HEXEN
Larva
Firstly, and very quickly, I just want to say this game, for me, is such a nostalgic itch. I was maybe 10 or 11 when I got SimAnt for the family Macintosh Performa and I played the absolute hell out of that game. While I've moved onto multi grand gaming PC's in my older years, these simple, refined nostalgic throwbacks always seem to get me.
As the title states, the addition of Free Play has easily added hundreds of hours of value and has opened up possibilities for even further expansion. The Formicarium is a nice base game for people who'd like a story, but it is limiting and I've always preferred simply playing against the AI in skirmish modes.
While not exactly a true skirmish mode, Free Play was absolutely essential to the health of the game. Not only do you now get to completely design your own nest, but its size, shape, design and just about everything above can be controlled through varying difficulties and options like Nest Raids and Uber Creatures.
Overall difficulty is controlled by a slider, and off of that difficulty, the game gives you more customization with options to have it spike, remain constant or grow with the size of your colony. Night and Day difficulties can also be individually tuned with a couple options as well and I've not even mentioning half of the other things you can tweak and control.
To put it simply, you can fine tune the games difficulty and challenge to your own designs and matches can now be experienced that actually endure without the colony being overrun after a few nights. You can build the colony of your dreams, the only drawback now is that you can't save it, something I'm sure will be remedied as this patch comes out of beta.
Currently you have to sit down for long gaming sessions, or keep the game paused and alt tabbed for hours on end while you take a break. This is something I can tolerate while the patch is in beta.
Whether you're new to the game type and genre or are a veteran from SimAnt and other RTS titles, Empires of the Undergrowth is shaping up to be one of the best values for the money, especially considering it's still in early access. Outside of this Free Play Beta, the game has never crashed, has never lagged, has never glitched up beyond the games design... it's been a pleasure to play. For $20, this is a steal, as I know I'll be getting hundreds of hours out of this title. It scratches that special niche for a game I loved so much in my youth, one who's joys I'll now be able to experience again, creatively redone and expanded for 2018.
Thanks Slug Disco!
As the title states, the addition of Free Play has easily added hundreds of hours of value and has opened up possibilities for even further expansion. The Formicarium is a nice base game for people who'd like a story, but it is limiting and I've always preferred simply playing against the AI in skirmish modes.
While not exactly a true skirmish mode, Free Play was absolutely essential to the health of the game. Not only do you now get to completely design your own nest, but its size, shape, design and just about everything above can be controlled through varying difficulties and options like Nest Raids and Uber Creatures.
Overall difficulty is controlled by a slider, and off of that difficulty, the game gives you more customization with options to have it spike, remain constant or grow with the size of your colony. Night and Day difficulties can also be individually tuned with a couple options as well and I've not even mentioning half of the other things you can tweak and control.
To put it simply, you can fine tune the games difficulty and challenge to your own designs and matches can now be experienced that actually endure without the colony being overrun after a few nights. You can build the colony of your dreams, the only drawback now is that you can't save it, something I'm sure will be remedied as this patch comes out of beta.
Currently you have to sit down for long gaming sessions, or keep the game paused and alt tabbed for hours on end while you take a break. This is something I can tolerate while the patch is in beta.
Whether you're new to the game type and genre or are a veteran from SimAnt and other RTS titles, Empires of the Undergrowth is shaping up to be one of the best values for the money, especially considering it's still in early access. Outside of this Free Play Beta, the game has never crashed, has never lagged, has never glitched up beyond the games design... it's been a pleasure to play. For $20, this is a steal, as I know I'll be getting hundreds of hours out of this title. It scratches that special niche for a game I loved so much in my youth, one who's joys I'll now be able to experience again, creatively redone and expanded for 2018.
Thanks Slug Disco!
