Review: Warstorm

Introduction
Bit of a departure for me this, but I will be reviewing a few more social media games with a more /TG eye -ohmygodIjustmadeanonironic4chanreference. Warstorm is, probably, the first social media game that I’ve genuinely gotten enthusiastic about rather than just using as something to waste a bit of time or distract me when I need to rest my brain. This is, essentially, an online CCG but it has the advantage over regular CCGs in that you’re never short of someone to play against and you can earn ‘money’ in the game to grab yourself your booster packs.

Story
There’s no real, overall story to the game per se, though there are a series of themed ‘campaigns’ which are single player battle campaigns that are good for earning in-game money. The story is really just an excuse to bring you into battle though and any pretence at factional combat is chucked out the window when you start allying your elves with undead. This doesn’t really matter that much, but it would be nice if they brought in some branching storylines or restricted you to one alliance or the other for certain campaigns.

Gameplay
You create up to four teams from your selection of cards. These teams are each headed by a hero and can only consist of members of the heroes faction, or mercenaries – which can join any team but have an associated extra cost for that advantage. Each team is made up of soldiers (which can include monsters, terrain and other factors), spells and artefacts, all of which interact on the battle screen as the battle unfolds.

You don’t get to take direct control during the battle, which can be seen as a drawback, but that doesn’t make the game less tactical, indeed it can make it more tactical since everything is in your selection of cards and then it’s placed in the lap of the gods. Different cards take a different amount of time to come out, which may leave you vulnerable to attack from quicker units. Spells can really mix things up and different cards have different effects like poison, armour, zapping from range and – my favourite – setting people on fire.

Controls
You point your mouse and click to select the cards you want in your units, then you click fight, that’s all you need.

Atmosphere
It’s a card game, so this factor doesn’t really come into this game but insofar as it does, that’s covered under Graphics.

Graphics
This is a 2d game, based around Flash, but there’s some nice flips, fades and other overlaying effects here and there. The artwork on the cards themselves is good, if a little small (you can zoom in a bit by hovering your mouse over or clicking on them) though for quite a few of the pictures the cheap approach of ‘reskinning’ the same pose and illustration over and over again goes on. Still, the standard is pretty good and some of the pieces are nicely evocative with the three main types of card having a different approach, design-wise.

Conclusion
This is a good game with some real tactical depth and many different options in the way you can play or the factions you can favour. No particular tactic or card combination seems to be foolproof, you can go straight for the enemy army’s morale, try to ‘zerg rush’ by bringing out a ton of low-cost units, try and rush out more powerful units with magic, or rely on artefacts and other boosts to make your average soldiers into much tougher and harder ones. If I understand correctly this game was originally developed independently to Facebook, which probably explains why it’s more compelling and interesting than a lot of the other social gaming fare.

You should play it if you like CCGs, that’s the final word!

On the plus side:

• Nice – if repetitive art.
• You don’t have to spend money to be good.
• Seems to still be being developed for.

On the minus side:

• Addictive.
• No direct control during battles.
• Failure to innovate on the social options.

Score
Style: 4
Substance: 4
Overall: 4

Review: Red Dead Redemption

Introduction
Red Dead Redemption could easily also be called ‘Grand Theft Horse’, it’s a freeroaming sandbox game in the style of the GTA series and by the same company with much of the same humour, cynicism and cinematic eye that those games have. The game is set at the very end of the ‘Old West’ in one of the last remaining frontiers, just as the government and other forces are making a concerted effort to finally civilise the area and bring it under the heel of proper governance. Meanwhile, in the south, Mexico is thrown into the chaos of a revolution…

Story
You are John Marston, a former outlaw who has been trying to make a new life for himself as a chicken-scratch farmer, though he has no talent for it. With a wife and son to be used as leverage against him, Marston is manipulated into tracking down his old gang, members of which can still be found in the area that the government is trying to control.

After an ill-conceived confrontation with one of your old gang you’re shot and left for dead, rescued by a local rancher and her father and nursed back to health, ready to try again. You find your feet and your health again as you re-learn the skills that will serve you well in the frontier, riding, herding, lassoing  and the use of your firearms as well as scavenging for plants and skinning animals. Once you’re hale and hearty again you need to come up with an effective scheme for pursuing your old gang and that, of course, entails doing a huge variety of different missions and tasks for all manner of Old West characters across the desert, the plains and south into Mexico.

Of course… once you’ve dealt with the old gang, there’s still one member of the gang left. You…

Gameplay
This is a third-person live-action RPG, in effect, though your moral choices throughout the game are quite limited and two-dimensional, it’s no Fallout or Dragon Age on that score, there are a lot of annoying characters who you’d love to shoot in the face, but can’t. The story, while good, is pretty locked in to one particular course.

The land is rich with wildlife and feels alive, even if sometimes that life is really fucking annoying, such as when invisible rattlesnakes bite your ankles or a cougar appears – apparently out of warp space – and eats your head before you can even do as much as shout ‘Eep!’. This is good as it provides variety and skinning critters is a great way to get some money so you can buy some better guns and horses.

There’s a lot of variety in the missions and the optional side quests, of particular relief to me was that the few race sections that you were forced into were pretty easy – a sticking point in many GTA games – and only optional additional races got more difficult. There’s nothing worse than an impassable mission in something you’re really not good at.

Controls
You negotiate the land using the thumbsticks and gun combat can be either freehand or rely on a lock-on effect. You can also drop into a bullet-time effect called ‘Deadeye’ which lets you line up a number of shots and then unleash them in a rapid fusillade of fire. Controls are intuitive and largely effective, the only real annoyances are the unreliability of the lock on and negotiating terrain that looks surmountable, but isn’t.

Atmosphere
The world is well realised – though it tends to be either way too bright to see what you’re doing properly, or way too dark. The cinematic old west is well realised and familiar stereotypes – some of which are confounded or twisted, make it easy to slip into character, even if the nature of the quests can be jarring for that. Throughout 90% of the game you’re carried along by the atmosphere and story and it is only in the final 10% and the epilogue that one, unfortunately, ends up feeling betrayed by the game and fobbed off. Something that prevents RDR getting the full five stars from me.

Graphics
The graphics are effective but, as pointed out above, can feel a bit too dark or too light. Long flowing clothing feels a little odd and texturing rather than form is used to create effects and shapes that would have better been served with additional polygons. As with quite a few games this end up making the game feel more like an uprated PS2 game, than a true next-gen game.

Conclusion
An awesome game let down only by its ending and epilogue.

On the plus side:

• Evocative.
• Immersive world.
• Engaging story.

On the minus side:

• ‘I fought all that time to get back to this pinch-mouthed shrew?’
• ‘What did I done tell you boy? Ah’m comin’ back from the dead to whup your arse’
• You can’t bone Bonnie, or whores.

Score
Style: 4
Substance: 4
Overall: 4

Review: Drood by Dan Simmons

Introduction
God, fucking DAMN but Damn Simmons is a lot of hard work to read. I thought Ilium/Olympus was a hard read and that was an advance on the density of Hyperion. He’s hard work to read but in a good way, he makes you think and he’s dense with references to classical (in both senses) literature. Where Hyperion and Ilium call back to more ancient works, Drood calls back to the Victorian writings of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins as well as the obsessions, strengths and weaknesses of both men, woven together with a thread of the supernatural (?) obsessions of the times.

Review
For me, at least, this was a book about what’s real and what’s fiction, about the inevitable jealousy that exists between even great creative individuals if one perceives the other as being even greater or one gets more attention than another from the public or feels that they are being overlooked. The story is told from the position of the ‘lesser talent’ in this partnership between Collins and Dickens, Wilkie Collins.

Wilkie is presented extremely unflatteringly, even though he is the narrator. All the flaws and weaknesses of the historical Wilkie are exaggerated and enhanced in the book, conveying a sense of the character’s arrogance and self-loathing simultaneously. Dickens doesn’t come across that much better, a domineering boor and an exploiter of friendships, controlling and altogether too impressed with himself, buying into his own legend.

The book commences with the rail disaster at Staplehurst, in which Dickens was caught up and which profoundly affected him in his later life. This disaster also introduces the peculiar, mesmeric and supernatural character of Drood, a mutilated underworld boss and master of animal magnetism – a topic which also fascinates Dickens – who hovers amongst the dead of the disaster like a vulture and whose existence begins to have a more and more profound effect upon the life of both Dickens and, more especially Collins.

Collins and Dickens pursue Drood in London’s seedy underworld, Dickens’ ‘Great Oven’ and its more literal underworld, a place of crypts and chambers, of sewers and hidden vaults. While Drood’s power increases, Dickens slowly declines and Collins sinks further and further into opium addiction while he struggles to deal with the pain of his ‘rheumatical gout’.

What is Drood? A shadow? An underworld boss? A mystical kingpin of the occult? An imagined ghost? An hallucination? Despite the revelations on all these possibilities throughout the book you’re left not, quite, feeling sure.

Conclusion
Worth the effort, this is, par for the course, an intelligent, literate, deep novel that’s worth more than one reading to get to the real meat of the horrific story – whichever interpretation of it that you prefer.

Score
Style: 4
Substance: 5
Overall: 4.5

Shadow World: The Ourobowrong

An ancient symbol the Ourobowrong is meant as a warning and a curse to those who are too enamoured of their own Machiavellian schemes. It is a sage reminder that the more complex the plot, the more people that are involved, the less likely it is to remain secret and the less likely it is to succeed.

Out-of-game the Ourobowrong is the identifying symbol of The Shadow World line, a rallying flag for those who like the line of games and a way of identifying fan material that you write for it. All of which, however contradictory, overpowered or stupid is official so long as the author sends us a copy and includes this symbol on their work.

In game the Ourobowrong is a symbol of the mysterious ‘Old Boys Network’, the secret masters of the Shadow World who manipulate all the vaguely-supernatural races from behind the scenes using the power of the Metagame and the abuse of their temporal and transtemporal power. Some of their secret knowledge has spread to others though, resulting in the widespread use of the following ritual by Crowleys, Chemistz and Wizkids…

Curse of the Ourobowrong
Over the course of half an hour the caster knots, unties and re-knots a piece of string until it begins to fall apart at which point he intones:

“Are you a piece of string?”

To which an assistant should answer:

“No, I’m a frayed knot.”

The curse affects a single target and lasts for a whole 48 hours, enough to ruin a weekend. During this period anyone attempting to assist the target or to do something on their behalf has their DC raised by 5 (or increases the difficulty for the person that they’re assisting by 1 per helper* or increases the difficulty by 1**

The GM should keep these modifiers secret so that the players don’t cheat like the conniving bastards they all are.

*OGL version.
** Xpress version.