Last Train Outta’ Worm Town has a long name, long enough that I’m just going to refer to it as Worm Town from here on out. If it’s good enough for the opening menu screen song, it’s good enough for me. It’s probably not good enough for any level of SEO, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
Worm Town is an asymmetric hunter/hunted game in the vein of Dead by Daylight. It’s very clearly inspired by the 1990 film Tremors, so much that I’m confident making this statement without having actually ever seen the movie.
Here’s how gameplay works. Players play either as either a surviving human, or a worm. Humans win by completing a set of tasks, including finding a special key, clearing the train tracks of obstructions, and refueling the train with random objects. Worms win by eating all the delicious humans.
Maps for gameplay are semi-randomly generated. A few features will always be present in approximately the same place. For example, the train is located in the middle of the of the map, and the quarry is always in the north east. However the locations of rocks, cactus, clusters of buildings, and consumables are randomized.
The human player controls and systems on their own are fairly limited. You can pick up and store items. You can carry items up to a total of 3 weight units, plus one item in your hands. You can throw items away from you. There’s also a set of equip-able items that tend to be single use, including a rifle and a zipline that I still don’t actually know how to use.
The worm is much more interesting. The core mechanic to the worm is simple. You can’t see human players if they aren’t moving on the ground. As a result, humans are invisible on top of buildings, large rocks, or while on the train. However, you’re much faster than humans, and you have a short cooldown jumping attack to launch to launch yourself into the air. You can also burrow underground for even faster movement.
Personally, when playing with my friend group, we’ve found the game to be a bit biased in terms of the human players, and it’s also not a very deep game. It’s possible that the game is much more fun with higher player counts, but I haven’t experimented with that.
For $8 bucks, a game that everyone can download and play pretty quickly, Worm Town is a pretty decent time. It’s not as fleshed out as many other games in the genre, and the controls don’t always work, but it’s really good as a medium level filler game when no one else in the discord can agree on what to play.
Ed Note: This writeup is a bit light this week. I’m heading out to PAX Unplugged 2023 shortly, and I need a bit more time for my other writeup. If you’re also gonna be there, why not hit me up on Twitter?
Naming your game The Finals is a bit of a crime against words. It also makes me wonder if the game ever had some sort of comp scene, what that would be called. The Finals finals? Finals of The Finals?
Regardless of the weird naming, The Finals was neat enough for me to put 7 or so hours in. So here are some first impressions after that time.
And this is where I’d put my in-game screenshots, if I’d taken any before the beta went down.
Gameplay
The Finals is a multiplayer shooter, and most of the game’s novelty and innovation comes from everywhere except the shooting. The Finals’ innovation starts with its game modes: Cashout, Quick Cash and Bank It.
Gamemodes
Cashout and Quick Cash follow the same general structure, but with different numbers of teams and objectives in the game. In both cases, the goal is simple: get to a box, bring it to a deposit point, and then defend it while it deposits.
In Cashout, the game’s competitive mode, it’s four teams of three against each other, and in Quick Cash it’s only three teams of three. The scoring also changes between modes. Quick Cash requires 20,000 points to win, and only spawns 10,000 point boxes, making it effectively the first team to get two points. In Cashout, it’s 40,000 points. In addition, getting team wiped costs a large amount of points.
Bank It is closer to something like the dog tags mode from Call of Duty. There are various coin spawns around the maps, and enemy players drop the coins they’re carrying when defeated. Once picked up, coins have to be deposited in boxes that spawn in for about a period of 90 seconds to actually be added to your score.
What’s interesting about the game modes is that while I was playing them, they did generate a bunch of interesting decisions. Is it better to rush an enemy team that is trying to capture, or just to go after another objective on your own? Should you go in now, or try to wait for the third team on the map to attack first, then swoop in to clean up?
Traversal
The most interesting part of The Finals for me is the traversal, and traversal mechanics. In the context of this game, that can mean several things. It can mean putting down a zipline to go over a gap, a jump pad to make a surprise entry into a skyscraper, or a dash to zoom down alleyways.
Or, if you’re me, ignoring that and smashing through everything in your path.
One of the biggest features in The Finals is a incredibly high level of destructibility. Almost all smaller buildings and objects can be blown up or smashed to pieces, allowing the impromptu creation of entrances and exits. I’ve played games with high destructibility before, and often they end up turning the map into a giant pit as players destroy and destroy and destroy. But The Finals neatly manages to avoid this pitfall (ha) and maintain the structure of its maps while allowing much of them to be destroyed.
The end result is that a coordinated team can go across a gap, up 5 stories, and then through most of an office building in about 15 seconds. For me, this was the most fun part of the game, and it was a shame that only one of the loadouts I played really had the ability to conduct emergency home renovation. Which is as good a time as any to talk about the loadout system.
Loadouts
Loadouts in The Finals start by choosing a body type. There are three, ranging from heavy to light, with each having a different pool of items and weapons to equip, as well as different specials, speed, and HP.
I mostly played the heavy class, so I’ll use it as an example here. After picking heavy, you have 1 special slot, 1 weapon slot, 3 equipment slots, and 4 backup slots. The weapon slot holds a primary weapon. For the heavy, these include a large machine guns, a sledgehammer, flamethrower, and a grenade launcher.
Equipment slots contain grenades, walls, and other supplemental items like a rocket launcher. The Finals doesn’t have an external ammo system. Instead, while guns have to be reloaded, everything else is cooldown based.
Finally, the backup slots. Anything except special abilities can be placed into these slots, and they can be swapped out mid game. It’s important to note that even if you put a primary gun into a backup slot, you can’t swap it with a equipment slot while in game, only your primary. In addition, swapping items isn’t possible in some of the modes.
Overall, the loadout system is fine, but the lack of sidearm or secondary weapon to close out fights felt really weird. Presumably, those are supposed to be ended with say, flame grenades, but it still feels off for a fire fight to pause while both sides scramble to reload.
Overall Thoughts
The Finals was fairly fun. If I was grading it, I’d call it fine. There are a bunch of impressive things about it, including the terrain destruction, and the high fidelity while doing so. Does that mean I think it’s gonna succeed?
Not really.
I’m not sure how much space there is in this market for live service games, and make no mistake, The Finals is a live service game. It feels like it’s trying to primarily compete with something like Apex Legends.
Now, I could be wrong here. If the team creating The Finals is small enough, and they can capture a small portion of their playerbase as a long term audience, maybe it could become self-sustaining. But I could just as easily see it going the way of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt.
Perfectly good game! Interesting mechanics! Relatively fun! But might not hit critical mass. Same thing happened for Gundam Evolution.
It’s kind of depressing to continually see this pattern repeat, but hey, many of these projects have been in progress for years. I have to wonder if we’ll see this sort of thing continue.
Author’s Note: All the voice acting in The Finals is done with generative AI, a point covered in this podcast. Some people are, unsurprisingly, rather unhappy about this.
So, maybe you read the last post, and despite the fact that Lorcana boosters are currently going for a street value of $5 an ounce, (a ratio that really feels like it should be reserved for a different type of substance), you still want in?
All right. It’s a pretty fun game. But instead of buying those starter decks at prices people are selling them, we’re instead going to use the power of the free market in our favorite for once.
Here’s how it works. First, click on one of the above links. This will bring you to TCG Players bulk entry page. It will look something like this.
If this all looks good, click the add to cart button! And presto, we have a cart with all the cards in the starter deck!
It’s also going to currently be costing you a lot more then the starter deck. No worries. We can fix that by clicking on the Optimize button in the lower left corner, right under the Paypal option.
After this, TCG player will try to optimize for shipping and buying from the fewest number of sellers. If everything looks good, you can send your purchase though, and end up with your very own Lorcana starter deck for less than a retail video game.
Ed Note: This writeup contains links to TCG Player, the management of which is a bunch of union busting corporate weasels. These aren’t affiliate links, (we don’t ever do that) and we don’t endorse their anti-competitive bullshit. That said, they’re owned by eBay, so it’s not like there’s a better place to go buy cheap singles that isn’t tainted by a desire to screw the employee.
Ed Note 2: This was written when Lorcana was being CRAZY scalped. It’s possible that the prices have gone down to a sane range by the time you look at this writeup. Such is the internet, and writing about collectibles.The general approach to using TCG Player, and the optimize functionality for buying singles likely remains the same though.
I like bubblegum. I like cereal. I like a hearty stew.
That doesn’t mean I want to mix all of them together and eat the result. I have a similar problem with SIGIL.
Sigil (full name SIGIL – Magical GPS Action RPG), is a single player alternate reality game. Players walk around in the real world to move in-game. Combat is real time, and takes place on a large grid, involving casting spells, and trying to avoid the enemies spells. There’s a tone of whimsy in the design and theming of the enemies, which is a nice change from every mobile game being themed around nude anime girls.
All of which is to say, I’d really like to recommend it. But I’m just not having enough fun with it, and there are some real pain points.
First up, exploration. You can only interact with items in an 150m radius of your player character, and there are a fairly limited amount of things to do. In theory, that’s when you get up and walk around. But unlike Pokemon Go, or Orna, SIGIL doesn’t let you see far away from you, or a map.
This makes it hard to set goals, or to target specific items or enemies to fight. If there’s some sort of system for how enemies and harvestable items are spawned, the game does not explain it, and I have not been able to figure it out just by looking. The game also doesn’t have an in-game map that underlays the interactable objects. This means that the only way to get more stuff is to just go out, and walk around.
This brings us to the second big mechanic: Combat.
Sigil has a grid based real time combat system that feels really interesting. The game starts you out with a single long range attack and block, but there are unlockable spells to summon minions, walls to block to block projectiles, and spells that require you to charge. You do all this while moving around, trying to stand in specific locations on the grid to get buffs, and pick up “Mana” that boosts your resource pool for the fight you’re in.
I have a few problems with the combat, but none of them are directly with the combat mechanics. Instead they’re all parallel problems. First off, you can’t play combat passively at all. You have to be actively engaged, moving around, attacking and blocking at all times.
Which is fine. That’s how video games are supposed to work. The problem is that with most video games, I’m not playing them while also trying to avoid walking directly into the path of an oncoming semi-truck.
The other issue with combat is the performance. I have a relatively new iPhone, and on the lowest settings, the game just sort of chugs along, occasionally lagging, and in one instance straight crashing.
My last painpoint is with the resources themselves. There is no easy way of figuring out how to get most things. One critical resource that’s used in every single hex craft, or hex upgrade, I straight up never found.
Instead, I went and bought it from the game premium currency shop, because of course it has a premium currency shop. It also has ads you can watch after combat to double your rewards bonus. This to me is almost more egregious, because, remember, this is an augmented reality game. You seriously want me to spend data streaming and watching an ad while I’m walking around outside?
You know what screams victory to me? Being told that if I watch an ad of someone screeching at a slot machine, I could get double rewards!
SIGIL is somehow less than the sum of its parts. It has a beautiful weird Tim Burton-esque world I actually would like to know more about, instead of being the typical mobile “Wow, you’re in a world where you need to collect girls who are an anthropomorphic personification of rocks/trains/boats/the subconscious desire to be loved.” It has a strong and unique combat system.
But the combat doesn’t work with the augmented reality, the crafting feels incredibly grindy, and typical mobile garbage rears its ugly head early, and doesn’t put it down.
Imagine that I come to you with an incredible idea for a business: buying lottery tickets. You are skeptical at first, but I make the following argument. We’ll only do it for a little bit. If it doesn’t turn out to be profitable, we’ll stop doing it, after a few months.
Oh, except instead of just going to a convenience store and buying Mega-Millions, I’m going to need you to get me a team of artists, programmers, a full QA team, and a publisher, because we’re not going to be buying lottery tickets, we’re going to be making live service games. So I guess in this metaphor, our lottery tickets take likely several hundred thousand dollars, and maybe a year or two to buy.
Let’s look at a few of those tickets shall we?
GUNDAM EVOLUTION just announced its end of service. Also, a bit ago, MultiVersus ended its beta, with a promise to return in 2024. These aren’t the only games, but they’re recent examples. CrimeSight was a paid game, and it was a brilliant deduction game with incredibly clever mechanics that never found a playerbase, and it shut its servers down. Oh, and The Cycle: Frontier, while it sucked, was a good example of this thing we’re talking about, so I guess I’ll include anyway.
As an outside observer, I don’t have perfect insight into what’s going on here, but I can make a guess. If I was in games purely for the money, I get why everyone would want a League of Legends, or an FGO, or a Genshin Impact. It’s tempting! And perhaps even the math makes sense. Maybe if you buy enough tickets, this all works out in the end.
But I can’t help but look at all of this and be mildly depressed. Thousands of man-hours, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and tons of effort is being spent on creating games that sometimes don’t even last a year.
And many of these games are good, when you peel back the endless daily quests, in app purchases, and optional addons that cost $30 a piece. They have their own communities and player base, but because they don’t become a massive hit, they get shut down.
It’s depressing to me that video games feel like they’re switching from something like a book, where you can have a cult classic that gets discovered years later, to something more akin to software as a service, where when it’s gone, it’s just gone.
