Wolcen - Thoughts

A genre I didn't expect having so much resistance to is the Action RPG. I was an active participant in its heyday, having grown up on the unforgettable one-two punch of Diablo and Diablo II. But I suppose in retrospect I didn't play them a lot—or rather, I didn't play them as much as my peers tended to. After finishing both games, my relationship with ARPGs was mostly casual: I played Diablo 3 a decent amount, bounced off of Titan Quest and Path of Exile, and liked Grim Dawn but sadly never finished it. I've always kept my eye out for projects on the horizon that looked interesting despite my own personal struggles with the genre, because I was waiting for an experience to finally click with me.

Yet there's also an irrepressible, morbid side to my desires. I'm enthralled by broken dreams, overambition, and an out-of-depth arrogance. I love writing about games that fail the player, because even though I may detest the title while playing it, it's fascinating to pick apart a game's design and ponder what went wrong. That's why Wolcen has always had a giant red bullseye on its back, begging me to play it. The game released to aggressively mixed reviews on Steam and had its fanbase quickly burn out, despite receiving numerous post-launch updates in an attempt to resuscitate the community. And if the fans of the genre abandoned Wolcen, a game that by all impressions looks pretty good, then what hope did it have for me, a jaded apostate that has abandoned the genre?

Well guess what? Wolcen is fine. Well... "fine" is a bit of an oversimplification—Wolcen is a mediocre action romp that looks and sounds great but fundamentally misses the mark. It's not a game that will leave you itching to try out a different build or strategize around unique gear you discover; Wolcen is firmly a "play, theorycraft, and wipe your hands once done" type of experience. I think that kind of thing can be a huge disappointment for ARPG addicts looking for the next juicy hit to keep coming back to, but for someone like me that bounces quickly from game to game, it was an unexpectedly fun ride. Personally the best part of an ARPG is near its start anyway, when you first get to submerge your hands into the gooey, squishy clay that is character building—and Wolcen's clay reservoir is practically overflowing.

Besides its above-average presentation, the best thing Wolcen has going for it is a massive passive skill tree that puts Diablo IV to shame. It's not as mind-bogglingly large as Path of Exile but it's still deeper and wider than many of its contemporaries, giving you a ton of pathways and connections to mull over. You start by picking one of three core "builds" to focus on, and as you spread out you'll run into two secondary builds further in and four tertiary builds on the outer rim. You can also cross into adjacent builds pretty quickly and rotate bits of the web to make it easier to beeline for a tertiary build from the start. Additionally, there are larger nodes that grant build-defining skills sprinkled throughout, although most of the ones on the outer rim tend to come with a downside that make them risky to take (at least for my build). Still, no matter if you're big on experimenting with wacky triple-class shenanigans or laser-focused on damage of a single type, it's hard not to find something to love within Wolcen's giant web of possibilities.

The downside to all of this is that Wolcen's active skills fail to support the range of options here. Similar to the passive tree, there are three core active skill types: melee, range, and magic. You can pick up as many as you want (provided you have the money) but your access to them is limited by the weapon you have equipped (ie if you wield an arcane staff you can't use melee or range skills). While that may sound like an acceptable restriction, what kills the game's variety is that skills are woefully scant: there are 18 skills for magic, 13 for range, and only 12 for melee. With 6 skills able to be loaded into your hotbar, and most of them being simple do-damage doodads, it's going to feel like there's not much room for build variety. Wolcen tries to remedy this with a rune system similar to Diablo III (but with 16 skill runes instead of 5), but I never felt this made up for the lack of active skills on offer. If anything it made the game slightly more confusing to sift through, as a skill's true value was often hidden somewhere amidst its runes.

For my playthrough, I kept my build in Wolcen deliciously simple: I was a big strong lad that liked to smash things with his right-click hammer. I knew to follow ARPG 101: get a good damage ability, get a quick escape ability, and then everything else is supplemental (AoE, utility, buffs, debuffs, etc). Due to Wolcen's limited skills, the three non-damage supplemental abilities I picked up were the only three the melee class offered: a shout, an AoE buff, and a summon of all things. Everything else would compete for resources against my big bonk attack, and pretty early on I found the bonk to be unparalleled at pulping foes. I zipped across the passive skill web to pick up as many +physical damage nodes as possible, and when I ran out of those I doubled down on becoming a tank, pumping my resistances up to 55% across the board. It was a fun experience that kept me engaged for the most part—but I couldn't help but feel everything was so... arbitrary.

For instance, I spent a long time trying to figure out if I should be going for high HP or high resistance. I received plenty of gear for both builds and could easily pick up nodes to support whichever choice I made, seeing as they were both major pillars for melee builds. But what truly muddled my options was that raw and multiplicative numbers are hidden—you're only given the total of your statistics, not the raw value nor what it's being multiplied by. This forces you to flick back and forth between your stats tab and the passive skill tree with each change, as you're never really sure just how much "10% more resistance" adds to your overall resistance (for me it was closer to 2% total). The same is true for all damage types, attack speed, crit chance, force shield—basically every upgrade on the passive skill tree gets put into an equation you never get to see.

That's why it was so hard for me to figure out my defense strategy. Is 10% more resistance better than 8% more max HP when I can't see the cumulative total for either until after I level up? And considering the lightning-fast speed at which new gear dropped ("rare" quality? More like I "rare"ly get anything else), I was changing out my equipment so fast that old comparisons I made were immediately outdated. I wound up waffling between the two defense stats, ultimately looking for gear that provided both but willing to lean into resistance if the stat was high enough. I encountered a similar hurdle when I found a unique weapon near the end of the game, one that gave a huge amount of arcane bonuses if I switched to that damage type. But since Wolcen doesn't offer a way to save different loadouts or view your total stats while respeccing, I spent 10 minutes remaking my character to an arcane-melee man, saw my damage would be a tiny bit less, and then spent 10 minutes trying to rebuild my original bonklord. Thankfully respeccing is fairly cheap, but the process was so tedious and unproductive that I never again considered altering my build.

As far as the campaign goes, Wolcen does an admirable job, although the first three acts aren't anything to write home about. The story here is unabashedly about Warhammer 40k marines in a fantasy universe (so Warhammer?), bombarding you with an incredible amount of side chatter in an attempt to endear you to its lore. For some folks this will provide a great incentive to care about Wolcen's grim universe and quippy cast of characters, but for those used to every other ARPG, the dialogue will only get in the way of whatever media is playing on your second monitor. That, and the prose itself isn't particularly gripping; it reminds me most of 90s comic book writing, the kind you'd find under a Liefeld-esque cover where a gallon of blood drips off the main character's spiked gauntlets. As you play it you'll realize that Wolcen suffers from a self-consciousness problem: it's trying to be what it thinks is cool, and you can't help but notice the "trying" part while playing.

Wolcen's final act however, is definitely one of the most interesting things about it. In it, a big bad demon is coming to attack your hub city, and each time you embark on a mission he gets a little bit closer to arriving. In order to give yourself a fighting chance you have to pick and choose missions that will weaken him and his forces, along with bolstering your city's defenses and productivity. The final boss starts at roughly 15 levels above you, so your first attempt at tackling him will likely end in crushing demise. Afterwards, you'll be whisked back to the start of the demon invasion with only your gear, levels, and a few town upgrades intact. It's a cool idea with a tiny roguelite spin on it that I vastly prefer to the boring, dungeon-delving act structure that most ARPGs religiously follow.

But just like the rest of the game, Wolcen's final act is poorly thought out. Upgrading your town is cool in theory, but in reality you only have about two dozen upgrades to choose from, with a good chunk of those being "increase productivity for your city". Early on I thought the idea of a garrison was great since it could gather gold and items for you between missions, but the gold they accrued was pitifully low (2000?! When it costs 15k to build anything?!!) and the gear was worse than the whites I'd stumble across laying by the side of the road. Mission variety—while decent—was severely imbalanced too, with some missions taking over 10 minutes to complete while others (specifically headhunter) could be wrapped up in under 10 seconds. And the weirdest of all is that a bunch of postgame stuff (building structures, bounty maps, hunt trophies) would show up during this act but you can't interface with any of it until the final boss is slain. Like, why give me a bounty map or show me the trophy vendor when I can't access either? Why prevent the player from building the transmutation forge or enneract lab or salt baths until after the hardest battle has concluded? Ultimately the final act felt underbaked and aimless, reaching for greatness but falling short the way a middle schooler would playing college basketball.

Make no mistake: I liked my time with Wolcen. I don't feel comfortable calling it a good game, but it definitely didn't feel like a bad one—it's mostly just janky and imbalanced. Imagine a shiny new office desk with plenty of papers atop it, ready for you to scribble down your zany character builds. But on closer inspection you'll see that the desk's nails were never fully hammered in, the screws only slightly turned, and the panels assembled from disparate types of wood. The desk is sturdy enough that you can write on it for some 20 hours or more, but to spend longer than that—to feverishly draw harder than you have been—is to send the whole thing toppling down. Wolcen is a fine experience, but at the end of the day the classics of old will outlast it—and it won't be a surprise why.

Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon - Thoughts

[contains spoilers]

If you're curious what a western spin on Earth Defense Force looks like, then I would recommend to keep dreaming because Insect Armageddon is a grim portrayal. I may have been lukewarm on EDF 4.1 seven years ago, but that's largely because I didn't expect it to be a simple retread of EDF 2017 in a bigger, more bloated package. Insect Armageddon takes that formula and applies its own tweaks, producing a game that's similar in style but quite different in taste. Frankly: it's a colorless experience, one that swaps out cheesy authenticity for American pulp and jargon, rightfully earning its place as the worst game in the franchise.

Insect Armageddon can be lambasted for a plethora of reasons, including but not limited to: drab artstyle, short campaign, no large swarms, cliffhanger ending, boring music, and only a single setting for the entire game (city). While these shortcomings already condemn the game to mediocrity, what sticks out as the most egregious to me are the lesser details—things easily missed unless you're accustomed to the eccentricities of the series. I don't deny that a newbie could play Insect Armageddon and have some harmless fun with it, but they won't know what they're missing until they play a Sandlot title. And then, like the transition from Dominos to a New York pizzeria, the disparity will be staggering.

My first issue is one that immediately kills any kind of love I could have for the game: the chatter. Camp is ingrained in EDF's DNA just as much as its bald-faced commitment to its delivery. Insect Armageddon however, prefers its camp to be low brow and satirical, poking fun at itself rather than taking the alien invasion seriously. Gone are the worldwide updates, shocking monster reveals, and frantic cries of fleeing civilians—instead you'll mostly have your operator stoically telling you what to do all while your teammates crack terrible jokes. Prepare for comments like: "these bugs smell worse than my mother-in-law", "remember the Alamo!", and "forgot my deodorant this morning! Gonna have to burn this armor when this is done!" All of these are a far cry from the beautiful, inane simplicity of "go home, bugs!", "I agree, guns are the best!" and "do you like death? Then die!"

It's hard to put into words why this precise brand of camp—the self-serious corniness—is integral to the series, but I feel it's as essential as the act of shooting bugs itself. The difference between Sandlot's EDF and Vicious Cycle Software's is akin that between bad 70's sci-fi movies and films made by The Asylum. The former may or may not be aware of the tremendously low quality of its material, but it is committed to presenting it as an earnest and pressing tale. Meanwhile, the latter is made to entertain folks that grew up on such schlock, winking and nodding at the viewer over its own ludicrous script. In a way, you can derive meaning from the former—while the latter is intentionally devoid of it.

Similarly, Insect Armageddon thinks of itself as a big bug attack game, rather than a big bug attack story, prioritizing objectives over events. There's very little reason or urgency beyond what your handler tells you is "mission critical", and even those orders are one step removed from her, coming from a faceless bureaucracy (which the game tries to paint as morally dubious in a poor attempt to raise stakes). Gone is the focus on the human element in this equation: the boots on the ground trying to maintain their sanity and morale in an outlandish horror scenario. This ultimately keeps the player from investing in Insect Armageddon's storyline, as they're not fighting to save the world or their country or even a single town—they're simply doing their assigned mission. In other EDF games you're part of a (hyper) nationalistic, collectivist unit that knows that if it falls, so too will the world; in Insect Armageddon you're an expendable military grunt that will speak only when spoken to, and that doesn't bother you one bit.

Things don't fare better in the gameplay department either, as Insect Armageddon doesn't understand the power trip inherent in EDF's arsenal. In the other games, weapons sound weighty and pack a mighty punch, rocketing bugs off into the stratosphere after a congratulatory explosion of alien blood. Here however, it feels as though you're firing low-velocity needles into your foes, their corpses rarely bouncing into another block (before instantly disappearing). Rocketing hordes will never see their bodies careening off into the far reaches of space, and larger enemies brush off your shots entirely, sometimes spewing a meager pink mist to show you're hitting their weak spot. Compare that to the hectors in EDF 2017, where laying into one with an assault rifle sees them jostling around like a drunk frat boy atop a mechanical bull. From the sound to the animation to the reaction of the aliens, none of the guns in Insect Armageddon are made to be satisfying to use—and that's a death knell for a shooter the way terrible physics are for a platformer.

On the bright side, one of the things Insect Armageddon can laud over its older sibling is its class system. From here on out, EDF includes four distinct classes for players to swap between, and the series is all the better for it. But like with 4.1, progress between classes is not shared, so switching from Wing Diver to Fencer will have you starting from rock bottom progression-wise. Thanks to Insect Armageddon's experience system, it's not that hard to go from one class to another early on, as your health and weapons are meted out by your experience level rather than random drops out in the field. But this too comes with its own downside, as you no longer get to collect piles of goodies between every fight—instead, only health pick-ups dot the battlefield, which are more useless than usual as you'll rarely be returning from whence you came. Occasionally bigger enemies will drop a weapon pick-up, but these too are gated by level requirement—meaning if you pick up a level 4 weapon when you're level 2, then you better get to grinding soldier.

The only other thing Insect Armageddon got right are its new enemies. Although ticks prompt an annoying QTE mash-fest once they latch on, they're a good low HP swarm enemy to stay on the lookout for, and their big bad momma looks properly grotesque. Wasps are nasty aerial units that are good at distracting the player, mantises are mobile titans that are the right level of dangerous, and the daddy long legs is an awesome variation on the walking fortress concept that sadly doesn't see enough use. That's about all there are for new additions (though hectors are fairly different from their 2017 counterparts), and for as short as the game is, I think it did an admirable job of spicing things up... at least for the enemies.

The mission structure on the other hand is exhaustingly repetitive, constantly ferrying you from one ant hill or crashed plane to the next. Occasionally your battles will be broken up with a stationary turret or vehicle section, but it's nevertheless surprising just how unexciting and routine the game feels even with a five hour runtime. Part of the problem is that Insect Armageddon has a misguided preference for long missions, throwing two dozen waves of enemies at the player over the course of a single level, rather than the 3-4 waves you'd see normally. Each bug barrage gradually wears on the player as each wave pops up without reprieve—and given that this all takes place in the same washed-out city, it's not as though you'll feel progress moving from one mission to the next. Plus, the longer mission structure runs antithetical to EDF's giant armament selection, limiting the chances you have to experiment around with different weapon loadouts. By the end of the game, the only missions I remember with some clarity are the giant hector, ditch, and bug queen missions—the first because it's the quickest level to grind experience for, the second because it seemed to go on forever, and the last because I was completely unaware that it was the end of the game.

That's right—there's no mothership finale! It does indeed show up to shoot at you, but all you can do is flee from it, your tail tucked between your legs.

In retrospect, I think I was too harsh on EDF 4.1. I expected more out of the franchise... despite having not known that every game is more or less a remix of the very first Chikyū Bōeigun (including story beats, enemy design, and stage themes). After Insect Armageddon was over, I actually returned to EDF 4.1 for a couple missions just to make sure I wasn't imagining things. And nope—that game is still rock solid, even if it is too big for its own good. Insect Armageddon on the other hand I will probably never revisit. It's not abysmal nor a blatant waste of time, but the problem is that in a series so steeped in unflagging repetition, there's almost no reason to play an inferior iteration. Every other EDF game delivers on the promise of a world uniting to fight back against an alien menace except for this one, and because of that, I don't feel guilty leaving it behind.