[REVIEW] Forged Battalion: Tech-Tree Tango in Retro Pants

in #gaming5 years ago

Forged Battalion was surprisingly hard to review. Not brand new, retro-seeming, an iterative play loop. But it's not bad.

#gaming #videogames #strategy #forgedbattalion #review

20190402 11.02.09 www.strategygamer.com ceed41d21a5a.jpg

https://www.strategygamer.com/reviews/forged-battalion/


It's hard for an editor of a modern, online magazine-style publication to decide to run a review of a game that has been out for a year, and accessible for more than a year before the actual exit from early access. It's not shiny, people are not excited because of the hype pulse, there's no actual demand for the game to be covered. The only time you see this kind of article going up is during a slow news cycle – and real-time strategy games have been in a real slow news cycle for a while now.

There are a few games on the horizon which have some excitement (Steel Division 2, for example) but the pool is shallow and largely already consumed. So it was lucky for me that dipping into the historical pot and pulling something out that people haven't looked at in quite a while was acceptable.

I really like looking at older games. That's how you get a sense of history, a sense of where things came from and where they're going. And it helps to look at something other than the big hits or the complete failures, because those don't really tell you as much as something that merely hit the middle-of-the-road and then drove off a cliff. People that hate games (and I'm looking at you Dawn of War 3) have some sort of emotional connection to that game. It may be inherited, it may be grown, it may be cultivated, but it's an emotional connection. That, in a sense, is a kind of success.

And then there are games like Forged Battalion.

I won't recap the review; it's probably better for my hit rate that you go and read it yourself, but I will say this:

FB is the only article I've written for Strategy Gamer that had someone on the Discord asking of the site editor, in mild disgust, "why in the world would you review that crappy game?" Not that I had reviewed it too positively because I'm sure that they hadn't even bothered to read the article itself, but why would anyone review that game at all? Implicitly, the question was "why would anyone play that game at all?"

I had to look at their objections, that it is largely one-dimensional and focused on production over everything else (not quite true, but somewhat), that the techs only differ in name and special-effects and don't really matter (which is actually not true, because various techs are hard counters to one another and some simply let you do things you can't with other techs, like hover, legs, and jump packs), and I really could only come to one conclusion.

There is a portion of the audience, every audience, who believe that the only things worth talking about are the things they like, just the way they like them, and nothing else should ever be discussed. Ever. It's the delusion that only things specifically created for you are worthy of your eyes. You will never learn something by being exposed to ideas in things you're not really interested in. There will never be something that you just say, "huh, that seems pretty cool in this thing that I otherwise don't have much interest in."

That's an attitude I just don't understand. I've never really been able to understand it, even though it is a strong portion of every single fandom that I've ever experienced. It doesn't matter if you're talking about video games, role-playing games, programming languages, cars, historical military operations – there are always of vocal minority of people who believe that they should never have to look at something they've already made a decision about and no one else should ever get to make another decision about it, either.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's bullshit. That is one of the real, visible, too-widespread social behaviors that are actively toxic. It's not everybody, it's not even most people, it's not even a lot of people – but it is everywhere. All the time. And if you happen to get some on you, it's erosive.

It's the kind of attitude that keeps other people from talking about the things that excite them and sharing some of that excitement with you.

If you find someone doing that, say something. Not insulting, not aggressive – just say "you know, some people like that sort of thing. Is there nothing that you can learn from it?" Ask the question. Put it forward.

If you find yourself doing that, stop. Just stop. If you notice that your engaging in that kind of activity, change your path. Find something about it that seems interesting to you, that intrigues you, that could be interesting in a different context, and talk about that to the people who are excited about it. You might learn something. You might just learn that you have very little interest in whatever it is, but you'll also learn why the people who are really into it are excited and share some of that excitement.

Find the excitement. Engage with the excitement. And go dig through some of the piles of strategy games that are available online, right now. It's a great time to go catch up on some of the older releases at huge discounts which will run like a bat out of Hell on your modern potato and who knows? Maybe you pick up a five pack, give out copies to four friends, and you find something new to do on Saturday nights for a few hours as a group.

Don't get hung up on wondering why other people are talking about things, go enjoy things.

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