On Fri, 21 Nov 1997, Brian Morin wrote:
> wondering what everyone else thought who's had a chance to try it out.
>
> Brian
Here's what I mailed to my local spmar mailing list.
Just FYI but the E40K Computer Game came out yesterday. It's quite amusing.
I've only had time to go through the tutorial and the first 2 or 3 battles of
the campaign game. I got home kinda late and could only put in 3 or so hours.
[And I had to restart after I had trouble working out the mechanics of
unloading transports and got a bunch of guardsmen toasted inside their
chimera -- with no savegame at all oops -- RTFM]
Initial game is Ork v Imperium. There are Codex buttons for the Eldar, Chaos
and Tyranids so perhaps those will be added later. Probably as expansion
di$ks and not patches, but we'll see.
They use the detailed unit stats from SpMar but add in suppression from E40K
and score by reducing army morale. Units are moved in an X-Com like manner.
You get movement points which correspond to your 'charge' rate. If you don't
move you get 2 shots, move up to 1/2 you get 1 shot [which stops you] or
move more than 1/2 and get no shots [a charge]. You can choose to move an
entire side at a time or detachment by detachment.
Naturally you have nicely rendered terrain, animated units [believe me watching
troop stands run around is amusing] and animated gunshots. When whirlwinds
fire rockets you really know it. Haven't played long enough to get to the
titans and gargants yet but they're there. And yes the rumors are true, there
is some live action FMV, and the CGI THawks in the cut scene are pretty cool
too.
Campaign mode is missions v Orks, but there is a "build and play" mode that
lets you play either side to an army point value. Supports TCP/IP and IPX
for you lucky ducks on campus.
Only bug I've noticed so far is that my game locks up completely after about
10 minutes. When I played again and turned off the music I could play for
hours with no problem -- probably my ancient sound card with ancient driver
not liking DirectX 5. No big loss as the music really isn't that great.
[I don't know how many games I've played where the first thing I do is turn
off the music]
Oh, and suppression seemed odd at first when I saw a unit with 104% suppression
*not* get routed. Then I looked again and saw it was my Commissar ;)
Anyway, I'm not saying it's a *great* game or a *bad* game -- that's too hard
to judge with only about 3 hours of playing. I did find it to be a fun game
and you know those are the ones I play. [In other words, YMMV and I am in no
way a judge of good or bad games]
I'd say check it out. If I can get it running on my laptop I might bring it
in Sunday for people to look and see.
Sean U
---------
Sean A Upchurch |
http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~sau
Jet Propulsion Laboratory | EPIC /spmar/spmar.html
sau_at_... | WH40K /wh40k/40k.html +others!
Received on Fri Nov 21 1997 - 23:53:12 UTC