So as you might expect from a medieval fantasy/heavy metal dystopia game, you spend a significant amount of time guiding Eddie the roadie around and hacking, slashing, electrocuting, or igniting anything that moves, when you're not mowing them down in your lightning-shooting, flame-spewing heavy metal hot rod while blasting a selection from something like 100 songs. Par for the course. Even a bit repetitive, honestly.

But every so often, at key parts of the plot, you engage in battle... and because you're a roadie, and that's how you roll, "battles" are played out as huge stage shows. ("Hey, where I come from, this guitar makes noise. Here it shoots lightning. I can't wait to see what happens when we put on a whole show!") The game temporarily becomes quite different - you can still run around and pound enemies, but "winning" the stage requires you to take control of various strategic points, then take the resources they collect and use them to recruit troops, which you then order around with a fairly simple "attack that/stay here/come with me" command system.

The combat's not that hard to put together. Collect the resource points nearest to your stage (you do this by playing a solo, which prompts the construction of a... merchandise booth... sigh), pick up a few Headbangers and some ranged troops, then set off after the nearest enemy-controlled point. Trying to take the enemy army on alone is suicidal, but if you have even a small group with you, it really cuts down on the amount of fire you draw (the computer is not smart/evil enough to say "everyone shoot at the player!") You then plow into the biggest group of enemies, play the "Face Melter" riff, and watch as they dissolve. Suddenly the skirmish is overwhelmingly in your favor, and you can go on to whack an enemy resource point. Once this is done, rinse and repeat, except more and faster.

I can see how some people would have trouble with this part - if you're playing mostly to go kill stuff, it can be hard to think "oh, it's too dangerous to attack that group, I need to fall back and pick up my reinforcements". But if you have invested even a little time in RTS games, it'll be really simple - the enemy does not have great strategy, and once you get rolling you have a resource advantage over the enemy, which usually means victory in the long run.

Overall I'm quite pleased with the game. It could have taken itself really seriously, in which case it would have been terrible. But the writing's quite witty so far, and Eddie's got the right mix of "I am a Bruce Campbell-style badass" and "everything will be fine so long as I remember that I'm a roadie". Could have been whiny, but isn't; could have been a cardboard hero cutout (could always devolve there, too; I'm not done with it yet), but so far, hasn't.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 01:58 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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