My goodness there have been a lot of broken links lately...I guess there's not much I can do other than review the ones that work, right? Sorry, Toons n Tactics
It's okay, though, because Trade Tides filled me with enough anger for like 3 reviews. My first thought when playing this was "boy, this loading screen sure is taking a while." My second thought was "come on, why does this list have to have so many RTS games...and why do they all have to be so terrible at conveying the game's controls?!" So then I clicked the menu button and was immediately greeted by a loading screen.
...WHAT?!
Are you serious? The game needs to go through a loading screen just to bring up the in-game menu?! And then, guess what happened when I clicked "how to play." go on, guess! Have you guessed? Another loading screen! And another one appears when you finally learn the controls (oh, and believe me, I'll get to those in a second), so that makes THREE SEPARATE LOADING SCREENS, none of them especially quick, that you have to sit through just to learn how to play the game! How the hell do you get a game this wrong? I can understand making poor choices when programming a game, or trying new ideas that don't end up working, but THIS?! WHAT IS THIS?!
Oh, but it's my fault for not picking up on the controls, isn't it? Nobody forced me to open up the menu, right? Well guess how the (pretty much) only function in the game is performed? You have to left click on your castle, and then RIGHT CLICK on a surrounding neighborhood to link the two. WELKRJWWHAT?!
How on God's green Earth does that make any sense? Why would you switch up the buttons in the middle of performing a command? Left clicking on both the castle and the town does nothing, so why the hell did anybody think it was a good idea to require the player to first left click and then right click?
And once you've done that...well, you wait until time runs out. No, I'm not kidding. The objective of the game is to link all your territories and then "hold out for 5 minutes." Now, let me go on record saying that the "don't die until x time passes" game mechanic is very rarely pulled off well. I can think of maybe one game that did it right, and it's kind of a stretch (the game is Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and if you played it, you know what scene I'm talking about, and you know how big a stretch it is). Regardless, though, I don't think anyone would deny that one thing you need to make that game mechanic even remotely successful is some sort of threat. In Trade Tides, every now and again some pirates will appear on the screen, but they are so few and far between that by the time the next batch appears, you have enough money to basically flood the map with depth charges. Add onto that the fact that you can quick-plant charges by right clicking wherever you want them to go (ie- right on top of the pirate ships), and you've essentially been given a god hand that makes quick work of anything that might try to stand in your way.
I can only recommend this game to the kind of person who is addicted to winning, because I've never played an easier game that actually claims to have a challenge. That's all I got for today. Until next time, stay seaworthy.
Links
Nothing Works!: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=25906
Trade Tirade: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=24661
