Despite sharing the same engine and the misleading title, this is not a Massive Assault game. The mechanics are totally different. This is much more like a Panzer General game. The RNG affects whether or not you hit, armies suffer morale damage, artillery automatically returns covering fire for nearby troops, units are built at upgradeable bases, terrain provides defensive cover, infantry can occupy buildings, there is fog of war. There are no bordered nations, no secret allies. Unfortunately this game lacks Galactic Assault's bombastic music and over the top units for a more somber cold war-esque look to better match the source novel. It's a good game, but don't come in expecting it to play like Massive Assault
Oh god, what an incredible misstep! Majesty 2 brings back the voice actors from the original Majesty, but forgets the core gameplay. Instead of a living breathing fantasy kingdom that you influence by shaping its layout, now you have a stripped-down RTS with brain-dead units who must be babysat every step of the way. No heroes stray very far from your castle, not even rangers, unless you explicitly tell them to with an explore flag. There are no strategic trade-offs in hero choice, you can have dwarves and elves and agrela and krypta temples at the same time in your kingdom with no negative consequences. Instead of automatically grouping up with heroes their AI has an affinity for, you now have to manually put together parties in a process that's way more time-consuming and complicated than it needs to be. Tax collectors glide around like they're on segways, so building placement isn't that important, just plunk a guard tower directly in front of the marketplace and you're golden. Don't think that the dumbed down gameplay means easier missions. After the first couple tutorials the missions turn into rigidly scripted puzzles of what heroes to build when and in what order, and straying from this formula means certain defeat. What's worse, apparently many of these missions were changed extensively by patches so the voice-acted mission briefings are no longer correct (see the dragon mission). There are some ideas that would have been good ones to add to the original game in a patch. Healers are now tier-1 units, graveyards are free and save dead heroes for resurrection, monster lairs "level up" over time, so there isn't really a tipping point like in Majesty 1 where your kingdom becomes unassailable. The music is a zillion times better, and it's gratifying to see your heroes change visibly when they buy new equipment or level up. It's not as good as Majesty 1, but it IS more fun than any tower defense game I've ever played. Take that for what it's worth.
RPG games always focus on the experience of being a player character. This game is about the experience of being the dungeon master. You play an unseen king ruling a fantasy kingdom besieged by monsters. Your city and castle guards can't protect you from much more than sewer rats, so you must summon mighty heroes to protect your lands! Unfortunately, much like a table full of drunken PCs who want nothing more than to ruin your carefully planned adventure, the heroes in Majesty have their own ideas of the best course of action for the kingdom right now. From cheap thieves who will do anything for a buck but will drain your kingdom of gold and magic items in the long run, to paladins who will face any threat head-on, sometimes to their detriment, and so on... You interact with the world of Majesty first by setting building sites, which are assembled by your miserable peasants, then by researching weapons and potions for your heroes to buy with gold they earned out adevnturing, and when times get desperate you can just bribe your greedy heroes by offering a bounty to slay a particular beast or explore a particular spot. A wise king soon learns that proper building placement is the key to victory. A warrior's guild next to a temple of agrela means that healing priestesses are more likely to follow your warriors around and boost their survivability. The waddling, vulnerable tax collectors are the lynchpin of your kingdom, guardhouses are less about protective fire against hostiles and more about minimizing the distance a tax collector with a sack full of gold has to run to get the gold to your treasury before a hungry troll devours him. And a wizard guild placed just close enough to a rat-spawning sewer grate can help a scaredy-cat beginner get a kickstart in levels to start himself on the path to becoming a fireball-spewing engine of death! Superior to the sequel in everything but production values, I highly recommend it.
This is the most singleplayer-oriented of the Massive Assault titles with a whopping five modes of SP, in addition to the tutorials. Also, the two sides in this one have unique units. The basic game is a "world war" that takes place on a continent divided into several countries of 20-40 hexes each. A third of the countries are neutral, a third are held by the Free Nations Union, and a third are held by the Phantom League. However, only one of your held countries is visible to the enemy at the start of the game, all the rest of them are "secret allies" that appear to be neutral. A country can only produce (finite) resources if there are no enemies on any of its hexes, so the ideal strategy is usually a line of cheap units backed up by heavy artillery. The game's signature "move" is flanking one of these formations by revealing a secret ally on an unguarded border and producing a strikeforce to pour in next round and cut off their supplies. Of course, what if that secret ally you just used was itself bordered by a secret ally of the enemy? The tactical combat itself is entirely dice-free. Units do a certain amount of damage at a certain range and have a certain amount of hit points. A 1-HP enemy is just as damaging as a full-health one. Terrain brings no defensive bonuses, only movement penalties and impassible barriers. You can't move through a hex containing the wreckage of a destroyed unit until 1 round after it dies, so cheapo units will hold the line while you wait for reinforcements to come from overseas. The music is a series of crazily bombastic military marches along the lines of the Total Annihilation games. I like the graphics, but the textures, especially for the terrain, are very muddy. The voice acting in the campaign is beyond bad and enters the realm of David Lynch surreal. Ahh... but I did mention bugs. Keep the autosave on because this game is prone to crash-to-desktop, especially on the orbital station thunder map. Recommended!
Like the previous Anomaly games, you control a convoy of military vehicles navigating a city overrun with alien turrets, basically a reverse tower defense where you control the creeps. In addition to choosing the units and giving them a route, you can pause the game and rearrange the unit order at any time, AND new to this game, the vehicles are all transformers and can be switched between two forms with different weapons and powers. There are also nifty new handling features, like if you maintain target lock for an extended time with the hellhound miniguns, their barrel rotation speeds up and increases damage output, which can be a game changer in certain situations. As before, your little avatar can drop area-affect powerups to aid the vehicles when the going gets rough, and his handling is slightly improved over the previous games. Now the negatives. There are 14 missions at 3 levels of difficulty, but sadly this is the kind of campaign that's a long, glorified tutorial drip-feeding new units bit by bit, so you only get a small handful of levels with your full strategic options available. What's worse, the designers REMOVED the skirmish aftergame from the previous titles where you have the full unit list and battle random formations of turrets. In its place is a multiplayer mode that nobody plays. Don't hold your breath for a skirmish DLC either, the designers gave up and turned Anomaly 3 into a straight up vanilla Tower Defense game. How frustrating! If you want replay value, you have to stick with the earlier titles with their weaker graphics and more limited units.
Astebreed may be the prettiest indie shmup, but from a gameplay perspective, Crimzon Clover is the best indie shmup of all time. (Hellsinker is a very close second). Crimzon Clover is a plotless affair borrowing liberally from titles ranging from Rayforce to Dodonpachi. You start with a standard forward bullet spray, and lock-on tracking shots. As you destroy enemies rapidly, you build up a power meter that can be used for a screen clearing bomb with a half bar, and with a full bar you can trigger Break Mode, where your weapons become superpowered for a limited time and the scoring multiplier is doubled. Cause enough havok quickly enough to refill the bar during Break Mode and you can trigger Double Break Mode which increases your weapon power even further, and doubles your scoring multiplier once again in a glorious display of number confetti. Many reviewers throw around the word "Bullet Hell" frivolously to refer to any game that haphazardly throws a lot of bullets onscreen. Crimzon Clover is a perfect example of the bullet hell genre as the term is originally meant. The bullets LOOK chaotic and impossible to avoid, but if you stay calm you'll see that they don't move that fast, your ship's hitbox is smaller than its sprite, and there is a pattern to the bullets that you can navigate or even control. If you want an accomplishment to shut up your gamer pals bragging because they beat Dark Souls, tell them you beat Crimzon Clover! A very serious warning about playing any type of arcade game on your PC, but especially shmups: Credit Feeding is equivalent to playing a FPS with the god cheat on. Of course it's boring and easy to play that way. Your first goal in any of these games is to be able to clear the whole game in a single credit (1CC). This is not the kind of game you play to watch pretty movies and be told you're the world's biggest badass because you hit "square" when prompted. Do you REALLY think you're up to this level of challenge?
In a world where survival horror games try to ramp up the fear factor with scripted spring loaded cats, limited ammo, and sometimes even penalize you just for looking at the monsters, here's Aliens vs. Predator. It's a game where you slide through the scenery as nimbly as the Doom marine, your default weapon is an assault rifle with underslung grenade launcher that pulverizes enemies in seconds, and otherwise does nothing to handicap the player to ramp up the fear factor. AND IT'S TERRIFYING. Why? Simply because Weyland Yutani skimps on lightbulbs, you can have only 4 flares burning at any one time, and Xenomorphs are FAST! The monsters are coming for you, and if you don't spot them fast enough it's over. That's all it takes, and it never gets old. The Colonial Marine levels are the meat of the game, and I'm not gonig to penalize it for the weaknesses of the other two modes. The main thing I'll dock it for is occasionally obscure level requirements. There's one level in particular I was stuck on for weeks before I realized some strips in front of a locked door were actually shootable objects keeping it shut. The predator levels are amusing at first, playing with all the vision modes and other toys, but you're so indestructible it gets boring fast. The Alien levels were great in the original release, and they're still lots of fun, but they seem to be a little bugged, if you'll pardon the expression, in this release. You sometimes get stuck on geometry when crawling over polygon edges, human "auras" constantly change color, and the stealth mechanics seem to be completely broken. Even if you break every light in the room, the marines always spot you instantly. But I re-emphasize, this game is all about playing the colonial marine, and in that part of the game it's an absolute classic. Too bad the sequels didn't capitalize on this game's strengths and used the scripted Half-Life-wannabe funhouse ride approach.
*IMPORTANT NOTE* Credit-spamming arcade games is like playing a first person shooter with the god cheat on. Of course it's boring and easy if you play it that way. One of the most gorgeous indie shmups to come out of Japan. This is a scrolling shooter where you fly a sword-swinging mech against an army of alien robots because blah blah reasons. The scoring system is straightforward: build up the score multiplier with rapid fire attacks up to 16X, then cash in the multiplier by taking out multiple enemies in a single sword attack. This is a much more forgiving game than arcade-difficult shmups thanks to your Halo-esque regenerating health bar and multiple difficulty settings. I highly recommend this game. Looking forward to more shmups on gog, like Crimzon Clover!
Sacred 2 has two major details that set it apart from the rest of the ARPG genre. First: It takes place in a gameworld comparable in size to an Elder Scrolls game. Second: there is no MP and the skill tree is flat. Where in, say, torchlight you might have to play for 5 hours before you finally unlock the skill combination your build is intended to emphasize, in Sacred 2 you can get all the skills you want within the first 15 minutes of gameplay. Builds in Sacred 2 are more about balancing the skill's base power against its recharge time. This is why at the start of the game attacks seem slow and floaty, over time your build will increase attack speed and the animations will speed up accordingly. The main reason I'm docking this game a star is the bugs. The community patch is mandatory to get this game to run properly.
