game feelings

I guess this was inevitable. I’ll try to only review games that I’ve extensively played. Why don’t I start with one of the best;

Harvest: Massive Encounter. The tutorial is awful, the music only plays for about a minute every hour, there’s a paltry three levels, and God knows why some of the best control shortcuts are hidden from being explained anywhere. But if you can slog past all that, you might agree with me that this is one of the best games ever made.

There are only seven tools at your disposal in Harvest: power plants, powerlines, miners, laser turrets, and three types of missile turret. There are also a couple more abilities that these buildings can manually employ, but really that’s it. This here is a game of great complexity that could be played without any menus on a Super Nintendo controller.

“The tides of an unwinnable war are upon us, and we must seek refuge upon higher ground, lest we be swept away by the flood.” -Arcturus Mengsk

Normal mode in Harvest is a bit like playing a weed on the fringe of a locust swarm. You start out small, spread like wildfire, start duking it out with the bugs, and slowly get whittled down to your final stronghold where you make a bitter last stand. Thinking about the whole thing in discrete phases is helpful, but the world itself escalates smoothly along a spectrum and the most important thing in Harvest is figuring out exactly when to call, “fuck it, time for Plan B!” (no pun intended, Oxeye)

So right out of the gate, you expand as quickly as possible, shooting out supply lines to feed clusters of miners all over the map. There’s very little opposition and you can usually start building defenses even after sighting the enemy, but there are dark, dark clouds on the horizon. Your power plants should be clustered in little camps rather than spread out for optimal flow, and your supply lines, while diffuse and efficient, should also be very redundant. Like all of Harvest, there’s no magic formula or macro that can communicate how to lead a healthy growth spurt; everything is so widespread and chaotic and massive that your decisions can only be made with experience and intuition.

Pretty soon your reactive defenses stop cutting it, so you can kiss Phase 1 goodbye. Only turrets that have been planted, built, and fed will be able to fend off the swarms of nasties from here on out, so you should start entrenching all those little power plant camps with rings of lasers and missiles. Micromanagement starts to play a bit of a role here, as you’ll want to link your lasers into a big death ray normally, unlink them for a panicked Fire At Will!! if saucers get too close, and link them back up if you make it through. Phase 2 really kicks in when you can no longer keep your thinly-spread supply lines protected without outrageous defense expenses. If you’ve kept up with the weed metaphor, in Phase 2 you are crab grass. The angry flying-saucer-lawnmower comes and it snips off your feeders, but you hold the root and when the blade passes by you are back with a goddamn vengeance. Any area that is not directly under threat should be expanded into, but be careful about managing your resources so you can still wall up your power plants. Phase 2 ends when you feel like you are about to lose a power plant camp.

This is it. The fiery, gut-wrenching, apocalyptic climax. It’s a final showdown between you and the saucers and every chunk of rock you’ve scraped out of the ground up to now comes into play. The screen will be filled with enemies and lasers and missiles and explosions everywhere, and your only goal now is to make the saucers pay for every inch they take. Ideally, your power plant camps were set up at regular intervals so that they constitute a rough circle spreading from your starting point. As Phase 3 starts, you want to make this circle as perfect as possible by lacing together rows of lasers backed up by your favorite missile type and lots of power. You really can’t have enough power in Phase 3. In Phase 1 and 2, overheating powerlines are wasteful; in Phase 3, an overheated powerline can be popped as a last resort and save your defense ring from being breached. Micromanagement is pretty heavy this entire phase, but every situation is unique and most abilities used are decisions, not a tasks. Depending how well you've played, sooner or later your defenses will be breached and you will die very quickly.

There’s a few other modes to Harvest, but none quite as spectacular as Normal. Rush is essentially a powerline-overload spree, Insane is for anal perfectionists who can’t handle the widespread chaos of Normal, and Wave takes away the pacing, which is the best part of Harvest.

Hephaestus is the simplest map, but I’ve found Poseidon to be way easier (the aliens coming from downwind are extremely easy to hold off, allowing you to concentrate defenses elsewhere). A lot of people think Ares is the easiest with the chokepoints, but some of the saucer types that spawn there can be a real pain.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/15400/

oh, and nothing I've said here is actually forced by the game. I arrived at it all by extensive trial and error, but there are people with higher scores than me who probably play the game totally different.