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I bought the Indie Royale pack and, luckily, this fun game was in it. In my opinion, if you’re paying the minimum, the royale is well worth it even for this game, even if you don’t have people to play with. If you do, then it’s definitely worth it.

It’s a tower defense game, but in 3D and played from the first person perspective. You can play with a couple of people in coop and all you really do is defend a level from X number of monster waves, buy buying and placing towers and also by shooting them with your weapons. I idea itself is nothing revolutionary, but the way it’s executed is what makes it fun. You can shoot your own weapons, so you’re part of the action even after you’re done with building. There’s plenty of towers and you build your own “decks” out of them, so you also need to plan ahead right from the start. When you add friends to it, it becomes a frantic game of planning, building and team shooting. Now, I did have some issues with lag when my friend hosted the game, but when I was hosting, it was going pretty smooth for both me and him, so that might be a network problem on his side. Other than that, I’ve seen no issues with it. You shouldn’t expect any story or anything immersive like that, but you can expect a nice, fun single or multiplayer experience.

In any case, I played a couple of games with a friend and we realized we both suck. We couldn’t win any game on medium, so we had to dial it down to easy to win one. Maybe it’s cause we really don’t know the enemies or the towers yet, and we keep forgetting to check the encyclopedia. We had fun anyway.

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The Review

Ancient Trader plays more like a board game than anything else. You select a scenario, each with different winning conditions, start with a small ship and begin trading. You go from port to port, buy low and then sell high, all while collecting treasure, fighting mythical sea creatures and avoiding or defeating other captain’s. You can get quests from ports for extra cash, buy some powerful artifacts and upgrades your ship’s weapons, cargo hold and speed.

Ancient Trader also quite pretty, and everything looks like a hand drawn ancient map. The effects are fine and the music fits well with the package.

Sounds fun, right? Well, not so much. You see, Ancient Trader is extremely simplified. You only have three types of merchandise, only three types of weapons which follow a rock – paper – scissor system, and that’s about it. Once you complete a single map, you’ve pretty much seen everything there is to see. Now, the game does support hotseat multiplayer, so that might be fun, but that’s about it. It’s pirates diluted to the point of not being fun anymore, at least not for me.

I know people hate that word, but I think an accurate description would be to say that the game is extremely “casualized”.

The Verdict

Score: 5/10, maybe 7/10 if hotseat turns out to be fun.

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I finally managed to get my computer working, so expect a whole bunch of posts in the future. Sadly, I have a headache today, so all I did was to play some Civilization 5. It’s every bit as awesome as I imagined, so I’m reserving a permanent spot on the hard drive for it.

I just started a random, non-custom game and I got China as my civilization. First I’ve spent some time expanding and then I encountered a total of four nation states and the Aztecs. I destroyed two of the states and allied with the other two. Then the Aztecs attacked one of them, so I decided to retaliate and destroy them. Since I was now alone on the continent, I researched the required techs to cross the ocean. On another continent, I encountered the Ottomans, Americans and the Egyptians. The first two hated the Egyptians, so I decided to cash in on that and gang up on Ramses. Pretty soon, he was capitulating and gave me half of his empire just to stop the attack. This is where the headache got to strong and I saved my game.

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I’ve been waiting for this game for a while now. It’s a crossover between Heroes of Might and Magic and Civilization, very similar to Masters of Magic and Age of Wonders. What it does way better than those two, however, is the city building and the heroes system. You can place various buildings yourself, so you can make the cities look very nice. You can also design your own units and buy equipment for your heroes.
Your channeler, which is your starting hero/leader can also marry and start a dynasty. You can then marry of your family members to foreign countries to improve your diplomatic status and maybe even get a shot at succession. They can also become leaders or heroes for your armies. The research is more in the style of Galactic Civlizations or even Alpha Centauri. You choose an area to research and, once it’s done, you can select a specific tech.
The cities can be big or small, depending on where you build them and what you use them for. The game also slightly nudges you to specialise your cities, as you can accumulate resources much faster that way.
First I started a few normal maps and I pretty much got my ass handed to me. After that, I decided to try the campaign, but I had problems with bad performance and random crashing. Then I found out there’s a patch, so I downloaded and installed it. The performance got a bit better, but more importantly, I didn’t have any crashes any more.
Anyways, it turns out that the campaign consists of only a single map, so I’ve completed it pretty fast, but it seems that more “Books” will be added in later patches. This is why I won’t be adding this game to my completed list.  Just consider it as another Civilization clone – something I have installed most of the time and play for pure fun every now and then.

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I played very little, but I did finish a few games. I tried a special game with a tiny map and 18 civilizations. That way, each civilization mostly has room for one city and that’s about it. I went for culture at first but then steamrolled through the other civs one my borders reached their towns. I finished the game with 3 vasals under my control, which never happened in any of my previous games.
I’ve also been watching some gameplay videos of Civilization V, and I have to say, I can’t wait until it gets released. This should be happening in a little over a month. It basically keeps all the great stuff about this one, and greatly improves on all of the flaws.

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I had a Starcraft II marathon yesterday. After doing some WoW stuff I started playing and didn’t stop until the game was finished around midnight. It took me a while, but it was completely worth it. The story and the presentation is amazing, and even through the campaign, I can tell that there could be some awesome skirmishes later on.

Sadly, since it’s a pirated version, I can’t get any achievements or play proper multiplayer. It’s probably better that way. I can save those for when I buy the real thing. Sadly, since college is getting closer and I will be extremely busy, that probably won’t happen before next year. Still, I can’t wait.

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I keep coming back to this game. Off course, there is no campaign or anything similar so I won’t be completing it, but I do plan to go through a session every now and then. I installed it a few days ago, so I played a few games already, but nothing major. I would like to try and win some games on higher difficulties.

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I didn’t buy it yet, but after clearing the first five campaign missions, I decided I will eventually. I’m completely broke right now, though, so it will have to wait a while. In any case, the game is awesome. The story is interesting, and the campaign is even more interesting. You can choose between multiple missions and earn credits after completing them. The credits can then be used to buy upgrades for your units or hire mercenaries. Also, some missions contain sub-objectives which grant you Zerg or Protoss research points which you can then use for unique upgrades or units for your team. Right now I have five Zerg points and I could choose between one of two unique upgrades. One increases the Bunker hit points and another adds an automatic turret on top of the bunker. I opted for the turret because, for now, my bunkers didn’t have health problems. After completing mission five and spending some credits, I decided to take a break. I will continue further tomorrow.

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I decided to try my luck with some horror gardening. I managed to get to level 5-4 or 5-5, not sure exactly. I also completed a few of the puzzle levels (I, zombie and vase breaking) and managed to unlock the zen garden as well. This one is interesting. You basically water and tend to your plants, so they produce money. I’m not really sure how much I can get from it, but I’m hoping it will turn into a decent, steady income. Oh, not to forget, I hate the roof battles. It’s basically one big pool. You have to lay down plant pots, before you can position your plants and I hate it (in a good way).

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Instead of Bioshock, I tried this game. This is how a PC game should be like. No bugs, no crashes, just smooth gameplay all the way. I went through the tutorials just in case something changed from the previous two games (it didn’t) and then started my first mission. I had to build an export economy based on farming, which means I was supposed to build a few farms first and then, once I get some more money, build some canneries and other factories. Since canneries can also produce canned fish, I added a few of those to the mix and the first mission was completed fast. Over the past few days, I managed to get the time to finish about five more missions and get a few achievements on the way. This is definitely a quality PC game that I recommend to any fans of this genre. I just hope I’m able to complete it before my exams start because it might otherwise affect my performance in that area, if you know what I mean.