Review: Moon Breakers

So I tried playing Moon Breakers, which is free on steam. I dusted off (literally, it was covered in dust from disuse since I stopped playing Wings of Prey) my joystick and plugged it in, then fired it up. Well, I should have saved myself the trouble. It doesn't use joystick.

A flight simulator, that tries to insinuate itself as the spiritual successor to Wing Commander... has no joystick support.

Ok, leaving that aside... there are further annoyances. It is 100% online, but you can't arrange games with friends or even control the game type with your own lobby. The game shoves you into a lobby and picks your side and the type of game at random. There's no way to arrange to play as a team with friends, you're just stuck with 29 or so random internet asswipes every time. There's no single player, either, so there's no plot. The game is "There's the Government and the Pirates and they fight over H3! FIGHT!!"

There are basically 3 kinds of game: Team deathmatch, destroy the enemy carrier, or capture the flag. The game type is chosen at random or perhaps on a rotation, and if enough players click "veto" on it in the scant few seconds between the start of the lobby and the start of the game, it will change, but I never saw enough vetoes for it to happen. Then you pick your craft, and you're launched. Every game has a 15 minute time limit, so often the game will end just as things are really starting to get good.

There are many craft available to fly, and by available to fly, I mean available for purchase. Oh sure, you can earn enough points eventually to unlock a ship without paying for it, but... well, the cheapest ship I saw was 160,000 points (or "cred" as they call it)... and on average I'd say I got about 2-4 thousand points per match (and I saw plenty of poor suckers who made less than a thousand every round). I don't see how I could possibly ever play 40-80 or more rounds of this game without going insane. And that's for one of the more modestly priced fighters - I saw some big badass ones for over a million cred. Compare that to League of Legends, a true free-to-play success story, where you could conceivably unlock a new character (granted, a cheap one) after 5 or so games, depending on performance.

Anyway, the ships are separated into light, medium, heavy fighers and bombers. Light fighters are agile and fast, but lightly armed and armored. They don't do a lot of damage and can't take a lot of damage, but in the hands of a skilled player can jink enough to survive. Medium and heavy fighters trade maneuverability for firepower and armor. You can take more hits but it's harder to dodge... and dodging is often a better defense if you've got more than one attacker on you. Bombers are the slowest of the bunch, and only have moderate offensive capability versus fighters, but they carry torpedoes which are the only weapons that can do damage to enemy carriers. The torpedoes require time to arm after firing, so you can't fire point blank, and travel slow enough to be shot down by fighters and/or turrets on the carrier itself.

Let's get some praise out of the way - the game looks sharp, and it can be pretty entertaining. While I lament lack of joystick support, flying by mouse is pretty easy and intuitive. Ships are good looking, and asteroids and broken moons are both pretty and functional as there were many times I shook an attacker by darting around a huge chunk of rock or zipping through a tunnel. There are some definite echoes of Crimson Skies here.  I especially liked the torpedo paradigm - them being able to be shot down and relatively slow moving definitely adds to the experience because it gives light fighters a defensive role and means teamwork is still essential to attack a carrier because the turrets need to be destroyed or at least distracted by other targets, as do any fighters on defense. I also have to say the game had pretty much no latency-based problems that I could tell, and I ran into no bugs at all while playing it. That's impressive. And the voice acting in the background is a nice touch and actually sounds natural and in context - something else you don't always get these days.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned lack of control over game lobbies is not my only gripe with the game. And the lack of joystick support. The instrument panel is nice and easy to read, but it needs a radar. Little arrows with names around the edge of the screen do not suffice - I need operational awareness in under 9 square inches. Also, more cues about things like torpedoes headed for your carrier would be nice - for instance, it could be a feature of light fighters that they automatically track and draw attention to enemy torpedoes in the HUD. The missiles carried by fighters always seem to dumbfire no matter what I do (I don't even know if they are SUPPOSED to lock on and track, there's practically no documentation on this at all). The afterburner reservoir seems to be a little on the small side... and yes, I know SPACE FLIGHT DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY but it's a game mechanic I can respect - a limited burst of speed to be used sparingly. But I still think it could be a little less miserly with the boost juice. I am highly aggravated that the targeting reticle for anyone I do damage too changes from red (enemy) to grey. I realize they're trying to go for a way to differentiate who you're attacking with a kind of automatic target flagging, but white/grey is the WRONG COLOR for that. Maybe a brighter shade of red or flashing red and orange or something... other games have hardwired my brain to equate a grey target with one that can be ignored... and indeed, against all that space-rock backdrop, sometimes it's all too easy to lose track of grey text. Most of all, I find myself irritated by the blatant "pay to win" business model the game employs - people who spend real money to buy the better fighters are at a distinct and immense advantage over those who stay free to play - to the point where really, the only pragmatic purpose the "free to play" players have is to be the legion of mooks the paying customers blow out of the stars by the dozen. Other free to play games (such as League of Legends or Team Fortress 2) take special care to balance what you can buy against the default, but this game clearly does not.

All in all, I don't find this game to be worth my time. Sure, it's free to play, but that comes off as an excuse for shortcomings rather than a genuine selling point. The gaming experience is shallow, the interface doesn't have a lot of thought behind it (indeed, some of the menus look like a website from the 90s... I AM AWARE OF WHAT MY WEBSITE LOOKS LIKE SPARE ME THE COMMENTS, PEANUT GALLERY). The inability to control your gaming experience with personalized lobbies and setup controls is a big minus (and of course, such lobbies would require bot support if you wanted to just play with a few friends).

Oh, and it needs joystick support, of course.

Grade: C minus. And that's the word from Bandit Camp.

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World of Warplanes Website

World of Warplanes Website: "Wargaming.net has launched a new World of Warplanes Website as an online home to this upcoming MMO action game set during the 'Golden Age of military aviation.' At this point the site offers some..."

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Review: Wings of Prey

I'd been jonesing for a good flight simulator for some time, practically ever since Chuck Yeager's Air Combat fell off the radar. Is Wings of Prey a good simulator? Well, it depends on two things: How much you like or dislike realism, and how important to you the between-mission fluff is in a game.

Wings of Prey is a technologically impressive WW2 flight simulator from Russian developer Gaijin Entertainment. And when I say it's a flight simulator, I mean it's a simulator. The ground, the sky, the planes, the water, the boats, even the cockpits are all very detailed and impressively rendered. Combining 3D rendering with high resolution textures and some very good postprocessing, WoP manages to convey a very immersive flying experience.

There are 3 settings to the game: Arcade, Realistic and Simulator. Arcade mode has lots of HUD "augmented reality" instrumentation like most games do these days, and on top of that it plays "physics nanny" to help keep you from smashing into the ground like a hefty bag full of beef stew. In arcade mode, the game is almost too easy... not much of a challenge at all.

But when you flip that switch to Realistic mode... hooo buddy.

Realistic mode still keeps the augmented reality targeting and instrumentation of arcade mode, but when it comes to flying, physics and damage, the training wheels are most definitely OFF. The phrase "punishingly realistic" kept coming to mind. And I'm not talking "100 different switches and buttons to pay attention to" realism like in Falcon 3.0 (for those of you who remember it back in the day), I mean in regards to physics, damage, and the scientific principles governing flight.

Never before have I played a flight simulator where I could stall simply by maneuvering. I don't mean "whoops I pointed straight up and now I have no speed" stalling like just about every flight sim, this is different. See, what makes an airplane generate lift is the uniform and rapid movement of air past the wings, the shape of which cause lift. In previous games, including my fondly remembered CYAC, I've never experienced a stall by rolling 90 degrees and pulling back on the stick all the way. That, I had been led to believe by every sim ever, was your standard way to turn.

How misinformed I have been.

The performance characteristics of your average WW2 fighter plane apparently are such that you can change your bearing faster than you can change your momentum - IE, if you start out facing north, roll to the right, and pull back on the stick, your nose will be facing southeast about the time your velocity will still be sending you northeast. This means that air is no longer rushing toward you from the front, but rather rushing "up" from "under" you... no longer generating lift, and pretty much guaranteeing you to go into a spin and start spiralling toward the ground. Assuming you can wrestle your way back to control (and you have to do it firmly but gently or it just gets worse), you'll still lose several hundred feet of altitude. Hopefully several hundred feet you had to spare, otherwise you're now an impromptu bonfire.

That's not the only way things "get real." As you take damage to your airplane, it suffers. Damage to your engine makes it harder to maintain airspeed. Damage to your wings (Actually visible in the form of real polygonal holes in them) makes them generate less lift and makes it harder for you to roll your airplane, thus making you easier to kill. And let me tell you, these planes don't take much to kill. I was under the impression (again from previous flight sims such as CYAC) that it took many seconds of sustained gunfire to shoot down a plane... such is not the case. A withering half-second barrage from most planes (especially those with large bore cannons) will start you streaking for the earth... and much more than that will cause such structural damage that a the wind might rip a wing right off you. Also, so many of these planes only carry so much ammo. I had no idea that the machine guns on an ME-262 could basically be exhausted by 10 seconds of continuous fire. Light, quick bursts are the name of the game here. And it goes without saying that you have to lead your target.

Switching from "arcade" to "realistic" mode is a shock, like going from "easy" to "expert" in terms of difficulty... but heaven help you if you crank it all the way to "simulator." In addition to the physics realism of the previous mode, Simulator mode takes away all the augmented reality. You want to know your airspeed, heading, or altitude? You have to LOOK AT THE INSTRUMENTS in your cockpit! That plane coming toward you, is that a friend or foe? Well, I hope you've boned up on silhouette recognition charts, because there's no "targeting" feature or any kind of labels. If you can't distinguish a Messerschmidt from a Mustang in pretty quick order at 100 yards (while being shaken like a wet dog), you're probably going to be having a hot lead sandwich for lunch, and it's all you can eat.

Now, I'm a fella who enjoys a challenge, as long as the BS factor is kept to a minimum. I find Arcade to be too easy, but I find Realistic to be very difficult. Forget about Simulator mode. Fortunately the developer realized that it would probably be too difficult for most people, so the game gives you (now hear me out on this), infinite lives. Well, not lives so much as "do-overs." If you get shot down or crash for whatever other reason, you simply hit enter and you're back up in the air a little behind where you died, at full speed again. "Well, what's so hard about that?" you might ask - well, it keeps track of how many times you get killed, and at the end of the mission it rates your effectiveness. So there's still the achievement factor for those who want it, and yet the content tourists can still progress through the game instead of being denied access because they aren't aces.

These are the guts of the game, and for the most part it's pretty solid. The garnish, however, leaves a little to be desired. Much like other games I've reviewed from Russian developers, the localization leaves something to be desired. While the voice actors don't have inappropriate accents (in fact they usually have correct accents for their nationalities), the verbiage is just ever so slightly off, the emphasis usually in the wrong places, or the vernacular out of place. It's clear they were reading from cards without knowledge of context. Some of the tertiary controls are also a little confusing, and the joystick throttle controls are a little too sensitive - pushing the throttle all the way to the stop takes it past 100% and into WEP, or "Wartime Emergency Power," a kind of super-nitrous flank speed that will burn out your engine before too long... and it becomes difficult to find 100% throttle without bumping over into WEP.

I have to say this is probably the best Russian game I've played since Tetris. Unfortunately, as loyal readers will no doubt recollect, this is relatively faint praise. There's also a point where it becomes possible to have too much realism. Wings of Prey flirts dangerously with that area, yet I can't bring myself to dislike it. It's not a bad game, but it'll never replace Chuck Yeager in my nostalgia hall of fame.

Verdict: B-, or if you aren't into realism, C+.

Video Games | Wings of Prey | Launch Trailer

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

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Review: The Tomorrow War

Seems like there's a lot of games coming out of Russia these days. The 1C publishing company has released 3 of the last 4 games I've reviewed: Cryostasis (which was good), Necrovision (which was so bad it should have incurred criminal charges), and now "The Tomorrow War."

The Tomorrow War is a space/flight sim based in a hypothetical 27th century galaxy, where it has been eons since humans have left Earth for the stars.

Graphics
The game has some very nice visuals, out in space. Since space sims generally aren't very cluttered, the game takes advantage of the spare video processing power with high poly fighter models (though some of the capital ships are a wee bit simplistic) and expansive environments. The planet surfaces however tend to be a little more on the sparse side, reminding me of a flight simulator from approximately 10 years ago. The cloud rendering is particularly disappointing, since a cloud consists of a single 2D white polygon that doesn't even turn to face the camera... it gives the effect of somebody having cut a cloud out of a sheet of paper and left it hovering in the air for you to be disappointed in. Also, on the first mission of the game, you are tasked at one point to fly through the rings of saturn, which are comprised of giant chunks of rock and ice. Flying around the rings is pretty... flying into the rings is also pretty except for one thing - the "transition" between rendering the rings as solid bands of color, distant 2d rock sprites, and a wall of true 3D asteroids you need to fly around and between is pretty apparent and almost immersion-breaking. There's also some severe range-clipping issues with these things, but I suppose it can't be expected to render every asteroid in the rings at all times and all distances. Still, when flying through them at low warp speed, the "poof an asteroid appears" effect is pretty obvious. The portions of the game that take place inside the crew areas of ships (as well as the rendered insides of your cockpit) have textures that are a little on the low quality side, and there's lots of sharp angles on objects.

Sound
The sound requirements for a space sim aren't very demanding. You need sounds for the weapons, the engines, some explosions, and some ambiance. They have all these, and they do the job. The music isn't bad either but can get kind of repetitive. But my oh my, does this game fall flat on its face in the department of voice acting. Not only has the translation from Russian not gone particularly well, the voice actors also telegraph that they are reading lines from cards with no knowledge of context or proper emphasis. Thus, when your character approaches the flight deck engineer to inquire about his ship and says "Where is my hunk of iron?" it sounds like he is irately inquiring about a ferrous slug which has gone missing from his apartment, rather than playfully asking about the location of his ship. It also seems that most of the dialog meant to play during missions has been entirely left out. Maybe the translation didn't get done or something, but often the face of a wingman or officer will pop up chattering away in the corner of your viewscreen, but no words come out and the game doesn't give you a caption of what they say. To top it all off, in the cut scenes which involve talking, the movements of the models' lips do not even remotely sync to the words. They look like they're syncing to SOME words, just not the words they're saying. Honestly, the effect is even worse than in the old Wing Commander games... at least then the computer knew to stop moving the lips of the people when the sentence was over.

Gameplay
The first thing you find about this space/flight sim is that the learning curve is very steep and helpful directions are practically nonexistant. By the time you slog through the dozens of cutscenes between you and your first mission, somebody STILL has yet to actually inform you about important things such as "you will be expected to target your wing leader and press 4 to join his formation before anything else." So once you figure that out, which may take any number and combination of wandering off and running out of fuel, crashing into your wingmen, accidentally shooting your wingmen until they get pissed off and destroy you, etc... you'll eventually learn how to target your wingleader and press "4" to join his formation.

Once you're in formation, you and your buddies fly around looking at how pretty the universe is. And I'm not just talking about the first mission any more... an extraordinary amount.. check that, an excruciating amount of your game time will be spent flying in formation across hundreds, if not thousands of kilometers of scenic empty space. You practically need a second computer on your desk, so you can play something else while the autopilot keeps you flying in picture perfect unity with your wingmen.

So you formate, you fly out to where something to shoot is, you shoot it, you formate back up, fly back to the carrier and land on the carrier (which is also handled via autopilot). Frankly, I'm a little surprised they didn't just include a combat autopilot as well... you could start the game and go to the movies while your computer plays for you, then. Cutcene, rinse, repeat, and apparently there you have your game.

The controls are a little unintuitive as well. You have the option to make your mouse the targeting reticle, which sounds neat but it doesn't always behave as expected. 9 times out of 10, instead of your weapons shooting where your mouse reticle is, they will fire straight ahead anyway, making you wonder what the hell the point is of giving you a mobile reticle if the weapons don't train on it.

The story, or what little of it I could make out through the bad translations and worse acting, is also laughable. It deals with an interstellar war bent around the 27th century rediscovery of Zoroastrianism. It feels a little silly that peace in the 27th century is threatened by the resurgence of the proto-religion that eventually gave us the "big 3" standard religions. That'd be like a nuclear physicist suddenly deciding that pulleys and levers are a neat way to generate energy. I understand it's based on a book famous in Russia, but that didn't help "Hard to be a God" either.

The final breaking point for me with the game was when on the 3rd or 4th mission or so, I returned to formation after succeeding in the mission, only to have my wingmates sit like lumps, refusing to fly anywhere. Getting bored of that after 2 minutes, I broke off and flew back to the mothership by myself. But despite the fact that the next item on my mission list was "return to the carrier," I was not allowed to land because I didn't arrive via formation with my wingleader. I tried a manual landing (they do give you the manual controls to lower your landing gear and land yourself) but despite the ever so gentlest of touchdowns, the moment my fighter contacted with the flight deck I exploded in a giant fireball of sucky russian game.

Conclusion
While it is neat to finally play a flight simulator that has a "seamless" transition from stellar to atmospheric flight, it's not enough to carry this game. It's awful. It's not as bad as Necrovision, but it's still way too terrible to bother with. I want it off my computer, out of my memories, and I want those few hours I spent playing it refunded to me.

Grade: D-.
And that's the word from Bandit camp...

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Review: Red Baron Arcade

Sometimes the game market seems so choked with multi-year-in-development multimillion dollar budget ubergames that so often fall tragically short of expectations that it's often surprising when a budget title actually brings more fun to the table than many a "real" game.

Make no mistake, Red Baron Arcade definitely is a budget game. At this very moment it is on Amazon for a mere $19.99, and it definitely doesn't have the depth or extras of your average full-price game, but sometimes the extra crap gets in the way of making a game fun... and naked of cut scenes, voices, complex mission structure and other high dollar features, it shows that a game can be fun even if the developers didn't mortgage a nation to make it.

Red Baron Arcade seems to me to be an attempt to take one of the first arcade games ever, Red Baron by Atari, and update it 25 years later. The original was a green and black 4 frame-per-second vector graphic wireframe flier... sometimes I still play it today just to feel the retro coursing through my veins.

In keeping with the quick entrance, immediate action and simplistic design of the original Red Baron, Red Baron Arcade also features lots of shooting and jinking and even some bombing and such. The game is very straightforward and looks pretty nice, although where the game really shines is in cloud rendering... it makes the ground and the structures on it seem a little cartoony in comparison. A better way to keep track of enemies on screen would have been nice too (the targeting brackets around enemy planes blends too easily into the ground), but it's a small gripe.

The game features 23 single player missions as well as online multiplayer through gamespy. It also allows you to set the controls to be either "arcade" or "simulation." The stick behaves more realistically under simulation mode, whereas arcade mode is mostly just point-and-shoot without having to worry about the actual methodry involved in flying a plane. This choice allows the game to appeal to both the casual gamer and the flight sim enthusiast who might want a slightly more realistic experience. But beyond that, there isn't much realism to be found here. Enemy planes often appear out of thin air to join the battle, and of course what biplane or triplane could carry so many darn bombs? There's also an "energy" bar that refills over time that you can use to perform special maneuvers such as a turbo boost, and what my father (who is actually a pilot) refers to as an "Immelman," that is, basically half a loop-de-loop with a twist that makes you nearly instantly change direction. Also, the "powerup balloons" that can instantly repair or rearm you aren't exactly historically accurate.

But who cares!

The point is, you start the game, you start shooting, and you enjoy shooting down planes in fire and smoke. Some of the single player missions can get a little hairy though, pitting you against 20 or more enemy planes (and sometimes alone against them). The zeppelin busting missions and the bombing missions are fun as well. The game also provides 8 different planes to unlock and use, each with different stats, and you can customize the paint scheme of your planes (nice to have a little fluff even in a $20 game). You'll get shot down a lot in this game, but a single click starts the mission again, and it's rare that a mission will last more than 20 minutes anyway so it isn't overly punishing.

Oh, and you're gonna need a joystick for this game. Really. You really would be missing out otherwise.

The Verdict: Grade B+. Ok, it's not the game of the century, but it's 20 bucks and short, casual fun.

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Wing Commander Soundtrack For Sale

Ha ha ha... wonder if the X-Wing soundtrack is soon to follow?

I remember "Fat Man," he was the name of names for video game music back in the 90s. He did all the music to "The Seventh Guest" if you remember that little bit of creepy Myst-in-a-haunted-house goodness that was one of the first games (other than myst, obviously) to make use of the unprecedented space afforded by the burgeoning CD-ROM media.

((LINK))

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Wing Commander Privateer Gemini Gold

It's been a long time since we had a good game like this, and I'm happy to see that Privateer is being retooled with modern technology in mind. Privateer was an excellent mix of economics and spaceflight sims. These guys have been working for more than a year to recreate the experience, and I'm glad to have been pointed to it courtesy of Blue's News. It is open source and free to download, so get to it! Just be aware that it is still a work in progress, much like the Ur-Quan Lords remake of Star Control 2, so there's still some spit and polish missing, as well as a few bugs.

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