To one who'll stand and fight - A Valley without Wind 2

So, a few weeks ago I reviewed A Valley without Wind (readable here). In that review, I mentioned how the game had a bit of a troubled development, seeing the game undergo many changes leading up until release. This went so far as to see the game still receiving changes after release, eventually reached a point where Arcen decided to do the following: They were going to take a lot of the ideas and improvements they had in mind for the game and use it to make a sequel instead. This sequel would then be sold in a bundle with the original game and this would be the only way to buy the games, they would not be available separately. Finally, to be fair to all the early adopters and those who brought the game before the sequel came out. The sequel would be given to these people free of charge.

That brings us  to where we are now, so how did the game turn out?

A Valley Without Wind 2 takes place in the same setting as a Valley Without Wind. A world named Environ where reality has shattered, resulting in a strange world made of various places form different time periods. A valley without wind 2 however, only takes place on a single continent and introduces a twist to the set up. The Ilari, strange living stones that help guard humanity and the glyph bearers never showed up on this continent. Worse yet The resident overlord, Demonaica has an Oblivion Stone, making him and his followers functionally immortal. Fortunately, your character is part of a resistance effort that's managed to get into Demonaica's ranks and get an oblivion stone themselves, giving you a chance to fight back and hopefully take down Demonaica for good.

Again like in the last game, this is mostly an excuse for the gameplay, but it's still a fairly unique setup.

You know you've got a bad job when it's only your first day, and you're already plotting to kill your boss.

At it's core, A Valley Without Wind 2's gameplay is very similar to the first game, you explore a randomly generated 2D world, pushing back windstorms and gathering things to strengthen your character. Although compared to the first game, things are far more focused. Each tile on the world map only has one map to play through, and there's far less in the way of side areas. As a result each area feels more like a level in a traditional platform game rather than a large open area to explore. Each area also has an obvious goal, usually taking down the wind generator at the end of the level, though some special locations give you bosses to fight or terminals to hack.

Also gone form the game are the random spells and enchantments. Instead, your character can pick a class from a random list, split into 5 tiers that decides what spells they have access to. There are a lot of classes in the game, about 50 and which ones you get to pick are randomized each time. Not only will you not see the same classes every game, but they'll be put in random tiers each time, meaning a weak tier 1 class one game could end up a tier 5 in the next. There's also equipment, which gives various bonuses and sometimes penalties like less movement speed in return for extra attack damage but you can only have one piece of equipment at a time and it breaks after you take enough damage, so it's not as big a deal as enchantments were in the last game.

Missions have also been removed from the game. Instead the game has special locations you can visit going to these places and completing the levels there awards you with various things. Windmills for example, level up your character, giving them access to more perks. There's also caverns, which give perk tokens, unlocking more perks to pick form when you level up, which give small bonuses like extra health or movement speed. finally there's robotic research facilities which give feats, which unlock special abilities like double jumping or the ability to shrink to fit through small spaces.

instead of finding random spells, you pick mage classes, like the ones shown here.

A new addition to the game is your resistance, unlike the last game where you had a single, protected colony, here you have resistance members, these members can be ordered around on the overworld and can do things like gathering food and scrap, building new buildings (which costs scrap), like farms, shelters and clinics and recruiting new members found on the world map. You're not really building a permanent settlement in this game, as structures can be destroyed and your resistance members will constantly need to move to either to other things or get away from danger. Instead structures are more of a temporary solution. You build them, get as much use from them as you can, then abandon them once things get too dangerous.

Speaking of danger, your main problem in the game is Demonaica himself. The overworld is turn based, with a turn passing every time you destroy a wind generator and purify some more land. as turns pass, monsters will come out of Demonaica's keep to attack your resistance members and destroy structures. and your resistance members have to deal with them, you can't just go fight them yourself. Eventually Demonaica himself will emerge and he's quite nasty, not only does he summon more monsters and cast spells like blizzards over the landscape. He's invincible, and will instantly kill any resistance member he encounters. You lose the game if all of your resistance members die, so it's in your best interest to hurry on doing what you need to beat the game once he shows up.

You can issue orders on the world map, but ultimately it's up to your resistance members to get things done.

A Valley without Wind 2's graphics are a major improvement over the first game. This time, Arcen handed the job of graphics over to Heavy Cat Studios and they came up with a nice, hand drawn graphics style. A lot of enemies form the first game have been given a new look. Environments look more distinct from each other, with more detailed tiles and backgrounds, characters are more detailed and better animated overall and everything works together, rather than oddly clashing like in the first game. Where the fist game could be downright ugly, this is a major improvement.

The game also has a pretty sizable soundtrack, though notable it doesn't sue much if any chiptune this time. A lot of the tracks are remixes and rearrangements of stuff from the first game, and it all sounds better for it, of particular note is the game's title track "to one Who'll Stand and fight" It's somewhat rare you get a vocal track in in an indie game, and it's also one of the first times Arcen games included one. Though it would become something of a tradition for them, with a lot of their later games including at least one vocal track. overall the soundtrack is very nice, though again I don't think the soundtrack on Bandcamp is the complete soundtrack.

Graphics are much nicer this time around, and the assets work nicely together.

In playing the game I did encounter one notable flaw: The game would pause for a few brief moments whenever the games music had to change or restart. it was annoying, but didn't cause me to much trouble. In reality, the games biggest flaw is more about preference. You see, A Vally Without Wind 2 fixes a lot of things, but for every thing they fixed it seems something had to be taken away. Mage classes allowed for a much better control scheme, especially for gamepad users, but less freedom in developing your character. Level design is much cleaner and better focused, but there's much less exploration. Fighting Demonaica and his followers gives the game a clear goal and much better direction overall, but the game is no longer endless, in fact, you can lose now, and is no longer a sandbox. While I'd argue the game is better overall, I can understand people preferring some of the features of the original game despite it's flaws

Overall, A lot of what I said about the first game applies to the second: If you can handle some of it's stranger ideas, A Vally Without Wind 2 offers a massive amount of replayability. That said, while it has to drop a lot of stuff to do so, the sequel cleans up a lot of the first game's rough edges and is far more accessable as a result. That said, the two game come bundled together so if you're getting one game, you'll have the other and as well give it a shot while you're at it.

A Valley Without Wind 2 developed and published by Arcen Games, LLC. It is available on Steam. It's homepage, which includes a direct purchasing option and demo is available here. It's soundtrack is available on Bandcamp.

You can't kill the metal! - Brütal Legend

So here's a game with a bit of a weird history. Brütal Legend - yes, with the umlaut, so you know they mean business, originally came out on the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 in 2009, it billed itself as an open world action game, though in truth when people finally played it, it turned out to actually be an action/strategy game. I've also heard, though I have nothing concrete on this, that the game had something of a troubled development, which is a big part of why it's developer Double Fine's last games before becoming a full independent developer. Despite these troubles though, the game managed to become something of a cult hit and in 2013, about 4 years after it's initial release, the game got a PC port.

Brütal Legend tells the story of the roadie Eddie Riggs as he gets sucked into an alternate world that looks like something off the cover of a heavy metal album. Just from that sentwnce, it should be obvious that the game's story is going to be pretty crazy, and it is. The story also does a good job of integrating itself into the gameplay: a lot of stuff in game, from your weapons to the various units in your army are explained at some point in story, it's a nice touch. Unfortunately, while the story is fun to follow and generally well done, it's also pretty rushed, at least in the final act. While I can't give details due to spoilers, I can say that later game, the story goes from dropping some major plot points to the final battle in what feels like only a few short moments. part of me suspects that there was supposed to be more to the story but it apparently got cut.

The game actually opens with a live action video, leading up to this record sleeve/main menu.

Gameplay in Brütal Legend can be broken down into two parts, there's the open world action gameplay, and Real Time Strategy. As an open world action game, The world itself is decently sized, covered in landmarks, hidden collectibles, roaming enemies to deal with and plenty of side missions. It should be noted that compared to a lot of games like this, where the main character generally fights with a selection of guns and explosives, Eddie Riggs is more of a brawler, fighting with an axe... as in an actual axe, not a guitar, while backed by special moves that use his axe... as in a guitar, not an actual axe. While you do have some ranged options, mostly by putting guns on your car, combat is very melee focused, and while as a brawler this isn't a very technical game, there's not a lot in the way of complicated moves or combos to perform, hacking and bashing your way through enemies is still a lot of fun.

As a real time strategy game, Brütal Legend takes a somewhat simplistic approach, There's no base building, and only one resource: your fans. instead, matches focus on capturing and holding control points, building up an army until you have one big enough to take down the enemy's stage. The big twist here is that you still control your character and can readily fight alongside your army using all of your usual attacks and abilities, even gaining access to new special moves by teaming up with your units. A lot of the challenge in matches actually comes from the fact that you still control a character, as you not only need to keep yourself alive, but quickly zoom from place to place to direct the troops and keep a watch on the map, though the game fortunately gives you the ability to fly to help with this. While those who played a more traditional RTS might find this a bit too simplistic, I honestly liked how the game mixed action and strategy.

Instead of building a base, you summon units from a stage like this one.

In both modes of play, you have access to two special tools: your car, called the Deuce or Druid plow, and a guitar named clementine. The Plow is a perfectly serviceable car, fun to drive, looks nice, though outside of some optional weapons like machine guns or homing missiles it isn't anything super special. Clementine on the other hand is pretty unique, you use clementine to use various super moves and special abilities, most of which require you to play a small quick time event called a guitar solo. There's solos for all sorts of stuff, capturing control points, buffing your units, There's even one that literally melts people's faces. The catch is that solos take a few seconds to complete and you're still vulnerable while playing them, also your guitar needs to occasionally cool down after several attacks or solos in a row. This gives some strategy to using the guitar as you can't just spam stuff, and when you see an enemy start a solo you can attack them for a lot of damage and possibly a free kill, or at least force them cancel their solo.

I said earlier that the game takes place in a wold that looks like something off the cover of a heavy metal album and that wasn't a joke. Walls made of electric amps and speakers? Amazon warriors in king diamond makeup? Demonic imps riding flaming motorcycles? Even your base in RTS matches is designed to look like a concert stage, and you capture control points on the map by building merchandise booths. Everything about this game screams of something from heavy metal. There's even a boss that's a giant chrome spider with an engine block for a body in a lair filled with webs made of bass guitar strings. Design wise, this is a very inventive game that has a lot of fun with the things that influenced it..

Tying into the concert theme, you even track information in a tour book.

Almost all of the music in Brütal Legend is licensed and it's amazing. the tracklist is basically a best of metal album with dozens of songs covering everything from 80's hair metal to power metal to growling, screaming black metal. There's plenty of great songs and artists covered here. Kiss' Dr. Feelgood, Black Sabbath's children of the Grave, Manowar's Die for Metal... I'm barely scratching the surface. if you like Metal, you are going to love this soundtrack. While the music is great and the perfect sountrack to shred your way through a heavy metal word to, there is one major drawback. While the game has a soundtrack available for purchase, it only contains the original music made by Double Fine, so those hoping to get this music for their MP3 player will just have to hope they can find it all on iTunes.

Awesome soundtrack aside, another big part of the game is the voicework, on top of some big names like Jack Black voicing Eddy, and Tim Curry gloriously hamming it up as a demon named Doviculus, There's also some music stars in the games voice cast. Rob Halford, lead signer of Judas Priest voices voices a hair metal-themed villian General Lionwhyte, and Ozzy Ozborne as the Guardian Of Metal. The voice work overall is really good, characters, both the big characters like Eddie down to generic Headbangers, are full of personality and the voices fit the characters nicely. Considering how much trouble the game's development went through, it's good that the music and voice acting came out so well.

This game is full of cameos, some more obvious than others.

I said earlier that part of the story felt rushed, and unfortunately this also leads to a major flaw in the gameplay. The game has three major factions in it: Ironheade, yes with an E at the end. Drowning Doom, and Tainted Coil. You play as Ironheade in single player and fight against all three factions in turn, but the factions aren't handled very well, namely the story starts to rush itself at about the same time you start fighting Drowning Doom. The end result is you spend the vast majority of the game fighting Ironheade backed up by a couple of Tainted Coil units and see almost nothing of the other two factions. In fact you only really get to directly fight Tainted coil, the faction presented as the main villains of the game and you're spending the entire game working towards bringing down, once. I realize that the game had a troubled development and it was likely this or no game at all, but to have the main villains almost sidelined until the very last second is pretty terrible.

Despite it's troubles however, I'd say the game is very much worth playing. While it's somewhat obvious that things had been cut or the developers had to hurry things in places, the story and gameplay that managed to see release is still really good. Also, it's setting and mix of action and strategy gameplay are fairly unique, there's honestly not many games like this out there, and I'd say the game is worth it on that uniqueness alone.

Brütal Legend was developed and published by Double Fine Productions. It is available on Steam, GoG, and Desura. It's soundtrack is available on Steam and It's homepage is available here.

Beware of the blob... - Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal

This is a game that somewhat defies description. On paper Creepr World 3 a tower defense game, except your towers can readily move. It would be realtime strategy, except the mechanics are nothing like a typical RTS. If I had to call it something I'd Say it a Tower Defense/RTS hybrid but even that might not be quite right. Whatever it is, we're clearly dealing with a unique game.

Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal actually has a fairly complex story about humanity's fight against an invading force called the creeper which is which takes the form of this strange blue slime that spreads to cover entire worlds. What exactly the stuff is and what it's doing are a major part of the story, and there's more here than I would of expected. As always I can't give much in the way of details because of spoilers, but I will say the game takes place a very log time after the first two games, and covers a lot of what happened since then. There are some references to the first two games, but you don't need to have played them to make since of what's going on here.

From this map, you can choose what mission to take on next.

Gameplay in Creeper World 3 is fairly simple, from your main base, you build weapons to fight back the creeper, and to power them you need to build collectors, which generate energy and help build a network which you need to transmit all that energy through. your main objective on most maps is to clear a path to the emitters the creeper is coming from, allowing you to build nullifiers to destroy them. and to do that the game gives you a lot of options. on top of simple lasers you can use mortars to blow small holes in the creeper, or use aerial units to get at distant areas. you can even build ore mines to produce anti-creeper, which can hurt creeper but won't damage your buildings. The whole time you have to carefully manage your power. try to build too much at once or don't have enough collectors making power and you'll have brownouts, slowing everything down as your base struggles to meet the demand.

The creeper itself is an unusual enemy, like I said before it's basically slime and it does act like a liquid: quickly running down hill or pooling in ditches or valleys to create deep pools of the stuff. The terrain makes a huge difference as trying to clean out a pool of Creeper is very different from trying to fight uphill against it. In fact terrain is a big part of the game, unlike other strategy games, the creeper doesn't make units or plan attacks, it just spreads. How it spreads depends entirely on the maps layout and how you choose to fight it.

Terran has a huge effect on how the creeper acts

The game comes with several game modes, on top of the main campaign there's two additional areas called tormented space and the prospector zone. These areas contain extra missions, complete with their own campaign map that slowly unlocks new missions as you beat previous ones. There's also the Dial Map Device which acts as a random map generator, the generator allows you to tweak several properties to effect how maps are generated, and you can even save and name generated maps to share them online with other players, or readily play other maps that players have saved. There's even a map editor for making your own maps, as well an in game browser for easily downloading and playing user maps. Put simply, there's a lot of content to this game.

In fact, the amount of content this game has is worth mentioning. Between the campaign, tormented space, and prospector zone, there's easily hundreds of missions here. Add the map generator and user maps, and you've got virtually unlimited missions, this would be overwhelming except the game handles it in a simple but rather clever way: The bulk of the content is optional. The main story campaign is actually quite short, it's only about 16-17 missions and can be beaten in only a few hours. meaning if you just want to beat the game and see the ending, it's not all that much of a slog. If you want more, there's all the content you could need, and you can readily take or ignore almost all of it.

This is a map of the prospector zone, each one of those stars can contain several missions.

The game has a nice soundtrack, it goes for more of a sweeping, orchestral score and while there's only a few tracks, they're all nice to listen to and fit the game's overall theme of fighting against impossible odds quite nicely. Sound is somewhat minimal but effective. It's mostly the sound of weapons fire, backed with the occasional whoosh of things flying up or down from orbit, backed up by the occasional beep or siren to warn you of something important, there's no ambient sound or anything like that, but that's fine as when missions heat up the sound of weapons fire becomes almost constant. Everything works and there's nothing to distract you.

The games' graphics seem to somewhat favor form over function. Unit designs are somewhat simple with a nice, clean UI that's easy to read. The layouts of some levels can be interesting but for the most part this game seems to be designed more around being readily readable than pretty, and it succeeds at that. Units are brightly colored to stick out from the terrain and it's easy to see what's going on at a glance.

Small maps are difficult in this game, as the creeper can quickly overwhelm you.

Surprisingly I haven't encountered any major flaws with this game. The only real bug I encountered is some lag when changing menus but other than that I didn't encounter any major technical issues. The worst I can say is that in playing the game, I found some of the units to be mostly useless to me, and I tend to focus on the same small handful out of what's available, though how much of that is due to my play style vs, how the game was designed I couldn't tell.

overall I'd say Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal is a game worth having. It has a really unique take on tower defense, and with almost limitless content, the game can readily last as long as you want it to.

Creeper World 3 was developed and published by Knuckle Cracker. It is available on Steam, Gamersgate and Desura. It's homepage, which includes a demo and direct purchase option is available here.

Taking Names and Kicking Astral Lords - Eador: Masters of the Broken World

Two things clearly come to mind when I play this game. The first is that this game is huge, scary huge. I've put a decent chunk of time into Eador and while I've made it a good distance into the campaign, it feels like I've barely scratched the surface. I've been told a full campaign can take around 100 hours to complete and I see no reason to doubt that claim.

The second thing I've noticed and this is important, is that this game is very obviously a labor of love.

Early game on a random Shard

Eador: Masters of the Broken World is a turn based fantasy strategy game made by Snowbird Games, and they clearly love turn based fantasy strategy games. From the first few turns of game play, it's obvious the devs have played all the greats: Heroes of Might and Magic, Master of Magic, Age of Wonders, etc. and both love them to death and have taken notes off them in designing their game. The end result is a strategy game that feels like a mashup of the best bits of several of those classics I mentioned.

In Eador you play as an astral lord who is tasked with restoring the broken world of Eador, bit by bit. You do this by attacking shards, building and upgrading a main town as your base of operations, hiring troops for your armies along with heroes to lead them, casting spells and so on. Mostly standard stuff, but where Eador shines is in execution.

This is Beleth, one of the Astral Lords you'll be dealing with. He's kinda grumpy.

At any point in the game there are a ton of options at your disposal, you can attack provinces or try to negotiate with the natives living there for control of them. Areas you control can have random events that need your attention, or can have locations for your heroes to visit, ranging from simple monster dens to stores or quest locations. Heroes have branching classes to pick from as they level up. Your main town has a large variety of buildings but can only have so many buildings of any given type, forcing you to choose what you really need: a plate shop would be nice for arming your warriors, but building it might mean having to go without a chain-mail shop for your commander. The list goes on.

On their own, playing one shard would be a game in itself, and the game does have an option to do just that. But Eador's campaign goes a good ways beyond that. Between your attempts to take over shards, you spend time in the Astral. The Astral acts as a macro game to tie all the shards you're conquering together. as you take over shards you unlock new abilities, some of them are new buildings you can build on future shards that unlock new units or spells. Other things you unlock are abilities you use in the astral, allowing you to spend Astral energy, gained by conquering shards or spending turns in the Astral, to do things like start with more gold or gems at the start of a shard, or have items placed in the town's treasury for your heroes. This means every time you take over a shard, there's even MORE options to think about going into the next one.

A view of the Astral. From here, you can spend astral energy, or choose a shard to attack

All this complexity however does come with some drawbacks. Namely, this game is hard, VERY hard. even at the easiest setting, which I was playing at, the AI is quite aggressive and the game as a whole is very unforgiving to new players, add in the wealth of options I just mentioned and Your first few games will likely end in disaster until you start to get the hang of things. Also, the game can be something of a grind. While each shard you win unlocks new things for the next, the unlocks are fairly incremental rather than something large and game changing, making a lot of the shards you attack little more then just another shard. The later parts of a shard can also drag, as you must wipe out all the other lords on each shard to win, no surrendering, no diplomacy, forcing you to spend time marching around the map to mop up enemies long after your victory has been made obvious.

Finally, the game was originally made in Russian, and while the translation isn't as bad as you might expect, it still occasional has it's moments, an odd phrase here, a strange choice of words there. It's not very hard to understand what the game is trying to tell you however, if you can understand my crappy writing, you should be fine.

The shop looks empty now, but more items become available as you build up your town.

That said, if you're a fan of turn based strategy and want a game you can readily sink a LOT of time into? I'd highly recommend you try this.

Eador: Masters of the broken World was developed by Snowbird Games. It is available on Steam and GOG. It's homepage can be found here.