Recent reviews by Kindred

MEGALODON!! YES!!! BOUT TIME!!! OMG, I've been waiting for this thing for YEARS!!! FISH ARE NOT FRIENDS BUT FOOD

[knock knock]
Who's there?
Oh you know...

A REAL F*CKING VAMPIRE!

I legit think this is better than the sequel

I did have this big huge review all planned out discussing classes, game balance, art style, sound design, endgame content, and just how many things Chronicon gets just PERFECT. Down to the last minute detail.

But I'm going to just go with how it is one of the greatest tragedies of the modern age that so few people know about this masterpiece. Do you need to buy it? Yes, click the purchase button right now. Do you need the DLCs? Yes, click the purchase button right now.

Life, uh.... finds a way.

Is it hard? OH YEAH. Imagine trying to dock at an orbital space station 188km above the planet moving at 7800m per second. Its like trying to hit a dart board on the back of a semi moving down the highway the size of a dime, but it does get easier with practice. I mean, BREATHING is hard when you’re 3 seconds old and don’t know how to do anything.

This is analog flight at its finest. No warp drive, no computer guidance, and NO FAST TRAVEL. There are so many ways to screw up and die. Don’t understand how atmosphere works on re-entry? Go look up the space shuttle Columbia because THAT is going to happen to YOU if you don’t figure it out.

But the game does its best to explain everything in an extremely immersive heads up display that is very sensibly set up. There is so much about this game that is smartly designed. If you ever wanted to be a commercial airline pilot in space, now’s your chance.

Gameplay? Perfection.
Story? Perfection.
Aside from one or two easily fixed technical issues? Perfection.
I first noticed a lets player playing this game in February of 23, grabbed it during the summer sale of the same year.
Worth every single second of the wait.

So... Diplomacy. It ain't an option, but what is this game, exactly? More or less, this is Age of Darkness : Final Stand with a more cartoony art style, and a development team not crewed by morons that don't know their gluteus maximum from a hole in the dirt. Obviously, this game has taken some pointers from They Are Billions, a game that showed Activision was WRONG when they declared RTS games dead as a genre, but they don't copy it word for word like AoD did. Instead, they expand upon it! There's a lot to appreciate here with quality of life changes and good design decisions.

To start, one flaw TAB had was with its camera system. When designing towns, it was difficult to manage the entryway of buildings, especially houses, in such a way that you could make neat, orderly lines that were as efficient as possible. Diplo has a full 3D camera that can view the game from any angle you please, even getting those top-down views that allow for picture perfect placement. Nice. :)

Another problem TAB and AoD has was maintenance. Everything costed a maintenance fee, which really made me scratch my head. Was there not a zombie apocalypse going on? Their payment should be a day's meal, and getting to live another day without getting turned into a brain eater. Diplo took this to heart and soldiers only cost the food required to keep them from starving to death (it can happen), and the raw materials required to create their gear, which is a nice change of pace. Much like humanity in its adolescent, medieval times, you're going to be spending most of your time focusing on creating enough food for everyone, and then raw materials like stone, iron, and wood to keep the malcontents from burning your throne room to the ground. The gameplay loop of resource collection, logistics, construction, expansion, clearing, and wave defense is really quite satisfying.

A word on defense. At first glance, its very simple. You have walls, towers, and archers to shoot down from them. Even TAB had tesla towers, ballistas, and gatling guns... but FEAR NOT, dear basement dweller, Diplo has you covered. Towers can stock about 9 archers/crossbowmen at a time, giving them a nice little range boost, but they can also have catapults, and ballistae loaded instead. This gives some nice, tactical options for how you want your defense to be laid out. Oh, and your archers can also stand on walls, which is something I haven't seen since Battle for Middle Earth 1 back during the halcyon days when EA used the Sage engine!

Even though it's still in early access, there's more than enough content here to satisfy even the nit-pickiest of internet denizens (though there are still many who engage in what I call “unemployed behavior”, and you can't appease someone with THAT much free time). The developers are just blazing through their development schedule too, and have released FIVE major updates, based on community feedback, in the single year Diplo has been in early access. These guys have their thumb on the pulse of the community and know precisely what they're doing. The price tag isn't overly extreme for what you get either, but wait for a steam sale if you must. I wholeheartedly recommend this game.

Buggiest f*cking game I've ever seen in my life.

...

Fortunately, we have flamethrowers, artillery, and air strikes to fix that >=3. Joking aside, this game is fun, and HARD. Like... hard as nails being chewed by some dude who just got out of prison for killing his own mother. Every mission feels like Starship Troopers and every ounce of progress must be CLAWED against the tides of unending adversity.

This is right up my alley.

Do I recommend this game? Yes, absolutely, and let me tell you why. At first glance, it might seem cheap and badly made with sub-par graphics. FOOLS! How many AAA games have you been sold by disreputable individuals that played like @ss and had the depth of a rain puddle? They sure looked nice in the trailer though, but they ALWAYS look nice in the trailer! That's the point of trailers.

No, I recommend this game because the developer has something that has been lost in the gaming industry lately: Creativity. He has a mind to do something off the beaten path, and the stones to put his labor and time into something with no real guarantee of success, as opposed to the current gaming industry who only seems keen on investing in products assured to bring in the millions, thus perpetuating the same old lowest common denominator homogenized mush we've become accustomed to.

But how does it PLAY? Well, let me tell you, this is something I haven't seen in a decade, and even when the likes of the Walking Dead, Dead Rising, and Killing Floor were doing it, they didn't do it this well. You start off building up your base, command and conquer style (RTS will never die), creating a few troops and then seeking out and engaging the enemy. As you progress, building up more resource generation structures (which are NOT dependent upon map control, thank god), you get better units and defenses. Riflemen give way to jeeps with .50 cals, who give way to tanks, aircraft and artillery, and that last word is the name of the game when facing an enemy army that is larger than yours. Which, the armies of the undead are almost always larger than yours unless you are winning. In the immortal words of the great Markiplier, you are going to kill a LOT of zombies.

However... that isn't the only way to play. At the match set-up, you can opt not to control a faction, but to command support powers, air forces, or only play in first person. What is available in that mode? I'm so glad you asked. Would you like to mow down the swarms of the undead on board an AC-130 gunship, Timmy? Yes, you would. Hop aboard, little guy.

Say the AC-130 isn't quite your speed. You are pickier than a wine snob, but don't worry. We've got you covered. How about an old B-17 with plenty of bombs on board to turn that infested hamlet into a walmart parking lot? How about an old Spanish galleon suspended by a helium blimp, and has a full broadside of cannons raring to take that old run down zombie horde, and refurbish it into a violent spray of meat confetti? It's a good thing :) It's the perfect thing for if you had to spend the last 10 hours around your boss, who has the personality of a jalapeno suppository, and you just want to shoot some dead guys. Clearly, Insane Dreamers knows its audience.

What if you are an especially disturbed individual and have some of the more creative mental disorders? Well, you can play AS the zombies. How many games actually let you do that? How many games actually do it well instead of just as an afterthought? Not many, let me tell you. Believe me, I've looked. The zombies are a mix of resident evil, Killing Floor, Left 4 Dead and The Thing with plenty of unit variety. You've got your groupie crowd shambling their way toward the humans by the thousands, runners, Hunters that leap like freaks, several different variety of tanks, cybernetically augmented zombies like the FleshPound, and even ones whose flesh has mutated into solid stone. Some units can even spread the zombie virus to enemy units and when they die, they swap teams to come to work for you.

If neither the Undead or the Army rub you the right way, there's also the survivors faction, or the “fun faction” as the game lists it so, but I prefer to call it the “Redneck” faction. They're big on fire, can raise an infantry army on a budget, enlist psychopaths and convicted felons to help out with our zombie problem, and have brought up a number of old WW2 aircraft, which still work.

Is it going to challenge Starcraft 2 for the throne of RTS games? Well... no, but dammit man, they are trying something new here in an industry that has become completely paralyzed by greed and indecision, and that is worth the price of admission. There is a demo available to try before you buy, which harkens me back to the time when you could rent video games for $5 instead of paying $60 for cleveland steamer stuck on your chest because you played a game for 2 hours and 42 seconds and steam is showing you which of their fingers is the longest, so go ahead and give it a shot. If you like what you see, give the developer some scratch and support his work. In my humble opinion, he has earned it, and honestly, the way he handles the myriad forum whiners of the internet is absolutely hilarious. Dude is 110% savage and has my respect. Now, I'm gonna go shoot some more dead people. Y'all excuse me.