1 hour ago
5
The thing you need to understand about Fogpiercer is that this deckbuilding roguelike, in which you control a train battling Mad Max-style road bandits, knows the secret joy of artillery. It is one of the few games that recognises that while it's satisfying to hit an enemy with a shell from a howitzer, it's even more satisfying to target the space next to them and use the force of the blast to give them a sideways shove into a wall.
It's a mechanic that puts Fogpiercer into the same fine company as Into The Breach.
I'm sure there's a rich story of the whys, whos, and whats that led to the world in Fogpiercer being wreathed in a thick smog. It probably gives good reasons for why some people have become bandits driving heavily-armed cars and others have become superpower-wielding engineers driving heavily-armed trains. I don't think you or I need to know what those reasons are. Perhaps a scientist really liked Snowpiercer and Mad Max and reverse-engineered a machine that would push the world to become reasonably close to their two favourite films.
What you should know is that at the start of a run of this roguelike, you'll pick a character, a locomotive, and set off down a Slay The Spire-like branching map of event nodes. The character you choose comes with a unique set of abilities. Monica, an ice harvester by birth, can freeze enemies and strike them with shards of the cold stuff. While Pan can control time, forcing enemies to skip their turn or even swapping their position in battle. The locomotive you pick also brings with it unique cards (there is only one available to use in the demo, so it's hard to say how varied these will become). The map, as in all the games that have replicated the system, is dotted with battles, shops, upgrade stations, and boss fights.
So far, a lot of this will be familiar. Where Fogpiercer becomes more distinct is in battles. Your locomotive, along with any carriages you've brought along for the ride, are set on a track in the centre of the map. Each round you draw a new hand of cards from a deck formed by the locomotive and carriages that make up your train. The protector carriage, for instance, gives you a set of shield cards, while the minigun provides cards with a more offensive bent. As the battle begins, the grid around the track fills with road bandits, each looking to derail your trip through the fog. While you are locked into only spending action points moving forward or backward on the track, your enemies are much more mobile, able to move into any free square – including driving on the track. Though, if they do that, you can always ram them on your turn.
Like Into The Breach, you're given total knowledge of your opponent's intentions. So, on your turn, you can see which enemy is planning to attack which square and for what damage. In this way, each turn becomes a small puzzle of how to avoid or mitigate the incoming damage. If two enemies are sandwiching one of your carriages, both planning on shooting your train, then moving a square backwards means that on the bandits' turn their shots will pass through the now-empty space and hit each other. In one run I lost my artillery carriage, and I was left with no damage-dealing cards. For the next three encounters, until I could acquire a new truck, I had to use all my nouse to avoid getting killed and using the enemies' attacks against themselves.
The most fun I had, though, was using the abilities that let me reposition the bandits. While a direct hit from an artillery shell will damage a unit, it also sends out a pulse of energy that pushes back any units in the square immediately around the blast. With tactical shooting, you can make one shell force a string of cars into one another, damaging them all. Or move them onto the tracks where your train can then ram them. Or just shove them into the canyon wall that runs along the side of the map. Like I say, every turn becomes a puzzle with you dealing out and dodging damage to best effect.
This all said. While there is a lot of promise on show in Fogpiercer's demo, there were times when it felt like the game's best toys were being kept from me. Artillery blasts can only move light units, and late in my run I seemed to only be facing heavy units I couldn't shove around. I still had direct damage weapons and they were fine, but I had had a glimpse of a much more chaotic, creative way to play its battles, and I wanted more of them.
I certainly will be playing more when Fogpiercer is out later this year, but for a game that appears to do so much like the roguelikes and deckbuilders I already own, for it to grip me, I want to see more than a glimpse of the creative play I can't easily find elsewhere. The trailer promises more oddball carriages, like one fitted with a crane that lets you lift and reposition the units around you, so I have hope. Still, if the worst thing I can say about a game's demo is that it's got me installing Into The Breach while I wait for its full release, then that's not bad at all.
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