Recent reviews by Jiiiiim

Right! Completed a campaign on the starting difficulty. I reckon it took about ten hours all told, and at various points I was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sick of everything but Massive Chalice has some interesting enough points that it's worth discussing.

First off: the obvious comparison to make is X-Com. It's the same basic template of a squad of five engaging in turn-based percentage-themed combat with alien-looking-things. Backing that all up is a world map where events emerge and you react. There's some research where you use alien-looking bodies. There's a timer. Surely just a rip-off? Well...

...not quite. Let's take a step back: What's the premise? The MASSIVE CHALICE is a superweapon of sorts, charging up to once and for all defeat the dastardly Cadence, a vague orangey blob around the map there that is planning to destroy you and everyone you care about. But it's gonna take a while to charge up - 300 years in fact, so your elite squad is going to be experiencing a lot of change. They've got a fighting lifetime of maybe 50 years if you get lucky, so you don't invest in single supermen, you invest in super-bloodlines.

Each of your castles on the map is occupied by heroic families. The Kuan! The Leones! The Aabershots! The Berrys! Heroes all! Keep 'em married and not covered in orange goo and they will provide you with a fine selection of heroes. Then you cross-breed them with special tweezers to try and encourage positive traits to emerge. I mean in theory you do, I just married off people with high fertility so I could get maximum manpower, which led to some ♥♥♥♥♥♥ super soldiers indeed.

The research you're doing is gradually improving their equipment, both in stats and fancy stuff, and during their short lifetimes, they'll level up themselves and unlock special powers of their own.

Basically it is a balancing act, trying to keep the conveyor belt of babies rolling consistently enough that you always have a good enough five-man force to call upon while trying to boost up the long-term bonuses - I've mentioned research but there's also relics which have to be passed down bloodlines, and gain power every time they're used in battle.

As long as you make sure to build a few keeps at the start to house your families, minion numbers aren't really an issue, so then it's going to be battles which could be your downfall. Every ten years or so the cadence strikes in 2/3 provinces, and you defend one. Three strikes and they vanish forever.

You're inevitably gonna lose something. What you have to do is not lose battles, as that will accelerate the process of loss, and at the difficulty I was on, this wasn't a taxing task either. I lost one battle out of maybe thirty, which meant a lot of those 300 years were boring , waiting for the next fight to emerge so I could get it over with.

About 200 years in, I'd unlocked enough stuff, advanced my soldiers enough, and came across bad enough dudes, that the occasional interesting battle slipped in. Everything I've said so far is functional and boring, but let's get in the praise for MASSIVE CHALICE now, which is the diversity of battlefield options.

There's Cradles - upside down jellyfish who spit out babies. Roided-out blue guys called Twitchers, who can instantly swap position with anything. Ghostly Lapses, who causes your heroes to forget how to do things. Spiky Ruptures, who only exists to explode, leaving behind damaging sludge puddles. There's also baddies that can only be hit once and go invulnerable (Bulwarks), and baddies who cause your heroes to age years in a single punch (Wrinklers), potentially having them die of old age in the middle of a fight.

Your heroes are also pretty damn fragile, which means everything can suddenly go 100% to pot in a moment. So at its best, MASSIVE CHALICE is this little battlefield puzzle, where you have a huge amount of enemies around you that you can't possibly all kill this round, so how do you prioritize? Can you chain-reaction the ruptures? Can you knock some of them into a tree so they get knocked out for a turn? Can you smash up the local flora?

In my favourite battle (barring the final showdown which I shall not go into cos I want it to be a surprise if you play it), I found myself against a very large number of bulwarks, who go almost invincible after their first damage instance each turn. I did not have the damage to take out eight of them simultaneously, so I couldn't just start locking and loading as they would ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ murder me, but I had invested in some bulwark armour (researched with their corpses), which does exactly the same for your men.

So the big men waddle into the centre and absorb the hits and hope they don't run out of health while the alchemist stands at the back lobbing crates of bees at the enemy, which meander around, causing damage to everyone and the hunters prowl around in the shadows looking for pickoffs as the blundering bulwarks try and escape the bees.

Later on I got something from the Twitcher corpse research called Skipping Stones, which let you be the one who swaps positions with anything - there's some really inventive things you can do with them, to force enemies onto certain paths, to save people, to drag baddies into range. I kept a guy alive on 1HP for a good ten minutes on the final battle by swapping him all over the shop

The other thing which got better as the game went on was my feeling towards Bloodlines rather than specific heroes. X-Com is all about that one sniper who is the best at killing aliens, and you give him a name and ooh isn't he the best. Whereas with MASSIVE CHALICE, your heroes are going to see at most five battles before they die, so you better get used to them fast. Ultimately - I can barely name anyone who fought for me, but I have a strong recollection of the bloodlines they came from (always rely on the Aabershots) but you're not going to be able to tell the same stories about them.

In summary: MASSIVE CHALICE starts off immensely boring, and gradually increases in challenge and options until it becomes interesting. My normal campaign took about ten hours, so it depends whether you have that time to spare.

I'm gonna try an ubertough campaign and see if that helps or compounds the issues.

Anyway, it's worth a fiver

Alright that's Tomb Raider done. It's pretty brainless fun on the whole but you really feel it could have done with a closer eye on scale. It follows what I'm going to call the Batman template of a story taking place on one interconnected island which you can go back and walk around, with many, many collectibles scattered about should you be so interested, and a gradually unlocked series of equipment to explore more and more of the environment. It's almost two separate games, though. There's the railroad-straight main storyline, a mess of shooting, fleeing and quicktime, and the calm after the storm, where you potter about the map trying to find hidden vases.

It uses height really well. There's some vertigo-inducing sky fights and climbs, and everything is really solid/competent. The climbing axe is really fun but you can only use it on special climbable walls. The rope arrows are really fun but you can only use them on special roped objects, or when you're next to rope posts. It's not free-roaming, it's figure out how the game wants you to get there and do it.

Nontheless, the tools you have are fun tools, and it's an enjoyable ride. Has it got anything special? Well, it's very pretty, there's a huge quantity of fire, the characters are fine....not really. The story arc is the only thing that makes it different, it really builds up impressively, but that suspense of disbelief only really lasts until 2/3 of the way through. After that it's just a standard Do Impossible Things And Kill The Bad Guy ending

In theory I'd have liked everything to have been ratcheted back a few notches. Have you kill maybe 5 people over the game rather than 500. Have a slower burn. Make it more based on survival and exploration. I dunno if it would have stood up to that lack of action though. Anyway. It's alright, it's fun, you're not going to miss out if you don't play it.

This game caught me a bit by surprise, with my purchase entirely decided by an intense longing to play Settlers 2 again, and that it looked very pretty. It's about making Medieval civilization in the wilderness, starting with a group of twenty hardened fiends who have been BANISHED (the game doesn't say what for but I think murders), and seeing how big you can get. There's no external military threats, it's just a question of if you can balance your expansion, production, transportation and all that other stuff that makes a town tick, without everyone dying. Pure sandbox, no aim in mind beyond what you want to set yourself.

My first few settlements predictably toppled over, when we ran out of food/firewood/clothes/all of the above, but eventually I settled into a nice, soothing rhythm of building and consolidating. Stuff takes time to happen, so you can't charge around building farms and smithies and whatnot, you get there gradually, and with planning. Secure basic food, fuel and shelter in the first year, scavenge materials, plant trees, open a smithy a few years in, maybe barter for some chickens, a few more houses, a bridge over a stream...seasons tick by at a leisurely pace while you think about what you want to do in the next decade, or how you're going to create enough food to support the next twenty people.

It's not frantic, and once you know what you're doing there's not much that can surprise you, but sometimes you just want to do that, build up your little decorative fishtank of farmers and quarrymen. I think what it sets out to do, it accomplishes excellently, but the lack of surprise and novelty will (I think) stop me playing in the long run. There's nothing grandiose to shoot for, like Pharaoh's monuments, there's no pressing reason to keep expanding. Beyond occasional gimmicky disasters, you're mostly going to be staring at the streets, weighing up whether a tunnel would be a good use of stone, and adjusting the worker distribution to pump out a few more iron tools.

It's relaxing, it's reasonably deep, it's pretty, just don't expect too much in the way of an epic saga and you won't be disappointed.