Posts tagged hills and rivers remain

Didn’t play much last night, because I went out to the cinema to see Paranormal Activity. It scared me witless at the time – I believe I may even have screamed a couple of times and I never, ever do that – but luckily for me the fear faded with the adrenaline. My wife’s still freaked out, though, so I’m trying my best to look after her by emphasising the normality of things and how there aren’t really any nasty things that go bump in the night. (Except the cat, obviously.)

Still, I’ve advanced some way in the story of Hills and Rivers Remain and have tested out Free Play mode a bit more. I think to get fun out of it I’ll have to work out the best settings – on Normal with one enemy you can simply put your headquarters next to theirs and wipe them out before the game even really starts.

Grrr. Yes, that’s right, I said “grrr”. I say it because the level on Hills & Rivers Remain Lite that I’m currently on appears to be impossible. It’s this one:

I’ve realised what the main problem is – the enemy is just far stronger than me. No matter what the stats say when I choose sides, I need overwhelming forces to capture enemy bases. A small numbers advantage just isn’t enough. This makes things very, very difficult. So difficult that I think I’ve given up on it for now. I’ll come back later, I’m sure.

I’ve put hours into this now. Hours. It’s probably one of my most-played iPhone games and I’ve not even got the full version yet. I spent a long, long time trying to get a medal on the fifth Free Play mission, which requires you to capture every base within thirty turns. Winning the game wasn’t hard, but doing it within thirty turns – and making sure I’d captured all the neutral bases before finishing off the enemy – was very tough. I kept finishing in thirty-two or thirty-three turns, but couldn’t get it down any further.

Until, somehow, I managed it twenty-three turns. I think I shouted out in my victory and may have punched the air. I seem to remember having to explain to the wife why I’d startled here.

The most important thing to do when you need speed is to make sure you’re constantly moving troops around. On a time limit you can’t afford to keep troops in reserve behind your front lines, no matter how tempting it is to leave some defenders just in case the enemy breaks through. Also, if you know you’re going to lose a base to the enemy, you’re better off retreating before they arrive, so you’ve got more men available for a counter attack. And you really have to make good use of the power ups that you’ve been given and not leave them in reserve until it’s too late.

It’s brilliant game and I’m definitely going to get the full version. I’ve been planning on finishing off all there is to do in the Lite before buying it, but I’m not sure that’s wise. It seems sensible on the surface, but the Lite version is getting very hard indeed now and I really don’t want to find the full game a pushover when I get to it. It might be better to have both and swap between the two. (The Lite version features content not in the full version, by the way. I think the Free Play mode in the full version may be closer to a Skirmish mode than the mission-based structure of the Lite, but I’m not sure.)

Love the name of the game, am slightly unconvinced by the gameplay, which seems to be a slightly slower and more structured version of Galcon, all done up with the typical Square-Enix polish. Though the main character is called Alan and the big enemy appears to be called Herbet, which makes the whole thing seem a bit less epic than usual.