Day 16 - XCOM: Apocalypse and Shellshock 2: Blood Trails

X-COM: Apocalypse 

While X-COM: Terror from the Deep is essentially a re-skin of  UFO: Defense, Apocalypse is the first true sequel. Unfortunately, it loses a lot of what made the original X-COM to great. For one, the sense of scale is all wrong. Why would you go from defending the entire planet down to defending just one city and expect me to feel as rewarded? I already had a fairly good idea what Apocalypse would be like, as I did play it enough in the past, but I figured I'd give it another shot anyway.

This title is one of the many games on Steam that is really just a dos title packaged with dosbox. It works well enough, as long as you don't plan to alt+tab, but neither Fraps nor Steam could take screenshots. After a bit of googling I found out how to do it with Dosbox, thankfully. The game looks dated, that's for damn sure. Part of that is actually because it has modern devices, such as scroll bars, but doesn't support modern things, such as scroll wheels. The UI is chock full of buttons, far more than I could imagine needing. It's almost overwhelming.

I played a few missions, took care of a few aliens and only lost one agent in the process. I tried both real-time and turn-based, and neither was particularly appealing. Turn-based has the downside of really not getting much done each turn, while the real-time had me spending a lot of time paused anyway, trying to control 4 squads, but at the same time I didn't feel like I had as much control. If I kept playing I'd probably stick to real-time, but with judicious use of the pause button. I went through a whole month and between buying equipment that you really need from the start, and paying my first months wages and upkeep I had already burned through half my starting money. I'm not really sure how to turn a profit in this game. I seem to recall raiding being extremely lucrative, but it essentially means attacking one of the earth-side corporations and stealing all their equipment, hardly a heroic thing to do.

In the end, while I love X-COM, Apocalypse is just not that good. If and when I feel the itch to play some X-COM, I will no doubt continue to grab UFO Defense or Terror From the Deep.

Shellshock 2: Blood Trails 

Ok, so this game is rated 40, which is one of only 4 games I own under 50, and my second lowest scoring game. I was definitely not looking forward to playing this, and in fact quite dreaded the experience. With that being said, the game wasn't that terrible. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty bad, but I've played worse.


Shellshock 2 takes place in Vietnam, I think, and probably involves Zombies. That's about all I understood, really. The game opens in a base of some sort, and a military guy that's wearing a mask and an accent speaking gibberish that I could not follow. Then there's an attack, and suddenly we're killing everyone for some reason. I had no idea who I was killing or why, but they were intent upon shooting me, so I wasn't going to argue the point. All the while there's hints of, I don't know, Zombies I guess. It was never clear. There's an odd injection you're given, and a bed-ridden man that lunges for you, weird noises, etc. Lots of foreshadowing, I guess.

This game is just chock-full of poor design choices. For one, it tries REALLY hard to make sure you get motion sickness, or just generally can't see anything on the screen. This guy must be a bobble head, because anytime you're running, or in a moving vehicle, the camera bobs up and down violently in a very unpleasant manner. Then there's all the things that aim to obstruct your view, such as the iron-sights that take up far too much of your screen, the blood spatter that indicates you're loss of health that creeps way too far into the center of the screen. I like that there's the little touch of holding up your gun when wading in the water, but does the gun have to cover half my screen? Using the mounted machine guns is a challenge, as the fire from the shooting is twice the size of the aiming reticule, forcing you to stop shooting or guess what you're aiming at. Then there's the QTEs that on a keyboard ask that you use WASD, which is just about the least intuitive way to handle a QTE. Finally, there's picking up ammo, which requires that you press the space bar when standing at the precise spot the game wants you to.

There were a few bugs and polish issues as well. At one point, while using a truck as cover to shoot enemies far away, I got terribly annoyed by an enemy that seems to be constantly looping 2 or 3 taunts, so I turned to look for him. It turns out he was right behind me trying to attack me with a knife, but for some reason couldn't. I got stuck on a few walls while running, and died twice to some sort of room filled with smoke, but I'll chock those two up to design flaws. The game tries to be cinematic, but does that by wrenching control away from you unexpectedly. For instance, at once point I was priming a grenade to throw at an enemy when the game decided to turn me so I can look to my left, and caused me to release the grenade onto an ally standing right next to me in the room...

I think it's safe to say that I will not play this game again.

Notes

Got to take the good with the bad, I suppose. I picked up Sleeping Dogs the other day, but on X360. It's still technically a steam game, even if I don't own it on PC and it's not part of my challenge, but I might still write about it later.

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 016