Earth Reborn Redux
Got through tutorials four and five yesterday and dang it’s a tricky game. It’s like…the High Frontier of tactical mini games.
I can totally see why it wasn’t a commercial success, and what a shame. Besides the vertical learning curve, play is so dense that nobody really fields that much plastic. One of the two factions only has three characters! They could have dribbled our individual character packs with more cards and missions, maybe, but that’s not where the money is. Nor is it where the market is.
We’re only halfway through the tutorials and I cannot imagine skipping any of them. Each new system they add expands the sandbox nature of the game. Like, in mission five each faction has a list of things to do to earn mission points, and the goal is to earn the most in six turns. Easy enough, right? So the NORAD faction has a shopping list of gear to extract from this Salemite facility, and the Salemites are trying to raise zombies and hack a laptop. The Salemites also start way ahead on mission points. So the obvious thing to do is for NORAD to speed up their search, right? Wrong! That’s dumb and you can’t ever catch up to the mission points the bad guys are getting when they’re left alone to hack the laptop. Meanwhile, the Salemites decided to blow off their search objectives (the whole tutorial is built around learning how to search, which is in fact super cool) and just run to the armory to arm themselves and go hunting. What looked like a straightforward search race ended up a brutal cat and mouse. Wild.
Four more to go and my brain already feels overcooked. But I do kind of wish High Frontier had doled out its lessons this way as well.
Sounds a bit on the “too much” side…
Something about this reminds me of an old PC game. It was basically X-com but WWII with a big twist part way through.
Maurice Tousignant Silent Storm! >:)
Paul Beakley, do you think that once you’ve completed all the tutorials you’ll continue being interested enough to play in the sandbox? Or do you think it’s all too damn much?
It’s very X-Com!
Adam Day Won’t know until I get there.
Phil Hatfield so after we played this, we got a couple missions into our Imperial Assault campaign. I had the opposite feeling: not enough, very shallow, kind of boring. Probably I need to not play them back to back.
Adam Day also: once you’ve got the whole game in your head and the tutorial is over, there’s an amazing minigame where you procedurally generate a mission. There’s a deck of missions with all kinds of asymmetrical goals, and guidelines for map building.
Allegedly they are gonna build an app but I’m not sure that happened.
Adam Day that’s it!
Paul Beakley man, if you were the person trying to sell this to me at the exhibit hall I’d own a copy now.
It’s two player exclusively, isn’t it, though?
Adam Day allegedly four! No idea what that looks like, I assume you’re just splitting up sides.
Adam Day there is a lot of good in the game, and Asmodee’s holiday sale price was like $30 or something. Money very well spent.