It's an extra-special Monday as we managed 2 games this week. While CigDangle is playing Beowulf over in America I have been busy with Shadow Zone from Ojom.

Shadow Zone has a strange story about Chernobyl and radioactive mutants and the far future, but this turn-based strategy game could do with a little mutation of its own. It was nice that they at least put a story in, something that many such games lack.

 

Shadow Zone combines an interesting story with a turn-based strategic form of gameplay that takes the basics of the genre and distills them down into their essence. Unfortunately I think they may have distilled it too much. It is a slightly older title from Ojom so I hope their next TBS will show improvement.

The graphics on the game are pretty good considering the resolution and screen size one would play on. They remind me of some old SNES TBS games that I used to put hours into. Surprisingly, this game didn't capture my attention as much as those did and I know exactly why.

The game is nearly impossible to beat at times. The damage amounts vary greatly and when you think you will kill someone you do only one point of damage and their return fire will do 30. Bizarre considering we were both on the exact same terrain and the turn before I did 39 damage and took 16. It almost seems that the enemies take less damage each round so what was a 30 point attack is 20 the next and 10 the round after that.

They did a good job of making terrain and the characters look different but the animations are all basically the same. Also, no matter the unit type it seemed they all moved the same distance. The only change in this was terrain-based. Considering there is a mix of humans, mutated creatures and robots made for battle I would have expected drastically different movement rates from them.

The sound is decent and while I played at home I actually left the sound and music on so I could hear it during the battles. It's nothing awe-inspiring, but it does the title justice.

 The dialog is terrible in areas and I didn't always bother to read it. Peter, one of the characters you control, dies and Jane, another of the characters you control, gets over it in about 5 seconds. It goes something like this:

"Peter is dead. He was like a brother to me."
"Are you Ok Jane?"
...
"Yes, I'm over it now"

The game calculations seem to have been oversimplified as they are often unpredictable. One huge flaw in the game is that there is no undo action, so if you make a move you didn't want because you hit the wrong button, you're stuck with it.

Overall the game was interesting, at times even fun although frustrating. I made a mistake and lost a whole slew of moves because I had to go back to my saved game. When I went back to do the same thing again I was killed. Strange because I had just won that level quite easily and was only 3 rounds away from the end. That's the type of total randomness that occurs in this game. If you relish the thought of possibly having to do the same scenario several times because of unpredictability and no way to undo a simple mistake, then you will love this. Personally I could only play for about 20-30 minutes at a time before I became disinterested. Is it worth buying? That's up to you. I would at least look into it if you're in the market for a mobile turn-based strategy.

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