Upon seeing the videos of West of Dead I was hypnotized. The odd cmera angles, strange lighting, and peculiar theme of this roguelike gunfighter action thriller made it stand out among the slew of supernatural wild west titles that have flooded the market. Throw in the voice acting of Ron Pearlman as the protagonist of this story of death, atonement and redemption and you've got the makings of a one-of-a-kind classic. Rolling, sliding and sprinting your way from one flimsy cover point to another, desperately trying to get off a few clean shots before your shelter is stripped away. It's a frantic, high pressure challenge with each reload of your bizarre collection of guns and other tools that relents only when you yet again die and find yourself back in the Saloon at the Entryway of Limbo. You must collect Iron to buy new tools that appear randomly and Sin to sell for new abilities that marginally incrase your survival chances. Each new death sets you back almost to zero, and your struggle begins anew. Just as life in the gunsmoke hazed fontier was fragile, redemption shatters just as easily in death. Accept you know nothing, prepare for the unfathomable, and find your way to paradise by beoming the cleansing force other lost souls fear but which takes you closer to atonement one bullet at a time. Have iit yout way partner, will you be the instrument that sets the afterlife to rights, or will you end up West of Dead?
Between GOG and Steam I have a pretty hefty collection of Warhammer games, both Old World and 40K, and this title yearns still for challengers to depose it's firm grip in my personal Top 5. Sitting amongst more commonly loved giants like Dawn of War and Battlefleet Gothic, Mordheim is a game that will either send you screaming and tearing out your own hair or it will sink it's Skaven like claws into your grey matter like a crossbow bolt. This gem of a title will force you to learn patience, discipline, and an instictive tactical acumen which is hard won and painful but also transferrable to strategy and tactics games of all sorts. Your first steps into the ruins of the City of the Damned will likely see you snatched by an unseen foe, dragged behind the woodshed, and left facedown in the mud with more bruises and wounds than intact flesh. Resist that first anvil of despair dropped upon your head by the Ruthless Number Gods and soldier on if you wish to unearth the wonders and wealth concealed beneath the tormented ruins of the once great metropolis. It's a game that makes you earn any semblance of victory, a toll extracted in blood, lives, souls, and no small number of faceplants onto your own keyboard as you discover for the umpteenth time that hubris is a trait not tolerated in Mordheim. A few simple tips will help you build a warband worthy of songs sung over stiens held aloft as foaming mead and ale spill upon the revelers inspired by your deeds. -No man, woman, rat, flea or shadow ought proceed alone, even if it is just to retrieve a single fragment of precious Wyrdstone in a seemingly safe locale. -Projectiles provide the security of range, but a 25lbs hammer removes threats faster. The fallen harm none. -The clever outlive the brave. When in doubt - rout. -Casualties are unavoidable, always bring disposable assets. -Get the DLC, the best units are extra...Warhammer, right? It's survival of the most unscrupulous, can you sink to the challenge?
This game caught my eye entirely because of the dazzling colour and light of the scenes I had perused among marketing screenshots. It's a post-apocalyptic world which appears to have benefitted from the demise of the previous apex species, and in their wake an innumerable collection of new species, and utterly unique mutants, have risen from the ashes. If you can't stop taking the unserious too seriously you won't like this title, but if you can embrace your inner problem child it's a playground of creation, destruction and unhinged furry mayhem. The open world is like an 80s anime, filled with bright colours, wildly impractical everything, and ten tons of fun in every wushu squirrel. "Wung Fu" that provides blade and gun action at speeds so frantic my partner is easily able to identify what I'm playing from two rooms away by the key clacking. Dodging, pouring gunfire from your handmade...thingys...only to roll in close and batter a foe to death with customized toilet plungers dangling with wrench heads and other assorted junk. Yes...high speed plunger combos executed by a seemingly infinite potential range of custom mutants that get droopy ears in the rain. Plot? Sorta, yeah, in the same sense the droopy eared plunger ninja is an identifiable species. Kill the bad narration and run through dreams of madness with only Gibberish heard spoken. Trust me. The apocalypse never seemed so inviting, the protanist both pettable and lethal, and the very land beneath your pattering paws so vivid and unreal. Where Fallout is grity this game is clever and silly. Given the massive discount you can get on it these days, pick up the Mercenary Class DLC addition. You'll see why the minute you roll out with your low budget ninja movie costume and twin blades.
I tend to appreciate the ostensibly flawed aspects of some RTS/RTT games which either abaondon realism impossible to cultivate and allow AI behavior the quirks that effectively simulate unpredictable humans. This game has an embarrassment of riches in both, but well balanced on top of delightfully deep mechanics that are easy to overlook. Green troops crack easily under heavy fire. War is Hell...like really. The visceral realities scar souls, there's no way to realistically simulate that in a way that is remotely tasteful and facilitates recreational enjoyment. You have to pick your battles, and the stunning armor behavior mechanics, direct control, and wide diversity of assets are gems worth giggling through Germans with generic accents and delivery that phones the perfromance in without apology. The actual kinetic mechanics and material dynamics of things like armor penetration in this series are deeper than any I've seen, and my library is packed with this genre both here and on Steam. The legendary ricochet shot Sherman crews required to disable heavier Panther and Tiger models in a mid scale tactical simulator? That's the product of loving craftsmanship by developers who are first and foremost fans themselves. You can feel a hands on appreciation for why Germans called the Sherman "Tommycookers". This game bristles with features directed at history buffs with a deep knowledge of the nuts and bolts of the biggest of all enormous wars. The complexity mechanics blended with a respectful avoidance of the critical moral quandrys of the war allow you to play about with the many sides of this enormous conflict without donning the weight of ideologies best left in the dust bin of history. This is a game, not a joyless exploration of ethics and morality. Let the History Channel tediously relitigate sociopolitical issues. Just cook them Tommies.
I appreciate this game first and foremost for tackling a conflict so unpopular, sitting at the intersection of sour defeat and Tricky Dick's sour mug. This game works because it keeps to the tactical scale allowed by an asymmetrical strugle in a jungle oft too dense to manuver a unicycle through efficiently. Forget your wall of foundry fresh war machines flattening nations, it's small arms, death from a shadow already passed before it is percieved, and even some primal fisticuffs close struggle for a place in history not relegated to a footnote. To paraphrase Coppolla, this game is about the Vietnam War, it IS the Vietnam war. Marginally trained draftees might not hear the call to fall back over their own ballistic bowels. Green recruits high on panama red might wander into a clearing and draw a typhoon of mortar fire. You might amuse Lady Luck somehow and see your smugly textbook succession of tactics and manuvers play out in way that leaves a witness to boast of your triumphant defeat. Tighten your belt, depantsings are the daily special at the Viet Cong Cafe. In a game about the biggest flaming clown car pile up in the history of warfare, giving orders damn well ought to return thin margins of satisfaction. Ever been in a jungle? It's often real loud, all that life, and gunfire on top doesn't boost verbal, somatic or even psychic communication to measurable efficacy. When you accept some of the eccentric behavior of the AI as a feature of a war that was nothing but incoherent bug reports it becomes a force multiplier for the battalions of hard realism. Extra bonus points for letting us experience the war from the winners podium instead of always having to obfuscate the outcome with the blood drunk narrative of incoherence and denial. Just remember to mentally overwrite hilariously bad voice acting with R. Lee Ermey shouting a war machine into slack jawed draftees from Nebraska.
