The Move-Overwatch crawl was what prompted the mission timers to be added in the first place. The big problem with XCOM 1 was that for 90% of the mission, you’d be sitting there and nothing would happen as long as you were playing optimally, so it kinda sucked all of the tension out of the missions. With the timers in the mission, you really have to hustle and move your team into sub optimal positions or you are going to lose the mission.
I personally really liked the changes they made to the missions for XCOM 2 and I thought the Chosen that they added were a fantastic addition, to the point where I consider War of the Chosen to basically be a required expansion. The reaper was a bit busted as a character, but the rest of it was super fun.
The only big issue I had with the new XCOM series was that I feel the over world stuff was a bit too streamlined in the new series. I wish they had kept some of the complexity of the old games for the Strategic map stuff, but I accept that the over world stuff wasn’t really polished enough for a game in 2013.
Even the first XCOM tried to get people out of crawling by having Meld timers in the Enemy Within expansion. Once you’re used to playing a little more aggressively the timers aren’t too bad to work around.
War of the Chosen, at times, does seem like “Create problems that can be solved by underused abilities”.
The Lost were created to make Gunslingers more attractive. The fact the Chosen prefer to stun their enemies before abducting them, make recovery protocol a viable option.
At least you don’t have the Headcrabs from Apocalypse, those were complete bullshit if you were playing turn-based.
Oh, that;s so true. If you made a sniper a gunslinger in Vanilla XCOM2, people would look at you like you’d grown a second head. But if the map has a pile of lost on it, suddenly “shoot from the hip at everyone in range” becomes super necessary in the toolkit. Also the lost on a map meant 6 Grenadiers was no longer a viable strat.
one of my favorite things from XCOM2: WotC were the away missions, because every once in a blue moon you’d have to do the squad evacuations through the Lost maps, and those were so much fun. Dropped in a map with half the necessary manpower and just given the directive of “Get to point A; Don’t Die”.
My only problem with the Chosen was that they were a blast to have, but My strategy ended up being “explore until you find a chosen, then don’t expand territory until you kill that Chosen”. I’m not sure if that was intended or if you were supposed to just deal with three chosen during the game. but the way I played it, it made for a different over world experience, but not a better one
It’s not Wargroove, but Valkyria Chronicles 4 is somewhat adjacent. You’re commanding a Squad instead of armies but each level is a puzzle. Complete the objectives on the map in the fewest turns possible.
Compared to the first one, they’ve made several technical improvements. Lancers and Tanks can now fire together. (Previously only riflemen and machinegunners could concentrate fire.) Real Mortars and APCs are in the game now, which opens up a lot of new strategies.
Eh… Not really. It’s a different set of people for whatever that’s worth… To its credit you can staff your squad with characters that are over 18 years old.
But then I just sort of button mash through most of the Cinematics.
Valkyria Chronicles was the maximum safe level of modern anime tropes, and then the sequel immediately took a hard turn into high school.
Edit:
I forgot how compact CT is… but also how many sidequests there are relative to the main game. The kingdom of Zeal is a crater three hours after you see it for the first time, and there’s nothing but sidequests after that.
Why bother if you’re not going to watch the story? I’ll never ever understand people skipping basically half of a game. I know people who do it in my MMO, did it in Metal Gear and freaking JRPGs and I just don’t get it.
I read the subtitles faster than most people talk. Also 99% of the time the foul-mouthed, sexist, machinegunning guy doesn’t have anything interesting to say.
About the only time he was interesting was when he realized he should quit smoking.
Imagine you are sitting at a table playing a game. It’s about to be your turn, but before you roll the dice I stop you and you have to listen to me tell you a story for five minutes before your turn. Would you shut me up so you could just take your turn and move on with the game, or would you sit and listen? If my story was so good would you stop caring about the game and just try to take turns as quickly as possible to hear me tell more story?
Most video games, especially from big time studios/publishers fail to properly integrate narrative and gameplay. Look at Half-Life series or Dwarf Fortress. Whatever you think about them, they integrate story and gameplay. Even the old scrolls games have the plot integrated into the gameplay to an acceptable extent. It is very hard to separate the two or to skip the other half. The plot is the game.
But Metal Gear and JPRGs do not integrate much at all. Someone made a movie. Someone made a game that looked like that movie. They then chopped both up into pieces and alternated them. If you’re only interested in the movie part, watch it on YouTube. If you’re only interested in the game part, play it and hope they let you skip all the movie parts. If you’re interested in both, well, good for you.
When I started Wargroove I was thinking I wouldn’t disable the animations until I got all the units, so I could see them at least once. I completely disabled everything in the middle of the very first mission.
That’s not even story, it’s just animations. I disable them because they are slow as balls! Just speed that shit up and I won’t disable it. Let me have a Pokemon battle that moves as fast as my fingers.
Anyone playing this Apex game? I see it mentioned a lot now, but I havn’t owned an Origin game since they brought Dragon Age to Origin and took it off Steam.