I’ve encountered a bit of a new genre, kinda. If I had to put the entire genre in a nutshell, I suppose I’d call it the “Home Alone” genre.
You know that there are bad folks coming. You know that, just by yourself, you won’t be able to handle them. HOWEVER. You know that you have all the time in the world to set up traps and when the bad folks come, *WHAM*. Right in the mush.
The first one of these games I encountered was Orcs Must Die! (note the exclamation point). The basic idea there was that you were the last of the anti-orc mages who was left to guard the gates. You have a handful of traps at the beginning (spikes coming out of the floor, arrows coming out of the walls, pendulum maces from the ceiling…) and, as you fight off more and more gates more and more successfully, you unlock traps and gain skulls with which you can unlock even *MORE* traps.
The hordes get bigger and bigger and more and more complicated as the game progresses which means that you have to figure out how to best set up traps and how to best run around to fill in the gaps when the traps are recharging, or when fliers are coming in and you’ve spent the last 10 minutes putting floor traps down.
Orcs Must Die 2! picked up where the first left off and is one of those great sequels that tells you that the first one was just a (really, really awesome) tutorial to play the *REAL* game.
Well, I’ve just found another game to add to that: Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves. This one takes a bit of a different tack.
In the Orcs Must Dies, you’re running around with your crossbow and sword and setting traps on the fly (as you kill orcs, you get money to set even more traps!). In Sang-Froid? You spend the day setting your traps and, come the night, you’re stuck with what you did during the day (and you’re limited with both money and time for those). So if you set up a crappy trap? You’ve got to live with it. Thankfully, you have your trusty axe and your trusty frontloader… but these are werewolves we’re talking about here. Those won’t do anywhere near as much good as you’d like.
Another difference is that in the Orc games, you’re sent 100 Orcs and you’re vaguely disappointed that they didn’t send 200 by the time you’ve got all of your traps set up juuuuuust right. In Sang-Froid, you’re sent 4 werewolves and you’re wondering how you’re going to survive the night because you can only set up so many traps… and you’ll be wishing you set up different ones. So Sang-Froid is pretty heavy on strategy and tactics and very unforgiving for people who don’t do their homework while Orcs is pretty forgiving… except, of course, when it’s not.
All in all, if you like the idea of setting traps for the coming hordes, you should definitely be exploring either the Orcs games (for the action lovers out there who like a bit of strategy) or Sang-Froid (for the strategy lovers out there who like a bit of action).
So that’s my recommendation for you this week.
isn’t this stuff lumped in with the “tower defense” genre?
It feels different from, say, Plants vs. Zombies (perhaps the quintessential tower defense game). When the expectation is that your avatar is going to be running around killing things that slip through the cracks, it seems like a different game.
But, yeah, I suppose.
I stand by it feeling different, though.
I was thinking of it as a FP Tower Defense game, a similar appendage to the Tower Defense genre the way Natural Selection is an FP RTS game.
I think it’s Dungeon Defenders that also sorta fits in the genre, a lot of my friends play that but I’ve never gotten it.
i don’t play these types of games so i was asking more out of ignorance than certainty.
Though Plants vs. Zombies is based on the tower defense formula, it struck me as being heavy modification of the formula. It might be the most well known, but not necessarily the best example.
What’s the best example?
I am not sure. I have only played a handful, so I might even be mistaken. However, most of the ones I played had winding paths, and the towers tended to have firing arcs. PvZ is a fun game, so I am not disparaging it, but it seems to be a greatly simplified variation of the formula.
Gemcraft is the urexample.
I do enjoy tower defense games and I like how this also has an aspect of you having a character that fights as well. Can you improve your guy as well?
In Sang-Froid, you can improve both your equipment and your stats.
In the Orcs, you pretty much just improve your equipment.
What type of perspective does Sangfroid have? Is it 1st person?
There are gameplay videos on the Steam Store page for Sang-Froid: http://store.steampowered.com/app/227220/?snr=1_7_15__13
The camera hovers about a dozen “feet” behind your character’s shoulders.
Ah, then I’ll able to play it.
I hate first person shooters too.
My problem is I get some kind of anxiety attack when I try to move around in first person, especially if I have to hurry or there is any stress (like being shot at). Aiming is OK, if I don’t have to move much. Even searching shelves in an Elder Scrolls game is OK, but I have to be able to switch to 3rd person or I can’t cope.
Nu, James, you should play Thief. It is a good game for training you out of panicking.
I’ve been trying to train myself with Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas, because if it gets to much I can switch back. It’s slow going though.