Art | Cookie | FAQ | Index of Posts | Links | Main | Oracle | YouTube
22 May 2015 - 30 May 2015
Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4 | Episode 5
You'll show them! You'll show them all! Why, as soon as your greatest creation is complete, you will unleash it upon the cities of the world, and make them pledge allegiance to you. Then, you shall rule the world!
It's a pretty simple and cathartic game: go through the city and bash buildings. You'll gain resources, which you can use back at your secret lair to build additional buildings that will eventually be used to defend against any insurgent forces that may resent you're new leadership.
In the city, you have to defend against the police and the military as they fight against your inevitable rule. If they do too much damage to your creation, you'll have to spend valuable time rebuilding it as the insurgency grows stronger.
Actually going through the city can be a little tedious, as the buildings can sometimes alternate between being too difficult to target or too easy. Tanks and aircraft can "hide" behind critical buildings, so a lot of the time it's better to just clear-cut entire neighborhoods so that no one can get a jump on you. Clear too much room, though, and then the bombers are completely clear to do their bombing run.
The skill tree for the monster has a lot of nice effects, though I'm not sure that I totally understood how various things were unlocked. I imagine that towards the end of the skill tree that it would be pretty difficult for the military to stand up to me, but that's probably not true if only to maintain some kind of balance to the game. The battleships are definitely my most feared foe, as their guns can take significant chunks out of my health. Bombers are probably next, but as long as the lasers aren't on cooldown they can be easy to take out before they get a chance to do too much damage. Tanks and armies, though, are just a nuisance. They can do significant damage only if they're allowed to live, so they have to be swatted down if they get too close. Otherwise, they're too slow to catch up to you unless you're busy taking down a building.
It can be fun, but each level is basically just more of the same. If you go to a city with a high difficulty, that just means that the city is on high alert and the military shows up sooner. But that's just a matter of time for any city. Eventually the police will realize that they're outclassed and call in some better firepower. Until then, you're just attacking buildings and attempting to build up the meter so that the city surrenders.
And that can get a little silly. Some cities will surrender if half of the city is gone. Others take much longer. But even just half a city takes a long time to destroy, and there are some cases where I'm in a city for twenty minutes and my healthbar hasn't budged at all. If there's no real challenge, shouldn't the city surrender faster? It would seem like there should be a horrible morale loss if they can't even scratch my monster.
Overall, it's fun, but I think the base management might be the worst part of the game. Having the moster tear through cities is good, but might be done better (perhaps as a roguelike, so the monster must stay alive?) Some good ideas, but I would bet that most people will stop playing long before they completely subjugate the entire world.