GAMES |

GENERATION ZERO

November 7, 2019 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

GENERATION ZERO is a new video game that challenges you to survive an amazing open-world set in Sweden in the 1980s–a country in which everyone is either dead or disappeared, and an ecology of killer robots roams the towns and countryside. Your task is to collect supplies and weapons while completing missions to fight the robots, find out what happened, and stay alive.

I’m a sucker for co-op games with great game play and plenty or ambience and lore, and GENERATION ZERO delivers. I can see it maybe becoming monotonous over time for single-player play, but when playing with friends, it’s loads of fun. Stylistically, it’s like running around combating robots in a series of Simon Stålenhag paintings. The world is huge, beautifully rendered, and filled with numerous houses, vehicles, and military installations to explore and plunder. The atmosphere is just terrific, and there’s a lonesome 80s vibe to the whole thing, with the ability to customize characters and listen to electronic music rendered in full 80s nostalgia.

The game play is challenging and exciting, though there’s a lot of travel, juggling missions, and inventory management. Finding bullets is tough, and you’re constantly scavenging for ammo, which comes in many types and must fit your particular gun. You can only carry so much, so you have to make choices about what weapons and items are handy and which you’re going to keep in your inventory. Finding guns is hard at first, though over time as you get into military installations you’re more likely to find good weapons and attachments (such as scopes), from sniper rifles to rocket launchers that have a beautiful effect on target.

Now I have to talk about the robots, which are really cool and come in different types and capabilities. These range from air drones that alert all nearby robots of your presence to little eerie spider robots to giant behemoths that lumber around and are really, really hard to kill, and more. You can use stealth to spy on them or avoid them, you can lay ambushes with explosives and flanking, and you can snipe them in weak points that are more likely to kill. The robots can be very challenging to destroy, prone to sudden bursts of speed, and explode in beautiful splashes of sparks. The closer you get to cities, the more likely you’ll find great loot, but the robots become far more numerous. A friend and I tried to get into an airbase and spent a half hour in an impossible fight against a horde of robots, including several giants that just rain missiles constantly.

Overall, GENERATION ZERO is a beautiful, addictive, and fun game. Highly recommended, especially if you’re into co-op games like LEFT FOR DEAD.

NORTHGARD

October 24, 2018 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

One of my favorite forms of procrastination is to lose myself in a good civilization-building strategy game, and Northgard is currently my top pick to turn off my brain for an hour or two. In this game, you control a clan of Vikings that is settling on a new continent and competing with other clans doing the same. While winning the game is satisfying, simply surviving this brutal game is its own form of victory.

You start out with a few settlers foraging for food. Build a scout camp, and you can assign a worker to reveal more map tiles. Build a wood camp to get wood, or your people will freeze. Build farms, fishing huts, and hunting camps, or they’ll starve. Build mines, so you can improve all your buildings. Build markets and trading posts, so you can sustain your buildings and buy things. Build mender’s huts, so you can heal your wounded and stave off plague. Build towers and train different types of warriors, or wolves, draugr (Norse zombies), and other players will mercilessly tear you to shreds. Stock up on everything because winter is coming, maybe even a blizzard, which will rapidly deplete your supplies. Did I mention everything in this game is trying to kill you? This new continent is wonderful, but it really doesn’t want you there.

The game is easy to learn and play but difficult to get good at, as you have to precisely manage your resources, from manpower to basic necessities to land. Each land tile on the map holds only so many buildings you need to build to grow and survive, so your clan is under constant pressure to expand. Plus you’ll keep finding map tiles you really want, which offer fertile land or iron or stone or easy ability to defend. This pressure to grab land puts you into natural conflict with the other players, who will be raiding you anyway but are now fighting with you over important resources they need. It’s a brilliant part of the game. Speaking of wars, the other players will all have a specialized skill their clan possesses, such as the Raven clan, which hires mercenaries to attack your coastal provinces and plunder them, or Wolf, which earns happiness for having a big army and gold for every one of your warriors they kill.

If you’re into gaming and enjoy strategic civ-building games, check it out. I highly recommend it as a really fun and challenging game in the tradition of games like Rise of Nations.

DEAD BY DAYLIGHT

November 21, 2016 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Recently played DEAD BY DAYLIGHT, a multiplayer game that captures the terror of slasher horror movies.

The game combines competitive and cooperative gaming. As one of four survivors, your job is to find a series of power generators and repair them. As the monster, your job is to hunt the survivors and mount them on a handy meat hook as a sacrifice to your dark god.

I played the game several times as both a survivor and the baddie, and had a great time doing each. The survivors and monster have different capabilities and advantages, but overall it’s really hard for the survivors. No matter, it’s one of those games where it almost doesn’t matter if you win or not, it’s all about how you play and how much fun you have. The monster is genuinely scary, it’s like being in a horror movie. When I was the monster, I particularly enjoyed sneaking up behind my friend John and starting up the old chainsaw, laughing maniacally as I did so.

Check it out if you’re tired of watching movies and want to be in one for a change.

Here’s a video I found on Youtube that shows an example of game play:

Game Night! Contagion

June 5, 2016 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Last night, our friends Simon and Jessica joined Chris and me for our monthly feast/drink/board game night. This time, we played Pandemic: Contagion for the first time and loved it.

Chris (left), Jessica (rear left), Simon (right) smiling as they destroy the world with plague.

We’re already fans of Pandemic, a game that pits the players working cooperatively against a series of deadly diseases that are sweeping the globe. Those games are real nail-biters, so we were excited to take a crack at Pandemic: Contagion, which turns the tables and pits you, a series of diseases, against humanity. Another big difference is that while Pandemic is cooperative, Contagion is competitive. Whatever disease kills the most human beings by the end wins.

Each disease has an incubation rate (how many cards you can draw per turn), infection rate (how many infection cubes you can put against the drawn cities), and resistance (which you can spend to reduce the impact of World Health Organization (WHO) counter moves. Each turn, you can invest cards in infecting new cities, ramping up the infection rate in already infected cities, or boosting your incubation, infection or resistance. You score primarily by generating death toll and destroying cities. When you destroy a city, the death toll is tallied as score and whoever did the eradicating gets a special action that can boost their play.

Each round, event cards are played, some of which help you, some of which hurt you. Every fourth card is a WHO card, which can be devastating to the players.

We had a ton of fun playing two games. In the first game, we caused the collapse of civilization (there were only two cities left). The second, we played right to the last card. Both games played out very differently, promising repeat playability. I learned it’s a good idea to get on as many cities as possible early on, and next time I play, after that I’m going to invest heavily in my incubation and infection rates. Then I can get four cards per turn and slam cities, destroying them. Jess won both games, but next time I’m going to give her a run for her money with my robovirus!

Explore TOOTH AND NAIL In An Exciting Role-Playing Game

September 22, 2015 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Tooth and Nail by Craig DiLouie I would like to invite you to join me for a special online event. In it, you will have the opportunity to creatively experience the dire events of my novel TOOTH AND NAIL. The event will take the form of a role-playing game, meaning that you will be able to decide the actions of your own character reacting interactively to the story as it evolves.

If you aren’t sure how role-playing games work, rest assured that the event will be very friendly to newcomers. And everything you need to know will be explained beforehand. The event itself will be held on Sunday, October 11 from 12PM to 3PM Pacific Time. Registration for the event is closing soon. If you have any questions (about the event, role-playing, or otherwise) please email brad@rpglory.com.

There is a $60 fee that will go towards helping the event organizer, RPGlory.com, host this and future events with both myself and other authors.

I hope to get to see you at the game!

Click here to sign up. Basically, you’re contributing to RPGlory.com’s fund-raising campaign, and then select “Game with Craig DiLouie” as your perk.
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BETRAYAL AT HOUSE ON THE HILL

October 13, 2014 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Played my first two games of BETRAYAL AT HOUSE ON THE HILL a few weeks ago with pals Adam and Dave, and it was a blast. The board game plays like a haunted house movie.

It starts as an exploration game. Each player picks a character–I got Father Rhinehart–and together you explore a haunted house one revealed map tile at a time. The Abandoned Room, the Game Room, the Kitchen, the Laboratory and more on three levels–main floor, upstairs and basement. Each room has a symbol, which may be an Item (draw a card to get an item that will help you), an Event (something creepy happens that affects you) or an Omen (an item or happening). Every time an Omen is encountered, you have to roll–a poor roll triggers the Haunt.

There are many Haunt scenarios depending on the Omen and the characters in play. One of the characters becomes a Traitor, betraying the others to effect the Haunt, while the others become the Heroes, trying to stop the Haunt. In the first game I played, Father Rhinehart ended up being a hero, tasked with finding a statue and an item that animated the statue. Once Dave and I did that, we were able to animate the statue and slay the evil character played by Adam, who was actively hunting me as a human sacrifice. I appropriately fled screaming while Dave did all the hard work. We were saved by Adam ending up on the “coal chute” map tile and ending up trapped in the basement for long enough for us to find the items we needed to activate the statue.

In the second game, I played Professor Longfellow. The Haunt turned out to be these evil plant monsters that spread tentacles all around the house. Adam was strong enough to fight them while I was smart enough to whip up the plant killer spray. Unfortunately, through massive bad luck, my flashlight died, giving me limited movement, and I ended up doing the fighting while Adam grabbed the Book we needed and, through a miraculous die roll, got himself into the kitchen to make the spray himself. Meanwhile, I did just fine for a bit thanks to a stick of dynamite, but ended up being dragged screaming into the chomping maw of one of the killer plants and turned into bloody fertilizer. Again, I did a lot of screaming while my comrade did most of the heavy lifting, killing the plants for another win.

Overall, it’s a really fun game, plays quickly, isn’t too complicated, and captures the flavor of a haunted house movie perfectly.
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