Armour-geddon sets a new high water mark for how lost I can be on starting a game. Others have been immediately confusing, or made it immediately clear that they’re not my thing, but none have stumped me completely before even getting to what I thought was the main point of the game. In this case, the part where you drive an armoured vehicle/fly a helicopter around a vast three-dimensional landscape. Which is pretty cool for the short time it lasts before being blasted to bits by unseen enemies.
Before you get there, there are a lot of metallic menu screens for resourcing, researching new tech, looking at spinning 3D wireframe pictures and so on, and none of them are very obvious. I looked up videos to try to figure out what I should be doing, and while I was there I read comments from people more familiar with the game. They broadly fell into two camps:
1) I loved this game, my strategy was to take out the power lines and then use telepods to take the heavy tanks into position for the bomb parts, it was easier working with a null modem link and a second player offering cover but…
2) I loved this game, I never had any idea what was going on.
One of the latter suggested that the UK first edition came with a misprint that meant the manual was missing the English language section, which is so perfect I don’t want to discover whether it was true or not. Either way, its apparent that there was an appeal to many in being baffled. I remember the days when some games seemed infinitely complex and like they would hold immense wonders if only they could ever be figured out. Enough time and expertise put in and you could be in a really special position. On the other hand it’s easy to see why so many more gamers on a budget were buying the more approachable Magicland Dizzy instead.
Once you get to read the manual in English, the background it provides adds an extra dimension. Armour-geddon is set in a world after a heavily destructive nuclear war. One which it seems to cast as a consequence of the folly of disarmament: “As the world’s peace-seekers strived to ban the bomb they were given an untimely reminder of the destructive powers of nuclear weaponry.” From there, the background goes, “while most of the human race were left to experience nuclear hostilities and a post-holocaust Mother Earth, the privileged few entered purpose-built structures to exist safely therein. The rest of the world struggled to survive outside.” The outsiders aren’t happy and make a plan, and you play the role of… The Sheltered Ones on the inside. Who have to find the pieces of an old neutron bomb and set them up to blow up a big laser the outsiders have developed. It’s all rather a long way from “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”.
So the game itself takes the side of the privileged with the resources, which makes its uglier potential clearer. Complexity isn’t a bad thing in itself, but obscurity as a point of pride is a short step away from setting up a gate to keep out all those undeserving outsiders, and launching attacks at them. Surely it would be better for everyone to gedd their armour off.
