E3 2015 - Armello Tasks Animals With Saving The Kingdom

Perhaps the biggest problem with E3 is that there are so many games to see and so little time to see them all, let alone dedicate a good portion of time to any singular game. Armello is one such game, coming from Melbourne based developer League of Geek, it is a combination of various game types and something new all at once.

My run through of the game was by the games director Blake and one of the first things I noticed was his level of enthusiasm for the game, even though this was around lunch on Thursday and the energy of everyone was low; I had seen very little of the game before, so it was all very new for me. The game has you taking control of an animal warrior in order to take the throne from the corrupt king that sits upon it.

But this is not corruption as you and I would think, this is corruption like poison, with this evil changing the world as the story progresses. You can actually selection your hero from one of four different animal races, Rat, Rabbit, Wolf and Bear which was shown for the first time at E3. In order to take down the king and take the throne for yourself, you will need to make your way to the heart of the kingdom, over procedurally generated hexagonal map pieces and it's this system that makes things different.

When you attempt to take control of a village, there is always the chance that you might be attacked from another side and as the pieces are six sided, that increases the chances a lot, but it's not all bad. You can also take cover in forest pieces, mountain pieces and even caves, but for all the spaces that can work in your favour, they can also work against you as the enemy can already be there, waiting for some unsuspecting hero to enter.

The game does not offer up straight combat, instead you will use a series of cards to help modify your stats, which will help you or hurt you, depending on the situation you are going into. Each card will have stats that improve your character or hurt the stats and sometimes even both, so knowing when to  use the cards is almost as critical as knowing what is going on elsewhere.

My time with the game was not long enough, you can see the system in play in Armello is deep, from even a few moments with the game and taking the time to learn its intricacies is something I look forward to doing. The game is coming to PlayStation 4 later in the year and is in Early Access on Steam for PC, Mac and Linux now, with a full release coming in the next few months.