Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball is a fast and lively arcade playground, marinated in neon shades and seared by the hottest techno tunes. The lights pulsate as the bass bumps, the colors shift as the action swells, and, somehow, your movement seems to synchronize with the chaos painting the map. This competitive PC arena experience is teeming with character, but with its overly loose controls and absence of meaningful progression, the game pushes its style over its substance. Like disco itself, the enjoyment provided by Disco Dodgeball's vibrant walls is fleeting, fading like a fad forgotten not long after its initial boom.
It fails to make a lasting impression, but that doesn't stop the action from being gripping and entertaining early on. Robots roll on a single wheel up and down the various maps--resembling dance floors with their vivacious lights--while explosive dodge balls whizz by your head. Power-ups transform your projectiles into boomerangs and provide jetpacks mid-round, so it's critical to keep your eyes on both the position of your opposition and these enhancements. Blasting opponents out of the air or pelting an unsuspecting robot with a ricocheted ball is supremely satisfying, but learning how and when to take a shot isn't easy. You're riding on a wheel against a surface providing little friction, so everyone on the dance floor continues to roll long after letting off the gas. Balls arc downward after being thrown and bounce off walls in often unexpected ways, so it takes a great deal of practice to understand how, when, and where to take a shot with so many variables at play.
If it weren't for the explosive dodge balls, I'd totally chill at this club.
Multiplayer games are player-hosted, so a high ping can result in robots flying from one end of the screen to the other as if hurled from a catapult; as a result, the already fast movement speed--which is only enhanced by a rechargeable boost--can be a little too sporadic to account for. There's nothing wrong with combat that takes time to master, but even after hours of play, I never felt fully comfortable with the direction of my explosive shots.
Thankfully, there's more to Disco Dodgeball than just throwing and catching balls. Beyond the classic Elimination and Deathmatch options, modes like Hoops and Grand Prix offer unique, interesting ways of playing with the mechanics. Hoops forces you to focus on fitting a specific ball through a square goal in order to score points for your team, while Grand Prix transforms the map into a speedway of sorts. Instead of using your momentum to dodge oncoming action, you must barrel through checkpoints as you race against the competition. Catching and throwing balls always remains a significant piece of the puzzle, but these various mechanical alterations allow for much greater in-game creativity that what the standard rules supply. Most servers lean toward the classic modes, but mixing up the rules within a room full of competent bots is always an option.
The different game modes provide creative ways to explore the physics. Determining the arc of a throw is tricky, even after a lot of practice.
Once the early wonder starts to wear off, though, what's left is a fun curiosity with hooks too dull to pierce the skin. There's single-player content, including Arcade, Horde, Training, and a handful of other solo affairs, but the real appeal here is the competitive play. Leaderboards and the ability to level up provide some incentive to come back, but other than basic robot customization, the actual tangible rewards for continuing to play the game are weak. Without a true sense of progression, Disco Dodgeball doesn't do much to pull you back onto its thumping dance floors.
When the connection is strong, the balls are bouncing as you intend, and there are enough players to populate the servers, Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball is a treat. The audiovisual package superbly complements the wall-to-wall mayhem found within a competitive round, and there's a healthy suite of modes to mix up the action. There's just not enough staying power, and controls that are a few notches too loose make it difficult to determine a shot's trajectory. Disco Dodgeball is a creative player in a crowded space, but lacks too many attributes to stand out.
A pneumatic leg slams into a neon breastplate, dislodging a ball with curious, flattened sides--futuristic-looking in that characteristically impractical sort of way, like a concept car with inaccessible wheel wells. It's a turnover in favor of Sporting Automata, and one of its robots lumbers into the phosphorescent glow of the end zone, where it spikes the ball and does a few celebratory sit-ups.
This is Cortex, an object lesson in a brand of futurism that's surprisingly hard to come by in the world of electronic sports. Its gridiron is littered with extruded geometries and embossed with cosmetic circuitry patterns. Broad-shouldered athlete-simulacra smash into each other like promo animations for the NFL on FOX as their head coach/Matrix operators look on, bottom-lit by monitor glow. It's a wildly speculative vision of what sports could one day be. It's the kind of thing you used to see a lot more of earlier in the digital era, and a far cry from the current tack of e-sports with its gently iterative shooters and fighting games.
Frozen Cortex's other hereditary through-line runs straight back to football. In a planning phase prior to any action, two players simultaneously slip step-by-step instructions to their team of five robots, setting up running routes, passes, blocks, or zone coverage. The goal is to score by reaching the thin strip of the end zone or crossing smaller "extra point" tiles strewn across the randomly generated maps. Waypoints can be laid down with simple clicks of the mouse, and a bot will faithfully trace a direct route through them to the end of its line. With a full set of paths and nodes diagrammed out for the five robots, the traditional playmaking X's and O's here begin to take on the look of an electrical schematic, and it's easy to imagine some subsequent Frozen Cortex '16 version introducing stutter-step resistors and spin-move inductors, or maybe a "battery" symbol for a stiff-arm to the face.
A lot of Frozen Cortex's tactical potency is owed to the fact that it allows players to sketch out and demo their opponent's game plan exactly as if it were their own. It's a subtly brilliant little inclusion that opens up the opportunity to tailor-make counters to highly specific plays. Of course, the awareness that your opponent can just as easily construct a 1:1 model for any play you might conjure up ends up bleeding into your strategic subconscious, too. Against a well-versed player, a match of Cortex becomes an exercise in recursion: "They'll be expecting the obvious pass--but they'll also be expecting that I expect that they expect the obvious pass. But then again…"
You can imagine the effect this can have on turn length. Outside of a specialized mode with a thirty-second play clock, players can take as long as they want--days, even--to submit their move. But it's all well accounted for in Frozen Cortex's elegant matchmaking system, which allows you to field multiple games simultaneously and even enable email notifications in case your turn comes up while you're away. While the server population never seems to stretch beyond thirty players at a given time, games are easy enough to come by. The measured, deliberate pace seems to attract a crowd that's more genial than most, if sometimes prone to "forgetting" about your match soon after you burn them for a big score.
This all means that it only takes a match or two to pick up the fundamentals, which is as long as I can recommend bothering with Frozen Cortex's single-player mode.
With both players' interpretations of the ensuing play in hand, the game crashes them into each other and films the resulting chaos like Jake Gyllenhaal's creepy Nightcrawler cameraman, tailing runners with an uncomfortably narrow chase view or leaping sideways to frame the secondary getting burned on a long pass. A quibble, but it's easy to lose track of a robot during these rare and irregular perspective changes, especially when a given part of the playing field so often looks like any other.
Learning to respect the deep ball is the first harsh lesson in the education of a Cortex player. A bot can hurl the rock from one end of the small field clear to the other--as long as there aren't any tall blocks in the way--and drop it in the end zone to be caught or picked up by a nearby teammate. The longest passes freeze at their apex, ending the turn. This ostensibly allows the defense time to swoop in for an interception, but the effect is like a crystallization of that wonderful moment when an NFL cameraman begins that telltale, frantic sideways pan--the moment anyone watching suddenly realizes that something's just gone dramatically wrong (or, less often for a Texans fan like me, right) in the backfield.
Unlike passes, runs draw out through the full length of a turn. True to real football, they're the grind-it-out option, leaning on the cumulative effect of bonus point tiles for a win by attrition. Because of the idiosyncratic way that blocking works in Frozen Cortex, stopping the run requires a patient defense and timely risks. If it lapses enough to allow a robot to scamper through to the end zone after hitting a string of extra points, it's a coup.
Two circles around each bot govern all collisions in a game chock full of them: one for blocking and one for tackling. A robot that's "first on scene"--that is to say, reaches an area and goes stationary before the opponent does--will block any comers trying to run past its circle on their prescribed routes. But stationary bots will automatically bypass would-be blockers to snuff out ball handlers that enter their larger tackling radius. It's a strategic wrinkle that forgoes the random number generators so endemic to sports games in favor of something more aboveboard and ultimately more intuitive, too.
This all means that it only takes a match or two to pick up the fundamentals, which is as long as I can recommend bothering with Frozen Cortex's single-player mode. There are two main formats: a one-and-done "Knockout" mode and a standard single-season league. In league play, the AI provides stiff initial competition, but it quickly fades as you use the perfunctory free agent system to outspend it on new robots with better stats. There's an overarching text-based narrative involving an investigation into thrown matches, but it goes nowhere fast and rings especially hollow because Frozen Cortex actually allows you to bet against your own team and throw the game without consequences.
It's weird to cite a game for trying to go deeper or tell a story. But the futuristic coating that Frozen Cortex paints over its sport works best as a surface treatment. And if you don't cut into it, it looks great. The teams have slick, expressive names like "Heavy Perspective" or "SXT Vision," and their logos look like the glyph symbols in Blade that denote secret vampire rave nightclubs. The industrial electronica tracks thrum along as naturally as a pulse. A news ticker drip feeds evocative little blurbs like "Core 4' Teams to Meet with WRC and League to Discuss Player Rights." It's only in the actual exposition that these things end up belabored, as the league's talking heads try to pack an entire personality into each of the tweet-sized messages they send before each match.
Maybe that's a mark in favor of replacing the human element in futuristic games like this. If you could only excise all those flimsy, unreliable human bodies, with their proclivities for head trauma and contract renegotiation demands, you'd perhaps reach something purer--sport ascended from the flesh, so to speak. Bigger but more thoughtful. Gladiatorial but safe. With blitzes that play out like chess, with mechanized athletes that can pull any move if you can just hit the right combination of buttons. Some ultimate game where nerd and jock fuse together and assume their final form.
Somewhere in the world, there's a 14-year-old in an interminable high school history class who, just to stay awake, is probably imagining a scenario that looks a lot like Bladestorm: Nightmare. The Hundred Years' War is one of the longest and most pointless conflicts in human history, memorable primarily for Joan of Arc's involvement and as the basis for hundreds of years of Brits and the French throwing shade at each other, with decades upon decades of grousing about kings and succession happening in between. Surely, such a memory can only be improved by imagining the war being fought by anime-haired mercenaries commanding legions of sellswords to slay massive armored knights, vicious dragons, and snarling armies of demons, right?
On paper, that's a yes, and I wish the folks at Tecmo Koei were capable of doing it justice. Instead, Bladestorm's pretension of being a massive scale real-time strategy game with action elements turns out to be little more than a European coat of paint slathered over the tired Musou formula, with the RTS elements working to its detriment instead of providing much needed fun and depth. At least the game gives you a lot to work with. Bladestorm Nightmare is a remaster and a sequel all in one. The original game, released in 2007, is included here with a few new features to bring it up to par with the new scenario, Nightmare, which totals out to anywhere from 25 to 30 hours of gameplay, all told. If nothing else, it at least succeeds in keeping you busy.
This is...not a good-looking game by any standard.
Staying busy in the Hundred Years' War scenario involves making a mercenary in the game's fairly deep character creator to lead specialized troops--swords, spears, archers, and the like--into the fray of the ongoing war between the British and the French. Just as in the Warriors games, your job is to go from enemy base to enemy base, clearing out hordes of enemy combatants and their generals, lowering their defenses to nothing until the base commander shows. Killing him or her means that your side sets up shop in the base, and the enemy has fewer reinforcements to prevent you from taking out the big target on the map and clearing the stage.
While there's at least a measure of flash and flair to the ongoing march to war in the Warriors games, Bladestorm tries to throw an RTS twist into the mix, in which you don't directly control one single, legendary fighter, but an entire squad that swarms enemies at the push of a button. Special moves are powerful, but they all have a cool down period, meaning that each coordinated move has to be planned carefully. You also have the ability to pair up with another mercenary--either by switching back and forth at the push of a button or via online cooperation, both of which are new features in this version--and you can strategize your attack to leave enemies trapped in massive walls of zealotry and death.
Bladestorm's pretension of being a massive scale real-time strategy game with action elements turns out to be little more than a European coat of paint slathered over the tired Musou formula.
Though you could do that, chances are pretty good that it's unnecessary. Despite a slew of strategic features and options, generally any squad of any weapon can walk right up to any group of enemies, start slashing, and walk away no worse for wear. There is, ostensibly, a strength/weakness system in which specific weapons are more effective on certain squads than others, but aside from occasional trouble with troops on horseback when you're at a lower level, the chances of your squad being wiped out entirely are slim, especially since you can always retreat from battle to your nearest base, round up a new squad, and take another shot. Failure ends up being a virtual impossibility the further you go, since the enemy AI is profoundly awful. I have literally left the game unpaused to take a phone call, with my squad standing ten feet from a group of enemies, and not had the enemies take a single swipe the whole time. That's a characteristic of Warriors as well, but the fun of stringing together insane, crowd-slaying combos against nigh-defenseless masses is non-existent in a game in which all combat boils down to holding a button until damage numbers stop popping up.
Once upgrades start coming into play, enemies stop being a factor altogether, and pretty much exist just to be cannon fodder. The tavern, which serves as an ersatz base of operations, allows you to level up each squad's attack, defense, and item frequency, as well as giving you the opportunity to select variants with special powers. The variations are actually fairly extensive, which would be delightful if you didn't have the ability to sail through the game using just your hard earned points to buy attack and defense upgrades, never touching the rest. Instead, your enemy most often ends up being the clock, which times every stage at ten minutes, and stops the fighting no matter how much progress you've made. This would not be such a big deal if traveling from enemy base to enemy base didn't usually take two to three minutes, but even on horseback, you still face long stretches of riding through endless unchanging countryside looking for fights.
Aside from occasional trouble with troops on horseback when you're at a lower level, the chances of your squad being wiped out entirely are slim.
The tavern and the loading screens provide most of the story, which also ends up being a wash. There's plenty of detail to be mined out of 100 years of war, and the game hits on the highlights, with major figures like Edward the Black Prince, Gilles De Rais, and of course, Joan of Arc all making cameo appearances. The historical highlights are, unfortunately, utterly disconnected from the gameplay. As a mercenary, you're allowed to choose which side of each battle you want to fight on, and no matter how much work you put into claiming territory for one side or the other, the cutscenes still generally ignore your progress in favor of the real event. So all your time spent in taverns, chatting up other mercenaries and a bartender with the worst excuse for a French accent this side of Eddie Izzard's Bond-Villain-With-Broken-Translator skit ultimately makes absolutely no difference to the story.
Does the Nightmare scenario change any of this? Somewhat. It does introduce a more varied throng of enemies than the Hundred Years' War, with magicians, dragons, and snarly goblins. You're allowed to carry over your mercenaries from the Hundred Years' War, and if you owned the original game on PS3, you can import your character from that version. The difficulty level is kicked up a minor notch, so you might actually catch the occasional beatdown if you're not a bit more careful at first. The ten minute time restriction is eliminated in favor of a more dynamic system of shifting objectives, fake enemies, and a map that actually expands as more enemies make their appearance. So, yes, for what it's worth, Nightmare is a better game than the original. However, the core gameplay hasn't been touched, and turning Joan of Arc into an anime villain--who probably-not-coincidentally bears a more than passing resemblance to Cia from Hyrule Warriors--just makes the scenario into a strange Soul Calibur RTS, rather than doing anything interesting with France's beloved Maid selling her soul to stop a war.
Bladestorm: Nightmare is a game trapped in 2007, awkwardly fumbling for a way to push a tried and true formula forward. The ideas are appreciable, but not nearly enough of the required effort has been put in to make this game great or even challenging. Somewhere, a history student is daydreaming of a Hundred Years War full of magic, danger, wild-haired mercenaries, and insane alternate histories in which Joan of Arc becomes witch mistress of Europe. Whatever that kid has in mind, it is certain to be more ambitious than what Bladestorm: Nightmare can provide.
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