Last Week's Games: Regicide (I beat it!) and Murder in the Alps

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.

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!

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!

No Game New Year: Gotham City Impostors

While deciding what game to play through next I became aware that my Xbox 360 is running out of memory. With the Games on Gold downloads meaning that I’ve somehow managed to acquire 20 or so games for absolutely nothing, I’ve got a log going on with my hard drive now and have roughly 60 gigabytes left. Not a small amount of memory given that the laptop that I’m writing this on only has 80GB altogether, but given that this time last year it was something like 180, I realised that perhaps I might need to play one or two of these games I’ve been downloading so I can farm all their achievement points and delete them.

That being said, I was as surprised as anyone at the game I found myself playing this week:

 

Gotham City Impostors

This is a multiplayer-only 6v6 shooter that is currently available to download free with an Xbox Live Gold membership, and that is how I came to own it. It’s got some nice little quirks, not the least of them the setting: Seemingly normal people in Gotham City, dressing up as the “Batz” and the “Jokerz” that make up the two factions of the game. The differences between them are aesthetic, as you might expect from a balanced shooter, but the unusual art style and customisation options makes for quite a varied set-up.

Now if this hadn’t come out as a free download I probably would never have played it, and here’s why: I thought the idea of the game was absolutely ridiculous. If I was going to play a multiplayer-only game, I wanted to be using DC’s own super-heroes, not a bunch of people dressed up as Batman and The Joker!

I’m also not a massive fan of multiplayer games for one simple reason: I’m terrible at them. I haven’t really got the reflexes to be able to pull accurate headshots, I’m not good at combining load-outs etc for maximum effect, and I die far too easily to people who are far better at it than me. I’m not saying I’ve never had any fun playing multiplayer games, but I would not usually buy a game purely for the purpose of playing multiplayer.

I think Yahtzee made the point quite succinctly in his review of Halo Reach: “A full-priced game has to stand up on single-player, because there are always factors in the way of multiplayer that the game can’t help, like its servers becoming tumbleweed-haunted ghost towns three months down the line, or the aforementioned[1] meta-****s doing what they do best at full volume in my ear.” And I’m absolutely convinced that the same will become true of Gotham City Imposters in the not too distant future, presumably once the next Call of Duty game comes out. That being said, right now the game is free, which means a tonne of new people will have downloaded it so there will be people playing on the servers and perhaps not all of them will be, er , ‘power gamers.’[2] It is for this reason, more than anything, that I decided to give this game a go.

 

You can use foot traps as well. He's about to die...

Getting into the game, I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun it actually is. As you might expect, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. The maps are bright and colourful, the game has a good variety of modes and the usual gunplay is augmented by ‘mods,’ ‘gadgets’ and support weapons. It is with the latter point that the game really comes into its own, because it gives you the freedom to decide how YOU want to play the game. Want to play a sniper on roller skates? You can do it. Want a melee-oriented thug who can glide? No problem. Want to play a ninja who can turn invisible? Yes, you’ll have to work for it, but you can do it. The end result is that your ‘teams’ consist of a mixed bag of eccentric personalities and perhaps isn’t always so coherent. This is made up for by the gadgets being a lot of fun to use, like the grapple-hook which allows some fast movement to a high place, and the roller-skates which increase your speed but decrease your accuracy and control.

I’m not good at the game, by any stretch of the imagination. But I do OK and I tend to finish around about mid/low table, depending on who else is in the game. I went with a ‘tough’ (average) build with a semi-automatic rifle, a sub-machine gun, grenades and I switch between the Grappling Hook and Roller Skates depending on the map. I’ve been having a decent amount of fun being the guy shooting into a firefight and taking down two or three enemies, or sneaking up behind people who don’t know I’m there and gunning them down. That’s where most of my kills come from because in a straight fight I rarely come out with my arms raised. The game shows a ranking of the top three most valuable players at the end; rarely do I make it onto this list but I’ve been pleased with my performance on the few times that I have.

There are some performance issues that I think mainly relate to having a lot more people playing the game than its servers are capable of coping with. All too often I see other characters flutter in and out of sight as the game struggles to keep up with them – a bit of a problem when you’re trying to aim! Sometimes the game apparently remembers that about 4 different people have now been killed, and sometimes the server goes down completely. There may also be some balance issues relating to some of the combinations of builds, weapons and mods, but to be honest in a game this diverse that was always going to be hard to avoid!

I also liked the micro-transactions in the game, simply because I’m at no point obligated to buy them. As far as I can see, the only difference that any of the items you’d spend actual money on are aesthetic. It’s not like you can buy the best weapon in the game and spam it; your money affects your costume and nothing else. If you want the weapons, you have to play through the game and earn them, and rightly so.

So how do I ‘play through’ a purely multiplayer game? I look for all the achievement points. So far I’ve got 4 out of 12, and it is going to take me a long time to get all the rest. For example, I have to max out all the ‘feats’ that relate to a single weapon – which usually means get a certain number of kills, a certain number of headshots, and a certain number of kills with each mod. I’m about halfway through the latter but like I said, I’m not very good at this sort of thing and I’m not getting the kills I need. I have a feeling I might be tired of this before I get there. I’m trying to achieve multiple points by playing the right game mode (the Psychic Warfare mode is played by attaching a battery to a brainwashing machine. If the enemy activates theirs, it sends you mad and all you can do is slap people. One of the achievement points I’m chasing involves getting 50 kills in this manner.) but I think I may be fighting for a lost cause with the Nemesis one (I think that just means you have to kill someone twice without dying) because I’ve not managed it even once yet.

Not sure what this is all about but it's amusing...

I’ll keep playing Gotham City Impostors for now because I’m still having fun with it. I’m glad I didn’t spend any actual money on it, but it’s a good game for what it is. While it is still essentially free to play, and should be for another day, I’d more than recommend giving it a go. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised, as was I…

---

[1] Referring to a previous comment relating to the game’s fanbase.

[2] While I’ve got no problem with using the word Yahtzee used when referring to the same demographic, I do need to be aware that other people read my blog and will be none too pleased to see such language!