I founded my empire in the depths of the earth. As it grew, I built it with the bones and rotting corpses of the subterranean dwarven kingdoms. For millennia, I crafted my undead legions, preparing to crawl out of the caves and rock and wage war on the evil in the world. That's right. My zombie army was good and holy, wanting nothing more than to create a unified world government founded on the principles of cooperation, trade, and kindness.
Age of Wonders III encourages this type of emergent, player-centric storytelling. The more I play, the more I realize that its strengths come from the unique melding of role-playing and turn-based strategy. It trusts you to create your own rich role-playing experiences and lets you control the narrative through empire-building and a robust tactical battle system. The result is a vibrant, special game that is ruthlessly entertaining. Age of Wonders III's latest expansion bolsters an already exceptional core with more races to play, a better grand-scale strategy, and an excellent morality system.
Eternal Lords trusts you to create your own rich role-playing experiences and lets you control the narrative through empire-building and a robust tactical battle system.
Those familiar with the Age of Wonders series, particularly the third installment, will immediately recognize the tactical/strategic duality driving each session. You'd bounce between macro- and micro-management, controlling both the direction and structure of your civilization as well as the outcome of individual battles. However, that two-stage system is hard for any game to pull off well, and it was one of Age of Wonders' weakest points. While tactical bouts had plenty of variety and the available options made matches thrilling and tense, the large-scale planning lacked depth, leading to a lackluster half. Eternal Lords finally brings enough new features to flesh out the game and cover almost all the base game's weaknesses.
For starters, two new races (the Frostlings and the Tigrans) are added to the basic Dwarves and Elves. Both have a visual flair and uniqueness all their own. Frostlings, for example, are an offensive race with bonuses for ice magic. They dwell in cold areas and can take advantage of often-barren land to launch raids on more temperate cultures. Tigrans are their natural foil. Based on the mythology of ancient Egyptian culture, they are a quick, desert-dwelling class of felines. They worship the sun and idolize the duality of nature. To wit, Tigrans specialize in necromancy, and they worship the dead as well as the living. This makes Tigrans an ideal pairing for Eternal Lords' new class--the Necromancer.
In the base Age of Wonders III game and the first expansion, players chose both the race and class of their young nation's leader. Because a good chunk of the game was modeled after Dungeons and Dragons and similar fantasy settings, the classes were standard fare: rogues, warlocks, and warriors. Necromancers are a bit different. Whereas the others fit into standard heroic archetypes, fiction has always associated the art of controlling the minds and bodies of the dead with evil. Let us not forget that in the original Hobbit novel, Tolkien created a necromancer character who bided his time until he could revive himself as the Dark Lord Sauron.
Age of Wonders III's latest expansion bolsters an already exceptional core with more races to play, a better grand-scale strategy, and an excellent morality system.
Suffice it to say, it's a strange premise to work into an empire-building strategy game. Even fictional conceptualizations of the undead lend themselves to a different system of goals and values. The dead, for example, don't care where they are or what they're doing. They're nigh unlimited as well because any war is likely to yield more soldiers to bolster your armies. Eternal Lords understands this and makes necromancy and its related magicks whole and distinct.
I spent the majority of my time with Eternal Lords leading an undead sect of dwarves below ground. I defended my cities with small bands who could summon up much larger armies from fallen warriors on the battlefield. They were a bit weaker than some other units, but I overwhelmed my enemy with sheer numbers. After a time, I gathered enough power to cast a massive spell that revived recently killed troops from around the world under my control. I had become a demigod, and my abrupt omnipresence spooked other world leaders. In short order, I flooded the surface with my abominations and championed the spread of good and kindness throughout the world. Again, it might sound incongruous, but it does a make a sort of sense when you consider how all of Eternal Lords' pieces fit together.
For example, the morality system facilitates a broad variety of play styles and leads to some distinct late-game units based on your alignment. The path of good is tied more to sparing the lives of the innocent and protecting the weak than it is to any cosmic moral authority. As such, I decided that my undead were like friendly vampires. They did what they needed to do, but they were more interested in establishing systems of cooperation with the hope that everyone else would willingly choose to become zombies at some point in the future.
To that end, I made friends with the other races, brought them under my protection, and governed them as well as I could. I eventually converted them, but they were almost always better for it. Those choices lead to a positive alignment in the game, and I won by unifying the globe in peace and harmony. You won't see any complex, ambiguous moral quandaries here, but it works as the foundation for a creative system to promote an interesting network of decisions and allegiances.
Tendencies towards openness and role-playing even show up in Eternal Lords' single-player campaign. Here, you'll play as Arvik, a necromantic Frostling. He is the heir to his kingdom's throne and is thrust into a complex political situation, forcing him to make a series of tough calls as he unlocks his abilities as a powerful wizard. Each new scenario presents you with important decisions regarding how you want to govern your people and what kind of leader you want to be. It's not the best writing around, but it does reinforce the themes of Eternal Lords' minute-to-minute play--engaging decisions.
Eternal Lords carries a few problems over from its core game. Worker units aren't terribly useful, for example, outside of building singular roads. Flying units can move around the battlefield without any kind of penalty, and because those are typically the strongest units (i.e., dragons), it can sometimes feel like you don't have much recourse against stronger opponents. That's balanced somewhat by the sterling tactical play, which rewards careful planning and gutsy gambles, but it still leaves something to be desired.
The morality system facilitates a broad variety of play styles and leads to some distinct late-game units based on your alignment.
Strategy game legend and Civilization creator Sid Meier once said, "Games are a series of interesting decisions." By that metric, Age of Wonders III: Eternal Lords is excellent. Your possibility space is vast, and you can craft your adventure and your nation in any number of ways. Systems of morality, player races and classes, and governance all work together to create an interlocking web of player-driven narrative potential. This expansion's only real weaknesses are those endemic to the structure of the base game, but Eternal Lords is a worthy follow-up and fresh take on the classic turn-based strategy game formula.
Right from the landmark battle aboard the UNSC Pillar of Autumn, the Halo franchise has almost always been a team effort, even though Master Chief has done most of the heavy lifting in the mainline series. That's where all the spin-offs and novels come in. As the follow-up to Vanguard Games' Halo: Spartan Assault, Halo: Spartan Strike is not only a spin-off, but also a top-down shooter that reinforces the notion that Halo need not be limited to the first-person perspective. From a continuity standpoint, Spartan Strike takes bigger risks than Spartan Assault, setting reprisals from Halo 2 while giving more screen time to the Prometheans, who weren't introduced to the series until Halo 4.
Spartan Strike's bite-sized five-minute missions fit in well with a straightforward story involving the Artifact of Doom plot device. In this case, the artifact is called the Conduit, a device that functions as a Promethean portal key. It is also a tried and tested sci-fi term that has been used in Mass Effect, Dead Space, and as the title of a Sega-published first-person shooter. Through much of Spartan Strike, the Conduit is subjected to a football-like change of hands between the UNSC Marine Corps and the Covenant.
Spartan Strike is never monotonous, partly thanks to its vehicular sections.
Equally engaging is the opportunity to revisit familiar areas from the main series. In Halo 2, New Mombasa was a war-torn battleground where Master Chief was just one of countless soldiers tasked to repel the Covenant. The raised visual perspective of Spartan Strike shows off New Mombasa as a highly vertical metropolis. While you're guiding a Spartan-IV along a commercial district in the foreground, UNSC troops are holding their own on a bridge in the background, hundreds of yards away. Although your player-character functions like a one-man army, nothing detracts from the implied accomplishments of the soldiers in the surrounding areas. Conversely, the location shift to Gamma Halo (also known as Installation 03) is a less engrossing environment, as, for the most part, it's a generic jungle accented with Forerunner architecture.
The 15 years Halo has been around offers more than enough time for minor timeline errors and potential retconning. It might be inconsistent to see Prometheans in a story arc related to Halo 2, but that doesn't dilute the gratification of making them disintegrate, especially when using their own weapons.
Spartan Strike's bite-sized five-minute missions fit in well with a straightforward story involving the Artifact of Doom plot device trope.
Much like the Rappys in Phantasy Star Online and the blackbirds in Bloodborne, the Halo Grunts are the series' annoyance incarnate, which makes melee kills with rifle butts all the more satisfying. Even without the first-person view, killing up close in Spartan Strike quenches the bloodlust for these troublesome halflings. As in Spartan Assault, transposing familiar enemies into an overhead-camera perspective works, because of the familiar weapons used to kill them. The battle rifle bridges the lethality of the sniper rifle with the firing rate of the assault rifle, and, as always, makes short work of any elite. The same goes for the mounted gun atop a warthog, which doesn't suffer from overheating.
If you've played Spartan Assault (and you should have already, if you're a fan of Halo's expanded universe), the Spartan Strike mission objectives will be very familiar. A given stage will involve one, or a combination, of the following objectives: get from Point A to Point B, destroy X objects, or survive for X seconds. Again, these are short missions, and the simplicity of these assignments works well for Spartan Strike. Holding your ground in a limited space offers a glimpse of how a Fireflight mode would work as a twin stick shooter. Whatever your objectives, it's the abundance of Covenant and Prometheans that serves as the game's connective tissue. The odds seldom feel overwhelming, but there's still a lot of death to go around. Thrilling moments, like vanquishing energy sword-wielding elites, often make high-score incentives a secondary priority. And with all the A.I. marines joining the fight, it's a mystery that Spartan Strike lacks multiplayer, especially when it was one of the big draws of Spartan Assault.
There are very few extended breaks in between gun battles.
That's not to say Spartan Strike is bereft of features. Customizable loadouts, uncommon in the mainline Halo campaigns, let you pair the assault rifle with a rocket launcher right out the door. Add an armor ability like a regen field, and you have a Spartan who can go toe-to-toe with the Chief. You are fortified well enough that, potentially, you could clear Spartan Strike without dying. This is compounded by the mandatory auto-aim, which cannot be toggled off in the Settings menu. At least you can count on Halo Skulls to give the Covenant and the Prometheans a fighting chance. Whether it's lack of armor or low ammo pick-ups, there's something to increase the stakes. As usual, using Skulls isn't a purely masochistic exercise; reward flirts with risk, since XP is multiplied with Skulls.
XP is the juicy core of Spartan Strike's replay incentives. It's the currency for purchasing optional weapons like the Spartan laser or the sniper rifle. These armaments significantly help in fulfilling Assault Ops goals, purely non-mandatory assignments that yield more XP, bragging rights, and progress toward a couple of achievements. And while, typically, achievements are not worth noting, Halo: Spartan Strike's inclusion as an Xbox game for Windows means that achievements can already be earned without having to wait for the unannounced but presumptive Xbox One version.
A nostalgic return to New Mombasa .
Much like Spartan Assault before it, Spartan Strike is the closest we have to a Halo game, had it existed in the late 1980s arcades. While the lack of multiplayer is disappointing, it features more than enough loadout options to add variety that it warrants repeat playthroughs. More importantly, Spartan Strike still retains Halo's core combat appeal despite the top-down view, auto-aiming, and amped up armor abilities. It preserves the palpable tension in emptying two M7 Caseless SMGs while back-pedalling against a brute. It's a familiar predicament for Halo fans, but one that can be remedied in Spartan Strike with the one-button ease of an air strike. That might be unfair to the brute, but if you've ever been on the receiving end of a gravity hammer, an air strike is hardly a cheap countermeasure.
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