ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 162. never alone)

Fabulously Olivier · October 23, 2023

I actually own Wargroove 1 and have literally never played it. It actually intimidates me because my only Advanced Wars experience was Days of Ruin, and that game kicked my ass.

Integrity · October 23, 2023

wargroove eases you in better than days of ruin does, and has some decent difficulty options - i definitely give it a full-throated recommendation

Integrity · October 24, 2023

BATTLE BROTHERS (OVERHYPE, 2017)

Finished: 23/10/23. Playtime: 656.1 hours.

I don't know how to begin talking about Battle Brothers. It's in a similar boat to Dungeons of Dredmor and Monster Hunter World, where it's a deep relic of a long-gone part of my life that has persisted for untold years, and which I have attempted time and again to muster the courage to finish it out and been walled out time and again. I played Battle Brothers through my grad school years, always kinda-trying to get those deep achievement runs, never quite. I played Battle Brothers through Covid lockdowns, thinking this would be the time to really knuckle down, never was quite. It's been the central star of my strategy games thread on the Discord server I think four distinct times, and I have at least one failed Let's Play on this very site. Battle Brothers, in many ways, has been my white whale for a long time.

First up: Battle Brothers is one of the single finest games ever made. It's a ballbuster, to be sure, but nothing I have ever played has captured the raw tactical depth of this little shitty mercenary game. The only thing to even come close is Harebrained Schemes' Battletech, and I say close for a reason. You're put in control of your mercenary company, in a world that sucks the rawest of ass, and you're told to make it work. You'll lose guys, you'll lose companies, but you'll keep coming back. The worlds procedurally generate in fun ways, and the sheer breadth of ways to approach squad building is unparalleled in the TRPG sphere. There's no plot to bog you down or to give context to things except for the flavor text in the world and the importance you assign to your little pawns. Make it work.

How do I even address the gameplay? It's a TRPG, clearly you're all familiar with the type, but it's a TRPG built of utter mastercraft. Every enemy faction requires distinctly different approaches to handle, and the way you build out your squad is inevitably going to leave you with a hole, somewhere, that you have to patch up with some advanced tacticizing. Until the deep, deep postgame, all of these ways to build out a squad also, themselves, play differently, some to absolutely bonkers degrees. This is a game where the core systems are strong enough that you can play a midrange skirmish composition, and that's by far the hardest element for a tactical game to represent. However you want to play Battle Brothers, you can - but the particular Brothers and kit you get offered might not be conducive. Don't try to force the square peg in.

A campaign of Battle Brothers generally starts you off with three-to-five guys, where you can field twelve at once. You spend a few dozen in-game days scrabbling for any work you can do, building your guys up, hiring shit guys to die in the place of your good ones, and then your Plan begins to take off in earnest, whatever it is. You go through a midgame surge, acquiring talent and kit at an accelerating rate, until you hit the crisis around two or three months into the game. The crisis represents some worldstate-altering threat, such as a feudal war or a massive Waaagh! from the edges of the map, that you can sell your talents to attempt to resolve and win. Once you do, you'll be presented with the option to retire and register a company score. If you don't, you can keep going through another crisis every eighty or so days, as the world devolves into madness, essentially forever. It wasn't always this way - time once was that things would get burnt down during the battles in these crises and never be rebuilt, so every world was doomed to eventually not have enough food for you to feed the company. This has since been changed, I think for the better, but it was an interesting design decision at the time, and I think eventually would betray Battle Brothers' singular Achilles' heel.

I've outlined the flow of the game in order to help me communicate what an obscene amount of labor 100% Battle Brothers represents. There's a solid load (a hundred and one) total, but many of them are incremental steps that you'll inevitably get in a serious run trying to get any of the real ones. The big three, for length, which I only got all of today in a quick flurry, are to survive for 365 days on a Veteran (the original, punishing normal difficulty) campaign, amass 250,000 gold pieces, and accrue 8,000 renown. I want to point back to the previous paragraph, that the intended gameflow basically ends after about a hundred days - seventy or eighty to spawn the crisis, and a month to resolve it, give or take. I got these three in a row, within about two hours of each other, at the end of one final campaign which I started back in July, and have played fairly regularly since. This is an endurance test, no two ways about it.

It's not even the nastiest endurance test, though. There's four total crises: the noble war, the holy war, the greenskin invasion, and the undead plague. One is selected at random for the first one, then the other three iterate after a 60-80 day pause, and this continues until you've seen all four, then one is chosen at random to be the next first one and it loops. Savior requires you to complete three crises, on the same file, on ironman. These days, there's easier difficulties to use. When I did it, the only difficulty was fuck-you. If you follow in my footsteps, I strongly recommend you don't go on Veteran.

This is where the DLC becomes unignorable. Battle Brothers got the honor of being the source of one of the most pathetic review bombing campaigns I've ever seen, years ago, when the developers made it through early access and released a feature-complete, enjoyable product, and said they were moving on from it to pursue another project. Some dipshits started a downvote bomb campaign on Steam (to wild success, it peaked at 9% positive reviews falling from a previous level of 89%) to express to the developers that it was unacceptable to release a finished product and not to support it with later paid DLC, which continues to boggle my mind to this day. Sic semper gamers. Fuck the load of them. In any case, eventually three DLC packs would come out - Beasts & Exploration, Warriors of the North, and Blazing Deserts. Two of them are fantastic and beyond reproach, and Beasts & Exploration is merely good and worth your money. Each one, if nothing else, adds fantastic mechanics and terrible achievements.

Beasts & Exploration came first. It adds a host of new beasties and things-in-the-dark for you to fight, and these are a mixed bag. Some are very interesting fights, with Webknechte fill out an early-midgame monster niche that was sorely needed, and I hold the controversial opinion that Alp fights are some of the most engaging in TRPG history. Hexen and the similarly-timed-but-actually-free-not-in-this-DLC Lindwurm are ass, though. The problem with Beasts & Exploration, though, is that it represented Battle Brothers' first toe-dip into post-crisis content, and Battle Brothers is not well-suited to it at all. The expansion retools the Black Monolith, the previous "endgame" location, and adds the Kraken and the Rachegeist. These fights are Battle Brothers at their worst, and each one has an achievement tied to it. I won't drag the game too hard for them, though, given as they're essentially Final Fantasy superbosses, and really I'm the one owning myself by expecting myself to do them.

Warriors of the North is the runaway standout. In the original game, you start with a defensive Brother, an offensive Brother, and an archerial Brother. Warriors adds Origins, which give you significantly different starting laydowns and often campaign-altering rule changes. The peasant militia can field up to 16 men in combat, but cannot recruit from any of the "advanced" backgrounds such as witch hunters, hedge knights, or disinherited noblemen. The lone wolf start gives you a guy who starts at level 5 in midgame gear, but if he dies the campaign ends. Shit like that. It's a fantastic expansion, and it adds the worst achievement in the game. Not its superboss, the Ijirok, no. That's actually a pretty good fight. The cultist start gives you a set of cultists (wow) and some quiet new mechanics to let you get more cultists and to sacrifice guys to Davkul for infernal endarkenment. Every 21 to 50 days, give or take, you'll get that sacrifice event. Afterwards, every cultist in your party has a 50% chance to have their enlightenment level go up by one. You need to get a brother with Enlightenment Six to pop the achievement, essentially savescumming to win six consecutive cointosses over the course of, at minimum, hours of doing nothing. That's what I did, baby.

Blazing Deserts adds a southern reach to the map complete with Arabesque city-states and a holy war crisis for you to choose sides on. It's also a great expansion, and it hugely fleshes out the weapon design space for the better while including a bunch of generally-sidegrade cosmetic alternatives to northern kit. It also adds the Retinue, allowing you to customize out-of-combat bonuses for your company. It rules, completely... and also adds the Lorekeeper. The Lorekeeper is a huge postgame fight with a ton of spells and magical mechanics, it sucks ass, and it bugged out and softlocked on the last 5% of the Lorekeeper's health for me. This is my one instance of cheating: after taking an hour picking that fucking fight apart, I gave Josh Groban 999 action points, had him solo the fight in a single turn, and reloaded to before I did it. You don't need a single save to do all the postgame fights, you just need to do it once for Steam.

One insanely long campaign and all of the worst fights in the game later, I still think back fondly on Battle Brothers. Not even the most tedious and most annoying parts of the game all experienced in sequence were enough to tarnish its legacy. It's genuinely in my top five all-time games, and it's got a Switch release if that's more your speed with a pretty slick interface. However, the final point I'm here for has nothing to do with Battle Brothers itself. That aforehintedat "next project" was finally revealed this year, and Menace looks absolutely fully fucking sick. I swore to myself, with the Menace trailer, that I would pack up Battle Brothers by the end of the year and, by God, I've done it.

Parrhesia · October 24, 2023

I've had an interesting experience with Battle Brothers. It's the kind of game that just claims me for weeks at a time, but only every once in a while, to the point where I always think I haven't really given it that much time or as much attention as it deserves, then I check and see I have 152 logged hours and the legendary company achievement. The two biggest saves were from relatively early in the development; I sank maybe 40 hours into an early release file, and my legendary company was pre-DLC (or maybe post-Beasts). I feel like the time will come when it claims me for another 25ish hours down the track, once or twice more.

It just has such a delightful flow to it, the ebb and flow of running the company, searching for contracts, making regrettable hires, ranging out into the wilderness trying to find bandits and not finding any and swearing and reloading. Like Mount and Blade at its best, but all the time. It's just so, so smooth provided you never touch super-endgame content, ever, ever. Just do the crises. Ideally on Beginner/Veteran. Don't get fooled into thinking you need to pull off deranged Teutonic min-maxing, either, the kind of strats that those higher-difficulty things demand. And then, bizarrely, for such a punishing game, it's really chill. You can roll with the punches.

Anyone sufficiently grognardy to sign up to a Fire Emblem fan forum should buy Battle Brothers.

Edited October 24, 2023 by Parrhesia

lenticular · October 24, 2023

On 10/21/2023 at 7:15 PM, Integrity said:

There's one more for getting all S-ranks, which are largely divorced from turncount (unlike the first) and entirely based on finishing the side-objectives.

Oh, that's good to hear. I quite liked the first Wargroove but I ran out of steam on it before I finished, and the way that the S ranks worked was a big part of what turned it into a slog and made me give up on it. I had thought I probably wouldn't bother with the sequel, but this is making me think that maybe I should do.

15 hours ago, Integrity said:

BATTLE BROTHERS (OVERHYPE, 2017)

How had I never even heard of this game until now? Seriously. This sounds exactly like my sort of thing, and somehow it had managed to completely pass me by? WTF, 2017 Lenticular? Why weren't you paying attention to notice this? This might be just what I was looking for to cover my currently being on a break from my ridiculous on-again off-again torrid love affair with Baldur's Gate 3.

15 hours ago, Integrity said:

Battle Brothers got the honor of being the source of one of the most pathetic review bombing campaigns I've ever seen

That's a pretty high claim. I've seen some really pathetic review bombing campaigns. I'll believe it when I see it.

15 hours ago, Integrity said:

when the developers made it through early access and released a feature-complete, enjoyable product, and said they were moving on from it to pursue another project. Some dipshits started a downvote bomb campaign on Steam (to wild success, it peaked at 9% positive reviews falling from a previous level of 89%) to express to the developers that it was unacceptable to release a finished product and not to support it with later paid DLC

Well shit. You weren't even kidding. How did we reach a point where having games parceled up into multiple DLCs wasn't only accepted but expected to the point where that happens when someone doesn't do it? Jesus wept.

Integrity · October 24, 2023

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

Oh, that's good to hear. I quite liked the first Wargroove but I ran out of steam on it before I finished, and the way that the S ranks worked was a big part of what turned it into a slog and made me give up on it. I had thought I probably wouldn't bother with the sequel, but this is making me think that maybe I should do.

wargroove 1, while i loved it, is absolutely a game that turns into a slog. there's just a bit too much to the S-ranks and the puzzles, and way too much to arcade, and even the campaign drags on at points (the Floran maps in particular). wargroove 2 is a far, far tighter game, both just basically to play-and-complete as well as to 100%, compared to its predecessor. if you liked wargroove 1 for the most part but it ground your will to keep going down, the sequel may just do enough to keep you in the game. grab it over the xmas sale, i reckon

Integrity · October 27, 2023

HALFWAY (ROBOTALITY, 2014)

Finished: 27/10/23. Playtime: 11.1 hours.

You know what I've been too much of here recently? Positive. Wargroove this, Great Ace Attorney that, several nostalgia trips, one of my favorite games ever. Eeeugh. Makes me wanna hurl. So, anyway, I went back in the catalogue of Wargroove 2's co-devs to find they'd made two games: 2014's Halfway, and 2019's Pathway.

A year ago (to the day, that's a weird coincidence) I brought up the concept of WAR to define the wild and abiding neutrality I felt about Soul Calibur 6, and I didn't really elaborate beyond a link, as I was still figuring this whole process out. See, baseball is the land of all of the coolest and stupidest ways to measure stats, and Wins Above Replacement is the absolute best. It's a nebulous concept that seeks to define how many wins a player contributes to a team as compared to if they were to go on strike and be replaced by a "replacement player" instead. Nobody agrees on how it's calculated, it's calculated differently for multiple positions even by the same source, and even what the "replacement player" does isn't agreed upon. It's the greatest statistical measurement in the history of professional sports. Halfway is the "replacement player" against whom XCOM has a hefty WAR.

The entire game takes play isometrically in a big ol' spaceship that's gone derelict. Your one crewman awakened from cryosleep becomes a party of (eventually) eight, from whom you generally deploy four per mission. The campaign isn't long, registering a mighty 27 mandatory missions with 7 optional ones, most of which take ten or so minutes to bite through. Your guys are fairly simple, being defined as health and aim (both obvious) and agility, which is a horrible mishmash of movement speed and hit avoidance. Each guy also has an active and a passive skill unique to them, which we'll get into momentarily. Progression is... well, weird. It's entirely gear-based, and you get nothing for killing enemies besides the right to loot whatever chests they were guarding. There's generally about four tiers of weapon and five of armor, and the only way to buff your guys' stats is via stimpacks. Stimpacks function as statboosters, but with two twists that I think completely thunderfuck the system when taken together. First is that any given unit can only eat five stimpacks, in total, without "suffering dramatic consequences". I did not test this to figure out what it meant. Second is that there are rare dual- or even triple-stat boosters that you can find, which means that eating five basic one-stat boosters does gimp someone's future potential. On top of that, not every stat is equal when one is "the ability to do damage" and both others are "not that", particularly as your ability to tank damage goes up significantly with better armor and your ability to hit enemies does not go up significantly with gear, moreso your ability to do damage when hitting. I ended the game with a pile of health and agility stimpacks just gathering dust because I didn't want to burn stimpack points on those stats when I might find more aiming stimpacks - or, God, multi-stat stimpacks - to fill out those capacities.

To get into the balance of the game, which is weird and I think deserves talking about, I think a brief description of combat's in order. Every unit has a two-action economy, where your choices are basically move, shoot, skill, and item. You can use any combination, in any order, or double up if you like, with the only noteworthy part of this being that you can spend both action points on a single shot to boost its hit rate significantly. Accuracy is in the absolute worst place possible, with a point-blank assault rifle shot on an uncovered opponent capping out at 58% for your main character early on, and every tile of distance and anything in the way degrading that significantly. Even in the deepest lategame, my absolute marksman I had pumped every possible aim statbooster into who was using a peak sniper rifle against enemies standing three tiles away in the open was hitting the mid-80s for hit. Enemies, meanwhile, don't have any trouble hitting you. Early on, bulk is fairly even - a sniper rifle can generally one- or two-shot enemies, while the ones will go down in 2-3 assault rifle shots and the twos will go down in 4-5. You're, on the other hand, losing guys to 2-3 enemy hits. There's no permadeath, and units who go down are revived at minimal health as soon as the fighting's over. Enemy bulk massively outstrips yours as the game goes on, with some enemies taking 4+ sniper rounds to bring down, but they don't tend to occur in significant numbers so you can at least pile on.

First up on the chopping block of balance is the weaponry. Everything fits fairly neatly into close-range, assault rifle, and sniper rifle. Each class has its own ambiguous 'accuracy curve' whereby e.g. sniper rifles have a sweet spot and fall off if the enemy is too close or too far, and close-range weapons have a dramatic 0% hit at five tiles away but ramp up hugely with each tile closer. It's not a bad system, theoretically, were it communicated better, but it plays very poorly with enemy bulk. When enemies take multiple hits from even the close-range weapons, and your guys are relatively fragile, you cannot pull off XCOM flanking maneuvers. A few low rolls (weapons have shockingly huge damage variance as well) on your shotgun and you've left a guy inevitably in poor or no cover and spent turns to not remove a pawn from the board. The comparatively-safe-and-boring 'just get in cover and snipe em' strategy works better and is more straightforward. One may note that this is true for most games - obviously the close-range aggressive strategy is higher risk and higher reward - but due to the high enemy bulk and large variance on your damage output in a turn, the close-range aggressive strategy is higher risk and at the very best equivalent reward. Your shotgunner can flank and, with a high roll, kill an enemy in a shot. With the same roll, your sniper would have killed an enemy in a shot and not had to reposition, so can do it again. Given that the enemy AI is very simple, either closing to attack you if you're not closing the distance or trying to make space if you get in close, you're almost never incentivized to make bold plays.

The skills play into this, as well. Most are extremely forgettable, though I'll give a big shoutout to your main character, force-deployed on every map, having a skill that lets him bypass the RNG once per few turns. I think that's an absolutely fantastic skill to give to the forced unit, beyond reproach. Three are pretty middling and I won't even address them. One is insanely shit and is going to get its own paragraph. The remaining three will get some time here. The fourth guy you get, Josh, has the ability to drain an enemy's entire shield without rolling to hit. This is decent, at worst it's a free shot that always hits, provided it's the first attack you levy at an enemy, but really underwhelming considering that every enemy is health-heavy on the health-shield spectrum for the entire game, and you're never given the ability to see how many health or shield points an enemy actually has beyond a bar showing what proportion are left. If you make the mistake of benching Josh for the middle 20 chapters of the game because he's pretty bad, though, in the penultimate mission you get attacked by enemies with approximately 200 shields and about eight or ten health. There's only one map after this, so it's completely feasible that you simply whiff what would be Josh's finest hour, and I think that's awesome. The final two skills come on the final two units you get, and they're completely fucking obscene compared to everything else in the game. One is the ability to paralyze an enemy for two turns with a five-turn cooldown, no saving throw necessary, she just has to be able to see the guy. Just from a sheer action economy perspective, ignoring enemy bulk being pretty high and enemies being dangerous, this is obviously nutty - trading a single action for four of the enemy's. The other one is, simply, for a single action, Jenna dumps her magazine and attacks every single enemy in sight. I rammed every aiming stimpack into her, gave her the biggest sniper rifle I had, and had such spawns as "two guys combined to kill a single enemy in three total actions, while Jenna killed six of the seven guys she attacked with her first action and reloaded with her second". It's completely busted. Her passive is even a higher crit chance with sniper rifles, making those juicy oneshots all the more common. There's literally no reason, on aggregate, to not deploy Nia and Jenna anytime you can deploy two units.

Dr. Schaffer is the holder of the final - well, fifth - skill, and a fellow so odious I'm dedicating a section of the post to him. As a unit, he's terrible. He's got poor stats, and his passive skill increases his armor's shield at a time when you don't have significantly-shielded armors yet. His active skill takes the cake, letting him spend an action to reveal all enemies on the map. Don't let that trick you into thinking it's good, because enemies spawn around you for arena fights, never hide from you, and are only rarely even out of your line of sight. In the deeply rare occasion that they are, the camera still pans to their locations when their turns begin. Dr. Schaffer's skill is absolutely, truly, worthless. The action you spend using it would be better spent, in almost all circumstances, giving a magazine of ammo from him to someone else. Compounding this is that Dr. Schaffer, as a character, is the insufferable genius scientist type, abrasive and rude, and Halfway does not have nearly the quality of writing nor time to breathe to give the archetype any payoff. He's just an asshole, all the time, to everyone, he's called on it a single time, and he's force-deployed in approximately a third of the maps after he's introduced. He would be bottom-of-the-barrel writing tier for Symphony of War.

The funny thing, though, is that I didn't dislike my time with Halfway. It annoyed me periodically, I'll remember almost nothing about it in six months, and when examined critically the systems fall apart with spectacular ease, but I still managed to enjoy myself. It's pretty breezy, it's not terribly difficult, and the writing is forgettable in a kinda-bad but not super-bad way. For the, what, four bucks I paid for it, I'm still pretty satisfied. It was a Game. This is what 5/10 review scores ought to be for.

It's not hard to platinum, either. One run through the campaign is guaranteed to get you all but four achievements. One is to do all seven optional missions, and you get these by just talking to your guys between missions. I got them all without thinking about it. One is to kill 500 enemies in total. I left the first run of the campaign at, to my recollection, 387. About a third of a second campaign, done in about two hours, polished that off. The remaining two are secret achievements, and the only guide to getting them on Steam is in French. Good news is my buddy Wyatt's sister speaks fluent French, and she sent me back translations for them. Networking is important! I dedicate this post to her. One of them is for getting a Portal reference (in fucking 2014? yeesh) in the map where you raid Josh's apartment. The other, which I had to get on my for-kills rerun, is for letting a certain amount of dialogue play out without clicking to fast-forward, only clicking once all the words are on the screen. That's psychotic, but also pretty funny. Sorry I read fast, geez.

Integrity · October 27, 2023

god bless one of the tank mechanic simulator devs put in one final patch to put toggles for the halloween/christmas events so the achievements would always be gettable as the team moves on to other projects. that's officially on the shelf

Integrity · November 4, 2023

PATHWAY (ROBOTALITY, 2019)

Finished: 4/11/23. Playtime: 54.8 hours.

Ah, so this is where it came from.

I've now played Robotality's entire gameography in the strange 3-1-2 order. Wargroove 2 was absolutely fantastic, a shining example of its genre. Halfway was weird and raw, as you can see two posts above this, but I didn't hate it. Surely, there must be some kind of step between Halfway and Wargroove 2? Well, hey, there is.

Pathway is an odd game. It's a cover-based shooter in the vein of neo-XCOM, but the game plays out mostly just like FTL with a splash of the progression mechanics of Darkest Dungeon. You put together a squad of three from a roster of up to sixteen unique combinations of traits and kit options, and go out into north Africa to fight Nazis and find shit. You're dropped into a branch-and-node map with strategic (fuel, supplies) and tactical (ammo, supplies) resources, and told to get to the end. Fight Nazis and zombies, see weird shit, get random event resolutions based on the backgrounds of your chosen three guys, and so on and so on. There's five Adventures each of one to three Acts. Progression is permanent - experience your guys earn, and loot they equip, stay on them when they return to the roster to be redeployed in a subsequent Adventure. It's a very tidy little progression system that incentivizes you to find a group of guys you want to main, but the wrench in the works is that you cannot deploy a fourth member, but your party size is four. The fourth comes from a recruitment event randomly seeded into the node-and-branch map, and can be anyone on your roster, coming in with their current level and skills and kit. This means that even if you use the same three guys all game, you'll get a taste of most or all of the roster just through having a fourth guy being better than not having a fourth guy. It's a strangely fantastic decision for a game like this.

The core combat loop also takes some daring risks that I think would really betray their future in Wargroove 2. The biggest change to the accepted cover shooter format is that every attack made against a target who is not in cover automatically hits. End of story. Shotgun at max range? Accuracy-debuffed disintegrator? Doesn't matter. 100% hit outside of cover. Your aim stat doesn't even matter. Inside cover, things work around a baseline of 50% hit and go up and down from that - a good sniper can get into the 80s, while a disintegrator can sink into the 30s. Out of cover? 100%. All the time. I think it's genuinely a fantastic way to do the genre, honestly. The core gameplay loop of Pathway feels amazing. It goes both ways, too - if you leave a guy out because you overextended for a kill or fucked up a positioning, the AI has 100% hit on that flanking shot. In all those 55 hours I was only almost-fucked by pure RNG one single time. Everything else was a matter of me messing up or going for variable plays and failing to compensate.

Balance, it should be said, feels a little funky. Pathway has an actual relationship with armor that most games lack - shotguns are completely walled out by it while they shred unarmored targets, for instance - and while this is superb, the actual progression of the game doesn't match up to it quite perfectly. Since knives and other melee attacks ignore armor (as they should, being flak jackets and the like), if you want a proper all-rounder to fight both Nazis (often-armored, lower health) and zombies (rarely armored, high health), you gravitate towards the psychotic shotgun-and-knife kit. Sniper rifles end up falling in a weird place where they're just not very good at anything except zone control, in a game that deeply rewards decisive movement and removing pawns from the board. Pistols and assault rifles both have the capability to take multiple enemies off the board instantly, but you have to get higher gear or stack modifiers to get it to work. The shotgun and knife combo, in its singular Brazilian representative, is just the best of all worlds. That isn't to say anyone is useless. I was discovering new combinations of guys and new uses for guys all the way up through my final run of the game. I do think some are significantly better, but there's no composition that couldn't clear an adventure except for maybe taking all the non-Pereira shotgunners and a sniper into a lategame Nazi run and having no real answer to armor. Even so, Omar can flex into assault rifles and do enough of a job, so it's really on you for doing that.

Still, despite any criticisms I have, the raw Vibes of the game carry it hard enough for a whole single clear without any real thought. I found this to be a fantastically underrated little strategy game, easy to recommend to anyone who likes the Cover Shooter style of putting pawns in places to kill other pawns, and also easily recommendable to anyone who likes that criminally-underrated world-at-peace 1930s killin-Nazis vibe. It's basically, at a review, FTL-In-Syria with all the great and bad that entails.

Do not 100% Pathway, for a single reason. The game is five adventures, spread across eleven acts, with an act being a screen of node-and-branch map to explore. Going through it once on the default difficulty and then once on the top difficulty shows you everything the game has to offer, and you can take off with 21-odd hours played and say that hey, Pathway was fun as hell, I should recommend it to my friends.

Failing to abide by that restriction opens you up to Pathway's hell. Very much in the spirit of FTL, there are about thirteen random events that can only spawn during certain adventures (or even certain acts thereof) that each count for an achievement. There is no guarantee that one spawns even if, for instance, it only can spawn in 2-3. You can claim every single node in 2-3 and not find it, repeatedly. I have read testimony of someone who combed 4-2 for a single event ten times before he found it. I wasn't quite so unlucky, but it is beyond frustrating to go in with no other reason than to comb for an event you don't get. Some of them are even random outcomes of common events, so you can happily get the event early on, not get the achievement outcome, and then reset because the event won't recur in this run. It's torturous, and it doesn't even represent the worst part. Back in Pathway 1.0, the zombie faction was a proper swarm where you had tons of enemies to fight all the time, or so I'm told. As such, the final Nazi-killing achievement was fixed at 1,000 Nazis, and the final zombie-killing achievement was fixed at 1,500 zombies. These were not adjusted as the zombie faction was completely retooled to not be terrible to fight, and while they're in a great place now, they only occur in numbers similar to the Nazis but in fewer maps. After completing every single random event, it took two days of idly grinding Adventure 5, with maps of 7-13 zombies each, to get up from the at-the-time 350 to the final 1,500.

After that is something genuinely interesting. Pathway includes a Hardcore mode, which has you go from adventure to adventure without any return to the deploy screen or any ability to reselect guys. You pick three, drop, and your supplies are constant as you go from 1-1 to 5-2. It was actually a fantastic little run, where I ran the entire gamut from it's joever to we're barack at least twice, and crunched through it on my first try. It's honestly, genuinely, hard. I loved it. I went with Omar, Natalya, and Miguel, and found Dr. Chandra as my fourth. If I did it again, I'd absolutely drop Miguel for Pereira. Little spot of advice for you. Spec Natalya hard into disintegrators, too - I took her pistols, and while pistols are fantastic, having four party members completely reliant on bullets was a recipe for running completely out of ammo in the third adventure.

All-in-all, I can only strongly recommend Pathway while strongly cautioning against 100%ing it. It's a fantastic game, for what it is, and what it is is a ~30ish hour tactical RPG. You can grab it off sale for $15, or I'm sure get it for far cheaper in the upcoming fall/winter sale cycles. I genuinely implore you to do so. I think Pathway has been critically slept on.

Integrity · November 5, 2023

GHOST TRICK: PHANTOM DETECTIVE (CAPCOM, 2010)

Finished: 5/11/23. Playtime: 9.8 hours.

It's time for the Shu Takumi sweep. I guess I can just call myself a fan.

What's there to write about Ghost Trick? If you've played, you know. If you haven't, you ought. Anything beyond the most basic summary - your two buttons are Ghost and Trick - gets into story spoiler territory, and I don't even want to allude to how it goes in a post like this. It starts fun, warms up fast, hits a smooth cruise, and wraps up perfectly. As a game, it's on the easy side, but there's enough to keep you engaged while the story pours into you, and I'd rather a game like this err easy than hard. Amazing little package. Extremely easy recommendation.

Peanuts to 100%, too. 21/30 are all but guaranteed as you play the game - 18 progression achievements and 3 for pressing the game's two buttons, Ghost and Trick, certain numbers of times. I hit the last one in the final chapter. Five are for acing individual segments of the game without resetting the puzzles, trivial with a guide or a replay of those individual sections. Two are for putting the two puzzles that can be softlocked into their softlock states. One is for completing three 5x5 sliding tile puzzles, making this game literally impossible to 100% for like two-thirds of gamerkind, but fortunately I'm built different. The last one is for getting all the others. Peanuts.

Integrity · November 6, 2023

CATS HIDDEN IN BALI (TRAVELLIN CATS, 2023)

Finished: 30/9/23. Playtime: 16 minutes.

Steam has a thing whereby small enough indie games have to go through a validation period before they'll count for profile metrics like Games Completed. Took a month, but the new Travellin Cats outing just did. The guy's getting more complex little interactions to click on while you hunt your cats with each iteration, which has been fun to see. The next one's out in a week. Look for cats and click on them.

lenticular · November 9, 2023

THE ELEPHANT COLLECTION (WONDERFUL ELEPHANT, 2023)

Finished: 9 November 2023. Play time: 10 hours.

You remember Kongregate. That's not a question; that's a statement. I don't know who you are, dear reader, but the fact that you are here on this forum reading this thread tells me that you play video games and that you spend too much time on the Internet. That you choose a web forum over more modern platforms like Reddit or Discord tells me that you're probably at or about a certain age. Combine these different facts and it seems overwhelmingly likely that you remember Kongregate.

You probably also remember the weird blue elephant and some of the games that it featured in. Maybe This Is The Only Level or maybe Achievement Unlocked, for instance. This game, released a few days ago, is a compilation of 10 different remastered Flash games from Kongregate, all starring that elephant. Hence the name.

There's obviously a lot of nostalgia bait going on here. You only need to look through all of the reviews on Steam to see just how many of them talk about having played them back in the day. But is it actually any good? Well... kind of. The games all feel like the decade-old Flash games that they originally were. They're about as simple -- in both gameplay and graphics -- as you'd expect. But if you're looking for something pretty quick and mindless then it's a pretty fun time. I can't really say I'd recommend it to anyone who doesn't have any nostalgia for them, though.

The achievements are pretty decent. They range from "you get them just for playing through the game" through "do a specific thing that you would only ever do for the achievement" (like having an elephant play Call Me Maybe on a piano, for instance) to "actually kinda tricky". The two hardest ones, without a doubt, are beating Run Elephant Run on its hardest difficulty setting, and doing a speedrun of This Is The Only Level Too in three and a half minutes. They weren't soul-destroyingly difficult or anything, but both took quite a few tries and a fair degree of perseverance. Overall, getting 100% achievements made me feel that I had seen pretty much everythign that game had to offer me, btu without outstaying their welcome and making me do obnoxious busywork. Which is pretty much what I want from a set of achievements, honestly.

And that is my E game completed. Only J and Y remain for me.

Integrity · November 9, 2023

haha hell yes kongregate

ping · November 9, 2023

4 hours ago, lenticular said:

And that is my E game completed. Only J and Y remain for me.

Too bad that You Have To Burn The Robe doesn't seem to be on steam :lol:

Integrity · November 12, 2023

LIKE A DRAGON GAIDEN: THE MAN WHO ERASED HIS NAME (RYU GA GOTOKU, WEDNESDAY)

Finished: 11/11/23. Playtime: 35.5 hours.

Gaiden, hereafter, is a weird game. In many ways, I think it's the worst modern outing RGG have put together, and possibly even worse than the Ishin! remake, but it's an extremely hot and cold game. Gaiden, for better and worse (and worse), never commits the sin of mediocrity. When it sucks, it sucks out loud. When it lands, it's great. That makes it difficult to approach in a nice, simple, summed-up format, but I think it's fair enough to say that I often enjoyed my time with Gaiden, but I do not look back on it with any particular fondness, and if the next main game didn't have the absolute meathook of being set on my native Oahu, I'd be seriously reconsidering purchasing it.

To get it out of the way first and foremost, Kiryu's new Agent style. It's a slow burn style that relies on upgrades and practice to a huge degree, and making it the only usable style for the first chapter of the game is a preposterously bad decision. That first chapter generally cannot decide who it's for - if the game is for newcomers who started with the JRPG and haven't played the brawlers, then the first chapter has a very non-straightforward brawling style and ramps up the difficulty too quickly; if the game assumes the player has played the brawler games, then it's even more railroaded and slow-burning than the first chapter of Kiwami. The other huge problem with Agent is that it's designed as a massive crowd control style, with the grapple fully upgraded being able to knock out a dozen+ guys in a single use, and the game's encounter design is perpetually designed around this. Enemy pods get into the 20+ guy level by the midgame, and by the endgame you're tackling fights like the climactic Tojo Clan fight in Yakuza 5 on the regular.

The game becomes a lot more palatable once Kiryu decides to just fight as the Dragon of Dojima again, but Agent never stops impacting the game. Kiryu's got a new grapple that functions basically like Batman's grapple in the Arkham games. It's essentially magic, and Kiryu high-wire swinging creeps into the plot and has the permanent presence of random items in the world being grappled instead of found on the ground. The grapple, and to a lesser extent the other gadgets, represents a swerve out of traditional Yakuza stakes to Kiryu becoming, even more than before, essentially just a superhero with super gadgets. Random minibosses in the first chapter shooting you with laser rifles is, apparently, the exact point in the scale of ridiculousness that I can no longer stomach it.

The most scathing thing I can say about the plot of Gaiden is that it feels like the cool Agent Kiryu reveal moment in 7 was written first, and then this game was entirely retroactively conceived of and written to fill out the lead-up to that cool reveal. I'm not going to go too deep into spoilers since it literally came out on Wednesday, but while being written to fill out a fun moment in 7 I felt like it stepped massively on 7's toes and represented Kiryu's ascension to a true Crime Jesus. I did not like it. The half of the plot that was filler (and it really is filler) starring Akame was by far the better half. Hell, to put some credit on the game, Akame was a genuine highlight.

If the playtime didn't tip you off, Gaiden is both a short game (18 hours to credits doing almost all substories) and a game that you don't have to 100% to 100%. There's still a Completion Log, but you don't get it until about a fourth of the way through the game, and fleshing it out isn't even close to required. On top of that, the game doesn't have anything like Climax Battles to pad things out, and doesn't even have NG+ or Legend difficulty in any capacity. One time through the game and then cleanup and you're done, and the cleanup isn't even particularly bad. Even the substories aren't actually required, though I did all but one of them anyway (I never found the seventh golden ball...) just to see. I'll touch on them, though. The remaining things you need to do for completion fall roughly into minigames, coliseum, and hostessing.

First up, the substories are fairly anemic compared to previous entries, unsurprisingly given the length of the game, and are all offered in huge batches from Akame like the request board in Yagami Detective Agency. There isn't a single one to stumble upon in the world, which is a huge shame. The actual content of them ranges from decent to quite good, with a particular shoutout to a crossover episode where Kaito and Higashi accidentally work the same case as Kiryu while trying to expand their operations into Osaka. It's a charming little skit. The worldly substories are replaced by Stroll-n-Patrol requests, which are the Ubisoft map design philosophy [derogatory] applied to an RGG framework. It's occasionally funny but mostly just feels like the busywork it is, and falls badly into the RGG standard of multiple levels of request for one person unlocked by walking around the corner from them and having no other gating. Either timegate it or just let me take the next request while I'm standing there! Jeez.

You do have to splash into minigames to get all the achievements, but nothing in the actual Completion Log is necessary or even really worth doing. The notable minigame completion rewards are e.g. completing the hardest table of mahjong rewards 2,500 skill points, when a single substory can be worth up to five digits of them. They're a nice bonus if you're doing the minigames anyway, but there's no real reason to fill out the log besides saying you filled out the log. Bafflingly, the only minigames that have associated achievements besides "play it one time" are pool and darts. Darts you just have to win a single round against anyone, which is also an early Stroll-n-Patrol. Pool you have to beat the one-shot challenge on Normal (the second difficulty from four) and holy christ. I'm decent at video game pool (ask Parrhesia how I am at real pool) and even Normal was hard as hell. I guess they were really proud of bringing back pool in the Dragon Engine for the first time. The major minigame is Pocket Circuit, largely how you left it in 1988, and it's not a ballbuster. I found the physics worked better at 30fps - I fell out of the track a lot less - but it's entirely possible that was a placebo. Getting through the ten or so plot races (and eight or so rivals to get points for parts) took me about three or four hours without a guide. Not bad.

The coliseum fights are, weirdly, the best they've ever been in RGG history, with a massive asterisk. The coliseum interrupts the main plot several times to task you to rank up and such, but the plot presence of the coliseum is responsible for both of the best bits in the story, and the fights tend to be at least neat and reasonably fair. The main new attraction is putting together the Joryu Clan of fighters, which walks the weird line of being canonical and referenced in-story but being comprised of largely characters from Kiryu's past who do not have any plot presence. It's a bit off for Kiryu to be told to ready the Joryu Clan for combat when the Joryu Clan consists of Majima, Saejima, Daigo, Patriarch Gondawara in his diaper, the random gimp he fought that one time, the robot who runs the Sotenbori Combat Dungeon that Ichiban plundered, Gary, that guy whose love life was a substory in like four consecutive games that RGG thought was a lot funnier than he is whose name always escapes me Aki-something, and Fumiya Sugiura for some reason. Still, the Joryu Clan fights are chaotic but in a fun way, like the realization of what they wanted to do with the Ishin! strikeforces, and I enjoyed them all except for the optional Four Kings fights. The Four Kings represent the ultimate coliseum challenge and the precursor to Amon (who is himself both a Joryu Clan fight and a solo fight, neither was remarkable) and two of the four are Joryu Clan fights. The notable thing with these fights is that they're psychotic DPS checks. You have three minutes to take out the enemy clan in its entirety or, even if the enemy clan has one guy and you've taken no casualties, you lose. Professional difficulty adds a shitload of extra health, and you can say I could have turned the difficulty down, and you'd be right, but I have some insane toxic pride. I was only able to pass the DPS check of the third King by restructuring my team to be all gold star level 20 guys (2 tank 2 heals 6 damage) and rigging a setup where I could stay in EX Mode for over two straight minutes. It was an even worse coliseum experience than the time I grinded Tatsuo Shinada up to the #1 overall rank only to flex on 5's shitty coliseum, and that's a goddamn statement.

Last up is the hostess content. Man, I didn't miss these. Gaiden pushes the envelope to being even weirder and more uncomfortable than previous games by having the hostesses be superimposed FMV rather than just being modeled to look like their actresses, and the resulting effect is... uncomfortable, to say the least. I gave it the old college try for about two sessions and then began skipping all the dialogue as soon as I was able. Maxing out a hostess, of which there are five, gives you an unreasonably horny (but no nudity ofc) short video of that hostess doing something sexy which is also entirely unskippable, and then Kiryu has sex. Big shoutout to my wife for blithely continuing to play Final Fantasy XIV while a mostly-naked woman writhed around on the room's TV last night twice. Weirdly, though, one of the five hostesses ends in a actually fairly sweet scene that isn't weird or sexual in the slightest to watch, so, uh, shoutout to Kokoro, I guess!

And that's Like a Dragon Gaiden. Don't recommend this one except for true completionists, especially not at the going price point of $50. I know it's gauche and Gamerific to talk about play time per dollar and all that but good lord, I pulled out all achievements for Gaiden on the highest difficulty (without any guides even existing yet) in less time than it took me to gut through the first clear of at least four of the Yakuza games and either Judgment game for the same starting price point. Shoddy effort, 5/10 game in the precise opposite way that Halfway was. Let's see if they pull it back for the next proper entry next year, or I suppose this'll end up being Ryu Ga Gotoku's next-to-last entry in this thread.

Edited November 12, 2023 by Integrity

Parrhesia · November 12, 2023

At least now you can uninstall and become the Man who Erased his Game.

On 11/10/2023 at 1:51 AM, lenticular said:

THE ELEPHANT COLLECTION (WONDERFUL ELEPHANT, 2023)

You remember Kongregate. That's not a question; that's a statement. I don't know who you are, dear reader, but the fact that you are here on this forum reading this thread tells me that you play video games and that you spend too much time on the Internet. That you choose a web forum over more modern platforms like Reddit or Discord tells me that you're probably at or about a certain age. Combine these different facts and it seems overwhelmingly likely that you remember Kongregate.

Extremely true. Though for whatever reason I was mainly an ArmorGames loyalist. Being reminded of all this made me check out an old site from my childhood, Orisinal... except, right, Flash is down. Alas.

Fabulously Olivier · November 12, 2023

I for one enjoyed LAD Gaiden a lot as a Gamepass game. Like, 8/10.

It's not quite up there with most of the series (0-Kiwami 2, 4, J, LJ, & 7), but it's paced a hell of a lot better than Ishin, 3, or 5. And as a dumb action game, it's a blast for a weekend.

(But yes, I agree that the FMV Cabaret Club shit is awkward af. Get rid of that and bring back Cabaret Club Manager.)

Edited November 12, 2023 by Fabulously Olivier

Integrity · November 12, 2023

13 minutes ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

bring back Cabaret Club Manager.

real

Fabulously Olivier · November 12, 2023

But anyway, real talk. Yakuza/Like a Dragon shouldn't have dating sim mechanics. Kaoru was a healthy relationship for Kiryu 6 freakin games ago, and they wrote her off in the next game so players could keep creeping on hostesses. And the rest of the Yakuza arcs (Judgement and Like a Dragon) also have a canon-but-not-canon relationship that they should also be committing to.

Edited November 12, 2023 by Fabulously Olivier

Integrity · November 19, 2023

dredge: the redredgening

On 5/13/2023 at 12:38 PM, Integrity said:

The game has about twenty hours of life in it, and I won't be surprised if they add more achievements with the DLC late this year and I fire it up to get the rest of the blood from it, as Boyfriend Dungeon did. Sublime game.

yep

patches between then and now added crabberations, so the vanilla game would be a bit longer, but i already have the achievement so i didn't mess around catching all of them. the pale reach was about two hours of extra content that seems to fit snugly into the part of the game where you're roaming the four zones. certainly not a necessary purchase to enjoy the game, but a good tip for the developers if you already liked the base game and want a Little More Dredge, which i did

achievements were basically just to catch all the pale reach-exclusive fish and do its fairly short storyline. i had fun with it, and the monster in the reach was a little funny to just effortlessly elude with my endgame boat lmao

Edited November 19, 2023 by Integrity

Parrhesia · November 24, 2023

On 10/24/2022 at 10:59 AM, Integrity said:

AGE OF EMPIRES (ENSEMBLE, 1997)

Going back through the thread again and realising an old entry has had a significant update.

I mean, the takeaway - do not play Age of Empires: Rise of Rome, or Age of Empires 1: Definitive Edition - remains intact. But there's now a way to play Age of Empires 1 without actually having to play Age of Empires 1.

So when the Definitive Edition was announced, people had high hopes, but I think it was pretty clear that AoE1 DE was a tech demo for AoE2 DE, The Important One. DE1 had a lot of bumps in the road, DE2 significantly fewer. I don't think that is a coincidence, and I do think it was the right decision, insofar as one can tell without actually being in Microsoft studios. But a lot of people, realistically or not, had held out hopes for AoE1 in the AoE2 engine.

Well, somehow, this actually happened. Return of Rome - along with adding the Romans to AoE2 - brought the whole package of 1 into the far sharper, far smoother, far superior AoE2 engine, and it's honestly a pretty seamless fit. They also made three brand-new campaigns in that engine. By the standards of new AoE2 campaigns, the Swindon-- sorry, the Akkadian campaign is... quite bad, but it still probably blows all of AoE1 vanilla out of the water. The others they added, a Roman campaign and, the third best-named figure of Antiquity, Pyrrhus of Epirus, were honestly quite good, and worth checking out.

They're still, nontrivially, held back by... being Age of Empires 1 campaigns, in the AoE1 system, with AoE1 units. Faction balance is nonexistent and a lot of factions just don't have any natural unit compositions that feel good. I trained a lot of Improved Bowmen as Rome, for fuck's sake. A major thing dragging down the Swindon campaign is that the Sumerians are a genuinely awful civilisation; Pyrrhus' Macedonia, by contrast, just feels far better to use.

That feels about where they're going to leave it, though they did also let users vote on some original campaigns to port over. For reasons that I genuinely cannot fathom, outside of 'it's the only campaign they were able to beat as kids' (understandably, because, again, the AoE1 campaigns were Fucking Terrible), the two they voted for were... the tutorial campaign, and... the Rise of Rome demo disc tutorial mini-campaign. They are complete nothings, but I beat them, got the achievements and got out.

Anyway, AoE2 recently put out another expac, and it's back to, well, AoE2. My beloved Persians got a rework and a massive buff. But the Return of Rome was a curious little footnote, and if anyone did have some fond memories of AoE1, I think it's worth picking up and going through the old systems given new life.

Integrity · November 30, 2023

CATS HIDDEN IN MAPLE HOLLOW (TRAVELLIN CATS, 2023)

Finished: 30/11/23. Playtime: 32 minutes.

I refuse to treat these cat games with anything less than the full gravitas afforded to any other. This one's got a ghost in it.

Integrity · November 30, 2023

BLACK MESA (CROWBAR COLLECTIVE, 2020)

Finished: 30/11/23. Playtime: 29.6 hours.

Black Mesa is a weird beast and needs a bit of framing. Here's the first one: despite everything, I'm not particularly beholden to the Half-Life games. I recognize 1's place in the FPS Pantheon far more than I actually enjoy playing it, and while 2 was extremely impressive for its time, I have no idea besides inertia why it continually gets cited as one of the most bestest games ever. Ocarina of Time syndrome, I suppose. Inertia is a hell of a drug. Black Mesa, itself, started life as a mod project to bring Half-Life's campaign into 2's far superior engine, and gradually became a standalone retail product that set out to "expand on" Half-Life, particularly the legendarily-anemic Xen levels. This was a long-ass process, with a first release as a mod in 2012, a first standalone release in 2015, and a final actual release not until, well, 2020. Add another three years and a price drop to $3, and I figured it was time to see how it all turned out in the end.

It's a mixed bag, to say the least. Part of the problem is certainly that I just don't think Half-Life's campaign holds up all that well, to be sure. I haven't played that game since before Black Mesa was even a mod, so I'm not going to try to tease out precisely what parts of this review reflect on the original and which are unique to Black Mesa, but my overwhelming feeling after playing Half-Life for the first time in the late aughts was that it was completely fine, and that feeling pervaded a huge swathe of Black Mesa as well. Maybe the problem is that it was too faithful! Who knows. The maps are easy to split into pre- and post-Xen, and that's useful because almost the entirety of the post-Xen content is Black Mesa. Pre-Xen, the game kind of yoyos around. Some chapters (Residue Processing in particular, Blast Pit, and most of Surface Tension) are just absolutely atrocious, and the balance never really swings far in the other end. At its best, probably Questionable Ethics and Forget About Freeman!, it's absolutely recommendable to someone who already likes that kind of late-90s adventure FPS. It's rough for the pendulum to swing from about a 2/10 to about a 7/10, but there it is.

The reasons for this, I think, are threefold. The first, and easiest to define, is the enemies involved. Half-Life's remembered for the iconic headcrabs (and their associated zombies) and, for those who played its sequel (which is everybody by now) the Vortigaunts as well. These are both pretty good, save for Black Mesa making them twitchier than they need to be, and the game's predisposition towards random single headcrab jumpscares that knock ten of your health off for free. The rest of the alien roster is rounded out by houndeyes, which are the nothingest boys ever to be fought; bullsquids, who fire shotguns of eye-searing neon that do absolutely obscene amounts of damage sometimes; snarks, which are smaller and more annoying headcrabs holy SHIT I hate snarks; and alien grunts, who fire projectiles that miss you about 85% of the time and 100% if you're paying attention, and who completely fucking juice you if you're not dodging. One notes that outside of the iconic pair, neither of those is, like... good. The other half of the roster is the humans, and this is where Black Mesa really takes the piss. Marines, outside of a few scripted instances, laser onto you the frame their head can intersect with your model, and spray unlimited hitscan bullets that do credible damage at you while running around erratically. They're never fun to fight, and not at all in a thematic-feeling "oh shit it's the marines!!" kind of way. The advanced marines, the assassins, were the absolute fucking pits in the original and are, if anything, worse in Black Mesa. Fighting other humans always sucks, which could be used to make a point in a better game, but instead it just means that half of the pre-Xen encounters are destined to be awful.

The second and third reasons are more nebulous and related to each other. Black Mesa makes a lot of little expansions to Half-Life's maps throughout the terrestrial campaign. Black Mesa also has a really terrible relationship with visual design - for instance, some doors are orange and some are white, and while it seems logical that the orange doors are colored to make them stand out because they're the usable ones, that's only usually true, and the thing that actually signifies if a door is usable is the presence of a slim, chic handle. This also isn't always the case, though; not all doors with handles are usable. At one point, you exit a tunnel into a small open area with a truck with its lights on pointed at a gate, with a flimsy chain-link door bearing an oversized padlock for you to apply your crowbar to, and with an identical clone of the door you used to enter the area opposite the area from where you entered. There's no way to interact with the truck to crash the gate down, the padlock cannot be crowbarred off, and the visually-identical door lacks a handle. The way forward is to notice a break in a concrete low wall that leads to a ramp to drop into the enemy camp. Shit like this is just all over Black Mesa's pre-Xen maps, and it combines to remove all sense of causality from what you're doing. In a 1999 corridor adventure shooter, you move forward because it's the only thing you can do and sort-of accept that this is intrinsic to video game design. In 2020, by providing the illusion of choice, Black Mesa has ironically made things feel less organic rather than more, when five identical doors don't respond to pressure and the sixth leads to an intricate laser puzzle to get behind one of the others. It's silly to complain about doors not being bustable down and shit like a broken TVTropes record, but Black Mesa so wants to feel organic that it makes the very videogamey puzzles feel... well, videogamey, in a way that the 1999 game was more comprehensive about.

Post-Xen, the game turns into a complete shitshow. The first Xen level (titled, fittingly, Xen) is honestly pretty good and I can't complain about most of it. You get the Long Jump Module, which generally feels really good to use, and you do some sick parkour and some (occasionally-obtuse) puzzles and relatively lighter combat. The environments are genuinely gorgeous, and the worst thing I can possibly say about it is that it outstays its welcome a little bit. That's still high fucking praise for Black Mesa so far. Problem is, then Xen keeps going. Gonarch's Lair is a long boss battle where you fight the titular Gonarch and win, it runs away from you, and then go through an entire stage of platforming and sprinting and smacking headcrabs with a crowbar while the Gonarch will completely murder you if it catches up to you, and then you fall into an arena where you fight and kill the Gonarch in single combat and it isn't even a hard fight. It sucks. It's a bad level. The next level is, way, way fucking worse. Interloper is the highest concentration of Black Mesa Content, and it's one of the worst levels of an FPS I've played. Interloper "introduces" (you fought a few very briefly at the end of the Earth levels) the final enemy, the Controller, and he's just annoying as hell to fight. They float around erratically and shoot homing projectiles at you, appear in swarms, and occasionally randomly telekinesis objects at you. The chip damage from the former would be worse if Interloper didn't have a preposterous amount of unlimited healing, but the latter is where they drag. These telekinetic projectiles, if they hit you, can do anywhere from about 15% of your health to an instant kill from full health and armor, with absolutely no rhyme or reason, and because they're physics interactions and not hard-coded attacks they're unaffected by your difficulty selection. These guys suck, and Interloper has you kill them in pods of six to fourteen and about a hundred over the course of a really long trek through an alien factory that feels like the worst terrestrial map, Residue Processing, but longer and with more lasers and with more combat and ending in a massive five-minute autoscroller. It's awful. The final boss is expanded hugely from the original game, for the worse, but pales in comparison to fucking Interloper. Interloper even has another sin that I'll get to momentarily.

Black Mesa's weapon loadout contains one of the few elements of absolute praise I have for the game. Half-Life notably came out at the peak of the "more weapons is more awesome" style of FPS loadout design, before approximately-Halo made designers en masse start considering why players would bother to use certain guns over others. All told, you end up with your melee weapon, six relatively-traditional projectile slingers, two energy weapons that share ammo and roles, three ways to deliver explosions to an enemy (not including the submachine gun's underbarrel grenade launcher), and your own snarks, which are not only a dogshit worthless weapon but actively attack you if you're the closest thing. Thirteen weapons is too many. That's an Unreal Tournament loadout, and the point of an Unreal Tournament loadout is that you're never supposed to have all of it. On top of that, essentially no situation demands any weapon except for the few setpiece tanks you have to fight only being damaged by rockets (or satchels). If you make a judgment call on what weapon to use against a certain enemy, it's almost certainly either out of favoritism or out of ammo rationing between your eight different ammo types + snarks, which you will never use, and then during the midgame you get an infinite-ammo projectile weapon that's balanced by sucking ass. Interloper then throws the final wrench into all of this loadout "design": the map is coated in crystals that regenerate your energy ammo, allowing for either the gauss cannon or the gluon gun to be infinite ammo essentially for the whole map, and the gluon gun is by a huge margin the highest-damage weapon in the game while also being hitscan, so for the last hour of the game there's literally no incentive to not use it. Fuck you, Interloper.

I did say I had praise for the game here, though, and here it is: the submachine gun (an MP5 with underslung grenade launcher which is actually real somehow) is easily the single most satisfying submachine gun I've ever used in a FPS. Any of them. The only thing keeping me going fighting the fucking marines is that they all also use the MP5, which means that I use the MP5 to throw 9mm bullets into them causing them to die and to drop 9mm bullets allowing me to keep using the MP5. I have such unending praise for their design of this gun that I'm leaving this short paragraph in the middle of all my deranged screeds just to emphasize it.

It's hard and kind of sucks to talk shit about Black Mesa like this because it's obviously a huge labor of love produced by technically competent people, but my takeaway coming out of the game is that their additions didn't enhance the actual campaign of Half-Life much, or at all, and in a lot of cases the expansion made the game actively worse. If someone wanted to experience Half-Life for historical reasons, I'd hesitate to even call this the definitive way to do it. If someone wanted to play another FPS, not necessarily Half-Life for historical reasons, it's just not good enough to recommend on that front either. It's a game for people who already liked Half-Life to have another way to enjoy Half-Life and, while that's not an invalid way to design things, I really don't think it does enough to earn its own keep without its father's legacy, and I think that's an absolute shame. If you're going to play it, I'll leave you with one last piece of advice: play on the lowest difficulty. I played on the middle one (Black Mesa, the "intended" one) first, and I found I liked the game a hell of a lot better on the replays, which I did on Normal, the lowest difficulty. It wasn't even a shitstomp or anything; I'd loosely compare Black Mesa Normal to somewhere between Call of Duty's Normal and Hardened. Plenty of gameplay to be had, plenty of danger, and it moves the emphasis onto the platforming and navigating and puzzle-solving that the game really obviously wants to focus on. There's a third, highest difficulty, but if you're playing Black Mesa on that, then you don't need any of my advice because you already know and love this game.

Don't 100% Black Mesa. It takes its cues, almost exclusively, from one game. Remember a year ago when I ranted about Episode 2's achievement design? That one. Most of the achievements are for dying or killing in innovative ways, but there's seven to focus on. The game's eighteen chapters long. Two of these achievements are for grabbing a prop (a hat in chapter 3, and a pizza box in chapter 11), and carrying it all the way to the end of the game, through platforming and through teleporters and through everything else. Everything I bitched about regarding the gnome is multiplied with these fucking things, and the game is far longer and the physics even less reliable to help. The game was absolutely not designed around it, either. There's tons of forced-movement portions (railcars, vents, etc) that will cause you to actively lose whatever's in your hands unless you hold it Just So. Moving anything through teleporters already sucks, and dropping them through teleporters onto moving platforms is essentially random at its best. There's a whole submap of the game where the gravity bugs out on the hat and it will float into the skybox if you let go of it - and there's a jump platform that will rip whatever you have in your hands out of them unless you back slowly into it. The objects will roll, slide, and bounce off of irregular geometry, or in some cases simply clip into the floor and fall. They're also physics objects, so if something hits them hard enough into you or your Long Jump Module into something at the wrong angle and subtick, you can just die instantly from the collision with the pizza box you're holding. Houndeyes, Vortigaunts, Controllers, and regular old marines can all cause explosions, sending your shit into the middle distance, off ledges, or simply vaporizing it. Barnacles can steal them directly out of your hands. Ladders (always a sore spot in the Source engine) have a dedicated mount/dismount button, which not only does nothing to help them be usable, but it is also shared with the Interact key, so if you drop your item on a ladder (say, because it hit the wall at a wrong angle), the button to pick it back up or catch it out of the air instantly knocks you off the ladder instead. This was never fun, and you have to do it twice.

Sorry, thrice. When you get to Xen, you find a secret way to kill the Gonarch that you have to lug into its lair, and it's also a prop. Thankfully, that's only for about a chapter and a half, but it's still another chunk of the game to replay if you don't want to go through the obscene task of juggling items to safe spaces while you run along. Grabbing this inconspicuous canister and bringing it to a teleporter near the start of the Gonarch chase sequence arbitrarily opens a door that's off to the side during the final Gonarch chase that's missable even if you're actively looking for it. There's four achievements related to this single inconspicuous canister. Go into this secret room and trigger the Gonarch script kill to skip the fight, or set up the kill and then use the platforms you can only get to from this room to leave without killing it instead. The other two also harken back to Episode 2. Remember the antlion grubs? Across Xen, there are 64 floating blue blobs you need to shoot (thank Christ, not all in one file, though if you miss any you only get a counter and they respawn but don't count again on map transition) and seven research scientist corpses you need to crouch on and Interact with. The former sucks more because only the seven in Gonarch's Lair count, even though the same corpse model with the same flashing light is used repeatedly in the previous chapter. Anyway, the 59th blob and 7th scientist are only accessible via the secret room that the canister opens, so even if you're meticulously scanning for these things without a guide (God help you) you'll never find them all without figuring out to carry the orange canister from the start of Xen to the Gonarch chase through puzzles and teleporters. Then, on top of that, there's a multiple-hour break of gameplay with zero of the blobs before the final five are in one of the final rooms of Interloper, an easy hour or two of casual gameplay later after the blobs having shown up in every other or third room to that point. It's fucking atrocious design. I would venture that it's genuinely impossible to 100% Black Mesa without a guide, which is not something that should be said for a corridor adventure FPS.

If you can stomach either two-and-a-half runs of the game or juggle the three items consistently to pull this off, and follow a guide for the blobs and dead dudes, nothing else will challenge you. There's a small handful of secret areas that are absolutely fine, and two different speed kill achievements for Nihilanth where I don't think you could feasibly get one without the other. There's two slightly-garbage ones left, but they're boosted by not actually being hard. Black Mesa Decathlon Winner has you escape from some huge guys without taking any damage - it's a short sequence, and it's really easy not to take any damage during it (I did it blind my first time through), but if you save at all after the map transition to the chase scene, you void the achievement instantly. Similarly, Laser Immunization has you not take any laser damage for the entirety of the Interloper conveyor belts section, which is about a half hour long if you know what you're doing and there's only six or eight lasers to dodge and they're really easy to dodge, but if you quicksave or quickload at any point during this you void it. Manual saves and autosaves are fine, just don't hit those function keys. Baffling, but after the other headaches, hardly even worth mentioning except as a footnote in case someone stumbles across this post and wants to 100% Black Mesa.

Integrity · December 15, 2023

TOTAL WARHAMMER 3 PART 2
They're here. Bastards. Each of these achievements required a run of Immortal Empires, on Very Hard, and you have to reach either the Domination or Ultimate victory condition. Domination involves painting the entire map, so Ultimate it is. Ultimate involves defeating the endgame crisis, which generally spawns around a hundred turns in (faster if you achieve your other victory conditions) and turns one race into a Chaos Invasion from the first game. They're pretty fun, honestly! For the first campaign, I didn't know this and left it on random crisis, but for subsequent ones I picked the one that's most likely to spawn close to me (e.g. skeletons spawn largely in Africa, dwarves spawn largely in the Caucasus, I won't ever select elves) to avoid having to either conquer across the world or hope an AI picks up the slack.

I want to preface this with another measure of just how much shit has gone into this franchise. I'm writing this paragraph after finishing the Beastmen campaign at the end of this post. This post contains the final sixteen campaigns, added onto the nine from 1, the fifteen from 2, and the previous eight from 3's initial launch. That's 48 total campaigns. In all of the Totals War I played previously, I beat a single Spanish campaign in Medieval 2, a campaign as Maratha and one as Russia in Empire, and a campaign as Satsuma in Fall of the Samurai. If you want to add on the earlier Empire plat in this thread, you get a whopping extra two, to take the total to six. Forty-eight. This is spread across a grand total of one thousand two hundred and sixty-one hours of gameplay, across several real-time years. I wouldn't have had the fortitude to gut through this if the Total Warhammer trilogy weren't among the best strategy games ever created, and 3 might genuinely never be surpassed by Total War for variety of experience for the remainder of Creative Assembly's life as a studio. Let's knuckle through this and put the game on the honored shelf.

Chaos Dwarves - Zhatan the Black, the Warhost of Zharr
I'm of two minds on the Chaos Dwarves. First of all, they did a pretty good job cutting down on their bullshit since my previous post on Total Warhammer 3. They weren't as big an issue in Immortal Empires to begin with, but some buffs to their major checks (primarily Kislev, though they may have overdone it) and strategic cuts to some overperforming units put them in a pretty good place. As far as playing them goes myself, though, we get back to the two minds. First, they're fun as hell on the tactical map. Impactful ranged units, fun siege and stuff, they're kind of a wild AI bullying army but for a singleplayer game who gives a shit.
My problem, such as it is, with the Chaos Dwarves, is that they have a genuinely pretty cool factional mechanic whereby you have to balance slave labor, mining for shit, and making guns all with each other. It encourages you to build tall, which is rare for Total War, and have outlying garbage disticts that exist just to funnel slaves back to your decadent core territories. Chaos Dwarves are, in fact, so stupid and greedy that you don't even have the option to not extort taxes from your subjects. It rules! It's unironically great!
The problem is that this encourages a good amount of empire planning and, God forbid, strategy in how you go about conquering to get proper gains out of anything. Your ultimate goal in the tower you build with the other factions is to confederate them. Subsuming an AI empire can be tedious even under good circumstances, but doing that as Chaos Dwarves involves juggling the hell out of labor assignments and completely rebuilding entire provinces because your material consumption is deeply in the red now. It's a little much, but the mechanic works fine when you're not confederating so I won't dog them too hard.
Anyway, the campaign wasn't too interesting. Zhatan starts in an incredible position, with an easy and essentially-permanent western bulwark you can set up instantly, and to the east is just a bunch of easy stomping grounds leading into crunching into Cathay long before they're ready for you. By the end, I had all of Cathay under my thumb, a significant amount of the Dark Lands, and was just kind of waiting for Franz to get Carstein back under control. I sent some sacrificial armies to kill tons of vampires to speed it up, and finished without much difficulty.

Empire - Markus Wulfhart, the Huntsmarshal's Expedition
Markus Wulfhart is this game's Est, holy hell. Good job for that, too, because I chose my crisis poorly. Wulfhart starts in Mexico, surrounded by enemies and with a special mechanic that spawns more enemies if he gets too greedy in taking land. However, his tech tree is significantly limited, and the only way to remove the limiters is to conquer land to expand the Emperor's mandate. The more you're hated by everyone around you, the more supply shipments arrive from the motherland to help you out. This turns out to be absolutely bonkers, letting Wulfhart spawn entire armies out of nothing once you get rolling.
This was the run where I discovered the concept of astroturfing my own allies. The new patch added a Cathayan faction, Yuan Bo, to roughly Baja. I sold him some of my northern provinces in exchange for an alliance so that I could focus my entire energy in a single direction, and then when I went to war with Mazdamundi I just supplemented my economy by selling Yuan Bo provinces I took off him. I made a little buffer state to my north and turned my attention everywhere else. I had selected the Greenskins crisis - it felt thematic! - so I had to get myself to a position where I could project power to Europe and Asia.
Two hundred and four turns later, I'm almost to the Domination victory condition. I own all of both Americas except for the part I sold to Yuan Bo. I own all of Africa except for the west coast, which has some human expedition factions who love me. I own all of Antarctica, for no real reason. I own all of Atlantis, except for one province I let Tyrion keep so I could farm allied units off him. I astroturfed a Chaos Dwarf ally on my eastern border, and I've been fighting orcs for a hundred turns. It was awful. Fortunate, then, that I did this with Markus Wulfhart, who scales out of control once you finish his personal shit.

Dark Elves - Lokhir Fellheart, the Blessed Dread
Druchii are stupid busted. They've got weaknesses, to some degree exclusive to tactical combat, but just on the face of it having your primary recruitment being roaming massive, cheap armies that are bound to the ocean is just inherently strong. Add onto it the fact that the AI generally can't tell when a Black Ark is going to reinforce a battle, and you can cheese an absurd amount of the game. Expansion is trivial since you're chill with Chaos and there's a tremendous number of very lucrative order-aligned port provinces for the aforementioned Black Arks to secure, and on top of it you've got good-guy confederation mechanics to eat up the other elves. I had millions of gold and nothing to spend it on because I didn't want to macro more armies and I was already contributing an appropriately overwhelming amount of force in every theater of war, which was every theater of war eventually. The one downside, if it can be called that, is that they struggle to break down a strong capital-D Dwarven formation, or anyone with great artillery capability. The problem with that as a downside is that your economy is so huge that you can just bring another stack.
I can't really talk about allies here, since Lokhir (the only cool dark elf) starts in China, surrounded by people who hate him, so right into the crisis. Lokhir doesn't start near to anyone, so I just left a handful of them on and hit the random crisis button. By the time the crisis was on the way, I owned all of China, both Americas, and Atlantis, while expanding into Europe and the steppes. Malekith was the only other dark elf on the map, largely because my reliability took a huge hit after I broke a defensive alliance in favor of the aggressor... who was Malekith, who I had an alliance with. I was in an absurdly good position for the chaos dwarf crisis out of Kazakhstan, and it was anticlimactic. They seed a bunch of invasion points throughout the world and get a ton of event stacks of troops out of their core province, but they don't actually feed into the existing chaos dwarves. The objective isn't to beat the faction, it's a keystone victory - take the Tower, win. I took the Tower in about eight turns. Game.

Warriors of Chaos - Vilitch the Curseling, Puppets of Misrule
Warriors of Chaos got completely overhauled with 3, because they were always a kind-of anemic faction (albeit one I generally enjoyed) in the previous games and now there are four bespoke Chaos factions to compete for their spot. Combined with 2's take on Beastmen basically just being what the original concept of 1's Warriors of Chaos should have been, and it all adds up to a desperately needed rework. Good news: the entire fucking rework lands. The idea behind Warriors of Chaos was that you would have organic, growing warbands with their own unique character, and 1 went with having you build recruitment buildings directly into unit stacks to accomplish that. 3 takes a different tack: every province has a pool of Chaos units that half generally-low% chances to seed every turn up to a maximum, with stronger units unlocked based on things you buld or corruption levels. You can find Marauders all over the world, and god-themed Marauders where the god has tained the world, but to get the real shit you need to get into Chaos-tainted mountains to get dragon ogres, or deeply-god-tainted lands to get Spawn or Forsaken or even Aspiring Champions. While other factions have recruitment zones and non-recruitment zones, the way I end up building out my empires, Warriors of Chaos ended up having a decent swathe of core lands and a massive pile of hinterlands where replenishment was slightly worse but still doable. It created the fiction of a swelling tide coming out of the north so, so much better than 1's implementation did.
On top of that, your guys promote. Every unit card has its own level, from 0 to 9, which gives bonuses to its core stats and that's all. With Warriors of Chaos, each type of guy has a little promotion tree - Marauders can be promoted to Chaos Warriors at rank 5, who can then be promoted to Chaos Knights at rank 6 or to Chosen at Rank 7, and the latter can be promoted to Aspiring Champions at rank 6, etc. It lets Chosen properly shine, because each card of Chosen is (generally) a Marauder you picked up to replace a fallen unit who has just kept at it with that sigma grindset. On top of that, Marauders can be dedicated to a specific god instead, and move up that set of rankings. Chosen of Tzeentch cannot promote to Aspiring Champions, but Chaos Knights of Tzeentch can promote to Doom Knights while the regular variety cannot. Each lord has a set of Authorities with each god (and with Chaos Undivided) that affects how well they play with that god's units, and traits, events, and specializations (lords can also themselves be dedicated to a god) feed into that system to make sure not all of your armies are just using interchangeable all-star Chaos teams; this is left reserved for the Daemons of Chaos faction from the vanilla game.
Going even further, that's just how the core three (Archaeon, Kholek, and Sigvald) work. There's also a Warriors of Chaos faction that is automatically dediated to each god (Festus to Nurgle, Valkia to Khorne, Azazel to Slaanesh, and topically Vilitch to Tzeentch) who trade any ability to acquire units from the other three gods for a diet version of the strategic mechanic their god's proper faction practices. Vilitch can only gain Undivided and Tzeentch authorities on himself and on any of his lords, but in exchange he has access to the less-impactful half of the Changing of the Ways and his armies can teleport on the strategic map. This extra push takes the original Warriors of Chaos, three factions who played essentially the same and not very interestingly, and turns them into eight factions with approximately six distinct playstyles. It's beyond reproach. It's one of the biggest glowups in strategy game history. I am thrilled.
Anyway! What about the campaign? Vilitch starts in the far northeast, next to Zhatan, so it kind of went the same way. Kicked Zhatan's ass first, reversing the dynamic where I started his campaign by kicking Vilitch's ass first, and then consumed the entirety of China. Lokhir played nice with me, which was fantastic for adding dark elf crossbows to a faction that mostly lacks ranged fire support, and from there I just expanded west. Warriors of Chaos handle territory like the wood elves do now, where the majority of land does basically nothing for you except hold token garrisons, but there are Black Fortresses scattered across the map that are incredibly high-value settlements. I could have gifted more land to my Norscan allies and squeezed much more value out of it all, but I had fun blobbing over the world and setting up corruption everywhere. By the time I made it across Asia Minor, I was friends with all the chaos dwarves (the southern one proved to be a bizarrely competent ally!) and had vassalized a few other gods' minor factions. Karaz-a-Karak had died, Kislev had blobbed out of control, and the Empire was losing handily to just about everyone. I threw my weight in, got some extra vassals, and picked up a new ally in the extremely blobbed-out Wulfrik before the crisis popped.
Vermintide! It turns out the Vermintide crisis involves the Skaven setting up undercities all over the world for ten or so turns before the crisis actually pops, and from there it wasn't too bad to control. Eshin respawned in the middle of Lokhir's empire and I had a stack ready to assist him and never needed to contribute any more forces, but the dumbass would declare war on me while I was mopping up the rest of the world and had to be culled. Rictus respawned next to one of my Black Fortresses and I basically had one stack defend and wall them out while Drazhoath (again, bizarrely competent ally!) contained them from the south. He even relieved me in a bad siege that was going to lose me a stack! Wild. Moulder resurged into the front I was already sustaining against Kislev, so the bulk of my force was actively in position to kill them. Mors was already on the ropes against Drazhoath (again!) and got a strong counterpunch, so I returned the favor and sent a few stacks to help. Skryre owned all of Iberia and was pushing into Italy before the crisis hit, and only got stronger from there. He was my endgame boss, because Pestilens spawned into a massively blobbed Markus Wulfhart and the Jade Court, mirroring my own campaign over there, and my campaign actually ended when Yuan Bo kicked Pestilens' teeth in a few turns after I beat Skryre. Never had to go to America. Thanks, dude.

Bretonnia - Repanse de Lyonesse, Chevaliers de Lyonesse
Bretonnia's core gameplay loop appeals to me probably the single best of all of the classic factions. Keeping your peasants corralled, only getting certain tiers of knights on your lords, all of the bullshit you do as Bretonnia is fun for me. The only complaint I'd have is that keeping track of your lords and ladies' Vows is a pain in the ass and should have some interface queue to help you out, but beyond that I genuinely love playing as the French, both in the strategic and tactical maps. Particularly of note is that, in previous games and version, Bretonnia had been handicapped by their sky cavalry (Pegasus knights, primarily) massively underperforming against, well, everything. 4.0 brought a few tweaks to them, and all of a sudden they have that dog in them. Pegasus knights, the flower of French chivalry, saw me through so many nasty spots. It was so absolutely refreshing to play with.
Repanse starts in the northwest of Africa, surrounded by enemies and two potential friends in a minor dwarf faction and Volkmar the Grim. I fuckin' hate Volkmar. I killed both. I had no friends for the first hundred and ten turns of the campaign, whereupon I bribed Imrik to not attack me while I finished securing every piece of Africa. The crisis was the Vampire Counts - trivial. One spawned in my territory and was quickly eaten - and as I did it, the Antarctic lizardmen declared war on me for no reason, so the campaign took at least fifteen more turns to crush them. Ghorst died to a massively oversized Zhao Ming. The French and German vampires blobbed very hard and Carstein himself became my final boss. I lost tons of men attacking him, and at one point he had no fewer than seven full stacks in a knot, but my economy was out of control and he was being nipped at from every angle. This was a breezy and very fun campaign.

Tomb Kings - Arkhan the Black, Followers of Nagash
Nothing's really changed about the Tomb Kings between 2 and 3, which is a good thing. They were already a fantastically-designed inclusion to 2, and they really didn't need anything to keep them fresh in 3's gamespace. It's interesting how the scope of Immortal Empires does properly make them feel like you're playing the long game, which is really thematic for the ancient skeletal lords. At least, it does until you don't, at which point you feel like the titan has woken up and you begin the skeleton war. Unsurprisingly, that's what happened for this campaign. Arkhan starts next to Repanse, topically, so I just did the opposite of the last campaign and then blasted outwards in all directions with my back to the sea. Seventy or eighty turns later, I had Africa completely under my thumb. Ninety-one turns in, it was over.
This was the fastest campaign so far because, while Tomb Kings didn't change at all, Total Warhammer 3 did during the creation of this post. The 4.X patches have been steadily improving the game, and during this campaign a new patch dropped to ease the requirements for achievements slightly. Every faction has a Short and Long victory in addition to the shared Ultimate and Domination. The Short victory typically involves neutralizing your canonical foes and/or securing thematic provinces, e.g. the outcast dwarves reclaiming their ancestral homeland or Vilitch owning any four (I think) of the Black Fortresses around the world. This was all that was required for 2's Mortal Empires achievements, and it led to some pretty shallow campaigns. Long victories generally involve the entire Short victory and then, in addition, some stretchy-fleshing-out of the conditions and typically also being allied with or killing your race's other regional factions. For the archconservatives, not only securing the ancestral homeland but also ensuring that the local orc tribes are wiped out. For Vilitch, owning seven of the Black Fortresses and ensuring that the Chinese are dead. Arkhan's Long victory is to own all of the great pyramids and ensure that they're built, and have every other Tomb Kings faction in Africa dead or subservient to you, and also building your forbidden tower of dark magic. It's a better achievement criterion than having to make it to either owning the majority of the world or defeating the crisis, but I can't say there wasn't a little petty pride in having to crunch through the crisis for every single campaign. Still, at 447 hours as of writing, with ten campaigns left to go, I'll take the handout.

Dwarves - Ungrim Ironfist, Karak Kadrin
Funny enough, right after that, I end up with a crisis victory. Ungrim Ironfist is the Slayer-King, starting surrounded by enemies on all sides deep in the mountains, with factional bonuses to, well, slayers - naked dwarves with big axes. They're fun. The faction isn't really significantly different from other dwarves outside of Ungrim being an absolutely massive shit. He'll beat almost anything in single combat, but the AI's micro is good enough to walk away from him whenever they choose. It's annoying. Still, dwarves are just inherently pretty fun, and the enhancements to fights that 3 brought have made me realize how badly I've been dragging irondrakes and gyrocopters in particular.
The campaign was weird. Ungrim has issues consolidating and will always be beset on all sides, and it wasn't long before I was firmly stuck in fighting every Chaos faction. The other dwarves died really early, but the humans all blobbed up very nicely after I took out Carstein early so I had a secure western front for most of the campaign. The problem came from the actual win condition. Provincal growth is determined by a bunch of things, but the general calculus means that larger provinces grow faster. Provinces can be two to four settlements, and rare settlements are their own provinces. Karak Kadrin itself is a two-settlement province, and it took until the turn 90s until I realized that Karak Kadrin had to be completely maxed out to achieve my non-crisis victory. Mathematically, the fastest I could swerve to accomplish this was around turn 140, which was longer than some of my actual crisis wins.
Good news! I'm leaving the crisis on random all the time now, and the crisis was the chaos dwarves, and I was already invading their lands, and it popped early. I simply let my northern holdings fall as I swarmed every stack into Azerbaijan and took out the keystone faction in a series of horrific battles. The chaos dwarf crisis doesn't need obliterated, just for that head to be taken off. That saved me several forever-wars in the north, so thanks for that, game.

Norsca - Wulfrik the Wanderer, World Walkers
They fixed Norsca! After being a fun campaign in the first and the single most miserable campaign imaginable in the second, Norsca got one direct and one indirect buff to make the campaign far more enjoyable. Directly, they regained the ability to settle non-coastal and non-chaos territory, meaning fighting any inland is no longer a horrible series of whackamole as you have no ability to grow your economy nor prevent the enemy from resettling what you do take. Indirectly, the change in map dimensions helps Wulfrik by both making reaching other Norscan chiefs (to kick their asses for confederation) easier, and by hugely expanding the chaos-focused part of the map for relatively safe expansion without provoking the wrath of Franz. 2's map had you take a very limited amount of land before you either ended up fighting Malekith or Franz to the death; 3 gives so much more territory you can take before sparking the hell-wars and allows you to actually enjoy playing Norsca.
That's how the campaign went, too. Fast as hell expansion through Scandinavia, then a brief consolidation before the momentum resumed and I just started burning everything in sight down and resettling it with Norwegians. Wulfrik's victory condition is to burn down enough shit to completely dedicate himself to one god (I went with Slaanesh this time for fun), burn down and/or occupy a bunch more shit, and beat the challengers sent by the other three gods. Nice and breezy. A fun change made by 3 is that the proper Chaos factions in the wastes seem to tend to hate Wulfrik, since he's kind of the MGTOW of the north. It's him against the world, baby, and those are some good odds.

Lizardmen - Nakai the Wanderer, Spirit of the Jungle
Lizards are largely as they were in 2, but Nakai is a completely different beast. Rather than playing like a traditional faction as the other lizards do, Nakai is a horde faction in the Total Warhammer 1 way, right down to not being able to take and hold his own territory. Instead, anything Nakai seizes is dedicated to Quetzl, Itzl, or Xholankha, and is given to his permanent vassal, the Defenders of the Great Plan. The Defenders of the Great Plan staff it with a modest garrison, never field armies of their own, and kick vassal income up to you. Recruitment buildings are built directly onto Nakai, and his entire tech tree is redesigned on account of playing completely different from the rest of his kin.
The critical change from 1 that makes this work is that recruitment buildings are only built onto Nakai. Your other armies you recruit, like minor settlements, only go up to tier 3, and they cannot recruit directly. Instead, they global recruit from Nakai's pool with doubled recruitment times which can be cut down by building portals into the sub-armies. These portals take some unit types' recruitment down to standard time, but still leave the army beholden to whatever you've built onto Nakai. It basically removes all friction from the horde playstyle. It's fantastic. Your tech tree represents Nakai the Wanderer being the world's omega solution to the growing threat of Chaos and the Order-aligned factions coming to grips with his legitimacy. Your final tech makes it so that, on portal-equipped armies, every single unit (up to and including the biggest dinosaurs) recruits in one turn each. Flood the world in lizards. Chaos will break. Nakai fucking rules. He's even got a nice and thematic victory condition that I'm not even going to mention because it doesn't matter, ultimately. You flood the world in lizards, and if you consolidate a base of power for the Defenders, you become unstoppable. It kicks ass.

Vampire Counts - Helman Ghorst, Caravan of Blue Roses
The gameplan of the Vampire Counts is simple. You have anvil units, zombies and skeletons, who hold the enemy in place while your hammer units, various monstrosities and undead knights, smash into them. It's a classic for a reason. Ghorst twists this a little bit by just lamping shitloads of buffs onto the zombies. He makes them, already among the cheapest units in the game, cheaper. He adds tons of buffs to not only his own, but all faction-wide units of zombies. He makes them regenerate while in melee, and increases how much they can regenerate by an insane degree. Ghorst's zombies are digustingly sticky, and unless they're up against a dedicated anti-horde melee infantry, they're going to either grind down a win or guaranteed hold out until your hammer comes down. Even in the lategame, when one's generally making stacks of high tier units, I was still using nine to twelve cards of regular old zombies in every stack, because they were just so obscenely good at what they needed to do.
A side effect of buffing the cheapest unit to absurd degrees and making them even cheaper is that Ghorst can blob fast as fuck if you're willing to commit to aggression. Depending on the race, I'll generally start mustering my second stack in the teens or early twenties by turncount. By that time, as Ghorst, I had four full stacks of mostly-zombies with some ghouls and a fifth on the way. By the end of the campaign, I had something to the tune of twenty+ full stacks of units. To put this in perspective, I finished the Norsca campaign with about eight, and the Dwarves campaign with maybe eleven. It got to the point where I was able to throw three stacks of units at vanity projects without impacting any of my existing fronts, or to simply decide that I needed two more stacks right now using the Counts' Raise Dead mechanic. Absolutely unbelievable macro potential. If I had to do a world conquest out of everyone I've played so far, it would definitely be as Ghorst.
His win condition is insane, though. Long Victory requires Ghorst to go home and own all of the Empire in Germany and Belgium. Problem is, he starts in roughly Afghanistan. There's just no nice way to do it, unless you do some kind of corridor conquest where you carefully curate allies on your north and south as you go. For me, nobody but the rats liked me, so I ended up fighting wars in every direction all the time. I owned everything in China and adjacent, and almost everything in the Near East, and all of Italy and the mountains in between. I was repositioning my entire force to invade the Empire when, on turn 106, the crisis countdown happened. In ten turns, the dwarves would rise up again. This sucked tremendously - I owned almost all of the dwarven homelands, so the crisis was going to impact basically only me, right on the eve of my victory. I cast about for solutions and learned that the dwarven crisis win condition is to own any six of the great Holds, of which I already owned four and two were adjacent to me and held by guys I had treaties with. I let the game play out til turn 116 and confirmed that, while the crisis will strip territory from the AI, it doesn't strip it from you. I reloaded back, and on turn 115 did a little bit of treachery to steal Karak Hirn and Karak Zorn from Gelt and Carstein, and as soon as the crisis popped I got the victory screen, because I already held six Holds. A little anticlimactic, but what the hell, I'll take it. Don't ask how turn 117 would have looked...

Wood Elves - Drycha, Wargrove of Woe
Drycha's got some of my favorite flavor of all the playable lords in Warhammer, probably second place overall. Her deal is that a million years ago, the wood elves bound their spirits to the forest and that's why the wood elf roster is a mixture of elves and dryads and shit. Drycha is not only old enough to remember a time before the elves did that, but she's also old enough to hate them for it, and she considers it to be a betrayal of the woods. This has some mechanical effects, first and most notable that her forest spirits are instead Malevolent <Unit>, making them slightly better and, more importantly, purple. Her elves, factionally, have been Glamored into thinking that Drycha is their fae priestess Ariel, and this confers penalties to their stats, makes them more expensive, and most importantly gives them the Expendable trait like goblins or French peasants. To round out her roster, Drycha can muster actual animals, bears and shit, from the woods to pad her armies. Other elves hate her, but some factions who hate the elves (everyone hates the elves) hate her less, making diplomacy weirdly easier in some cases. It's a genuinely amazing twist on the wood elf campaign.
She's got the same goal overall, though. There's nine Big Trees all over the world, and a tenth in the woods where most of the other wood elves live. These trees, like the Black Fortresses, are the only settlements that truly matter to the wood elves, and become massive economic powerhouses as you get more of them. The Deeproots allow you to teleport armies between Big Trees, even if you don't own them, and each Big Tree comes with Heathlands that must be cleared or pacified to heal the tree. Once each tree is healed to full, you can enact an eight-turn ritual to Awaken it, fight some armies, and get a building that gives big factional bonuses specific to that tree as a reward. To win, Awaken any eight of the nine Big Trees and then Awaken the final tree in Orion's crib. It makes for a fantastic globetrotting campaign with your mobile armies full of fun unit, and Drycha's peculiarities only make it more fun. The actual flow of the campaign was basically as you'd expect from that - I generally seized trees east to west, left Oreon's Camp unclaimed, and healed my damn trees. The crisis would have been orcs, but it triggered its ten-turn countdown when I had twelve turns of healing left, so I just pulled everyone back to the trees and let the world descend into chaos for a bit while I fixed my Big Tree and then stomped all over an easy quest battle. Easy, straightforward campaign, but still great fun.

Greenskins - Azhag the Slaughterer, Bonerattlaz
The remarkably fast Tomb Kings run was 91 turns. Azhag was over in 68. Ludicrous. Greenskins blob like hell, with a factional mechanic that temporarily doubles your entire army, factionally, for twenty turns. This is exactly as abusable as you might think. There's almost nothing to say, I did the entire campaign in a session while laid out from my flu+covid vaccines. Azhag's win condition is to make sure the minor orc factions are all dead, and I never saw a one of them; to occupy Sylvania, Kislev, and Ostland, which is already one of his natural routes of expansion; and the standard occupy/loot/raze 75 settlements. I didn't even build a top tier settlement at any point during this run, it was over so quickly. More's the pity, since I do really like playing as the green boys. Finally got around to watching Fargo (1996) while doing it, though. Superb film.

High Elves - Imrik, Knights of Caledor
Do you play Total War to experience total war? Boy, do I have the lord for you. Imrik starts in Persia, beset by natural enemies on all sides, and by God, they just bring it one after another. Took out the starting rats faction, get attacked by the chaos dwarves to my north. Pivot to fight them, get attacked by the ogres to my east. Barely stave off the two of them, get attacked at the same time by the other rat faction to the northwest. Polish off the dwarves, the ogres take a peace deal with me, and Ghorst kills them and then declares war on me. Split my armies again, finally finish off the rats, come around and the big rats, Clan Mors, to the west declare war on me. Get peace with Ghorst, scramble to handle Mors (who are significantly larger than me), and Grimgor comes down the hills to eat Ghorst. Grimgor then declares war on me. I was fighting on three or more fronts for something like 80% of the whole campaign. It was horrible.
Fortunately, Imrik is broken as hell. He's the Dragon Prince, and his gimmick, as you might suspect, is dragons. How this manifests is that Imrik can tackle an überdragon every twenty-ish turns, which is supposed to be a fairly difficult battle that rewards you with a permanent buff to Imrik, a temporary buff to the faction, and said dragon as a recruitable unit. What this means in practice is that Imrik struggles to find his footing until he can fight that first dragon, and then his stack becomes completely unassailable. By the second or third dragon, Imrik himself could simply fight it in the air, himself, and win. By the fifth dragon, Imrik could fight a dozen max veterancy steam tanks, alone, and come out at full health. He's completely insane, and only nominally limited by being a single stack. For the rest of them, I just went back to the well of 2's Tyrion campaign and built my stacks out with nothing but Lothern Sea Guard and regular bowmen backing them up - and gave a few of my lords an überdragon, since I had them to spare.

Vampire Coast - Count Noctilus, the Dreadfleet
Nothing much has changed from 2 for the pirates, with a minor exception. For Skaven, Dark Elves, and Vampire Coast, your lords all have a Loyalty level that you can largely ignore as long as you're not losing fights or trying to disband them. The latter is kind of annoying, but that's as bad as it gets. 3 adds a Loyal To The End trait that each lord can buy at level 30 to turn off the Loyalty gauge. It's nice to reduce lategame micromanagement. Otherwise, the guns-forward approach I used for Cylostra before works perfectly in 3 with a little AI cheese, which I'm absolutely not above. Noctilus starts primed to invade Atlantis, and I just swarmed all over it within about 40 turns and then sent tendrils in all directions to conquer land and build my Infamy meter until it was over. Breezy campaign.

Skaven - Throt the Unclean, Clan Moulder
I had to give the guy a run due to his being a staunch ally in a good few of my chaos-forward runs. So, as a thank you, here's Throt the Unclean. The Skaven are split into two batches of six lords: Mors, Rictus, and Pestilens are all pretty standard Skaven Core factions, and Skryre, Moulder, and Eshin all have some bespoke mechanic strapped on top of them. Moulder's gimmick is the Flesh Laboratory. Throt gets Growth Juice for fighting and winning, and can turn this into horrible experiments on his units to give them traits or maybe make them explode. You can also periodically drain the tank to get monsters for free. It's a weird and deep whole thing that you can either interact with or, as I did, pump all sorts of crap into some slaves to unlock better experiments and then for the rest of the campaign just interact with it when you want free monsters or to make your Stormvermin regenerate forever. It's fine. It's not as fun as Skryre's Warpstone Laboratory, but I liked it well enough. I got the most recruitment use out of hoarding the monsters as an emergency reserve force, which is useful but a bit dull.
Throt's campaign is weird. You start with your back to the bulk of Chaos, which is good if you get them to like you quickly, which they're predisposed to do. To the other direction is Kislev, then the Empire and the vampires, meaning you're right in the European thick of it from the jump. No time to hunker down and warm up, you just get thrust into your choice of hell wars over and over until it's done. I made nice with Azhag with a few gifts, and just kept pushing to the sea as I got dragged into wars by my allies. All Skaven have a common win condition - there's thirteen special settlements spread all over the entire world, and you need to own a simple majority of them to be declared the biggest clan. The problem with this is that they're all over the world, and Azhag refused to expand south to give me more of them through our alliance. By the time the crisis countdown started, I still only had four out of seven, one through an alliance with Ikit Claw. The crisis, unfortunately, was wood elves - and I was deeply tied up in France and the elf woods, which meant in ten turns my life would fucking end. I went for broke, scrambled everything, sold off provinces to make peace, and sent armies deep into the fog of war to commit treachery. With four turns to go, Ikit Claw broke our alliance. With two turns to go, a carefully coordinated backstab against him, Khemri, Ironbrow, and Rictus gave me the "win", with Throt's empire completely collapsing around him. Thematic, I suppose.

Beastmen - Morghur the Shadowgave, Warherd of the Shadowgave
I hoped this was going to be a victory lap, and it was a victory lap. Beastmen are just as straightforward as they were in 2, and the additional tightness of control in 3 just enhances their core strengths. Morghur is more attrition-based than Taurox, but plays essentially the same - and I confederated Taurox by turn 35 anyway. His campaign goal, starting in Spain, is to kill all the humans of the Old World. This snowballed basically instantly. I made a pact with Ikit Claw (man, he keeps coming up) and began my rampage, and as I gutted out the big minor Order factions, the major ones began to collapse. Grom the Paunch became the #1 power in the world with zero southern pressure from elves or men. Once I ambushed and destroyed Gelt's entire army across two turns, Franz began to fall to Carstein at a prodigal speed. I ran out of stuff to burn with 35/80 settlements burned and every single Imperial and Bretonnian faction dead in the water. I turned my eyes west, to Ulthuan, and burned it to the ground. Still not enough. I turned my eyes west further, and the rampage finally ended in the lands of the Druchii. It's over. Thank you, my Beastmen.

Integrity · December 18, 2023

RESIDENT EVIL 5 (CAPCOM, 2009)

Finished: 18/12/23. Playtime: 91 hours.

In 2009, Resident Evil jumped the shark.

Cards on the table, I love Resident Evil 5 a lot. I don't think it's an especially great game, and there's the minor bit of the entire middle third of the game being against grass-skirt-wearing spear-chucking African "tribals", but if you can excuse the racism the rest of the plot is still not particularly good. The first four main-numbered Residents Evil were variously fairly atmospheric, slow survival horror games. 4 Resident Evil, the fifth main Resident Evil, previously featured in this thread, took a more action-forward approach, but one that (I think, though it's certainly not the universal opinion) represented to some degree the style of the first four games brought forward into a modern gamescape where a lot more had become possible. Resident Evil 5 throws everything out the window basically from the word go. It's a co-op action shooter, as was very vogue in 2009, wearing Resident Evil's skin, and not even wearing it particularly tightly. It should fire its tailor, honestly. The sequel would fall impossibly deeper into these vices, but that's a story for another day. And believe me, I'm absolutely going to tell that story.

When I point out that this style of game was vogue in 2009, I'm really doing Resident Evil 5 a disservice. Resident Evil 5 is the entire zeitgeist of the Xbox 360 given flesh and form. It's brown, it's bloom-filled, it has a completely bespoke suite of multiplayer modes that nobody played, it's a permanent-progression co-op adventure shooter, and it even turns into a cover shooter against enemy guns in the back third. Every vice you can imagine attributing to a game nobody ever played, like Army of Two, is present. Instant-kill quicktime events, overpriced DLC, weirdly sexualized alternate costumes, awful one-liners, wildly Unreal Engine looking dudes (weird being as this game wasn't on Unreal 3), vehicle sequences, turret sequences, a light laser puzzle - just imagine anything that you think was probably in an Xbox 360 Cover Shooter and Resident Evil 5 has it. It's genuinely impressive, in a way.

Why do I love it so much, then? I'm not totally sure. I think most of it is down to two simple facts: the minute-to-minute gameplay loop is fun, and the game is a co-op factory. There is no part of the game where Chris and Sheva are separated for longer than it takes for one to grab something while the other is on overwatch, You're just pal-ing around through Africa on a vaguely- (and occasionally deeply-) problematic conspiracy-uncovering action jaunt. Everything comes together just right when you have two guys together to turn this deeply six out of ten action game into a masterpiece. I've played the whole game twice solo and all the way through with three different friends across thirteen years, and I could honestly do it again after a little cooldown from this last sprint.

That, said, for the topic of this thread, how does it hold up to 100%? It absolutely does not, in any imaginable way. Let's break it down into some numbers. The game's sixteen chapters long, and clearing a given chapter gives you points based on your rank (C, B, A, S) and difficulty level (Amateur, Normal, Veteran, Professional). You also get various treasures and things that you can sell for money that you can spend upgrading your guns. The rarest treasures sell for the 5-10,000, uh, Ws range, realizing i have no idea what the currency in Resident Evil 5 is supposed to be to this day so we'll say dollars from now on. Slugging through a really long chapter like 5-3 can get you something to the tune of 20,000 dollars, while the early maps get you in the low thousands at the best. For points, you cap out at an S-ranked Professional clear (a very difficult proposition, as you're graded on deaths, kills, and time taken) at 2,500 points. Got all that?

First up, clear the game, then do it again. Professional starts locked behind beating it on Veteran, but there's an achievement for beating the game on each difficulty or higher, so you can get 3/4 for a Veteran clear and then the fourth for a Professional clear. You do need to S-rank every map for a different achievement, but that can be done on an individual level basis through chapter selection and doesn't have a difficulty requirement associated. There's a handful of kill-related ones that come very easily if you know about them and that you'll probably get by accident - kill guys with exploding barrels, kill with the secret weapons, kill with the knife, do enough damage to Wesker to make him leave early, etc. All of these are possible to chance into and trivial on NG+ if you don't. Every map also has collectible emblems that you have to shoot, and you need to get all 30 both for their own achievement and to unlock alternate costumes, which is another one. There's also one to gather all treasures in the game, where most of them only appear in one place or are a reward for doing a specific thing (like doing enough damage to Wesker, for instance). None of these are particularly bad and, on the face of it, 2.8-odd clears of the game is just putting it into Ideal Sonic Game territory and isn't at all outlandish.

All those treasures are necessary, as said, for weapon upgrades. There's one each for owning and fully upgrading all weapons, which will require something to the tune of 1.2 million dollars. Refer back to the numbers, if you will. This was the last thing I finished, finding a superb checkpoint loop where I could secure about 5,000 dollars every minute. After clearing absolutely everything else, I was still about half a million short. I will leave the math to you, but it was not pretty. The points are next, in the form of unlocking every costume, every model for the model viewer, and every character for the multiplayer modes. This requires something to the tune of 180,000 points. I refer you back to the numbers, and await your eyes bulging. If you prefer to not count, that's roughly four and a half perfect clears of the game, full-S-rank-Professional, which is an incredibly hard task. Bringing either of those down takes the reward down commensurately.

I've done a little bit of a lie, though. See, you're going to hit that points level and surpass it by double or more, trivially. There are four multiplayer modes, which are all pretty samey - you and 3 other people are in a map with respawning zombies, and you're given points based on some combinations of zombies and other players you kill, like a arcade arena DayZ predecessor. I imagine they might have been quite fun back when the game was new, honestly, but they're long past dead now. In any case, you have to win 30 rounds of each, which, if you bat a thousand, results in a whopping 300,000 points from just the multiplayer side of things. I put in more than a solid points grinding session offline before I did this map, and worse, I did it while watching Magic Mike's Last Dance, possibly the single film that has made me angriest in my entire adult life after the first two Magics Mike were genuinely great films. If any of you happen to know Steve Soderbergh, please DM me his address anonymously so I can go kick his ass in real life in Minecraft.

Anyhow, I said that the multiplayer was long-dead, so where's that leave us? Fortunately, some guys have crowbarred a trainer together that lets you trick the game into loading local Versus matches against rudimentary bots. They're not very interesting, and cannot interact meaningfully with the game, so your best bet is to get your hundred player execution kills and various killstreaks, then use the trainer to End Round after you get a kill the rest of the 120 times you need to win. Otherwise, you're looking at, by my calculations, eight hours minus load times and menus of just waiting for timers to tick down. The trainer's already there, anyway, fuck it. It still takes roughly an hour to End Round that many times after getting single kills, but at least it's quicker. At this point, you're done with the vanilla game. There's two DLCs, and they're completely unconnected to the game and exist only in their own sub-menus in the Extra Content part of the menu. These weren't originally in the game's Windows release, which was handled through Games for Windows Live (rip bozo lmao), but as part of the death of GFWL, the Steamworks patch for Resident Evil 5 years ago included them and their achievements.

Lost in Nightmares comes first. It's a slower, slightly more puzzle-forward campaign, where you're encouraged to avoid fighting when possible (there's barely, if even, enough ammo to kill everything) and the entire enemy set consists of about nine discrete super tough enemies that take both you and your partner to kill. It's a sort of homage to how Resident Evil used to be, right down to a secret where, if you interact with the entrance three times, it puts you into a fixed-camera mode similar to the vintage games. It's cute. I'm reasonably fond of Lost in Nightmares. It caps off with the fight against Wesker that kicks off Jill's part in the story, and the fight's largely pretty shit. The campaign is mostly good, though. Completing it on Professional and with an S-rank (not necessarily together) is required for both of the DLC campaigns, and Lost in Nightmares also has a set of shootable emblems as another, and one to "inflict a certain amount of damage on Wesker", which basically means to bait his QTE-response attack and succeed all the QTEs a few times. It sucks, like everything about that Wesker fight.

Desperate Escape is a complete balls-to-the-wall action mania fest. There's no time to stop or think, you're just constantly being hammered by new varieties of Fat Guys, rockets from all angles, and a final climactic showdown on a roof that lasts about eight real-world minutes where you're under attack from all directions all the time. It sucks. It's just kind of bad. There's a glimmer of decent idea in it - and it would have been fantastic in, say, Resident Evil 6 - but in this game it just flops. On top of the shared achievements from Lost in Nightmares, Desperate Escape has two fantastically bad ones. Way of the Warrior requires you to personally kill 150 enemies in a single clear of the campaign. There's about 220, depending on how you shake things up, and anything your partner kills doesn't count. This basically just begs you to do it alone on Amateur and take the AI's gun away, which doesn't make for fun gaming. Shoot the Messenger has you kill the three guys with bullhorns who appear at various points in the Escape, and two of the three require you to linger and farm enemies until they spawn. It's, you know, completely counter to the Escape part of Desperate Escape, and also pretty counter to the Desperate part. It's pretty impressive how badly it fits the fiction of the campaign.

The major problem with these two campaigns today is that they were much more comprehensively designed for co-op play than the original campaign was. There's far more times where you get separated from your partner, either forced or by choice, or really need to have both players doing something productive at the same time. Lost in Nightmares requires luring enemies into traps from one player, and for the other to spring the trap. The Wesker fight is designed for one person to bait his attack and the other to get the QTE flurry counter. Desperate Escape relies on conservation of ammunition and careful use of explosives, neither of which the AI is capable of, and you spend about 30% of its runtime separated. The AI is sufficient for the original campaign, and I'd say the game is even reasonably fun solo. Soloing the DLC campaigns is an exercise in misery. It's the holidays, my mates are traveling or hard to get ahold of, so I just used the trainer I already had for multiplayer to make the bot invulnerable to damage, because 85% of my failure points were "the AI did something dumb and died". Managed to slug through the campaigns with that slightly-lessened handicap, but boy were they not fun. You have to do them in a session each, too, by the by. Since they're handled through their own menus, they don't save anything besides "the last checkpoint you were at", and they wipe when you exit.

Resident Evil 5 represents a lot of things. It's the moment that Resident Evil cast off all pretension of not being really stupid, a move which would nearly kill the franchise entirely before an astonishing effort from 7. It's a complete encapsulation of all of the good and bad game design heuristics from fifteen years ago. It's a game impossibly steeped in the White 18-25 Male target demographic. It's, somehow, the highest-selling game in Capcom's history prior to Monster Hunter World. It's a bad, bad, great game, and I owe it a lot of memories.

And then things got worse. Oh, baby, am I excited to write about Resident Evil 6. Ta for now.

ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 162. never alone)

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