Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Squad goals: Gain Ground made team-building a blast

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Squad goals: Gain Ground made team-building a blast

    At first glance, Gain Ground appears to be retreading old ground. With its chunky combatants and sorta top-down view, it looks rather like teeming mega-brawler Gauntlet broken up into bite-size chunks. Instead of a sprawling, eight-way-scrolling dungeon with enemies crammed fractiously into corridors like commuters on a rush-hour train, you are presented with a single screen -*often a rather sparse, scraggly green-brown field more suited to a mid-tier music festival than the glorious crucible of combat. Gain Ground has no gold to collect, no food to shoot. There are still plenty of baddies, though, and it's your task to wipe them out as a warrior of your choosing.
    Perhaps you fancy a turn as the bald spear-chucker with a handlebar moustache who can shish kebab enemies camped on higher ground? Or maybe you prefer to play as a trigger-happy lady commando packing stick grenades. It feels like a vertical slice of Gauntlet - combat with the training wheels on, a primer in how to fight effectively when outnumbered. It eases the player into things, and gives you enough agency to feel like you're in charge. There's also a sneaky byproduct: when you mess up, it's tangibly your own fault.
    What I loved about Gain Ground back in the day, and still love about it now, is the way it literalises the old three-lives gaming trope. You start with a trio of characters, and once they're all dead, it's game over. But you can swell your ranks by picking up new recruits along the way -*frozen, slightly shrunken fighters who look like garden gnomes placed incongruously on each battlefield. Collect one and successfully steer them past the barbarians and angry knights to the exit zone, and they return to actual size and are added to your roster for future levels. Play with a little tactical care and before long, you can assemble an Expendables-style squad with a broad spectrum of overlapping specialities. You've gone from just three lives to seven, nine, a dozen.
    Read more…


    More...
Working...
X