There’s been a bit of a dispute going on in the dark underbelly of xnPlay Towers (for those not in the know the dark underbelly is where we keep the pies) over Cavemen Vs Aliens. Well, I say dispute it’s not really much of a dispute per se more a discussion on the levels of brokenness present. In the game, not in the pies. The pies are resolutely not broken pies. You’ll find out my opinion in a moment, xAD on the other hand is far more forgiving than I. So we fought with bricks. If there’s no round up this week, you’ll know why. I used my cursor on him. He didn’t stand a chance.
For those who’ve not had the pleasure, Cavemen Vs Aliens is a pretty cynical piece of work that not so much screams riding on the Popcap bandwagon (or whatever other super mash up of cool things trend that passed us by whilst we groomed the pies for eating over the course of a 4 year “Best Pie Ever” plan) as sort of dangling off the coat tails of the driver being a bit of an irritation. A ruthful irritation at that. Yes, Ruthful. At least according to Cavemen Vs Aliens, it’s a word. Ruthful.
At some point during the game you’re going to face some more ruthful aliens in your battles. Ruthful. Perhaps they meant rueful? I don’t know, maybe the aliens having got bored of intergalactic destruction in a quest for mobile phone masts (quirky plot!) decided they were going to run up to some cavemen and look a bit sad and have a bit of a cry at them. We just don’t know. To be honest, we didn’t really care to find out either. At least the aliens aren’t filled with strongth I suppose.
Attempting to do for the RTS what Plants Vs Zombies did for Tower Defence probably seems like a really great idea on paper and sort of gives us hope that one day we’ll see someone attempt to do what Plants Vs Zombies did for Tower Defence to, I dunno, Battlecruiser 3000ad perhaps. Except of course, it’s massively point missing.
Yes, Plants Vs Zombies may be streamlined, it may be cute and stupidly funny compared to the vast majority of TD games out there (admittedly a genre I’ll never quite understand hence all TD game reviews on here being handled by xAD) but there’s one thing that comes above the polish, all the cuteness, all the quirkiness and shiny-ness that Popcap have thrown in there. A good game idea first and foremost.
Cavemen Vs Aliens is a really shit idea, isn’t it? The internet may occasionally be aflame with Ninja vs Cat vs Chuck Norris vs Larry Grayson WHO WILL WIN? discussions but no-one really thinks “I wonder who’d win in a battle between cavemen and aliens” do they? Not unless they’re a total mental at least. So the premise itself is our first stumbling block with the game. It’s not funny. It’s just quirky for the sake of trying to be quirky. Stalin Vs Martians on the other hand? That was funny. And Stalin Vs Martians knew it was rubbish too, which definitely gives it an advantage.
So you start the game up and yup, it’s a pretty game alright. You can see where they’re heading with this. It’s clearly that quirky casual thing a la Popcap. And you get to the menu and you’re presented with a cursor to select the menu option you require. Hang on, thinks I. I’m on a console. I’m sitting on my sofa using a joypad and I’m using something designed for a mouse controlled interface to select a menu option. This doesn’t bode too well, but hey – it’s an RTS, right? RTS have their natural home on the PC so I guess it sort of makes some logical sense if you squint long enough, juggle some words up in your head and do some sort of super sekrit arcane ritual. Sort of.
You sit through the intro, with at least one block of text that I found incredibly hard to parse into English and it’s overly long and not really that interesting. So far so very much like most intro sequences to be fair. And then you hit the map screen and onto the first map, a tutorial map. Where the game expends a lot of words and phrases over what essentially amounts to “move your cursor here and hit some coloured buttons a bit”. With that horrendous “we’re stopping the game to teach you things” that some games are want to do and never fails to make me start grinding my teeth at the horror as the information it tries to teach flies out of my ears instead of sitting there enriching me with powers of gamey wonderment.
And with that out the way, it’s onto the game proper. Eventually. Having used up a large proportion of your trial period reading nothing of either use nor ornament. However, you have been armed with the knowledge that the cursor is your weapon. Phew, thank god. I was beginning to think it was just an egregious design mistake but no – it’s your weapon it would seem.
Only it’s not. Not really. It’s just this thing you use to point at stuff. Like most cursors really. I feel cheated and I haven’t even played one round of the game yet.
Ah yeah, the game. This is where the discussion between myself and xAD reached at least some sort of agreement. It’s broken.
At one end of the map you have your cavemen and four pterodactyls (each pterodactyl corresponds to a coloured button on the Xbox360 pad that matches the colour of the pterodactyl, intuitive controls these really aren’t). At the other end of the map, you have some aliens and their spaceships. So, it’s capture and hold time.
You move your cavemen to the right across some islands. The aliens move to the left across some islands. You’ll both be trying to take control of the islands until the other side is wiped out. And you do this by munging coloured buttons in the hopes that at some point there’ll be a semblance of strategy to it only to find out that no, the only sensible course of action is to just push some buttons and win.
Dump your cavemen down on an island using one pterodactyl, give him some rocks with another pterodactyl and watch him throw them whilst being smacked up by flying saucers. Pick one up if he gets lasered in the face too much and take him back home for a big prehistoric cuddle to make him feel better. It all moves so fast that half of the time, selecting the caveman you want to move is an exercise in futility as he’ll be pretty much dead by the time you use your cursor/weapon upon him to select him to then press a coloured button to take him back home.
Not that it matters because you’ll still probably win anyway. There’s no strategy that I could find. Just button munging. Place hairymanthing. Give hairymanthing rock. Watch the game play itself. Hit buttons. Win!
Perhaps there’s scenarios later on where you can die but you’ll likely not bother finding out as there’s far better things you could be doing. Like licking your doormat, perhaps.
Certainly, I wish I’d spent 8 minutes licking a doormat instead. i) I’d get a clean doormat. ii) I wouldn’t be spending 400 fakemoneypoints on something that’s pretty poor all told iii) it’d save the cat a job.
So yeah, Caveman Vs Aliens. Not as good as licking a doormat. There’s a boxquote for you.
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I saw this demo’d at an xna conference in January and, whilst the graphics seemed pretty enough, I couldn’t quite grasp the gameplay mechanic. It seemed like a watered-down Mega-Lo-Mania, but without the tech tree or anything else that might make it interesting or tense. At least in Risk you get to roll a dice.
I don’t understand?? Am I supposed to play it?