Those cacti can come in irritatingly large groups, but that one is especially large. So can the jumping beans. There are a couple strategies to dealing with them:
1: Run away! This is what I usually do with the cacti. If they get a hit in and initiate combat mode, just hit B to break combat and keep moving as a group. You can usually outrun them.
2: Especially if you can channel them a little with the terrain, keep most of your group behind the Avatar and let him take on the enemies with either a shotgun (BTW, I think high intelligence keeps you from shooting your friends) or double melee weapons. Again, if they get a hit in, break combat immediately and keep swinging. The Avatar can usually take the beating.
Most of the individual enemies, especially the swarmers, are pushovers to kill and often graze you when they attack. So you’re not in much danger. Usually.
These encounters get frustrating, I completely agree. And after awhile they really don’t add anything to the game. I actually have started to learn where they show up and walk around them. For instance, there’s a pack of cacti as you head into Noctis Labyrinthis that I can just skirt by and leave behind in the narrow canyons.
So I actually quite like the U6 combat system for how relatively straightforward it is. I do wish there were some indicator of initiative order, but once you’re used to it being unpredictable I don’t find it to be that big of an issue. I assume that initiative is based off of INT or DEX? But the manual doesn’t seem to address it.
For me the bigger question is whether combat, particularly the random encounters, add much to the game. I think what it contributes is minor, and often outweighed by the frustration of getting out of them without spending a ton of time with little benefit. There’s never any loot! What a huge difference that makes in how you feel about combat.
Similarly with the RPG mechanics. Do the stats and leveling up really add much here? At least in that case, there’s not really a downside–you just keep getting more powerful. But having a competent team from the beginning, maybe with skills in different types of weaponry… that would work just as well for what the game is, at heart, really trying to do. So there I think you have an artifact of this game expressly being an offshoot of the Ultima series for business reasons, but that rationale maybe running counter to what the designers wanted to do. Now, personally, I would much rather play this game than Ultima 6–because of the setting and characters, but also because of the structure and the storytelling.
About the storytelling: I would never have thought of the fan-fic comparison, but I think it is cleverly put and close to the truth. But, hey, fan-fic is entertaining, right? It’s just only entertaining to people with a certain knowledge or obsession. So maybe it’s just a story for history nerds. How many games from the time (if they even had coherent stories)–or even today–aren’t stories for Tolkein nerds or military nerds or whatever? Darklands is less about the story, but even with it: if I didn’t care about what life was like in the historical middle ages… why would I engage with that at all?
I promise that it gets to be a deeper story as you get into what happened to the Martians. I won’t ask you to stick with it until then, but I hope the game itself inspires you enough to get there.
