The New Flesh

Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood is undoubtedly one of the most visually impress 3D indie games I’ve ever seen. It also plays pretty well, sounds pretty good, seems technically solid and has it’s own fairly unique style and yet none of that can save it.

Lets talk about the good things first because in fairness to the developers Sakari Indie there are many many good things about Foreign Legion and I’d like to get them out the way before I proceed with the crucifixion.

Foreign Legion is an over the shoulder third person shooter. The premise is simple, you’re the last survivor of a group of army folk who is tasked with defending a group of civilians who are barricaded inside a nearby building against waves of attacking enemies until the helicopter arrives and rescues you all. There are three different types of enemy and they’re quite nicely varied. The standard soldier types with assault rifles who try to shoot you or if you hide they start shooting the building and damaging it. The suicide bombers are armed with pistols and explosive vests, they run towards the building at all times and if they get there they explode doing a fair chunk of damage. Finally there are the rocket men, they have RPGs, like the soldiers they’re shoot you if they see you and the building if they can’t, either way they’re big trouble and you’ll want to kill them as fast as possible. Perhaps not the most inspired list in the world but each class does represent a different kind of threat and demands a different response so they do the job of keeping you roughly on your toes.

Zoomed in for the kill

Gameplay wise most of the time it all amounts to standing roughly in front of the building you’re defending and shooting people in the face! Generally with your assault rifle, sometimes with RPGs, occasionally with air strikes, rarely with a minigun that you can sometimes collect from right the other side of the map that isn’t really worth the walk and never ever with your pistol because it might as well be a banana. The shooting itself is quite good fun and oddly considering the cartoon look to the game counter-strike style rules apply so most of the time your looking for head shots and shooting more than a quick burst results in a large decrease in accuracy that makes all the difference at the hard and veteran difficulty level. I found that little detail very pleasing, there’s just something about the juxtaposition of using my limited counter-strike skills to shoot what look a lot like Lego men that makes me smile.

Thankfully you can’t just just pick the obvious spot and turtle because at some point you’ll need to collect ammo from half way down the map or go to your radio and request more ammo is dropped half way down the map and there isn’t quite enough time to do one of these things between waves of enemies so it all gets quite pleasingly chaotic. It’s quite exciting but also fairly generic, it is after all basically just the defend the point scenario that has come up at least once in almost every shooter made in the ten years. It’s solid but it isn’t the sort of thing to inspire any great love for the game.

The graphics are what really make Foreign Legion stands out from many other indie games. Now that I actually think about it there are a fair few indie games that do the whole 3rd dimension thing but there aren’t that many that do it with the professionalism and style of Foreign Legion (by the way, click on the screenshots for full size version). The whole thing has a very stylised cartoony Lego look to it that reminds me a bit of Battlefield Heros. The desert theme works very well and the early sunset lighting is a nice touch and all in all it’s really quite a pretty game. The giant yellow chickens standing about the place waiting to be shot are rather odd but what the heck.

The minigun makes a rare appearance.

The sound design is also very good. The weapons sound right, right in this case is rather weedy but since my mind insists these are Lego guns that does seem. The dynamic soundtrack also works very well, it’s generic rock that sinks into the background quite well and and keeps up with the action a lot better than say the one used in Far Cry 2.

Ok, now for the crucifixion. Lets start off with difficulty, the game has four difficulty modes, easy, medium, hard and veteran. They seem to purely adjust how much damage the enemies can take before dying, maybe also number of enemies but I wasn’t really keeping count. I’m ok at TPSs, definitely not good because I’ve never really felt at home with them but I can hold my own so I’d have said I should probably be having a bit of trouble on hard and veteran should kick my ass. As it turns out easy and medium are cake walks, hard is medium at best and I beat veteran on the 2nd attempt so I’m sceptically of it qualify as a hard setting never mind anything above that. This has obvious implications as to the value of the game, basically if you’re a competent gamer then you’ll likely find there’s no real challenge here and you’ll likely die once or twice on your way to beating the hardest difficulty level. That ain’t good.

Now for the real killer, length, this game is about 10 minutes long. Yep, that ain’t no typo, 10 minutes. There’s only one level and it takes a maximum of 10 minutes because after that long the chopper will arrive even if you haven’t beaten every wave. I beat every difficulty level, messed about, deliberately lost, got all 10 steam achievements (most of which you get during normal play) and took some screenshots for this review. The total time I played at the end of all that was 1.2 hours. There very basic online leader boards but without even a basic view friends option I think you’d have to really get into this game to want to more than glance at those and there just isn’t enough of a game here to demand that level of devotion.

Ok so is at best an hour long, that’s bad but we have to compare it the price before we can make a proper judgement on value for money, well at the time of writing it’s £5.24, $5.24, €5.24 for the PC version Steam (Mac versions are also available from Gamersgate but then it’s even more expensive). Ok so because I’m a self centred Brit let me assess this according to the £5.24 price. I think the politest thing I can say is this game is a total ripoff.

Now I know the sort of things people are going to say. They’ll say it’s an indie title and we should make allowances. That’s utter nonsense, the whole point of the current Indie revolution is that many indie titles like World of Goo, Darwinia, Defence Grid, Braid, Zeno Clash, Blueberry Garden and The Penny Arcade Adventure to name but a few are competing with the big name games without any special allowances, they’re competing on merit alone. Sure some of them are very short, Blueberry Garden in particular but Blueberry Garden is also longer, cheaper and a lot more interesting than Foreign Legion and unlike Foreign Legion it can still compete with the big name titles without any special allowances being made.

People will also say that I should stop moaning because it’s just the price of a couple of pints of beer or a sandvich or whatever. Well fortunately when I’m buying entertainment my choices aren’t limited to Beer, sandvich or Foreign Legion. I could for instance choose to spend three times as much and choose to buy the ‘Bioshock/Oblivion’ double pack for £14.99 from play.com or if I wanted something newer for less than three times as much I could get ‘Fallout 3′ for £12.99 from Gameplay.co.uk. If I didn’t have that much and wanted to stick to Steam I could buy the original ‘Far Cry’ or ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ each of which are only £4.99 on Steam and both of which are far better games than Foreign Legion on top of each being at least ten times as long.

Adding insult to injury is that fact Foreign Legion is currently 25% off, the normal price is going to be 6.99 so if your reading this in a weeks time then you can amplify every bit of criticism here by 33% (trust me that works out). If you’re rich and you really fancy a fun shallow little TPS to occupy the next half hour of you life then by all means ignore the price concerns and buy Foreign Legion and then after you’ve finished it could you please send me a bushel of cash. Over £30,000 ideally so I could fund my PhD, if you can’t find a bushel I do also accept paypal, just send it to spam(at)persus-9.co.uk. If you don’t have near unlimited amounts of money at your disposal then the answer is simply no, do not buy this game [In it's present state, see below - Ed]. I did and I had fun for half an hour or so but when push comes to shove £5.24 is too much to pay for an hours entertainment so I’m feeling rather ripped off.

5/10

UPDATE: I’ve just been reading a bit more on the Sakari Indie website and felt this was worth mentioning: -

As we firmly believe in supporting our community we’re already planning the future updates of our game. These updates will be completely free and will include additional content to Foreign Legion. We’ve got some cool things in the works and hopefully we’ll be able to tell (and show!) you about these really soon.

Given that my only real criticism of this game is it’s length then continued after release support like this could turn this little game around and make it live up to it’s initial promise. I’m not going to adjust my score because I’ve got to review what’s sat in front of me and at the moment what’s sat in front of my isn’t up to much but I’m now rather more hopeful that this will in the end prove a good buy. If you like the sound of the game then it might well be worth checking it out in a couple on months time to see if Sakari Indie have been able to deliver the goods and it might even be worth a taking a gamble on it now while it’s on sale rather than waiting for the price to go up to 6.99. If and when new content is released I’ll add more updates to this review to re-access the games worth.