Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In between leaving pumpkins uncarved and scary masks unworn, I have been playing 1c’s new RTS, Men Of War: Red Tide. The standalone expansion features twenty-three new missions with naval bent, and a small museum of new units. But is it any good? Here’s Wot I Think.
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Today on Obscure Russian Strategy Watch we’ve got a blinder in the form of Real Warfare: 1242. It’s a kind of Medieval: Total Russian Bloom, in which blurrily-lit real-time soldiers do strategy in each others pauldrons, unto death. Awesomely the game is based entirely on the life and times of one of Rus’ most splendid medieval heroes, Alexander Nevsky, who famously thrashed European invaders and negotiated a useful not-getting-pasted pact with The Golden Horde. The 1c announcement explains: “The player’s goal is to direct Alexander Nevsky through meticulously recreated historic battlegrounds and achieve the greatest of victories by repelling the attacks of Teutonic and Swedish knights, bringing Lithuania to peace and eliminating every single invader in 1242.” The first video of the game in motion is buried beneath the rich earth of this post.
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The original Death To Spies was seen as something like a poor imitation of the Hitman games, with a whole bunch of technical problems holding back its ambitions as a stealth action experience. The new game, Moment Of Truth, looks to be much more of the same disguise-wearing, back-stabbing action, but I think the test will be whether complaints about omnipotent AI and awkward controls can be dealt with. I’ve not had a chance to play this demo yet, so if you’ve got an opinion from your experience with Moment Of Truth you should carefully type it into the comments box below.

The Death To Spies: Moment Of Truth demo is 589mb, and you can get it here and you’ll find some Russian footage below to give you a taste for the thing…
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My favourite RTS so far this year will receive an expansion in the Autumn. It’s a 20-mission campaign in a standalone release. Russian publisher overlords 1c say: “Men of War: Red Tide has players take command of the feared “Black Coats,” the nickname given to Soviet Marines, an elite combat group specializing in engagements near the shoreline. The player has direct control of new game units including the Black Coats, new tanks, self-propelled guns, armored trains, landing craft, artillery and new enemy emplaced weapons to capture and use. New air support options include new fighters, bombers, hydroplanes; cruisers, destroyers and gun boats which provide naval fire support.” No word on multiplayer options, however. I hope it supports co-op, which is one of the best features of the original game. (Via Blues, and mysteriously absent from the 1c site.)

The other 1c game that turned up on our gam-o-scopes this week is this rather handsome-looking medieval turn-based strategy game, Empire: Time of Troubles. It comes with the most sedate and unhurried trailer I think I’ve ever seen (posted below) and seems to include a promising-looking 3D campaign map and a whole lot of menus, currently rendered mysterious (to me at least) by their encryption in cyrillic. The game apparently covers the period of 1350-1650AD in Poland, Lithuania and Russia, where dudes get chopped and stuff gets plague and is buried. You take charge one of the twenty six different factions involved in the region and attempt to lead them to victory. Expect micro-management, beards.
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So I can barely even recollect the 2007 third-person fantasy RPG Dawn Of Magic (which was called something like “Blood Magic” in Russia), but that’s probably because it was deemed a bit rubbish. Undeterred by the picky Westerners, Russian developer Sky Fallen (who did Deathtrack Resurrection) is apparently working on what looks set to be sequel of sorts for the game, which will be called Time Of Shadows by new publishers Kalypso Media. Except no! We just got a press release thirty seconds ago announcing that Kalypso are calling it Dawn Of Magic 2, too. So what happens to Time Of Shadows now? No idea. They should probably just go for broke call it Blood Time Of Magi2 Dawn. Something like that.

And cheap on Direct2Drive. And more expensive on GamersGate. It’s also slightly less expensive on Steam. So perhaps you can buy it. Why am I promoting this fiddly war game in such brazen fashion? Well, because I love it. You might love it too. Thanks to Teodor for the tip.

Creepy, clunky Cryostasis now has a proper demo, and it’s available here for a modest 1.1 of your gigabytes. The demo seems to be somehow connected to Nvidia drivers or somesuch technical promotion. I believe it contains the initial chapter of the survival-horror FPS, which is okay, but not great, as I outlined in this Eurogamer review.

I’ve been playing through a number of the Men Of War levels again for a second time, trying to feel like I’m somehow closer to mastering the game. I wanted to break down how one of the levels plays out to try and explain the game to people who haven’t yet played it. This afternoon my level of choice was an assault on a German hilltop entrenchment, before an attack on a fortified base. It takes about an hour to play through, and my first time around it was one of the most chaotic gaming experiences I have ever known. After perhaps fifty hours of play I should now be a veteran of the game able to breeze through this early challenge quite easily. Right? Wrong.

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This mod for current RPS strategy beau Men of War is a bit good: a dynamic campaign generator [FORUM DOWN AT THE MOMENT, you can use this link but the mod needs loads of stuff that is not detailed there, only on forum thread.], complete with a bunch of map packs. It allows you to build a sequence of battles in the skirmish mode, and populate them for attack or defence scenarios. The install process and required extras is a bit hefty, but I doubt that will be too much challenge for Men Of War enthusiasts. There’s also a realism mod out which is under continued development. There’s also some chatter about a native languages mod for replacing the English with Russian dialogue, but no sign of that at the moment. I’ve posted a video of the announced (but unfinished) Stalker mod after the jump, which is some kind of perfect collision between two games. Man!
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