Qvadriga is a game about Roman chariot racing - a very good game about chariot racing (not that there's a whole lot of competition for that title). Turn-based at heart, though with a real-time option in case you needed more pressure - I don't - it still captures the excitement and brutality of racing with an elegant set of rules that offer variety without needless complexity. You can play single races, but the campaign mode offers a more satisfying experience - the individual races are fun, but not quite thrilling enough to be worth playing for their own sake more than a few times. This is part of what makes the campaign work though, since conducting a race isn't too draining, you can play several in one session and earn the coin to buy better chariots and horses, or even new charioteers (though they will also get better with practice, it's a slow process, and you'll want multiple good racers so that you can switch them out for a race or two if they get injured). In the context of a campaign, everything becomes rather more high stakes. If you flip your chariot, you haven't just lost a race - you've lost the prize money, the chariot itself will be totalled, and your horse team will need expensive replacements. Then you've got to hope your charioteer can make it alive off the track without being run down. You can pay to recover a 'dead' charioteer, but it's not cheap, and unless you have a strong attachment to them it's probably not worth it. That's about as far as the game goes in terms of mercy, though. While your decisions obviously matter, there's a healthy dose of luck involved every time you hit the track. In one session I had a great run, with opponents crashing and fighting each other constantly, allowing me to get some solid finishes and earn enough to travel to more prestigious circuses and upgrade my gear. You get a decent sum of money for just completing a race without crashing, but if you've taken damage you'll spend a fair bit to fix it. In a different session, nothing went right at all. I swear I wasn't playing differently in any major way, but I was getting horses whipped to death by opponents, skilled charioteers flipping on fairly gentle turns, and generally losing masses of expensive equipment. When you get these runs of bad luck, it leaves a sour taste in your mouth that can make it hard to come back. Of course you expect the occasional disaster, but like buses you can go a while without seeing one before several turn up in a row. With no league system, there's no incentive to push on after bad things happen, hoping to recover before the end of the season - you might as well go back to grinding low level races in quiet towns to rebuild your cash reserves instead. Ultimately this is where I think Qvadriga falls flat: it's fun when things are challenging or going well, but even in the campaign each races stands too much alone, which makes unlucky (or even deserved) losses very frustrating. You can't console yourself by looking at the bigger picture, since the only bigger picture is upgrading your stuff and earning money. Every time you lose, at best you break even and cover your losses, at worst you put yourself back several races worth of play time. It's not like X-Com, where even failed or costly missions will generally help your team level up or allow you to recover some valuable alien tech - it's just pure failure. Which is a shame, because I really like chariot racing otherwise.
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21/12/2019 12:21:23 am
I am a man of culture, which is why I love these robots that you have here. I think that people do not even know how amazing they can be. I understand that people do not love the idea of robots, and in my opinion, that is a backwards way of thinking. I am of the opinion that people need to go and try it out first. I will do my best to try and it explain in to you in future blogs.
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What's All this then?I like making and writing about PC games - mostly strategy games. Expect after action reports, thoughts about design and gameplay, and maybe even a few prototypes. Archives
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