So I load the game up and it is quite clearly an online game - there's all sorts of pop-up tutorial windows, a brief tutorial playing a final match against Germany and then.. I was plopped into the "what do you want to do" where all the options were to play online.
So, I did some of the tutorials - and wow, the game has more going on than I thought and it really plays up the super powers and stuff. The rookie tutorial has like 25 different steps and I only did 10 before going..ugh. I 'm not sure I can remember all this stuff! So, I try to play online. It's like 5 minutes with no matchup so I bail.
This is not looking good.
I've done all the offense tutorials (not the defense or special stuff - all this in the rookie section), but I decide to try a free-play match.
I can steal the ball - good.
I can pass the ball around - also good.
I'm not able to strike on goal very well - bad.
And...I just can't seem to catch the defenders.
I'm losing 2-0 to Italy and I'm gettin ready to bail.
I exit to the main menu - there's nothing but "press x"...so I do some more tutorials.
Then I bail to the menu feeling very disappointed that there isnt some sort of story or campaign mode. The game is based on the anime after all! And all the interstitial loading screens feature the characters...so, what's up?
And, somehow I end up on a different main menu - and this one DOES have links to a campaign (consisting of two episodes with a 3rd as DLC) so I start playing that. And it's SO MUCH BETTER. My limited skills let me make some progress and I'm even having a little fun! I thought this was going straight to the shelf, but I think I might finish the first episode just to see.
Played for another few hours - and I think I spent most of my time just wandering around trying to understand how to make progress in the game. It felt like I was doing a bunch of backtracking and "busywork" I wasn't too excited about, but perhaps there's more to the experience. I take that back - I'm sure there's more to the experience (the big boss battle before I left for the island kind of demonstrates that?) - but, I'm not currently terribly excited to continue to play the game "just in case". It really is a full-feature RPG experience and I don't have the time to want to dive in.
It's strange - when leaving for the island I was excited about the promise of wild lands and mystery and adventure...and on getting there things just felt too..."civilized"? Less exploring and more like going to the next city/outpost. This isn't about the art or anything like that - it definitely looks "on the frontier" - but the wild mystery is what I'm missing - there's known factions, and politics, and intrigue, and stuff like that...but not as much mysterious unknowns? So that's been a bit of a disappointment in that sense. However, for the price I paid for the game - I had fun, so all's good!
I really enjoyed Advance Wars back in the day so I was intrigued when this game was described as a spiritual successor (of sorts? it's a fantasy-themed game, so different in that sense at least). It really is similar but, for now, the differences are getting in the way of my "properly" enjoying the game. For example, taking over buildings works differently here - in Advance Wars you unit's health is subtracted from the health of the building (20) and that's how long it will take you to capture. It doesn't work like that in Wargroove. Here, you can also heal by reducing strength from a building - which is also different from Advance Wars.
There's lots of other little things like that. So, the experience has been less than optimal so far but it's mostly because (1) new units are handed out too slowly for my taste and (2) I've been playing the game as if it was a clone of Advance Wars - and it's close but not quite the same so sometimes I do things poorly with a unit because I think I know how it works, but I'm wrong. Stuff like that.
Overall though - I am interested in playing some more, just to see how much more interesting it gets once I have new units out and so on.
I was looking for a "mindless" shooter to pass the time - and I thought, ooh, this should fit the bill! And it does, but it also did not.
I hadn't realized that this is a two-player game! (the 2nd player is an AI if you're not playing online or with other people) It's got all the crazy that the Wolfenstein games now have - the WWII was lost to the nazis and so on...and here you play as "Duke Nukem" (BJ Blaskowicz?)'s daughters - or something like that. And they're both all gung-ho and trigger happy like their dad. There's some sort of resistance, they get involved, it was all a bit confusing but they end up in Paris and there's shooting, and - for the level I played - a giant zeppelin.
I was having fun - but the game's difficulty curve was surprisingly uneven - it was all easy peasy fun and then - I died 10 times - and then it was easy peasy fun again, and then died a bunch of times. I'm not quite sure what it is - either my tactical approach is bad (but works with weak enemies when it shouldn't) or certain enemies are just an order of magnitude harder to deal with - or, there's some thing I should be doing but I'm not (e.g. use a weapon a certain way, etc.).
The game also has a whole perk economy and weapon upgrade econonomy that triggers more perks and stuff...and it all felt a bit TOO much data for what I was looking for - just shoot stuff and have fun.
Maybe I'm just a bit annoyed because I was required to sign up for an online account I don't want or need? The longer I think about it the more this feels like a "dark pattern". The back of the box does say that a Bethesda account is necessary to access certain features - but my recollection is that you can't play the game at all without access. So, perhaps all you can see/do is look at stuff in the menus?
