This week, I played two new games…
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| Splat! |
The first was Kill the Bad Guy on the PC. It is a puzzle
game where you have a “bad guy” taking a pre-determined route in a city-like
setup; the objective of the game is to kill him and make it look like an
accident. You can drop a piano on their head, start a car so it goes flying in
to him, make a power line fall on to water that he’s walking in etc.
It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure how well it’s
pulled off. It’s not a good-looking game; the environments are deliberately
designed to be very drab. It’s pretty easy, at least in the earlier levels, to
work out what to do; the challenge is in timing and force. For example, one of
the stages involves launching a car over a ramp and in to the bad guy. Do this
with too much force and the car will go straight over his head, but too little
and the car won’t go far enough to reach him. How much force to use is precise,
and the build-up metre is very sensitive; it takes a second to fill the whole
thing. There are other objectives too, such as finding a passport hidden in the
environment, and catching a tooth that comes flying off the bad guy when you
kill him. Secondary objectives add to the way you kill someone, but that’s
usually described in very vague terms and not easy to work out. I’ll give it
another go, but I hope I can find a bit more fun in it than I currently am.
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| Monkey is performed by the always-excellent Andy Serkis |
The other new game was Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. This
is a Post-Apocalyptic action-adventure; you play an agile but brutish thug
called Monkey, who escapes slavery with a vulnerable but tech-savvy young woman
called Trip. Trip binds Monkey to her using a slave headband, and he now has to
guide her home, initially through what was once New York. First impressions of
the game are good, because it breaks out of the usual desolate wasteland that
forms the basis of most post-apocalyptic adventures. The adventure occurs
roughly two hundred years after the apocalypse, and nature is starting to
reclaim what was once modern New York City; traces of civilization are still
there but the environment is surprisingly lush and green. The game plays well;
less fluidly than I’m used to but it better contributes to the idea that the
stunts and combat moves that Monkey pulls off are quite difficult to do. I’ve
got a little way into the game and I’m looking forward to coming back to it!
And I continued playing Eternal Crusade; I’m still enjoying
playing the game. I’ve played multiplayer shooters before like Gears of War and
Gotham City Imposters; arguably better games but I suspect I’m enjoying this
one a lot more for the 40K setting!
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| Always a pleasure to play this... |
I went in to Warlords ‘n’ Wizards in Netherton and played
The Settlers of Catan with a couple of the people there. I’ve often described
this game, borrowing a quote from Yahtzee, as the game to play “if you’re a bit
strapped for cash in the run up to Christmas and you need to lose three friends
as quickly as possible.” A harsh description, and one that doesn’t necessarily
fit the nature of the game about settlements where no one gets killed. But it’s
very competitive, with the trade mechanic being almost entirely a matter of
personal choice and establishing how one can benefit from a deal. I like it
because it is a self-contained game; you don’t have to micro-manage optimal
army lists or paint models to play. You go in with the materials that the game
gives you, and your wit and experience which you have to earn – there is a lot
of skill involved!
I signed up for some tournaments; one of them is Catan. This
will be happening at the UK Games Expo in June, and I’ll be playing Dominion
there as well, which I haven’t played yet, but I like deck builders! I’ll be
playing X-Wing at a tournament in Stafford in July, but more on that later…
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