What I Played Today: January 21

Puzzle Strike, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

I played the Dominion knockoff Puzzle Strike today. It’s an interesting beast, with its active timer that you constantly have to worry about. Each round, a chip is added to your pile, and if you ever have a total of 10 in that pile, you lose. So you have to use a certain kind of chip to get them out of there, which will in turn send those gems to your opponent, so it’s a lot of back and forth, trying to get some good combos while worrying about the constantly ticking clock. We played two games, one in which my opponent wasn’t paying attention to his gem pile, and one where he was well-aware of it, and completely ruined me. It kinda sucks that you know you’re totally going to lose a good two minutes before you do, because if your pile hits 10 and you don’t have the right chips in hand, you are done.

Also played what felt like way too much Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood multiplayer. The new update came out, with a new map, which is A-alright, and a new mode of play, which is crap. It plays a lot like Manhunt, in which one team tries to hunt down and kill another team, only instead of the hunted just being required to not get killed, they instead have to run around “opening chests,” meaning standing in very specific locations for short periods of time…meaning a lot of movement. If there is one thing you don’t want to be doing while being tracked by three to four enemies, it’s moving around a lot. It’s just absolutely no fun for the treasure hunters, because the protectors can still track you with the compass, and it’ll be obvious which one you are because you’ll probably be running. Sure, the compass shuts down if they are near a chest, but at that point, there is no incentive not to just stab the hell out of every version of the treasure hunter’s avatar that ambles into view.

This mode could have worked a lot better if no one had a compass and instead knew where the chests were and when they were currently being opened. That way they would have to depend on specific tells to figure out who to kill and who to hide from. I guess in that mode the hunters would instead just go hang around the treasure chests and just start stabbing at will. Maybe the only info the protectors get is “A chest is being opened!” without specifying which ones? I don’t know, all I know is that this was not fun, so I played two hours of wanted instead.