Excelling in sport means knowing when a moment is outside of your control and recognizing when an opportunity is there to seize. In Rocket League, both events occur countless times in any given match--not surprising for a game heavily inspired by soccer. It caters to the competitive realist who thrills in having sole control of the ball for a few seconds despite knowing it can be snatched at any time. The best part is that you get to kill opponents' dreams and agonize in your own losses from the comfort of a very, very fast car.
Every moment in Rocket League demands split-second judgment. Are you the assertive type who takes control of the immediate situation at the risk of being in the middle of a chaotic, unpredictable scrum? Are you more of a long-term planner, one who watches your cohorts fight over a ball in a corner with the confidence that the ball will inevitably escape. When this happens, are you ready at the top of the penalty arc with the hope that the loose ball will roll between you and the goal? This echoes Wayne Gretzky's words of wisdom: "A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be." Rocket League offers countless opportunities to be Gretzky--or Nostradamus.
Rocket League thrives on speed and momentum. This is best exemplified by the gravity-defying excitement of driving up the side of any of the game's arenas. This ability is useful as well as thrilling. Without the curves along the edges of the pitch, cars would simply bang into the wall. Constantly having to reverse and make three-point turns over a five-minute match would be a disappointing series of momentum-ending buzzkills. Rocket League has none of these obstacles. The curved corners means you do not lose momentum. Your tires will smoothly caress these bends as you ride the walls horizontally, chasing the ball in parallel with rest of the cars on the pitch. Given that the ceiling is also fair game, every player will feel compelled to attempt a gravity-defying loop across the width of the roof. The game's physics and your limited boost will prevent you from completing such a stunt, but you'll attempt it anyway.
The ball in play is comparable to that perpetually bouncing beach ball you find at every music festival, only slightly less buoyant. It bounces and flies in unpredictable directions when touched by two parties at the same time. This is where fortune favors the Rocket League sportsperson who embraces chaos. Transcendence comes when you realize you don't have to be in control of the ball at all times; you should chase it only when you think you can make a difference.
Getting a "first touch" credit during a drop ball is as tough as it sounds.
A goal scored ends the fleeting, yet fulfilled, existence of a ball. In its death, the ball's life is celebrated with a literal bang. It's a colorful, smoke-filled explosion that sends all the cars flying away at heights and velocities that would kill any human in real life. It is so spectacular that you can't help but savor the blast, even if you weren't on the team that scored. Rocket League is that rare kind of video-game sport where you're compelled to play your best, even when you're being blown out 5-1 and there's only a minute left on the clock.
There's no shortage of advanced ball handling in online multiplayer. In Rocket League, experience leads to tactical thinking. Tactical thinking leads to performing with finesse. You cannot open car doors to use them like arms; that would be the equivalent of a handball in soccer. Instead, you can spin your car forwards, backwards, and sideways, which is analogous to bicycle kicks and headers. Once you learn to use these moves to advance the ball, you are soon ricocheting shots on goal. Over time, you also discover that your chances of scoring are boosted by hitting the car closest to the ball rather than the ball itself. It's all obvious highlight reel material, which is why the replay save option is so welcome. Learning and mastering these advanced moves makes playing Rocket League endlessly absorbing, even after you've logged over 50 matches.
The joy of Rocket League rests on the countless plans that are conceived and discarded every other second in any given match.
Playing a single-player season in rookie mode is as useful a practice ground as the training mode itself. Without real-life competitors ruthlessly charging to the center of the field for the drop ball, you can practice making spectacular goals from midfield. The drawback is that imperfect A.I. applies to both teams, meaning that your computer-controlled squadmates will average at least one incompetent move per match, whether it's taking the ball to the far side of your end of the field or blocking your path to the ball.
Rocket League's replay value lies in the draw of constant participation, not in a progressive system of unlockable advanced abilities or shoehorned novelty modes. All the arenas are uniform and consistent in shape, without any bells and whistles like the terraces in its predecessor, Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars. The only variables are the team sizes, A.I. difficulty, and season lengths. This lack of flexibility adds legitimacy to the sport, mirroring the steadfast traditions within many professional sports, some of which are over a hundred years old.
The only thing better than a car with a Viking helmet and bubble exhausts are detailed blades of grass.
This thoughtfulness extends to the studio's crafting of a convincing world where Rocket League is the number one sport. You see it in the multi-tier, sold-out arenas and you hear it from the indistinct chants of allegiance from the fans. The crowd goes 'Oooohhhh!' or 'Aaaaahh!', whether it's a goal or a key ball hit at midfield. These sprinkles of realism aren't strictly necessary but are greatly appreciated; for instance, the pitch itself features blades of grass that all move independently. These manicured fields are best admired during the pre-match camera shots, but you can't be faulted for staring at them in the middle of a game. They are complemented by the myriad customization parts, from wildly swinging antenna flags to neon-blue engine exhaust trails.
The joy of Rocket League rests on the countless plans that are conceived and discarded every other second in any given match. Trying to predict where and how the ball will bounce next is a game within the game. Despite the use of cars, Rocket League emulates the emotional surges typical of The Beautiful Game, such as the rush of an unexpected fast break or a well-timed header into a goal. With Rocket League, the promising concept of combining two wonderful things--cars and soccer--is equally magnificent in execution. You can't say the same thing about, say, combining cake and fruit to make fruitcake, as the comedian Jim Gaffigan observed.
Guild of Dungeoneering is not a story of heroes. It is not a tale of bravery. It is not a tale of gods and demons and the men caught in the wake of their eternal struggle. It is the story of petty street trash looking to die an ignoble death to buy a better bedroom. It is the story of anonymous, disposable failures casually flitting through a death maze of your making towards dubious fame. It is a game for losers. And that is what makes it great.
On the surface, it's pretty simple. You're presented with the journal of a douchebag: A guy who was kicked out of the world's premier guild of heroes before deciding, out of spite, to start his own guild of famed adventurers. Having neither fame nor adventurers, he settles on your first character after he answers an ad on a poster: The Chump.
No, really, his class is Chump. He fights like a chump. He defends like a chump. The narrator sings ballads of his chumpery. And the chump has been chosen to conquer a dungeon full of rats, zombies, and goblins.
Cat Burglar Used BAD PUN. It's super effective.
The gameplay exists in some beautiful nexus of all RPG styles, flitting between being a card-combat title, a turn-based system, and good old-fashioned Dungeons & Dragons. The format, with its focus on leveling up fast in quick bursts of gameplay to survive the ultimate challenges, pleasantly recalls Half-Minute Hero, albeit stripped of that game's 8-bit flair. You start with the Chump, but eventually earn enough gold to hire one of several classes of useless adventurer: Apprentice, Cat Burglar, Bruiser, Mime--you read that right--before choosing which dungeon to raid.
The twist is that you have control not over your hero, but over their environment. You're dealt five cards at the start of each round with an enemy, a treasure or a chunk of room to place in tiles along your hero's path. Your job is to place those rats, zombies, and goblins in your Chump's line of sight, in the hope of beefing him up with enough XP and weaponry to direct his attention toward his set goal, which might be as simple as looting three chests in the area or all the way to slaying a pissed-off minotaur. And if that handicap isn't enough, he's got to do it in a dungeon drawn on geometry-class graph paper.
Where's that sad Mad World cover when you need it?
Guild of Dungeoneering becomes endearing the second you start and realize the aesthetic is little more than every middle-school nerd's D&D scribblings, with crudely drawn dialogue bubbles and enemies traveling along a marginally less crude grid of multi-directional rooms. Battle plays out by a series of handwritten Magic cards picked up at random from enemies who either attack or defend from physical or magical damage. The cards themselves are a riot. The Chump defends with Cower and attacks with Closed-Eyes Punch; the Cat Burglar throws cats for physical damage; the Bruiser attacks mostly with Cockney insults and bar-brawling moves. And, in my head, sounds like Jason Statham--even the female variant. The point is, it's easily the most fun set of commands since Citizens of Earth.
When the game's immense charm and good-natured snark wears off, the challenge sets in. You might think that building a straight and narrow path to the goal is the way to win, but you fast find out it's really a very elegant way of getting yourself killed. What you really want is to kill as many enemies as possible before you face the boss or go after the big treasure, which is typically guarded by high-level enemies. Later dungeons will have enemies who won't wait on their square, but instead will start to pursue you with a vengeance, two tiles at a time. None of the dungeons are impossible and playing smartly enough could net you a win the first time you meet the boss, but it also works the other way around--the wrong enemy at the wrong time, with the right luck when the cards deal out, could see your adventurer dead early.
Pretty sure this is exactly what Chuck Norris' dreams look like.
And oh, die you shall. There is quite a bit of trial and error involved in figuring out how and when to place which enemies to make for a nice steady curve of difficulty over time, but the game is very good at throwing a curveball by placing stat-debilitating fountains in your way, or giving a low-level enemy the Fury buff, which gives them double damage after half their life is gone. It's times like that the game makes quick work of killing heroes. It does occasionally frustrate, leaving so much of your success up to the luck of the draw, and it makes quite a few dungeons altogether irritating, but those stretches never last long enough to result in a thrown mouse. Mostly, it adds to the game's snark. Every hero can be renamed, and it fast becomes a fool's errand even bothering to get attached, when running into the wrong bear or bat in the maze means we're looking for another Barbarian in 10 minutes.
What happens instead is getting attached to specific personalities, to the awful, hilarious puns and the ridiculous variety of makeshift armors and weaponry gleaned in your travels. Facing a Fire Demon armed with a tree branch, while wearing a straightjacket and a cooking pot for a helmet, is the best kind of absurd--a brand we don't get often enough from modern RPGs.
There may not be much more to the game than the constant adventures, but it's tailor-made for short, easily-digestible chunks of gameplay. It would've been right at home as a 3DS or mobile title, but it has an honest shot at displacing Minesweeper as a go-to timewaster whenever there's 5 minutes to kill, and you feel the need to slay a rampaging hellbeast with a fork. If that's not a need you've ever had, don't worry. After a few go-arounds with the Guild, it will be.
Legends of Eisenwald has just about everything except Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses on a church door. Developer Aterdux Entertainment has traded in the usual Dungeons & Dragons-influenced fantasy realm common to tactical role playing for a more realistic story and setting based on medieval Germany at around the time the Reformation was starting to annoy the popes. The concept brings a unique feel and an absorbing (if occasionally workmanlike) campaign to a been-there, done-that genre.
Nevertheless, the heart of Legends of Eisenwald is based on the same structure that has powered fantasy role-playing/tactical combat since the glory days of Heroes of Might and Magic. Differences between this game and traditional tactical fantasy role players seem rather superficial, at least at first. The three available Knight, Baroness, and Mystic character classes match up almost perfectly with the standard Warrior, Ranger, and Mage/Cleric found in standard swords-and-sorcery gaming. Both heroes and the mercenaries you employ level up and come with assorted skills, special upgrades, slots for a full range of gear and armor and weapons, and a range of stats for hit points, attack, willpower, and so forth.
You can almost smell the bratwurst.
Action plays out on a real-time map screen where you explore the German terrain, and a turn-based, hex-overlaid combat screen, vanquishing foes one by one. Anyone who has ever played a game in this genre will dig into what's on offer right away. Tactical combat is a bit simpler than in many similar games, in that you control a single adventure party comprised of up to 12 units instead of the multiple armies with stacks of units generally required in the likes of Heroes of Might and Magic, Disciples, and so forth. Also, you don't have to build towns, gather resources, or deal with any management tasks. This is far more of an RPG than a strategy game, with your primary focus always on exploring the maps for quests, villains, and loot.
But you aren't a good guy. You are no hero or heroine out of a D&D campaign. Instead, you're the average feudal boss, with no compunctions about working peasants to death. Modern morality has no place here--a point drilled home again and again in situations where you have to be an utter bastard. My favorite was a fairly early quest, which involved forcing peasants to repair a bridge so I could escape a pursuing enemy. First, I had to kill a bunch of them in their village. Then, I had to keep the resulting press gang on the job, even while some of them tumbled into a gorge to their deaths.
Yet even with the inclusion of plenty of 15th-century brutality, this isn't a strictly historical game. Legends of Eisenwald walks a line between "Gygax Goes German" and adherence to the history books. Maps contain more realistic landscapes than we've become accustomed to in tactical fantasy games. There are no hordes of monsters, no pots of gold, no magical resources casually cluttering up the terrain. What you get here are inns, villages, castles, ruins, mines and churches, spiced up with the occasional wandering gang of foes, such as villainous warriors and bandits.
Tactical battles play like the majority of similar games on the market.
Even though there are no orcs or unicorns, there is a little magic. While most of the units hired for your party are realistic soldiers, pikemen, archers and the like, you can also bring in support troops. Catholic priests (who look like everything from pissed-off versions of Friar Tuck to bishops or inquisitors as they level up) and pagan mystics (who at first look like zoned-out hippie chicks from The Wicker Man but progress to become either witches or abbesses) can make with the abracadabra stuff and whip out basic healing and protection spells. Artifacts like icons of Christian saints, potions, magic rings, and even special weapons and armor offer real benefits to stats. Other than this, though, fantasy is dialed down to the point of being nearly non-existent--especially in the early stages--although more mythology is introduced as the game progresses.
Oddly enough, I found that this flirtation made the game seem even more realistic. All the hints about magic and myths (including a great early sequence about a cull of the undead from a church cemetery that turns into an eviction of bandits who have been using dead bodies and cadaver stink to scare people away from their hideout) worked beautifully to make me feel like a superstitious medieval peasant who was never sure what was real and what wasn't.
The look of the game is realistic to the point of being a little on the grim side. Graphics use a dark color palette a long way from the cheery hues found in the average game with hexes and hobgoblins. Maps are incredibly detailed, no matter if the scene is a thick forest, river valley or narrow mountain canyons. Everything is a little dated, giving the visuals a sharpened and somewhat stark appearance. At times, I likened the game to a woodcut come to life. Maps are tinted with dark brown and black to make them look hundreds of years old. Character and town screens are filled with nice touches like parchment backgrounds and simple, medieval tapestry. Only the audio is a disappointment. There is no spoken dialogue to accompany the written text, and the bland lute-and-flute music sounds like something from the lobby of a Medieval hotel.
Clerics may be able to cast healing spells here, but they do so wearing crosses. This small touch adds a lot to the distinct setting of Eisenwald.
At times, however, all this realism dragged. Legends of Eisenwald lacks the pizzazz of more fantasy-oriented tactical RPGs. Loot drops just aren't that exciting when you know you're not going to score a wand of fireballs. (There is a good range of items on offer, both from defeated foes and from the markets scattered around the maps, although most of it is average stuff that lacks the glitz of what's found in traditional fantasy games.) So little magic in the game makes the priest and female mystic units bland; their being stuck mainly with healing and cursing spells means they don't have the impact of full-blown clerics and mages. Combat grows repetitive and predictable, as there are only so many ways you can mess around with garden-variety soldiers and archers. A hippogriff or a neo-otyugh might have livened things up, though the quick pace of battle means you have little time to be bored.
A few aspects of the design are somewhat problematic. Quests are not always spelled out clearly. At times this is good, as it promotes more exploration. At times this is bad, as you can get lost when a destination and/or the maps are too dark and cluttered with complicated terrain features. Some quest descriptions leave a lot to be desired, and locations are often given different names in quest dialogues from the maps. Also, be wary of bugs: I had the game crash to the desktop with exception errors on a few occasions, although generally the game was stable.
Visiting a virtual medieval Germany probably isn't at the top of the to-do list of any tactical RPGers, but maybe it should be. While Legends of Eisenwald is something of a grim, brutal experience much like the land in question back in the 15th century, the game is certainly a unique addition to a genre that has mostly settled into a high-fantasy comfort zone. Strong storytelling and sheer novelty make guiding Heinrich and his pals around the dark forests of old-time Deutschland enthralling...even if you do miss the magic missiles and elves every so often.
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