Blight of the Immortals Cleaned Up And Put On Steam
Grrr arrgh
The slow hordes of fantasy zombies from Blight of the Immortals [official site] were first spotted back in 2010. “Hmm, there’s some undead from a browser-based strategy on the horizon” we thought. “Spawned by the folks who made Neptune’s Pride, looks like. But that’s fine, they are very far away.” Six years later and the zombies on our doorstep. And by “doorstep” I mean Steam. The browser version has been out for yonks but has been heavily spruced up via Steam Greenlight over the past few months and was released yesterday. You can now indulge in time-hopping single-player or team up with friends for “the slowest real time game you’ve ever played”.
Blimmortals is set in a fantasy world where zombies are spewing out of every corner of the map. It’s a mix of strategy and collectible card game. You have to muster whatever support you can and order them around a map, finding and using over 100 special character cards to boost and augment your forces. The single-player mode lets you skip ahead in time, becoming a pseudo-turn-based game with 36 missions across 6 playable races.
But there’s also a real-time mode. If you’re familiar with Neptune’s Pride or the aquatic Subterfuge, you’ll know just how demanding and stressful this can be - it takes hours for units to travel from one city to another, and you face ruination if you forget to give an order at a critical moment or check in on the troops regularly. Mercifully, this one is co-op, not competitive, so there’s less chance of falling out with your mates over a double-crossing space invasion. Instead, you have to organise yourselves into a decent resistance force.
It seems much shinier than the version of yore and has seen some changes in that time. “It's a much deeper game than the original,” says the developer. “We wanted to see if a much bigger, more involved game would have more success than the small games we made in the past.”
The horizon darkens with new games too. Iron Helmet are working on another turn-based digital board game, which they are calling Colossus and which they say is a mix of Settlers of Catan and Neptune’s Pride.
“It’s brutal already.”
And on top of that, there’s a Neptune’s Pride 3 in the works, currently undergoing some playtests. In the meantime, if you're not bothered with the Steam version of Blimmortals, you can still login and play on the original website. There’s nothing stopping you.