I thought I might record my thoughts about it before I started so I can look back on them later on.  So here goes.

Expectations

Although I have watched most of the videos on the official website I haven’t really done much reading otherwise about the game.  A bit here and there but nothing exhaustive.

From what i’ve read the questing will be awesome.  Cut scene type voice overs for every quest is a big leap forward from old-school, wall-of-text, type quests.  Having said that the complexity of the actual quests doesn’t seem to be a lot different from standard.  I’m a bit of a Star Wars fan so getting a bit immersed in the world is something I am very much looking forward to.

Combat will be sadly WoW-like but with lasers and lightsabers, which is some compensation.  Nothing innovative.  There is so much that could have been done here but hasn’t.  Multi-part or combination type attacks (the longer the comb the more powerful they get), body blocking, team combination attacks, a more active avoidance system (manual dodging/blocking) or even a more free-style attack generation system something like Magicka maybe.  Guild Wars 2 has a couple of these at least, so I suppose i’ll have to look forward to that being released.

One thing that did impress me was the animation of the lightsabre wielders deflecting laser fire.

Space combat looks quite fun and a nice distraction without being a massive seperate grind.  Flying on rails isn’t really a negative to me although I suppose  a more free form space flight system where you could trade goods from planet to planet or be a space pirate would have been nice.

Class mechanics are somewhat varied to WoW, but the talent trees look very WoW-like  I have very low expectations about the customisations as far as talents go sadly.  I was disappointed also to learn about the mirrored classes in both sides as it reduces the variety 50%, although I can understand it from a designers point-of-view.  A couple of the resource systems do look a bit more interesting than boring old blue bar goes down (mana)/red bar goes up (rage) systems.

End-game – I have no real expectations as I haven’t read or seen much about it.  It looks fairly standard, but as i’m not really planning on doing too much I haven’t bothered looking into it.

Companions look pretty awesome, although might get tiresome.  Definitely a plus for the game though.  The henchman system in the original Guild Wars was pretty awesome for its time and companions look even better.

Crafting – WoW-like with a little more complexity, but not much.  I hope it is actually useful at high level as in my experience most games seem to make their crafting nearly pointless at top tiers.  I love crafting so I hope there if a fair bit of complexity in there.  No overly hopeful though.  There seems to be some sort of requirement that crafting systems are all unchallenging grinds in MMO’s for some reason.

PvP  looks decent.  Although the same skills seem to be used in both PvE and PvP so i’m not that hopeful that PvP will be much more fun than WoW.  I hope i’m wrong.  I wish the’d split the problem skills into PvE and PvP versions and then balance them for each of the modes of play.

Plans

I had firm plans to play a trooper commando, right uptil the game launched.  Then I read that everyone else (well not quite, but you get the idea) had the same idea.  Now i’m thinking a bounty hunter powertech.

Probably on a role playing server.  Probably on a PvP server.  Preferably both.  I’m keen to roleplay more in SWTOR than I did in WoW.  I missed that in WoW, but only really realised after the event that no roleplaying was part of the lack of enjoyment with WoW.  I’ll join a social guild not a serious raiding one.  Probably a roleplaying guild.  I’ve got no plan for end-game raiding currently although i’ve said that before.

You could have guessed some of this from my expectations section above.  Great story and setting but an unoriginal combat and class system really lends its self more to roleplaying and less to raiding in my opinion.

I also think a jedi consular sage and a smuggler gunslinger will be in there somewhere.   In between a commando and a powertech I was thinking a gunslinger, but I wasn’t that impressed with the video I saw of the smuggler.  Looked a bit dull.

I guess i’ll know more in a few days…

As I mentioned in my Kingdom Rush mini-review a couple of weeks back I have played Goodgame Studio’s Empire game quite a bit over the last few weeks.  This is my first browser game I have played for more than a few minutes.  Normally by this time i’m closing the game down (or in this case closing the browser tab) and writing the game off as just a lot of repetitive clicking.  Goodgame Empire is a bit different.

Goodgame Empire is a browser base castle building game where you build things in real-time.  No it doesn’t take two years of real-time to build your castle wall, but it does take some time for it to complete.  What this means is you don’t spend much time actually playing the game.  I tend to log in the morning and collect taxes, read any messages and start building.  Then I log out.  I might come back at lunch time and check progress, etc.  Each time i’m logged in for 5-10 minutes only before I go on my merry way.  This makes it a great game for people with limited time to play for whatever reason.

Graphics are cartoony and easy on the eye.  The interface is a little clunky but most of the basic stuff is intuitive to use.  Make sure you click on all the buttons on your main screen at a some stage as you might discover as I did after a few weeks of playing that there are alliances and a chat system in-game

You accumulate resources such as wood, stone and food over time and then spend this building stuff and feeding your population and army.  There is some limited functionality for sending resources to others and therefore trading.  Goodgame Studios have also recently introduced outposts, which are like mini castles you can capture and build up from scratch.

Its not all random building though.  You receive quests, which are the only way to get experience, and they direct you to build certain building.  Gaining experience means gaining levels.  Gaining levels means more types of building and better soldiers to recruit.

Besides building stuff you also recruit armies and build siege equipment.  This means, of course, you can make use of this for attacking other players.  The combat itself is automatically resolved, but the setup and combat reports are complex enough to be interesting without being daunting.  Beating up other players gives you honour (a strange name for it IMO).  Ranking within the game is based on this honour.

Overall i’d give this 7/10 and recommend this game to those who are time poor or instinctive turtlers.  The interface could use some love but still a decent game.

Gobble gobble.

Star Corsairs wasn’t really a priority on my list of games to give my opinion on but a recent post on the developer’s blog got me thinking.  Perhaps I should do my small part for helping indie developers where I can.  So we have a Star Corsairs mini-review   This game was developed by a single guy over about 6 months, which is quite an impressive feat in its own right.

Star Corsairs is a top down, space exploration, massively multiplayer online game.  You can play a fair bit for free but to reach the top you need to subscribe.  I must admit that I only played this game for a few hours.  Although I like the style of the game (I have an upcoming review of Space Pirates and Zombies in the works), I just didn’t feel there was enough variety to justify a grind or make it entertaining.

The basic premise of the game is that aliens are invading and you (and your friends) are fighting the power.  You start with the typical small space ship and work on building a bigger and better space ship by collecting resources and cash and crafting one.

Yes, you craft your spaceship one part at a time.  Each type of resource effects each piece of your crafting differently resulting in more or less power usage, shield regeneration, etc, depending on the combination you use.  Thankfully the outcome of the manufacturing process is displayed for you so you can decide in advance and without experimenting what combinations you like to use.  I must say I quite liked the complex nature of the ship manufacturing process.

You get money by completing fairly standard “destroy alien” quests, and destroying the aliens themselves.  You gather resources by mining the asteroids in each sector and taking them back to home base.  This basic game play is quite enjoyable at first but I found it a bit dull after a couple of hours.  There is no travel time as such and you can warp straight to a sector, which reduces the tedium of mining resources somewhat.

Combat is fairly basic at the moment but the developer is slowly adding new features.  One of the best of the game is the ‘fire button’  at the bottom of your screen, which graphically displays which way your turret is facing and the time until it is recharged and ready to fire again.  The graphics are generally quite crisp and easy to use, but nothing special.  I can’t comment on the sound as I often play games without my sound on.

Personally I won’t be playing this game as there are too many others I’d prefer to play first.   Overall I’d rate it 5/10 and suggest you check it out if you have the time to devote to a fairly grindy 2-D space shooter MMO.  The demo is quite easy to access and you don’t need to put in credit card numbers or anything like that.

Gobble gobble.

Kingdom Rush was a surprise discovery while I was wondering the wastelands of browser games.  Until very recently i’d never played any of the browser games and had mostly written them off as dull time-sinks.  However via a convoluted path, which started with looking for non-violent games for my son to play, I ended up playing Goodgame Studio’s Empire (more on that in another post).   This got me thinking that maybe these browser games aren’t all bad.

There is a lot of trashy browser games, but Ironhide Game Studio’s Kingdom Rush isn’t one of them.  Basically this is a browser-based, fantasy tower defence game.    The bad guys come from one or more sides and you have to kill them before they escape off the exit side.  Sounds basic, but the bad guys are so cute and in fact all the graphics are well done and clear.

There is a number of features to this game which not all tower defence games have.  The enemies get harder as you advance and each is introduced with an overview of their abilities.  Your towers can of course also be upgraded and at their highest level (four) they can gain a number of special abilities.  Mage towers can gain teleports to transport enemies backwards, polymorphs them into sheep and summon earth elementals to fight for you.  Your paladins at your barracks can get healing and heavy armour, etc.

There is a free campaign with ten battles to win and progressing through them all takes about 10 hours.  As you progress you get points (stars) to spend on skills which upgrade your towers with more range, more health, slowing abilities and more.  You can achieve up to three stars per battle and there is some replay value in re-fighting battles to try and pick up that extra start or two to improve your towers.  There are also Heroic and Iron Man modes once you have completed the normal mode and these are very challenging.

There a more screen shots and strategy guides on the official website for Kingdom Rush. One of my few complaints about the game is that you can’t enlarge the viewing area unlike some browser games.  I guess this does ensure you stare at their advertising the entire time your are playing   Overall i’d give this 9/10 for fans of tower defence games and recommend even those new to tower defence games give this cute little title a look.

Gobble gobble.

Battle for Wesnoth was one of the hidden gems I discovered once I stopped spending hours waiting for raids to start or grinding daily quests.

This is the sort of game I first loved PCs for (well after International Karate, Ultima 4 and Bubble Bobble).  A turn based strategic game based in a fantasy setting.  Think fantasy wargame.    It looks good despite only being old school VGA graphics.  It is clean and all the elements are easy to identify on the screen.  None of that mousing over random scenery to try and figure out if it’s something you can interact with or just eye candy.

The game is free and comes with more than a dozen well written and complex single player campaigns.  I must have spent more than 100 hours playing all the way through most of them.  If you run out of content there is a healthy modding community which has created hundreds more campaigns and alternate rule sets.  There is a variety of campaigns from easy through to quite hard and even within this range you can bump the difficulty if each new campaign up or down as you like.  If you any anything but new to these hex based war games I suggest you start at normal difficulty or harder as easy is very easy.

Each campaign follows the adventures of a hero or heroes who gain levels and power as you go.  Your units also gain in experience as they fight and as units level up there is usually at least two options for how to develop the unit.  Do you want that elven archer to be a ranged powerhouse as a marksman?  Or do you want it to be better in melee and able to become invisible in forest hexes?  Units can also gain new abilities such as accuracy, elemental attacks (e.g. fire breath), poison attacks, backstabbing, first strike and more.  Each of the races develop quite differently and have their own areas of specialisation.

One nice counter balance to the usual maximise everyone’s level strategy is that higher level units cost significantly more maintenance.  Do you want one level 3 killing machine or three level 1 rookies?  Different battles work better with different strategies (of course).  Some units are received free during the story line and these loyal units cost no maintenance even at high level.  This can be crucial in the harder games.

There is no turn timer and turns can be saved at any time.  PC resource use is low, so you can run it in the background while doing other things.  This makes it ideal for those who only have small blocks of time to devote to games in between other chores such as children or work.

There is no city management or resource management other than your troops and heroes.  This is a war game with some good roleplaying flavour, not a simulation.

Combat is basically the units taking turns to hit each other until they run out of attacks or health.  One nice feature is that the combat confirmation screen calculates the odds for you so you can see potential outcomes of your attacks.  Terrain plays a significant part in determining the outcome blindly charging your enemy is usually a recipe for disaster.

I have not tried it but functionality for multiplayer against other humans is included if you are into that sort of thing.

Lots more screenshots are available on the Battle for Wesnoth wiki.

Overall i’d give this game 10/10 and recommend it to anyone who likes hex based war games with a fantasy flavour.  It’s not perfect, but being free and with a strong modding community you get a lot for nothing.

Gobble gobble.