Day: April 11, 2012

First Look: Legend of Grimrock

Posted on by Nimgimli

This is going to be really short and no-frills since it’s pretty late and I didn’t have the presence of mind to take screenshots or anything.

Legend of Grimrock launched today and from my first couple of hours playing I’m going to say it’s delivering exactly what developer Almost Human Games promised they’d deliver: old school party-based dungeon crawling with updated graphics. I freaking LOVE IT!! I wonder how many others will, though. Lots of people say they want old school games until they actually start to play them. 🙂

When you first fire up the game you can use a pre-rolled party if you want to miss out on half the fun, or create 4 new characters. There are only 4 races: human, minotaur, lizardman and insectoid. I went with a Minotaur Fighter and a Human Melee-based rogue for my front ranks, and a human Archer Rogue and a human Mage for the back row. That’s how I assigned my skills anyway.

I choose normal difficulty and resisted the temptation to go truly old-school and turn off the automap since I had no graph paper handy. 🙂

Movement is turn-based and uses basic WASD controls. Q&E turn you 90 degrees, A&D sidestep. You can look around with the mouse but mostly you just use it to click on stuff. Combat is time-based. Click on a party member to have him/her attack and then a cooldown for that party member starts. Magic is a bit more complex. Clicking a magic user brings up a panel of runes. Choose some runes and click Cast to cast your spell.

So the game starts and my 4 party members are… totally naked with no gear. I start wandering through the hallways scrounging up cast-off weapons. I did get a knife for my melee fighter, which was great since he’d trained in daggers. But my Axe-Trained Fighter wound up with a mace and my Missile-Weapon trained back-rank Rogue wound up picking up a few rocks she could throw. My Mage experimented a bit and quickly figured out a short range flame spell.

Early enemies come one at a time and aren’t too tough if you have a Mage shooting fire out her palms. Health regenerates by itself, slowly, and there are plenty of doors that you can close behind you if you get low on hitpoints. Monsters don’t seem to heal while they wait around for you to come out and finish them off. There is a food gauge but most early monsters drop chunks of meat you can eat. I assume running out of food will mean you won’t regenerate health, but I’m not positive about that. There’s also a Rest option to speed up healing time but I assume (maybe I should look for a manual…I’m assuming a lot of stuff) you have to be somewhere safe. I locked myself in a small room when I used it.

Light is an issue. You probably want to yank a torch off the wall and give it to a party member if you want good light as you explore. In fact, grab a bunch of them because they do burn out (though if you stick a burnt out torch into a sconce it magically springs back to life).

Puzzles abound, most of them obvious up near the top of the dungeon. Throw a rock on a pressure play to open a grate, press the loose brick to swing open the hidden door. That kind of thing. There are shrines that resurrect and heal your party, but they seem to be 1-use objects.

I only made it to the second level of the dungeon tonight (and level 2 with my characters) but wow… this is EXACTLY the game I’d hoped it would be. It was like I was back on my Atari ST playing Dungeon Master again. Though you can’t repeatedly slam a gate down on a monster to kill it (man, did I abuse that trick back in the day), and the one time I trapped a monster in a pit it respawned back at its starting point.

Almost Human promised an old-school gaming experience and they delivered it. If you’re really nostalgic for the old days of dungeon crawling, but can’t stomach 1987’s graphics, then definitely check out Legend of Grimrock. Even if you only play it for a few evenings you’ll get your $15 ($13.50 if you hurry) worth of fun out of it. But be warned…if you just THINK you want some old school gameplay, you might want to wait for a demo or something.

Also, and I kind of hate to say this but…this would make a GREAT iPad game…

First Look: Anomaly – Warzone Earth for XBLA

Posted on by Nimgimli

If you’re a PC or mobile gamer, 11 Bit Studios’s Anomaly – Warzone Earth might be old news to you. The game originally came out on PC about a year ago, on iOS last summer and on Android earlier this year. Now it’s finally made it to Xbox Live Arcade and in turn I finally got around to giving it a try.

Anomaly is a tower defense game, inverted. Instead of placing towers to ward off incoming attackers, you control the incoming attackers trying to get past, or take out, fixed emplacements. You’ve got two tiers of control in order to accomplish this.

First there’s a strategic map, accessed any time by hitting the Y button, where you plot your route to your destination. Your troops all follow roads in a single file line (at least in the first half dozen levels that I got through) and at each intersection you determine whether they should turn left, turn right, or go straight through the intersection. You can jump in and out of this map at any time, tweaking the route your troops take in response to battlefield conditions.

Once you’re done on the strategic map, your view changes to a nicely rendered map of the city and you appear on the field as a commander unit. He’s a pretty fast, quite durable unit with no offensive abilities. His job is (minimally) to draw fire, to run around and collect power-ups dropped by air support, and to use these power-ups to help keep your units alive. The three power-ups I’ve encountered are Repair, Smoke and Decoy. Repair forms a short-lived auto-repair circle on the map. Any unit that travels through it gets patched up. Smoke offers limited cover in a section of the map, and Decoy draws fire from all enemies within range (until the decoys are destroyed). There’s a least one more type of power-up that I haven’t uncovered yet. Some kind of Bomb. Yay bombs!

As you travel along the map fighting towers (your units, other than the commander, move and attack autonomously) you’ll also encounter nodules of ore. Destroying those converts them into cash. Cash is used to purchase or upgrade units. You can do that any time by pressing X. You can buy new units, upgrade existing units, sell units, or re-arrange the order of your units. In the 6 missions I played I was exposed to 3 kinds of units: an APC with good armor but mediocre firepower, a crawler with weak armor but good offense and range, and a shield unit that had no offense but placed a shield around the units in front of and behind itself.

As for enemy towers, there are basic machine gun towers, beam towers that you should only take on from the sides or behind (not always easy when you need to factor in the limited choices the road grid offers), Behemoths that are very powerful but slow to aim, and some kind of lightning tower that I haven’t quite figured out yet.

And that’s about it so far in terms of game mechanics. I’m playing through the Story Mode: chunks of an alien space craft have fallen to earth and covered Baghdad and Tokyo in strange domes. What’s going on inside? My military unit has been chosen to go in to investigate, and kick some alien ass at the same time. It’s not an epic tale but it’s enough story to keep your interest and get you to play just one more mission.

The game looks great and plays really well with a controller. It comes with some Xbox-y unlocks like stuff for your Avatar and so forth (I don’t play a ton of XBLA games these days…maybe these are standard features now?) and you get scored on each mission so there’s replayability there as you strive to earn more medals.

Like I said, I’ve only spent a couple hours with the game, so don’t consider this any kind of definitive review, but I had a really good time playing. I’d avoided the game on PC because I was pretty burnt out on Tower Defense, but I was offered a review copy of the XBLA version so I figured I’d give it a shot. I was very pleasantly surprised. Turning the tables and making you the attacker is a nice twist on the genre.

Old hands at the game may be tempted by the 6 Xbox-exclusive ‘tactical trials’ that 11 Bit Studios has created for the XBLA version.

Anomaly – Warzone Earth is 800 Microsoft Points, and of course there’s a free demo available.