Chronicles of Arax Review

Or: "Dungeon Crawling for Recluses"

I was going to write a review of one of the Gothic games, having just bought them off Steam super cheap-like. However, I found playing the first one too fiddly early on (couldn't work out how to talk to the first NPC you have to meet, maybe I'm not ready for a game made when innovation meant "be different even if it breaks the game"), so I've decided to give my two cents on a little RPG I found for free: Chronicles of Arax.


The basic premise is that only 1 player is involved in the adventure, which comes in the form of a 'choose your own adventure' style dungeon crawl. You are given a pre-generated character at the start (no character generation might sound odd, but this game has been made to be more of a time killer than an evening filler), and fight through encounters randomly rolled from a table. When you need to do something, you roll a dice depending on the relevant stat (abilities are measured in dice rather than numbers: you might have a Strength of d6 and a Reflexes on d8) and try to get a particular number or higher. In fights, you roll Fighting Skill and see who gets the highest. It's really one of the simplest games to play I've ever come across.

Treasure is easily worked out too. Each encounter lists exactly what you get for killing the baddies; sometimes you have to roll on a table for the more exotic magical items (the table in the core book is small, but it turns into a massive d100 table in one of the expansions). Simple and standard.

I went through  the adventure in the core book with my brother (I rolled for the monsters), and we found it to be really fun. The encounters are varied within a theme (orcs mostly), so it all fit together despite the random element. The items were well distributed so it didn't get too easy, and the skill challenges are difficult enough that you'll fail sometimes but not often.

I'd had a go at it by myself before and, well...this where solo stuff falls down: it just felt like a lot of dice rolling, and only dice rolling. Anyone who plays RPGs knows that it's all about the social interaction and shared experience between the group. There's none of that in a solo game, where you just have a book and some dice and hopefully enough patience to slog through before RSI sets in.

And once you slog through...that's really it. There's no guidelines for writing Quests and no monster stats outside of the encounters where the monsters themselves appear. There's only three Quests published right now, so once you're done with them, you're done for good, unless you fancy replaying them with another character type (of which again there are only three), which doesn't sound too inviting to me. In fact, unless the developer, Crystal Star, brings more Quests out, the lovely abilities characters can gain may be wasted.

My final gripe with this game is the way the character types are balanced. They aren't. The character given in the core book, The Adventurer, has a fighting chance of getting through a Quest if you're lucky and the monster aren't. The other two however, which come individually in expansions, are way overpowered. The Battle Wizard might have a hard time with his first quest, but after he levels up and gets some spells he's gonna  blast his way through. The final character, the grandly named Knight of the Steel Fist will just zoom through the encounters easy as pie, simply because he starts with plate armour and a really high armour and Fight Skill stat. Even if the bad guy hits him, he's unlikely to damage him; and even if damage is dealt, the Knight has so many wounds it doesn't matter. Put simply, the character types aren't so much classes as badly made difficulty modes.

I much as all that annoys me, I'm tempted to let it slide for now. It's only a recent release, and RPGs do tend to need a bit of tweaking and errata before they get really good. I can't deny I had a good time playing it as well, it just bothers me that I had to find another person to enjoy a so-called "solo adventure game".

If you're up for a old-school dungeon-crawling time killer on a slow day, pick up Chronicles of Arax. It's free for the core rules and the expansions are only $1 each. Just don't expect to be able to take it too far for the time being.

Chronicles of Arax was created by Crystal Star Games.
The game can be found for free on DriveThruRPG.com

Multiplayer Ramble

I haven't posted anything in a fair while, due to lack of having played or seen anything interesting in games for some time (or at least, anything I can think of a lot to write about). I've been thinking about multiplayer gaming though; I tend to have a love/hate relationship with muiltiplayer. While I do find the social side of gaming fun, I sometimes dislike having to interact with others during play. I think it has something to do with that fact that while I am of course an avid and enthusiastic gamer, I'm just not very good at games sometimes. The ratio of games I've completed to games I own is rather low, and I often end up playing at lower dificulty settings because I find it hard stepping up to the challenge (not that I don't like a challenge, but there's a limit).

The inherent fact of multiplayer is that, well...people can see me fail. I like my failures to remain a secret, so when I've got several people (some of which I may actually know) watching me suck at the game, it's a bit of a downer.

Let it be known: I do like co-op. The thing that attracts me to things like D&D, and which prompted my short spell as a World of Warcraft player, is that it involves peaceful and friendly co-ordiantion between yourself and your mates. My favourite example of this recently: Magicka. I was going to write a full post on this game, but it doesn't work with my new laptop (something about integrated graphics cards), so that went out the window. Quick run-down: Magicka is an RPG that puts you in the role of a wizard, and has you using and combining different elemental spells to combat enemies. There' a big emphasis on experimenting with the different types of spells: eg the Fire spell sprays fire in a short arc, but you can combine it with the Arcane beam spell to make a Fire Beam. The system for selecting spells is a little fiddly for the PC; I found myself continuously staring at the little diagram in the corner before pressing the buttons, by which time I was usually dead. I've been told that it gets easier as you go on, but still no points for intuitiveness.

Anyways, I had a go on the co-op with some guys at university. It's really fun, and it adds more to the game than just more people. When firing beam spells, you can combine beams at a point to make an even bigger beam (think the main gun on the Death Star). I would say that it's a game that really emphasises the term "co-operation", more so than many other games. I had a really good time of it, as we were working together rather than competing.

PvP, on the other hand, can largely take a hike in most games as far as I care. I've been playing some Call of Duty: Black Ops with my little brother today. It's a good game, but like nearly all multiplayer shooters, it strikes me as rather...repetitive. You pretty much do the same thing over and over again until you win or lose. I'm sure any CoD conniseur will tell me why I'm wrong here, but it felt even more grindy than your average MMO; I felt this was due to the lack of a context or story, which is really what a game that has you doing the same thing (shoot people) repeatedly kind of needs to keep me interested. I had the same issue with Counter Strike years ago, and that didn't even have the good grace to offer a decent singleplayer experience,

Wait, what's that I see coming oover the horizon? Dear me, it's an exception!

Anyone who knows me will probably know of my love for Team Fortress 2, a game that has received just praise over the years, and a great community. Yet it's a game I should hate: there's no singleplayer, it's entirely PVP, and there's absolutely no context for the fictional conflict between RED and BLU. But I can't help but feeling that TF2 has miraculously transcended the need for these things. The classes are characterful, the maps are fun and cartoony, and it even stops me from feeling bad about being sucky by making the deaths so damn comical (there' your head, there's your arms, and waaaay over there are your legs); the little message telling me that I nearly got a new personal record on kills is always a nice pat on the back too.

So, to summarise: I don't like multiplayer unless it's co-op...or TF2...ok, Assassin's Creed can come in too...and maybe PVP is ok if it's in splitscreen...

Huh, maybe I just don't like military shooters.

Comment's down below :)

Alice: Madness Returns gameplay demo opinions

Here's a gameplay demo in two parts for Alice: Madness Returns that was showcased at GDC recently (video from IGN's YouTube channel):






What do I think? First off...wow. This game is just gorgeous. The level looks beautiful, the characters, objects and even the GUI look like something I'd frame on my wall (if there's an art book with a limited edition of this game, I'll buy it). The life bar, represented as a string of red roses, smacks nicely of Zelda-style heart containers, which is a nice touch. The baddies are suitably eccentric, and even Alice herself is styled in a traditional-yet-unique way that I'm sure will put her top-10-best-looking-character lists for years to come.

However...

...the game doesn't shock or surprise me in terms of mechanics. Granted, this is based solely on visual analysis of the game in action, and a short section at that, but isn't that all anyone has to go on at this point? I've been worried that it would turn out to be a generic action-platformer, and from this first look alone it seems to have lived down to that. The platform section is almost the most basic gameplay I've seen in years: jumping between level floating platforms. Oh wait, sorry, the platforms are invisible. No, wait again, you can see them if you press a button to go small for a bit, plus they are clearly pointed out by the collectibles sitting on them...erm....

The combat looks nice though. I stress LOOKS. Again, the graphics are bleeding fabulous, the enemies look menacing and the weapons used (I like that hobby horse club a lot) have a great audio-visual character to them. Let's face it though, it seems to play like so many other action games. The weapons seems to operate on a one-button mechanic, which is a good idea for fast-paced combat, but it strikes me as just a light melee/heavy melee/ light ranged/heavy ranged attack system that has been around for donkey's years. The lock on system has been seen before, as has blocking things while locked on.

I'm not saying that the combat is BAD, not at all; it seems to use tried and tested systems that work. This game, in short, works. But only in the sense of there being bare minimum involved. In fact, there seems to be a lot missing that we've come to take for granted in hack n' slashers: where are the finishing moves, the over-the-top quicktime events? It seems that in a quest to avoid being branded "Like God of War but..." it's ended up as "Like God of War but without..." and I have to say I was hoping for more. My worry is that American McGee and the folks at Spicy Horse are being really restricted by EA, which would be a real shame.

I really want to be proven wrong as more of this game is shown. There's a lot of potential seemingly going to waste, and the fact that only a small snippet of the game is demoed is what allows me the hope that there will be something great, just over the horizon. The game will have to PLAY as good as it LOOKS, and if it happens...then we'll have a masterpiece on our hands. I've got my fingers crossed...


Think I'm wrong? Comments down below.

Alice - Madness Returns is the property of American McGee and EA.

Dragon Age RPG review

After ages of having it in my possession, I finally got to run a game of the Dragon Age tabletop game. And it's pretty damn good.

It's only got the first set out (of  an eventual four, so Green Ronin tells us), so naturally it's quite rules-lite at the moment. It only covers the first 5 levels of character advancement, and the Talents (more on them in a sec) only have a couple of ranks in them, but what's there makes for a fun little swords-and-sorcery game that doesn't even require intimate knowledge of its video game cousin to play.

The game's core mechanic involves the rolling of 3 six sided dice ("3D6" to the gamers) and adding one of 8 core Abilities (Strength, Constitution, Communication, etc) as appropriate, and trying to get a high enough total to succeed at the given task. Extra skill comes from Ability Focuses, which give a +2 bonus to the roll in that specific situation. For example, your character might have a Dexterity score of 2, and an Focus in Stealth (written as Dexterity 2 (Stealth) ); they would add 2 to a roll for a task involving agility and quickness, but in situations requiring a talent for hiding and sneaking, they'd add a total of 4.

A less prominent aspect of the game, but one that still gets a use, is the Talents mechanic. These are little skills that offer benefits to different tasks, such as bonuses, re-rolls or negating of penalties. They have multiple ranks that increase in benefit as the character levels up, but so far they only have the Novice and Journeyman ranks detailed (one assumes that there'll be more in future sets if they get released), and cover a wide range from medical skills to combat proficiencies.

Just like in the video game, you pick your class from Warrior, Rogue and Mage, each being the archetypal fantasy character. You also have a background, which determines what race and character you can be, as well as offering some extra numeric benefits. There some familiar ones from Origins (City and Dalish elves as well as mages both Circle and Apostate), as well as new ones like the the Fereldan Freeman and the Surface Dwarf (that being the only kind of dwarf you could play in this game world).

The game specifies that when you roll your dice, you designate one as the Dragon Die, normally by having it a different colour to the others. The Dragon Die usually shows your degree of success (1 being just succeeded, 6 meaning it was a breeze), but it can do other things as we'll see later.

That's it. Even combat scenarios are resolved this way, using standard Ability checks with Focuses available for weapon types. However, combat does have one more in-depth feature, which makes it more interesting: Stunts.

Stunts happen when you hit an enemy in combat and get two dice with the same score. When this occurs, your character receives Stunt Points to spend on nifty effects, like extra damage, knocking the baddie prone, or even getting a second attack. The Stunt Points you get are equal to the number on the Dragon Die (remember that?), so when you see two 3s and a 6 on the red die, you know your enemy's in for a beating.

Character generation is pretty swift and easy, and uses a simple to follow step-by-step method. I managed to get a party of 3 generated in about 40 minutes with players who had never even looked at the game before, and they caught onto the game-play pretty quick too. What I can definitely say about this game is that it's small enough to be picked up by anyone.

Problem is, that smallness means there's not a lot of room to explore the game on any terms. You are really just stuck with a small amount of stuff, and while a new gamer would find that good to get on with and not overwhelming, someone a little braver might find themselves restricted. There isn't a lot of support for the game, as it hasn't gone very far into the product line (hopefully the inevitable publicity from Dragon Age II will push it back into gear); GMs don't have a plot of published monsters and adventure-making tools at their disposal, which is made worse by the fact that the rewards system for encounters is far too abstract in advising how much XP you should give the party: it just says to award them some based on how difficult they found it, when XP is used in most otehr game as a tool for decided the encounter's difficulty. Hmm..

The game world gazetter is good enough to get you started, but a bit more in-depth information would have been nice for those not into the video game (and this is coming from someone who hardly ever reads the fluff).

Long story short: if you like the Dragon Age video game series, get the tabletop game. If you like swords and sorcery, get this game. Just don't make it your main game in your group, keep it for one-offs or in-between your main game. There's enough for that, but too little for anything else.

Comments down below :)

Why Fable 3 Falls Flat

Tonight, I missed what could have been a really good Pendragon RPG session out of sheer idiocy on my part. I won't voice an opinion on Pendragon as a game, as I've only played 2-3 times; all I'll say is that my mum made gammon for tea, so I'm not quite as sorry as I otherwise would have been.

**The main section of this post contains spoilers on Fable 3. You have been warned.**

Out of need for something to post, I'm gonna voice a concern I had with a game I very nearly loved: Fable 3. Now, I know a lot of people dislike the Fable series, and I see why to be honest: it's always been rather flawed, plus Peter Molyneux's fixation on the (rather stupid) task of selling an RPG to the casual crowd has meant that there has been less and less challenge within the games as they have been released - the third game really has no significant penalty for dying, so what's the point?

However, I've generally been able to forgive that because there was always some intangible quality to the games that would make me come back to them time and again; I found the game world, the characters and the narrative to be rich and engaging. So, my judgement of Fable has always been "flawed but enjoyable".

So, naturally, I got down to Fable 3 and began my adventures as an exiled revolutionary with gusto. Yay, swords. Yay, sorcery. Yay, pseudo-Pratchett humour. All fun. Then I got to the bit where you become king...and it all went horribly wrong.

This all happens after a section of the game where you fight a horrid demon-thing made of darkness and sludge, which has almost wiped out a nearby country. It's rather dark and atmospheric, and more than a little bit scary in places. Upon becoming king, I was told that the only reason that the previous ruler was being so tyrannical was so he could build an army because the big demon-thing is headed your way. At this point, I would have called the revolution off and chalked it up as a misunderstanding. Sadly, the game doesn't give you this option, you've gotta go through the next bit...

You are given rule of the country, which involves 1) deciding what to do with the kingdom's infrastructure in the wake of the revolution and 2) trying to gather as much gold as possible to fund the military action against the monster that your brother already had going before you wrecked the place.

You are given a series of choices when rebuilding the country. This will involve one of your allies asking you for something (build a school, help a country join your kingdom, etc) that you promised them in exchange for their allegiance, while Stephen Fry - well, the character with his voice - explains that this will cost too much money. Which it will. The game will clearly illustrate to you that to fulfill your promise to your ally is the "good"  option, while going against them for money is the "evil" choice. All the while with the knowledge that any money spent building house isn't being spent on the soldiers to save the people living in them.

This is pretty broken already, right? Damned if you do, damned if you don't, right? No way to structure a game's mechanics. But it gets worse. In the loading screens for this section of the game, there's a report as to how much money you currently have, and the projected civilian casualties. You start with 400,000 gold in the royal treasury, and you have to have 6,000,000 gold at the end of the game year if I remember correctly; the projected casualties are tied to this. After I about an hour of playing through this section, the treasury was about 600,000 gold in debt, and the loading screen was telling me that every last man, woman and child in Albion was going to die. That, folks, was my reward for building schools in workhouses and helping small countries get out of poverty. I would have tried to save money without looking like a tyrant, but unfortunately there's no button for "Sorry, love, but a while a education is indeed important for our nation's future, it won't do much good if the children are dead before they reach 6 years old."

The worst part is that "projected casualties" bit in the loading screen. Because it's a number. With that one little feature, Lionhead, a company I respected until then, turned an already poorly constructed moral choice mechanic into a numbers game. Or, if you will, a PUZZLE. You know what one of the defining characteristics of a puzzle is? That is has a RIGHT answer and a WRONG answer. You know, like morality doesn't? I think there's a bit where you can go on a quest to get some valuable treasure, but by that time I'd given up. Wasn't fun no more.

I've been told that the best way to solve this puzzle is to spend the earlier sections of the game buying up property and saving money so you can add it to the treasury. That makes sense but...how was I supposed to figure that out? I had no idea that that part of the game was coming, and I've never really bothered with the properties in the Fable games. So, the only way to win the game properly is to have played it through already? That's just plain stupid. I could play through again and buy stuff up as I go, but honestly - is it worth it?

Like Ann Hathaway walking in front of a lorry, it started out looking great, but ended in a horrific mess.

Comments down below :)

PS: I know I'm not the first person to moan about Fable 3, but like I said, I needed to post something...