the original graphics since it just looks like coloured squares making other coloured squares explode into bits of coloured squares. The remastered graphics certainly make the game playable in a modern era but they are hardly anything special. Gameplay wise there is no difference what so ever, given that both games were remade using the same engine as the originals it’s easy to understand why this is. There are also a tonne of bonus unlockables for completing each mission, such as behind the scenes footage or bonus art work. I can imagine that this is mainly for the hard-core fan and that most players will give a miss. The music is the biggest improvement for me. All tracks from both games have been re-recorded by Frank Klepacki (the original composer) and the fan band The Tiberium Sons, as well as some songs from later games and some that were cut or lost from the original games.

I’m not sure what I was expecting from these games when I first heard about the Remastering. I went into the game hoping for the same feelings of nostalgia I got when I originally played them all those years ago, sadly however it just wasn’t there. As much as it upsets me to say it, the years have not been kind to the original games and sadly they just don’t hold up to modern military strategy games. They feel a bit basic and simplistic. In writing this review it’s come to me that I preferred Red Alert 2 to the original games. The story campaign was much better, it was far superior graphically and the gameplay was much more varied with a larger array of units and team perks allowing for different strategies. Most importantly however, it was more fun.

Like most of the time I revisit something I enjoyed from my youth, Command & Conquer Remastered doesn’t hold up to the place that I gave the original. The game feels that it has been released far too late to be relevant (a lot like most of my reviews). The industry has moved on and Command & Conquer feels like a bit of a dinosaur now. Maybe if the game was rebuilt from the ground up in more of a modern style (like FFVII:Remake) rather than the old game with a fresh coat of paint and a few bells and whistles stapled to the side I could get into it, C&C Remastered however is a little late to the party. It’s been 10 years since the last main title C&C game and 25 years since the original game was released. You ask me this is nothing short of a money grab in the name of nostalgia, then again would you expect anything else from EA?

by Individuo

XCOM: Enemy Unknown (PC, PS3, XBOX 360)

I find myself these days playing video games less and less, this is probably due to me not having a lot of money and being bored on what games I already have, hence why all my reviews are on games that have been around longer than the Crab Nebula… Anyway. This time around aliens have invaded Earth and it’s up to the nations of the world to camber together and create the XCOM initiative. Earth’s first and last line of defence.So here we go, XCOM Enemy Unknown.

I was originally going to play Metal Gear Rising because it was free to PSPlus users, and since I’m a PSPlus user it made sense to download it. The problem was it would take some time to download, therefore I decided to play something else in the mean time. This game was kicking around because again it was free to PSPlus users so I thought I’d give it a go. I remembered hearing it was quite good so decided at long last to give it a go, and you know what? I’m glad I did. I found myself staying up until the small hours of the evening engrossed in the workings of my squad and my base.

XCOM starts in the near future at the start of a global alien invasion, you are a nameless, faceless commander type in charge of XCOM, a massive international effort to protect the earth from alien threat. It’s up to you to not only manage the troops in battle, but also take charge of base management, research and development, engineering, finance, caring for the troops etc. It sounds like a lot but as long as you don’t do anything too stupid a lot of it manages itself. Just make sure not to spend your money and resources too frivolously and you’ll do fine.

Gameplay wise, it’s your standard turn based strategy game, you move your troops, the aliens move theirs until someone has no troops left. Each troop type has their own special abilities and traits, Snipers fire from long range, Assault troops get up close and personal, Support troops heal the wounded and Heavy troops blow shit up. As you play your troops grow and get stronger (if they survive that is) unlocking more perks. Meaning later on when the aliens show they really mean business and send their elite soldiers you can still have a fighting chance. It’s also up to you to keep the different international bodies happy by deploying satellites above them to detect enemy spaceships, or complete missions within their borders. If not they will pull their support from the XCOM initiative and you’ll lose their funding.

One point I do need to mention that both goes for and against XCOM is the randomness of the missions, especially that of the UFO missions, which is the main way to collect the alien alloy which is needed for a lot of the later armours and weapons. It can be in game weeks between aliens invade areas where you have satellite uplinks. Therefore if you blow all your alloy on developing your base, you’ll end up sitting around twiddling your thumbs for the next week waiting for a ship to turn up and knowing you it’ll land somewhere with a low threat level and force some country like France to leave the XCOM initiative, but I digress. In it’s favour though it does mean that each game is different in the fine detail. Sure the story never changes but how you get from the beginning to the end is sure to be different.

Another mild annoyance I have with the game is with the difficulty curve. Especially for first time players. The difficulty ramps up over time rather than how much effort the play puts into the war. At the beginning the game the aliens are pretty much sending out the kids on work experience and over time they send out more aliens each more powerful than the last. So if they start sending out their berserker and you haven’t researched laser weapons yet you are in for a world of hurt. Which is why I’d recommend getting laser weapons as soon as they become available. I’d also recommend levelling up many soldiers rather than take out the same 6 over and over. I say this because later in the game it is near impossible to train recruits due to the difficulty of the enemies. Equipping them with the best weapons and ammo may help but it does seam that the enemies know which of my squad and instantly seeks them out. Maybe they can sense inexperience, I don’t know. On a similar note I thank god for the ability to save at almost any time. The amount of times I made one false move and ended up losing my best men was beyond measure.

Now my final thought. I started writing this review months ago, but never got around to finishing it because I was too busy playing it. I enjoyed it from start to finish and all moments in between. I must get for anyone especially those with a PSPlus subscription because you’ll be getting a great game for a ridiculous price.

by Individuo