Pros: Exciting strategy, decent graphics, variation of classes
Cons: Customization is quite linear, a wider selection of Commander pings would be ideal, the games can snowball quit quickly
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We jumped into the new European/US beta of Affected Zone Tactics from IDC Games, a team orientated turn based PVP strategy game where you control one or more mercenaries in a team and go up against other players in point capture PVP battles. The game has been pretty big in Russia for a while, but finally it has been localized into English (and other European languages) so we finally took the chance to try it out for a few hours.
The game revolves around the concept of mercenaries, corporations, mutant settlers and criminals all battling it out in an unknown land known as the Tesla Zone, named after Nikola Tesla after his research lead to the construction of a huge teleporter that is the only way to reach this place. It is the typical “we found a valuable resources so let’s all kill each other for it” that we’ve seen in a lot of MMOs. In all honesty though the backstory and lore are kind of redundant outside of the websites description, the game doesn’t even seem to scratch the surface of any story content, and it doesn’t need it; the game is a team based PVP strategy so the lack of RPG really isn’t noticeable. Second to that is the maps, which we’ll touch on later, but they could be anywhere on Earth, albeit a little run down, but there’s nothing particularly alien about the environments you fight in, the weapons you use or the mercenaries you recruit.
Starting out you get to choose your initial class; an Assault Submachine Gunner who has high mobility and health, an Assault Machine Gunner who has high accuracy and damage, or the Assault Grenadier who can attack around obstacles and helps control the map a little. We jumped in with the Assault Submachine Gunner figuring we’d try our hand at being a scout and getting around the map to get vision on our enemies.
The game takes you into a brief tutorial which covers all the basics of combat; you get two Action Points per turn and the different actions you can take (firing, reloading, moving) can take one or two points. Similarly the game goes over Cover where the environment has different coloured indicators to show the level of cover an object will give you as well as vision and the ability to move silently so as to remain off the enemies’ radar. The basics are simple, but the nuances of the game and a few of the mechanics aren’t that well explained, so took a while before we started to get a better idea of how accuracy and damage was being calculated.
The first few matches we played in were 4 v 4 battles, unaware at the time but the number of mercenaries per team increases as you level up (or maybe just when more players are available), but we were getting six to a team towards the end of our testing. The size of the group also determines the size of the map, there are a pretty wide selection of semi-apocalyptic maps available that range from military bases to urban streets, all littered with burned out vehicles and wrecked buildings; the larger the map the more capture points available and the more points you needed to win a game.
It didn’t take long for us to get bored of the lack of damage output from our character and so we created a new Grenadier to be a little more tactical with our positioning, we were constantly getting prompted to be the Commander of the group, but in the beginning we had no idea what it did and so kept refusing. So onto the battles…
We found the early game smaller maps were quite frustrating; both teams start with their own point already captured and so it is a race to cap the central point, which only requires moving onto it for a turn to switch it from neutral to your team colour. The points rack up pretty quickly and so if you don’t capture or flip the middle point, the game is generally over pretty quickly with nearly all matches being sub-ten minutes. The frustrating part was how oblivious so many team members seemed; getting to the capture point but being too afraid to step out from cover to move across it and catch it, so often we saw a stalemate of players just shooting at each other whilst the timer ticked down obvious that the team who had capped the middle were going to win simply through inaction of the other team.
You really need some early aggression to capture a point and then push the other team out, it’s pretty common sense, but so often you would have people hanging way back and barely contributing. Fortunately as we levelled up we unlocked a second Mercenary slot.. and then things changed.
Whilst there are a set number of mercs per team, you are able to control more than one mercenary in the battle. With our frustration of players not capping points we reverted to having a Submachine Gunner to back up our Grenadier commander, if people wouldn’t use their own common sense then we’d start leading by example. Able to research different gear we made our new NPC “Adam” what we termed as a runner; his purpose was to get in, get on the point and then get out and head off to the next one, so we researched into improved armor to give him a little more sustain, weapons be damned as he wouldn’t be staying around long enough to fight.
We also took the hint and chose to start playing as the Commander, which gave us access to different map pings where we could try and direct players to Take a Point, Attack a Target or Defend a Location (you do have team chat but no one would talk, or couldn’t understand). Suddenly our experience shifted massively; we were now commanding our team to all push in a certain direction, forcing the enemy team onto the defensive, whilst Adam went solo skirting around the edge of the map to pick up the abandoned points. It was a strategy that worked remarkably well, but no doubt due to the players we were up against being fairly inexperienced, regardless it was a lot of fun and really gave us an enjoyable experience.
The game is pretty solid, with team work it definitely opens up to being a much more fun experience, organizing your group to fill different roles and working on coordinated attacks against the same targets. Riding solo it is a bit more of a challenging until you start levelling up and are alongside more experienced players who have a little more intuition about what to do in a battle. Overall, most definitely recommended and a fun strategy game for sure.
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