R-Type Tactics

The next game that's been taking a pretty significant portion of my time is R-Type Tactics, which is a weird way to take the series I think.  For anyone who may not know, R-Type is a dirty big long series of side scrolling shooter games for various formats, most notably in the arcades so to see it appear as a turn based strategy game more than raised an eyebrow the first time I saw it.

Anyway, the story for this thing is that there is this huge alien army called the Bydo that's being ruining Earth's shit for a long long time and its up to you to get all your ships together and go wreck face.  It's a pretty minimalistic plot that tries to flesh itself by talking about the state of the Earth army and crap like that, but if you've ever played a shooter, you don't give a shit about the plot then and you won't give a shit about it now.

 I'm actually finding this game kind of hard to write about as now that I think about it, it's actually pretty boring.  Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy playing R-Type Tactics, but I can't ever do more than one or two missions in one sitting and by the time its over I'm pretty burnt out.

I think the problem is that there is very little variation in the missions and all the objectives boil down to "kill the enemy flagship" and on top of that all the maps are just expanses of space or boring orange looking interior levels.  Granted I've not beaten the game yet, there may be some cool looking levels coming up, but I'm pretty far and it's been dull as shit so far.

The second problem I have with this game, is the "tactics" part of the title.  I've used the same strategy every time and I've never even come close to losing a level yet.  Oh, and before anyone calls me out on my progress, I'm INVADING THE BYDO HOME WORLD, so that must be getting on to the last section of the game at least.  Every level I just scout, keep the bombers close behind, keep the fighters in the back until their charged and then let them rip, and that's it, missions usually over by that point.  That feeling of routine that has sunk in with each mission really makes me not want to play it for long periods of time, it does an absolutely garbage job of keeping me engaged.

The third issue I have with this game is the ships.  Here is an example of the Research and Development menu to build new ships.

Sorry about the image quality, I had to take it off my camera because I don't know how to get proper screen shots off a PSP, so whatever.  Anyway, unless you've played the game you have no idea how good or bad these ships actually are, but take it from me, apart from the bomber they are ALL garbage.  I refuse to even waste resources on a Orbit Fighter because it's going to be a load of crap just like the rest of them.  Oh, and that bipedal thing is a load of wank too, and that's the upgrade that I own down at the bottom.  It has like, 2 movement and can only melee, so yeah, fat lot of fucking good that ship is.  Finally, that bomber, is the most overpowered goddamn unit in any turn based game I've ever seen.  It comes equipped with a nuke, that just bodies whatever the hell you fire it at.  It never misses and it does HUGE damage.  So you keep a resupply unit on each of your bombers and your set for every mission.  Sure, the fighters get a super powerful charge shot, but it takes like 4 turns to charge so that can piss off too.

Anyway, one final issue I have with this game is the load times.  Loading between missions is OK, but occasionally the game will do that Advance Wars thing where it shows the groups of ships firing on each other.  At first its cool, as an R-Type fan to see the ships and bosses rendered in 3D but the problem is, the game has to load each sequence and it takes a LOOONG time.  You can add about 10 minutes of mission time just in loading time for those sequences so to make the boring missions go faster you end up just turning that shit off anyway.

Up there I said somewhere that I enjoy playing R-Type Tactics, but over the course of writing this post I think I've made myself hate it.  Anyway I'll slog through it and post some updates about the rest of the game later.