So I got this indie turn based tactics game on Steam yesterday for the sale price of $7.99 (regular price $9.99). I’m a huge turn based fan but since I lack a handheld or a console had missed out on all the Advance Wars games and their various clones and progeny. Future Wars is a decent little TBS, with absolutely horrid between-battles cutscenes (which are thankfully text only with no voice; I can only shudder contemplating how bad the voice would be). The translation is godawful; not quite “All Your Base are Belong to Us”, but on the level of say, Hard Truck Apocalypse. In fact, the game reminds me a tad of Hard Truck Apocalypse in that it is an Eastern European game with terrible translation and a truly bizarre aesthetic but fairly decent gameplay.
Overall, I like it as a beer and pretzels TBS. I’m guessing for those with Advance Wars experience the game play is pretty derivative, and I will say the unit types lack style (and are often hard to distinguish - the various infantry look like indistinguishable generic hover-robots to me) but at least the tanks (thus far) look like tanks. Also, the rock/paper/scissors is spelled out but not in a numerical fashion so I don’t always know the best matchups.
Keep in mind, I’m a TBS fanatic (probably second only to Tyjenks on these fora) so take my reccommendation with a grain of salt. If you have a handheld or console you’ve probably seen better. But if you’re a TBS-starved PC gamer, it’s worth a look at the sale price of $8. (Heck, eight bucks, you can’t even see a movie for that anymore.)
Special note to Tyjenks: If you buy this and hate it, you will have shifted to me all the negative karma generated by that game-which-shall-not-be-mentioned fiasco :O. But I bet you will get $8 of out of it.
I had looked into buying this a couple days ago, especially at the $8 price point, but ended up deciding that I didn’t need yet another TBS game in that style. The main selling point would be the customization possibilities (which I’ve heard are very strong), but I’ll probably wait until I can get it at half price or less.
Oh, it’s not Hinterlands I’m referring to. I actually enjoyed the hell out of Hinterlands, warts and all. You must go much deeper into the bowels of this board to find Tyjenks’ true shame.
Well I finished the main campaign on this, in about 20 hours. For an $8 sale price, that’s good value for the money. The gameplay is simplistic, the AI is terrible and the unit balance is pretty whacked (Raptors > all, pretty much). The campaign itself has such bad cut scenes (text, no voice thankfully) that I skipped through them without reading 98% of them. The missions themselves are only a little varied, mostly variations on: destroy the enemy and take their capital, or sometimes: defend against a huge wave attack, then destroy the stragglers and take their capital. And from what I understand, this game does nothing that Advance Wars and others have not already been doing on other platforms for years. But it does have a nice streamlined beer and pretzels style, and lets you enjoy the relaxing turn based method of obliterating all before you. Overall, I enjoyed it, as a turn-based starved PC gamer.
There are quite a few other maps included and it does have a scenario editor so I may mess with that. It was not immediately obvious how to use it first time I fired it up.
So: bargain game, mediocre quality overall, but if you are a turn based fanatic who is not already replete with Advance Wars etc gameplay, then Future Wars is worth a try.
HA! Evidently I will have to wait for all of you to die out in order to live that down. 7+ years and counting. Surely some statute of limitations has expired by now.
Thanks for the heads up…I think. It is almost worth hating it to get this burden off my back.
I hate to say the game’s title as I start to convulse and have flashbacks. ;)
Sufficed to say, it was a fantasy turn-based strategy game that was in development and touted to be like HoMM. I brought it up here and pimped it and, evidently, convinced some folks to blow their $50 on it. It was awful and since then, no one has listened to me. Some people liked Hinterland, which I gushed over and defended and I feel partially redeemed…6 years later.
Do you have a Smartphone, Sharpe? A bunch of us have been playing Uniwar, which you would probably like (it’s an Advance Wars clone), and it’s supported on BlackBerries now, as well as Android and iPhone.
LOL - fair enough. There have been a few games I was suckered into believing they’d be better than they were. As for Hinterland, I like it well enough. Mind you, I only paid $5 for it from a Gamestop that had the retail version on clearance (with a badly beaten box, no less), but I certainly got some enjoyment from the title.
