Tag: Wargame

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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July 31, 2023
Frostpunk: The Board Game: The Kotaku Review

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I’ve reviewed a lot of board game adaptations of video games on this website, and with good reason: it’s the most intimate intersection of our board game and video game coverage. In nearly every case, the key consideration has been how does the board game feel compared to the original. What kind of concessions have been made, how does it differ, does it match the video game in terms of vibes, if not exact mechanics.

Frostpunk is different. It’s a hulking huge board game that seeks, in almost every meaningful way, not to adapt the video game to the tabletop, but to bring it wholesale, warts and all. It’s an ambitious undertaking if nothing else, but I’m also not quite sure if it’s worth all the effort.

And it is an effort. When I went to play the game for the first time I was at least 30 minutes into setting it up when I started to get the sweats. I had spent half an hour painstakingly punching cards, reading the manual and placing tokens on the table and it looked like I’d barely begun. Was I doing something wrong? Was I just a very slow guy? After reading this Dicebreaker story called “I spent an hour failing to set up a board game and it made me question everything” it turns out no, thankfully I’m fine, it’s the game that’s slow.

Photo: Luke Plunkett | Kotaku

Frostpunk is one of the most complex board games I have ever played, let alone set up (and that’s not just me talking, it has a 4.32/5 “weight” rating on BoardGameGeek, which is very high). There are a seemingly endless array of tokens, multiple decks of cards that look the same but aren’t and loads of different rules that bend and sway for each player. Most maddeningly, there are eight boards you have to keep track of.

Eight. Boards. That’s too many boards.

If you’re wondering why the board game version of a (relatively) straightforward city-builder needs to be so complicated, it’s because this edition of the game, for whatever reason, didn’t want to vaguely recreate the spirit of playing Frostpunk. It wants to recreate the whole damn thing, substituting tabletop components for mouse clicks. Nearly everything you can do in the video game, from the politics to the resource gathering to the quest expeditions to city-building is here, and it works much the same way it does on PC.

It is, in many ways, a staggering achievement. Once you (eventually) get on top of the game’s vast array of components, boards and rules it really does feel like you’re playing Frostpunk, the pressures and nagging responsibilities of the digital wasteland transplanted perfectly to the physical world. Indeed some of those pressures are even better here, because Frostpunk is a co-op game, meaning there can be 2-4 of you (there’s also a singleplayer mode, but I didn’t play that) taking on different jobs within the city, working together while at the same time arguing over every decision. If you thought the social and political stuff was cool in the video game, it’s great here since you’re essentially acting out a lot of those debates in the flesh.

Yet in other ways it all feels a bit pointless? The board game cuts so close to the video game’s cloth that at times you wonder why you’re bothering at all, since the video game does all this for you, without the arduous setup time or constant consultation with the rules. Sure, that’s a more solitary experience, but there’s a point where that trade-off can be worth it, and for many people—myself included—that point can come when you’re hours into a single game and find you’re not even close to finishing it.

Photo: Luke Plunkett | Kotaku

At least some of that setup is worth it. The game ships with an enormous plastic recreation of The Generator, which doesn’t just look amazing on the middle of the table but has actual gameplay use as well, since players need to drop coal into it almost every turn as they play, an act that rivals Deep Rock Galactic’s robot mining as one of the most satisfying physical actions in recent board game history.

And, in a very rare occurrence for these reviews, I want to give a shout out to the game’s documentation. For whatever reason most board game rulebooks in 2023 still suck, but Frostpunk, despite the game’s complexity and scale, never let us down.

There’s a very specific type of person out there for this game. Someone who is into Frostpunk but gets lonely playing it, or someone who has never played the video game but is intrigued by the density and politics on offer here. Sadly I was neither of those people, I found its setup time and length just too much, but like I’ve said I can at least appreciate the exhaustive design effort that went into the approach taken here, if nothing else.

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Luke Plunkett

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April 11, 2023
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!)
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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March 30, 2023
Deep Rock Galactic (The Board Game): The Kotaku Review

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Co-op shooter Deep Rock Galactic was first released on the PC back in 2018. It has a dedicated following online, and tons of loyal fans, but this is not a review of the video game. This is a review of the board game with, confusingly, the exact same name.

And the name is not the only thing the two have in common. While a lot of board game adaptations I cover here tend to worry more about the spirit of the video game more than its literal interpretation, Deep Rock Galactic’s tabletop experience, despite its shift to a turn-based system, is very similar to its digital one.

You and up to three other players take control of space dwarves who are headed into a dark cave to drill for gems. So far, so video game. You then find those caves full of alien bugs that you have to mow down. Again, just like the video game. Then you have to grab those gems and get the hell out of there. You can see where this is going.

Image: MOOD

The difference here, of course, is that in the video game this plays out in a Left 4 Dead-like frenzy, as players rush around in real-time playing a frantic shooter. The board game is much more relaxing, as it shifts to a system where players are able to take turns, and their time, working through the caves.

Deep Rock Galactic looks, and plays, like so many other modern dungeon-crawling games, from Descent to Imperial Assault. Everybody gets action points they can use to move around and interact with stuff (“interacting” includes “shooting insects in the face”), everybody gets unique weapons and powers they can use and, as expected in 2023 for a licensed game, everything—from the dwarves to the bugs even down to the stalagmites—is represented by a set of incredibly detailed, immensely satisfying miniatures.

(NOTE: The game ships in two editions. The standard only has plastic minis for the dwarves, while the pricier deluxe edition, which I played, has minis for everything).

Where this tries to do its own thing, and match the video game’s feel (if not pace) at the same time, is the way enemy actions are triggered. Rather than basing enemy moves off initiative, or having them move after all players have done so, in Deep Rock Galactic every time a dwarf concludes their move they draw an event card, and these almost always trigger an enemy spawn and/or move.

The build quality on this game is impressive. Each player card is full of recessed slots for your ammo and tokens, always a welcome (and premium) move by publishers.
Photo: Luke Plunkett

Having them appear on the board so often, and moving before all players have had a chance to react, may sound unfair but it does a fantastic job of feeling just like the video game, in that you’re being constantly swarmed by stuff crawling out of the walls. And it’s rarely unfair anyway, because each dwarf is loaded with very cool (and powerful) weapons that satisfying blow huge chunks in any insect hordes making it close enough to you.

The key consideration of the board game, again like the video game, is to balance your need to mine a certain quantity of resources versus your need to keep blasting enemies to stay alive. Lean too far towards one of those approaches and you’ll fail the mission, either because you didn’t mine the goods in time (each level has a time limit) or because…you’re all dead.

I like the video game and I like dungeon crawlers, and so for the most part I really loved playing Deep Rock Galactic. The tension between the game’s two imperatives is constant and perfectly-balanced throughout, and its combat—a combination of your powerful weapons and hordes of huge plastic miniatures you get to move around and throw off the board when dead—is some of the most fun I’ve had in ages with a game of this type.

Plus, and I know people (myself included!) are getting tired of every game shipping with a ton of minis, in this instance they’re very welcome, not just because they’re so detailed and solid but because the game also includes a MULE that you drop your little gems into, a tactile experience so wonderful it was maybe the highlight of the entire game for me.

Nothing is more enjoyable in this game than dropping gems into your MULE and popping the lid closed.
Photo: Luke Plunkett

One thing to note though is that, despite its pricepoint and genre, Deep Rock isn’t the kind of long-term tabletop experience you might be expecting. While the idea of a miniatures-heavy dungeon crawler may conjure expectations of a days-long campaign, Deep Rock Galactic is actually just a collection of standalone missions that can be tackled in an hour or so depending on how many players are taking part (another cool feature of the “bad guys go at the end of every player’s turn” system is that it scales perfectly to the number of humans at the table).

While there is technically a campaign—just a brief to do all the missions in order without dying—and it’s not a game built around narrative, it’s still a bit weird pulling out such a huge box and setting it up for what’s essentially a mid-length session game.

That’s not a problem, just something to note ahead of time if you were thinking of picking this up or playing it. You should also know that, despite being a very literal adaptation of a video game license, this requires absolutely no familiarity with the digital version of Deep Rock Galactic whatsoever. So long as you know you’re a space dwarf drilling and gems while also shooting bugs, you’re good to go.

About my only real criticism of the game is that it’s documentation is some of the most frustrating I’ve encountered in a while, lacking in a proper quick start guide and splitting its important information between separate rules and mission books, which made our first mission a very slow slog. Indeed it took us forever to find out how the enemy system even worked (pretty important info!), so if you’re playing this and have the time I’d 100% recommend watching an online rules explainer beforehand.

Here is a very strange warning: these are the sharpest minis I have ever encountered.
Photo: Luke Plunkett

There’s nothing revolutionary about Deep Rock Galactic. As I’ve alluded to above it’s another dungeon crawler, another licensed adaptation and another game that (version depending) has a ton of minis. But fans of the video game will find a tabletop conversion that faithfully converts the co-op experience into one more conducive to drinking beer and being in the room at the same time, while everyone else will just find a solid night’s gaming blowing up space bugs and looting some treasure.

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Luke Plunkett

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January 18, 2023