Backlog Beatdown: Joining the 8-Bit Army with 8-Bit Armies

I picked up 8-Bit Armies after seeing TotalBiscuit’s coverage on it a few years ago. He wasn’t particularly complimentary of the game, but I remember at the time thinking that it looked interesting and I thought I would give it a go.

In the beginning, there was a base...

8-Bit Armies is a real-time strategy game, which, despite its name, has a more Voxel art style than 8-bit. It was developed by some of the people who had worked on the original Command and Conquer games, and it shows in its gameplay! You build your bases, collect your resources, buy your armies and use them to attack the enemy. The campaign mode features 25 missions that scale up in both difficulty and the level of units you can produce, and with the game almost solely focused on its gameplay, the story is minimal. This is your base, those are your enemies, these are the buildings you need to destroy – the rest is up to you.

Some questions were raised about the game only releasing with one faction – the Renegades. This creates the obvious issue of there being absolutely no differentiation between what you can do and what your enemy can do, with the exception that your enemy can build slightly more advanced units at certain points in the game. At the time of writing there is another faction in the game – the Guardians – but they don’t feature in the base campaign at all, and as it was downloadable content I have yet to play it. This might seem like a hinderance, but on the other hand it did stop any situations where one side was able to win the battle because they had something their opponents didn’t, which led to a more balanced if less interesting experience.

The map design isn't particularly inspired...

The game handles well. The mouse controls are fluid and responsive, and there is a selection of hotkey commands that you can use as well, though you must go into the options menu to find out what they are. The feedback that you get from the game gives a good idea of how well you’re doing, whether you’re under attack, which buildings are being attacked and which have been destroyed. And the battles can be good fun as well, with the units responding quickly and dynamically to orders, though for some reason they won’t try to defend themselves if they’re being attacked by an enemy out of their range. The level design is a little symmetrical for my tastes, but 8-Bit Armies was developed with multiplayer in mind and some of the later levels introduced an extra level of challenge, such as allies you must keep alive, and the potential for your resources to run out turning the battle into a war of attrition.

A chaotic battle rages on.

The graphics are pretty good; the Voxel art-style isn’t to everybody’s taste, but the game looks bright, colourful, and clear. The only exception is that you can’t rotate the map; the would have been fine for a top-down view but the isometric point of view we have here makes some of your units a little difficult to see if they’re behind buildings and hills. The sound is good as well; the guns, explosions and voices do what they need to do, and the soundtrack is on par with the early Command and Conquer games; I understand they’re by the same composer.

Is 8-Bit Armies a good game? Difficult to say. Mechanically, it’s very competently designed. At its most basic level it doesn’t present a huge challenge, but extra parameters can be added to all the levels if that’s what you want. But people wanting a huge variation in factions and mission styles may want something more from this. I should say that my experience with the game is hardly complete: haven’t experienced the more difficult missions, the multiplayer modes – which includes a co-op campaign – or even the DLC. I’ve beaten the core game, and that is enough for me for now; I can always go back to it later if I want. I enjoyed my time with it, and if you’re a fan of classic RTS games, there’s a better than decent chance that you’ll enjoy it too – but there may be other options for you.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.

Last Week's Games: Lumo, Planescape Torment, Assassin's Creed 2, Tekken 6

I’ve not been in the best of health this week; nothing worse than a cold but it’s knocked me about!

I like being able to change the colour of the character...

I’ve played some more of Lumo on the Nintendo Switch; the puzzling nature of the game makes it better enjoyed in short bursts, but I’ve been having fun with it. Collecting all the rubber ducks continues to be a challenge, but it became a lot easier once I’d gone online and found that you can hold down the jump button to jump as soon as you land. This isn’t usual for platform games but is a welcome addition here! There are other elements to the game too; a minecart level, and I’ve reached a rather odd section where you have a space-shooter mini-game, of all things – an odd addition to an already very surreal game, and I’m hoping it will all make sense by the time I get to the end! I’ve also found some measure of combat in the game, though currently this amounts to nothing more than shining a light on your wand and scaring spiders away.

The starting room. Grim.

On advice from my sister I gave Planescape Torment another go. I say another go, but it’s been nearly two decades since the last time, when I owned it on CD-ROM! This is a computer RPG in a similar style to Baldur’s gate, except that the setting for this is Sigil, the City of Doors – and is quite frankly bizarre. You play as The Nameless One, a human-like being of some considerable power but not much in the way of memories, as you journey through a morgue trying to find out who and what you are. This is about as much as I’ve been able to discern so far, both from the time I’ve spent playing it and what I can remember from playing the game all that time ago! It is a complex plot and a very involving game, and like many RPGs I will be surprised if I manage to see it through to the end, but I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far and I hope I continue to do so.

Managed to pull this move off the other day...

I continued my game of Assassin’s Creed 2, guiding Ezio through a few speed and assassination challenges. Assassin’s Creed games can very often feel like busy-work, and this is no exception, but I enjoy what I can in short bursts and progress through the game a bit at a time. That way, I enjoy what time I put into it – even if it isn’t very much! I particularly enjoyed the mission where I had to assassinate four guards without using my weapons. Three of them were easy – they were on top of buildings, I just had to push them off – but the fourth was on the ground level, and the way I had to beat them was to hire a group of mercenaries to do it for me. This may seem counter-intuitive because on the surface it seems like you’re paying a certain amount of in-game money for the game to be played for you, but it got more interesting once some of the other guards started to interfere – at that point, I could join in the fight, as I was allowed to kill the guards that weren’t my targets!

Boom!

Finally, Kirsty and I played Tekken 6 on the Xbox 360. Tekken has always been a good set of games and I’ve enjoyed each one I’ve played, whether in the arcade or on various iterations of the PlayStation. I downloaded this version off Games with Gold, and we had a fine time experimenting with the different characters, finding out who we liked and who we didn’t. I used the random generator to pick a different character each time, whereas Kirsty likes who she likes and tended to go for Panda, Jack and Eddy. Eddy is probably the best character in the game for button-mashing, and Kirsty has a track record of winning with the bigger lads by spamming a low kick attack. We played 11 matches and Kirsty won 6 of them; some of them were close calls! It’s a pretty good game, and I’m looking forward to getting more deeply in to it later on.

 

Last Week's Games: 8-Bit Armies, 88 Heroes

I started off this week by beating a game I’ve been playing for a while now: 8-Bit Armies. I reached the end of the campaign, but there wasn’t an ending to speak of as such plot as there was appeared in a text box before each mission. This should have been a bit of a let-down, but I found myself thinking that I shouldn’t be too worried about plot and endings – 8-Bit Armies is not that kind of game. It’s far more about an engaging process than it is about displaying an outcome and getting to the end of the game is its own reward.

This isn't actually the level I'm talking about.
I should do my own screenshots, really.

Last week, I mentioned that I wasn’t always impressed with the level design for much of the game, and while I stand by my words, I did find myself eating them somewhat in favour of the last few levels – they were excellent. Symmetrically designed as ever, but with more factors to consider than just killing the enemy. The last level was particularly memorable, as this was the only mission that I failed all game – I had two allied armies that I was supposed to keep alive, and while I was attacking the nearest enemy to me, one of my allies died! When I had another go, I made sure to attack the enemy base closest to my allies first to keep them safe from the enemy. This worked up to a point, but then something happened that hadn’t happened all game: The resources ran out. I had about $2000 left to spend, and all the oil wells had run dry so there wasn’t going to be any more. I had about half the force I’d used to attack the enemy base, too – I had to take out two more, with only minimal reinforcements! I used some of my remaining money to fill in the gaps in the ground forces, and the rest of it to buy some mechanics to repair my units. I took the fight to the enemy bases, hitting the power plants first where possible to disable the gun turrets. (By then, the enemy had run out of resources as well, so his gun turrets were his only line of defence.) This worked up until I attacked the final enemy base, where I lost most of my units to not realising there was another set of power plants on the other side of the base! Thankfully, I’d kept a flight of helicopters in reserve so they could destroy all the remaining buildings and take the win.

I’ll write a full review of 8-Bit Armies in the week, but I wanted to share that last level with you as it’s far too specific to put into a general review.

He's rubbish, obviously.

Later, I had a go with a game that I’d owned for some time and never played 88 Heroes. This is a mad platforming game, where you must traverse several levels, defeat the boss at the end of a stage and save the world. To someone who grew up during the 3^rd and 4^th generation of consoles, this is nothing new. But the winning card of this game is the randomised selection of the titular 88 heroes. Each level starts you off with a different hero, each with his or her own gimmick that makes them unique to play. Some are better than others, from kittens that fire laser beams, to a barbarian that flourishes with his sword every time you try to attack, to an escaped convict who must hold down the action button all the way through the level or he will explode, to a woman made entirely out of glass and can’t fall any significant distance, to a man who can’t attack but can float around the level and dodge most of the traps. You never quite know what you’re going to get – but you must make the best of what you have because once those heroes are gone, they’re (mostly) not coming back and after all 88 heroes have fallen, you lose the game.

This wouldn’t have been anybody’s Game of the Year but I’ve really enjoyed it so far. It’s nice to see a game not take itself too seriously!

Backlog Beatdown: Being an Army of Two with Army of Two

I picked up Army of Two a few years ago, as I had downloaded one of its sequels onto my Xbox 360 as part of the Games with Gold series. I usually prefer to play games in sequence, and I wouldn’t have touched the later game until I’d played and beaten the older two, so I bought the first game. It took me a few years and a large gap in between to get to the end of it. Here’s what I thought:

You know this dingus has had it...

At first glance it looks like a generic war shooter of the time. The colour scheme is brown/grey, the setting is contemporary, the weapons are varied but have all the tropes of a modern military shooter – a pistol, a standard weapon (shotguns etc) and a special weapon (sniper rifles, grenade launchers etc) and the heroes are hulking badasses. What makes Army of Two different is the interaction between the two characters. You can order your team mate to hold their position, advance or stay on you, in either an aggressive or defensive manner. This works because of the “heat” meter – the more aggressive one of the characters is, the more attention they will draw from the enemy, leaving their teammate to flank the enemy or attack them undisturbed. This is the only game I’ve played with this kind of mechanic designed to work across two people, and for the most part, it works quite well. The game was obviously designed to work best with two players, but I wouldn’t know how well it works and the AI worked well enough with the occasional fumble.

This is the unique feature of an otherwise standard game. The two characters, Rios and Salem, fit their tropes – a scarred veteran with a present moral standard and a swaggering mercenary in it for the money, respectively. Their dialogue is well performed but could fit a “buddy”-style comedy film as easily as a gritty war epic. The graphics are are competently designed and do the job. The sound is good as well, the guns have a nice rattle to them, and the background music plays its role of heightening the tension while not sticking in the memory after the fact. The plot, though not particularly difficult to predict, carries Army of Two across its campaign mode without outstaying its welcome. And the game handles well enough. I could have been playing any game with a similar theme and setting, and the AI control would be the only thing that differentiated Army of Two.

And yet…

Somehow, I managed to stay engaged enough with Army of Two to see it through to the end. I was interested enough with the plot to want to see how it turned out. I enjoyed shooting enough to want to keep playing through the frustratingly difficult sections. I liked buying equipment enough to want to collect the entire set of weapons and masks (though I’ll need a couple of goes with it to do this!) It took me a while to get going, but once I did, I was determined to see it through to the end.

Can you tell which is Rios,
and which is Salem?

Overall, I enjoyed the experience, though I do feel the game wobbled with its final boss. The problem with military shooters is that as they have a contemporary setting in whatever fetid standards pass for realism at the time of development, they can’t really do anything extra with a villain – we’re all human, after all. Other games get around this in various ways. Quick time events are rarely welcome, but they work. Giving the enemy and the player something extra to do in the environment helps as well. Even a larger amount of health would be different, though it would require some suspension of disbelief. With Army of Two, there’s nothing to differentiate what you’re doing with the final boss to the same cover-based shooting you’ve been doing all through the game. It didn’t spoil the playthrough, and I do recommend at least trying the partner mechanics if you want to do something a bit different with guns, but if you’ve been playing military shooters as your go-to for the last couple of generations, you’ll probably want something a little more.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.

Last Week's Games: 8-Bit Armies, Lumo

My time has been limited this week, but since that means I’ve played less games, I’ve got a little more space to write about them:

See what I mean? Exactly the same either way.

I’ve been soldiering on through 8-Bit Armies, and I’m not far from beating it now. Those of you who have been following me for a while will have seen that I’ve been mostly positive about the game so far, and for the most part I’ve enjoyed it. However, I want to talk about an aspect of the game I’m not enjoying so much: The level design. All the maps I have played on in the campaign so far have been almost completely symmetrical, either two, four, six or sometimes eight-way.

The problem I have with this is a matter of suspension of disbelief more than anything else. This might seem like an odd thing to say about a game like 8-Bit Armies, which understands that it is a video game. But the map design is not very inspired at all. It always places your home base, and that of your enemies, in a raised easily-defendable position at a corner of the map, and while that is strategically sound, it’s hard to believe that it’s ever that simple for military forces. It keeps the pace of the game going, I guess, but it’s hard to be particularly engaged with a map where the key to victory is almost invariably smashing a gauntlet of gun turrets at the top of a hill to where the enemy base is, and defending your own is nothing more complicated than building a set-up of gun and rocket turrets. Would it have been too much to ask to create some different maps that would force players to use their positions and resources more creatively?

There's a Red vs Blue series in here somewhere...

I can see why they would have done this for the multiplayer aspect of the game, as you’re not going to want to design your map so that one player or team has an advantage over another. But even then, some asymmetry wouldn’t necessarily have been a bad thing. Perhaps they could have designed some maps so that the tactics used for each side of the map were different, but would have created an equal chance of winning or thereabouts? Part of the skill of strategy games is learning how to use the lay of the land to your advantage, and with 8-bit Armies, you only need to do that once and then you’ve learned the enemy strategy for the entire game.

Having said that, I really enjoyed one level that occurs late in the game. Your mission is to destroy three enemy HQs, but that’s nothing unusual. What is less regular is that your centre ground is almost always under attack, so you must keep your eye on your defence network there. Also, the level starts you off with a few harvesters and refineries already active, which means the oil fields around your base deplete quickly, forcing your harvesters to look for resources in less-well-defended areas. I was surprise by the few times the enemies had found my harvesters and had brought a tank company to attack them; having to respond to that was an extra level of challenge the game just hadn’t managed at that point.

If you put the soap in the water it will clean it.
It will still kill you though.

Elsewhere I have been playing Lumo on my Nintendo Switch. This is an interesting isometric puzzle platformer, where you play a boy or girl dressed as a wizard trying to navigate your way through a labyrinth of blocks and jumping puzzles that take the form of, from what I’ve seen so far, the basement of a castle. Your aim, I think, is just to get through the castle, but there are lots of collectables lying around as well for you work out. The Rubber Ducks, for example, appear in water that kills you if you touch it. You have to jump on to the duck, then you have about a 15^th of a second to jump onto the next platform, or you die and have to start again. It’s the kind of game I play the Switch for, and I’m enjoying it so far, though as it can get frustrating it’s better played in short bursts.

Until next week…

Last Week's Games: Aracania, 8-Bit Armies, Assassin's Creed 2, Trivial Pursuit, Codenames, Labyrinth, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Hey! That's My Fish

As I’ve been off on Christmas Holidays for the last couple of weeks, I’ve had more than the usual amount of time to play games! There’s been quite a few of them so I’ll be brief:

At least the guy begins the game equipped for his
supposed profession - shepherd.

On the PS4, I’ve been playing Arcania. This is a grim dark western Role-Playing Game, of little surprise to anybody familiar with The Witcher or the Elder Scrolls. This has been a mixed bag for me so far. There are some major flaws in the game, not the least of them that the cut scenes don’t work. I thought this was deliberate when I first booted the game and started playing as a King in the middle of a nightmare, then woke up a few minutes later as some rustic pretty boy whose name I don’t know and had no greater aspirations than to perform a few fetch quests and marry his sweetie-pie. But then, after going through what I presume was the magic tutorial in which I defeated a giant beetle-like monster, the game jumped straight to the adventure being on a different island altogether, a malevolent force (of Paladins?) having apparently invaded your home and killed everybody there. I didn’t see any of this. Also, by the standards of what I expect from roleplaying games, Arcania is very basic. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it sustains under its own weight, but people who play these types of games may be expecting a little more. Nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far and I may see it through to the end!

On my laptop I’ve been mainly playing 8-Bit Armies. I beat another couple of missions on the Renegade faction. I like that the game is structured in this way, because it gives me a definite start-stop mentality; I can play it for a bit and then stop without necessarily having to carry on for ages. With a sometimes very busy schedule, this can be a blessing indeed!

The Ultimate Faffing About Franchise!

On the Xbox 360, I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed 2. I started this a couple of years ago and didn’t get very far. This was during the time where I was trying to play one new game every week; AC2 was my new game for that week but I don’t seem to have played it much beyond the first couple of hours. I wasn’t far off beating the first Assassin’s Creed game at that point and perhaps I was a little “Assassin’s Creed”ed out to put much time in to it’s sequel, but I’m enjoying it now. It’s a good game, hopefully I’ll see it through to the end as well!

Finally, we had a few Board Games! At Fran’s birthday party, we played a mixture of Harry Potter and Friends Trivial Pursuit. We didn’t have a board; we just asked each other the questions and I surprised a few people with my knowledge of Harry Potter! I didn’t even touch the Friends cards; I’m not saying I’ve never watched it, but I don’t know enough about it to be good at trivia questions. We also had a go at Codenames, which everybody likes; it’s a very simple concept – Word Association meets Spy Networks – and you can have a lot of people playing so everybody’s enjoying themselves!

I was so close! (Blue.)
But Kirsty (Red) was closer...

Later in the week we had our own games night around our flat with Fran and Phil, where we played a few games. Labyrinth is an interesting game where you must search for six treasures in a constantly shifting maze, then return to your starting block. It was a surprisingly competitive game, which Kirsty eventually won, but not before I’d embarrassed myself by playing the choral introduction to Inside by Stiltskin prior to making what I thought was the winning move – only to find out it wasn’t. We also played One Night Ultimate Werewolf, which was ok and put Fran in mind of a game she runs with her Youth Theatre group called Mafia. We rounded it off with Hey! That’s My Fish, which is an old favourite, if surprisingly competitive and is always a nice one to come back to.

I’m back at work next week, let’s see what I have time for!

 

Last Week's Games: Deal or Duel

This week I played The Witcher 3, Endless Legend and Magic Carpet. One of those is a long-form RPG, one is a long-form 4X strategy game, and the last is an old game, likely very difficult and will take me a long time to play through. I’ll have plenty of time to talk about them in the future. For today, I’m going to talk about a board game that me and Kirsty played: Deal or Duel.

Hamilton: The Board Game?

At any other time of year this would have been funny, but in the Christmas period I imagine this comes up quite a lot: I bought Kirsty some board games from Waterstones, including Labyrinth and Chameleon. She’d played both before enjoyed them, so I thought we could play them together. As it turned out, she’d already bought Chameleon for me, and one of our friends had bought us Labyrinth. So back we went to Waterstones to return the duplicate gifts and pick some new games. We then ran into the problem of me having most of the games that Kirsty would otherwise have been interested in buying, so we were there a while. We eventually decided to buy 221b Baker Street, The Big Movie Quiz and Deal or Duel.

Deal or Duel looks, at first glance, like Monopoly-like game, where the aim is to make as much money as possible. Glance a little harder, and differences start to emerge: You’re dealing with American Independence, the Founding Fathers, and some of the key figures involved with that tumultuous period of American history. And your aims are either to make as much money… or die trying.

Each player picks a colour, or faction, which gives them a set of nine “face” cards depicting historical figures. They have a hand of action cards they can use to make money, or initiate duels with their opponents. You can play general action cards, which usually result in money changing hands, you can sell some of your cards that affect the duels for money, or you can challenge one of your opponents to a duel. At the end of a sequence of turns, Alexander Hamilton – arguably the most influential individual in this period of history – introduces a new policy or tax that affects some, all or none of the players depending on what cards are in their hand. Your goal is either to accumulate $1000, or to be the last player with face cards when all others are either dead or in prison.

Looks like Monopoly, doesn't it...

The duelling is where the game comes alive: If you win the duel, you get the value of the person you defeat in money. You initiate the duel with a duel card, but you can respond with either another duel card, a deal card or a conduct card which changes the stakes. At the end of the second turn after the duel is initiated, the cards you used are flipped and the higher number of clapping hands wins. If a deal card is played, you must pay the value of the card you lost against – but you don’t lose your own card. This was how I eventually lost, however – when Kirsty initiated a high-value duel, all I had to respond with was a Deal card. When the cards were revealed, I didn’t have enough money to buy my way out of the duel – an automatic defeat.

We had a very good time playing the game, although it certainly helped that both Kirsty and I had some investment in the theme through Hamilton, the Broadway musical. I’m learning to sing a couple of songs from it, Kirsty is aware of it through her work in Theatre and will be going to see it in January. We knew who some of the characters were, and some of the historical events in the game. We also had a laugh acting out the duels, being theatrically over-polite in the way 18^th century duelling is very often depicted! It’s not perfect – the small amounts of money changed through the action cards wasn’t making much difference, and while multiple players would increase the strategic element, elimination mechanics are risky in a game of this length. But I’m looking forward to playing it again.