Last Week's Games: James Pond 2: Codename Robocod, Necromunda: Underhive Wars

 I’ve got quite a bit to say about the games I’ve been playing this week. I don’t know how much of it is going to make sense; I’m not very well today. But we’ll see how I get on:

The first thing I should say is last Friday I reached the end of the main campaign of Not Tonight; you can read my review here. I’ve enjoyed it, and it hasn’t outstayed its welcome so I might give the extra part of the game called One Love a go as well, but I haven’t got much more to say at this point.

I also reached the end of God of Word. As a game that I installed onto my laptop so that I’d have a game on there I could play without necessarily having to plug in my mouse, it certainly served its purpose, and I managed to spend quite a long time playing it over the last few weeks! I’m hopefully going to get a review out on Friday so I’m not going to say too much about it now, but it was a good time.

Back in the day when pickups increased your
score and didn't have to make any sense...

It was my birthday last Wednesday and my daughter Jessie bought me a game for the Nintendo Switch: James Pond 2: Codename Robocod. The James Pond series never really broke out of the fourth console generation (Megadrive / Super Nintendo) and hasn’t had the longevity of some of its contemporaries, but they’re still fun to play. A couple of my friends at school had Codename: Robocod, so I’ve played it a few times before, but never beaten it. It’s a side-scrolling platform game where you traverse colourful locations in Santa’s workshop, fighting your way through traps, hostile creatures and rescuing hostages. Interestingly, of all the James Pond games, it was Codename: Robocod that was ported and re-made onto several consoles after its generation, with some differences including level layout, music, and hostages. I have a vague memory of the hostages in the old versions of the game being penguins; these days they are Santa’s Elves – I suspect mainly because the penguins in the original game were a product placement for the McVities Penguin Bars, and the sponsorship deals have long since expired. The game was altered several times over the generations it was released on, so I don’t really know which version I’m playing – it could be that there was a new version entirely for the Switch!

I bet she's a sight for sore eyes...

Finally, on the PlayStation 4 I’ve been playing Necromunda: Underhive Wars. I’d been looking forward to this game for a long time and is one of the very few games in years I have bought close to release. I’d rather have got it on PC to tell you the truth, but for some reason it’s not designed to work on Windows 8.1 (My PC specs are fine in most other respects, but I wasn’t going to waste my money risking a purchase when it says on the Steam webpage it will only work on Windows 10.) So, I bought it on the PS4. Now, some of you will know that Mordheim: City of the Damned is one of my favourite games, and Necromunda looked like it was going to work much the same way but with guns. And it does – but there are other things going on as well. The campaign – the small amount of it I’ve played, anyway – is far more narrative than Mordheim, with each mission I’ve played so far supporting a plot point. I haven’t tried making my own gang yet, as the story mode drops you in with the Escher gang and presumably allows you to explore the other gangs (Goliaths and Orlocks) as you proceed. I’m not sure whether I like this or not – part of the fun of Mordheim for me was taking your warband through its own story and progression and having the occasional mission to do in between to move the plot along. I appear to have less agency over how the Necromunda gangs develop, but we’ll see how it goes. It may take some getting used to but I’m sure I’ll find the fun in it; it’s a GW game and I usually like those by default!

Last Week's Games: Sacred Citadel and Necromunda

Regular readers will note that I very often complain about not having enough time to play as many games as I would like, and this week has been no exception, though for different reasons than usual. I got caught up in a family emergency of the kind not terribly considerate of the average number of hours in a day, and while that’s been mostly sorted now, a lot of the spare time I was expecting to have this week has been taken up in dealing with it. Sometimes life gets in the way, and this week there were other places I needed to be!

See what I mean? It couldn't look
more XBLA if it tried!

On those days where I had an hour or two to spare, however, I found myself playing Sacred Citadel. One pattern that regularly occurs when I’m playing games is that after I’ve finished a big, heavy game like Assassin’s Creed, I’m more likely to play a couple of light or retro games that I don’t have to think too hard about in order to have a pretty decent time. Sacred Citadel is a fantasy-themed hack-and-slash brawler with RPG elements, similar in gameplay to the old arcade brawler machines that were the staple of the arcades in the early 90s, but with a look I that can only describe as Xbox Live Arcade. I didn’t realise until I was doing the research for this blog that it’s actually a part of the Sacred franchise, which isn’t a series of games I’m familiar with so I had no pre-conceptions about the content of the game. Honestly, at this point I just wanted to hit something.

You choose from one of four characters; the Warrior, the Ranger, the Mage and the Shaman. They have different abilities depending on who you choose; I went for the Mage because it’s a refreshing change to be able to fireball something to death without having to commit to a 40+ hour roleplaying game. The game is divided into four acts each with a number of levels in there; it starts out easily enough with the game showing you the different mechanics in the first few levels and taking the training wheels off for the rest of the game. You have access to a range of attack combos and can also upgrade your weapons. The more recent brawlers I’ve played have mechanics like this and they’re not awful, but it’s an illusion of depth as your weapon upgrades etc increase in power as the game increases in difficulty, as the enemies you face can take more damage as you’re going along.

Where the game truly becomes like an RPG is in its levelling-up system, where once your character gets a certain amount of XP they level up and you have to distribute points into their characteristics. This should also be an illusion of depth, and it would be if the game didn’t have a massive difficulty spike halfway through the second act and force you to go back and grind for XP to have a hope of beating the boss. There are some challenges to make this more interesting – complete a level without dying, or in a certain amount of time, or score a certain amount of points – but it’s brought the pace of the game right down to a standstill for me. I’ll keep going at it from time to time though, as I’m not expecting to have much time this week either and I’m not quite ready to get off my casual gaming horse just yet!

Looking forward to opening this!

I also bought Games Workshop’s new release, Necromunda Underhive. Necromunda is a game that was available when I first got into the hobby but had been and gone by the time I’d considered getting in to it. Games Workshop’s smaller skirmish games have a lot of good character development rules, though, and I remember Mordheim very fondly, so I’d love to see how it works in the futuristic gang war setting. I haven’t even had time to get the box out yet, and I suspect it will be a while before I do as I want to make sure I do a reasonable job with the painting this time, but we’ll see what happens with it.