Dungeon Liberation: 40,000 Final Rats

"Do you remember lying in bed
With your covers pulled up over your head?
Radio playing so no one can see"

 

The Ramones - Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio?

 

 

Looking for a new RPG I decided to try Dungeon Rats, the Fallout Tactics or Icewind Dale non-roleplaying spin-off of the role-playing game The Age of Decadence. Which is to say, a straight-up dungeon crawl. No exploration, no plot options, no mysteries or puzzle-solving, no moral or style decisions, just stat min-maxing and a linear series of scripted combats.

 

I'm less than enthusiastic about such pure party-management games to begin with. I can get the same party-based combat in strategy games like Age of Wonders with a lot more economic and empire-building goodies on the side... or in a role-playing game with role-playing choices on top. Dungeon Rats might be assumed to suffer less than others by this single-minded focus, because AoD already boasted anachronistically difficult combat as a selling point. However, it did so amidst a host of other difficult choices offering alternate paths to success. If a fight was too hard, you could go shopping / exploring for more crafting ingredients and better gear or advance in some other part of the city via a noncombat quest. While in AoD you might ocasionally have to repeat the same combat thirty times over, praying to RNGesus for the crits to go your way, Dungeon Rats makes this your only option! That. Is. TheGame. Moreover, being party-based unlike AoD only increases the frustration of randomization under such high damage / health ratios, as it only means I now have three characters instead of one to fumble a defensive roll and die (permanently, with no chance of recovery or resurrection and few opportunities for replacement) forcing more reloads.

 

Looking for a new strategy game I decided to once again try Final Liberation, an old WH40K game I abandoned twice before: first because it dates from the Full Motion Video era (a.k.a. spectator LARPs - 'nuff said) and second because it seems to lack any sense of scale or escalation. Before uninstalling it yet again, I still find myself unenthused by simply being handed huge numbers of redundant units to maneuver one by one across forgettable but oversized maps. But speaking of enthusiasm:

 

That's just a "detailed stats" pop-up info window, but the backdrop added a bit of flair, placing the unit in question in action movie context. It looks... what's that word I've been using again?

Enthusiastic.

Final Liberation dates from the "Betty Boop" era of computer games, when consumers more often expected to immerse themselves in the activity, to be consumed by this novel medium instead of merely consuming. Granted, it attempts this in fairly stupid ways (FMV and that intrusive, detail-obscuring, cluttered unit stats window above) but it felt the need to offer something. Not every game needs every sort of fluff, be it flavor text or mood music or lavish backdrops or voice acting or character customization or level design or world building, but each needs to put some effort into a few of these fields. Otherwise a game with "retro" aspirations risks bringing to mind not the more memorable titles of yore, but the mountains of decrepit shovelware churned out by formula over the past half century.

More than even its frustrating combat limitation, I think it's this lack of interest that puts me off Dungeon Rats. It is possible to build a game around combat while still interjecting background information, decision-making, humor or drama (see FTL) to pull the player into its world. The Age of Decadence had that enthusiasm in spades. Dungeon Rats lacks it, gives the impression it must've been a chore to make and so its makers, in retribution, inflict it as a blasé chore upon their customers.