Last Week's Games: Painting Backlog, Necromunda, Spyro 2

The biggest thing that happened to me this week gaming-wise was completing the painting of my Space Hulk boxed set. I tend to keep anything I want to say about painting separate these days, so I’ve written a blog for them that you can read here. I’m mentioning it in this post because it inspired me to think about painting my models, how many of them I still have to do, and whether ever actually doing it is a realistic option for me.

Painted, and ready to play...

I’ve run into the same problem that every wargamer / hobby gamer runs in to at some point: The backlog. I’ve bought a lot of models from hobby shops in the past, most of them Games Workshop, some of them not, and for one reason or another never got around to painting them. The reason for this is mainly because I give priority to whatever army I’m currently working on, as there is a certain expectation that they will be painted should I ever wish to use them in a shop game. At least, that’s the case with Games Workshop, or Warhammer as the shops are called now. Other, independent stores may be a little more lenient about it but having all my models painted is a standard I set for myself during my time as staff. The box games that I’ve been buying have therefore taken a back seat. This changed during lockdown, where I had more than the usual amount of free time (though not much!) and once I’d painted all the models from the Black Legion force I was working on, I made a start on the Space Hulk set. You’d think, with not even 40 models in the set, it would have taken me a little less than eight months, but somehow that’s where we are. I paint intermittently; always have, always will. But that means that my backlog of models is taking a long time to get through.

So, what does that mean? Is clearing my backlog a realistic goal for lockdown? Possibly; it’s been going on for longer than I originally anticipated, and with the UK Conservative Government changing its strategy about as often as most people change their clothes, it could go on for a great deal longer before we’re finally clear of Covid-19. It’s not likely, though. I’ve got quite a few sets to get through! However, it may be possible to make a large dent in it. And that will be fine too.

Close Combat doesn't happen often,
but when it does, it's brutal!

With video games, there’s not much new happening this week. I’ve been playing Necromunda: Underhive Wars, reaching the part in the story campaign where the three factions make an uneasy alliance to reach their goal. I’ve got a fairly shrewd idea on how that’s going to work out for them, given that their alliance is about as stable as, well, the UK Conservative Government. It will be interesting to see how the story ends, I’m not too far away from it now – but as the missions take anything up to an hour and a half to beat, and that’s if you manage it first time, I need to make sure I’m giving myself enough time when I sit down to play. Even after all that, I’ve still got to go through the warband mode, which is the next step!

Struggled to find a screenshot of the
underwater levels from the PS4 version...

Time management is an easier task with Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. I’m about halfway through the game now, having 100%ed at least half the levels on the Autumn Plains. It’s an absolutely beautiful game and is always a joy to play, and I’m enjoying the gimmicks and minigames that occur on almost every level which break up the gameplay quite nicely. I’m aiming for 100% completion for this one – none of the achievement trophies are tied up in multiplayer modes, so I could potentially manage it – so I feel absolutely no shame whatsoever in looking up how to do certain of the puzzles, which isn’t always obvious. Plus, it’s a great game to play when Kirsty and Jessie are around. Jessie likes the fact that Spyro can swim in this iteration of the game and loves playing around in the water on the Summer Forest level!

Last Month's Painting: Completed the Space Hulk set

Finally... the set is complete

This week I finally came to the end of my journey to completely paint my Space Hulk set. For those of you who have been following this blog for a while, you’ll know the story already: I obtained Space Hulk when I worked for Games Workshop in 2009, and even though I opened it and played it a few times with my mate Dave, I never got around to painting it. The reason for this is that I played the vast majority of war games in what was then Games Workshop, and what is now the Warhammer stores (though I’ve yet to play a game in one of those!) where there is a certain expectation for your models to be painted, or at least have some sign of progression, if you use them in the shop. The problem is that Games Workshop stopped supporting Space Hulk after the month it was released, so as I wasn’t going to play any games in the shop, it wasn’t a priority to paint them – not at the point where I perpetually had a tonne of Chaos Space Marines, Empire and Haradrim (one army from the three core game systems that it was expected I would have as a member of staff) that I needed to be painting! Dave, of course, didn’t mind the models not being painted, so even though we’ve really enjoyed playing the game in the past, the models remained unpainted for eleven years.

All the Terminators were very highly detailed...

That all changed when Lockdown began, and I found myself with a little (though surprisingly not much) more than the usual amount of spare time on my hands. I’d painted all the Chaos Space Marine Raptors I had for the Black Legion army I was working on, and while I did get some more eventually, I didn’t see any sense in going to any of the hobby shops to buy them while we were in lockdown. I had some of the old boxed sets in the loft of the flat I used to live in and decided to get the Space Hulk set down and paint them. I started with one squad of Terminators, then painted the twelve Genestealers that looked the most straightforward to paint. Both appeared in previous editions of the blog. I then painted the remaining squad of Terminators – including the dead one – and the leftover Genestealers, these didn’t make it on to the blog because I didn’t know what to say about them without repeating myself.

...and the Broodlord was a lot of fun!

Moving on, I painted the Librarian and the Broodlord. Both presented an additional challenge for me: As most folks who play 40K know, a Librarian’s armour is always blue no matter what chapter they’re attached to so that was a break from the red I’d been painting hitherto. I also went into a lot more detail with the weapons, face and armour than I did with the other models, as this was the “centrepiece” of the Terminator force in Space Hulk. With the Broodlord, this was much the same as the Genestealers I’d been painting up to that point but with an extra layer of colour on the flesh and carapace. There was also a lot more than the usual number of skulls and Terminator helmets that needed painting, and it took me a while, but I’m pleased with the result.

The finishing touches.

Finally, I painted the last little bits – the Artefact and the C.A.T. I didn’t spend a huge amount of time on these, but it was a lot of fun doing the jewels on the Artefact.

I’ve bought quite a few “build and paint” games in the last 10-12 years and this is the first time I’ve managed to do both with a complete set, so I’m pleased with that. Both factions presented a fresh challenge: The colour I painted the Blood Angels Terminators was the same as the colours I’d been painting my Word Bearers, but with more of an emphasis on the gold than the silver. The Genestealers were an altogether different experience, as I haven’t painted Tyranids many times before, and when I have, it’s never been in any significant numbers. Space Hulk is a great set, and I’m glad to have completed it.

Last Week's Games: The Sexy Brutale, Necromunda, Spyro 2, Crash Bandicoot 2, Warhammer Quest, Camel Up

 I missed last week, sorry about that – certain things going on at home meant that writing blogs was the last thing I felt like doing! I’ve been playing quite a few games in the intervening time though, so here they are:

You can get this for the Switch too, apparently...

The Sexy Brutale is a heavily stylised and utterly brilliant puzzle-adventure game for the PC, whereby you play a priest (I think) at a masked ball where all the guests get murdered. You must figure out not who murdered the guests, but how – and put the mechanisms in place to prevent it from happening. It’s a brilliant idea and a good game, but the fact that I’ve had to look up a guide to get through certain parts makes me wonder whether I have the stomach for this sort of game anymore.

The Zip line provides some much-needed
mobility into the game...

I went back to Necromunda on the PS4. I wasn’t so keen on this when I first bought the game, but it’s grown on me a little bit now that I’ve figured out the key differences between this and Mordheim. It’s a lot less reliant on random number generation – it is there but it’s also a lot easier to set up high percent hit chances. In its stead, the game is a lot more about action economy; the winner of the battle will come down to who can do the most things per turn, so it’s worth getting a few kills in the isolated gangers as soon as possible.

Moneybags will teach you to swim -
for a price...

I’ve also started playing Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. Regular readers will remember that I enjoyed Spyro the Dragon hugely last year, and it is a pleasure to play this one. I’ve been playing it quite a lot lately and I’m not even 20% of the way through the game yet. I’ve noticed that some of the collectables – the real challenge of the Spryo games – are tied up in abilities acquired later in the game, so there’ll be some backtracking this time around. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it’s nice to see the character progress, but it’s also nice to have all your abilities unlocked at the start of the game. We’ll see how it goes!

Watch out for that plant; it'll eat you.

On those occasions where the N-Sane trilogy has been in the PS4 disc drive, I’ve been playing Crash Bandicoot 2 as well. As with Spyro, it is a game I can play when my daughter’s around, and an experience I can share with my girlfriend who likes games but isn’t interested in war! It’s fun and frustrating in equal measure; the frustration at missing daft 3D platforming sections (which kill you far more than any enemy in the game, I think I can almost guarantee that!) has to be there for the payoff, but once you do beat it, there’s an immense feeling of satisfaction.

Can you flatten them all with an Area of
Effect spell before the fight even starts?

I continued to play Warhammer Quest on the PC. I have a feeling this is going to be one of those times where I love the game because it’s Warhammer, but I’m going to have to concede that the game itself isn’t that great. It feels a lot like a Baby’s First Dungeon Crawler game, where you have characters and abilities to use, dungeons to explore, treasure to acquire and monsters to slay – all of which becomes  easy once your characters get to a certain level! But sometimes that’s all I want out of a game, so I’ll keep playing!

Yes, there's a new edition out.
But I kind of prefer this box art...

Kirsty and I also had a go at Camel Up last week, a board game about betting on racing camels. I remember playing this at the UK Games Expo in 2015 and I enjoyed it a lot more this time around when I could take the time to figure out the mechanics of the game, and what we were supposed to be doing. As a one on one game, it’s great because each of us were constantly reacting to what the other was doing. With multiple players, it would be a very different beast as there’s a higher chance that our ideal actions would go before our turn came around.

I suspect most of what I say next week will be a continuation of this, if a little more focussed! See you then.

Backlog Beatdown: Ascending to the God of Word with God of Word

About a year ago I decided I wanted to increase the speed of my typing and bought some typing games off Steam. The week before last, I decided to play one of them: God of Word, mainly because I wanted to be able to play something on my laptop without having to plug in my mouse!

What's the longest word you can make here?

God of Word is a word game where the main objective is to make a 3-7 letter word out of the given letters. This central mechanic is nothing that we haven’t been playing in our internet browsers for the last twenty years or so, but what sets this one apart is that it’s set in Ancient Greece, as a kind of paper puppet theatre set-up. The idea is that you’re a messenger – not Hermes, but probably a disciple of his – and you’re telling the story of how you journeyed from one side of the country to the other, delivering messages and battling monsters.

Each stage has a few different enemies and monsters for you to fight, and you have a set amount of time to beat them. To beat them, you must type your words in to build up your attack; you need to build a certain number of points and your letters score points based on their counterparts in Scrabble. Larger words are worth more points and do more damage. You can press tab to re-arrange the letters, and space to draw a new set of letters – but at the cost of around 10 seconds of time. It’s simple enough, and if that was all there was to it, God of Word probably wouldn’t be interesting. But the game deploys bonus tiles from time to time to offer you more incentives for using those letters: Red ones do more damage, yellow ones give you more time, blue ones give you more renown (experience, I think,) and gold ones give you, well, gold.

You won't be using that E for a minute or two...

Ah yes, gold and experience. God of Word also provides the lightest of role-playing game elements, by assigning experience points to increase your character’s attributes (that give you more time, increase your damage, etc) and at certain milestones in the game you can also buy more equipment. Better weapons do more damage and can have additional effects, and better armour gives you more time. It is necessary to do this to keep up with the way the game increases in difficulty as you progress, but it gives you some agency over which attributes to increase which builds your engagement.

I wonder what the remaining letter
could possibly be...

God of Word also manages to provide some variety in the levels. Every so often there is a “hangman” style minigame, where you have a certain number of guesses to spell a word and rescue a follower – but take too many guesses and they will die. The game has boss battles as well, which tend to work in one of two ways: In one way the game works as normal but with extra stipulations on the tiles. In the Medusa battle, for example, a letter will turn to stone if you don’t use it quickly enough, and it will take a while before you can use that letter again. The other way is a word blast, which has a couple of modes as well – either monsters or hazards come flying at you and will kill you if they reach you, or you have a certain unspecified amount of time to type a certain number of words before you die. These require some quick typing and some of them are hard – the Sirens took me a while!

This is an indie game built in the Unity engine, and while it lacks a certain amount of polish, it’s competently made. The graphics boast a distinctive art style; you either like it or you don’t, but it does what it needs to do. The sound is good as well, nothing to write home about but the effects are all in the right places and the music sounds epic enough (if a little anachronistic for the time period it depicts, but hey, most things are!)

God of Word won’t change the world, but it’s a fun game to pick up and play – and get lost in.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a Look