Last Week's Games: The Chameleon, Machi Koro, Alpha Protocol, Absolver

This week there have been a LOT of games, many of which I’ve played for the first time…

A lot of green. But who is the Chameleon?

First, the hobby games. I had The Chameleon for Christmas last year and hadn’t got around to playing it yet. With lockdown still in full swing, organising a conventional gams night is out of the question, however many people are running games online and, with a bit of fiddling around with our phones, social deduction games like this are ideal. There is a secret word randomly generated from a grid, and everybody knows what it is – except one person, the Chameleon. The players then have to say a word that relates to the secret word, including the Chameleon, who must guess what it might be. Then the other players then guess who the Chameleon might be. Five of us played it over Zoom (Kirsty and I took turns in running the game and playing it) and we played for about an hour and a half in the end! 

Nice theme and well presented.

 

Me and Kirsty also had a go at Machi Koro later in the week. I had played this city-building game before at the UK Games Expo in 2015, with one of its expansions, but I’d never played my copy. It is like Monopoly but without the board, and with a far more manageable endgame! You buy various amenities for your city, one and later two die rolled each turn activate certain cards. The aim is to be the first to build four essential buildings for the city, and the first one to do it is the winner – but as most of them are relatively expensive, you’ll need to build some infrastructure to generate money. We really enjoyed the game; not without a few knocks which I might go into detail with later, but it’s accessible, friendly and anybody should be able to have a go with this and enjoy it.

The shooting is a little off but it's
still a pretty fun game.

I’ve been playing some different video games as well. I had a go with Alpha Protocol on the Xbox 360. I was inspired to buy this by Youtube’s Metal Jesus’ hidden gems videos, and as 360 games are usually very cheap now, it was a great time to pick it up. It’s a 3^rd person shooter with some role-playing elements, where you take on the role of a secret agent in an even more secret agency trying to save the world. The strongest point for me is the plot, as it’s well written and voice-acted, and tells an interesting story that hooks you in and conveys a sense of urgency. The gameplay is a little wonky; the enemies take more hits than I would usually expect from a game like this and the interface is a faff, but I’m enjoying it so far, so I’ll keep playing and hopefully see it through to the end.

An interesting martial arts game,
but not a good experience with a poor frame rate.

One game I won’t be coming back to is Absolver. I bought this for the PC on a whim, but it was a massive let-down for me. Not because it’s a bad game – far from it. It is a martial arts adventure game with some deck-building elements, set in a strange and beautiful but curiously empty world. You play a “prospect,” a trainee, who is trying to work their way up to the skills required to become an Absolver. You fight using a combination of light attacks, heavy attacks, weapons, and stances that give you different options for each. It looked good, and I know enough about the developers, Devolver Digital, to know it’s a competently designed game. But it doesn’t run very well on my laptop at all; the framerate is horribly low, and I have no idea why. I’ve made sure my GPU is linked to the game, and my computer is well within the minimum specifications. I may allow for the fact that I’m using the weaker (but more stable!) of my two power leads, but I can’t see the other one making that much difference. Perhaps it’s the mandatory online connectivity; domestic laptops aren’t really designed for this. But a combat system that relies on timing isn’t going to work with a bad framerate, so I’ll shelve Absolver for now until I get an upgrade.