Reptilian Rising is an enjoyably naff toy-based tactics game featuring Spartacus, St George and Einstein
Adam and Joe Show stans, assemble
The next advance in video game graphics technology is not ray-tracing or tray-racing or any variation thereof - it's janky stop motion and rubbish plastic dolls, and it actually began about 30 years ago, when I watched the Adam and Joe show for the first time. If you never watched the Adam and Joe show, they used to do home movie recreations of famous films like Titanic and Saving Private Ryan using stuffed animals and action figures. I found these "Toymovies" hysterical as a kid - I suspect they are less so now. Probably, they are full of jokes we might tentatively class as "of their time". The point is, Reptilian Rising is sort of Toymovie: The Game.
Created by Gregarious Games and Robot Circus, it puts you in charge of squads of wonky plastic miniatures fighting evil reptilians on cardboard table-top dioramas. The characters range from Cleopatra through (three versions of) Churchill to off-brand riffs on Back To The Future's Marty McFly. The devs have just released a new trailer, following which I gave the Steam demo a whirl, and while I have a few reservations, I could see myself enjoying this.
The reservations mostly concern the humour. This is one of those retro parodies that falls over itself to pile reference atop allusion atop in-joke. It's charming when it comes to the recreation of a tabletop wargame - the levels look exactly like the ones I knocked together for my dysfunctional High Elf army as a budding Warhammer player, and there's a nice, fat cassette player on one map with buttons you can press to stop the music. But the overegged dialogue voice-acting is a little yeesh, especially given that there aren't many lines per character. I get it, St George - you're a braying blue-blooded spoof. Please put that line about ye olde butt-kicking on cooldown.
I was tempted to stop playing, after a few moments of St Georgian patter. But sunk cost thinking prevailed - and it proved to be no fallacy at all, for I started having fun. Beneath the whimsy, Reptilian Rising is quite a sober tactics game. On the map I played, I had to seize control of crystals that summoned waves of hooded reptile cultists and cyborgs; once claimed, I could spend Time Energy at crystals to summon additional miniatures of my own.
Time Energy can also be spent on character upgrades like resistance to stun, and there are unpredictably spawning power-ups to lure you out of formation. You've also got to worry about a boss spawning after a countdown, unless you smash all the glowing purple dice. The overall picture is of a tactics game where you have to expand your position under varying pressures, rather than methodically whittling down a finite selection of foes. As for the characters, they fulfil familiar roles: Einstein is your artillery, armed with a beam cannon, while Not-Marty McFly gets a hoverboard for quick flanking. The off-map Reptilian overlord, who reminds me strongly of Bowser in the Bob Hoskins Mario movie, occasionally gives enemies orders that alter the odds - ordering them to focus fire on St George, for example. He has it coming, the bellowing nuisance.
It's no Into The Breach, but it entertained me enough that on finishing a demo mission and breaking off to write, I almost kept playing instead. If I'd recommend the developers do anything, other than varying the dialogue more, it's come up with a proper unboxing animation for each new miniature you harvest, rather than having them appear in a gust of Tardissy SFX. Let us rip the cardboard. Also, maybe a simulation of authentic wear and tear? I kind of want my Einstein to look like the dog has tried to eat him.
Reptilian Rising doesn't have a release date yet. While we're talking figurines, let me nudge you towards rad Celtic oddity Judero and the work of Jack King-Spooner in general. If Reptilian Rising is Adam & Joe, King-Spooner's creations have more in common with Mad God.