And if they're really attempting a mobile port of this it's highly unrealistic to expect players to "look up things in a manual" when playing. Both the game and UI require you to have a working knowledge of all the things in the game but it's tedious to be expected to leave the game to pursue a PDF manual when the info could have been included in the game itself. Even the play by Email multiplayer, through a proxy login account no less, is a throwback to games in the 90's when direct host turn based play is considered standard on strategy games these days. Just saying that it may have been better to have this game pay homage to the original game than to have cloned it outright with few additions. But I feel that there was a huge missed opportunity where they could have used BARiS as their starting inspiration and made a completely new game with better than the 21 year old game mechanics that are presented in this game currently with it's fairly obtuse UI that one has to muddle through. For those who may have wanted BARiS updated with better graphics and OS support for 2014, this is it and it's extremely well done for what it is. Personally I'm torn over whether I consider this a good game or just money grabbing garbage at the $30 price point, especially when I factor in the lack of features in this game that are considered pretty standard. The only panacea will be in discovering that you can reload the last autosave before a mission, and you'll quickly find out why there's an auto-resolve on the mission attempt screen. But let's go back to the fails which you'll have plenty of and be penalized severely for. The original game included NASA footage for this, the new version uses crisper graphics which are static animated and are a bit of a letdown and quickly become repetitive after the second viewing. Once a mission is launched the game is totally hands off and you await a resounding success or an epic fail while watching cut-scenes. I mean that's it in your choices, it's pretty cut and dry. And the game itself just consists of people management and training, choosing tech to research that you increase the reliability of, then choosing and launching missions. And once you discover the optimal path then that's pretty much the game. But once you figure out the mechanics hidden behind an obtuse and unintuitive UI, that's lacking even basic mouseover tooltips, the rest of the game becomes just optimizing a path from the start to the win goal. The biggest part of the difficulty is going to come from understanding the mechanics of the game which nothing in the game lends to help you with, there's no tutorial for instance. As there is no real deadline, you play until you win or the game tells you the AI won, but let's be honest, there's no real AI player here just random events moving the AI goals forward via headline blurbs at each turn screen. Having played a fair bit of BARiS back in the day I was able to jump into this game and obtain moon landing wins on my first play through of both the USA and RUSSIA. So enter in a small indie developer with aspirations of bringing this game to the present, it went Early Access on Steam last year, and looking at the final release results it seems the only feedback they got were from die-hard fans of the original which didn't improve much of anything. The one thing everyone can agree on is after 21 years it hasn't aged well. For it's time BARIS was one of those games you either painstakingly took the time to learn and loved, or you got frustrated with it and hated it for the unforgiving game mechanics. BARIS now falls under abandonware status, with Buzz Aldrin's name removed, and can still be found on the internet and is free to play if you can get it working through DosBox or similar. The original of which was based on an older board game from times past. This game is an updated version of the 1993 turn-based strategy/management PC game Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space which players generally refer This game is an updated version of the 1993 turn-based strategy/management PC game Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space which players generally refer to BARIS.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |