Tuesday, August 31, 2010

FrontierVille (Facebook)

Wait a minute, why are you reviewing facebook games?! The reader stomps off in a fit of rage...

Yeah, I think most self-styled hardcore gamers will be pretty down on any facebook related gaming thanks to the click-farming horrors that we all formed our association with. However, with the massive influx of first-time gamers that facebook brings to the table, and the huge amount of revenue pulled by some of these titles, it becomes worth your while to at least take a look and understand the genre.

There are a lot of facebook games around now, so I'm going to pick the one that seems to be the latest evolution, crafted by facebook giant Zynga - FrontierVille.

FrontierVille's basic premise is that you are a brave pioneer, working hard to set up a new place to live 'out west' somewhere, probably during the mid 1800s. You arrive alone in your covered wagon and have to clear land, plant crops, raise animals, build structures, tend trees, and do other wilderness-oriented stuff to improve your personal space.

Every action generally takes one energy to perform, and you have a limited supply of energy which regenerates one point per five minutes of real time. You also get refills by leveling up, or the odd bit here and there from random drops (when you clear land/harvest/etc it drops goodies), or you can purchase more from the shop in exchange for food resource.

The first few levels come very quickly, so you get to play a bit longer on your first sitting since it keeps refreshing your energy every time you level up. It has a long quest path where you are assigned one task after another. This both gives you something to do, and lead you towards developing your area in the normal sequence. Note that you can choose to completely ignore the quests and just do your own merry thing - build 28 sawmills into the shape of a giant turtle if that's what floats your boat, but the quests give you useful rewards and generally ask you to do reasonable stuff so you'll probably follow along.

You quickly run out of energy and will need to set the game aside for a bit. "How annoying!" your hardcore gamer self says. But that's also an advantage for their target demographic - casual gamers who really don't want to spend a lot of time playing something. Instead, it rewards them for checking in on it every day, puttering around a bit, and then setting it aside again without the pressing temptation to just play nonstop.

Normal gameplay is to check in once or twice a day and see what you can do to advance your homestead. To begin with, your entire area is overrun with weeds, rocks, trees, etc.. These need to be cleared out so that you'll have room to build and plant. Occasionally clearing something will turn up a varmint which also needs to be chased away (more energy use). This portion of the gameplay isn't bad. You've got a couple limited resources (energy, wood, food, money) and make choices on how best to build your homestead (buildings, trees, animals, crops) to unlock new items, create additional resources, and advance your quests. All pretty solid gaming fare and enjoyable in a bit of a Harvest Moon sort of way. One interesting element is that the land actually evolves a bit in real time, so each day when you check back the trees grow and you'll have more grass, flowers, bushes, saplings, etc.. there to deal with. More importantly, the new arrivals are proportionate to what you had on your homestead beforehand, which is both a plus and a minus. Careful though! It is very easy to clear every single cactus from your homestead early on and then never see one again only to later realize you have a cactus quest for 5 of 'em and no way to cause new ones to grow.

After you progress down the quest path a bit you start getting letters from your wife who will come out and join you if you make the right preparations, build the right structures, and collect the right supplies. Unfortunately this is also where you're going to start hitting the loathsome aspect of facebook gaming - the expectation to spam your friends. Yeah, all building construction requires building supplies that can only be acquired by spamming your friends for help. It is typical stuff for facebook games, but honestly pretty crappy. If none of your friends happen to be playing this game at the same time you can make yourself a fake account and farm it that way, but welcome to nuisance.

Even worse, later on you'll hit the minimum number of frontier friends requirements to unlock various items and structures. "Sorry, you can't do that until you have 3 more neighbors!" This too, is a common evil of facebook games but one that I feel really breaks the original purpose behind facebook - that of having a social environment to keep touch with your friends. Now you end up making one of several distasteful choices. You could spam your other friends who aren't already playing to play too - generally a bad option since if your friends wanted to play they'd already be doing so. You can create some fake accounts to neighbor you - bunch of extra nuisance for a low impact game. Or you can just friend a zillion random internet strangers who play the same facebook games you do and turn your facebook experience from one of interacting with actual people you know, into just a platform for crappy games.

I'm sorry facebook game makers haven't figured this out, but while cooperative gaming is good as an opt in experience, expecting people to spam their friends frequently or with stuff they don't actually want is terrible. I hope they figure it out before the industry suffocates itself with this kind of garbage since when you disgust a casual gamer to the point where they quit playing, you didn't just sour them on your game, you probably soured them on the entire genre. Its really just greed pushing marketing decisions that spew onto game design in a putrid way. Zynga, get your act in gear now!

So you probably get the basic idea now. The game progresses further down these lines. You have a kid, build a schoolhouse, convince a teacher to come work there, make more buildings, raise more animals, plant more crops, spam your friends, etc... The school teaches classes, which also require friends to send you supplies, and there is a quest path to expand your homestead (give you larger playing area) which also requires you to... wait you know this one... spam your friends.

Overall the game is moderately fun, and does have some nice resource tradeoff decisions and a cool gradual land evolution which lets you tailor your environment. The later quests get ridiculously long and repetitive so you need to kind of figure out when you feel done rather than expect an end to it. I'd suggest trying it out just to get a feel for what's hot in facebook gaming these days. This market is huge now and doesn't look to be going away soon.

FrontierVille
Rating: 6.1 (basic gameplay probably 7.1, but -1 for friend spam)

Monday, August 23, 2010

Might & Magic - Clash of Heroes (DS)

I know it reveals my inner dinosaur, but I'm still a big fan of turn-based gaming. I really miss the plethora of such titles that used to grace us on the PC so I appreciate the turn-based goodness that is provided by my Nintendo DS.

This week, a franchise that has spawned both good and poor games - Might and Magic, makes a foray onto the machine in question. Clash of Heroes, no doubt named in hopes that you'll feel some vague association with their Heroes of Might & Magic line, is an enjoyable puzzle / RPG.

You play as some forgettable generic storyline hero and fight some generic storyline villians to give you an excuse to play the game. Fortunately, the gameplay is neither generic nor forgettable, and is actually quite a bit of fun. All battles are resolved using a 'match three' style playing field. You have a variety of troops that stack up against the enemy that can be rearranged or removed in order to form sets of three or more. Once a set is formed they lock into place and charge up to deal damage to the enemy a few turns later. Enemy units that get in the way of this damage can blunt it (block with your face!) as can walls.

Its an easy mechanism to understand and has some variations and bonus complexities to produce fancier effects. There are larger and more powerful units that can take different matching sets to prepare and have more impressive combat effects. You can match units sideways to build walls, and you can stack multiples of the same type or timer for extra power. There are also some additional spells that are powered up as you get hit that produce powerful turn-around effects - significant damage, protection, board sweeping, etc.

All this is wrapped by a lightweight RPG excuse to provide flow and progression. There are five different factions that pick from, each with slightly different powers and units. The variations aren't particularly large, so battles are decided more by successful matching and pre-emptive attack (a unit locked into a matched set and powering up has significantly more durability than one standing around by itself, so you want to make sure to block with matched sets or walls, not idle guys). Each race's advanced units have a bit more variety to them, with some stunning, or absorbing health, destroying multiple rows of guys, or firing concussive blasts into the enemy. These advanced units are frequently what dictates the success or failure of a battle, so getting them set up early is very important.

The whole game has a bit of the same feeling as Puzzle Quest, with simple gameplay fleshed out a bit to include some variety and a nice dose of smoothly crafted fun. The campaign has a few amusing bits (undead dragons are good), and provides an excuse to play through each of the five factions. There's quests, items, gradual acquisition of units, minor resources, and the usual stuff you've probably come to expect in such games.

Overall I found it quite playable, and worth a run. If you're looking for something to bring with you on your next airplane trip, pack this in your bag.

Might & Magic - Clash of Heroes
Rating: 8.1

Monday, August 16, 2010

Titan Quest (PC)

With the recent release of Starcraft II I think quite a few people are turning a wishful eye towards the upcoming (but unscheduled) release of Diablo III. If you're one of these people, twitching for the critter-crushing loot-grabbing skill-unlocking goodness that we remember, then do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Titan Quest in the meanwhile. You should be able to pick up a gold edition (including the expansion pack Immortal Throne) for like 20$ which is well worth it.

Titan Quest is a third person RPG set in (mostly) Greek mythology. The controls are very simple - click to move, click to attack, big obvious keys for spells & abilities, etc. You start as a random peasant with a lot of nothing, but as is frequently the case in such games, your foes have been conveniently laid out in order from weakest creature in the entire land to strongest, in a nice 'follow here' pattern starting at your feet.

It has a pretty typical inventory system with body locations to drop equipment onto and a backpack for carrying spare loot, healing potions, and the like. The items are decent but not amazing, with some minor random modifiers added to magic items and different levels of rareness for better gear. The rarer the item, the more cool bonuses it has tacked onto it. There's also a nice collection of charms that can be assembled and attached to items, letting you customize their bonuses slightly to your own preferences. These will vary a bit depending on what sort of character you build. I'm a big fan of lifesteal since healing all the time while you kill stuff seems like a better health tip than eating vegetables regularly.

Once you've gained a couple levels you'll get the option to choose your first Mastery. This is your class selection. You'll end up getting two classes over the course of the game so choose carefully. Each class has an associated skill tree with abilities to match. Think about how two of those are going to go together, since the two will interact and the combinations can be pretty fun. Combine spirit magic (necromancy) with warfare and you get a life draining melee combatant with undead minions. Hunting and storm yields a bow-wielding lightning mage. Nature and rogue combine to give you a trap-laying sneak with wolves and healing at his call. With 8 masteries (or 9 if you have the expansion) there are a lot of fun combinations to try out, and you'll probably end up playing a couple different characters at some point just to do so.

Core gameplay is decent but a bit repetitive. The monster AI is just proximity triggered so its not going to surprise you by doing anything interesting. Monsters tend to be clustered in little packs at regular intervals so you can fight one group, move up, fight the next. Generally every level is laid out in one long path so you just move forward fighting group after group until you reach the next checkpoint / town / guy in a cart / whatever.

It does spice things up a bit once in a while with a serious boss monster though. These are notably tougher, have some cool spell powers of their own, and can actually be a reasonable challenge, particularly if you've over-specialized a bit too far. All your damage revolves around your pets? Whoops, this guy eats pets for breakfast. Entirely dependent upon your life-drain to stay up? Sorry, undead are immune to lifedrain and here's a BIG one. You get the idea. If you get stuck you can always pull back and level up a bit, fill your pack with healing potions, and try again. But when you've been coasting through the normal waves like they were butter for a while it comes as a bit of a surprise to hit something that's actually challenging for a change.

I should say more about pets. Quite a few masteries have a pet or two (or three) at their disposal. These are monsters that follow you around and lend a hand. Pets are fun! They come in a variety of flavors depending on the mastery and almost all of them are really enjoyable to have around. Nature, for example, gets a couple wolves that patrol around you, sweeping the little critters you might not even have noticed before you see your wolves busy eating them. Earth gets a big elemental that stomps around and tanks for you. Spirit has a friendly lich that happily life drains away next to you the whole time. You get the idea. There's several more, and almost all of them are fun, with perhaps the single exception of the Wisp. Storm has a floating electric zapper which I excitedly saved up to unlock. At last I had the points needed and finally summoned him, only to discover that he was a total dud. The Wisp is a close range defender that sits on you and only attack things that are super close by. Unfortunately, its cast by a class that defaults to long-ranged attacking so your Wisp ends up being a pointless speck that hides next to you and does nothing. *Shakes fist* Why couldn't you be a useful pet?

Anyways, there's definitely fun to be had here. You can play it multiplayer just fine. It scales the monsters up a bit for multiplayer play so you still make comparable progress to single-player. Make sure to play completely different masteries so you won't be competing for loot. It sucks to all want the same rare item of coolness when you know you won't see another one like it anytime soon.

If you've got the Diablo itch right now and need a way to scratch it, pick up a copy of Titan Quest today. It is a solid, enjoyable game that does a good job of staying true to its genre while providing enough unique additions to make it worth a run through.

Titan Quest
Rating: 8.2

Monday, August 9, 2010

Starcraft II (PC)

With their well-earned reputation for great game making, many of us wait anxiously for any new Blizzard launch. Starcraft II certainly got its share of associated pre-launch hype and anticipation. So it was with some excitement that I cracked open the case and fired up my copy.

Right away its obvious that the production values on SC2 are top notch. The UI is clean, the graphics are sharp, and every single campaign level smoothly designed with an abundance of integrated cutscenes, voice overlay, and high quality atmospheric elements. This level of detail, carefully designed missions with storyline relevance, and attention to tying elements together clearly make SC2 stand out as a well made game.

So let me step back for a moment and cover the basics a bit.

Starcraft II is a standard RTS, very much in the same model as the original Starcraft. There are three races to choose from - Terrans (human), Protoss (magic feeling aliens), and Zerg (swarming bug aliens). Gameplay involves harvesting minerals and vespane to gain resources, and to train units, buildings, and upgrades. Stronger units unlock with the progressive creation of additional buildings so you always have to make a tradeoff on building specific units to fight with now or continuing to push towards better late game units which might not be ready in time to save your bacon when you need them.

Terrans are the race you end up playing for almost the entire campaign (a departure from the original where they let you play all three races during campaign mode). They've got inexpensive ranged units, strong vehicles, healers, and a long-distance siege tank for smashing fortifications from a safe distance. Protoss (space elves, just admit it and move on) are shield-based with personal shields that recover naturally over time if not killed. They tend to be higher investment per unit but higher per unit output as well. They have some heavy high end units that give good returns for a lot of investment, including a carrier that releases a storm of independent fighters to scour the area around them. Finally, the insectlike Zerg are the rush race, with rapid deployment and the ability to spawn wave after wave of small fast damage-dealing units. Zerg have their own arsenal of tricks as well such as underground movement and infestation, heal naturally, and gain movement bonus when running across their terraformed terrain.

As I mentioned earlier, campaign mode is really well done. Between missions you can enjoy some well crafted story bits, upgrade individual units in the armory, and select tech advances in the lab which allow you to choose between one of two upgrades that will carry forward for the rest of the campaign. No single upgrade is game-breaking, but it gives a nice feeling of variety as you modify units to suit your own playstyle a bit more.

The story progresses forward in a fairly linear path, but you can switch up the order of missions a bit to unlock certain units or upgrades first depending on your preference. You get to do one brief set of missions as the Protoss, but for the most part you're Terran all the way through, so I apologize on Blizzard's behalf to all you Zerg lovers out there. Maybe they'll do a Zerg campaign follow-up later.

Multiplayer battles feel like the old Starcraft multiplayer, with tradeoffs between rushing, teching, and defense. Unfortunately, I actually find it a little too old-style faithful in this respect, as its missing a lot of the RTS evolution that you have probably come to expect in an RTS game. Terrain really isn't all that important, height yields very little advantage, there's no suppression, and battle is much more about straight numbers and rock/paper/scissors tradeoffs than about position and timing. I'm sure the Starcraft junkies are going to yell at me for saying it, and explain how if you memorize all the unit stats you can pick the perfect unit counter for your opponent's build, but truthfully I find multiplayer gameplay to be an awful lot about build fast, build plenty, and run them over with a giant blob. Really good Starcraft players may experience it differently, but I think most players are going to end up sharing my impression of it - speed and quantity is what wins games. That's ok, but not amazing as a tactical experience.

I should perhaps mention the achievement system, because... its got one. But its not memorable in any way, serving mostly as a stamp collection and unlocking a couple different profile images. I would have liked to see them use it for something more - unlocks, bonus content, etc... and was disappointed that they didn't bother.

Overall, I found Starcraft II to be enjoyable, but not impossible to put down. It has solid gameplay and a good campaign to play through. Even shooting for all the campaign achievements though, its not going to take you all that long (a couple days at most perhaps while still remembering to eat and bathe occasionally). It is a good game, and worth a play through, but it doesn't make me feel compelled to keep picking it up over and over for more.

Starcraft II
Rating: 8.9

Monday, August 2, 2010

League of Legends (PC)

League of Legends is a team-based strategic RPG, of the recent genre emerged from the Defense of the Ancients mod. That's a mouthful. More importantly though, its a lot of fun, and surprisingly, completely free to play. It runs under the microtransaction model with lots of small items that can be purchased one of two ways - either for straight money, or credit earned via game time. What is somewhat unusual is that everything (with the exception of a couple custom skins - visual change only) is purchasable with earned credits. So really they're just banking on people being impatient in order to make money.

The overall gameplay is relatively familiar - You choose a champion, basically a very strong individual hero, who you then take part in a larger ongoing battle with. Throughout the battle small NPCs fight the other team's NPCs while you stomp around and try to push your side to victory. Throughout the course of the game your champion will level up, choose skills, buy items, and refine him or herself into a pinnacle of kick-butt-itude. Sound like Demigod? Yeah, it should. That's the workings of the basic genre that both games are in.

Don't shake it off prematurely, thinking you've already played that. LoL is a really well done version with a lot of winning elements to it. Even if you've spent your hours on Heroes or Demigod you're going to want to pick this up and give it a spin. You're just missing too much goodness if you don't.

Right out of the gate, LoL has some great champions to pick from. There are 55 champions total, and each week about 10 of these are unlocked as free to play. The precise available ones change from week to week, giving you a chance to try them all out over time. In addition to that, you can spend your credits (earnable by gameplay) to permanently unlock specific champions. The champions have a wide range of play styles with a lot of individual personality. Feel like playing a giant demon that eats people and gets larger as it does so? You're in luck. There's the usual assortment of warriors and ninjas mixed with angels, rocket-powered gnomes, and a pyrotechnic little girl who animates her giant teddy bear to romp and stomp! The champions are done with a definite but not distracting humorous nod and lend a very enjoyable air to the gameplay. "I am evil! Stop laughing at me!" announces Veigar, the Tiny Master of Evil, and I still smile when he says it. There's also a lot of goodness in the sheer variety of abilities available. Definitely spend some time trying new champions out and savoring the options.

Gameplay itself is relatively fast and furious, with both sides gaining gold and levels at a fairly rapid pace. Your only real way to slow down the opposing team is to blast them into oblivion, so you end up spending a lot of time doing exactly that. If you are familiar with Heroes of Newerth, you may be distracted by the fact that you can't last hit your own NPCs (killing them when they are low health to deny experience/gold to the opposing team). This means that the only way to actually deny experience/gold is to chase off or kill the enemy heroes, and gameplay adjusts accordingly.

Each side has an assortment of large defensive towers that pack quite a punch in the early game. But since real advantage comes from making sure the other guy is dead, there's a lot of incentive to press dangerously close to them while trying to finish a wounded opponent. The towers are pretty unforgiving so it makes for a nice dance on the edge as you try to build a small positional advantage with one successful skirmish into a slightly larger one with a hazardous foray into tower space.

Another huge win that LoL has over Heroes of Newerth is that it actually has a reasonable beginner path and NPC opponents that you can battle. In addition to normal matchmaker mode, it has a 'practice' area, where games may be set up to include computer opponents. These are worth slightly less credits than normal games, but they're a great place to learn and try stuff out. They also have the advantage of being fast, with a typical practice game vs NPCs taking 11-15 minutes. Don't finish before 11 minutes or you won't earn any credits, but generally speaking most games naturally run just a bit longer than that anyways, so it doesn't tend to be an issue. The computer opponents aren't exactly gifted, but they're a nice way to learn a champion you haven't played before, or simply farm some credits and experience.

Speaking of experience, you also level yourself up a bit and have a minor skill tree full of small bonuses to unlock. You can reset and repick these at any time, so don't worry about 'bad' choices. Nothing you do is going to harm you later. Similarly, you have an inventory of Runes, that also give small bonuses. As you level up you unlock the ability to use more and stronger Runes, which once again, give small bonuses. None of these bonuses are huge, but you end up with loads of them to stack up, so you can tune yourself a bit with them as you grow.

Overall I had a surprising amount of fun with League of Legends. What I originally expected to be just another remake on a known genre turned out to have enough style and flavor of its own to be worth a lot of play. I encourage you to give it a try and get a giant flaming teddy bear of your own. Oh, and when you do, ping me for a referral (or just use the game link up top). Only 9,998 to go until they let me design my own champion!

Cheers!

League of Legends
Rating: 9.1