Looks like The Settlers. How does it compare to The Settlers?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: KeyrockI'll take a wait and see approach on this one, given that Games Workshop is willing to license their IPs out to literally anyone, which has lead to a veritable deluge of Warhammer and 40K games over the last several years, 90% of which have been garbage. Hopefully this one falls into the 10%.

I'd argue that it's a sea of mediocrity rather than garbage, few games are actually bad, then again few are also actually good and yes, it's a result of GW handing their license over to anyone willing. Now this relatively recent policy (they used to sue anyone for the pettiest things) stems from GW shooting themselves in the foot with various financial decisions, namely insane pricing (55 pounds for a plastic tank c'mon GW) while shrinking their retail distribution and I'm fairly sure licensing is the only thing that kept them afloat. With the big moneymaker (and more importantly tabletop awareness raiser) Dawn of War flopping recently I imagine their licensing output only to increase and it's unsurprising that mediocre developers who often end up making licensed games (as these come with time and money saving prepackaged audiovisuals and concepts) end up making mediocre 40k games. It requires actual effort (c'mon Relic) to mess up a 40k game as everything comes pre-packaged and often already known to nerds who end up developing it (c'mon Relic), all you have to do is apply basic games design (c'mon Relic) or at least steal it from other successful games (c'mon Relic) and give fanbois what they want (c'mon Relic).

My problem with this is that mediocre developers can make a decent game, but don't end up innovating in any way that would make those games stand out above what is considered bog-standard in their respective genres, except with 40k coating. The last two really memorable (and innovative! what a coincidence!) 40k games I've played were DoW 1 and the venerable Final Liberation. Then I would consider DoW2 as it combined a decent story with a mix of CoH/Diablo gameplay and then maaaaybe Space Marine by the principle of being one of the amusingly few real-time action games in a setting that's 100% action and warfare and grim and dark. After that almost everything else I played were decent games, but in every case I have already played a better version of it when it was called for example Panzer General, Aliens vs Predator, X-Com/UFO Defense or Starcraft 2 (c'mon Relic).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

My 40k fanatic friend got bored of it within 3 hours and we both played DoW1 and 2 for hundreds of hours. It was a major disappointment for me as well, it's like every decision they made was the opposite of what I wanted from a 40k RTS:
- the art style looked nothing like the content of 40k codices, it's hard to describe, it's like they took the comical heroic proportions of objects in 40k and tried to made them more realistic while keeping the ridiculous gothic look and making everyones faces look like they're made of play dough
- the audio was ok at most, just as safe and bland as gameplay, it wasn't Jeremy Souls orchestra blasting away while the worlds best AND worst voice acting confirms my commands
- I'm not going to comment on gameplay as I played maybe through half of the campaign and a few skirmishes before giving up, what I saw was slow, safe and boring and felt like being designed so people coming in for the new experience won't get offended at being exposed to pesky RTS features. The peak of DoW for me was playing IG with a SM friend and pushing a bloody grinder forward against 4 AI Ork players teamed up against us. I got none of that in DoW2, but it was still pretty entertaining to coordinate our squad members to take down targets. In the meantime I got none of these with 3.

All of these things would have been forgiven if they finally ditched the skirmish level of gameplay. It made sense in DoW1 due to hardware limitations especially considering how pretty that game was on release, DoW2 was forgiven due to focusing on a mix of small squad gameplay with RPG elements all wrapped in a neat story. DoW3 kept the DoW2 scale with nothing that made DoW2 actually good while stripping features that made DoW1 stand out as an RTS.

What I would like to see, now that we have the hardware for it, is a DoW game that actually reflects at least some of the scale present in 40k lore with massive battles with hundreds of units, there's reasons why Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander are still considered to be some of the best RTS games despite not having much else to offer other than their grandiose (IMO). Less 5 man tactical squads, more Ultimate Apocalypse mod type gameplay. What I should note is that I have the same piece of criticism about CoH, nothing made me feel more immersed than taking Reichstag with 3 early war tanks and 20+ penal battalion troops.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It looks like CoH with swords (not a fan of CoH, admittedly I more of a Total War fan as I lack the attention needed to micro a dozen different units at the same time), but looking at screenshots what is a real deal breaker is both unit size and unit limit.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: MohandevirIt would permit them to make Steam incompatible with Win7 & Win8

68.80% of Steam users run Windows 7 64 bit.
24.77% of Steam users run Windows 10 64 bit.
Now just to point out - free update period has ended on 31st of Dec. Even if another free period was to mysteriously pop up, I find it unlikely that most people would buy a product from a company that just fleeced them out of their multi hundred dollar Steam accounts, not to mention that a massive chunk of user base is from Russia and China, where finding someone willing to pay $119 on anything as perishable as Windows 10 stability becomes a problem.

If anything, an event like that would only boost Linux popularity, as:
1. Some sort of a workaround allowing people to use non-Win10 OSes would be inevitable considering the sheer amount of people (tech-savvy or not) using it.
2. MS would severely poop the proverbial bed as far as user trust is concerned after a stunt like this and Windows 7 and 8 are still MS products. Products with expiry date of 2020 and 2023, so not that far off.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

If MS paid $2.5B to buy basically a one trick pony company (I admit, a very profitable pony) in 2015, I can't imagine how much would they have to pay GAYBEN for Valve IP and their store when Valve had a net worth of $3.0B in 2012 and he alone went from $1.5B net worth in 2012 to $5.5B in 2018 according to Forbes.

In general it would have been a bad deal to tie your extremely profitable corporation to another corporation known for their reverse Midas touch regarding anything other than their flagship product and making less money off entire games on their equivalent of Steam than you make off digital hats.[/rant]

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I recall being interested the first time I heard about the Ataribox, however there was some major red flag that put me off. Unfortunately I can't remember what was it...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Is this the version that uses binaural audio? I recall playing it with headphones on PSP and was genuinely impressed.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: razing32Do you have just one type of bomber you customize ?
Or multiple types like the ships in FTL ?

Only the Lancaster, however the amount of available customisation is higher than in FTL. I wouldn't mind getting a B-17, even as a paid DLC.

The game in general is pretty good, but it's actually quite different than FTL, it's much faster and much more hectic as there's no pause button and as soon as the action starts you'll be expected to do multiple things at the same time because your crew has no sense of self-preservation and just sits idly while you're manually assigning targets to gunners and manually performing damage control and manually opening the bomb bay doors and manually arming bombs and manually missing the target because you blinked and manually putting out engine fire and manually steering the bomber back on target and manually assigning targets again and manually tending to inevitable wounded and manually reloading turrets and manually equipping your engineer with an extinguisher and manually assigning targets again while manually sending your engineer to your wing only to find out that you misclicked a pixel and he has a box of ammo and not the extinguisher so you manually send him back while manually assigning targets again while manually dropping bombs because you almost missed the target the engineer has the extinguisher now but there's another engine on fire etc, all of it while the screen is flashing like crazy due to tracers hitting your bomber. Then you crash in front of your airfield anyway because you ran out of fuel. There are upgrades that help automate some of these, but not at the start and quite a few of the Not Recommended reviews come from people who can't handle the pace.

The more annoying feature IMO would be the roguelite nature of the game where you blink for too long during any of the actions mentioned above, inevitably lose the airplane and very likely the crew with it and then you need to start from a scratch which can turn into grind.

90% of the game is damage control under pressure and prioritising decisions like should I put of the engine fire first or should I resupply the tail gunner?

I'd say it's worth playing but bear in mind that it's not a game for everyone.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Now that's a blast from the past. Unfortunately I was a part of the Soldat crowd with some Liero on the side, so I never really got into it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments