Report #39

Release Date: 2012

Wargame: European Escalation is a RTS game set in the time of the Cold War. In several campaigns, you play as either the NATO or the Warsaw Pact. The game tries to be very realistic. Therefore, you do not have to construct buildings or mine ressources. You buy units with points gathered by holding certain strategic points on the map. Your units are persistent throughout a campaign. They collect experience, but they are also gone forever should they be destroyed. This gives the game an interesting additional perspective, since you have only a limited supply of units to start with.

Gameplay is very easy to get, but quite hard to master. It's quite hectic, since there is no pause function during which you could give orderes to your troops. Most of the time you have to fight on several locations at once, which means splitting your attention. It's quite stressful (as a lot of RTS games are). Unfortunately the controls could be better, which makes the hectic gameplay worse. Pair that with a challenging difficulty and you have my main point of criticism concerning the gameplay. There are other, minor concerns I won't discuss here, you can ask about them, if you're really interested.

I had another problem, which might not apply to everyone, but judging from discussion on the internet, I'm neither the only one experiencing it: The ultimate patch killed my performance to a point where the game became unplayable. I had to revert to one patch before that to be able to play the game. This should definitely not happen at all! The game isn't patched anymore, so it really is the ultimate patch, which screws things up. There is no hope of another patch, correcting that mistake.

This technical problem is the reason, you are seeing a 3 star rating instead of a 4 star rating. Because, despite the problems with the controls and the lacking pause feature, I had quite some fun with the game. It was a different take on RTS, it was presented nicely and the fighting was fun. A little bit too hard for my taste, but not so hard that I gave up. I was surprised by having that much fun with it, because I usually don't like modern warfare in RTS games. It's either historic warfare or SciFi that I normally like. Which tells you, that the game made a lot of things right.

Achievements: You get all achievements by playing through the whole game and doing almost every secondary goal. It can be quite challenging, so be prepared to replay some missions several times. But it's not impossible.

Verdict: There is good and bad in the game. I feel like this is only suitable for a small audience, so best do some research on your own.

Release Date: 2012

Fallen Enchantress is a turn-based strategy game akin to Heroes of Might and Magic. It is set in a fantasy universe, where you play a young noble, setting out to bring peace to the world and wrecking it in the process. While you build up one or several settlements, you roam the map with your hero and fight the enemy or neutral armies.

I feel like this genre is really rare today. It was a welcome change to play such a game. Fallen Enchantress has some interesting ideas, but it feels very unpolished, even unfinished. Important hotkeys are missing, some bugs are happening, and there is not much immersion, though there seems to be some quite lore, unfortunately hidden in the minds of the developers. It was an okay experience playing through the campaign, but in the end, I was glad that it was so short.

Achievements: None.

Verdict: No recommendation, there are better games in the genre.

Release Date: 2011

Orcs Must Die! combines Tower Defense with a Third Person Shooter. A very enjoyable mix. I've beaten the game in 2014 but got less than half the achievements and decided it's time to collect some more.

It's a nice, casual game. OMD goes for a cartoonish look, which has the advantage that the graphics aged quite nicely. Don't expect too much story or lore or deep strategic decision making, just shoot away at orcs and watch them die in your traps. It was fun to play, even on the hardest difficulty. Which was challenging at first, but I got the hang of it quite quickly.

Achievements: Some are a bit hard to get by playing normally. But there is one map, which is a bit bugged and can be exploited for gaining several harder achievements really easily. Other than that you have to play through the game on hardest difficulty, but as I said before, that's manageable.

Verdict: Yes, a fun little game!