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Tag: Real-time strategy

  • I Wish I Loved This Final Fantasy Tactics-Inspired SRPG 7 Years In The Making

    I Wish I Loved This Final Fantasy Tactics-Inspired SRPG 7 Years In The Making

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    Final Fantasy Tactics nailed so many things so exquisitely that, despite plenty of sequels, spiritual successors, and fan homages, there’s never been anything quite like it since. Arcadian Atlas is the latest indie strategy RPG to try and channel its greatness into something familiar but new, and sadly, it mostly flounders.

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    Created by Twin Otter Studios, Arcadian Atlas came to Steam on July 27 after first getting funded on Kickstarter way back in 2016. Despite the years of waiting, it feels like a rough first draft that needs more work. Set in a kingdom thrust into civil war over a succession crisis and royal family in-fighting, it follows two romantically involved soldiers, Vashti and Desmond, onto the battlefield as their conflicting loyalties and principles threaten to unravel their lives. Every scene is rendered with beautiful sprites reminiscent of Square Enix’s classic, and each new plot point is punctuated by a turn-based fight on a chessboard-like grid between competing squads of archers, medics, magicians and knights.

    Gif: Twin Otter Studios / Kotaku

    I’ve played about four hours so far, and the story can be compelling when it doesn’t feel barebones or clumsy. Star-crossed lovers thrust into the chaos of a civil war is a fine crucible for interrogating what makes characters tick and how far they’re willing to go to fight for what matters most to them, even if the dialogue sometimes feels undercooked, “Listen, I’m not happy about it either, but you know how much dark magic damaged my village,” Desmond tells Vashti early on. “As much as I hate to say it, he has to be put to death.”

    But the real issue with Arcadian Atlas is that it’s a chore to navigate and play, and there’s no real creativity or depth in its RPG systems to make battles exciting or make it satisfying to grow and level up your crew. Skill trees are brief and mostly revolve around earning damage upgrades. There are a dozen unique job classes, but you can’t mix and match abilities. Combat also heavily favors ranged units, which have good damage output and little risk of ever missing their target.

    Screenshot: Twin Otter Studios

    The battlefield also feels wonky and incomplete. Animations for unit movement and attacks don’t feel fluid, and terrain has no real impact on strategy. Fireballs and arrows can pass through obstacles and comrades unimpeded, while melee units can strike anyone next to them no matter how much higher or lower the adjacent squares are. It makes for very unbalanced encounters with little in the way of tactical trade-offs to consider or competing priorities to weigh.

    In isolation, none of these shortcomings would be that big of an issue, but taken together they slowly add up to a simplistic and tedious experience that’s hard to recommend to even the genre’s biggest fans. Eventually even the mildest frustrations become hard to ignore, like having to press the accept button to progress every finished loading screen, and the fact that navigating the battlefield grid requires repeatedly flicking the thumbstick on the gamepad rather than simply holding it. The game supports mouse and keyboard as well, but I actually found the cursor controls to be even more finicky and sticky.

    One of the few points of pleasure for me in each battle was the soundtrack. Instead of dramatic horns and violins, Arcadian Atlas’ jazz-infused soundtrack by composer Moritz P.G. Katz is dominated by saxophones and guitars. The standard combat music in particular is so oddly unexpected but catchy, I still found it playing inside my head days later. I wish I could say the rest of my time with the game felt as memorable.

               

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    Ethan Gach

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  • The Great War Tries Once Again To Bring WW1 To Video Games

    The Great War Tries Once Again To Bring WW1 To Video Games

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    For such a momentous period in human history, the First World War has been relatively under-served by video games. Mostly because the defining theatre of the conflict—the nightmarish trench warfare of the Western Front—is almost impossible to recreate in the medium.

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    I mean, you can recreate it, loads of games have, but the problem is that—and I’m sorry for the ghastly reduction of the source material here, but we’re talking video games, so I have to do this—it’s boring. Most other forms of warfare, throughout the entirety of human history, have been turned into fantastic strategy games because there’s some degree of mobility to them. That’s what makes them games. You can flank, drive, encircle and withdraw. There are immediate and actionable tactics you can apply.

    The Western Front, on the other hand, was a meat-grinder. Attacks involving thousands of men could result in gains of just a few yards. There was an enormous strategic effort under-pinning the war, from recruitment to manufacturing to global supply lines, but in a tactical sense there’s very little for the player to do, which is why nearly every game based on the conflict has been slow, bad or both.

    Which brings us to The Great War: Western Front, a new strategy game from Petroglyph, the studio behind Star Wars: Empire at War and Universe at War: Earth Assault. It tries to tackle the subject matter from a slightly different approach, which I can best break down as “Total War meets Tower Defence”.

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    The strategic aspect is where you amass your forces before descending into an RTS battle
    Screenshot: The Great War

    The game is split into two sections. There’s a strategic aspect, where you move armies around a map in a turn-based system, and then when two forces meet the action zooms in to a real-time battle. This RTS element itself has two stages; there’s a planning and construction phase, where you get to design a network of trenches and firing positions, and a battle phase where you deploy units on the field and control them in real time.

    The strategic stuff is fine. It works, it’s simple enough. It’s the RTS side of things that is most interesting, though, and it’s where the game both shines and ultimately falls down.

    The design and construction stuff is, in the grimmest way imaginable, the highlight. Imagine a historical murder machine built the same way you’d put a LEGO set together. You’re given a map and can draw trench networks across it, picking the kind of trench, mapping out its supporting supply trenches, placing machine gun nests, agonising over the location of artillery batteries. If this was the game, and battles decided afterwards like some kind of flood management/tower defence title, I think it could have been the best First World War game ever made.

    The RTS battles themselves are a disappointment (though it’s great to see a game with so much Australian representation, something loads of strategy games miss!)

    The RTS battles themselves are a disappointment (though it’s great to see a game with so much Australian representation, something loads of strategy games miss!)
    Screenshot: The Great War

    Sadly, the moment a battle actually begins—perhaps as a nod to the actual conflict—everything falls apart. You control individual units, not entire lines of men, and a lot of the game involves moving them around the map, trying to time your devastating artillery support just right. The issue is that these units are weirdly sticky, having trouble entering or staying in trenches properly and making control of them a nightmare, while the AI’s own tactics are often somehow worse than those employed on the actual battlefields 100 years ago. 

    This sucks the life out of the whole thing, which is a shame! There are a lot of good ideas here, and the presentation is surprisingly earnest. There are loads of informative Company of Heroes-style 2D cutscenes, and the developers toe the line between respecting the horror of the conflict and expressing its brutality in the form of a video game as well as any other WW1 release I can remember.

    The Great War: Western Front is out now on Steam and the Epic Games Store.

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    Luke Plunkett

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  • After Three Months Of Struggles, Ashika Island Saved Warzone 2.0

    After Three Months Of Struggles, Ashika Island Saved Warzone 2.0

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    Since its release in November 2022, Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 has undergone immense scrutiny from the community due to its rocky launch. Warzone 2.0 dropped with numerous missing features that undid a lot of the goodwill garnered during the first game’s lifecycle, and while it still has a long way to go, it’s headed in the right direction, thanks in part to the recently released Ashika Island map.

    This small-scale Resurgence map doesn’t fix all of the game’s issues, but it certainly brought me—and many other lapsed fans—back to the battle royale, thanks to its more focused, faster-paced experience. There are many reasons the map works so well, but it mainly comes down to its design, along with the Resurgence mode featured on it, which makes the most of its smaller scale and tighter spaces by removing a lot of the downtime typically present on larger maps. This makes each match feel balanced and digestible, especially when compared to Al Mazrah, the main Warzone 2.0 battle royale map.

    Al Mazrah is fine. It’s not horrible, but it has a litany of problems that are exacerbated by some of the flawed gameplay design choices—like lots of open spaces in between POIs that leave players wide open for attacks while rotating. Likewise, the map itself feels too big for the limited 150-player count, which leads to far too much downtime. When combined with the game’s slow movement, this practically guarantees you’ll go several minutes at a time without any enemy engagements.

    Ashika Island, on the other hand, offers way more cover between POIs—whether in the form of small buildings, rocky terrain, or objects to hide behind. It encourages movement and pushes matches closer to the fast pacing the series is known for. There’s never a dull moment on Ashika Island since its player count is just right for the map size, which keeps engagements flowing at a consistent rate.

    Ashika Island’s impeccable design

    Image: Activision

    Speaking of POIs, each main hub on Ashika Island is a blast, from the condensed Residential area, to the multistoried Tsuki Castle, and even the close-quarters Oganikku Farms. Activision and High Moon Studios did an incredible job of creating POIs that are all fun to explore and battle it out against enemies in, without feeling repetitive. Ashika Island has something for everyone, whether you’re someone who prefers to take it slowly, or an expert player who likes to finesse and use the environment to your advantage.

    The underground area full of water is also a nice touch, giving players another way to rotate away from potential hot zones. Those who are less experienced can just hang out in the underground area, which is usually not well-trafficked. This gives newcomers a chance to get their bearings and survive, even against more experienced players.

    Likewise, Ashika Island doesn’t have choke points or overly advantageous positions like other maps. One of the biggest issues with the original Warzone is that certain spots like Prison from Rebirth Island and Peak on Caldera were right in the middle of the map and gave players a distinct height advantage. So, other POIs felt less desirable to take over, especially since they were often on the outskirts of the map. That’s why Ashika Island works so well: there’s no obvious power position that works better than others. Sure, certain POIs are slightly more ideal depending on the zone movement and your play style, but overall, Ashika Island’s layout is well-balanced.

    One of the best areas is the set of apartment buildings to the southeast of Oganikku Farms. There are two tall buildings here, each comprised of several floors, all of which can be reached from the opposite building across. This gives players multiple access points, rewarding those who like to outsmart their opponents. One of my favorite gameplay moments involved flying a helicopter toward a team, using it to distract the enemy players, and then jumping out before taking out multiple foes in one fluid motion. Outmaneuvering an opponent is Warzone at its best, and it’s all thanks to Ashika Island’s fantastic design.

    Back in the action, soldier

    Image for article titled After Three Months Of Struggles, Ashika Island Saved Warzone 2.0

    Screenshot: Activision / Joseph Yaden

    Beyond the map’s design itself, I cannot praise the Resurgence mode enough. By default, battle royales on traditional large maps can be tough to get into since it often takes upwards of 30 minutes to finish a match. You typically spend more time looting and preparing for battle than you do actually fighting against other players, which gets old after a while.

    But Resurgence throws that out the window; instead taking place on a smaller map with a max of 52 players (as opposed to around 150 on Al Mazrah). More importantly, it allows players to continuously respawn as long as at least one teammate remains alive, offering plenty of chances to get back into the action.

    What this means is that you’re not penalized as much for playing aggressively, resulting in hard-hitting and fun matches that are easy to pick up and play—even if you’re getting your ass kicked. It’s easy to get caught in the “one more match” loop when Resurgence games last between 12 and 15 minutes, and it’s less likely that you’ll give up in frustration when you know you can drop in, get in a firefight, and get back in faster than you can find a weapon in the traditional battle royale. While Warzone’s gameplay itself still needs a little work—like implementing a slower time to kill, and faster animations across the board—getting back into the action so quickly almost makes up for some of its fundamental gameplay flaws.

    Ashika Island’s excellent design, along with the faster-paced, less punishing Resurgence gameplay, equates to an immensely fun experience that feels much more like Call of Duty than the traditional BR mode. It’s swift and intense, with plenty of variation that keeps me interested for lengthy game sessions broken up into short bursts. It gets to the point faster and is ideal for players who don’t have hours upon hours to devote, offering the same thrills as a typical battle royale but in a fraction of the time. Sure, Warzone 2.0 has plenty of room for improvement, but Ashika Island makes me confident the game will eventually reach the highs of its predecessor.

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    Joseph Yaden

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