Out, Out, Damned City: A Mordheim: City of the Damned review

When I was younger, my brother and I got into the Warhammer games. We were already huge into board games (me less, since I lost frequently and would sometimes throw away a winning strategy I didn't even know I had) and Warhammer was just a bigger and more complex board game for us to waste away the hours on. But as I never had a head for large-scale tactics, I found myself drawn to the skirmish-based small-scale cousin to the Warhammer family of games, a game called Mordheim.

When the Mordheim: City of the Damned computer game was announced, I was ecstatic. Finally, a way to bring the gang warfare of the Old World's most wretched hive to a venue where I wouldn't have to keep track of all the rules. It looked excellent, too, with a variety of warbands and races, a massive city map, and a squad-based campaign feature. I couldn't wait to load up with a few of the people I played miniatures with and have at it. 

Unfortunately, City of the Damned isn't anywhere near as fun as the original product, and that's important to recognize. It tries so hard to get there, and maybe it even does in places-- the atmosphere, setting, and presentation are all fantastic-- but in the end, the mechanics are so byzantine and the gameplay choices are so confusing that it really doesn't make the end product particularly appetizing. Add to this an unfair learning curve that kind of shrugs and says "This is a difficult game and you're supposed to learn from your mistakes," and what you have is less a fun game, and more a byzantine slog for people who find Darkest Dungeon charming and too easy. 

So the basics. Mordheim takes place in the city of Mordheim, a wretched pre-industrial European hive where people grew corrupt and decadent while the lands around them fell to a state of total war between the forces of Chaos, the Orks, and numerous other factions. That was, until the massive twin-tailed comet known as "Sigmar's Hammer" struck the earth in the center of the city, making it an even worse hive, a home to violent cults and sickening Chaos abominations, and a haven for treasure hunters and those seeking the valuable mineral known as Warpstone, able to release massive amounts of magical power and energy.

You play a band of these hunters from one of five factions: The Sisters of Sigmar, there to cleanse the city; the Church of the Pit, a Chaos-worshipping cult that formed around the comet's crater; human bounty hunters; the Skaven, rat-people driven above-ground by the city losing its grip on sanity; or Witch Hunters, driven to remove the supernatural influence from Mordheim and have a fun time doing so. The game is split into two sections, the "camp" screen, where you recruit and outfit your squad to take on missions, and the "mission" section, where you deploy into the city to do battle with other warbands and scavenge for goods. Each skirmish has an objective and a series of sub-objectives that you can complete if you so wish, strengthening your gang and your position in the city.

And here's where it starts to go wrong. The game is played in a style similar to Valkyria Chronicles: You move your characters around in real-time third-person viewpoint using their movement points, then place them into stances, take actions, or attack enemies if there are any in range spending action points. While there is a tutorial, a lot of it is unclear on what each action actually does, requiring you to navigate a confusing series of stats and menus to figure out how to carry out actions on your turn.

Complicating issues immensely is the lack of a minimap, forcing you to zoom out to a larger map that doesn't seem to record your place in the city whatsoever. You can see the general area of things on the map, but finding your own people and planning moves is an exercise in frustration. While this helps with the "desperate struggle" atmosphere, as a game mechanic it's just another arbitrary hindrance in the way of enjoying the game. 

But in the end, it's just that there was a better way to do this. A turn-based tactical over-map way. XCOM2 showed how much fun a gang-based skirmish game where you have to scrabble and squabble and desperately fight for resources could be. With racial modifiers, multilevel terrain, and an RPG-style system of advancement, this could be the game to blow the doors off the entire tactical genre. At the very least, it'd give us one of the few interesting Warhammer Fantasy games, a thing that hasn't happened since Shadow of the Horned Rat, or maybe Blood Bowl: Chaos Edition if we wanted to get technical.

While Mordheim: City of the Damned tries very, very hard, in the end, it just falls short. It's a game with a ton of great atmosphere and ideas, but the frustrating mechanics, dense barrier of entry, and low reward for a high level of effort make this completely missable. By the end of my time in the city, I just wished I could leave these people to their squabbles, and maybe pick up Valkyria or XCOM again.

Final Score: 3/5. There is so much right about this game, and then the barrier of entry just knocks it down from perfect. It's a game I want to play, but not necessarily a game I can play.

The Reviewer received a copy of this game for review

Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown Review

The Shadowrun franchise is enjoying something of a renaissance recently. The tabletop game franchise; where the players take the roles of hackers, cybernetically enhanced mercenaries, and mages in a dystopian future; has been streamlined and cut down on at least some of the crunch that gives everyone issues with it. Shadowrun Returns (and its superior sequel Dragonfall) has made waves as the first successful licensed game for the franchise since the Genesis iteration back in the '90s.

Now with the online multiplayer game Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown, there's a way for people to link up with their friends, break into some corporate buildings, and cultivate an irrational fear of the words "milk run" just like fans of the franchise have done so for years, but with less of the bookkeeping, crunch, and confusing die pools of the tabletop version. And I'd love to say it's every bit as fun as the isometric single-player iteration, but...well, read on.

2077. Due to several unusual factors, a second age of magic has been ushered into the world, turning various people into elves, orcs, trolls, and dwarves among others. Dragons have taken their rightful place at the top of the food chain, ruling over some companies and even countries. Those not touched by magic have mostly decided to go the technological route with cybernetic enhancements and hacking. Corporations and privatized police now rule most of the world. And you have decided to take a career in shadowrunning, off-the-grid operations undertaken for a variety of contracts, usually dangerous. 

Shadowrun Chronicles plays out as a tactical turn-based roleplaying game with a hub level in between where you can recruit people to your party, buy better equipment, and level up. There are a few early tutorial levels, and after that the game settles into a rhythm of "do missions, sell stuff at the hub, rinse, repeat." 

However, this is where the issues begin to set in. The game doesn't truly open up until several missions after the tutorial, with a series of linked story missions that see you raiding Fenway Park after a dragon attack and attempting to escape with your lives. The linked Fenway missions are awesome, but until that point, the game feels kind of small and blocked-off. It gets slightly bigger after that, with a variety of side missions you can undertake for extra XP and cash, but I've also never really liked those "the game begins at (x)" chants that every MMO game seems to have by default. 

I also wasn't really a fan of the voice acting. It seems "Boston" means everybody talks like they're spoofing The Departed, and some of the performances rang a little wooden. As this is really the only form of plot conveyance apart from what happens during the missions, it hits a little harder than perhaps it should. (Granted, I was doing a similarly bad Boston accent while I was playing it as well, but that's in the privacy of my weird little monk's cell/office, not out in public.) 

Finally, the single-player options feel a little empty. I'm not a fan of games where you can't have an experience on your own as well as having the multiplayer experience, unless it's things like Team Fortress 2, where no matter what, you're shoved into a room with a whole bunch of other people to play with. You have to afford the players ways to play the game in the manner they want, and the game feels kind of sterile just playing botmatches, far more than it should be.  

And all of this is a shame, because the game is actually pretty good. The turn-based sections allow for simultaneous turns between players, with barely any hiccups in play. I think the one issue I had was that I'd plan a specific move out, only to find that the other members of my team had cleared the area I was going to grenade, or already cleaned out the lockers I'd been moving towards. The setting's history works really well, with the eponymous "lockdown" shutting down different districts of the city and limiting who you can talk to. And the graphics, while a little simple in places, are beautiful with a clean interface and very little chance of making the wrong move. 

It also gets the feel of Shadowrun down. The feeling of desperate firefights, jobs going wrong on a dime due to human error, and the way the world balances the grit of street-level ops with the sleek corporate towers all comes right off the tabletop game, only without a lot of the drawbacks of the RPG. It also does away with most of the gear optimization, which I'm sure would make most regular Shadowrun players throw up their arms in frustration. While there's still a little gear optimization, it's not nearly as prominent. 

In the end, I think if you have a group of friends who regularly mount up and play games, then buy this. If you don't, you'll soon find yourself missing the interactions this game can provide. It's weird when solitary, and I'd imagine it loses interest significantly faster.

Final score: 3/5

Full Disclosure: I received a steam key for this review. Also, to midnight, Voidwalker, and Walter: Thanks for running with me. 

A Review of The Charnel House Trilogy

Well, whatever you do, don't play The Charnel House Trilogy. You don't need more incoherent weirdness in your life.

I want to like The Charnel House Trilogy, really, I do.

It's an atmosphere-heavy point-and-click adventure game by a small indie company. It's got a strange plot like nothing else I've really played, except maybe for Downfall. The art has a handmade feel to it that reminds me of older adventure games, so it has the nostalgia factor going for it. And let's be honest, as someone who enjoys Jacob's Ladder and horror games a little more than anyone would ever admit, there is really no reason that I shouldn't have had an amazing time with The Charnel House Trilogy.

But as much as I'd love to trumpet Charnel House to the heavens, I found that the game falls a little short of what it could possibly deliver. While there are some great ideas overall in The Charnel House Trilogy, there's too much here for me to suggest giving this anything but a miss. 

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The Charnel House Trilogy is three linked adventure games in one: "Inhale", the first chapter, introduces the character of Alex, a young woman living in New York City who is about to take a train voyage to a place known as Augur Peak. Before her big trip, a series of mysterious events occurs in her apartment, including a blackout, a strange apparition, and sudden panic attacks. 

"Sepulchre", which can be downloaded for free from Owl Cave's website, picks up sort of where the first game left off, with Professor Harold Lang, Alex's fellow passenger on the late train to Augur Peak, as he wakes up after a nap to find the train completely empty save two members of the staff. From there, he is drawn into a surreal investigation that hinges on his past, and the massive black bags present on every room of the train but his. 

And "Exhale" concludes both the story of the train and Alex's story, revealing some (but not all) of the truth of what is actually going on. In this segment, Alex awakes on the train to discover that while it isn't deserted, there is something strangely familiar about all the denizens of the train and its compartments...

So first, this is a game that gets what a lot more horror games should get about horror: Horror trades on atmosphere. Entirely on atmosphere. Horror is the hardest-working genre out there because it has to unsettle you from the norm. It has to get into your head. It has to disturb you. And The Charnel House Trilogy gets that. The game starts out with an oddly subdued feeling that everything is slightly off. The feeling only grows as the story progresses, beginning with a few gently surreal quirks and then building to full-on disturbance by the final scenes. In terms of mood and setting, the story is fantastic. 

The setting is great, too. The three chapters take place in very confined spaces-- the first in Alex's apartment, and the second two on the train. Because there isn't a huge diversity of setting, the places in the game begin to feel familiar. Like you've been there for a while. When the plot really kicks into high gear, it affected me because these were places and people I remembered. It also made backtracking a little easier. But even with a lack of people, the train had a great sense of place. 

But there are some serious issues that have to be addressed.

The least of this game's worries is Alex's out-of-nowhere poetry about New York City

First, I strongly suggest that you go into the advanced settings menu for the game and disable the voice pack. I wouldn't disable the music, because in spite of the annoying radio (and the even more annoying DJ) during "Inhale", the music is actually pretty good. But the voice acting ranges from "Pretty decent for an indie game" to "a script read for the first time in the recording booth at knifepoint", with all but maybe three roles congregating near the bottom end of the spectrum. And the few roles where they got someone who did sound good aren't worth the ones where they didn't. It got so bad that the voice acting actually started to pull me from the narrative, rather than draw me in, and I made a neat metagame of guessing whether the characters weren't supposed to be reacting to the things going on around them, or whether the actors were just doing a bad job of conveying emotion. 

Second, speaking of things that break immersion, there were a a few in-jokes that, even knowing what they were talking about, felt forced and took me out of the experience. The big one is a scene near the beginning that talks about drama involving a game reviewer giving a game a low score. I'd be fine with this if it were something optional, something you could click through, something you could find as you go through the game.

GET IT? GET IT? IT'S TOPICAL! Now only if it had, um, ANY BEARING ON THE GAME

But making it something you have to see to progress through the game, forcing me to read your comment on modern game criticism and drama, isn't going to start me out on your side. I also thought the Phantasmagoria references in the later segments were a little forced. 

Finally, while repeated play-throughs did clear up some of the less coherent story elements, the plot winds up going...nowhere. The story picks up speed as it goes along, and there's no way I'd want everything tied up in a nice neat little bow, but the pacing is way off. Most of Alex's character arc is resolved by a single villain's monologue, a lot of the story threads are left dangling, and then the story ends on a cliffhanger that sets up the sequel...a year from now. I'd like to stress, I'm fine with the central mysteries being somewhat open to speculation or unsolved. But even the most feverish droppings from Suda51's brain-anus are going somewhere. They're saying something.

Hope you like a lot of rants and monologues basically saying this. 

They're doing something other than shrugging. There's obscuring, and there's having to play a game multiple times to figure out something where the plot points tend to obfuscate for no reason, come out of nowhere at times, and wind up ending on a big question mark and the words "to be continued". The second one shouldn't be done.

Another issue with this is that "Sepulchre", arguably the strongest chapter of the three by virtue of its self-containment, is kind of orphaned amidst Alex's story. It feels like a side-plot while "Inhale" and "Exhale" are going on, something that reveals more of the train's nature, but ultimately doesn't matter when taking the story holistically. Doctor Lang is barely introduced as a side-character to Alex's plot in "Inhale", and is only seen sleeping at the end of "Exhale", while "Sepulchre" focuses on him. I'd have liked to see him interact more in the plot during the "Exhale" chapter, which, while it might have diminished Alex's story a little, would have made the connections between the two characters seem a little stronger. 

In the end, it's a good game weighted down by its own self-indulgence, and I can't in good conscience give it a positive review when that's the case.  But, since it's not entirely a bad game, I have a solution. If you really feel like playing this, either download Sepulchre from the link above, or simply play the "Sepulchre" and "Exhale" chapters with the voices turned off. You miss nothing by skipping "Inhale", there's a chapter-select screen on the main menu, so there are ways to make it work.

But as a whole package, this is one train I'm glad left me at the station.

Score: 3 out of 5

Full Disclosure: The writer of this review received a review copy of this game.