PEGBRJE: Shoot Shoot Mega Pack and Hellenica
Minimalism and Tactical Overload.
Shoot Shoot Mega Pack, or SSMP for short, is a collection of four shooty arena titles by Actual Humans. They are in fact actually human I think, specifically a group of indie dev humans out of Canada just creating games for real people. So what is this title that has ben made for those of us that are real? Well, there are little cute planes that players control that shoot out bullets and survive. Sounds pretty real to me!
I called it a collection, but that’s not entirely right as there could be an implication that the four titles are vastly different. In reality, they are four different approaches to the standard arena shooter formula to spice up gameplay. For example, Zoom has the map shrinking with every shot fired by any player, with the map edges being the kill zone and the bullets being bouncy. Sync is by far the hardest to adjust to, as every player within the game has their thruster and firing ability linked; every shot made is made by everyone, which can seriously throw anyone off for getting distracted. Fade has all players invisible until they shoot, to which they fade in and out of existence making for a difficult time to find them. Thankfully for those previous two, bullets are lethal this time, so no need to worry about hitting people into walls. The final one, my personal favourite, is Void. Shots fired are of the bouncing variety such as in Zoom, but after they’ve completed travelling they become large voids. Getting knocked into one through any means (including making a void move since it is an object that bounces) causes the player to be destroyed, turning a simple arena into an area of denied space.
These are the 4 ‘hardset’ modes, but that doesn’t limit players in the slightest — as many will find out, there are tons of options inside SSMP to turn a simple arena into an absolute monstrosity of chaos. There are presets to be made, new maps to play on, rulesets to alter and combinations galore to find what works best for whomever is present to play. Chaos Mode utterly destroys any semblance of sanity but generating completely random rulesets for the game, while Party Mode will select presents and throw in some surprises here and there. These features only unlock after players have put in some time (probably to avoid overly complicated rulesets before players get used to it) so this isn’t all available from the start. Fret not, however, for thanks to the sheer simplicity players will be constantly hoping to beat each other over and over again, so this problem is essentially nonexistent.
There’s been a few other titles that have similar goals as SSMP, but I feel that this is easily the most polished of them all. The minimalism allows for better focus on the game itself while still conveying exactly what is going on. The ships are all tight and consistent, with each shot even shooting them back a tad to convey weight which was a nice addition. I know this because I ended up shooting and losing the round thanks to it; not the best way to recognize polish, but I’ll take it. I can only gush so much about the polish, so take this gif as explanation of it’s beauty.
If you’re looking for a fantastic game to play with friends once we’re actually able to do that again, then SSMP is exactly the opener to start with. The more the merrier I’d say — I only had one available person to play with, and even then I had fun. But I know it could be even more.
Hellenica is an old school tactics strategy game made by TheDragonLoft, an indie studio who released this title back in 2017. On this alternate history, Ancient Greece has discovered the power of steam and industrialized everything rapidly. Diona has been selected to become the warrior champion of Artemis, tasked with discovering her cryptic message to stop an incoming catastrophe. How she does this, however, is completely up to the player as she meets new faces throughout the Ancient Greek isles, some renowned throughout history. Even the possibility of the catastrophe may be up for debate.
Hellenica may look very familiar to any fans of the older grid turn-based strategy titles of the past, such as the JRPGs Fire Emblem and FF Tactics or the Western titles of X-COM. This gameplay structure follows these inspirations quite closely: players will start a combat instance by preparing what skills are prepped for each character, before jumping right in. Players will then have full control over each fighter, moving them along the grid to perform one of 4–5 actions varying based on each character, coupled with their individual passives such as Diona’s ability to morph into a bear every so often. How players execute each move is important, especially the order in which they execute these moves as technically everything will be done at once in that order upon ending the turn. Think of the player’s combat phase as a pause in time, and then every move is executed, rather than Fire Emblem’s ‘every move is completed and done after completing individual turns’.
Terrain plays a massive factor in combat success as well, for there will be modifiers when attacking from the flank or from above if a character can be situated. There’s even the ability to just toss people off of cliffs or into their allies to deal damage to them all, like treating the enemy as a boulder. Effective AND flashy. Of course, if the enemy doesn’t die, it still serves as a useful purpose to move them out of position seeing as they have their turns after the player’s. Any edge one can take, one should.
Outside of combat, players are treated to the other half of the game; the RPG. Each fight leads them to a new city or location to visit, to which they can talk with the locals and gain information about their recent quest. This usually presents more than one option to the player to explore, opening up the ‘story’ menu to see the multiple threads woven by Fate to see. Where players choose to go will completely alter the fights they encounter, along with who may end up within the party (or die within the party). That catastrophe that Diona is warned of isn’t explicit, nor is it written in stone; as Socrates says (paraphrasing), “Greece is beset by many catastrophes at the moment”.
Since it is an alternate timeline, Hellenica does its best to introduce some aspects of commentary on the subject that unfortunately have yet to go anywhere. One of the biggest focuses is that, due to the rapid industrialization, many ‘ludites’ have risen up to challenge the ruling of whether these steam machines are destroying Greece. It has torn the nation apart (granted, Greece being unified is a laugh and a half on its own), with many rebelling against Athens for its acceptance and causing tensions within the Mediterranean coast. How players choose to explore different plots may effect how this is altered, but Diona is fairly set in her ways of ‘not bothering with these people’ so the plot mostly takes the approach of her fixing things without intending to help.
It’s an interesting title, this Hellenica; one that brings one of my favourite genres to a very niche setting with upgrades, skills, branching plot lines and more. The combinations of where I could take my crew were staggering, and the combat is fun to knock people off of cliffs continuously. It’s not super customizable, but it has a set amount of options that keep it relatively fun and fresh while exploring this alternate history. If you wish to have some strategic fun with a Spartan Hoplite, a techno-nerd and a Bear, then this is definitely one to look into.
