When not volunteering for the Somali Pirates' Union or attending live tapings of Glenn Beck, guest contributer Dan Thompson can be found teaching in the South Bronx. In moments free from agitating for pirate rights or being corrupted by the youth, Dan dedicates his time to battling his cat, Bishop, and heckling John Constantine's Persona 4 play sessions.
Phenomic’s Battleforge terrified me. Not terrified that this chimeric mix of collectible card game, real-time strategy, and MMO would be bad, oh no. My soul-shaking fear was that it would actually be good. I could already see it happening: my descent into a dark, screen-glare jaundiced, asocial existence, my only activity the furious clicking of virtual cards to unleash winged beasts of burning doom. Like the first time I read about aerosol alcohol’s promise of inebriation through inhalation, I was overtaken by a mixture of horror and wonder. These are three gaming genres I hold dear, and the battles looked great. This hybrid had the potential to cost me my job, friends, and family. I popped in the disc and watched the install bar crawl to the right. Thankfully, none of my fears were realized. Battleforge just doesn’t work.
Its genre blending premise is actually a front; this is just a real-time strategy game and nothing else. Rather than spend time building bases in your campaign and climbing tech-trees, Battleforge lets you put together any combination of units you like based on the virtual cards in your deck. This take on the RTS genre’s staid formula is really just a cosmetic streamlining of old play conventions meant to speed the game up. The problem is that Battleforge is too fast. Losing the more ponderous pace of a traditional real-time strategy game (like building bases and slowly accumulating resources) reduces the actual strategy. I felt like I was throwing units at the enemy just to keep up with the game. The problematic pace is compounded by an awkward interface for grouping units. Assigning groups and calling units to the front of the battlefield is straightforward, but the game automatically has those selected units join the closest group. Provided you were building a force at a base before moving out as in genre mainstays like Starcraft or Command & Conquer, it would work quite well. But since new units are summoned anywhere on the map, you end up with giant, unwieldy mobs instead of a tight, strategically arrayed army. With no time to fix groups before you’re drowning under another wave of enemies, you lose the precision timing and control that are the hallmarks of a well-built RTS. Most missions are based on a time-sensitive goal or escorting some hapless fantasy cliché around the map. Any reasoned decision making is subsumed to saving General Who Gives A Shit from the giant rhinos.
(Speaking of the good General, Battleforge’s story is terrible. It’s the kind of insipid Tolkien knock-off you expect to find scrawled on a legal pad behind the trifold of some post-adolescent dungeon master. Not only is it bad, but the vast majority of the story is delivered in blocks of text presented during loading screens. It’s almost as if everyone at Phenomic read the thing and thought the only place to hide it would be in plain sight, when most people are too busy grabbing a drink to be arsed around with reading.)
Well, at least the collectible card game stuff will be cool, right? Eh, not so much. I wasn’t joking about it just being an RTS. The “cards” and “decks” are completely unnecessary, nothing more than a shallow schema on which the simplified RTS play is hung. These aren’t cards in any meaningful sense, just glorified units and spells. In the same way that Battleforge lacks the strategy and pace essential to a good RTS, it’s also missing the strategic card interactions that are the backbone of a good CCG. Worse still, the rock/paper/scissors feel of combat makes it so there’s no incentive to explore and create novel decks. What these cards do let you do is pay EA, Battleforge’s publisher, to unlock content you already paid for on your disc. The problem of buying new cards goes beyond EA squeezing you for a few bucks. The game employs its own virtual currency, which you buy with real-world monies, and this virtual cash can be used to either buy more cards from EA, or from other players in the game’s auction house. The ability to buy rare cards at auction destroys the game’s balance, and an RTS is only as good as it is balanced.
Finally, how does it fare as an MMO? Not terribly. There is fun to be had in the two-to-twelve player cooperative campaign missions, but I had a hell of a time finding anyone to play with. It’s not just that you’re waiting for someone who wants play a particular mission, they also have to be playing in whichever of the three difficulty levels you’ve specified. My shortest wait was fifteen minutes for a two-player game and my longest a ninety-minute wait for a four-player match. The player versus player, on the other hand, is brutally not fun. For every match I was in where there was solid interplay between the combatants there were two where one of us would just not have an answer for the other player’s deck thanks to the game’s inherent imbalances.
Battleforge seems like a great idea: take the strategy of an RTS, add the variety and depth of deck construction from a CCG, and create a deeply social game with cooperative and combative aspects. Unfortunately, what Phenomic made is just a deeply flawed RTS with a money hole carved in the middle. The whole is exactly the sum of the parts. At least it looks good.
Grade: D+
Previous Reviews:
Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.
Suikoden Tierkreis
Eat Lead - The Return of Matt Hazard
Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop
Resident Evil 5
Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride