Caltrops - Reviews - complaints

Forum Overview :: Reviews

by FABIO 12/10/2004, 6:05am PST

Now that the honeymoon is over

I'm through with the campaign. The strategic map part the developers were bragging about is merely cosmetic. They made it seem like such an open ended, non-linear feature in the videos. What it SHOULD have done is let you move and attacker wherever you want and give you the choice of capturing all the smaller territories to build up your resources/powers or skipping that and going straight to the important battles like Helms Deep and Minis Tirinth. Instead you must capture every single fucking territory. You will get your choice between attacking two different territories, but you must capture both eventually to move on so it doesn't matter a bit which one you choose. Okay I have an army right next to helm's deep let's go attack it, oh no wait I still have to capture every single insignificant backwater plains territory first. That's 3 more missions where I don't get access to the entire tech tree.

The epic battle of helm's deep? Seem like it'd be cool at first when you see the massive wall lined with archers and you line up the ballistas/ladders. Then I just placed an exploding mine in an archer blind spot and lit the torch a-HOLY SHIT! I just took down a third of the entire fucking wall! Then I just ordered my army to attack + move to the center of the keep, went to grab a drink, came back andI had won. Total time for the 2nd most epic battle of the trilogy? 10 minutes, and half of that was waiting for my building to get to level two before I could build a mine.

The levels themselves become fantastically retarded and frustrating once you beat Helm's Deep and take control of the mordor forces. Example: Mordor's first mission you have to conquer those eastern people with the elephant things to turn them to your side. You get like a dozen elephants (oliphonts? mumikils?) and hundreds of eastern dudes during that mission that you carry over to the next. With all those units your population max is blown out of the water so you can't build any more units and your entire army at the start of mission 2 is comprised entirely of elephants and eastern dude. The dudes are weak against archers, the elephants against archers with flaming arrows. So of course the computer starts out with an army entirely made up of archers with flaming arrows and your awesome far east army is wiped out.

Mordor mission 3 Gondor starts using catapults (or trebuchetes? whatever). A lot of them. A complete fuckload of them. What makes it retarded is that they can almost be an army by themselves with little support. By means of bullshit they can move just as fast as infantry and have no setup time. Tell your infantry to attack one and it just turns and runs away while all the others turn and squash your infantry (they not only slaughter infantry, but also trolls and elephants too) chasing around this stupid speeding catapult. Tell you infantry to turn and attack a different catapult and THAT one runs away while the one you were chasing immediately turns around and shoots you. Other side could counter this by using fast cavalry, but Mordor has no cavalry, or any other fast ground unit. What do they have? Nazguls. Normally you'd take your flying Nazgul and trash those catapults, just like in the movie. But the typical retarded RTS turtle's pace campaign learning curve strikes again and you still don't have access to Nazguls at this point. After 13 levels and 6 hours of play, the developers decided that I'm still not ready to handle Nazguls yet. So you're stuck building up a horde and desperately rushing this retarded line of lone catapults. Even then about the best you can hope for is micromanaging all your squads so that each catapult has at least one squad attacking it and that just means that you'll be chasing all the catapults all over the map, but at least they've stopped shooting at you. Oh wait some enemy cavalry just wiped out your infantry that was busy chasing the catalpults. Back to rebuilding that horde.

So fuck the evil campaign. And fuck the good campaign too. I haven't tried it but I just know at some point I'm going to be hit with one of those baseless missions with a set number of units and I'll have to use STEALTH to get hobbits past enemies. I KNOW IT! One of those missions will be having Sam fight and sneak past a bunch of spiders in a cave I'm sure.

BUT! Who still plays RTS's for the single player campaign? I'm still having fun with skirmish and multiplayer (where the game allows me to build Nazguls).

Balance issues? Sadly, siege towers and siege ladders seem pointless. If a wall is lightly defended enough that you can get a unit up to the wall and keep it there for a length of time, then you're better off just using battering rams or exploding mines to outright destroy the wall instead of getting a squad or two of orcs over the walls (only to get slaughtered inside). If the wall is heavily defended then go with catapults.