The Reticule

I’ve never really gotten to grips with writing science fiction. I’ve experimented with pretty much every genre, from steam punk to body horror, and the only one that causes me headaches happens to be sci-fi, the one genre that defined my youth. Perhaps it is because of this that I can’t help but fall into the conventions so prevalent in the media: hyperspace drives, technobabble, sexy triple-breasted alien chicks, the whole shebang.

But there is something that irritates me more than genre conventions and hideous stereotypes. You can still tell a good story while fighting the conventions, it’s harder but you can do it, and seeing examples of people failing to try manages to raise my ire more than any generic construction.

This is my issue with Dark Void.

I bought Dark Void to tide myself over until I could come to terms with wanting Mass Effect 2, a game I had tried to dislike purely because its prequel’s terrible combat mechanics had left a sour taste. All the pre-release goodies for Dark Void had detailed this sci-fi extravaganza: sucked into the heart of the Bermuda Triangle during a routine passenger flight, American Hero is introduced to advanced technology and aliens in equal measure, culminating in bloody jetpacks and the scientific undermining of ancient religion. This makes a change from space marines punching the snot out of multi-muscled behemoths, I’m in.

Unfortunately, the developers themselves seem to have decided that plot and story are unnecessary in this sort of game, that prolonged fire fights and drunken jetpack controls will be enough to drag you through the game. They also seem to think that this is worth the two years of average hype and the paycheck for one mister Nolan North. It’s not, and the worst thing is that it so easily could have been.

The actual mechanics are a bit wonky, but they’re passable. It’s a repetitive game hidden behind the notions of vertical cover, jetpacks, and enemies that take a Nottingham night’s worth of bullets to put down. The thing is, almost every action game is repetitive, they just conceal it well behind explosions and cutscenes. Good cutscenes. Ones that connect the game together in a meaningful and coherent manner, not haphazardly ushering you from level to level with nary an explanation.

I propose a way to remedy this. I’ll fill in the gaps for you.

Starting this Wednesday, I intend to do what the developers didn’t, and try to fashion a cohesive and hopefully compelling narrative out of Dark Void. There will be rules to this of course, which I’ll explain in a moment, but the basic idea is to take what’s already there and expand it carefully, spinning out the cutscenes and the back story to such a level that you should never think “what the hell?”.

In order to do this, there will be a few rules. Firstly, I will not retell what’s is actually there; I’ll write around them so as to actually provide context for what happens on-screen. I may make an exception for the intro and the conclusion, but only if I feel I need to, everything else will fit around the game itself. Secondly, I’ll try to do it both competently and concisely; it’s very easy to wax lyrical for three thousand words, but no-one is going to read that much on a gaming website about an average/mediocre game. Finally, this will be a weekly thing, every Wednesday (God permitting). Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it and it might just help to make the game a bit more fun too, but I make no apologies for any mistakes or continuity errors that may occur. I will do my very best to minimise them, even going so far as to play the actual game a second time, but if one slips through, well, you have been warned.

I’ll do it one game chapter per week, that should keep the word count down and come with the added bonus of allowing the thing to finish around the time the game will be visible in bargain bins across the world, so those of you without the (mis)fortune of already having played it will be able to pick it up, story bible in hand.

So, shall we see if this is worth the effort?

I have often found myself interested in truck simulator games, I like to wonder what it would be like to drive an articulated lorry around the motorways of the UK. Unfortuntately most truck sims have been focused on mainland Europe or America. Things are about to change though with the upcoming release of UK Truck Simulator from SCS Software.

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Friend of The Reticule Craig Lager has been playing the Killing Floor mod Defence Alliance 2 and has written his thoughts on it, hit the jump to check them out! (more…)

Fallen Earth is an MMO quite unlike other more mainstream titles of late. This is exactly why more people need to play it. Initially it seems to be just your regular, clunky and drab looking MMO. Actually it is at times, but it’s also so much more than just its looks. We’ve all seen the bleak wastelands and zombie infested future which games seem to adore showing us but it’s the way that Fallen Earth portrays it that makes it so much fun. Persevere through a slightly mundane tutorial section and it doesn’t take long to realise just what is so compelling and unique about this post-apocalyptic MMO.

There’s not a huge amount that can be said about the tutorial. It’s functional at best with nothing particularly grabbing me. In fact my expectations were very low initially thanks to my experiences with a very clunky combat system. I suspect my over reliance on auto attack modes has made me lazy when it comes to MMO combat, so having to aim at my opponent myself felt quite unnatural and awkward. Once the game opens up away from the instanced tutorial, things become very different. There’s no sign of the hand holding that is apparent in other MMOs in recent years. This is both a curse and a blessing as I can see many people giving up far too quickly in favour of easier, but less rewarding, games. It’s worth sticking by Fallen Earth though as you’ll be eventually rewarded with an experience that gives you more choices than nearly any other MMO in years. The desolation of the bleak wastelands around you are intimidating in their vastness and it’ll be many hours until you adjust your expectations appropriately and simply enjoy the fact that there’s no ‘set’ path to take. This really is an MMO that makes you feel entirely free in your options, something I haven’t experienced since my infatuation with space based MMO, Eve Online.

Unlike more conventional MMOs there is not even a class system to be confined to. There are templates that you can choose to follow but for the most part you can mix and match your skills however you want. This really opens up a lot of options and it’s refreshing to see a game treat its players so maturely, allowing them to really mould their character into a bespoke model. This is demonstrated even further by the impressively complex crafting system. As you would expect in a post-apocalyptic world, useful items are hard to come by in their complete form, so you’ll quickly rely on the items that you can create yourself. To create such items can take quite a while as initially core materials must be found amongst the rubble, before you even start to form more useful items. That’s not forgetting the matter of acquiring blueprints to know exactly how to make said item. After this the actual crafting element can take a long time, comprising of hours sometimes, but fortunately this can be left to finish while you are offline. Something that was used to great effect in the past by Eve Online’s skill system. Crafting is immensely rewarding but much like the rest of the game, players do need to be committed to the effort. At least if you’re the lazy sort of MMO player, you can always buy items from other players through an auction house system, although the snob in me can’t help but see that as cheating.

The crafting system was what really drew me into Fallen Earth. Being able to craft all my weaponry and even build my own vehicles felt like a great accomplishment, much more so than ever levelling up in other, more mainstream MMOs. It made things feel less like a grind and more like a battle for survival, which is surely exactly what should be felt when playing an RPG set in a bleak world. Frequently Fallen Earth felt more like a single player RPG experience by my own continuous self-reliance on myself rather than others. Despite this I still found the online community as mature as the game’s content, being (for the most part at least) extremely helpful and supportive.

It’s not all plain sailing for Fallen Earth. As mentioned previously, it does have a steep learning curve at times which is sure to put some players off persevering. However give it the respect it deserves and it becomes an extremely rewarding experience. It’s a culmination of small, initially mundane sounding things that make it so enjoyable. The fact that it explains your ‘respawning’ upon death by showing that you are a clone, or the fact that you can have horses or motor vehicles to travel with but they all need maintaining in some way. It gives the allure of true independence and choice, something that too many MMOs don’t bother with even though surely that’s the entire point of having an entire virtual world at your disposal.

Fallen Earth isn’t for everyone and I can see why some players will be disappointed by the lack of strong structure here, and the unconventional manner of the game. However others will thrive upon its openness and complexity. It’s the nearest you’ll get to a Fallout MMO which is surely high praise in itself. Just don’t expect an easy ride at first, good things come to those who persevere.

And now for something completely different. A game you probably shouldn’t care about.

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Jagex are the name behind the staggeringly popular free-to-play, browser based MMO Runescape. They’ve come a long way since they started up in 2001, producing 39 games for their gaming portal FunOrb.com and registering more than 165 million users for Runescape. They’ve grown to become the UK’s largest independent games company. On the eve of the release of their new game, War of Legends, we caught up with Adam Tuckwell and Christian Reshoeft from Jagex to discuss their new game and to hear their thoughts on the popularity of broser games and their place in the future of PC gaming.

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I’ve never liked the word ‘gratuitous’. It’s one of those words that is impossible to say in anything other than a Mary Whitehouse tone. It’s one of the elite cadre of words that has a reputation, and ‘gratuitous’ has a reputation for bad.

Yet here it is, in full, capitalised glory, amongst the title of a new indie game about things exploding in space. Even better, it flies in the face of gratuitous’s reputation. Gratuitous Space Battles is not only good, it’s rather charming with it.

For those not in the know Gratuitous Space Battles (hereafter GSB, acronym fans) is the brainchild of noted indie darling Cliff Harris, responsible for Democracy and Kudos. The main focus of the game is to take all your favourite parts of science fiction films (the exploding space ships) and cram it all into a game worth £16. It’s an interesting move in this regard, as though he’s taken Galactic Civilisation or Imperium Galactica, cut out all the bits with numbers, and dropped what’s left into a tidy little package.

The game part of GSB comes from designing your own armada of shiny death machines and arranging them prior to open conflict. In fact, true to its name, this pre-battle set up is the only time you have any input into what your ships will do. You can give your vessels standing orders, order them to support one another or defend a specific ship for instance, but once you click go that’s your job done. As you might expect from such a system, there will be moments where you will want to get on the phone and order a ship to shoot at the battleship right under his nose, but those moments are never too stressful thanks, in no small part, to the battles themselves.

I want you to stop for a minute and picture your favourite sci-fi film/programme, one with spaceships please otherwise this won’t work. Got it? Right. What you are thinking of there is almost exactly what you get in GSB. I say almost because I’m pretty sure you’ll be thinking of high-speed, stomach churning acrobatics accompanying your lasers, and GSB doesn’t do that. What it does do, however, is some rather delightful light shows. Lasers bounce of shields as capital ships crawl into range of one another, fighters explode as a wry shot from a cruiser catches the pilot off-guard, and torpedoes are shot out of the sky by point-defence lasers with seconds to spare. It’s simply beautiful.

It’s also rather hard at times. Get out of the tutorial missions and the game immediately expects you to understand how things work. Build your own ships, spend your cash and go out there and win. If you’re anything like me, you’ll spend a little while getting blown into captivating stardust before you finally start cobbling together a ragtag fleet of competent spacers. It is in defeat where the game shows yet more clever design however.

Losing, even in a game that makes it look good, will eventually wear out its welcome, and in games where battles can take a considerable amount of time there may come a point where it is clear to you that victory is impossible. Those irritating minutes where knowing that there is nothing you can do to reverse this trend can sap all the fun out of a game. GSB can detect when a battle has become unwinnable for one side, and presents you with a handy box to skip to the end. It should also be said that this box will pop up when you’re winning too, but at that point you will want to see your enemies explode into a twisted hulk of debris. While this feature itself is not new (the Total War games have something similar) it seems more intelligent than its predecessors, forcing you to play less of a losing game and get back to the drawing board much faster.

There is a very easy way to sum up this game: if you like Star Trek, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, or any other show with ‘star’ hidden in its title somewhere, you are going to love Gratuitous Space Battles. It’s both simple and complicated in equal measure, and at the correct moments, allowing you to see the game for what it is: a chance to build your own little space opera. Design, refine and conquer, and do so with some damn fine pyrotechnics.

Set faces to stunned, gentlemen

Solium Infernum is a new turn based strategy game from Vic Davis of Cryptic Comet, the brain behind the excellent Armageddon Empires. When I say new, I mean it in the sense that, trust me, you haven’t played a strategy game quite like this before.

Satan has vanished leaving the throne to Hell empty. It is your ambition, as one of the many Princes, Dukes and general denizens of underworld, to take the throne for yourself. To do this you will have to lie, cheat, steal, deceive and bully your opponents until you have enough Prestige to impress the all-powerful Infernal Conclave.

Here’s the rub: Hell has it’s own rules, it’s own morbid beaurocracy and a general code of conduct to which all demons of the underworld are expected to adhere. You can’t just declare war on an Archfiend who’s in your way and invade their lands without a good and proper excuse. So it’s a game of goading your foes, making demands you know they can’t meet and then using their refusal to comply as an excuse enough to declare a Vendetta.

It’s not quite as simple as that though, nothing ever is in Solium Infernum. There’s always another layer of strategy to be considered. It’s hard to ever truly know what another player is up to and there are many ways for your enemy to take your declaration of Vendetta and turn it against you, making you look foolish in front of the Infernal Conclave and losing you Prestige. This makes every encounter with your enemy a tense and fascinating exchange.

Much of the tension stems from the fact that you can only give two orders each turn. An order includes bidding on a Legion in the Infernal Bazaar, creating a Combat Card to buff a Legion, moving a Legion on the game board, casting a Ritual or even collecting resources from your minions. Being restricted in this way gives rise to an endless amount of internal debate. I need more resources to bid on a powerful Relic in the Infernal Bazaar, but I need to move my Darkwing Legion to take a place of power before Beelzebub nabs it for himself. I’m also concerned that another Archfiend is becoming a little too rich for my liking and I want to play an Event card to raise the minimum cost of all items in the Infernal Bazaar, discouraging a spending spree that might see his Military become unstoppable. Alternatively I could bully a weaker Archfiend, taking his resources and gaining Prestige at the same time. There’s so much that needs to be done, and I have to choose. Making the wrong decision can prove costly.

This is especially true in Multiplayer. You can play Solium with friends (who won’t be friends for long), by email. It’s a bit of a faff to get it working, particularly for the host who has to amalgamate all of the player’s files at the end of each turn, but if you get past that irritation there’s a superb multiplayer experience to be had. The AI works perfectly well, but isn’t a patch on a human opponent, especially one you think you know. There are many ways to gain Prestige, many ways to win the throne to Hell. Human opponents are innately more devious and unpredictable, able to use the game’s systems to create an emotional response. Having a more powerful human Archfiend demand that you hand over resources will make you angry. Knowing that you aren’t powerful enough to risk a Vendetta with that person and having to hand over those resources, that’s humiliating. But then that just makes your eventual revenge all the sweeter. Add some humans to the mix and it all gets that bit more intense. It gets personal.

All this complexity can mean that, to begin with, Solium is a confusing and slightly overwhelming game. This is the first time in many years that I’ve had to read a game manual. That pdf file tucked away in the game files is absolutely essential reading and it should be more easily accessible for new players. Even with the manual a basic tutorial or pop up help tips to introduce the player to each screen would go a long way to easing any initial frustration. It’s a testament to Solium’s originality that it needs to teach you so many new concepts, but it could definitely help the player out a little more from the get go.

Once you’ve got to grip with the mechanics Solium feels distinctly like a board game, albeit one that would have too many bits and pieces to really work as a physical product. There’s something pleasingly tactile about shuffling your resource cards around and moving your Legion tokens across the game board. There’s some great artwork, too, remeniscent of images you’d see adorning a deck of cards from Wizards of the Coast. After a while though you’ll be so focused on your grand strategy that you’ll barely notice the interface but for the essential number values that denote the effectiveness of a Legion or the competence of a Relic. It’s one of those games that will suck you in and have you falling for the age old ‘just one more turn’ schtick.

If Machiavelli were alive today, he would tell you to play Solium Infernum. As he’s probably conning Lucifer out of his throne as we speak, it’s left to me to deliver a verdict. I’ve given three vials of Ichor and a pillar of Flame to the Infernal Reviewing Machine of The Reticule and it’s still chewing quite happily on what’s left of my soul. It hath decreed, by the black fires of eternal damnation, that Solium Infernum is devilishly good.

Plotting to become Master of the Universe? Use Solium Infernum as practice.