This is a 4X strategy game that's unique in that it's asymmetrical. It's a shame because it does a fantastic job at some things but is god awful at some others. THE GOOD The game flawlessly recreates the strategic overview of the struggle between the empire and the rebels. The Rebels start on Yavin and have to organize a relocation before the empire player arrives with his starting overwhelming force. The rebels pick an outer planet, and rebuild there. Then it's a race for the rebels to scatter and spread out buying time to build up, and the empire sends out probes to find hidden rebel planets and crush them all before that happens. Other things that organically turn this into a recreation of the movies. Both sides send out agents to try and run missions, from sabotage to info gathering to assassinating enemy agents. You get heros that act as super agents to boost mission chances. You run into moments like sending Darth Vader himself to root out a trouble rebel area. Han Solo is sent to sabotage the empire's key shipyards, but since Vader was there he is captured. You run more missions to find out where Han is being held prisoner, and organize a rescue mission with Bothans and Wookies led by Luke Skywalker and Leia. Ships can't be recalled once in hyperspace, so you send your fleet to attack a planet only to discover it has a super shield or defense that will decimate your fleet, so it's a race to send a covert mission there to sabotage the defense before the fleet arrives, just like the movie! THE BAD This is what keeps the game from being a classic. The interface and combat are a total mess. The strategic portion is a never ending series of popup windows that simulates a bad malware infection. The fleet combat is a mess you can't effectively control and space battles always end in lopsided victories (one side is wiped out while the other takes almost no damage) no matter how closely matches the sides are. Worth checking out but the flaws are crippling.
The Good: The art is pretty, the technical performance is polished. The Bad: I've played countless board games. I've played hardcore, casual, war games, economic games, competitive, co-op,and "multiplayer solitaire" games. The Witcher Adventure Game is one of the worst board game experiences I've ever had. It reminds me of a mix between Elder Signs and Eldritch horror in that you're running around the world collecting clues to solve quests and combat is rolling the right symbols to match up. I loved Elder Signs and Eldritch Horror, but TWAG is just boring, pointless frustration. You get a quest worth victory points. The quest takes a certain number of clues that you have to move around collecting. You get 6 possible actions and can perform 2 of them per turn. The kicker is that the game is constantly penalizing you by blocking your actions with wounds (cannot perform action until you rest and remove the wound) or "foul fate" tokens which cause you to draw a punishment card if you perform that action, usually causing more wounds and foul fate tokens. You're forced to fight the area's monster at the end of every turn which inflicts more wounds and foul fate tokens. It's very, very easy to get crippled with an endless wave of these. There can be a powerful monster you cannot defeat wounding you every turn, but you cannot move away because your movement actions are covered in wounds and the foul fate tokens keep piling up. You can't die and start over, there is no safe space to retreat to and recover, so you're stuck in an endless cycle of wounding and resting every turn. There is no interaction between players. Zero. You all just keep rolling every turn until you have enough stuff to win. It's completely pointless and entirely luck driven. I'll usually give games a lot of chances, but TWAG is such a joyless slog of random die rolls and punishment that our group quit both games we tried to play. There are so many better board games out there.
Infested Planet would best be called a "Tower Offense" game where it's sort of like a traditional tower defense game against endless waves of enemies except your units are mostly mobile as they go on the attack. There are alien hives that send endless waves at your bases while you order marines around. Kill a hive, capture the area for upgrade points, be sure not to let the aliens retake it. Every time you capture a hive, the remaining aliens grow stronger in the form of an upgrade. Capture all points before the aliens get too strong and overwhelm you. What I like is that you never waste upgrade points. You can sell them for full refunds at any time to try and change your strategy. What I DON'T like is that 75% of your options are worthless. They are about 20 different upgrade choices for your marines and you will literally only use about 4 of them. The intent was to juggle and adapt to the ever changing aliens; swap out different weapons for different situations, build turrets at strategic points, etc. But the most effective strategy is to simply build a medic unit, grenade upgrade, then proceed to spam as many minigunner marines as possible. Nothing else comes close to the value offered by grenades and healing minigunners. To test this, I tried the game's weekly challenges where you compare your scores to other players. I went with mindless minigunner spamming and on my very first try got the #4 GLOBAL score on the leaderboard. Getting a higher score to crack the top 3 (in the WORLD) would have just been a matter of perfecting my micromanagement of that strategy, not changing the strategy. It's a shame because if all the options were viable as intended, this would easily be in my top 5 strategy games of all time. Buy it if you're okay with 3 hours of decent fun, but realize it's nowhere near as tactically flexible as it appears.
Gone Home is another entry into the unfortunate modern trend of critics praising awful indie "art" games. There is ONE puzzle in the game. The rest is walking around reading notes. The game is built entirely on false dread. There is no sign of your family in the house. You find a cryptic note on the door. A cryptic, distressing message on the answering machine. There is a thunderstorm. And...that's it. One-third the way through the game you find out the horror is a smokescreen for a very special episode "twist". Take away the thunderstorm and nobody would have even bothered playing more than 5 minutes. The end is one big "LOL just kidding!" *spoiler* Your sister is a lesbian with an unhealthy relationship and ran off with her highschool girlfriend of 8 months, ruining both their futures by going AWOL from the army and throwing away a scholarship. But since this game was made by social justice warrior hipsters from Portland, it's presented as a BEAUTIFUL LIFE EXPERIENCE where lesbians are perfect magical pixies. The lesbian angle doesn't even factor into the story. The girls face no prejudice or social exclusion. Would have been the exact same story with a straight couple, then people would rightfully call the kids out for being idiots. The one and ONLY thing the game does well is recreate a 1990s household. $5 and 2 hours of your time is still stretching it. $20 is insane.
The best I can describe this is S.T.A.L.K.E.R set in a plague ridden village. You arrive in town right as patient zero kicks the bucket and the game plays out over days as the plague spreads and things get increasingly chaotic. I don't want to give anything away, but you're always being surprised at the new surreal messed up stuff that begins happening. Giant warehouses, a meatpacking plant, and asylum loom over the city with crazy Something Wicked This Way Comes vibes about them. Getting into them gives you the same feeling as entering the S.T.A.L.K.E.R labs for the first time. It manages to nail the plague aspect; you feel like wanting to scrub yourself with disinfectant as you play. After hearing tons of positive reviews for Contagion as the ultimate germaphobe horror movie, I was underwhelmed when I finally saw it and I think it's because I played Pathologic first. Flaws? The translation is very bad; you can't tell what's supposed to be cryptic and what's supposed to be botched straightforward info. A LOT of the game time is taken up by walking all over the village. This wouldn't be so bad if it let you explore everything at your own pace, but often there's a very strict time limit on quests and it can result in an instant game over if you don't haul ass. This is especially restricting early on and I urge anyone interested to power past that part. If you enjoyed S.T.A.L.K.E.R despite its clunky gameplay, then this is a must play.
This game tries a unique approach to adventure games and succeeds about as best as it possible could given the lofty goal. You're a passenger on the Orient Express for 5 days and events progress in real time. Certain things can only be done at certain times. It leads to interesting situations where you suspect something is up by following people moving around suspiciously. A very Hitchcock feel. Now, the bad. -Most of the game there is nothing to do but sit around and wait, there is a rewind option but no fast forward. - Fussy hotspot clicking. In two spots, even with a walkthrough knowing there was an item hotspot there, I had extreme difficulty finding stuff. The starting cabin is the worst offender. Vital objects that need to be used early on are located there and finding them is a click chore. Just read a FAQ to discover all the items you need in your cabin at the start. Trust me. -Exploration is limited. There are only 5 train cars, and 90% of the game takes place in only 2 of them. Get used to that dining car, and lots of locked doors. The game is worth looking at as a unique experiment. Way too many things drag down the final product though. They had to limit the area (only 2-5 train cars) and events (there are only about 6 important things to do all game) to prevent too many moving parts from breaking the real time aspect.
Yes, I said it. Hear me out. Here are the 3 complaints everyone has about this game: "Mindless mini-games"- Yeah, they get repetitive. Honestly though I would take any of them rather than have to sit through another insult duel segment of some Monkey Island game. For some reason everyone loved those though. In Cum Laude, you put up with mostly tolerable mini-games that can go on longer than they should so you can great to some great writing. "It's not an adventure game!"- You do not solve infamous Sierra logic puzzles, true. I contend that this is not a bad thing. Sierra puzzle logic were what eventually killed adventure games in the first place. People wear rose colored glasses when they look back on those. "It's immature boob jokes aimed at 12 year olds!"- Okay, THIS one...seriously? What the heck serious mature games were these people playing? Because they sure as heck weren't Leisure Suit Larry games, the franchise where you distract pimps by playing porno on the TV and die of an STD if you don't wear a condom after typing "f*** hooker". This is like fans of the movie Porky's calling American Pie immature. Without the blindness of nostalgia, Cum Laude definitely has the best comedy writing of any game in the series. It is the game's primary strength and where it shines. Once you get through some repetitive, but tolerable mini-games, you get to the conversations which are the delicious meat of the game. Much like David Lynch perfectly captured the anxiety of meeting the in-laws in Erasure head, the conversation mini-game here perfectly captures the social mind field of hitting on chicks. Then there's the countless humorous monologues you get when Larry examines items; there's always another one around the corner as you explore the campus. Ruining some hippy's hacky sack game never gets old. So, it's a funny enjoyable experience once you get past the mini-games and realize that a lot of the original LSL jokes have aged as well as Ray Jay Johnson.
