Twilight: 2000: Another Wreck

Good . . . bad . . . I'm the guy with the tank.

        

Well, it looks like Paragon is 0 for 4 on its adaptations of Game Designers' Workshop adaptations. Or perhaps GDW is 0 for 4 on decent RPG systems. Either way, Twilight: 2000 repeats the mistakes of the MegaTraveller titles (and, to a lesser extent, Space: 1889). It starts off with a great character creation system, then falls apart with no character development and a horrid combat system.
     

The next mission.

    

My second mission to liberate Poland from Baron Czarny had me heading to Miechow, where there was supposedly some kind of hostage crisis. When I got there, it turned out that the NPC I needed to speak with spoke French, and none of my current party members did. Rather than return to Krakow and pick up a French-speaking character, I decided it was simpler to just reload.
   

We couldn't just use hand signals?

     

It turns out, however, that the second mission randomizes the location you have to visit and the language of the NPC you have to speak with. This time, he spoke Romany. None of my 20 party members had taken that language, so I reloaded again, wondering if there were any non-randomized encounters that would require me to speak a language I hadn't specialized in.

The third try, I had to go to Proszowice. On the way, the game told me that my journey was interrupted by "trouble to the south." The "trouble" turned out to be a tank, or at least something capable of firing artillery. As I hesitated wondering how to proceed, the enemy managed to blow up my HMMWV and kill all my characters, ending the game with the laughing face of (presumably) the Black Baron.
     

The Baron wins again.

     

I read in the book that while vehicle combat is a thing, it can't be done in the HMMWV (despite something that looks like a gun on the roof), so the next time I got interrupted mid-journey, I had the characters bail from the vehicle and engage in combat on foot. They lasted about as long as you'd expect four characters on foot to last against a tank.

The next try, there was no interruption and random combat, for which I was grateful. Many more such random encounters would come, and not once have I managed to successfully engage or even flee the enemy. He pursues relentlessly, and while I might be able to avoid some of his salvos by zigging and zagging, he always gets me in the end.

Anyway, I finally reached the next city, Bochina, with a character who spoke the NPCs language. He told me that Czarny's soldiers had taken the hostage to the city of Pilca, so I headed there.
     

      

The tactical map of Pilca showed me an NPC in a house with enemies scattered about the area. As I got out of the HMMWV, the game told me my party was taking fire. I hustled into the house and spoke to the hostage, but he refused to leave until I dealt with Czarny's men. Thus, I returned outside and entered combat.

The game offers three "modes" of combat, and they all suck. The longest is "interactive" combat, and by choosing that method, you specify actions for each character each round. You and the enemy fighters trade rounds based on order of initiative, and each round a character can fire his weapon (with sub-options for automatic or semi-automatic), simultaneously advance and fire (with small arms), reload, aim (to get a better chance of hitting next time), change equipment, move, or flee.
     

Choosing from among various enemies to target.

     

In "descriptive" combat, the computer decides what actions your characters should take, and you just watch them (and the enemies) run around and perform them. You still get a detailed account of what's happening and how much damage everyone is taking. It takes only slightly less long than interactive combat, as in both cases it takes much longer to watch the enemy's actions than to perform your own.
     

The computer chose the action and tells me the result.

     

"Quick" combat is the same as "descriptive" except you don't get any descriptions of what's happening. You still have to sit there and watch the characters run around the battlefield, shoot, and whatnot, but when someone drops, it's a complete surprise. I was never able to successfully finish a combat on "quick" mode because it inevitably froze at some point. It would have been nice of the game had offered a true quick combat option where the computer simply fights behind the scenes and you see the results, like Wizard's Crown or Roadwar 2000, but alas.

In between rounds, you can "break off" combat and re-enter with a different mode if you want.

I thus fought most of my combats "interactive" style. These are the many problems I had with the system:

• Characters who mysteriously started combat with an initiative of 0 and never got a turn. I don't know what causes this. I'm not even sure what affects initiative. It doesn't seem to be correlated to attributes, weight, or health.

• Enemy pathfinding is awful. They routinely get hung up on houses. Other times, they run madly back and forth right in front of a character (which admittedly makes killing them easier).

    

Can I . . . uh . . . help you?

     

• My lead character, though skilled with small arms, almost never manages to hit anyone.

You were a cop?

            

• The enemies love targeting the party's HMMWV and destroying it even though they're nowhere near it.

                 

That was just spiteful.

   

• Enemies take an incredible amount of small arms damage before dying.

• Toss a grenade within 10 feet of them, however, and it's all over. The same is true of your own party members. That's realism, of course, but I'm not looking for that level of realism in an RPG, especially a turn-based RPG where the game doesn't give you any tactics to defend or avoid the grenades.

       

And that's a reload.

    

• Enemies seem to get twice the action that my characters do.

• Despite offering a relatively complex tactical map, there are hardly any actual tactics in combat. There are no defensive options and no stealth, for instance.

• Although you can view a tactical map at any time, I find it very difficult to judge distance and direction on the main screen. I guess that's something that will become easier over time.

• Some enemies aren't visible by some characters despite other characters able to see them from an equal distance.

• The manual offers inadequate descriptions of combat and its options. It appears that anything besides "quick" combat was a late addition to the game, covered only (briefly) in the errata, and the errata suggests options not actually in the game.

• As I'll cover below, enemies seem to scale in difficulty and equipment with the characters.

         

Nonetheless, after a few false starts, I managed to defeat the four enemies in a combat that lasted about 30-40 minutes. I picked up a few weapons and items of equipment from their bodies. The hostage said he was going to stay put for a while, but he gave me some papers to return to the NPC in Bochina.
    

It turned out staying here was safer than going with us.

     

I neglected to save at this point, and when I headed back to Bochina, I got stopped by one of those tank encounters and my party was destroyed.

By this time, I had received a message from a commenter who recommended equipping all of my characters with grenade launchers, saying it made combat much faster and easier. I was also concerned about my language deficiencies. So I started the game completely over with a new party and took care to give them all some heavy weapons skills, plus the weapons themselves, and also to ensure that among my 20 characters, every language was covered. I then went about solving the first two quests again, the first of which was that easy transfer of medical supplies.
      

During the second round of creations, I got this fantastic set of statistics.

     

I was in for a surprise, however, when I got into my first combat during the hostage rescue mission. As I marched into the field with my grenade launchers, I discovered that the enemies had also leveled up their destructive capabilities. They came at me with LAW rockets, RPG launchers of their own, and handheld grenades. They particularly enjoyed blowing up my HMMWV, a situation I only rectified (eventually) by hiding it behind some houses
      

The new party.

      

My characters sucked at aiming their grenade launchers at distance. If I got close, the party members got caught in their own grenade blasts. All in all, it was a terrible decision, rendered worse when two of my characters simply refused to act, round after round.

But I wasn't going to going to start over again, so I persevered and won the combat after a few reloads. The commenter was right that the grenade launchers made combat ultimately faster. If I could land a grenade near the enemy's feet, he died instantly.
     

A lucky shot.

     

My reward for solving the quest turned out to be a new 2.5-ton truck back at the base. This game is giving me flashbacks, as I drove both an HMMWV and a "deuce and a half" back when I was a reservist. I crashed a deuce into an HMMWV at one point, if I'm being honest, from which point my battalion commander called me "Beetle Bailey" until he retired. But I digress.
    

I wonder if any mission requires me to carry 2.5 tons of cargo.

     

For Mission 3, headquarters wanted me to clear out a Czarny squad from the city of Skawina. It was basically the same story as the previous mission, minus the hostage. Again, I had to reload a couple of times to reverse character deaths as I tried to figure out the combat system. Yes, by having you create 20 characters the game tries to make it so that one character's death isn't a huge deal. Except that 20 characters is way too many, and I only really put any effort into about 6 of them.
     

Completing Mission #3.

    

My reward for Mission #3 was an M1A1 tank, delivered conveniently to the garage at headquarters. (I never got to drive a tank in the Reserves; that's a special MOS.) I figured that maybe now I can take out that bastard who keeps interrupting my travels, but my first few experiences with "vehicle combat" have not gone well and I'm struggling to master the interface.
      

Getting destroyed in a version of quick combat, but for vehicles.

     
Mission 4 asked me to go Pilica again, where Czarny's forces have inflicted casualties. Arriving in the city, I find that there are five Czarny soldiers running around and a bunch of wounded peasants standing in fixed spots. I keep accidentally injuring the peasants during the ensuing firefight, which affords me no reward from the city's leader even if I run around healing them afterwards.
     

Hey, man, those people were almost dead when I got here.

     
I leave you still trying to figure out this mission, hoping there aren't that many total missions in the game. Part of me likes that this recent one involves a medical skill. Just as with MegaTraveller 2 and it's open-world approach with lots of side quests, there's a nucleus of a good game here. A good approach to Twilight: 2000 would offer a variety of missions that could be completed different ways, using different skills and different vehicles. A hostage-rescue mission might give you the ability to bluff your way into the building with "Persuasion" or "Disguise" skills, sneak in with "Stealth," assault it with standard combat skills, or perhaps even breach the walls or tunnel under it with "Civil Engineering." I suspect that's the way the tabletop game works. Unfortunately, the developers weren't that creative or were incapable of programming a game that creative.
     

Does he refer to him as a "peasant" to his face?

     
Meanwhile, it appears that they've completely given up on any character development. Neither of the MegaTraveller games had good character development, but they at least pretended it was there. You could occasionally pay to level-up a skill, and sometimes you'd get a level spontaneously just by using a particular weapon. There was no consistency or logic to it, but at least they didn't ignore it completely. Space: 1889 offered skill and attribute increases as quest rewards, or a consequence of finding particular items. Twilight: 2000 doesn't even go through the pretense. Your characters are fixed from the moment they finish the character creation process. You suddenly need a skill you didn't take during creation? Too bad; start over.

I get far more annoyed with games that had potential but failed than with games that were always destined to be dreck. I guess that's a good segue for moving from the former to the latter.

Time so far: 9 hours