[Stronghold 2 Crack Gamecopyworld Mad
Betty Neyhart
Not the usual intro line to a squad-level real-time game, but Abomination is no usual game. That's obvious from the striking intro movie sequence, powerful not only in its text, imagery and sound, but also in its demands for CD power - my humble eight-speed CD barfed on it forcing me to install the video to hard disk. And some video it is; I've never seen or heard anything quite like it. The clip does an excellent job of conveying the fact that some weird unknown forces are at work in some kind of "Millennium prophecy" story... a virulent plague is sweeping across America, causing outbreaks of vile organic lifeforms and inflicting mutations in the population at large. A cult named the Faithful are blamed for the plague, and something very sinister lies behind them... the Brood... but is it an alien attack or a government conspiracy?
Your task is to lead the Project Nemesis agents in the fight to find the cause of the plague and to attempt to reverse its effects. But your team of agents is no ordinary one - each member is genetically engineered in some way... Savage has extraordinary strength, Pyro can burn enemies at a distance, Detonate can turn objects into explosives, Ninja can become invisible, Creep can take on the form of others, Doc can heal, Viper can generate protective shields and Steel has strengthened fire-resistent skin. Not quite what Agents of Justice promised before Microprose cancelled it, but the premise makes an intriguing filler for the much-craved Super Hero game that never was. A dash of Marvel comic book, a hint of X-Com, yet distinct enough to feel original in its own right.
In the first phases of the game you embark on missions against the Faithful and the Brood, and here your "superhero" agents can develop their skills via battle experience. To back up your core team of eight there's a pool of "expendable" agents; these too have skills, but mere mortal ones such as weapon accuracy and specialisation, health, reactions and stealth. Success in missions lets you spend experience points developing your team as you see fit. You can concentrate on developing the special agents, but with the tough missions ahead you need some well-trained regular troops as backup for when injuries occur. Spreading the experience around is probably the wisest strategy. The game is split into a number of Acts or phases; in each your mission types and maps are generated to be in keeping with the game situation. Your aim is to keep the enemy strength down (initially by restricting the number of strongholds they build on the map), while finding clues to the cause of the plague. This includes capturing live Brood specimens, for example, a task made tricky by the fact the only way to do this is by using stun grenades.
Each mission is generated "randomly" so that on each play you get different challenges. In practice the mission objectives, while also random (blow up X, rescue Y, kill Z), do blur into much of a muchness; to blow something up you have to kill most of the enemies in the area anyway. Mission maps are perhaps five or six screens wide by four or five screens high, and you can take up to four agents on most missions (solo assassination missions being one exception). You arrive in-mission via your combat jeep, and you have to fend for yourself from there. The style of play is rather more Syndicate than X-Com, though Hothouse designer Steve Goss worked on the second and third X-Com games. The action can be fast and very furious, with gunfire and mayhem sprayed all around, but you can pause the game to issue orders at any point. The original design (and the final manual) had a timer on the pause - shades of Space Hulk - but the final code shipped with unlimited pause ability, which I think is the right choice.
The strategic wrapper in Abomination lacks the depth of that in the X-Com games. There's no significance to the geography of the city that you begin the game in, nor any element of base design. Your facilities are merely token buildings to be defended, and a place in which to store items recovered from missions. However, you have to take on the missions thrown at you within a time limit, or face the enemy growing in strength and establishing more strongholds on the map. Choosing how to arm and equip your men (and women) for each mission is important; you can use stock weaponry such as Browning pistols, Uzis, shotguns, M4 or SA80 rifles, sniper rifles, medium machine guns, flamethrowers and M72 rocket launchers, but the more powerful an item is, the rarer it is in the game. The sniper rifle is an excellent weapon for low-risk elimination of enemies, but you need to save the precious ammo for key missions. Likewise grenades and rocket launchers. Ancillary equipment such as proximity mines and mediquik packs are also in short supply but very useful.
It's thus a shame the game makes such a poor fist of allowing you to manage your stock of equipment. First off, you have to hunt through the mission map for places where your cursor turns to a search icon so you can look for items. And the search itself takes a few seconds. You soon learn where to look, but searching in 30-40 places each and every mission to find the few mediquik packs in amongst the run-of-the-mill weapons is tedious. Moreso when you can't select which equipment to ship back to base at mission end, and you end up having to sift through each type of item one by one - with an excessive number of mouse clicks - deciding how many of each to store and how many to chuck (as space is limited). Worse still, if you don't do that sifting, once your three equipment dumps are full any new stuff you find is simply chucked away.
The searching aspect of the game is a painful chore; while finding some equipment in battle is OK, having to ferret through mail boxes to find M72's is both surreal and deadly dull. It's also weird that you only have to find the equipment to have it auto-recovered at mission end; you get to keep it even if you didn't pick it up and some group of monsters were stood over it when you left the map. A better way to manage equipment would have been through cash for missions and buying new equipment, as per JA 2. You can retrieve some kit from your "offmap" HQ, and doing so generates a special "equipment recovery" mission, but as things stand, you have to search for kit, and, rather like the required resource gathering in every Homeworld mission, it's a bore.
The curious thing is that despite the tedious item-hunting, the game keeps sucking me back for one more mission. I think the main reason for this is the very strong game atmosphere - the setting is rather original, the plot is one you want to follow to see what happens, and the introduction of new enemies as the game progresses adds an element of surprise. The first time I was shot at with a "plasma" weapon I was stunned (literally - your agents get knocked to the ground by blasts), as I was the first time I ran into one of the huge Brood creatures. The graphics are good, though not great. Fixed at 640x480 in software mode only they're comparable to JA 2. It's the scenery that makes the difference; bubbling red viral lifeforms litter the streets and buildings. Battered cars, trucks and corpses are strewn all around. The odd limitation, after X-Com, is that you can't enter buildings; you can only move around them, and because the map view doesn't rotate you rely on the "ghost" outline of characters to see them when obscured. It's also impossible to move to a position that is obscured, as the "goto" cursor will take you to the obscuring location - a rooftop for example. After a while, you learn to adjust.
Controlling your squad of four agents is relatively easy. If your men have motion scanners equipped you have the option of opening their motion scanner minimap at the top of the screen. If you split your squad across the map, rather than grouping agents together, you'll need to keep all four minimaps open to track enemies, which creates something of an "Aliens" feel to the display. It'd be nice to have the option of lining the "radars" up down the side of the screen, as they can get in the way sometimes - and turning them off is inviting disaster. The catch here is that all enemies on the minimap are shown as red dots, whether in line-of-sight or not (and for reasons which become apparent, you need to watch the white "neutral" dots too). So there's no element of surprise in running around a corner and spotting a new unseen enemy. You can also see enemies on screen that your agents can't see, but you can't scroll the map view outside of the minimap "radar" range. The result is that missions are less tense than X-Com, but you don't have such a problem tracking down that one last baddie (and you can often leave the map and get a successful result without killing all the enemies - hit and run can pay off).
Your characters can be ordered to move around the map by the conventional click-to-move method. The right-click pop-up orders menu offers some useful options. You can choose your stance (standing, kneeling, prone), your aggression (aggressive, cautious, only act on direct orders), your firing orders (fire at will, hold fire, fire when fired on), your engagement range, and whether to hold position or let the AI move your men. Sadly, the AI makes a complete hash of that movement, for example running your agents right past enemies to get into cover(!), so "hold position" is the way to go. Changing the default orders to "kneel" and "cautious" is also rather wise. Unfortunately you have to do this at the start of each mission; your personal choice of default orders doesn't get remembered. The computer is also very dumb at choosing a facing for your troops when they get to where you're moving them to - you'll move behind a row of sandbags, have enemy on the far side, and the computer will face your men back towards you. This would have been an ideal use for the Myth-style gesture-click. Then again, it's sometimes hard to tell if the facing makes any difference anyway...