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…