Operation Darkness is a turn-based strategy game with a supernaturally-infused WWII setting. You control a squad who are tasked with taking out Axis troops, living and undead. Basic movement orders are issued on a grid and squad members can open fire provided they are within range of the enemy. Weapons in the demo included bayonnets, hand grenades, and bazookas, which opens up strategy options even before you consider the game’s magic system. Deeper commands, like setting up zones of cover fire, also bolster the game’s tactical side. Sadly, nothing bolsters the game’s must-have side.

When a demo ends, I should be left with the feeling that I’d pay $60 on the spot to continue the gaming experience. That didn’t happen here. In Operation Darkness you issue orders from a third-person perspective so you can see a bit beyond what the squad members can see, but surveying the battlefield means fighting the camera. Let me be clear on this: the camera flails around like a drunken sailor.

Also, Operation Darkness looks more like Operation Washed Out. I’ve come to expect crisp, detailed graphics in my next-gen games. Here I saw generic buildings, muted colors, and generally uninspired effects. In short, there’s nothing in this demo that warrants the game’s $60 price point and I doubt Atlus can tighten this up by the June 24, 2008 release date.

Oh yeah, I spelled dovetail. Suck it, bitches.

Which is to say I went into Bookworm Adventures with high hopes, so it stands to reason they were, not unrealistic, say unrealized. The game delivers, but the pizza’s only lukewarm, there’s not enough pineapple, and a slice is missing.Need more places to pillage… er, visit.

Before we get too far into this, let me be upfront and say I’ve only played the one-hour demo. It adequately teases the game and exposes you to the mechanics behind it, but in an hour I was already three quarters of the way through the first adventure. I know the full version comes with two other adventures, but at 30 bucks for that full version it breaks down to 10 dollars an hour, which seems a little steep for my entertainment. For that price I could hire two high-school kids to carry me around on a palanquin. All right, two strong high-school kids.

This is what we call overkill.Don’t mistake me; the game is a lot of fun. It’s based on a simplified boggle idea that makes it easy to build words, but compounds that with enemies attacking your health, encouraging you to get on with it and spell defenestration already. As you progress you’ll do all the time honored RPG things: level up, fight bosses, and acquire items, like the bow of Zyx, which boosts damage from words you spell that include x, y or z. And there seems to be plenty of other cool loot to collect.

Few things feel as good as defeating Circe by calling her ‘dreamy’.The creatures are mostly mythological and there is usually “humorous” commentary accompanying each of them. The graphics are fine if webgamey. Battles stay fresh and interesting with twists like the status effects some monsters inflict on tiles (where you can’t use them, or they do no damage). There really is nothing to dislike, except that it seems like it will all be over so soon.

Ivalice, a world we last visited in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, the excellent (if overlong) Gameboy Advance game, is at war. If we’ve learned anything from recent history it’s that war is messy. The Judges, the Viera, the Bangaa, and of course the clever and cuddly Moogles all remain from the Ivalice of old, but gone are the precision orchestrated strikes against enemies arrayed as upon a chessboard of battle. Examined through the lens of modern guerilla warfare, FFXII’s Gambit system of auto-battling character AI and the loose, real-time brawling of the Vagrant Story-inspired combat style makes sense. Which is not to say it’s great fun to play.

Who’s a cute moogle? Yes you are, yes you are.Let’s not kid ourselves here, if you’re a FF diehard, you’re going to buy this game–hell, I’ll probably get it for Christmas–but just know that unless you adjust your expectations you’re almost guaranteed to end up disappointed. The graphics are lovely, if unremarkably so, and the plot looks to be the typical labyrinthine soap opera of plucky heroes, overwhelming odds and unwieldy romantic dialog. In other words, the same old Fantasy. The hotly debated issue in every new installment, the only thing that seems to matter, is the fightin’: active versus passive, real-time versus turn-based, random encounters versus pre-arranged rendezvous. Which will it be?

The worry is justifiable. Combat is the central mechanic behind every Final Fantasy game, the thing you spend the most time doing in game, and FFXII’s feels unpolished and ill-conceived. The environments they’ve created don’t even feel set up to take advantage of the more fluid combat they’re attempting. It’s as if they tried to approach Zelda’s gripping first-person sword-in-your hand combat from the other direction. They’ve got the in-your-face clash of steel and sting of sorcery feel, but you might as well be a butterfly flapping your wings to cast Bolt3 for all the sense of control it feels like you have over the characters’ actions.

Today on Bungee Jumping Off a Dinosaur…Games that do give us a large measure of control over our wins and losses tend to elicit a stronger emotional response from us, both when we win and when we lose, because everything rides on us. FFXII’s combat (both in Wait and Active mode) wrests that control from our eager hands and makes the victories and losses primarily the characters’ doing. Yes, you programmed that character’s AI, but there are so many levels of abstraction between you and that swinging sword that paradoxically, even though combat constantly threatens to teeter into a sloppy punch-up more akin to a bar fight than a planned attack, you end up feeling less engaged, not more, less like an active participant in that scuffle and more like some tool safely outside the bar, full of bravado and empty words of encouragement.

* As an internet nerd I’m allowed to say this. :-p

Recording supernatural activity in the nave of a church.Like the Dark Fall games, The Lost Crown combines Victorian ghost lore with high tech ghosthunting equipment, but Lost Crown ups the ante, promising the “most realistic ghosthunting gaming experience to date.” Sure it sounds like hype, but Boakes brings real-life ghosthunting skills to the table.

Learn of past hauntings and horrors.
When Boakes isn’t working on games (including writing, filming, sound design, and voice work), he’s a member of This Haunted Land, a group of UK ghosthunters. So you can trust the gadgets in The Lost Crown to be authentic and accurately portrayed.

Set in present day Cornwall (see also: Barrow Hill), players will follow Nigel Danvers on a ghosthunt in a creepy seaside town. Promising 30+ hours of thrills and chills, with day and night effects and a host of characters, The Lost Crown is Boakes’ and developer Darkling Room’s most ambitious effort to date.

The gravedigger offers plenty of information regarding the old ways.Still a month away, we aren’t sure what Boakes and company have in store for us (except for “frightful feathered fiends”), but we’re expecting strong puzzles, a solid (and scary) story, and sound and visuals that’ll leave us unnerved long after we’re done playing.

Take that, Peacekeeper!Those remaining fall into two camps: the Tribulation Force–new Christians who are seeking to save people and the Global Community Peacekeepers–followers of the AntiChrist operating out of a remodeled UN. The two camps engage in physical warfare, but also in spiritual warfare which is the only interesting aspect to the demo–and I am referring to the demo, not a preview copy (since I haven’t been able to establish contact with LBG and I’m not on the mailing list to get one of the million copies they are sending out to churches across the US).

Recruiting a Friend.The demo (beta demo, actually–why do people keep hiding behind the “beta” label?) weighs in at a petite 190 MB, but has three tutorial levels and four story missions. My first impression was that LBG had seriously overestimated the number of devout Christians in the Big Apple. The streets are deserted in the first mission, except for bands of evil musicians who can lower Spirit Points with their guitars. Jeff, the main character must skirt around them on his way to find his friend Brad. If he gets too close to their music, his spirit will drop below 60 and he’ll fall to the dark side.

With spiritual warfare, Eternal Forces brings something interesting to the table. It’s not uncommon to see morale breaks in RTS games, but without constant bolstering, your units’ spirits fade until they become neutral and walk away. Of course slamming the Pray button is the easiest way to bump up spirit points, but musicians, praisers, and evangelists have powerful area of effect… well… I guess spells isn’t the right word. And to get them, you’ll need to recruit lots of men.

I hope women like medicine, because that’s the only career path open to them. In the tutorial I was told to “select a male Friend” to become a Builder. Later on male Friends must be selected to train soldiers, musicians, and any religious unit, but they can also join the ladies and become medics. Hopefully the full version corrects this crap, but the error message that pops up when I tried to break the gender barrier makes me doubtful.

Brother Mumbo’s life story.Should I even mention that all the characters I saw were white, even a character named Brother Mumbo who is described as being the son of a tribal ruler? The regular inhabitants of NYC show some variety, but recruiting them into Friends turns them into Ned Flanders clones. Actually, it’s hard to differentiate between most units visually because they look like a group of people on their way to the Gap.

On our way to the subway.Props to the city visuals. The game looks good whether zoomed out to the half a block overhead view or zoomed in to a store front. Real stores are depicted: my Tribulation Force took over an AMC Theatre and set up turrets in front of a Washington Mutual. While the full game will feature ads fed from an ad server (which is another layer of controversy in the onion that is this game), the demo ads I saw were Ad Council PSAs and who can say no to McGruff the Crime Dog?

As far as actual gameplay, it’s just not here. Eternal Forces isn’t spreading the word, it’s preaching to the choir. Players of this game will more likely borrow a copy from their church than spring for LBG’s misguided $49.99 price point. Sure it’s just a demo, but the controls are wonky. Clicking on a unit requires hitting the right pixel, double clicking to select all of a particular unit type is hit or miss, and giving movement orders means relying on shoddy pathfinding.

Units have color bars over their heads: green for friendly, gray for neutral, and red for enemy. The color bar would be more useful if it referred to their Spirit or Health levels. Likewise, buildings have floating labels overhead, but the isometric distortion is deceiving, making building selection a chore. Unit grouping is possible, but the HUD doesn’t provide group information, just info about one of its members.

Hey, I am into computers!I have no doubt that there is an audience for this game, but it lacks the crossover appeal they anticipate on their website. Each character has a life story, which reads like a Chick Tract-lite. Missions end with the Tribulation Force finding a clue to the Rapture–a splash page with Biblical doctrine featuring a Christian pop song you can buy with a click and links to Don’t Be Left Behind.com. Setting the theology and the circumscription of roles available to women aside, Eternal Forces is a disappointing RTS entry. Left Behind Games should have farmed this one out, God knows they have enough money (He does, really). Their vision page mentions, “To date, not one high-quality video game has been marketed to this… audience.” I have to agree.

The newly terraformed Ka’Trulmo is ready to do its part for the Empire.Sword of the Stars is a 4X game, (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate), which is the buzzword for strategy games with an epic scope. The storyline finds us humans in the aftermath of first contact with an unknown alien race that ended less than amicably. As the newest player in an ongoing (and turn-based) space race, your goal is to develop new technologies to colonize and terraform planets while defending them from unfriendly races like the militaresque Tarkas. You’re also given the opportunity to form alliances with the less hostile races like the Liir, which look like evolved cephalopod/dolphin creatures.

A 360° Research Wheel lets you compare technology paths at a glance.I played a custom game and jumped right in without having too much trouble figuring things out. I was immediately given access to a whole slew of tools, with the 3D technology tree really standing out from the genre-standard static ones. I was able to zoom out to a general view of all the different techs or zoom in to get a detailed explanation of the individual ones. Kerberos implemented a customizable ship builder, so it shouldn’t be hard to end up with a ship that really expresses your vision of what space conquest should be. Considering the complexity of the ship design feature, the terraforming and management of your planets are accomplished through the use of a relatively simple slider bar interface.

We’re getting creamed, but it looks gorgeous!The least appealing part of Sword of the Stars is the real-time combat system. Kerberos does a good job of creating 3D combat environments that are eye-friendly, but without a manual (sure to be found with the full release), I found myself flailing around until I was eventually blown up. I came to rely on the auto battle feature, a nice option as well as a time saver for those of us who are more interested in the exploration and resource management aspects. The preview version also lacked a save option in the custom game– unless that changes, this won’t be the kind of game that you can just sit down and play for a few minutes before work.

Overall the game looks good and should stand out to the established 4X crowd. For those new to the genre, expect a steep learning curve with an enjoyable game on the other side.