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неделя, 28 юни 2015 г.

Massive Chalice - To X-COM with love



You open your eyes; you are on a throne, in front of you all your loyal subjects. In middle of them, above a small pool of glittering water your wisest adviser the Massive Chalice!  Yes, exactly, you're a King and you listen to a magical, talking chalice. Also you're immortal, but that doesn't really matters because you cannot leave your throne room.

Massive Chalice is a single player turn based tactical strategy game in which you will have to build keeps, create Bloodlines and lead team of elite heroes versus the Cadence, your mortal enemy. The game is done by Double Fine Productions and it came out on 1st of June 2015. For those of you who don't know Double Fine are the guys behind games like Grim Fandango, Brutal Legend, Broken Age and The Cave.



The Story or Why you're knee deep in Cadence




You awoke and find out that you're a king now and the whole kingdom relies on your wisdom. But why? Because The Cadence is at your front door and the people will not (for some reason) trust a giant magic chalice to lead them against the invaders. But you they will because you are a mix of the strongest Bloodlines in the Kingdom. From here on with the power of your inner vision you will lead the teams of elite heroes who have only one task, to hold long enough. How long? Well, just mere three hundred years, until the Chalice manage to gather enough energy and destroy the Cadence with one final strike.

The game does not offer much story in the sense of directly telling it to you instead it leaves you to sink in the role of the King and make your own story. Under your leadership mighty bastions will be built, Bloodlines will prosper and fall; powerful relics will be passed between generations. Something else that also provides bits of story is the random events. Strangers will come to you asking for your relics, explorers will want to take one of your heroes to see what is beyond the Cadence; couples will come to seek your advice and many many more. For every random event you will have a choice of three options, based on your choice something will happen. It may be good, it may be bad. This is a mechanic that you will be very familiar with if you have played Warlock: Master of Arcane/Exiles. But mentioning those things I'm entering the part about the...


Mechanics of the game or What exactly is expected from you as a King



Massive Chalice can be separated in two parts - Battle and Development. Let me start with Development, because it is what leads to Battle. 

Development takes place mainly in your Castle and in the Keeps of the many Houses of your Kingdom. In your Castle you will choose upgrades for your heroes and Kingdom. The ones concerning the Kingdom are mainly ones that increase the speed of researches, building and recruitment. The ones concerning your heroes are standard armour and weapon upgrades, each with three levels, but...BUT for different numbers of certain enemies killed you will get special items, armours and weapons. Some of those will give you things like lifesteal, piercing shots, AoE attacks or even will neglect some of the nasty abilities that The Cadence has. What's the cost you ask? There is only one precious thing in the situation you are in - time. You should hold for 300 years and to achieve that you will need to have well equipped heroes, therefore you will try to upgrade everything you can. The catch is that you can do one thing at a time and every 10 years the Cadence attacks. So you will have to plan in advance and have clear priorities what you need most - new heroes, better equipment or new fortresses. But this can found in pretty much every turn based 4X game. The more interesting things to me were the Bloodlines. 



When you build a Keep you will choose one of your heroes to become its ruler and if possible you will choose a wife of husband for them. By doing this they will be able to provide fresh warriors for your team of heroes. The parents will effects two main things in their children - their traits and their class. In Massive Chalice there are three main classes - Alchemist, Hunter and Caberjack. If the parents are the same class then their child will be their class, but if they are two different then it will be the result of combining those two classes. This gives really good depth to the game and replayability. You will have to be careful what classes get together if you're comfortable with a certain one and have built strategy around its synergy with the other members of your team.

Now unlike the class the traits that the child gets from its parents are randomly chosen, but they will always be ones present with the parents. The child may get only the good ones, or only the bad ones...or even a mix of both. For good or for bad the negative traits cannot be cured like in Darkest Dungeon.



Your team can have maximum of five members and they can be any combination of the nine classes in the game. But don't get too fond of them, because you may be immortal, but they're not and if they don't get killed they will die of age. It's a sad thing especially when core members of your squad die. Despite my advice I tend to get attached to my heroes and it’s...it’s hard when they're no more...But if they have done well on the battlefield, they have become legends and when they die, they will leave their legendary weapon behind which then will be passed in the Bloodline until it exists. Those weapons are usually a lot better than most weapons you can get with upgrades and they will become even better as they gain experience and levels.

For the last few paragraphs I've been circling around it, but this ends now, let’s talk about the Battle!

Approximately every ten years the Cadence will attack random outer territories of your Kingdom. From the attacked ones you will have to choose one and send your team there. Few factors will affect your choice. First of all will be the level of corruption that the attacked region have. If the corruption reaches level three you will lose this territory forever. The second thing is eventual reward you get if you defeat the attack. This reward may vary from more experience for the team members and get to things like reduced research times for currently running upgrades. And the thing that at least affected my choice (to you it may be otherwise) is the type of enemies you will fight in the attacked regions.



After you decide what is most precious to you will find yourself at the rim of the Chalice with all available heroes ready to jump in. Here you can change them with other characters, change their equipment or level them up. When you feel that they're prepared enough it’s time to jump in!

The actual battles are really similar to the battles in X-COM. In turns you and your enemy will take actions with your heoroes, until there is only one team standing. The main difference between X-COM and Massive Chalice is may be the simpler cover system here. You will be able to cover behind threes, rocks and hide in tall grass but you will have to move out of your cover if you want to attack with straight attacks like charges and crossbow shots. The Alchemists are the only ones who are able to attack from behind a cover, because most of their attacks have a trajectory. Of course if they hide behind a tree it won't work...

Interesting mechanic in battles is that the range troops always have the chance to fully miss, but if they hit their attacks cannot be glancing. While melees cannot miss, but there is always the chance their hit to be a glancing attack which deal only minimum damage.



The battles are interesting, scaling pretty well with the development of the game. The AI is a good opponent that will apply decent tactics and use his special abilities pretty well. The Twitchers will swap with your weak heroes effectively putting them in the midst of enemies. The Wrinklers will attack your oldest heroes and so on. There is also the real risk of friendly fire so be careful with those AoE attacks and piercing shots. Also exchanging blows with your enemies have a good punch to it. You can feel the hits, which makes the satisfaction from the battles even bigger.

Talking about your enemies I just want to say that I found very amusing the idea that most types of enemies look like some kind of mutated plants.


Lush forests, verdent fields and birds singing....well not exactly.



When I saw the Kingdom map for the first time I thought "Ha! This looks like Game of Thrones opening map! “The visual style of the game is a combination between GoT and Endless Legend, but unlike the two here the whole game is in this rectangular style even the heroes and the enemies. Now I've never been someone who pays much attention to visuals but it looks like I'm part of a minority here.



Regarding the sound of the game - your heroes don't talk; even the usual repetitive reactions when you give them orders are not here. Instead their reactions are text that appears when they kill someone. In contrast to your silent warriors the two parts of the Chalice almost never stop talking. They will babble about all kind of things. Old battles, past arguments, random remarks and of course they will mock each other nonstop. They will also give you information when you encounter new types of enemies. 


The music at first didn't have my attention much but at some point I caught myself humming it while in battle so I guess we can call it...atmospheric enough. 


Conclusion


Massive Chalice is a turn based tactical game in which you take the role of the immortal King who should hold the invasion of The Cadence while your magical Chalice collect enough energy. During the game you will build Keeps, marry heroes, create Bloodlines and pass relics of dead legends to their heirs and lead a team of elite heroes in X-COM styled battles. But by killing enemies you will not only give more time to your talking advisor to collect its energy but will also be able by researching the dead enemies to apply some of their characteristics to the equipment of your heroes and create unique items that give them additional abilities.



The biggest problem that you may have with the game is that it doesn't look...impressive. The chosen art style is something like a combination between Game of Thrones and Endless Legend. So those of you who insist their games to look amazingly good will be disappointed from Massive Chalice. But...BUT in my opinion the game have more than enough to offer and make up for its looks. 

Not to mention that one playtrough will take no more than a day or two and during this time the game will hold you under almost constant pressure, with all the decisions you will have to make.

My advice is to give it a chance if you like Kingdom management and turn-based battles, Massive Chalice have much to offer.

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