I started this week with a game that might by now be
considered an old favourite: Mordheim, City of the Damned. I think what
inspired me to do that was that at some point I had a look at the achievement
list on Steam, and found that there’s a lot of achievements that only a very
small number of folks have achieved. Wanting to be one of them, I’m aiming high
this time, wanting to get some heroes to level 10! It’s not an excellent game –
the bugs can get in the way sometimes, and it tanks the power on my laptop, and
that’s even before we get into the somewhat limited map design and ferociously
tough objectives. But as you’ve probably gathered from the tone of some of my
more recent posts, I love the Games Workshop licensed games, and Mordheim has
been my favourite of them so far.
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| Witch Hunters. They hunt Witches, I've heard. |
By “ferociously tough objectives,” I’m talking specifically
about the Crush their Will missions, which is Mordheim’s version of Capture the
Flag – you have to steal the enemy’s idol at their cart and return it to your
own. The problem that it runs in to is that the battle system works on Morale –
the war bands need to take a morale check once their morale falls below a
certain point, and if they fail, which they almost always do, the battle is
over. The trouble is that there’s rarely enough time to get from one side of
the map to the other to get the idol and bring it back to your own, except for
certain maps that are generated randomly so there’s no way of strategizing
this. And even if there were, you would have to use one of your heroes to do
this, as your henchmen don’t have the same kind of mobility. Then again, I tend
to play either Mercenaries or Possessed, I don’t very often play Skaven so the
position might be different there, we shall see! I played for a long time until
I ran into a game-breaking bug that stops you from beating one of the campaign
missions, and while I did get some advice on beating it, I ended up starting
again as the Witch Hunters.
I also had another go at Regicide, 40K’s version of Chess,
where I’ve got stuck on a mission where you have to stop three Ork Stormboyz
(knights) from getting into two squares on your side of the board with four
Tactical Marines (pawns) and two Devastators (bishops.) The problem I’m running
in to is that the secondary objective is to capture the three Stormboyz, (i.e.
the conventional way you’d do it in Chess,) not kill them. It’s a tricky thing
to do because of course it doesn’t stop the Stormboyz trying to kill you, so
even though you make the right moves, your pieces could very well be killed by
the enemy shooting at them before they have a chance to capture! So ultimately
I’m relying on a mistake by the AI, which isn’t a particularly rewarding way of
dealing with things.
I tried Eternal Crusade again after being away from it for
about a week, during which the competition seemed to have ramped up in
difficulty! I found myself not enjoying it quite as much as I used to, it might
just be getting a little old now.
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| This bit's a beauty... |
My new game for this week was The Witness, a puzzle game in
which you travel round an island solving maze-like puzzles. This sounds like
the most boring thing in the world but I actually quite like things like that
and I’m enjoying my time with it, even if I had to look at IGN to find out what
to do with one of the Tetris puzzles. It’s a beautifully-presented game, and
the ambience does a lot to keep my mind focussed on a couple of different
things at the same time. My only complaint so far is about the puzzles that you
only appear to have one chance to complete; if you don’t, that puzzle is shut
down. It seems a little harsh not to get a second go at it, especially if the
puzzle rules have changed!
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