Arbite Enforcers & Other miniatures

As i may or may not have mentioned before, I’m currently building up a brettonian army for WFB to play against LLcoolJo.  Frequent painting rage has limited my success in getting this done, but i’m getting to the point that i can actually field something worth while, and the standard of painting is pretty good thanks to some deft finishing work by Mr CoolJo.

As a way of breaking up that painting, I requested some Arbite Enforcers for Christmas to paint.   The 40k universe was what got me tuned in to miniature gaming, and i prefer small squads to huge armies to paint, so i basically went for the mini’s i thought were cool and damn the consequences.  10 models that are essentially based on Judge dredd, with some big shields. I have a penchant for big shields.

A third project i have on the go is some extra models for my Blood Bowl Lizard men – I have a team, but would like to be able to field a full set, which meant i needed a couple of extra saurus and some skinks.  I don’t necessarily need them, but i’d like to get them whilst they’re available, and it’s nice to have a full set.  This leads me on to my recent endeavour of making a nicer Blood Bowl board.  Will probably come up as a post at some point, but i’ve managed to find a set of interlocking foam boards that should make a good board that will give some character, but allow for some portability (Foams quite thick, so it won’t be as portable as a board, but i find the board to be a bit dull).

Enslaved: Done and Done

Enslaved was a game i’ve had on my radar for a long time and i finally got round to playing / finishing it last week.  Without going on for too long, most of the things said about it by everyone else I agree with, namely:  Great acting, fun gameplay, good length, room for improvement.

The acting in particular was just superb.  Nothing fancy, and always understated, the relationships between the three characters play out with a real air of authenticity.  After the problems I had investing in vanquish, this was a real change of scenery, and was a perfect antidote to that problem.  You care about what’s going on.

I was playing it on hard, which for the most part was quite cool, and made most of the fights interesting instead of bash bash bash – you have to block and dodge quite a bit.  Main issue with hard was swarming – if you get 3 bots attacking you you can die very quickly, which as the game went on happened at a few bottle necks to really take the charm off.  Unfortunately, i haven’t got the sense to admit the level should be a notch lower and so i carried on regardless.  It certainly helped to give a desperate feel to the proceedings.

Recommendation: I paid £17, for that price you can’t go wrong.

I’ll probably pick up the DLC if it ever goes half price on a gold offer, but wasn’t pigsy’s biggest fan.

Vanquish. Vanquished.

Finally got off my arse and finished Vanquish the other day, so thought it best that i worte up my thoughts on it.  In essence, the gameplay is fun but lacks anything to send it into the innovative category, the difficulty is tough and the story is bat shit crazy and almost impossible to follow.

Some of the most enjoyable moments come from the boss fights that have a real one more go quality about them.  All of them are tough, and basically rely on the same combo of run away, shoot lots, scream at the television that they must be dead by now, run away, shoot some more.  The main difference to this is if you have the rocket launcher, which does an absolutely massive amount of damage to most things, to the point it seems like cheating to use it.  It scratches a similar itch to Lost planet 2, where the ridiculousness of the bigger and bigger boss battles with the one weak point you need to shoot.  But Lost Planet 2 was better in that sense, the akrid were just so huge you felt you needed to shoot them that long, in Vanquish, it often seems like shooting for shootings sake.

Visually the whole thing is impressive, but i never felt like i was really invested in the whole thing.  The story was so all over the place it ended up lacking any real context at all, and i think that was really to its detriment.  On playing the demo I had high hopes for this and was quite excited to play it, and now I’ve finished i can’t help but feel a little bit meh about it, which was not what i was expecting.