As mentioned last week, Railway Empire is a pretty fun business management game. It’s not perfect, but I found it to be enjoyable. I also mentioned that there is a lot of Railway Empire DLC. So many pieces of DLC in fact, that if you own them all (like me) then you end up with a hefty amount of content. As each DLC adds 1 to 3 scenarios, alongside some achievements and new trains, wrapping the game takes a long time. I’ve put more than 150 hours into the game, and I still haven’t managed to get all the achievements for example. Part of this is because the scenarios can be challenging, especially when aiming for a President rating. Another part is that each DLC requires you to complete a 100 year sandbox game. Which takes a while.

With that out of the way, let’s begin looking at the various DLCs. The first DLC released was the Mexico DLC, which adds 1 scenario and 2 trains. It’s a very modest scenario in terms of content, although it does have two different “paths” that can be completed. Once you’ve done the first few tasks, you can side with one of two quest givers, and that then impacts the rest of the scenario. Generally it’s not too difficult and is moderately entertaining. This DLC also includes a new sandbox map, and the ability to play maps in night mode.

Following the Mexico DLC, we head to the other part of North America that has hitherto been missing. Namely Canada, with “The Great Lakes” DLC. Unfortunately this one kind of sucks, with just 1 scenario that’s a bit of a chore to play. It did add Warehouses to the game via a free update, which are useful and let you store excess goods. Aside from that though, if you pay for the scenario then you’ll encounter the new weather system. Which basically means that in the winter months, your trains move extremely slowly. It’s aboot as fun as it sounds. You do also get a new sandbox map and two new trains.

Almost as a form of making up for the Canada DLC, we have the “Crossing the Andes” pack next. Which contains three scenarios. It also has 2 new trains, a night-mode and a new sandbox map. The scenarios themselves are decent I would say, essentially it’s the same map every time with 3 players. Each scenario has you playing as one of these players, while the other 2 are competitors. The map is cordoned off for a while, so that you can build up your railway. Although you’ll need to complete various objectives of course. These scenarios have a nice build up of challenge, and I found the overall map to be decent.

After mucking around the America’s, the next Railway Empire DLC was for Great Britain and Ireland. This one is pretty good (hence the slightly raised price). Although I found the scenario to be extremely long. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but after Mexico and the Crossing the Andes DLCs I’d rather have more shorter scenarios. Than an extremely long one. As for the rest of the content, there’s a new sandbox map of course, alongside 10 whole trains. I think the sandbox map and fiddling with the trains is arguably where the meat of this one lies.

Following the UK DLC, we got the Germany DLC. This one isn’t bad, with one scenario that re-uses an idea from the Mexico DLC. Namely that the scenario splits into two paths, after a certain point, adding replayability. Unfortunately it adds a new feature, that sucks. This new feature is that the map is split into regions. That need to be unlocked, with fat stacks of Deutschmarks. The mission is both quite easy because your competitors are stuck in one region. Whilst also being a bit sluggish as expansion requires large upfront investments. Alongside the new scenario and sandbox map, there are also 10 new trains.

The next Railway Empire DLC was for France. The France DLC is basically a repeat of the German DLC, with two paths through the scenario. Alongside the same lousy region locking system. Although unlocking regions requires a bit less money. The mission is therefore another fairly easy one, with some replayability. You also get 10 new trains, the new sandbox map and a new piece of music. Which I haven’t mentioned for the others, but every DLC comes with a new menu screen and a new piece of music.

After the France DLC, we got the Northern Europe DLC. This one has a single scenario, that kind of sucks. Much like Canada you have the thrilling weather system that just makes the trains go slow in winter. As a bonus, the scenario also starts to veer into the tediously long area. The thrilling regions system also returns again. Oh and you only get 3 new trains this time. In conclusion then, the scenario isn’t good and it combines two of the worst DLC mechanics.

We then suddenly got sent to Australia for the Down Under DLC. This one doesn’t have the same lousy mechanics. Yet it adds a new mechanic that I personally don’t care for. So it’s swings and roundabouts. Essentially you can “choose” what settlements to grow. To do this, you need to ship a certain amount of basic materials to each settlement. These settlements then become normal towns. Various resources are only unlocked if there’s a town nearby though. In theory this lets you “grow” your rail network, as your needs change. The reality is that everything just takes a long time, in an already long scenario. With the cherry on top being a busted rating system for this mission. If you want the best rating, you need to disable the pause mode otherwise it’s literally impossible. Finally there’s a new sandbox map and 3 new trains.

Rounding out the Railway Empire DLC is the Japan DLC pack. This one has two scenarios, and is actually fun. The gimmick this time is that you can adjust passenger routes. Essentially each route gets a passenger satisfaction score. You can tweak this score by changing the train, staff, ticket price and building some new buildings in each town. Such as hotels that increase passenger satisfaction for trains stopping in that town. The scenarios themselves are decently enjoyable, if a bit easy. Even though the region locking mechanic returns. You also get 8 new trains and 3 maps (one is just a combination of the other two).

In conclusion then, most of the Railway Empire DLC is decent. I’d say the Great Lakes and Northern Europe packs are the weakest of the two. Most of the rest are pretty fun, with the Japan and Crossing the Andes packs offering the most content. The rest are somewhere in the middle, I think Mexico and France are stronger than Germany. With Germany being better than the UK and both being less tedious than the Australian one. Ultimately most of them are fairly basic with a scenario, new map and offer a couple hours of content. With 9 different packs though there’s a lot of combined content. Especially for the completionists. None of them are as good as the base game, but if you enjoyed the base game then this is a nice way to get something new to do.

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Railway Empire has ended up as one of my most played games on Steam, largely due to it’s prolific amount of DLC. Yet in spite of the excessive amount of playtime the DLC has added, the base game itself is certainly no slouch. Not only is there a full campaign with multiple missions that serves as a glorified tutorial of the game’s systems, but there are also more than a dozen scenarios. These scenarios are quite similar to the campaign missions. While they have a bit less polish, they add a good bit of extra challenge.

As for the game itself, Railway Empire is a fun little railroad management business simulator. Par for the course, it revolves around connecting cities and businesses. You take the goods that towns and factories need, then ship them into towns. Once the towns are stocked, they’ll gradually grow and develop businesses. These businesses then produce products that other towns will need. At the same time, you’re connecting the cities up and so you can start to transport larger and larger amounts of goods. Of course as you make a profit on every train-car of cargo (or passengers) shipped, your business grows. Which funds the placement of new tracks, the purchasing of new trains and thus the creation of new routes.

The twist with the gameplay mentioned above, is that you’ll need to achieve certain objectives. So you might need to grow a city to a certain size, by a certain date. Or ship so many of a certain good, to a certain destination. This sounds straightforward, but because you’ll have multiple goals at the same time, budget limitations play a role. As such you can often find yourself struggling to achieve these objectives. Especially as the game punishes you, if you aren’t able to achieve them in half the time. This punishment occurs through a reduction of the final score.

Once you’ve got through all of those objectives across the campaign and scenarios, you can enjoy the sandbox mode. Which lets you play through any of the maps from the previous modes, during any time period from 1830 through to 1930 that you choose. Each time period has it’s own trains and some technologies, although these technologies are largely the same. This is because the technologies add +5% engine power, or +8% more passengers waiting in stations and so on.

As for the other aspects of Railway Empire, they’re also pretty good. You can ride along any train in “real-time”, and even blow the horn. The graphics are pretty good, although I’d recommend limiting the frame-rate in the options. Otherwise my PC tended to try and throttle itself aiming for hundreds of frames per second. The music is also period appropriate and fine, although it does repeat itself a bit much. Finally there are some other things to manage. You can buy businesses, construct factories and hire staff. These are good ways to make a bit of extra money once you know what you’re doing.

With all that being said, there are some quirks and niggles in Railway Empire. Firstly, the AI opponents are extremely annoying. You can’t share tracks unlike some other games, so you’ll need to construct tunnels and bridges galore to compete with them. They field an insane number of trains, while also obnoxiously over-bidding. They’re bad at growing towns, and irritating to deal with at the higher levels as they cheat. As for the trains, mass upgrades are tedious to perform especially as you keep researching new trains. The track-laying tool is good, although it can be unforgiving with angles. Plus it loves to create expensive routes, that with a modicum of tweaking become much cheaper. Finally I found that too many of the scenarios ended with me sitting on the bonds screen, trying to buyout my competitors. A lengthy process, even if your business is clearly more successful than theirs.

In conclusion then, Railroad Empire is a pretty fun little railroad management game that has a lot of content. It’s not perfect, but with good visuals and lots of tweaks to make it is an engrossing game. The rating system also gives it so much needed challenge, while aiming for the achievements will take you a while. Ultimately I’d consider it a solid game, even if I think that some maps can just take a bit too long. As such I’d recommend it to any fans of this mini-genre, although I think Sid Meier’s Railroads is a better starting point for those who are unsure.

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Oh Evil Genius 2, you had such high hopes before your release but seem to be yet another middling Rebellion brand release. I’m not sure how they do it, I mean the concept’s are always solid and the games are never bad but they always manage to feel a tad… tedious. Unfortunately Evil Genius 2 is no exception, whether it be the inclusion of Denuvo (for some reason) or the weird battle-pass monetisation attempt. Even the core gameplay while perfectly serviceable can’t compete with Evil Genius 1, which while occasionally frustrating was a really enjoyable and unique experience. Of course a sequel would struggle to be as unique, but it could at least be more enjoyable. Alas Evil Genius 2 is not better to play than it’s predecessor, and while is visually more impressive contains a laundry list of caveats.

So I better get right into it. On the one hand, you have more Evil Geniuses and Henchmen to choose from – which is good. But at the same time, the process of taking over the world is less engaging – which is bad. There are more maps to choose from – which is good. But these newer, larger maps with multiple stories are hamstrung by a tight 300 minion limit that can’t removed – which is bad. There are some nice Quality of Life improvements, like guards automatically carrying their weapons around without the base being on high alert – which is good. At the same time the technology unlock system feels excruciating slow at times and often bottlenecks progression – which is bad. The world map where you conduct your schemes is easier to manage and far less prone to randomly killing a team of your minions – which is good. But this also means that you can basically negate any risk of base invasion with relative ease and thus make the game incredibly easy – which is bad. The graphics are prettier – which is good. But the general tone and visual design has taken a bit of knock in my opinion – which is bad. The soundtrack is still good – yes, that’s good. While the narrative railroading of the game with relatively low effort quasi-cutscenes makes the whole thing cheap – which is bad. Overall Evil Genius 2 is really a mixed bag and while it’s certainly not a bad game, this feels like a case of one step forward one step back. Maybe I’m just biased because the first game came almost out of nowhere and was excellent, but this feels like a wasted opportunity on Rebellion’s behalf.

At this stage in the review, I really ought to have explained what the game is actually about for those who haven’t played either of the Evil Genius games. Essentially Evil Genius is a base management simulator loosely inspired by the Dungeon Keeper series, which plays a bit like the various real-time tycoon games that are out there. You’ve got a variety of rooms you can build, items to place within them and then minions that you’ll need to keep everything running. The whole thing functions as a feedback loop of sorts, as you’ll need more rooms and items to get new types of minions that let you run new schemes and research new tech, so that you can unlock new rooms and items. In terms of the gameplay itself, it’s mainly managing and optimising your base to ensure that you have the right amount of minions and access to everything you’ll need to progress the narrative. Alongside some very light “strategy” sections on the world map, where you can send minions off to conduct various schemes. You’ll also need to queue up research, manually set how many of each minion type you want and place those rooms/items. The main threats to your steady growth are waves of hostile NPCs that will occasionally spawn in. Those schemes on the world map generate heat, and the more heat that’s been generated the more likely that enemies will spawn in. Higher amounts of heat correlated to stronger waves of enemies. You can build various traps in the corridors of your base to deal with them, but you’ll want to have a decent amount of security minions that can engage them in combat. Finally you can unlock up to 5 henchmen at a time, that are all strong in combat and have a handful of abilities each. To unlock them you’ll need to finish side missions, which will involve sending various minions to various schemes on the world map.

So with all that being said, Evil Genius 2 is a quasi-business tycoon game that is a mixed bag compared to it’s predecessor. As mentioned the gameplay can be simultaneously too easy and yet too slow, which means that I spent a decent amount of time waiting for research to complete so I could reach the next stage of the game’s main quest-line. It’s fun enough to micromanage your base and the world map schemes have moderately amusing descriptions, but the actual moment-to-moment gameplay can feel a bit one note and monotonous. There are a few twists to keep the pace up like a designated end of game boss fight (of sorts) alongside Super Agents that are powerful versions of the normal agents (one per geographic region). While the boss fight is cool, it’s at it’s best when you ignore the various Super Agent neutralisation missions as otherwise it’s pretty easy much the rest of the game. As for the Super Agents themselves, they’re actually not too much trouble to avoid (as they only activate if they spot you starting a scheme where they are on the world map) and aren’t even too much of an issue to deal with most of the time. As for replayability, it’s fairly minimal. Despite having 5 different Evil Geniuses to choose from, they all play pretty much the same and have the same minions/rooms/items to deploy. It’s also worth noting that these geniuses you choose, all control the same. While they have some different abilities, they’re essentially the same as your henchmen in terms of combat ability. So they’re strong, but you’ll generally not put them on the frontlines once you hit the mid-game as if they die 3 times it’s game over.

Not that you’ll ever encounter a game over unless you are quite frankly angling for it. Instead money is likely to be the only limiting factor to your playthrough, outside of the time it takes to research things. Money is a bit strange, because it’s not hard to earn but at the same time you’re often fairly limited as to how much you can store up. Items to better store your gold are of course, unlocked through the lengthy and time intensive research system. So for most of the early game, you’re kind of just treading water until you can really start stacking up the cash. At this point though I feel like I’ve harangued the game enough for you get the idea. It’s a bit sluggish, it’s a mixed bag, but it’s still enjoyable enough. The soundtrack is good and feels appropriate for the era. If you’re a completionist, then there are tons of side objectives to grind through. The base management aspect is enjoyable enough and rewards the efficient use of space. The visuals are impressive and the traps are varied enough to be enjoyable to use, even if most of them aren’t particularly great.

In conclusion then, Evil Genius 2 is a solid if slightly disappointing game. I don’t regret playing it by any means and have actually played through it twice (once with the post-launch DLC character) and had a decent time with both my playthroughs. At the end of the day, in spite of the good graphics, Quality of Life improvements, pleasant soundtrack and so on it’s just not as easy to recommend as the much cheaper Evil Genius 1. As such I would recommend the first game, over Evil Genius 2 to anyone who is interested. For those who have played the first game, I would say that the second will be bittersweet at best. It’s more of the same, but a bit more lame.

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Quick Note: It shouldn’t matter, but I’m reviewing the Xbox One version of this game – just in case it’s AMAZING on PS4 or something.

Oh Jagged Alliance: Rage, the critics and fans of the series have not been kind to you. You were to be a spirited spin-off of a venerable classic PC series, revitalised for a new age and of course a new customer base. Yet it’s hard to find anyone who has anything nice to say about this game. Even I can’t be too nice to a game that has so many issues, that it’s honestly concerning. I try to keep my reviews relatively short, but to describe all of the flaws in Jagged Alliance: Rage would take up basically my normal quota of 5ish paragraphs (plus 5ish lovely pictures). So I’ll just rattle them off in quick succession during this deftly written opener. The game looks mediocre, runs badly, crashes every few hours, has incredibly basic writing and characterisation, wastes a ton of time on inventory management, has limited enemy variety, inconsistent mechanics, a wonky difficulty curve, weird allocation of resources, some baffling design decisions and limited enemy AI. If (and it’s a big if) you can overlook all of that then you’ll find a decent turn based strategy experience. Now I know what you’re thinking “Big Boaby how am I meant to overlook the fact that apparently everything in this game is rubbish?”

Well I’ll tell you! You see, Jagged Alliance: Rage is an incredibly rough game that desperately needed a bit more time in development. I can easily envisage a version of the game that doesn’t run bad, doesn’t crash, has a bit more tweaking with regards to the inventory, item drops and enemy AI and would therefore be pretty solid. Unfortunately in spite of my sagely wisdom, I have to acknowledge the reality which is that this is the game we got, not necessarily the game we wanted. Despite this seemingly rushed (or underfunded?) development, the game still has a solid core where you are juggling stealth and normal combat in each level. Stealth is slightly overpowered, to the point that you’ll want to use it as often as possible as it grants instant killed at no cost. However, stealth also requires you to be out of position and understand the enemy patrol routes, which often requires an odd mix of haste and patience. You need to close the gap, while remaining undetected because sneaking is an alternative form of movement which eats up action points like nobody’s business. Before continuing I should explain that Jagged Alliance: Rage is a turn based game, where you move all of your guys and then the enemy gets to move all of theirs. Each character gets around 12ish action points per turn, with movement, shooting and using items all sharing this action point pool. You’ll therefore only be able to move a maximum of 12 spaces per turn (the map is split into grids of squares) or shoot around 4 times at the absolute maximum (many weapons require 5+ AP per shot). Enemies are relatively blind, but they can react to nearby gunfire, spot bodies and of course radio in your position which triggers an alarm which causes every enemy on the map to bum-rush your last recorded position. Stealth is therefore a great way to get kills without taking damage, but it involves a great deal of risk. Now you might be tempted to skip the stealthy route, but frankly because all of the enemies share vision and some of them are snipers and they all bum-rush you – things generally don’t go well. That’s not to say your necessarily stuffed, as you can make use of sight lines or bait them by having one guy distract them while the rest of your team sneaks around to deal with the enemy commander who summons reinforcements like an absolute jerk. But with that being said, stealth is generally the best option even if the intense gunfights can be quite fun to try and figure out. Yes the odds are against you, but if you can stop the enemy from getting vision (by shooting all the guys near you) then their comrades will keep running towards you like lemmings and you’ll be able to create effective killzones.

At least until you get unlucky with the hit%, or deal with a gun jamming. Which happens all the time to a ridiculous degree. Seriously you’d think that the guns were made out of unrealised aspirations and butter for how often they suddenly melt and fall apart in the middle of combat, to the point that I’d say a gun jams every… 5ish times it’s used if fires in bursts? You barely even have to reload in this game, because when your gun jams (and it will) unjamming it also counts as reloading. Don’t worry though, as your enemies guns will jam too if they live long enough. Then again, worry some more because unjamming a gun takes a lot of AP, which means you can shoot less, which means you’ll probably get shot more. Which is bad. I suppose you can just keep looting new guns and indeed you will throughout most of the game because guns continually get better while the enemies keep getting better armour, but once you’ve got a good gun with some weapon attachments it’s a real pain in the backside. To the game’s credit, Jagged Alliance: Rage has a weirdly comprehensive variety of guns and ammunition. To it’s disservice, you’ll spend way too much time looting every single enemy to see if they have the one ammo type you need because you can’t buy, sell or otherwise trade equipment. The game was smart enough to let you loot everyone remotely once a map has been fully cleared of hostiles, but it still takes a lot of time to optimise everyone’s inventory especially in the late game when you can have 4 mercenaries at a time.

Now you might be thinking something along the lines of “well managing 4 guns doesn’t sound too bad hrurhrdudhdurr” but I’ve got news for you PAL. Because Jagged Alliance: Rage also features a bunch of quasi-survival mechanics, which require items that also take up inventory space. You need to stay hydrated (but not fed), think about bandages to heal the bleeding debuffs, have medkits and revival syringes for when you mess up a combat encounter mid-level, have weapon repair kits and armour repair kits and grenades and antibiotics if you drink the dirty water. Then there’s the fact that I picked Ivan who is cool as a character, but is an alcoholic so I also always had to have beer on hand otherwise he would be bad at shooting people. So there’s a lot of faffing around, as you’ll probably want a gun that’s decent at ranged and a gun that’s OK close up for each character, both of which probably use different ammo types, then some healing supplies and some survival supplies, before we even consider stuff like carrying grenades or whatever. Fortunately Jagged Alliance: Rage is happy to just let you focus on the combat and the inventory stuff, as the plot is very basic and consists of a series of pre-baked levels that you can do at any time – so long you’re on the right Act (of which there are 3). To access these maps the game has an overview map, which you can move across with one space taking one hour. As it takes time, you need to bring water/booze or suffer debuffs from your team being dehydrated or in withdrawal. This brings us to the day night cycle. The way it works is pretty simple, each map can be played during the day or at night. If you play at night, enemies have reduced vision and everyone except for one or two out of the 7 potentially playable characters suffers a debuff to their aiming unless they’ve got night vision goggles equipped. You might therefore be tempted to wait for night to fall upon the map, so you can sneak around better (and have the sheer thrill of shooting out the lights) but good luck. There just isn’t enough non-dirty water in the game to wait for multiple turns. Plus the game sends out patrols from enemy bases that force you into semi-randomly generated battles.

Should you stumble upon one of these patrols, you enter one small map from a pre-baked selection that will feature a bunch of enemies on two sides. You’re able to sneak behind these guys, but generally these maps are fairly easy so I often didn’t really bother and only used stealth to wrap them up. As mentioned, enemies share vision so once most of the enemy squads are dead the few remaining enemies will often have lost sight of your squad. Letting you switch back to stealth for those 1-hit instant stealth melee kills. This happens more often than you’d think, because the AI loves having one or two squad members hang back and sit in overwatch constantly. Overwatch is actually one of very few abilities that the enemy uses, although the squad leaders and commanders have an annoying rally ability which gives everyone standing near them some extra AP. So you’ll quite often have some enemies rush towards you, run out of AP, then a squad leader appears seemingly out of nowhere and lets them all shoot your exposed team member. To compensate, each of your mercenaries get some unique “rage” abilities (hence why it’s Jagged Alliance: Rage) that range from great to OK. Ivan can taunt enemies and gets passive damage resistance, Fidel can suppress enemies in an area, Dr Q has some light healing abilities and can convert rage points into extra AP and so on. To get rage you need to get adrenalin, which comes from dealing and taking damage alongside some other effects (like having the shrapnel or infection debuff or drinking alcohol). Aside from the rage abilities, basically every action is determined by what equipment you have equipped and there aren’t skill trees or anything like that.

In conclusion then, Jagged Alliance: Rage is a game with plenty of issues but a nice balance of risk reward through the effectiveness of stealth, ability of enemies to rack up the damage through large numbers and extra AP abilities and the introduction of rage abilities which require you to take and deal damage or suffer from debuffs. This keeps the game fun and frantic, aside from the admittedly large amount of time you need to spend dealing with the inventory system and survival elements. The enemy variety is fine, but by tying abilities and damage to equipment Jagged Alliance: Rage is able to scale the difficulty with each batch of maps. As for variety and the other elements of the game like the OST, visuals and so on they’re pretty lacking. The music is fine and the maps are generally varied albeit fixed, so replayability isn’t the best. It’s a shame the performance isn’t great and that the characters are so bland, but you can’t have it all. I’d therefore say that Jagged Alliance: Rage is an OK/10 game. TBS fans might have a good time if they are patient, but for genre newcomers I would recommend another game like Wargroove or XCOM: Chimera Squad.

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Call to Arms is one of those games I was pretty excited about, until I made the fateful decision to actually play the damn thing. Which isn’t to say it’s a bad game, because it’s not, but it languished in my Steam library for years before I decided to finally give it another go and try to figure out what made me drop it in the first place. Honestly I’m not sure what caused me to get butthurt the last time, although I think I played it during early access and as such there were only 5 campaign missions which may have been entirely different from the ones in the base game. After playing through the campaign I can say that it’s alright, the mission structure will be incredibly familiar to anyone who’s played a Men of War game (any of them, even Faces of War the unofficial member!) because they all fit into a handful of standard roles. You’ve got two stealth missions, where you have barely any guys and have to crawl around the map dodging patrols until you can start shredding fools. Then you’ve got the defence missions where you hold a position against waves of baddies, and a couple of standard attack the enemy piece-by-piece missions where they keep adding new objectives while you have not quite enough men or material left. Finally there’s a proper assault mission which is saved for last, in which you not only attack various objectives but also get to call in reinforcements. The main twist in this campaign is a mission where you can only use Direct Control over a tank, and you drive around with some buddies shredding the defenders of an airfield before shooting down some jets and taking piece in a steadfast defence against waves of enemy armour. Most of these missions are pretty fun, although some of them (such as the 3rd mission) are much, much, much easier if you utilise direct control to a level I’ve never seen before.

Those not familiar with the Men of War series will no doubt be asking WTF is Direct Control? Well it’s when you assume direct control of a unit in the game, with the option of controlling them in 1st or 3rd person. You can control any unit at any time and the only catch is that while you’re laughing it up as a tank, you can’t be directing the rest of your forces. This feature has also been in previous games in the series, but the first person view and controls are entirely new to my knowledge. It’s a fun little gimmick and directly controlling an Abrams tank is pretty fun, I’m not going to lie while the soldier controls do let relieve your Rambo 3 fantasies on those nasty Global Revolutionary Movement baddies. One other caveat with this feature is that you have to bind both all of your 1st person controls, and all of your RTS controls on the same keyboard and mouse which means that the direct control erm controls are frankly a bit weird. Crouch is ALT, grenade is Mouse button 4 and so on. To make things even trickier, you still have to worry about your limited inventory because in Call to Arms like in Men of War every unit has their own inventory and consequentially their own amount of ammo. Unfortunately the other thing making direct control slightly tricky is the fact that it seems kind of… bugged? I don’t know why, but quite often when using an automatic weapon it would just keep shooting continuously for a while of it’s own volition. Then sometimes it wouldn’t fire for ages, again for some reason that I can’t quite figure out. Ultimately it’s a cool feature, that gets a lot of emphasis in the campaign but does lack a bit of polish. It’s also kinda over powered, because you can absolutely start shredding the enemy while in first person to the point that you’ll often find yourself racking up huge body counts with each soldier.

In terms of other changes to the game, Call to Arms sadly falls short. You do get two new factions in a contemporary setting, but the “bad guys” the Global Revolutionary Movement are pretty boring and so-so as they’re just a generic middle eastern “rebel” movement. You’re not getting something like the Global Liberation Army from C&C Generals which was oozing flavour and fun, but instead you’re getting the generic baddies from a war on terror game. So they’ve got some soviet-era tanks, a bunch of generic middle eastern dudes and nothing in the way of excitement. Then you’ve got the US Army, who are fine but have a pretty limited roster as they only really get the Abrams, Bradley, Striker and Humvee vehicles alongside a couple of types of infantry grunts. Compared to Men of War Assault Squad which let you play as (WW2) Germany, Russia, America, the British Commonwealth and Imperial Japan each of which had as many, if not more units each it’s a bit disappointing. You’d be forgiven for thinking “oh well this is the new baseline just like Men of War only had Russia and Germany”, but you can jog on because they’ve used Call to Arms as a gateway to introduce a new WW2 subgame (Gates to Hell) which has reintroduced all the WW2 factions (except Japan I think). So it’s kind of a small game, considering that you get only one campaign unless you upgrade to the Deluxe edition for an extra 750 Great British pennies or roughly $10 with only 10 campaign missions in the base game. Then it’s just skirmish and multiplayer maps against other players, so there isn’t too much to run with here.

As for the rest of the game, it’s really just a shinier version of Men of War as mentioned already. This means that you get an OK/10 soundtrack that you won’t listen to outside of the game but is fine enough and fits the mood. That means that the voice acting is bad, although it’s slightly better and no longer has laughably direct translations from Russian (so no more Americans shouting “FOR THE MOTHERLAND” and “HOORAY” when they get into combat). That means that you’ve got the armour penetration system with different shots and angles having a huge impact, which is still great although I must confess that it feels like battle tanks are well… tankier than they used to be. Finally it means that individual squads are alright at looking after themselves and will use grenades and medkits without too much prompting, although there is one big change that kind of got on my tits. You see in the other Men of War games, infantry had Anti-Tank grenades which meant that they could deal with unexpected enemy armour reinforcements without much trouble. Of course they’d quickly run out, but hey a decent amount of enemies had them too so you could just scavenge for them when there was a quiet moment. In Call to Arms these have been removed entirely, which doesn’t impact the enemy much because they get lots of Anti Tank rifles such as RPG’s mixed in with their squads. You don’t though, and the few AT missiles you do get tend to be wasted nearly instantly by your squad members as soon as they spot an enemy technical. You know, those jeeps with machine guns on them which the game LOVES to throw your way CONSTANTLY and which are even annoying to deal with in Direct Control mode because the driver will magically teleport to the gunners seat and back to the drivers seat endlessly making sniping them a total pain in the arse. The lack of AT grenades also means that your infantry, especially in the earlier missions will be totally bloody useless against any enemy tank and your own tank will be outnumbered 10-to-1 while dealing with swarms of enemy infantry with RPGs. It’s a weird downgrade and kind of annoying to be honest. Aside from this weird decision, combat is pretty much identical although there is a noticeable shortage of anti-tank cannons this time around.

And that’s about it really. There’s some new in-game monetisation stuff going on but honestly I can’t even pretend to care about it so make of it what you will. There was also some sort of controversy about the Season Pass not including the WW2 stuff, but again I don’t care because what sort of chump buys content that’s not out yet? Well me because I bought it during Early Access for a fiver but that’s totally different (honest). Aside from those two changes that I am frankly oblivious to, there’s not anything else to discuss. Call to Arms is Men of War but prettier and featuring ‘Murica against the generic middle eastern bad guys. Direct Control is a lot better, everything else is slightly better but there’s also a lot less content to go around. Make of it what you will. For existing Men of War fans it’s a fun little quasi-sequel, for casual RTS fans who haven’t played a Men of War game I can give it a modest recommendation whilst on sale and for everyone else I wouldn’t worry about it too much. It’s a perfectly fine and modest RTT experience with some fun missions, not a huge amount of content but you can always play it in Skirmish or MP or buy the DLC that doesn’t that much these days. Therefore I’m giving Call to Arms a singular thumbs up. Huzzah!

The post Call to Arms appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Quick Note(s) – Unfortunately the game can have some issues running on Windows 11, so be sure to run the “vcredist_x86” installer located in the Steamapps/common/Dawn of War Soulstorm/VCRedist folder. If you aren’t running the Steam version, you’ll need to download and install the Microsoft C++ visual redistributable 2005. As for those of you who are looking for mods, I’d highly recommend the Unification Mod which adds a disgustingly large amount of units, factions and maps to the game. Other mods are also available on moddb.com (just follow the previous link and click on “Dawn of War” underneath the name of the mod).

Back in those simpler, halcyon days of 2004 the developers at Relic took the (Warhammer) world by storm by releasing the original Dawn of War game. Now this wasn’t the first Warhammer 40,000 (W40K) game by any means, and in fact it was the 8th game to be released that took advantage of the setting. What it did do however, was enable players to play as multiple factions within an immersive setting (sorry Rites of War fans, but that game was slowwww and not particularly immersive) that was fully 3D. The combination of three popular factions – and the Eldar too – resulted in a hugely popular RTS game, especially as both the gameplay and audio design were excellent. Unlike the other goliaths of the space, such as Starcraft, C&C Generals and Age of Empires 2, the game was fast paced and highly rewarded an aggressive play-style, as resource nodes were spread across the map and holding them was the key to victory. In many other RTS games, resources were spread around but generally you’d need to build up your forces and faff around with villagers to build up the structures required to properly begin harvesting the tiberium/cash/gold/whatever. In Dawn of War however, you just needed to capture them with infantry and while it was encouraged, you rarely had to fortify them with a listening point structure (which would need to be destroyed before the enemy could capture it). This subtle little twist meant that it was your army not your villagers that were responsible for growing your economy. Compounding this design decision was the fact that you needed to control as much of the map as possible to receive these resources, as tech upgrades played a minimal role in the economy side whilst your builders could barely do anything (although the secondary power resource was entirely generated by the buildings they constructed). Of course this led to the game giving more aggressive players a significant advantage, which meant that the games were often quick and fast paced with the loss of your army often ensuring you’d lose your resource points which then meant that you were at a resource disadvantage which would then result in you getting ground down under waves of enemy forces. There was a mechanic to compensate for this (slightly) wherein resource points and power generating structures would decay over time, enabling turtles to cling on and eventually negate much of the disadvantage they were facing, but this mechanic in most cases took too long to have a significant effect on the battle.

Without going into excessive detail, I’ll briefly explain the mechanics of Dawn of War for those who haven’t played any of the games in the series. Like most RTS games you start with a mere HQ and a builder unit, who can then produce all of the production buildings in your faction alongside power generators and listening points. You’ve got multiple unit classifications (such as heavy infantry, demons, vehicles and so on) but generally there are 3 main types of unit on the battlefield. Infantry (who are the only ones who can capture requisition points), heroes/characters that are powerful but can get bogged down in combat, and then vehicles which are powerful and often heavily armoured but are require lots of power and aren’t available in the early stages of the game. These units are then either focused on melee or ranged attacks. Most weapons are good against certain types of units, with anti-tank weapons often (but not always) being hopeless against infantry and vice-versa. Furthermore each unit can have multiple abilities, and most units can purchase upgrades that are applicable to that one unit. There are also a range of technologies which can be unlocked that provide a bonus to all units of a certain type, both those you currently have and those you might build in the future. All infantry units can be reinforced to add squad members, which costs resources and requires a modest wait as they’re produced. Units in combat suffer a big penalty to reinforcement times but they can still be reinforced. As for the resources, you’ve only got two to worry about. Requisition (the main resource) and power (the secondary resource), which are obtained through captured points on the map & listening posts and power generating structures respectively. Finally there are two types of points on the map(s) worth noting – Relics which let you build your superheavy unit (max 1 at a time) and critical locations which you can’t build anything on or next to. As such the game revolves around building infantry squads to capture points to gain requisition, so you can afford to build power generators which will let you build your more powerful units and begin unlocking research items.

With that hasty summary out of the way let’s return to the review. Back in 2004 Relic decided that they should continue to build up momentum after the launch of the original Dawn of War by engaging in a classic strategy which has largely (but not entirely) been neglected in recent years. They did this by releasing two expansion packs, Winter Assault (WA) in 2005 and Dark Crusade (DC) in 2006. The former added the Imperial Guard race to the game and added some new maps, a handful of new units for the existing races and two short but challenging campaigns. The latter was considerably more ambitious and included two races in the form of the Necrons and the Tau Empire, while also adding new maps, units and more importantly totally overhauling the campaign structure. Both the base game and WA had fairly standard RTS campaigns, taking the form of around a dozen maps (in WA’s case spread between the two campaigns) that weren’t particularly connected with each other and were basically skirmish maps with some extra challenges and timed NPC spawns/attack waves. Oh and of course they had little cutscenes, which elaborated on the plot and served to motivate you. DC on the other hand replaces the standard campaign structure with a new hybrid campaign that features a turn-based map comprised of multiple regions, each of which needs to be taken in skirmish battles. Each faction can move their single army (represented by their command) across one region per turn, and if this region isn’t owned by them then a skirmish battle will break out. Each region has a strength ranking associated with it from 1 to 15, which determines the AI difficulty and number of AIs to be faced on that map. The difficulty of these maps ranges from one easy AI through to three Hard AIs, with the maps themselves being the same that you encounter in the Skirmish and Multiplayer modes. Every faction is present at the start of the campaign within their stronghold region, a bespoke custom map that is particularly challenging and if these strongholds are conquered then that faction is defeated. As these armies fight across the map they’ll gain new regions which enable them to recruit “Honor Guard” units that are stronger versions of regular units and which spawn with the commander in every battle (unless they’re wiped out in which case they need to be bought again). Some of these regions even offer a faction wide bonus instead of a new honor guard unit, such as enabling you to attack any region except strongholds in one turn or to enable you to spend resources on building structures before an attack begins. Finally there are also feats that commanders can achieve such as winning 3 battles or killing a certain amount of enemies, which give them war-gear points that can then be spent on… war-gear which grants them more health, attack and some other benefits or even abilities. Victory is achieved by eliminating every other faction from the map, which means you’ll need to win every stronghold battle.

Dawn of War: Soulstorm (DoW:SS) continues this trend and by and large as the campaign is the same, with one big difference. Namely that you now need to defeat eight other factions instead of a measly six. As a consequence the campaign is lengthier, even if the gameplay itself hasn’t changed very much. There are also a few more bonus regions, so that there’s roughly one per faction alongside more stringent routing between areas (i.e. the map now has more choke-points) which gives the campaign a modicum of extra strategy. These two new factions in the form of the Sisters of Battle and the Dark Eldar are of course one of the major selling points of the game, as at the time of release every faction with models was represented with the exception of the Tyranids. Much like the rest of the factions these two have their own unique units and voice acting although I must confess that I’ve always found the Sisters of Battle to be a bit boring. You see both the Sisters and the Dark Eldar have ways of gathering up a special resource (faith and souls respectively) that enable them to activate abilities, but generally these abilities don’t do that much. For the Dark Eldar these abilities are on your toolbar and can be popped at any time and anywhere that you have vision, and while the ability to enable a squad to detect infiltrated enemies is useful, the rest are kinda meh. As for the Sisters of Battle these abilities are used by certain squads and often require that you research a piece of technology to permit them to be used, with these abilities also being kinda… meh. To gather these resources you either build upgrades on your listening posts (Sisters of Battle) or have to send your builders to gather souls (Dark Eldar), with the former being super boring and the latter being a potentially interesting mechanic that gets squandered. This is because the Dark Eldar buildings can build themselves, the builder only has to start the construction process and is then free to go do something else. So far, so good as this fits with the asynchronous nature of the factions within the game. One of these buildings can be upgraded to produce souls though, so what ends up happening is that you build up your base, build a couple of these buildings (which are required for increasing the amount of squads and vehicles you can field in battle) and then have your builder sit in your base gathering souls. There’s no risk/reward ratio to consider from having your slaves wander around the battlefield, but then again as previously stated the abilities kinda suck anyway so it’s not a big deal really. Either way even with these lame abilities I still think the Dark Eldar are the more interesting faction, especially as their most basic infantry unit can infiltrate (letting them turn invisible and still attack enemies).

As for the other big selling point of this game in the run up to release, it’s also a bit underwhelming. Across Dawn of War and the first two expansions all units had been ground units (well except a handful of hovering ground units), which meant that the inclusion of Flying Units in Dawn of War: Soulstorm was HYPE. Unfortunately the engine just can’t handle flying units and as such these aircraft basically just acted as hovering ground units, which were still cool but were also just vehicles that could ignore some terrain. Ironically enough the developers of Dawn of War: Soulstorm (at this point the original developers at Relic were working on Dawn of War 2 and as such this expansion was outsourced to Iron Lore studios) didn’t want to add “flying” units initially and instead had planned to add some units that were commonly requested by the community. Sadly Relic insisted that Iron Lore get to work adding flying units, which while still useful and having some minor battlefield uses were relatively half-baked and a disappointment for many players. The Imperial Guard for example were bequeathed an aerial bomber, but it couldn’t really conduct bombing runs and as such just hovered around occasionally using a souped-up grenade ability. In spite of these flying units being half baked however Dawn of War: Soulstorm remains the definitive edition of Dawn of War, as it has everything that the other games had alongside a lengthier campaign, even more maps, more factions and of course more units. As a consequence of being the most feature complete Dawn of War game, it’s also the one that still retains an active community both in terms of being able to find multiplayer matches and with regards to the modding community which is still adding new races, maps and units to the game to this day.

Which of course begs the question, why is Dawn of War: Soulstorm still so popular? Well aside from the gameplay as mentioned earlier, and the sheer variety of units and races that you can play as, the game also has a handful of features which have kept players coming back. Part of the game’s enduring popularity is the way in which the game has managed to faithfully and accurately capture the W40K setting, with it’s bombastic units and fantastic voice acting. While strong voice acting is not unique to Dawn of War: Soulstorm, the game is absolutely brimming with memorable quotes delivered well by actors who clearly relish their roles. Every single unit is quotable and while they don’t have a huge pool of quotes, there are enough to avoid repetition whilst not too many that they fail to remain lodged in your mind. The depth and range of the performances are strong, while the writing clearly reflects an understanding of the lore of the W40K universe. There are some weird quirks in the game’s narrative, such as the Imperial Guard stronghold having legions of ostensibly rare Baneblade tanks and that weird screed against Metal Boxes by the Chaos commander, but generally the tone is faithfully conveyed and each unit and character acts as they should. Bolstering this performance is a handful of canny gameplay decisions, such as engaging (almost) every unit to engage in either melee or ranged combat, which ensures that even weaker units can successfully bog down stronger foes in ranged combat or try to force them to run around in circles. The game also has a “sync kill” system wherein units have special, pre-baked animations which play when they defeat enemies in melee combat. While these help to give the game some cinematic flair, they also have a strategic purpose as units are immune to damage while these animations are playing which can be abused to tank certain enemy weapons for the benefit of your less durable units. The combination of asymmetric factions, a high variety of units, fast paced gameplay and a host of little ways to tip the scales of a battle produce an engaging and enjoyable game, while the beginner AI settings are generous enough that newbies don’t need to fear getting completely and utterly stomped.

To summarise then Dawn of War: Soulstorm is an enduringly popular game because it is the successor to a great base game and two expansions which were of an equally high quality. By taking everything that had gone before it with regards to a strong, fast paced gameplay system that offered plenty of tactical depth across all nine factions the game ended up being a complex RTS experience that was still eminently approachable. Unlike many of it’s contemporaries the game was able to bypass a slow starting phase and encourage players to dive straight into the action, which had a strong blend of melee and ranged units to keep matters broadly balanced. This was then reinforced by an AI system that starts off weak enough to not overwhelm noobs, while being difficult enough at the higher levels that the game provides a significant challenge. Add to this a lengthy and replayable campaign mode, alongside fantastic voice acting that helps to immerse the player and you have a vast and engaging RTS game. The fact that the game has a huge quantity of maps, units and mods only cemented it as a long-lasting game that is suitable and indeed recommended for all RTS fans. If you’re a fan of the setting Dawn of War: Soulstorm is still one of the most commonly recommended games nearly 15 years on, whilst RTS players would be remiss to skip it. Even those without much experience with the setting or the genre should give this game a shot, as it’s approachable, memorable and riddled with content – plus it’s exceedingly cheap due to it’s age.

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XCOM: Chimera Squad was always destined to be a black-sheep in the overall XCOM family, as not only did it release at a budget release price-point but it also lacked a lot of the depth that the series is known for. Instead of needing to create and nurture your squad while the spectre of permanent death lingered over them constantly, here your squad is largely pre-defined and it’s impossible for them to permanently die. This is because XCOM: Chimera Squad is taking a more narrative approach to the game’s story, with each character being deliberately designed and balanced to ensure that you always have a balanced assortment of squaddies. While you can’t recruit all 11 agents on a single playthrough, you can have a maximum of 8 of them at a time and can take 4 with you on each mission. Each of these characters fits a specific role and while there is an upgrade tree, 3 of the 5 choices for each character are mandatory and so you only have to make 2 decisions as to how they’re going to develop. Again this was done deliberately so that the developers could spend time fleshing out each squad mate and generally speaking they’ve done an admirable job, as while the writing isn’t stellar they were able to give each squaddie their own flavour and plenty of opportunities for them to insert their own quips. These characters also have their own interactions both during battles peaceful police operations and while at home in the base, so that they feel like a somewhat natural and cohesive squad. Perhaps one of the biggest selling point of XCOM: Chimera Squad is the fact that you get to control multiple alien squaddies, specifically a Muton, a Snek, a Sectoid and two half-man half-alien hybrids. These alien squaddies have some of the abilities that their counterparts had in the previous games, with the Sectoid acting as a Psi-capable unit and the Muton and Viper having melee rage attacks and binding attacks respectively. As for the hybrids, one is a melee combatant while the other has an energy shield and mainly functions as a defensive buff provider with a focus on close range attacks.

The reason for this disparate group to come together is that you’re the new XCOM commander Reclamation Squad commander and this rogue’s gallery is your sci-fi SWAT team with which to keep order in a post-XCOM 2 world. In this setting humanity won and now humans and various sentient alien species have to live together amidst the remaining cities of Earth, one of which is City 31 where the game’s story takes place. Perhaps unsurprisingly the alien occupation has left myriad pieces of devastating equipment lying around, and it’s the job of you and your squad to reclaim them and keep them out of the hands of those who would cause further damage to a reeling world. Unfortunately for you and your team, there are three gangs/cults operating within City 31 and you’ll need to investigate and cauterize each one before they can wreak havoc on the city. In spite of how it sounds, these investigations don’t require much in the way of investigating, as essentially you’ll have a series of timers which obscure main-story missions and that give you time to engage in multiple randomly generated missions so you can build up your squad. While you’re galivanting around saving the day, you’ll of course have to develop new tech (although the research system is massively simplified) and are encouraged to rotate through your team so that individual squad members can engage in training. This training system necessitates squad members being out of action for a few days, in exchange for them developing some skills such as additional actions and bonuses to max HP, their dodge skill and so on. Unfortunately you can only train one squad member at a time, and if a squad member takes too much damage in a mission there’s a chance that they’ll get a “scar” which reduces one of their stats. The only way to remove this scar is to have them spend 2 days in training, and for context I finished the whole game in just over 70 in-game days so removing scars eats up a lot of your training time. Of course you could leave your scarred members be, but most of the debuffs are pretty significant such as -3 movement per turn, -30% chance to hit, -3 max HP and so on. Further encouraging you to rotate your squad is the fact that the more powerful training options are only unlocked once your squad member has reached a certain level, so if you keep one on the bench they’ll be relatively weak and if you keep a unit on active duty they’ll always fall short of their max potential.

Then to make things even more of an exercise in plate-spinning, you’ve got the Assembly which functions as your research lab and SPEC OPS which is basically a designated beach-warmers slot. To keep it quick, the Assembly is where you can research and unlock new gear, but fortunately all you need to do once it’s been researched is to buy it so there’s no waiting for something to be researched, then waiting again for it to be produced. Some unlocks are purchased 1-by-1 (for example grenades and medkits) while others only need to be purchased once and then upgrade is applied to all applicable squaddies (such as the weapon upgrades and the armour upgrades). As for the Spec Ops, these are essentially bonuses that can be attained by having squad members busy themselves for a few days. Initially you can only get basic bonuses such as +60 intel or +$80, but as your team gets more developed and as you build up “field teams” across the city more interesting Spec Ops unlock. Two of the more useful late(r) game Spec Ops are to receive a free Field Team, which saves you a bunch of the intel resource, or to reduce unrest in every single one of the city’s 9 districts at once. Speaking of which, City 31 is split into 9 pieces and in each part you have a separate unrest bar alongside the ability to build one of three Field Teams. These field teams are split between Security, Technology and Finance and each type provides a bonus to the applicable resources (Intel, Etherium and Credits respectively) once per week and also increases the unrest reduction of operations in their respective district. You can then upgrade these Field Teams using the intel resource (or farm the applicable Spec Op) with these upgrades increasing the bonuses / unrest reduction provided. There are also “situations” that occur, and these are basically non-missions that involve sending out your squad but no enemies or fighting occurs. Generally the cadence of XCOM: Chimera Squad is mission -> situation -> mission and so on, but the main story missions can interrupt this as they unlock after a certain amount of in-game days have passed.

Once the main quest missions are unlocked, they’re not mandatory (with a handful of exceptions) but as you can only do one mission at a time and they always spawn in batches you’ll generally want to do main missions as soon as they become available. Failing to respond to a mission will cause the unrest in that district to increase and once the unrest in a district reaches the maximum level of 5, it gradually begins increasing the overall City Anarchy at a rate of +1 anarchy per max unrest district per day. Fortunately you do gain some abilities as you build and upgrade your field teams, which let you reduce unrest in a district, auto-complete a situation, freeze unrest in a district (to prevent it going up for failing to respond) and one that reduces the City Anarchy level which is important. Why is that important? Well once the City Anarchy hits a score of 14, you instantly receive a game-over and lose the game. On the plus side once a district hits the max unrest level, a new mission is automatically created for that district which you can complete to reduce that district’s unrest. The caveat is that if you don’t complete this mission you’ll lose your field team and it’s worth noting that these missions tend to be quite difficult. They’re not impossible of course, especially as you get infinite retries but they’re noticeably harder than the normal missions which generally aren’t too bad.

On that subject, missions now have multiple phases and always start with a Breach phase. This is another one of the major changes that have been made to the formula, as you’ll be able to decide in what order your team enters the mission and what entrance you’ll be taking. Sometimes you’ll need an item (equipped in your breach slot) to be able to use different entrances, and each entrance will provide pros and cons. Once your squad bursts into the room the enemies will have a varied reaction time, with some being surprised, some being alert and others being aggressive. These reactions dictate whether they’ll do nothing (and have a bonus for shots fired at them), get a free non-aggressive reaction such as Hunker Down or fire at your squad during the breach action. Fortunately your squad members each get a free shot during this breach action, so you generally want to prioritise summoners and physic enemies alongside the ones that are going to shoot at you.

Some missions have multiple of these phases, with the final mission having 4 of them, and during each phase you’ll enter a room filled with baddies and either have to take them out or complete an objective such as escorting a civilian to an evac zone. One of the most difficult parts of XCOM: Chimera Squad is actually these escort missions, as they always make aggressive use of the game’s reinforcement system which causes new enemies to spawn in. The twist is that often these new enemies are able to get a turn in before most of your squad, so depending on your positioning and what abilities the enemies have this can be a significant barrier to quickly wrapping up a mission. To make matters worse, often these reinforcements continue to respawn at the end of a turn so a simple escort mission can involve 3 enemies spawning per round, and for most of the game you can only have each character fire once per round.

Which brings us neatly to another part of the game that’s undergone a change, as now squaddies and enemies take turns one-after-another with the overall order being determined at the start of each round and being impacted by the order your characters entered the room during the breach phase. This means that you’ll need to be strategic with your breach order, as you’ll often want shotgunners to go first and more accurate squaddies to go in last, but this then means that you’ll have to wait for multiple enemies to have their turn before the guys at the back of your breach option can do anything. Generally this isn’t a big deal, but occasionally your squad members put themselves in bad positions after the breach or are otherwise unable to prevent themselves from getting disabled, mind-controlled or charged by a Berserker. I quite liked this tweak as it makes the firefights feel much more intense and forces you to react quickly to the more threatening enemies, although as you don’t have the ability to command your entire squad at once those missed shots can quickly cause things to spiral out of control.

Another slight change that’s related is that enemy grenades, and some types of the grenades that you use (such as Claymore’s satchel charge) are given a spot in the turn order before they detonate – which means that you can often avoid them if you’re lucky with the enemy targeting… or miss the ones you’ve thrown if you’re a FOOL. One last thing to mention with regards to the breaching system is that your squaddies occasionally have other abilities that can be used, or can equip some items which enable them to take other actions, but generally these are limited to one per mission. As missions can have up to 4 breaches, this requires a bit of patience on the players part lest they blow through all of their good abilities during the first part of a mission. Similarly your squaddies have abilities that they can use, some of which have a general cool-down on the basis of combat rounds, but others are only usable once per mission. A good example of the former is that you can now use a “team up” ability to make a squaddie on your team take their turn next, which is very powerful. Squaddies also have the ability to use certain equipped items during combat, although these don’t count as an action and include things like grenades, medkits and the like.

My general feeling is therefore that all of the tweaks have been included to make a faster paced XCOM experience that still manages to be a challenge without ever feeling cheap. Abilities are quick, the breach system ensures that you always know where enemies are (so no more stumbling into a pod of enemies) and the turn ordering system makes moment-to-moment decision making more important. That’s not to say that you can’t take your time on each turn of course, but generally it’s a question of whether you can tank a few shots or need to pop an item/ability you were trying to save for later. Overall the game is relatively short and while the campaign has 3 investigations plus one or two boss missions after the last investigation is wrapped up, the whole thing never overstays it’s welcome. I will confess that some of the mission types felt repetitive, especially the escort/rescue missions which seemed to keep popping up but fortunately the inclusion of the situations means you’re still able to press ahead without getting bogged down. The only time the game felt silly was with the miss system, because I found that unless I put a squad member in danger with an exceptionally aggressive flank, most of my shots had already an 80% chance to hit. Which is often enough, but man oh man did those occasional misses feel spiteful. Of course this is a) entirely true to the series and b) a reminder that any good strategy isn’t dependent on a single shot hitting. Still, I had a few close calls as missing an 85% shot caused enemy A to take their turn where they crippled squad member B with an ability who then missed their turn so enemies B and C got some shots off and so on. With that being said, I played on “Challenging” and I’d say that the game was challenging without being overwhelming, especially as it’s almost impossible to softlock yourself by getting all of your best squad members killed. Indeed it can sometimes be beneficial to restart a mission as otherwise you’ll run the risk of having scars impact your squaddies for the next few in-game days. Don’t be tempted to savescum however, as on Challenging and Impossible you are dependent on the game’s autosave feature as you can’t make any manual saves!

In conclusion then XCOM: Chimera Squad is a great game and a solid entry for both the series and a good starting point for TBS noobs. While it has some quirks to it, generally these serve to create a fast paced XCOM experience that’s faithful enough to the rest of the reboot series while still being familiar. I enjoyed the setting, which some people hated as it gave a good justification for the Breach mechanic which is a lot of fun. Plus the inter-character reactions can be amusing, as was some of the NPC background chatter referring to alien conspiracies and news bulletins which made light of the political aspect of the post-XCOM 2 world. While XCOM: Chimera Squad is a budget release in terms of price it isn’t a budget release in terms of polish or content, as it’ll take you around 20 hours to beat and there are relatively few bugs to be found. I did encounter some animation glitches, but never had the game crash or encounter a significant bug which shows that the QA department did a good job. Overall I’d say that XCOM: Chimera Squad is well worth the modest asking price and I’d highly recommend it for anyone looking to try out XCOM or TBS games more broadly, although I would recommend the higher difficulties for more experienced players.

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Wargroove was one of those indie darlings that appeared out of nowhere and quickly made a name for itself, mainly by successfully aping a previously dormant series and appealing to it’s fanbase. Yet unlike most of the indie games that try to do this, the game itself is actually very refined and has enough changes to the formula that make it an enjoyable experience without just being a mere clone. Although in all fairness it is very similar to Advance Wars, to the point that at times I was getting tripped up as I was forgetting that the range for artillery archers worked slightly differently. That isn’t a bad thing however, as being similar to a great strategy game is a pretty solid strategy and one that appears to have paid off for Wargroove to the point that we’re now getting a sequel at some point in the relatively near future.

To quickly recap for anyone who hasn’t played an Advance Wars game, in Wargroove you are the commander of an army with a variety of ground, air and sea units that you can purchase at different price points. To purchase these units, you need to obtain funds from various buildings which are dotted around the map (that you view from a top-down perspective) and these buildings can only be captured by infantry units. Some of these buildings are bases, ports and airports towers that can be captured which let you train new units and as such these are crucially important to control. All of the units you can purchase are effective against certain other units, while being weak to others, ensuring that you need a somewhat balanced variety of troops to avoid getting #rekt. To make matters more complicated, the maps are split into tiles with each tile having a terrain type and these terrain types provide both defensive boosts and movement penalties to your units. As those units also have a different range of movement and attack per turn, maps will often feature natural chokepoints and areas that are difficult to traverse. Finally each army is led by a commander unit who has a power that increases as they’re near the fray (much like the last Advance Wars game), with these powers varying depending on which commanding officer you’ve picked. To give an example, Mercia the protagonist of the campaign’s plot has the ability to heal all units near her by 5 HP points (out of a max of 10).

With that out of the way, you’ll probably be curious as to what Wargroove has changed. The most obvious thing, aside from it taking place in a fantasy setting as opposed to a contemporary one, is that you no longer have to worry about ammunition. Units can attack and attack and attack until the end of the world, which can be helpful for both you and the enemy. There are also some unit types that have been radically changed from their counter-parts, with recon units having been replaced with war dogs which are similarly speedy but are much cheaper at the expense of having the lowest defence in the game. The capturing system has also been changed, with units being able to capture unclaimed buildings in one turn. The catch is that claimed buildings have their own HP pool and ability to damage attackers, so you can only capture enemy buildings once you’ve battered them down and dealt with counter attacks. When you capture a building it gains the equivalent of half the capturing units HP for free, but then it needs to gradually replenish itself at a rate of 1HP per turn. This then becomes important as the healing/repair system has been changed, with units now taking HP from the building that they heal at and of course they can’t heal more HP than the building has. Plus units can’t occupy buildings by sitting on them anymore, instead to heal you need to be next to them and new units you’ve bought will be spawned beside the building not on top of it. As such there is a bit of a risk reward system going on, as frontline buildings can provide a needed dose of health for a strong unit, but they’ll take time to replenish their own HP which makes them weak to attackers. Alongside the new building changes, Commanding Officers now can’t switch from unit to unit but are instead always on the battlefield and the game ends if they die. Yet the game also encourages you to use them as they’re powerful and their abilities can have a big impact in swaying a battle. Speaking of abilities, some units have abilities such as the Shamans (anti-air) which let them spend money to heal units within a short radius. Last but certainly not least, units have the ability to inflict crits upon their targets if specific conditions are met. To give some examples, swordsmen (infantry) crit when they are next to their commanders, shamans crit when on terrain that provides a +3 or more defence bonus and trebuchets (rockets) crit when engaging targets at their maximum range. These crits are very, very important as they’re often able to allow you to destroy an enemy unit in one hit.

So it’s fair to say that Wargroove has taken an existing formula and added to it, without neglecting any of the features that made Advance Wars so enjoyable. This includes the AI which is constantly capable of putting up a decent fight, but never one that feels unwinnable (especially once you learn their quirks, such as their LOVE of attacking your Commander). Fortunately you’ll have plenty of time to learn these quirks as you’ve not only got a skirmish mode, but you also have a fully fledged campaign and a handful of other modes (more on them later). The campaign itself features 7 Acts, each of which has 3 main missions and then the roughly the same number of optional side missions. These optional missions are often harder than the main ones, but you’ll need to beat them all if you want the true ending. This is because the final mission of Act 7 is an Epilogue mission and to unlock it you’ll need to have earned 100 stars, but each mission only provides a maximum of 3 depending on the post-mission rank you received. As such even if you A-Ranked every main mission, you’d still be 40 stars short. Fortunately I found that the turn-limits for receiving an A-Rank were fairly generous and as such it wasn’t until I got to the final two Acts that I was failing to consistently get them. And by that point in the game I’d already been working my way through the side-missions anyway, so unlocking the Epilogue didn’t cause me too much trouble. As for the campaign itself it’s fairly enjoyable and much like the Advance Wars series, the first dozen or so missions act as a gradual tutorial to all of the game’s concepts. In a nod to the first AW game, you basically go around the world getting in slapfights with various headstrong commanders from other factions before they realise you’re actually a pretty cool guy and join you. It does have some challenge towards the end, especially with the pre-deploy missions where the number of units you have is limited, but there isn’t anything as stupidly punishing as the final missions in the AW games.

And honestly while the game looks great and plays great, it’s the writing and characterisations if anything that give me a bit of pause. I was kind of hoping for something like Fire Emblem 7 or Advance Wars, but the tone is a bit different and everything just feels… for want of a better term, so heckin’ wholesome 100 big chungus. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a developer that has multiple office dogs and an office snake has written such an aggressive upbeat game, but it does feel a little weird at times. I found the AW characters largely enjoyable and while the Wargroove characters are equally as one-note, they’re just not as cool. I think it’s due to the fact that in AW every character (except Colin, but that’s his character) is very confident while being laidback, whereas in Wargroove every character is very supportive and friendly. It’s a small difference and not really a big part of the game, but I just wanted to note this as it’s basically the only thing that I think Wargroove does worse. Especially as the campaign has a mini-cutscene for every mission and while they are skippable, they’ve had a lot of time and attention put into them (plus every character has multiple pages of backstory as told via the in-game codex).

With that one criticism out of the way, I’ll just re-iterate that Wargroove has an overwhelming amount of content and as such you don’t really need to worry about the campaign’s storyline that much. In fact you could get hundreds of hours of playtime while barely interacting with it, as not only does the game have a skirmish mode but you can also straight-up download custom campaigns from within the game that have been made by other players. Plus you’ll be able to create your own maps, so if you were so inclined you could just rely on the community to keep you entertained. Of course the campaign does unlock new COs and other content, so you’ll probably want to play it anyway, but you don’t have to. Speaking of which the game also offers two other main modes of playing through it, in the form of the Arcade mode and the Puzzle mode. The Arcade mode is unlocked at the end of the 1st Act of the campaign and involves playing 5 skirmish battles back-to-back in one of three difficulties (easy, normal or hard). These difficulties determine how much gold the enemy gets from their buildings, with the respective values being x0.5, x1 and x2 in line with the difficulty setting you chose. Then you’ve got the puzzle mode which unlocks once you’ve cleared the 3rd Act of the Campaign and features 25 maps, each of which give you a single turn to complete an objective (generally winning the stage). It goes without saying that these maps can be fairly challenging to figure out, as you’ll need to make every move perfectly lest your best laid plan fall apart. Unlike the Arcade mode however there isn’t any penalty for failure, so you’re free to keep playing these maps again and again until you can figure out what the optimal methods are.

So to conclude, Wargroove is an enjoyable TBS experience that is heavily inspired by Advance Wars without falling into the classic indie trap of merely cloning an existing franchise. Instead it offers not only a vast amount of content, but also plenty of twists and new ideas on the established formula which make it a great game to play. In spite of the relatively weak characterisation, this is a game with a lot of heart and effort put into it and this hard work is constantly on display in the form of different game modes, high quality sprite work and a well balanced difficulty curve. Ultimately Wargroove is a game that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone, whether they’re a TBS fan or not, but I would say that it’s the best AW inspired game I’ve yet to play. As such I hope you’ll consider giving this game and try and will join me in looking forward to the sequel

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Now first thing’s first, I haven’t played the original game (released back in 1989) so I can’t do a comparison for you guys between this latest remaster – as there was one back in 2013 – and the original game. Second thing’s second, The Bluecoats: North & South is a game that I picked up in a bundle a while back, and as such I didn’t pay much attention to it when I first bought it. It turns out this was a mistake on my part, as The Bluecoats: North & South is actually a really enjoyable game even if it’s hard to pin down exactly what kind of game it is. It’s got a Turn Based Strategy layer, which is arguable the meat of the game and is fairly simple. Basically there’s a map of the (Dis)United states as of the time period, with each state functioning as a region and each region being able to hold one army at a time. Some of these regions contain forts, which are connected by railway lines and if a player owns both of the terminus points of a railway line then on the start of their turn a train will run along the line and generate gold for them. Generally you get two or three gold for each train that moves between your forts without a hitch and as such maintaining control of the railways is crucial to success. There are also some other minor factors to consider, such as a wandering storm cloud that affects one region per turn and paralyses any army contained within it (unless you pay some gold), the potential for Western states to be attacked by Mexicans and American-Indians and North Carolina having a port that provides free armies every few turns. Generally there isn’t too much to handle on this overall strategy layer, but as armies can only move to one neighbouring region per turn and as you can only have one army in a region (although you can merge two armies together up to 3 times) you do still have to carefully consider your moves. One other twist is that if you have 3 Gold, you can buy a new army but only on regions without an army already on it – but that army can then move as per usual, so it’s possible to lose an entire army in an attack and then buy a new one to send in against the harmed enemy army. If you have the money of course!

Which brings us to my favourite part of this game, namely the RTS-esque battles that take place between two armies. These are frantic but enjoyable and involve juggling between three unit types on the fly (as you can only control one unit at a time). You’ve got Artillery which are seriously powerful and can 1-hit KO entire enemy units if you get the perfect shot in, but need to charge each shot and they can only move left-or-right whereas the other unit types can move forwards. Then you’ve got Cavalry which are fast and lethal against all unit types (including other Cavalry) but melee only, so they need to dodge incoming fire while rushing towards the enemy. Finally you’ve got infantry that can advance like the cavalry, but have a ranged attack albeit one with a slight delay before firing. As mentioned earlier in this paragraph, part of what makes these battles so engaging is the fact that you need to keep switching between units to make the most effective use out of them. So you’ll need to be moving your artillery and firing shots, while manoeuvring your infantry and advancing your cavalry so that no unit is a sitting duck or about to be outflanked. Of course having a larger army does provide some advantages, as you can field more individual soldiers per unit type, but newly created tier-1 armies already have the maximum number of soldiers in the infantry unit. In these cases you have reserves which are instantly spawned when the units you initially deployed with are wiped out (e.g. you have 9 infantry soldiers in your army, 6 deploy at the start then if they all die a unit of 3 soldiers spawns). As such effective use of a smaller army can easily lead to victory against a larger force.

Most games would be content at this stage to be a RTS/TBS hybrid, but The Bluecoats: North & South is not most games and adds an additional layer in the form of two FPS mini-games that largely play the same. When you attack an enemy fort on the TBS layer, you will initially have a normal battle if they had an army defending and if you succeed (or they didn’t have a garrison army hanging around) then you start playing a FPS mode. Don’t get me wrong, this mode isn’t going to compete with Doom or even most bargain bin FPS games, but it does have it’s own charm. When these battles start you’re given a 4-minute time limit to gun down a dozen enemy soldiers, each of whom die in two shots or one headshot. The twist is that you have a limited amount of ammo and unless you hit 12 consecutive headshots, you’re going to need some extra ammo. Fortunately your enemies are kind enough to occasionally drop ammo (and sometimes even health!), which is a clever way of the game discouraging camping as you’ll run out of shots and need to dash out into the fray. This is where you can get overwhelmed, as reloading takes some time and the enemy is accurate even if they’re slow to fire. To prevent these FPS battles from being punishingly difficult, the enemy only has 4 active combatants at a time and you have a rough idea of where they are thanks to a mini-map in the upper right corner. In spite of the relatively modest amount of enemies at any given time, you’ll need to be careful when playing these battles as enemies can bum-rush you with melee attacks and if you need to reload at the wrong time you can quickly burn through your health bar. You do have two NPC buddies with you during these missions, but they don’t deal damage and instead can only stagger enemies with their shots.

The game also has another FPS mini-game that is very similar and which takes place during train robberies. These robberies happen when a player has an army occupying a region with a railway line that is running between two enemy forts. If an army is placed in this way then when the train reaches the occupied region a train robbery mission will start. These missions are essentially the same as the fort missions, but instead of wandering around a fort you’re rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ your way up the train. If you can make it to the locomotive engine within 4-minutes, then you steal the gold and the enemy gets nothing. Alternatively if your train is under attack, then you need to defend it from the enemy lest you suffer the same fate! These missions are short and easier than the fort attacks, but still enjoyable and can be tense as often successfully conducting a train robbery (or train defence) will decide whether you or your enemy will get to buy an additional army.

And that’s about it as far as The Bluecoats: North & South goes, as while the game has a myriad of game modes each is short but sweet. The campaign is essentially four scenarios back-to-back which are loosely based on the historic progress of the war in each year from 1861 to 1864, with some tweaked starting armies and regions pre-allocated. The game also has a free play mode which lets you select either the RTS or the two FPS modes and gives you some choice with regards to settings so that you can play each mode at your leisure without needing to mix and match them as per the campaign gameplay. Finally you can play each mode either against the AI or against a friend, acquittance, lover, relative, or exceptionally-intelligent-pet either online or in split-screen. Ultimately this is a game that’s intended for short bursts as playing through each of the campaign scenarios shouldn’t take you very long (around 2 hours), and if you win a handful of the initial engagements in a campaign it’s entirely possible to win in only one or two turns as the game has a powerful snowball effect in play. Part of this is that the more armies you have, the more regions you can capture. Another part is that you gain a bonus for having more regions/states at the start of each turn, which gives you one extra gold. When you consider that having more regions almost certainly means you have more forts and are thus earning more money anyway, it puts your opponent at a serious financial disadvantage. To win all you need to do is defeat every enemy army and make sure they can’t afford to buy a new one on their next turn, at which point you get a cute little victory screen and not much fanfare.

In conclusion then The Bluecoats: North & South is a short but sweet hybrid game with a charming art-style and a handful of relatively simple gameplay modes. It’s not a deep game by any means, but it’s a blast to play and manages to keep mixing things up so that it never feels stale at any given moment. The developers have done a good job of making every engagement feel important, as you can easily snatch victory from the jaws of defeat (or vice-versa) with a hard well-fought battles. Plus as you’ll be switching between TBS, RTS and FPS frequently you need to become competent at each to have any chance of victory, lest your brilliantly capable army fail to storm a fort repeatedly. While the AI is a little easy on normal, it’s a decent challenge on hard and of course the multiplayer mode provides plenty of opportunity for glory or upset. As such I’d have no problem recommending The Bluecoats: North & South to anyone regardless of skill level or even fondness for videogames, especially as it’s priced as a budget title and has full multiplayer support.

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8-Bit Invaders by Petroglyph is the 3rd game in their 8-bit RTS collection and much like the previous two games (8-Bit Armies and 8-Bit Hordes) it features a charming Voxel art-style, maps that are cluttered with destroyable assets, a fast-paced implementation of the classic RTS formula and a decent amount of content. Veterans of the series will therefore find a lot that’s familiar with 8-Bit Invaders, including the structure of the campaigns (12 missions per faction with each mission containing three objectives, one of which is mandatory and two of which are optional), the challenging skirmish AI that cheats in exactly the same way (perpetual map awareness? You bet!) and the lamentable fact that the co-op lobbies are as dead as a dodo. To stand out from the two previous games, 8-Bit Invaders adds three new things: New Factions (two of them), New Campaigns (three including the co-op one) and a new “Multiverse” mode that functions as a hybrid RTS/TBS strategy mode.

Starting from the top, the two new factions in 8-Bit Invaders are the “Galactic Marine Corp” (hereafter referred to as the Marines) and the “Invaders”. Of the two the Marines are by far the most familiar for series veterans or indeed anyone who has ever played a Westwood game such as C&C Tiberium Sun or Red Alert 2. You’ve got your traditional HQ, Power Plant, Barracks, Drone Foundry, Airfield and Tech Lab alongside two turrets – one for ground units and one for air units – and two newish buildings in the form of the Resource Enhancer which increases resources per harvester and a Titan Unit factory which replaces the Super Weapons that were in the previous games (more on that later). Like other games in the 8-Bit series, adding additional factories does not add new production queues like in most RTS games, but instead increases the production rate of your existing factory/factories (you can switch which factory the unit comes out of though). The units are a bit less familiar and have a Sci-Fi flavour, but are still easy enough to wrap your head around as there aren’t too many.

For infantry you’ve got Marines with guns who are decent against enemy infantry and air units, Harpies who are melee infantry with jetpacks that let them jump over small elevations in the terrain and F.I.D.Os which are deployable & stealthy mini-turrets that can shoot air and ground units.

For armoured units you’ve got two types of walkers – O.G.R.Es and Manticores with the former being able to shoot while moving & crush infantry while the latter need to be stationary to fire but can shoot both ground and air units, joining them are the GORGON tanks that deal splash damage and are great against ground units.

Finally you’ve got a handful of air units, the Shrike anti-air flier that can’t shoot ground units, the Medusa that acts as a heavily armoured helicopter gunship that can shoot both air & ground units plus the lightly armoured Gremlin that can’t attack but can heal friendly units. All of these units and buildings have large health bars, with the first 3 bars acting as “shields” that regenerate outside of combat. This means that the Marine units are fairly tanky and their ability to regenerate outside of combat gives them the ability to engage in hit-and-run attacks without too much risk, especially the O.G.R.Es which can shoot while moving. Compared to the Invaders however, Marine units tend to be much more expensive and the fact that they have to worry about their power supply means that building up a base can be slower (plus their turrets are disabled if the power supply goes down). As for their call-in abilities, you’ve got Overdrive which makes all Marine Units move faster albeit at the cost of them losing their shields (I didn’t use it that much aside from the occasional campaign mission which had a time limit objective) and… erm… another one that I have never used.

The Invaders on the other hand are a bit more unusual, as they don’t have to worry about their base having enough power but they do have a population cap to worry about which requires the construction of buildings to increase. This means that you can’t easily knock out their (very powerful) turrets, but if you’re playing them you’ll need to be constantly building new “Motivator” buildings which increase the pop cap. Most of the buildings they have are otherwise identical to those that the Marines have albeit with different names, although they do have the Parasite Hive building which gives you the ability to gain vision within an area via seeing what enemy units there can see. This is one of the powers they have, alongside the ability to designate a small zone on the map as an area where each newly trained unit will appear. Neither of these powers are particularly powerful, as the first one has a very limited duration and the latter only lets you move a relatively small amount of new units to an area.

As for their units, they are generally weaker and more specialised but are often cheaper with a few exceptions. For the Infantry you’ve got Xenodogs which are melee only infantry that create a hazardous acid pool which only damages the enemy when they die, standard Invaders that can shoot both air and ground units but are weak against infantry and Brain Bugs that make units around them invisible but are fairly weak themselves.

In terms of armoured units you’ve got Stink Bugs that are short-ranged anti-infantry specialists, Tripods that are walkers that can move while shooting and shoot both air & ground units plus Blast Bugs which are artillery units that can also shoot both air & ground units.

Finally for the air units you’ve got Saucers that are fast and intended for anti-air and anti-infantry use, Flyers which are a slightly slower anti-armour and anti-air equivalent and finally Motherships that heal units around them and which deal decent damage against anti-air and anti-ground targets. As many of these units are relatively cheap (except Tripods and Motherships) it’s tempting to spam them, however doing so will require a balanced mix as many unit types are useless against enemies that they’re not intended to “counter”. Blast Bugs get slaughtered at close range, Saucers are useless against armoured targets, Invaders are hopeless against infantry and so on. I personally found myself using Invaders as a cheap swarm that could deal with vehicles while using Stink Bugs to deal with enemy infantry, or just using vast hordes of Tripods as they are pretty much the only unit in the Invaders arsenal that is good against all enemy types. Either way bring Motherships for the healing, as unlike the Marines there is no shielding available.

Regardless of which faction is your favourite, you’ve got two campaigns with 12 missions each in them so you’ll have plenty of time to get to grips with each faction. I might be biased, but as a relatively experienced RTS player I found them fairly easy and my main piece of advice would be to read the mission “briefings” as they occasionally give tips as to what unit to use (generally the most recent one you’ve unlocked to be fair). I’d also highly recommend aiming for a 3-star rank in each mission, even if that means occasionally resetting the mission you’re currently playing as the bonuses you get for completing the optional objectives make the campaign much, much easier. These bonuses come in the form of pre-completed units and buildings which will let you start completing side objectives early, deny enemies the ability to use their harvesters to gather resources and to leapfrog the early stages of the tech-tree (such as it is). Something that newer players might miss in 8-Bit Invaders is that the maps each have crates lying around which can be “collected” by infantry units and that will then grant you free units or extra cash. Collecting these crates often lets your starting force snowball in strength which then lets you clear through the pre-deployed enemies on the map with relative ease while you build up an army at your base. Other than these general tips, I don’t have too much to say about these campaigns aside from the fact that they’re pretty fun and most of the missions aren’t particularly lengthy. They’re almost all relatively normal skirmish maps, with a bunch of enemies scattered around alongside those crates mentioned just above. There are a handful that don’t let you build additional units, plus one “defence” mission but these are the exceptions to the overall norm.

Speaking of the norm, 8-Bit Invaders follows the pattern set by it’s predecessors by highly encouraging and rewarding an aggressive focus on your economy in the early game followed by using massive groups of units to smash apart enemy bases. You’ll want to have multiple harvesters, I’d generally say no less than four active at any given time as in 8-Bit Invaders these units just stick onto a resource point and they don’t need to constantly head back to their base or a refinery building. Once you’ve got these harvesters, be sure to build multiple factories/barracks so that you can increase the build speed of your units – again I generally had 4 or 5 of each factory type so I could spam Marines/Invaders as a front wave, with Manticores/Tripods behind them to deal tougher enemies. If you’ve got enough harvesters then you’ll be able to pump out wave after wave of units and flood the enemy, while still having enough new units come out that you can defend your base against an inopportunely timed enemy attack. Of the two factions I had a preference for the Marines as I appreciated the fact that their units had regenerating shields and required less micromanagement, but to be fair their is a primordial joy to spamming so many Invaders that the game started to lag. Be careful when spamming units however, as the Titan Units which replace super weapons in this game can be lethal against hordes of cheaper units. Unlike every other unit in the game, these Titan Units are restricted to 1 per player at a time, and are the units themselves are free once their construction building has been completed. Instead of building them manually, they automatically begin building once the building has been completed or upon their death. This process takes 3 minutes, but much like every other unit you can reduce this time by building more than 1 of the Titan Unit buildings. The Marines get a HUGE mech and the Invaders get a HUGE dinosaur. While these units aren’t quite good enough to solo vast swarms of enemy units, they are a big fat force multiplier for your army and take a concentrated effort to put down.

As of the current time I’ve haven’t had the chance to play the co-op campaign ;_; but I did have the opportunity to try out the new “Multiverse” RTS/TBS hybrid mode. As someone who has enjoyed these modes in other RTS games, including Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2 and C&C 3: Kane’s Wrath I was pretty optimistic that this would be another quasi-RISK board game layer on top of a solid RTS game. Initial impressions were good as you can play as any faction from the 8-Bit Series including those from Armies and Hordes so long as you own those games. Unfortunately the Multiverse mode is heavily flawed and while it’s not terrible I don’t think I could honestly recommend it unless you were truly, utterly desperate for more 8-Bit Invaders goodness. The issue is pretty straightforward and alas seemingly impossible to resolve, but let me explain how the mode works first.

Essentially there are two players on a Hex board, split into various territories each of which contains a native garrison force and potentially a bonus for the meta-game in the form of additional resources or better vision over adjacent Hexes. So far in this review I’ve described it as a TBS layer, but really it’s still an RTS albeit a very slow one that has you building and moving troops in real time. The build queue is the same as it is for each faction, although you do now need to “research” buildings with gems that you gain by annexing various hexes. In each hex that you own, you can build buildings up to a maximum of 3 and also units so long as you’ve got the right buildings (e.g. Barracks for Marines, War Factory + Tech Lab for Manticores etc). These buildings always stay put and serve as your garrison, alongside any units you’ve built and these buildings & units will appear on that hex’s map should that hex be attacked. You can also take garrisoned units out of the garrison and use them as an Attack Force, which can be dragged onto adjacent hexes and this is how you attack new territories. When attacking you can either auto-resolve the battle, or play it manually which starts up a RTS map where you have a HQ and whatever units were in your Attack Force. As each territory initially has indigenous defenders, you need to have a decent attack force lest you get overwhelmed – and of course if the enemy player has taken that territory then you fight their garrison. When attacking a 10 second countdown begins, which just gives you enough time to shuttle around nearby troops and garrisons to help you defend.

With those basics out of the way, I’d like to now dismantle what is theoretically a very cool game mode in 8-Bit Invaders. The first issue is the fact that as it’s in real time and battles have a countdown, one of the main issues you face is the clunky interface for transferring units from Garrisons through to Attack Forces and then sending them where they need to be. You have to drag and drop each unit between Garrisons and Attack Forces, which takes time and you need to drag and drop each Attack Force to each hex you want them to travel to. If you want to build up a garrison, you need to either deal with the perennial drag that is the dragging-and-dropping or have built the correct buildings in each hex where you want to produce them (which is very expensive). To make matters worse, moving a group of units from Hex A to Hex C involves dragging them into an Attack Force one-at-a-time, dragging this Attack Force to Hex B, then dragging it to Hex C. Now that’s if you can wait for a stack to build up, but if the enemy attacks your territory you’ll find yourself frantically dragging and dropping each unit one-by-one into an Attack Force and hoping they make it there in time (which they probably won’t). So to prevent this from happening, you now need to drag units into Attack Forces one-by-one as they get built and then drag these Attack Forces across the hexes they need so that they can be in the right place to defend your borders.

Obviously the AI doesn’t have this issue, which gives them a slight edge on the metaverse layer. The flipside is that the AI can only auto-resolve battles, which is a handicap as the auto-resolve tool is kind of bullshit meaning that they need to build up larger forces to be able to take territories. HOWEVER this auto-resolve nonsense ends up being the biggest issue, as if you have the audacity to have a lightly defended territory near the AI, guess what they’re going to do? Attack it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Did that sentence seem repetitive? Well then imagine how I felt playing the same map more than a dozen times in a row, because as soon as I won the skirmish the AI sent yet another wave of 6 units at my territory as I waited for my garrison to slowly build up. I’d try to send in neighbouring units, but I only had 10 seconds between each battle and those units were also incredibly slow to build. Oh and as a fun bonus if the AI was able to kill one of my garrison units, that meant my future auto-resolve chance would be lower meaning I’d get to appreciate that same skirmish map yet again! As a consequence my multiverse campaign took around 4 hours, featuring around 15 hexes and around 40ish battles – of which 90% were on the same two maps. If you do want to play this mode, I cannot stress enough that you should have two stacks, one to attack and one to sit in the newly liberate territories. You should have as small a border space with the AI as possible, and in spite of these preparations prepare for repetition.

Now don’t get me wrong, this mode is definitely a good idea and if you can find someone to play it with then I imagine it’s good fun. Unfortunately, the AI is a total pain in the arse to deal with and while the skirmishes themselves are easy enough the meta-layer is a bit a grind. One thing that was neat about it was the fact that larger maps had pre-existing bases populated by enemies and buildings from the other (non 8-bit invaders) factions and that occasionally these forces would spawn next to the enemy AI and nuke them before they got to do anything. Of course sometimes this would happen to you too, and of course if you lose the territory you lose all of your garrison forces (the same rule applies to attacking forces to be fair). Oh and unfortunately you need to take them out too to win, so even if you destroy the invading force quickly you still need to hunt down the random “occupied” AI force. At least they don’t build any new units, so once you’ve dealt with their quasi-garrison they’re harmless. What isn’t harmless is the fact that the enemy AI cheats (even on normal) by having total map awareness, as such if you use your Attack Force to try and destroy the enemy early, then you had best guess which spawn point they’re in accurately or they’re just going to rush your base while your force is trying to find them. Then they’ll win, and you’ll lose all those units which were so slow to build. FUN!

Of course there’s also a skirmish mode to enjoy, alongside the ability to play against other players. Unfortunately the 8-Bit series didn’t have much staying power, so most players didn’t hang around for long and I say that as someone who played 8-Bit Armies shortly after release. As such I’d recommend treating this game as a fun little pair of campaigns, with a side of skirmish should you feel that you haven’t played enough. The Multiverse mode is worth a look, but for the love of god bear in mind my advance from earlier lest you be frustrated. In summary, 8-Bit Invaders is a cool little RTS game that is a good end point for the series and has plenty of content for fans both new or old. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to RTS fans, and I honestly wouldn’t find it hard to recommend to novices either as it’s pretty intuitive and not excessively difficult. Plus if you can persuade a buddy to buy it, then you can enjoy the co-op campaign together and maybe even get a good Multiverse game out of it!

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