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The Conversations With Distinguished Gentlemen Issue

BattleForge

This game leaves me suspicious.

Photo by Dan Siney

BATTLEFORGE

Platform: PC

Publisher: Electronic Arts

This game leaves me suspicious.

BattleForge

is a real-time strategy game that uses a collectible-card-game metaphor to handle its unit and resource management. Whereas in most RTS games, you pick a faction and that faction has lists of units it can build, in

BattleForge

there are no factions, and you build your own unit list out of four types of units—fire, frost, nature, and shadow. Each unit has a mana cost associated with it, and you get mana by creating mana orbs on a finite number of structures on every map. Every mana orb you create has an associated color and can only be used to create units of that color, which encourages you to build your deck around no more than two colors—theoretically, this ensures a high degree of specialization on each deck.

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Also like collectible-card games,

BattleForge

is based around microtransactions. The game starts you with a modest deck of cards and a number of points you can use to buy randomized booster packs. I forget how many, but it’s a decent number. To get more cards, however, you’ll need to buy more points with actual money. That was pretty much the moment I lost interest in the game as anything I might ever play seriously myself. But I know some people aren’t as averse to games built around microtransactions as I am, so it’s not an absolute negative.

It’s really pretty. It seems reasonably balanced. Units have a variety of unique abilities that synergize in interesting ways. There hasn’t been a really good RTS released in a while, so if you like the genre and have an itch that needs scratching, it could satisfy. It’s never going to be for me, but it’s executed competently enough. Cautious thumbs-up.

Keep in mind that it’s a dedicated multiplayer game. There aren’t really any neato cinematics (there’s a story, but it’s told through dozens and dozens of pages of text and has little to no bearing on the gameplay), it always requires a functional net connection, and even the player vs. AI content seems designed with cooperative play in mind. As usual for RTS games and collectible-card games, it’s not for people who want a decent single-player experience.

VELVET ASSASSIN

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: SouthPeak Interactive

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Stealth games have a problem: Their core gameplay consists largely of staying in one place and memorizing guard-patrol patterns. Unlike brawlers or shooters or even racing games, the core gameplay of stealth games is not viscerally satisfying. Also, generally speaking, if you’re losing in a nonstealth game, you have time to realize that you’re losing and correct your behavior, pulling off a win. In a stealth game, you realize you’re losing when a guard spots you, and then you have to start again.

So stealth games succeed or fail on their ancillary elements.

Metal Gear Solid

has its melodrama, cut scenes, and boss fights;

Splinter Cell

has its techno-thriller aesthetic;

Deus Ex

has its approach-it-any-way-you-want gameplay and moral ambiguity. All three have gadgets. The former two have the performances of their leads: David Hayter and Jeremy Irons as Solid Snake and Sam Fisher respectively. Other games have succeeded with action-based core gameplay and stealth as a sideline.

Velvet Assassin

is a “pure” stealth game by Replay Studios, where the player takes the part of Violette Summer, a heavily fictionalized version of real World War II Allied spy and saboteur Violette Szabo. As a framing device, the game is told in flashback—after a mission gone wrong, Violette lies dying in a hospital bed. As she drifts into and out of consciousness, she remembers missions she’s performed in the past, working in Nazi-occupied France to throw wrenches into the German war effort. Linked to this framing device is the gameplay gimmick: As Violette receives injections of morphine, her memories turn to hallucinations, so in gameplay, you the player enter morphine mode, leading Violette through a frozen world where poppy petals fall from the sky and a blood-stained negligee (ostensibly a hospital gown) replaces her WWII saboteur duds.

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The game’s problems stem from its very premise. It bills itself as the first truly realistic WWII stealth game, so no fancy gadgets or ridiculous, melodramatic storytelling—in other words, none of the ancillary elements other stealth games have used to good effect. But stealth games tend to be fun in inverse proportion to how realistic they are. If it had played up the fever dream, maybe it could have been something memorable. But it is by nature an unexceptional game from a small studio, and unlike action games, stealth games just can’t coast on viscerally satisfying core gameplay.

I wish it were better than it is. It’s intriguing. It’s

pretty

. It’s clearly a labor of love. But none of that helps me overcome this fact: What I enjoyed most about it was setting it aside.

THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK: ASSAULT ON DARK ATHENA

Platform: PlayStation 3

Publisher: Atari

This game is hours and hours of solid entertainment. There’s nothing especially innovative about the gameplay, and the graphics are not much above the current average, but it might be one of the better games I’ve ever played just in terms of sheer got-the-fewest-things-wrong.

Historical interlude!

In 2004, as a tie-in to the new Vin Diesel film

The Chronicles of Riddick

, Vivendi Games released

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay

on the original Xbox. It was a hybrid shooter-stealth game with RPG-like elements (no experience points or anything, just nonplayer characters you can talk with and things like that). Much to everyone’s surprise,

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EfBB

was

great

, graphically impressive with solid gameplay, and a prequel to the film

Pitch Black

instead of a standard game-of-the-movie adaptation of

TCoR

. (Together with

Spider-Man 2, EfBB

produced the illusion that movie games were starting to get good—this didn’t last, of course.) Due to technical limitations that can be summed up as “the game was too awesome,”

EfBB

was never made forward-compatible with the Xbox 360. This made Vin Diesel very sad, so he set about pulling strings to have the game remade on modern consoles. Sometime during the remake process, someone said, “Hey, why not stick a whole other game on here, too? We’ve got a working current-gen graphics engine and everything.”

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

is the result. It contains the entire original

EfBB

(with the extra level previously available only on the PC version of the game) with graphics updated to today’s standards, plus the

Assault on Dark Athena

episode, a sequel of roughly equal length that picks up where

EfBB

leaves off. The gameplay is straight out of 2004, but let’s face it, the state of FPS gameplay hasn’t advanced too much over the past five years, and this also incorporates stealth elements better than those normally seen in FPS games. The voice acting is great, the story is… well, mostly an excuse for Richard B. Riddick to be a badass, but whatever.

Overall

, it’s a solid game and deserves more attention than it’s been getting. Check it out!