Thumper, by Drool. Available on Windows and PS4. Compatible with Oculus VR and PSVR (VR is optional).
Rhythm is a central part of our existence as breathing human beings with functioning hearts. There’s a rhythm in the movement of the planets, which dictates the rhythm of the seasons; the slow annual rhythm of a forest which pumps sap into dead wood every spring. There’s a rhythm inside every living creature, not only in the breath and heartbeat but also in the pulse of electrical charge which drives thought and movement. There’s a reason why percussion is the oldest form of music in the world; we are naturally tuned to find rhythms. Attempt to disrupt a beat and you’ll probably find yourself simply creating a new pattern. Syncopation is, after all, simply the intentional disruption of a rhythm to create the desired effect. Rhythms don’t have to be perfectly paced 4/4 affairs. I’m fond of the driving, eternal forward stumble of the 7/8 rhythm myself.
That’s probably the reason why a good many video games out there are based on rhythm. We have the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games made by Harmonix, the indie music-parser games like Audiosurf and Beat Hazard, DDR-style dance pad games, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Osu, a myriad of mobile games like Cytus and Deemo, and many, many more that I’ve probably never even heard of. Even games that aren’t focussed on music can have a rhythmic element to them at some deep, instinctual level. When playing Bloodborne I’ve found that there’s a sort of deliberate rhythm of dodge, strike, and parry when you fight NPC hunters, and that’s when the game is at its best. Rhythm and music, rhythm and action, these are familiar by now. Rhythm horror, though? That’s a new one.
Thumper has no jumpscares, and though the survival aspect of survival horror is very present this isn’t a slow and methodical creep-around-corners-and-hide-in-closets journey. Thumper is fast and deadly and violent in a metallic and bloodless but terribly visceral way. Thumper deals in the horror of the unknown, a Lovecraftian insignificance amidst the cosmos horror. Here you’ll find the creeping dread of uncertainty, of knowing that no matter how strange and unsettling the things just got, what comes next is probably going to be worse in a way that you can’t possibly foresee. This is probably why Thumper is a little difficult to describe.
You’re a metal beetle, eternally careening along a rail through a hellish void to the sound of thumping, crashing rhythm and electronic drones. The music is difficult to classify as anything that I’ve heard before, mostly percussion. This is fitting considering that one of the developers is ex-Harmonix artist Brian Gibson, the bassist for the noise rock duo Lightning Bolt. The things that you witness on your journey, pointed tentacles and abstract shapes, reflect the darkly-colored void like chrome plating yet move in a disconcertingly organic manner. Sometimes you speed between rows of waving, angular antennae. Occasionally you encounter some strange, otherworldly entity, some fractal thing made out of raw, folded firmament. Each of the game’s nine levels concludes by confronting a giant, increasingly twisted and inhuman skull. H.P. Lovecraft would likely use the word ‘cyclopean’ to describe what goes on in Thumper, though he’d be hard pressed to make any sort of racial metaphors with it. Sparks fly and the screen shakes when you hit corners and break barriers, and the combined music and sound effects fill every wavelength the aural spectrum to complete the utter sensory overload. ‘Rhythm violence’ is the tagline used by the developers, Drool, to describe Thumper, and it fits oh so well.
None of this really captures the full extent of what it is to actually play Thumper. Perhaps we can start again with the controls. It’s simple: one button and four directions. Your beetle will encounter glowing panels on the rail. Press the button when you pass over to create a bass thump. Holding the thump button tucks your shiny beetle body tighter into the track and lets you safely grind around turns and break through barriers. Two levels into the game, you learn that you can leap into the air to hover over spike traps and hit floating rings to snag more points. Three levels in, you’re taught to slam back down onto the thump pads while you’re in the air, sending a wave of distortion down the track. You’d do this to break the barriers some bosses will put up, and to create combos for more points if your timing is good. Later on, the rail will occasionally split into multiple lanes. You’ll need to flit between lanes to hit thumps and dodge obstacles, and jump back onto the right lane when they recombine into one. The controls are simple and the pace at which the game introduces new mechanics is gentle. It’s very easy to pick up and play, but from around Level 4 onwards Thumper takes the kid gloves off and cranks the intensity to the max.
Fortunately, it’s possible to simply survive your way through this game. Perfection isn’t required to progress, and, besides, perfection is difficult to achieve at the speed at which Thumper moves. Missing the thumps might cause you to lose your combo, but it won’t kill you. Running into a corner without turning in the right direction or hitting an obstacle, on the other hand, deals damage. In later levels a ring will occasionally appear around the track for short periods of time, zapping you with lasers if you miss a thump. The first hit causes you to lose your outer shell. The second hit kills you. Each of the game’s nine levels is divided into a number of sections, with checkpoints between. You respawn at a checkpoint when you die, so while the game does get very tough near the end it’s got a certain amount of leniency when it comes to progression. But then you encounter a boss, an entity of some kind which blocks your way forward. Are these things manifestations of the twisted space itself, are they beings running along the rail in front of you, or are they creating the rail moment by moment, placing the obstacles in your way as their only form of self-defense? Either way, now you’re required to hit all the thump pads in a segment of track that will begin repeating itself until you either get the pattern right or die. Thump all the pads in a segment and you get a special, brightly-glowing one that causes you to fire a blast of energy at the boss. Rinse and repeat until the boss disintegrates into a wash of debris.
The mere mechanics of the game don’t really do it justice either. The tight and simple controls are part of the whole thing, certainly, but it’s the game’s unrelenting aesthetic crossed with responsive controls, a visceral sense of feedback, the sheer sense of speed and, most importantly, a rock-solid understanding of rhythm that makes it all work. The beats that you, the player, the beetle are hitting aren’t necessarily going to be “on the beat” with the music. The developer duo Drool know how to play with a rhythm, how to syncopate, sub-divide, and subvert a beat. The thumps, slams, slides and ticks that the player makes as they speed along the track overlay and then weave into not only the background drones and beats but also the sounds that the various obstacles make as they appear on the track. There’s an important element of call-and-response to this game, with the various obstacles signaling their presence a (musical) bar before you need to react to them. In later levels the nearly-subconscious recognition of these aural cues is essential as obstacles come fast and thick, the track itself twisting, turning and obscuring obstacles until the last moment. It might even be possible to play this game with your eyes closed, though I personally wouldn’t attempt it.
The moment that Thumper really clicked for me, though, was when I returned to earlier levels to replay them with the knowledge and reflexes I’d learned from later levels. It was when I started really playing the earlier levels, not simply surviving them, that I started feeling a mix of apprehension, elation and flow. Thumper is possibly the only rhythm game in the world to make me feel like I was actually performing live music. Performing live music is to pour everything you have into a brief period of time in which everything could go wrong. Preparation can only take you so far. When you’re performing you are not only turning rote-remembered skills into a form of self-expression, you’re reacting and adjusting to your instrument and the performances of other performers moment by moment. Thumper creates that feeling by reducing nearly everything to percussion, thus tying all the sounds the player makes to the game’s simple controls. Playing Thumper means creating a piece of music which corresponds directly to your actions. Thumper builds on this by giving the player leeway to add their own flair, to increase risk and reward by adding aerial thumps and going for perfect turns. The beat will go on whether or not you hit all the cues, but there is a satisfaction in not only playing your part of the music but playing it well. You hear what seemed like a series of random obstacles turn into an entirely new section of the soundtrack, performed by you.
Some might express disappointment that Thumper doesn’t offer the sort of endless replayability that a game like Audiosurf provides. Thumper can’t dynamically parse custom music files, but, really, that misses the point of Thumper. Every element of Thumper, from the oppressive soundtrack to the placement of every obstacle to the responsive controls to the stark and alien visuals is designed to create a singular experience. The end result is something strange and unsettling. Thumper doesn’t gently coax the player into a flow state, it instead pushes you onto the edge of the precipice and challenges you to thrive there. The game may only require gentle taps and presses, but I’d find my thumb getting sore partway through a level through sheer tension and wouldn’t even notice until the level finished. I wouldn’t recommend playing for extended periods of time unless you want your arms to lock up out of stress. The mounting fear of what comes next is countered by the demands imposed by Thumper’s speed. You either focus and become one with the beat, reacting to and perhaps even overcoming everything the void throws at you, or else you crash and explode. You may never fully understand the hows, whys, whats and wheres of your situation, but you can still plunge into that abyss and master the rhythm. Perhaps you might even find some sort of meaning in the act of thumping itself.
Oh, and high scores. There’s a leaderboard for each level and all sorts of little nuances to eking out a high score, just in case you didn’t feel intimidated enough by the hellish void. If you like pushing your thumbs and reflexes to the limit, that’s for you.
Tune in next time when Taihus dedicates his life to the glory of mankind.
-Taihus “I am a space beetle hurtling towards infinity; shiny and chrome” @raincoastgamer
Android: Netrunner, produced by Fantasy Flight Games
Author’s plug: if you live in the Greater Toronto Area and want to get in touch with local Netrunner players, you can find us on the Torsaug City Grid facebook group. Netrunner players are a friendly bunch, so don’t be shy! If you let us know you’re a new player ahead of time, someone is guaranteed to bring along a couple of starter decks.
Author’s note: Well, this article is now going up three months or so after I had intended it to. Chalk it up to life getting in the way of actually playing the game I’m writing about.
I’ve become a little obsessed with Android: Netrunner. This is unusual for a number of reasons, not least of which are the facts that I’ve recently moved myself across the country to a place where I have no friends and don’t know the lay of the land. Also unusual is the fact that A:NR is a card game. With physical cards. That you have to buy and shuffle. Manually. With your hands.
Barbaric, I know.
I’m an inveterate inhabitant of the virtual world. A childhood spent convinced that the world was beneath me was followed by an adolescence catching up with social conventions and learning how to actually make friends. The net result is that I had never managed to actually get involved in any IRL gaming until very recently. Perhaps it is all for the best, since I didn’t end up with a Magic: The Gathering addition, even though I did briefly try to acquire one. Nowadays I’m not sure if Magic is the right game for me, though I can appreciate the genius of its design. Netrunner, on the other hand, has got me by the brainstem and refuses to let me jack out. I’ve taken to recommending Android: Netrunner to pretty much anyone on the off chance that they might like it. In fact, if you have a tendency of disliking Trading Card Games and their ilk (for example, say, Hearthstone) I’ll recommend this game to you even more.
This is because Android: Netrunner is guaranteed to be like nothing you’ve ever played. The main (and most obvious) reason I say this is because A:NR is completely asymmetrical. Each of the two players plays using a completely different set of cards and rules. You’d think that this would make A:NR into a solitaire game with only occasional interaction between players, yet I’ve seen few games outside of Poker or Bridge in which each player needs to pay so much attention to what their opponent is doing. Android:Netrunner is a game of skill and getting into the other guy’s head as much as it is a game of having the better deck, and I think it’s down to the fact that it’s a game not about hitting the other person with numbers but instead about either trying to steal the other person’s stuff, or trying to keep the other guy from stealing your stuff. More on that in a few paragraphs.
Magic has a certain, well, magic to its design. It’s approachable and easy to learn, with a fairly low number of options to consider on any given turn. Of course, once you buy a few booster packs the real depth of the game becomes apparent and opens into a bottomless pit, which is why a lot of game stores rely on sales of MtG booster packs and cards to pay the bills. The majority of that depth is in the construction of a deck, which is why acquiring good cards is such an important part of the game. A good deck plays itself, as they say, and a game of Magic can be won or lost from the first few moves. A game of Magic can even be won before the match starts, if the decks are particularly mismatched. Android: Netrunner is a bit trickier to learn than Magic, since mastering the turn-by-turn play of the game is just as important as the construction of a good deck. Nearly every turn is a calculated gamble, a balancing of the known facts and the possibilities, trying to get the person sitting across from you to slip up and tip their hand just one turn earlier or later than they should. Even towards the closing turns a game can be tipped one way or the other, and victory is rarely certain even on the turn when you win.
What’s interesting about A:NR’s design history is the fact that it was designed by none other than Richard Garfield, the designer of possibly the most-imitated TCG design in the world: Magic: The Gathering. Back in the 90’s, after creating the utter genius that was MtG, Mr. Garfield wanted to try designing something that would integrate the kind of information control and bluffing that was such an integral part of poker into a TCG. As he wrote, hidden information means that calculation and optimization can only take you so far before you have to start figuring out what the other person is up to. Your calculation might be flawed because the other person could be misleading you. Being able to read the other player’s loadout and setup would be just as important as a well-constructed deck, and even a bad situation could be turned around with some smart play and bluffing. Netrunner was the result, and was released as a TCG, like Magic, in 1996 and proceeded to get buried under the pile of other TCGs which were trying to copy Magic’s success. It got some cult recognition, people would occasionally say things like “oh, yeah, Netrunner was great, a pity they stopped printing it”, but it ultimately drowned. Today’s article is only possible thanks to Fantasy Flight Games, who bought the rights to Netrunner’s design in 2012, reprinting it with a few rule changes and integrating it into their own Android universe as Android: Netrunner.
I want to take a moment now to appreciate just how cyberpunk a name like Android: Netrunner is. I’m not sure how much more cyberpunk you can get. Say “Android: Netrunner”, and you might think of things like trench coats, cool shades, punk culture, cybernetics, mega-corporations, neural implants, urban sprawl, clones, the ethical dilemmas brought on by the fusion of man and circuitry and rampant capitalism.
So, perhaps in this shiny dystopian future you’d prefer the safety and security up on top of the pile. One of the two players in a game of Android: Netrunner is the Corporation, or Corp. This is your quintessential megacorporation, organizations with control over vast flows of information and the economies of nations at their beck and call. On their turn, the Corp player spends action points, called clicks, to place servers. These face-down cards represent mass marketing campaigns and resource processing operations, traps to punish an unwary intruder, or agenda cards representing the Corp’s plans. Private militaries and corporate takeovers. Psychic clones and putting your logo on the moon. Agenda cards are what win the game. The Corp devotes resources--credits and clicks--to place advancement tokens on their agenda cards. With enough advancement tokens the agenda card can be removed from the table, giving the corp points. If the corp reaches seven points, they win.
This being a cyberpunk world, all of these agendas and assets are accessible through the ‘net. To defend their servers from intrusion, Corporations deploy Intrusion Countermeasures, or Ice. These are nasty bits of software, standing guard against cyberspace intruders. The corp player spends clicks and credits to place Ice cards horizontally in layers in front of their servers. As the game progresses, the Corp uses more and more table space as they set up servers and reinforce their defences. A visual counterpoint to the Corp’s increasing power and influence.
Of course, you may not want to be a mere gear in the vast corporate machine. Maybe you want to show The Man what’s coming. Sitting across from the Corp is the titular Runner, a hacker/cracker who is the reason why the Corp needs all that Ice in the first place. The Runner plays with an entirely different deck, with cards representing their skills and resources instead of agendas and assets. Instead of building an array of servers and defenses, the Runner spends clicks and credits to build their rig, a set of cards which represents the runner’s programs, hardware and other resources such as underworld contacts, jobs, and contracts. Some Runners use the best software and hardware they can build. Some use favors called in to supply them with tools. Some call on blackmailed employees to get them into the system. And, of course, it wouldn’t be cyberpunk without the quintessential Punks with a capital P, taking it to the fat cats armed with the profits from a day job and all the brainpower a nap and an energy drink (Diesel: It gives you flames!) can give them, then running at the Corp using a computer jacked directly into their stimmed-up nervous system.
Once everything is ready or a weakness has been spotted, the Runner hacks into the Corp’s servers. This is called a run, and is quite probably why the game is called Netrunner. In game terms, the Runner chooses a server to run on, then encounters each piece of Ice on that server from the outside in. No matter the archetype, the most important parts of any Runner’s rig are icebreaker programs which allow them to spend resources to avoid the effects of any Ice they encounter while running. Some Ice may simply block access, bouncing the Runner out of the server, but some goes further: destroying software or even zapping the unfortunate intruder’s brain. Some Ice traces the intruder and then simply tags the Runner’s location in meatspace (good old non-virtual real life), which sounds like the softer option. That is, until you realize that the corporation may simply prefer to do things a bit more old-school by contracting some private security to search the runner’s home and make all their contacts disappear. In fact, better to just level the city block (and call it “urban redevelopment”), then freeze all their bank accounts.
Once the Runner gets through the Ice, they get to access the server’s contents. If the server contains an asset, they can spend credits to trash the card, forcing the Corp to discard a resource. If the server contains an agenda card, the Runner gets to steal it and takes the points. No mucking around with advancement tokens or anything like that; if the Runner grabs the agenda, they get the points. Like the Corp, if the Runner reaches seven agenda points they win.
The Corp wins by scoring seven points, and the Runner wins by stealing seven points. Simple, right? Not quite. This is where things get interesting. You see, everything that the Corp plays on the table is initially face-down, which includes their Ice defenses. The Corp doesn’t actually have to pay to rez, or activate, the Ice on a server until it is actually being approached by the Runner. That Ice could be a painful Neural Katana or lethal Archer, or it could just be a harmless Wall of Static. The server’s contents, too, are often a mystery. That face-down card could be a valuable 3-point agenda, or it could be a pad marketing campaign or even a trap that’s been advanced to make it look like an agenda.
The Corp’s ability to hide the true nature of their setup makes every run a calculated gamble, and changes the game from one of simple calculation, i.e. “do I have the right numbers and cards to break through their defenses” to one of information control and bluffing. The Runner doesn’t know what they’re actually running on until they’re already there and facing the consequences. On top of that, the Runner must spend credits to use their icebreakers and get through the Corp’s defenses. On the other side of the table, the Corp can see the Runner’s rig and knows what they’re capable of. One bad run might set the Runner back far enough that the Corp can then score their agendas off the table, safe in the knowledge that it will be a few turns before the Runner can successfully run again.
A bad run might even outright kill the Runner. One of my favorite bits of design in Android: Netrunner is the fact that the Runner’s hand of cards is also their health bar. Ice that deals net damage and hitmen who deal meat damage force the Runner to discard cards. Some Ice even deals permanent brain damage, reducing the Runner’s maximum hand size. If the Runner is forced to discard from an empty hand, they’re flatlined and the Corp wins. The Corp, then, wants to make the Runner overstep their bounds, spend their credits and cards getting into the wrong server at the wrong time, and maybe just end the game right then and there.
On the other hand, rezzing Ice to make it actually do anything takes credits. More powerful Ice takes more credits, and the Runner knows this. A common Runner tactic is to make a run on one server, fooling the Corp into spending their money, and then running again on the real target now that the Corp can’t afford to rez the big guns. In addition, now that the Ice has been revealed the Runner can see exactly what they need to prepare for next time they run. It’s for these reasons that Corp players will sometimes choose not to rez Ice when the Runner is encountering it, preferring to save the money for other things and keeping their defenses secret until it will hurt the Runner the most.
Then again, this might not be enough. In a stroke of design genius, the Corp’s hand, draw pile, and discard pile are also servers that the Runner can decide to run on. These are known in Netrunner parlance as the central servers: HQ, RnD, and Archives. To put it another way: while the Runner has to worry about faceplanting into defenses or traps they weren’t expecting, the Corp has to worry about the Runner looking through the contents of their hand and deck. If they happen to access agenda cards while doing so, these are stolen and scored by the Runner. By running the corp’s HQ and R&D early on, before the Corp gets a chance to set up their heavier defenses, the Runner can get a view of what’s to come and get an early agenda point lead.
Even later on, it’s important for the Corp to defend these three central servers. If too many turns go by without agendas drawn, the Runner will grab them out of RnD (draw pile). If the Corp is keeping them in their HQ (hand), this leaves them with fewer options and creates a massive point of vulnerability. With four clicks every turn, a Runner can potentially steal four agendas with four runs on an HQ full of agendas. If the corp is forced to ditch some of these agendas into their Archives (discard pile) to create some room and give themselves options, this creates yet another point of access that they must dedicate resources to protecting. This can lead to the strange situation where the Runner wins the game by finding all of the corp’s nefarious plans just lying around in the trash bin.
It’s also important to note that a lot of Ice doesn’t actually block access to its server but simply inflicts effects, such as damage, on the runner while still letting them pass through. This means that an intimidating stack of Ice may gut the Runner’s rig and leave them brain-damaged and broke with private security kicking down the door, but if none of the Ice technically ended the run then they’re still alive and accessing the server’s contents. It might be worth blowing everything on a last Hail Mary run if victory or defeat is close enough. The Runner can’t afford to wait too long to run, since the Corp will have already advanced agendas while the Runner was setting up, but Running unprepared has plenty of its own risks as well. This makes the ability to scout out and evaluate your opponent’s strategy just as important as a good running setup, since you definitely don’t want to blow everything you have just to access a decoy server.
Unlike the original Netrunner, Android: Netrunner introduced the concept of factions. A:NR’s factions are similar to the heroes of Hearthstone: a deck is built around a single Identity card, or ID, which determines the minimum number of cards in the deck, available influence points for including out-of-faction cards, and provides some sort of bonus or rule change. These can range from providing simple discounts when playing certain cards all the way to tying the player’s hand size to the number of credits in their bank. Runner ID’s represent individual hackers and belong to one of three runner factions, while corp ID’s represent divisions or branches of one of the four corporate factions.
Each faction is a different flavor of cyberpunk. On the Runner side, the Anarchs are classic punks who play fast and loose and can flat out destroy the Corp’s stuff, whereas Criminals prefer to accumulate money, develop a network of contacts and favors, and pull off the perfect heist by flat out avoiding security measures. Shapers are the geniuses, savants and artists who run because they can, building big, specialized rigs with exactly the right tool for the right job. On the Corp side, Haas-Bioroid are the manufacturers of self-aware robotic labor; making their clicks efficient, plugging artificial brains directly into the ‘net as their Ice, and dealing permanent brain damage to Runners. On the other hand, Jinteki prefers to use clone labor, and positively welcomes people into their servers. Just remember: Japan has rather lenient laws when it comes to net implant feedback and- oh, dear, that Fetal AI doesn’t like being poked. Gomenasai! Weyland (who’s this Yutani person anyways?) is an old-school megacorporation and enjoys lots of money, throwing money at problems, hitmen, and a complete lack of subtlety. NBN are the new media, and they’re watching you so they can give you exactly the content you need. They’re masters of keeping the Runner tagged and exploiting that fact to accelerate their game while keeping the Runner bogged down.
Since every ID and faction has an associated playstyle, simply seeing your opponent’s ID gives you an idea of what to expect from them. An ID’s influence limit helps change that up. Every faction-specific card is worth a certain number of influence points, and a deck can include out-of-faction cards so long as the total influence cost doesn’t exceed the ID card’s maximum. The big question when building a deck is “how do I use my influence?” Some cards are considered to be universally useful, such as the Shapers’ Clone Chip that allows the Runner to install programs from their discard pile, or the NBN executive Jackson Howard (aka Action Jackson, our lord and savior) who increases Corp card draw and rescues lost agendas from the Archives. A more savvy player will seek to combine the strengths of multiple factions. Possibly the best-known combo is the Weyland-NBN “tag-n-bag”, which uses NBN cards to tag the runner, something Weyland lacks, which then enables the use of Weyland’s pyrotechnic methods of retaliation/urban restructuring normally unavailable to NBN. The core set itself comes out of the box with enough cards to make at least one deck for each runner and corp faction, and there’s more than enough combo potential between factions to make for a good few hours of deck building.
As a side note, it’s important to mention that Android: Netrunner is being distributed using Fantasy Flight’s Living Card Game (LCG) system. What this means is that cards are released in fixed, non-random packs, as opposed to randomized booster packs and decks. There are pros and cons to either system. A:NR has no secondary card market, the ongoing cost of maintaining a competitive card collection is fairly low, and finding a desirable card is a simple matter of buying the corresponding pack. However, it’s important to remember that this means there’s also no secondary card market, and the up-front cost of building one’s initial collection is intimidatingly high. The first two “cycles” of expansion packs are going to rotate out of the tournament card pool this year, but this still leaves a new player facing the prospect of buying at least one, probably two core sets, four deluxe expansion boxes, and 5 or 6 cycles of 6 expansion packs each if they want every single tournament-legal card. This is only important if you want a full collection, though. The core set is a self-contained experience and more than enough to play with a friend. If you’re looking to play with others, chances are that a few questions asked on Reddit or at a local play group will give you suggestions for deck building on a budget. I personally recommend starting with the Creation and Control big-box expansion, and the Blood Money data pack from the recent Flashpoint cycle is full of solid all-round cards. (Paperclip is love. Paperclip is life.)
I’d like to close this unhealthily long ramble by quickly pointing out that Android: Netrunner has some fantastic art direction. Oh, the style is consistent and characterful, the artists are well chosen and the cyberspace art is mind-boggling, but that’s not the best part. The best part is that the card art features very little of what I’d refer to as unnecessary fanservice or “ye gods people STILL think sex sells?!” Not only do we have 14 out of 36 Runner ID’s who are female, and who kick ass in reasonable outfits (Khan is amazing, can we just have a Khan appreciation moment here? Actually, let’s just appreciate all of Matt Zeilinger’s work.), we also have Quetzal, who is doing their own non-binary gene-modded thing. It’s refreshing to play a beautifully illustrated game of any kind where the female characters don’t look like strippers by default. On top of that, there’s some great POC representation, what with an array of races and nationalities across the board and an entire card cycle which takes place across cyberpunk India. It’s great stuff all round, and a sign of hope that game culture can be turned into something more accepting and diverse.
Also, yeah, the cyberspace art is kind of insane.
I’ll admit, at the end of all this obsessive nerdlove, that Android: Netrunner can be difficult to get into. It’s got its own vocabulary and an array of mechanics found nowhere else in the gaming world. I wrote all of the above without going into the details about the rules, and that’s because it’s so very easy to get buried in minutiae. Like Chess, A:NR has a lot of moving parts. Familiarizing yourself with how all the pieces move is just the beginning, because then comes the process of learning when to do what move, and why. On top of this, new pieces are released on a regular basis. This constantly gives everyone new options to learn, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. This is a game like no other that offers nearly unparallelled variety of play and consistently tense and engaging matches. Even with an outmatched deck I’m able to surprise my opponent and keep them on their toes.
But if you like cyberpunk and really engrossing card games, the only advice I can give you is this: grab a friend, split the cost of a core set, get some cool sunglasses, and put on your favorite cyberpunk soundtrack (I recommend the Neotokyo soundtrack, by Ed Harrison or the Frozen Synapse soundtrack, by nervous_testpilot). Array your defenses, pool your funds, and hide the fact you’ve drawn a hand full of agendas. Balance the odds, build your rig, and make one more run.
Tune in next time when Taihus writes something shorter (thank goodness).
-Taihus “tl;dr I like Netrunner a lot and so should you” @raincoastgamer
Android: Netrunner at Fantasy Flight Games
Design Lessons from Poker - Richard Garfield -- ETC Press (a great little article if you’re interested in strategy game design)
Furi, by The Game Bakers. Available on PC and PS4.
Come to think of it, I haven’t actually finished all that many video game stories in my lifetime. It wasn’t until I began to deliberately set out to finish games that I realized this. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 sat fallow for months before I finally picked it up to see why everyone wanted Valve to make Half-Life 3 so badly (other than the fact that the Half-Life games are still a high standard of single-player shooter design). Mass Effect 1 and 2 were a pair of rare titles that I played straight through because Shepard/Garrus is my perfectly-calibrated OTP, but I still haven’t gotten around to importing my save into Mass Effect 3. I’ve played through the opening bit of Dragon Age: Origins twice now as two different characters, and stopped shortly after. My Planescape: Torment playthrough is forever stuck at the bit where I think I’m supposed to join one of Sigil’s factions. I got caught up in some massive conversation trees instead. I almost finished all 4 of Warcraft 3’s Reign of Chaos campaigns, but I lost my saves shortly before the last stand against Archimonde. I still feel bad about not seeing Dishonored through to the end. Dark Souls… I might actually return and finish that one day. Playing a Souls game is like riding a bicycle--more muscle memory and mental approach than remembering the plot--and I’m not ready to go Hollow just yet.
There’s just something about playing a game with a linear story that makes me loath to actually finish. Maybe it’s a fear of endings, of seeing something finished and put away, or maybe it’s my tendency to get distracted by new and shiny things promising innovative game mechanics.
So please understand that when I’m saying that Furi defeated me, there’s actually a lot of precedence.
That all said, Furi has defeated me. This isn’t to say that I don’t like Furi, or that I don’t appreciate its challenge. Far from it. But when it comes to Furi’s mix of bullet hell and character-action hack-n-slash, I seem to have run into a wall, figuratively speaking.
Furi is an indie attempt to make an action-y character action hack ‘n slash game - the kind that normally gets made by a Japanese studio and features a lot of physics-defying, animation-cancelling and enemy-juggling action. Furi is a little different, in that it’s made by a French studio called The Game Bakers, and it doesn’t have the bits you’d find in your average Devil May Cry where you fight groups of weaker enemies. Furi is a boss rush game, which is to say that the entire experience consists of a string of big single-enemy set piece boss fights, with bits in between where you walk slowly through some pretty environments while a man wearing a purple rabbit helmet exposits angrily at you.
All you know in the beginning is that you’re some kind of prisoner, fated to be repeatedly brought to the edge of death. You’re then released by the aforementioned purple rabbit-head man, given a sword and a gun, and told that the jailer is the key. Kill him, and you’ll be free. Of course, in a plot twist nobody saw coming, things aren’t quite that simple. You’ve only escaped your initial jail cell, one section of a whole sky-bound prison. There’s a gauntlet of floating islands to traverse, each housing their own jailer, each with their own reason for wanting to keep you locked up. Or perhaps they’re fellow inmates? The story of this game turns out to be fairly straightforward despite a few twists and turns crossed with the rabbit-man’s best attempts at keeping things vague. That said, I will give the game credit for taking risks with one late-game boss and committing to a theme. That as well as taking a page from Spec Ops: The Line and giving the player a not-entirely-obvious choice in a situation where most video games wouldn’t risk it. The story obviously wants to be great, but only manages to be pretty good.
The visuals are much like the story in this respect. The character design work of this game was done by Takashi Okazaki, the man who gave us Afro Samurai (the manga, not the video game), and the game bears a strange but distinctive sci-fi look as a result. Everyone has long, lanky limbs and our main character bears a stream of wavy white locks that drift like seaweed in a gentle current. He also doesn’t seem to wear shoes, which bothered me for a while, though I’m really not sure why. Unfortunately, low-res texture work and model clipping issues don’t do the concept art justice. Judging by the shaders, Furi is attempting to take on a smooth and stylized aesthetic similar to that of something like El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. Unfortunately, I’m guessing that the limited budget and small team are to blame for the stiff animation work. I understand just how time-consuming animating a game of this type can be, but that doesn’t change the fact that the striking, memorable, and distinct visuals could do with a lot of polish. Then again, considering the size of the dev team, this category could probably be given a pass. Perhaps it was in all in service of the framerate, which stays at a smooth 60 no matter what; an essential part of any fast-paced action title. If so, it was a worthwhile tradeoff. I’ll take a smooth framerate over shinier graphics in a game like this.
Fortunately, both the soundtrack and the gameplay are exceptional. The soundtrack probably deserves its own article and easily stands on its own as something worth buying. Right now. I mean it. Composed by Carpenter Brut, Danger, The Toxic Avenger, Lorn, Scattle, Waveshaper and Kn1ght, it’s a thumping tribute to retro electronica and the perfect accompaniment to energy-ball-dodging, pew pew pew-ing, and laser-sword-swooshing. Whatever atmosphere was lost when I saw an awkward animation was more than made up for by whatever music happened to be playing at the time. My favorite tracks are probably “A Picture in Motion” by Waveshaper, and “What We Fight For”, by Carpenter Brut.
Furi is built around a core set of abilities. The player can dodge, string together up to four strikes with his sword, and make rapid-fire shots with his energy pistol. Each of these moves can be charged up for greater effectiveness. The dodge will go further, and the charged strike and shot can interrupt certain enemy attacks. The player also has a parry move that if timed properly will block melee attacks, reflect projectiles, and open up opportunities to unleash a counter strike on their opponent. It seems like a simple enough system at first glance, but there is a lot to master once the player has a basic grasp of the controls. Parry timing is critical, not only because your health is healed a small amount with every successful parry, but a perfectly timed parry will stun your opponent and allow you to carve off a chunk of their health. Timing charged strikes to interrupt certain boss attacks and knowing when to charge a dodge become important too, though not absolutely essential. The controls are snappy, precise, and perfectly tuned for the sort of exacting and demanding game that Furi is.
With mastery of the controls, I’d imagine that this game will become appealing to speedrunners. Absolute mastery of all the various attack timings and patterns isn’t required to beat the game. Rather, cutting down a boss’s health bar becomes much faster once you figure out a few tricks, and I’m sure there are a lot of people who will make it their mission to go through each boss as quickly as possible.
There are nine bosses total, plus one optional “secret” boss, each with their own theme, arena, gimmick, and twist to the formula. I’ve heard that Furi plays a bit like a last-gen cult-classic game called NieR, and this is true to a certain extent. Like in NieR, each fight is a blend of character-action/hack ‘n slash and bullet-hell gameplay. Each boss fight goes through several phases, indicated by blips below their health bar. Each phase of the fight requires the player to work through two health bars. Two sections to the fight, essentially. Generally speaking, in the first half of a phase the boss will engage the player with a mix of bullet hell projectile patterns and melee attacks, while in the second half of the phase the player is locked into a small area around the boss and the fight becomes melee-focussed. That said, each boss after the second one will start mixing things up, each one with a twist to the formula. The third, for example, has no melee section to the first phase of his fight, instead putting up a series of rotating shields that the player must shoot through, but saying much more will definitely ruin a fair amount of the experience for you.
The difficulty curve from boss to boss is, unfortunately, rather uneven. The third fight seems to be a common difficulty spike for many. He’s not exactly tough, but seems designed to test the player’s patience to a breaking point, while the fifth fight is a breeze after the quick reflexes and more precise positioning required by the fourth boss. While I never made it quite so far on the default difficulty level, the ninth fight is apparently quite easy after the extremely tough seventh and eighth bosses (though I’d argue that in this case it’s necessary for thematic reasons).
Fortunately, the game is actually quite forgiving in terms of allowing the player to learn while keeping up the pace of each individual fight. The player themselves has three lives, and losing a life only resets whichever phase of the battle they’ve currently reached. Successfully finishing a phase will restore a lost life and replenish the player’s health. The player must lose all three lives before being forced to start the fight from the beginning. The game may be demanding, but it has a fair amount of tolerance for mistakes.
Unfortunately, my own tolerance for the game was worn down by just how demanding later fights were. Taxing melee combat, that I can handle. I’m even okay with the occasional bullet hell game, though I can’t say I particularly appreciate the genre. Furi’s blend of both, on the other hand, seems to be geared to break me down into incoherent rage. Switching between the two modes of action on the fly simply proved too taxing for me. It might be argued that I had ruined the experience for myself by getting fed up at one point and switching the game to “Promenade” difficulty so I could essentially skip ahead and finish the story, thus removing a lot of my motivation for continuing the game. That may be true, but I do feel that by that point I’d already seen most of what the game had to offer, mechanically speaking. I’ve got a good look at what Furi does, and, frankly, I’ve got a lot of video games on my plate here.
This isn’t to say that Furi is bad, far from it. It’s an admirable effort, something that’s striving for greatness and bumping right up against the hard limitations of a small team and budget, especially for the kind of game it’s trying to be. To achieve Devil May Cry 3 levels of polish, you need much bigger teams of animators and software engineers, but the core of Furi, the fast and challenging combat mechanics, is rock solid. For those who want a precise and demanding series of fights, where a neat art style and kickass soundtrack are bonuses, Furi is definitely a game for you. Though lacking in terms of visual fidelity, Furi has tough boss fights where good reflexes and patience will win the day. No filler, just your character and your opponent. The experience wore thin for me about two thirds of the way through, though, for more or less the same reason. Furi knows what it wants to do and does it very well, but the things it does ended up driving me up the wall.
I will say this, though: playing the deceptively hardcore Hyper Light Drifter after bashing my head against Furi feels so much easier. Situational awareness? Dash timing? Juggling ranged and melee combat? I’ve got it covered.
Tune in next time when I drift on blades of the hypest light.
UniWar, by TBS Games. Available on iOS and Android.
Mobile games have been, for me, a bit of a mixed bag. You’ve got your Free-2-Play trash, your Clash of Clans and all its imitators and follow-ups, you’ve got your crappy attempts to port console control schemes to touchscreen, but then you’ve got some great experiences adapted perfectly to mobile, such as Monument Valley, Deemo and Cytus, Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery EP and Vainglory. Strategy games in particular can range from time-and-money sinks like Mobile Strike to bite-sized bits of strategy brilliance like UniWar.
Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t take a special kind of genius to make compulsive experiences that subtly draw the player into a mindset of “buy all the things”. I just happen to think that they give mobile gaming a bad name.
UniWar looks like the most generic piece of strategy gaming ever, and in a few ways it is. This game doesn’t do anything particularly creative in terms of mechanics or premise. Players face off in turn-based battles, choosing from three factions: Sapiens (humans), Khraleans (bug aliens) or Titans (robots). On their turn a player creates new units at the bases they own, and moves and attacks with their units on a hex-grid based map. Combat follows a very Advance Wars type system, where the damage a unit does against another unit is determined by a combination of its remaining hitpoints and its damage rating against the type of unit it is attacking. A unit with few hitpoints left is going to do less damage, even against a type of unit it is strong against. Whenever a unit attacks, the attacked unit will counter-attack as long as the attacker is within range. Most units can only attack enemies adjacent to themselves. Some can attack at range. Some have a minimum range and can’t attack enemies close up. Ideally, whenever you attack, your unit will be doing more damage to the enemy unit than the enemy unit is doing to you.
And that’s it, really. When you start a match you generally have maybe a few basic units on the map, and perhaps a few bases under your control. Every turn you gain Credits from every base you own, which you can then spend on units. You use your infantry units to capture neutral or enemy bases on the map, improving your income and giving you another place to spawn new units. Capture all of your opponent’s bases or keep your units sitting on them and you win. At its heart, this is a game about efficiency. Generally speaking, if you’re able to kill enemy units worth more credits in total than the units you’re losing, you’re in a good place. That superiority in numbers becomes superiority on the map, which translates into being able to capture bases and snowball to victory.
Where this game shines is in balance and the variations in strategy created by faction and map combinations. Though the factions seem very similar on the surface--each one has equivalent units, things like a basic infantry unit, a tank unit, and an artillery unit--the stat and price differences along with the unique units of each faction make for a dramatically different playstyle. I personally like playing the Titans, since they favor a slow and steady buildup. A Titan player uses their sturdy Plasma Tank units and superior infantry to form a front line and then bombard their opponent with their superior artillery options. Then again, I could use the Khraleans’ ability to burrow their infantry and their cheap flying units to outmaneuver my opponent. Or perhaps I’ll just spam the hell out of my opponent with the Sapiens’ incredibly cheap tanks. I’ve had moments during my time playing UniWar’s multiplayer when I’ve felt that any given faction was overpowered, abused what I saw as that faction’s strength, and then had my ass handed to me by someone who understood how to counter that faction’s strengths. This quality is, in my mind, a good indicator of balance in any competitive game. If everyone seems overpowered yet can be beaten with good play, it probably means that the game is balanced.
A big deciding factor in my victories and defeats is the use of terrain. Each hexagonal tile on the map can be one of a variety of terrain types. Different kinds of terrain affect movement and provide defense and offense bonuses to different unit types. Mountains in particular can’t be crossed by ground vehicle type units at all, but provide massive bonuses to infantry units.
One standout feature of this game, of any decent strategy game, is the inclusion of easy-to-use map creation and sharing tools. This means that I’ve been playing on an incredible variety of maps, all of which require me to rethink how I approach playing this game. A small island with mountainous terrain requires a completely different mindset than an open map with a few chokepoints. Different amounts of per-base income and the placement of bases relative to the front line also make a big difference when it comes to one’s approach to the game. If the starting positions are far enough from each other, being able to scout out the other player’s army composition becomes important in how you build your army and when you begin your offensive. Despite this game’s fairly basic and generic mechanics, there’s been a surprising amount of variety in the matches that I’ve played.
The developers have proven themselves capable of responding to feedback as well, as there have been updates not only for balance but also for interface functionality and clarity. This is a game that is very polished indeed, made by developers who care for it.
Of course, the big worry with any cheap mobile title is that there will be microtransactions within the game. Thankfully, I can say that the extremely generous price of entry )about a dollar) will unlock the full game. The only things available in the microtransactions shop are convenience items, such as tokens for undoing your turn or extra slots so you can take part in more concurrent games or archive more of your favorite matches. These items are hardly what I’d call pay-to-win.
UniWar is a polished, easy to play but hard to master bit of strategy gaming that has managed to stay on my phone for a long time. Despite its generic exterior, I continue to play matches which surprise me and encounter new approaches to factions that I thought I understood completely. The incredible variety in the maps churned out by the community gives this game a surprising amount of replay value and the balance between factions is precise enough to support the variety in terrain and map setups. If you’re looking for a turn-based strategy game for your phone which has no persistent unlocks or anything which could possibly be called pay-to-win, something that rewards strategic thinking and an analytical mindset, you can’t go wrong with UniWar.
Tune in next time when I write something… I’m not quite sure what it’s going to be. I had planned to play some Valkyria Chronicles, but The International 2016 Dota 2 tournament kind of happened and got in the way.
UNDERLORD IS COMING AUGUST 23RD LOOK OUT WORLD HERE COME THE MASS TELEPORTS
But I have a strange urge to recommend the Humble 2K Bundle to anyone who hasn’t picked up one or more of the following:
Any of the Bioshocks
Xcom: Enemy Unknown
Spec Ops: The Line
It’s debatable whether or not the Bioshock games really are as great as people say they are, and they suffer from some severe hype backlash in my opinion, not to mention severe ludonarrative dissonance (it’s a fast and fancy way of saying the gameplay and story are disconnected). In my opinion, though, they do a great job at creating atmosphere and a sense of place, the gunplay is pretty solid, and the stories are good even if they don’t mesh well with the player’s actions.
I have yet to play the other two, but both appeal to me for different reasons. Xcom received a lot of praise, and I’ve yet to play a “triple-A” turn-based strategy title, especially one with such a history behind it. Spec Ops, on the other hand, has been touted by many as one of the only shooters that will actually make the player examine their own actions. I mean, it probably won’t be enjoyable towards the end, sure, but damn me if it doesn’t sound fascinating. Plus, I hear it’s basically Apocalypse Now or The Heart of Darkness in video game form, so I’m already interested. I mean, just read Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s review of it. If they think it’s thought provoking, it almost certainly is.
I’m also interested in seeing what other games they add to the paid-above-the-average tier when Tuesday rolls around. Steam Sales may have that memetic “BRACE YOUR WALLETS” status, but I say beware the Humble Bundle, for when the Bundle gets good, it gets your wallet.
