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Clash of the Ardennes Review: Unusual Presentation of a Tired Topic
- Jackwraith
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A relatively novel idea with an overused setting that can't escape the seemingly rote gameplay.
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- Sagrilarus
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But putting those photographs sideways instead of upright on St. Patrick's Day is borderline cruel. I damn near threw up my 2-2-2 Irish breakfast (2 eggs, 2 toast, 2 shots) from the vertigo. Please consider the gastric well-being of your audience in future postings.
Now back to the article.
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- fightcitymayor
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- Cuddly yet angry.
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And they list 39 (!) different "preview"/"first impression" links, and I have not heard of a single one of them. Nice to see the preview-industrial complex of setting up your own "game review" brand in exchange for free games & publicity is alive & well in some corners of the globe.
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- Jackwraith
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Sagrilarus wrote: But putting those photographs sideways instead of upright on St. Patrick's Day is borderline cruel. I damn near threw up my 2-2-2 Irish breakfast (2 eggs, 2 toast, 2 shots) from the vertigo. Please consider your audience in future postings.
Sorry. Didn't even consider that when I was adding them, but after looking at them again, you're right.
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- Sagrilarus
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Wargames need unpredictability, because "no plan survives contact with the enemy" is the nature of the business. So as I continued to read your review it became more and more clear that this package doesn't stand as a unified package. If you're going to use setting it needs to fit. Tanks do not defeat infantry. It's more complicated than that and anyone with any interest in this setting is going to grit their teeth a bit. That is, the game deselects its target audience. The result is that the wrong people pick up the box and no one is happy. At no point in the design process was there a sanity check that identified this fundamental disconnect. It makes me wonder why the publisher didn't identify this problem and let the designer know during development or testing. (And yes, that's a straight line.)
Oddly enough, I think a setting in war production, i.e., the arms race in the air or across all of operations might have been a better fit for a Rock/Paper/Scissors sort of mechanic and lifted the game away from its dependence on a 1970s romantic view of the war. But that wouldn't solve the fundamental problems you identify in the gameplay, the back and forth slog that doesn't make for good gaming. When there is no unusual die roll to break things open, to change up the mix, slogs remain slogs, not entertainment.
There's a reason luck has been part of this industry for fifty years.
Well written review. I liked this one.
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- Jackwraith
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