A PC game review…a review?

 

Well not really. This is more my first take on the multi player. Lets face it the campaign has a few cute surprises. It has a Mark Walker themed story line.  It has all the tension and tightness of a nubile….I mean of a set of scenarios that one would expect from Mark H. Walkers LNL series from the physical world.

You might not like the stories. you might not like the back ground or the intermittent graphical pop ups. “Screw that.” I hear you say. I hear you. I’m a LNL Fanboy. I do not want to meander thru a campaign. I want some damn action and I want it now.

That my friends is why you should not turn down the opportunity to play the multi player side of this game.

No sir. This is some awesome at a whole new level for LNL. Look its ok to play your opponent on a board and know where he is and play your typical strategies.

Do that in multi player and your goose is cooked. A game takes the same time. But all of that time is spent working out WHAT to do. Everything else from initiative to if you have an opportunity fire is calculated for you. Even the die rolls!

Now  you can invest all your effort into tactics! Lets talk about that for a moment. Why did I say that the same tried and true wont work in Multi player?

Because you have the option to use hidden units!!! holy cow. That changes the game, amps up the tension and generates some nice surprises.

In the scenario depicted in the video below the not only are the enemy hidden from you, or masked if you know where they are but they are not spotted, but you have this crazy random dropping arty coming in all over the map. SCARY!!!!

What don’t I like?

Yeah, Yeah even a fan boy got bitching to do! I find the user interface at first clunky. I’m always trying to ‘grab’ the map with my mouse like in VASSAL….ewww VASSAL WTH is that. Move over. So let that go!! After 2 turns of play however I was zipping along. The rules engine makes the occasional error. It would offer up a Opportunity Fire, thru blocking wheat fields, but thankfully would not let me execute it.

That is really all.  The multi player lobby is cool, some sort of persistent scoring and ranking would be nice. Some server based options to host your own games would be cool.

Speaking of your own games…..IF you have not checked out the forums @ Matrix Games lately then do so. The HoS has a boat load of expansion counters, map and even scenarios.

Some dude is even creating ASL scenarios! Go figure. There are counters for most aspects of WWII in all theatres.

There are mods for Heroes of the Gap. Jets baby!

Lots and lots going on. I came away, with my eyes opened to a new world of PC Gaming.

It feels like the early days of Half Life, where people took that engine cool places.

Check it out.

Don’t turn it down for what?

🙂