Nation Red: The Purity, Simplicity and Elegance of Zombie-Killing

We take a break from our regularly scheduled occult zombie-killing in The Secret World to bring you this feature on… more zombie-killing.

Or rather, you’re seeing my craving for variety in action. I like to change things up every now and then – different games feed and fill different ‘fun’ needs.

Some days, all you have time for is a half hour or two of gaming, and in general (though there are exceptions,) MMOs are not terribly good at short spurts of entertainment. Load up the client, patch whatever is necessary, enter in your password and log in, one-third or more of your game time is gone. Take another one-third to reorientate on who your character is, what they’re currently up to with their quests/missions log and check their inventory or equipment, and by the time you gallop or jog to your destination, you may as well log off before killing those ten rats.

Enter the arcade shooter.

I like shooters. You might have noticed with my /played time on Realm of the Mad God.

A good one is rat-killing distilled to a pure fine essence.

And these days, they all come with Achievements like MMOs for extra challenges. (But they’re optional and just for kicks, if you want to.)

Nation Red is an oldie and a goodie.

It didn’t hit my radar until one of the ubiquitous Steam sales where it was going for ludicrously cheap, and I picked it up on an impulse buy. (If I recall, it may have been one of those Summer achievement-fest events, which are a great excuse for me to buy and sample a whole lot of indie games and hopefully find a diamond in the rough or two.)

Hell, Nation Red is a polished gem. Don’t believe me? Ask Totalbiscuit then. The opening cinematic sequence was an eyebrow-raiser in terms of the polished Half-Life 2-esque graphics I wasn’t expecting, and the game just gets better from there.

Basically, shoot zombies. Or smack them with melee weapons. But the optional variations just keep going up from there until it looks ‘deep,’ in the sense that there’s many ways to play this.

You can select your class to focus on different strengths. As you level, you get perks, similar to a Fallout style, that improve and change up your game. Weapons drop like candy, all of which have various firing patterns, and providing a constant stream of having-to-adapt-to-the-situation – especially if you accidentally pick up the wrong weapon at the wrong time. Power-ups also keep throwing in variety into the mess of zombie waves that keep coming.

There’s multiple game modes: a bunch of missions, Free-Play, Survival and Barricade, you can play in single-player mode or multiplayer, but the essence is simple, survive and keep shooting, not necessarily in that order.

And there’s an elegance in that simplicity. Easy to grasp, hard to master. Aim, shoot, kill, dodge, run, kite, round and round, testing yourself over and over, increasing your score, leveling up and learning and challenging yourself as the game adapts naturally and perfectly to your current capabilities.

Not so good at the game? Die earlier. Try again. Get better. Survive longer. Get a higher score. Die again. Repeat until enough. For now.

And the game will keep until the next time you feel like a bout of pew-pewing. No subscription nonsense necessary.

—

Messed around for half an hour with it today. (It came to my attention as it just got a recent update on Steam, a new Prison level for the Barricade game mode.) Scored a few more Achievements through the regular course of play. Was fun.

RotMG: Whaddya Mean I’m Not Done?

Mad God Update.

Steam Played Hours: 69

My archer actually maxed defence roughly a week ago, but I didn’t want to post a celebratory note and then proceed to jinx it with YASD.

Instead I was taking a much-needed wizard farming break and having the archer go out to play around. It’s been… different. Very much so.

1) Damage Pattern Ain’t The Same

I’m using a Golden Bow on the archer. It’s the only vaguely respectable bow I own. The firing pattern is a spread of three arrows.

On the one hand, the spread means good aim is less necessary. (And I don’t -have- great aim, so that’s nice.)

And on the other paw, it means my damage is spread out at long range, when only one arrow can hit. If I want to apply more damage, that means running in closer to mid-range where the god bullets are closer together. Which is more nerve-racking.

In the screenshot, the difference is really obvious. The necromancer behind me has nearly the same firing pattern as a wizard and he’s pew pew’ing the beholder at a much faster pace and with higher damage than my archer can.

If I was concentrating more (and not just out to take a screenshot for demo purposes,) I could hit both gods with my firing pattern, but overall dps per god would be lower since likely only one arrow would hit each.

Or I could move in closer on the ghost god and try to hit it with two or even three arrows and increase dps that way.

Assuming I didn’t eat a faceful of bullets.

2) High Stats is Noticeably Better

Then again, eating one or two bullets on the archer is not the “ow, argh, my face!” experience it is for the throwaway farming wizards.

Between the max defence, which cuts down on the damage per bullet, and the high (if not yet maxed) vitality, which determines hp regeneration rate, and the naturally higher health bar reservoir, the archer has much higher resiliency and survivability.

Even if I accidentally get too hurt, the high vitality helps to regen it back at a fast pace. Downtime is a couple of seconds, especially if I throw on a +7 vitality ring for an extra boost.

The wizard by contrast is noticeably squishier.

Come to think of it, after checking the wizard base stats average on the Mad God wiki, this incarnation #5 is possibly somewhat below average to average. Slightly higher dex, slightly lower speed and wisdom, about average on attack and vitality. Not sure on the hp and mp, I’m too lazy to log in to check right now.

I won’t be suiciding him to reroll better stats like some people do, though. No point hastening the inevitable. He’s been kinda lucky in that he’s survived this long, and gotten a T8 Staff of Horror (one tier better than my standard T7 Staff of Destructions for throwaway wizards) and a T4 Destruction Sphere spell. He’ll bite it one day on his own. Of that, I am sure.

The one thing I really miss on the wizard is speed.

I still enjoy the glass cannon crazy direct damage mobile turret thing he’s got over the archer. But the archer has 45 speed over his 24, and it feels SO much better. It’s more fluid and dodging is easier and more forgiving of slower reaction times. One can circle strafe gods and do other crazy risky things with higher speed.

I’m still working on getting the rest of the archer’s stats maxed, but once he maxes speed, I’ll be glad to start squandering some on the wizard. Probably not this one, since he’s starting out below average, but chances are good he’ll be dead by then.

(Poor fella, talking about him like that. Maybe he’ll prove me wrong? …Nah.)

Both classes are capable of doing sufficient damage for both soulbound drops and stat pots. That I tested. It’s naturally easier solo, rather than side by side competing with more buffed out wizard types.

The archer takes slightly longer to kill gods, but the tradeoff is he can hang around much longer as well. And some gods like the sprite god are much easier, the bullet spread lets me hit the god while dodging and circle strafing and the higher resiliency means being hit by a bullet or two is not as painful.

I suspect I’ll be alternating between the two to farm.

(Another worthwhile goal is to try and hit 400 fame with the archer as that’s a class quest that earns a star. But that one is long-term and all in good time, because the archer will have to die in order to reap the fame, and I really rather not have him die just yet.)

I just have to start playing more carefully with less ‘throwaway’ mentality from now on. (Which might help Wizard #5 to survive…

…I doubt it, somehow.)

RotMG: Oops #2 – Expected Expiration and a Variety Break

I’ve been getting in bouts of Realm of the Mad God over the last week. More godlands farming for stat pots. Nothing exciting to post about. It might help if I actually counted the stat pots that drop per session, but I’m a failure at OCD planning where that is concerned.

I just shoot stuff, see nothing drop most of the time, shoot more stuff, check the purple bag, shoot even more stuff, hey, a stat pot. Pick it up. And when I’m sitting on 2-3 of them, head back to the Nexus, put it in the Vault, switch characters, chug the potions down, and switch characters back to shoot some more.

Count? What count? That would break the flow.

So it was inevitable that this would happen one day. (About seven days to the last wizard, says the news postings on the game.)

A couple milliseconds too late to absorb the fact that the squishy glass cannon had absorbed one too many ghost god bullets.

Ah well, easy come, easy go.

Got a bit tired of the endless farming, so I decided to switch it up a bit. My Steam RotMG account hadn’t unlocked all the character classes yet (though my Kongregate one had, so I didn’t find it a rush to do so for the Steam one.)

Still, Steam has Steam Achievements! Nothing like a few popups to raise the spirits.

I had Assassin and Paladin left to take to 20 and unlock the rest. Should be easy since I figured out how to get to lvl 20 in 20-30 minutes.

Lucked into a massive quest mob spawn on the assassin. Fairly insane hordes, but amusing.

Also discovered I don’t really have much skill at playing the shorter range classes. Often can’t dodge in time. I like the higher base speeds of the dagger using rogue classes, and I think the dagger range is decent – playing it well can probably be learnt some day.

I suspect I didn’t have a good enough ability item for the assassin – I couldn’t find any higher tier poisons to twink him out with (I think I chucked the one or two I had on the Kongregate account, and I was too lazy to log in on that) so no decent aoe damage.

Worth trying again some day. As is, I got tired of him failing to kill gods efficiently once he hit lvl 20, so I put back all his gear into the vault, and hurled him into the mouth of random death.

Paladin time.

I was missing a sword, so he started out really slow with the base sword. Just kept grabbing any sword upgrades that fell off the mobs, making sure not to push him too fast beyond his killing ability (he was decked out in 20 def armor and +6 def ring, so fairly impervious to anything lowbie).

At level 10, he found a Giant Snake quest mob. On death, it dropped a Jungle portal, so in he went.

The Jungle is a pretty fun dungeon for level 10s, nothing too hard, just some annoying mobs that like to hide behind the trees.

One of the mobs has this cool debuff bullet effect called “Hallucination” which turns everything on your screen into… well… see for yourself

Got him to level 20, unlocked the class and the achievement, and also decided to kill him off. I can’t manage melee at present. I’m sure it’s fun to stand around impervious to most things, but to do it at high levels means I’d have to farm enough defence first, and we’re still having problems on that avenue

As of now, range is too short to do anything without eating some very painful shotguns and risking death every god mob, so off went his gear and into the lava he went.

Their total lifespans, about an hour for the assassin and half an hour for the pally.

For the hell of it, I took a mystic to 20 next to try out the stasis ability. Unfortunately, players are so well trained to ignore the three orbiting golem gods that even if you stasis, they walk away and don’t help you to kill them. And I was dismayed by her lack of base attack and dex, which made god farming slightly more tedious than on the wizard.

Commit harakiri, she did too.

So I guess it’s back to farming wizards again. (Priests and necromancers I also like, but we’ll save that for the next time I get bored.)