by Necroscourge Wednesday 6th July 2016

10 Hour Challenge: ‘Affected Zone Tactics’

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When you are shopping around for a new online game, you often have to experience it for yourself if you want to know if you will really like it. Especially considering this new era of bait and switch gaming, where the game suddenly changes in tone and format because of your arbitrary rank level overflowing. My (not) favorite part of the game is when I reach level 2 and all of my enemies get free bullet proof shields to show me just how awesome buying anti armor bullets in the cash shop would be. For this I devised the Ten Hour Challenge, where I play a game for ten hours straight (like in one sitting), which is typically enough to give anybody the idea of whether they like or hate the game.

I love strategy games! Some of my first memories are playing Age of Empires 2, Sid Miers Alpha Centauri, Populous the Beginning, and The Tone Rebellion. The original X-COM was released for free by PCGamer back in ye olden times when thine magazine came with a disk full of content; I spent weeks playing what many consider to be the best rogue-like strategy game ever. So turn based titles have a special place in my heart, which sucks because the “Show me pretty graphics in boring team deathmatchs with flags” crowd has dominated the industry perverting all other genres in the process. These days if a good strategy titles comes out it’s going to be from Europe.

Russian MMO Affected Zone Tactics talks a big, poorly translated game. It urges you to travel through a magical portal to the land of Tesla, which is an fallout-like world of mercenaries and bandits where you will lead forces in point based combat. You start by creating a main character of the Assault class, picking any of the three sub-types. You can later re-class your soldier in any of the four classes, which will let you pick any of those three spec’s. The issue starts when you realize the decision is literally “Shooty, Snipey, or Other”, grenade launchers are abundant and act like sniper rifles with arcs and splash.

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Each character also suffers from “I got one gun-itis”. Every class type has exactly one option of primary and secondary each, and it very quickly bothered me. Shooty guys have some variety of automatic, Snipey’s have single shot ranged grenades (Besides the Commando, who actually gets a sniper rifle) and Other with a variety of rockets and mines. This crippling overspecialization makes combat feel so generic and repetitive.

The game-play is the tried and true two action point formula popularized by the Firaxis version of X-Com. Unlike X-Com, you have a variety of firing modes, a special “sneak” movement type, no verticality, and ALL THE GRENADES. Players are shuffled into an order and turns are taken (enemy character goes, ally goes, etc), so the game moves fast. Even if you bring multiple characters the game ends up flowing nicely.

The Early Hours

I was overjoyed by how quickly I got into a match. The objective of the game is to capture the points, which will give you victory points. Reach the max and you win, kill them all and you win. Simple. Matches last about fives minutes and 5 game rounds, and the focus is all on those flags. The fighting is slight and it’s rare that a guy goes down. The game is teaching me that the flags are what matter in this game. Cool.

My allies began to drive me nuts. I was confused when I noticed all of my fellow players hiding back on their side of the map rather than moving forwards.  In a few instances I lost a battle because they would option to stand by and shoot instead of capturing a flag.

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After each battle it gives me experience. The game was nice enough to even give me 24 free hours of Premium time, claiming I get 200% more experience. Well that’s fantastic I thought, I should be higher level in no time! I noticed that in games where I only focused on getting flags I got little to no experience, while allies that I noticed going in and shooting received far more experience. As I said, these matches are super short and not very lethal right now. My objective is to capture flags, but my account only progresses if I ignore the flags and shoot people. Interesting.

After about three games I notice a new type of unit on the field, guys running around in mechanized armor. At first I was afraid of them, noticing that they barely did any damage and were fairly easy to hurt. I didn’t even think too much of them. For some reason most of them even have grenade launchers, which kind of blows my mind. What is the purpose of decking a guy out in heavy armor and giving him a grenade launcher?

One of the few messages I saw in chat revealed the fiasco about four hours in. Every player besides ones with a star besides their names is a bot, not a real player. They all have fairly convincing names, and at this point are equipped only in Premium items. These items are bought with real money, are better than the free stuff, and is generally considered to be a bad thing. Honestly, since all of the bots have premium equipment you end up realizing what they have is not much better than what you have; unless it is a grenade or medkit.

The Later Hours

I’m getting near the end of my play time and I’m only just at Rank 3 out of 14. All the bots now have armor so good they can shrug off some rounds, and now Heavies are actually worth playing! They can shrug off multiple grenade impacts! These matches are starting to last 20+ minutes partly because of the armor they have on and just how high the goal post has been moved. Even though you gain points every players turn, it’s such a low amount at this point of the game that it becomes two matches every hour instead of ten an hour.

I point out the armor because the AI players only play as Assault or Heavy classed characters; so at this point in the game they get from being annoying to being serious tanks. Even the Assaults have decent armor! When you are behind on this grind, the game jumps in difficulty so much that you get a little bit of whipslash

What disenchanted me quickly was the presence of an Commando on the enemy team, sitting back and picking off my NPC allies until he came for me. That was my last game and my time was up. So I can come to my final thoughts about this title.

The Good:

The Bad: