For the second time in as many weeks I find myself
apologising for being late with this blog. I wanted to beat the final level on
Regicide before I wrote it, so that I could write about beating Regicide! But
by the time I eventually did, it was far too late in the night to write
anything meaningful about it and I had work the following day. But I’m here
now, and I finally managed to beat Warhammer 40K: Regicide.
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| Well you're about to die, sonflower... |
If you’ve been following my comments on this game you’ll
know that Regicide can be a bit hit-and-miss with its level design. Some of
them were great, but some of the levels and secondary objectives were designed so
that it was only possible to do it if the A.I. made a mistake. Thankfully, the
final level of Regicide was an absolute beauty. The Space Marine’s objective is
to take down the Warboss (King,) with the secondary objective of eliminating all
of the Orks. The Orks have the advantage in numbers (they have two more pawns
than normal and the Space Marines have two fewer,) and the placement of the
terrain makes them difficult to deal with. It took many, many attempts; I found
myself taking out as many of the Shoota Boyz (pawns) as possible to stop them
throwing Stik Bombs at my Librarian and Captain (Queen and King,) as they do a
surprising amount of damage if you ignore them. The Weirdboy (Queen) is always
a messy piece to contend with, the Lootaz (Bishops) are brutal in surprise
attacks and the Stormboyz (Knights) can be lethal if you forget about their
movement patterns. The Meganobz (Rooks) are very hard to take down, thankfully
I managed to capture them both. But even after all that, the Warboss is a very
tough opponent; he doesn’t take much damage no matter what you’re firing at
him, and can call in a shield every few turns. The only way I found to beat him
was to use my Terminator (Rook) and Librarian to force him to the back of the
board and into a Checkmate position, but even then there was always the risk of
him using his bombardment move to attack my Captain from a distance!
Nonetheless, I managed to beat a game that I’ve put roughly
60 hours into. The ending was… well, thematically, it fitted. But the set-up
from the intro video and some of the cut-scenes promised a lot more than it
delivered. There was a potential set-up for a sequel, but Hammerfall Publishing
are not an active presence right now and unless someone else picks up the rights,
I can’t see it happening. I’ll try and have a review out by the end of the
week!
I’ve also been playing Murder in the Alps, the first Hidden
Object game I’ve played. This purports to be a murder mystery, and you solve
puzzles and clues in order to progress through the game. It looks great, with a
graphic novel-type vibe, and the script is well-performed if not particularly
well-written. The hidden object sequences, while far from the most exhilarating
gameplay mechanics around, nonetheless give a nice sense of accomplishment if
you manage to get through them without help. I’ve found myself pleasantly
engaged!
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| Who dunnit? Probably not the girl in the middle since that's who you play as. |
However, the game is let down by incredibly poor pacing with
its payment model. It works, as many free-to-play mobile games do, on an
“energy” system, whereby anything you do in the game takes up a certain amount
of energy and you have to either buy more, or wait until it recharges naturally
to keep playing. The trouble is you’ll only get about 10 minutes of play out of
the game before you run out of energy, and because it has a very slow recharge
rate, you’ll be waiting for almost a day before you can play again. When I was
playing I discovered I had the option to speed this up by watching advertising
videos, but I don’t remember it being there when I first started the game!
I don’t know what will happen next week, as most of my free
time has been taken up by this week’s content, but we’ll see what happens!
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