A diamond in the rough
I sometimes wondered whether there was much point in RTS games on Xbox Live. Only a few have been made well. Well, 2 actually and I think we may have a third on our hands. The two that work well for me are Tom Clancy’s Endwar and Halo Wars. Both titles have been made with consoles in mind and fortunately Protege Productions have also thought about console gamers in this RTS title. Sometimes in RTS games you feel like god, or you feel a little subtracted from the overall action, mainly because you are giving orders around. Well originally RTS games did not work like that and for some stupid fucking reason everyone seems to think that RTS games started with Command & Conquer, bullshit. Anyway, i won’t go into a fullscale rant about that, mainly because i think C&C games are drastically overrated and that they suck harder than Michael Barrymoore on poppers when it comes to it on consoles.
So, what is different here? Well firstly, you are actually a part of the action. You man a helicopter that looks like it’s come straight out of the movie Avatar. As you progress within the story mode you can indeed fly some more interesting ships that offer you better speed and also aerobatics. What does this all mean? Well you’ll actually be doing the shooting and missile launching yourself, whilst you can buy units to follow a set path to the enemies base. It’s refreshing that you don’t control the NPC’s that are on your team and that’s good because they are pretty intelligent themselves at shooting shit up. When it comes to strategical elements you really need to cover deployment. You can buy tanks, surface to air missle launchers, normal troops but the fourth unit is deceptors. Deceptors are the EndGame. You need to protect these with your life, as they are the holy grail to winning a battle. If you can manage to get one of your deceptors into the enemy base, it will knock out the shields around the base and open it up for fire and that’s it, the game is up.
Homing missles, salvation!
Story mode really is pretty pointless, its very empty and the only real noticable effects of going from one level to the next is that you’ll have new vehicles to buy or special weapons to rotate between. Special weapons then are pretty useful, you can have anything from being able to parachute your infantry, straight to homing missles or mach boosts. As you fly your helicopter you’ll need to be careful about your fuel and ammunition levels, these will run out. So flying back to your base at times is essential. You can thankfully buy extra lives with credits in this game, they are pretty costly but definately worthwhile as your helicopter is not only leathal for combat, it’s also your eyes in the sky to see how well your machines are doing on the ground. It’s funny, this game is by an indie publisher and yet it pisses all over Hudson’s Military Madness: Nectaris that we reviewed last month.
Perhaps the most enjoyable part about Armor Valley is that you can bypass the rather pointless campaign mode and jump into quickplay. Fortunately the developer has been very coy in allowing you to access all the level maps from the off, which means none of this unlock-level-in-campaign-mode bullshit. So yes, thankyou Protege because that little masterstroke alone just bought you an extra staff in our final score. The maps really range from various landscapes, from nuclear to ice, straight through to desert landscapes that look dryer than Margraet Beckett’s crusty mot. Having access to all these levels will certainly take away the feeling of frustration which can sometimes reside when you have helicopter battles against the A.I. This is one area the game could of had a little more attention, manual targetting of missiles is so annoying on Level 2 that sometimes you feel like deleting the game off your system, thankfully Level 3 onwards introduces homing missiles and that frustration is gone. It’s a great feeling, similar to taking the stress edge off by having a crafty wank in the office toilets. My other gripe with the game is the bombing system, you can have a top-down camera in this game to aim bombs at turrents, don’t bother. In some maps you’ll struggle to find what terrain is flat and what is hundreds of feet in the air.
Just to talk briefly about the sound, the soundtrack is really professional. It sounds rather epic in scale. However, the sound effects in the game in most cases are woeful, especially when your helicopter crashes into the ground, it’s particularly awful that soundbyte. Either way it once again shows that the production quality needed some extra polish which if given a bigger budget no doubt would of succeeded.
Split screen support (hardly anyone does anymore)
The big cau de date that the developers had up their sleeves was multiplayer. It’s split screen, it plays excellently and there is no frame rate slow down. I’ve seen a few reviewers bitch and moan about how there is no Xbox Live support here, but unlike the other reviewers, I actually have friends so that’s not an issue. Adding multiplayer has added longevity to a title that already would have given you your 400 Microsoft Points worth. On that note let’s talk about the price. 400 Microsoft Points is perhaps a steep price to pay for an indie game and I must state that graphically you are definately not getting the polish you would expect from a game sitting on Xbox Live Arcade so fortunately the gameplay does make up for that. The game does look a tad hideous in places but nice in others. I’d love to see this title totally refined with a bigger budget because I would love to play a sequel and immerse myself in proper decent HD visuals. That last sentence alone is a testament to the developers themselves because i’m not a massive lover of RTS games, but this title had me in all sorts of emotions. At one point i thought the game was shit, I then discovered how to beat the opponents on level 2 and then i found that quickplay offered me salvation if i was to get stuck in story mode. So if your looking to get into RTS games, or are a seasoned RTS player, I would recommend this game, even at the 400 Microsoft Points. Sure it has its niggles and annoyances but you are going to get your moneys worth here and it’s a very entertaining multiplayer experience for those that have a social circle off the inter-webs. Highly recommended.
