X-Com was a profoundly single player game – a solitaire of paranoia and perspiration. So, much as fans were clearly compelled by the multiplayer-first pitch for Julian Gollop’s Chaos Reborn, they were keenly interested in how its nebulous solo campaign would turn out.
That’s still a long way off – but Snapshot Games’ latest early access update to the turn-based tactics game has introduced AI opponents in an offline battle mode.
The local battle mode allows us to play ‘hotseat’ with other players in our immediate vicinity, alone against an AI opponent, or with any combination of human and AI players.
Gollop and team have also introduced a “cool looking Christmas theme” for the holiday, alongside a new spell used to summon a pack of three hideous, mutant giant rats. So much for ‘not even a mouse’.
“Since the release on Steam Early Access on December 9th the player community has more than doubled,” wrote Gollop. “I would like to thank our Kickstarter backers who helped make the Steam launch a great success, especially those of you who eagerly helped new players learn the game and get involved in the discussions.”
Chaos Reborn’s planned single player campaign will envelop its battles in an RPG metagame. Players will be given the goal of defeating a Wizard King, and in the process exploring a procedurally-generated realm, picking up new loot and interacting with NPCs one hex at a time. But all the while, the King will grow stronger – eventually fostering forces powerful enough to kick you off the map if you meander too long.
“The main difficulty there is having sufficiently good algorithms there to generate this stuff,” Gollop told PCGamesN earlier this year. “It’s not just random generation – the algorithms have to follow certain patterns and rules which will make both the environment plausible and interesting.”
Hmm! It’s worth noting that Gollop’s enamoured with Age of Wonders 3. Think you’d like to play something like that infused with the X-Com signature element of chance?