Well. After I finished the tutorial, I did the first thing any sane man would do. Start a skirmish match so I could play as the Antichrist's
U.N. Peacekeepers Global Community Peacekeepers. As your game loads, you get a excellent shooped picture of a tidal wave of blood annihilating a city. Notice anything out of place?
If you couldn't find it, here it is highlighted:
The developers, if they might be graced with such a title, obviously grabbed the first picture of a tidal wave they got from Google images. Or, as Killjoy suggested, maybe Satan decided he wanted to surf some gnarly waves before Jesus showed up to spoil his fun.
At any rate, I started the skirmish in earnest. I suppose now is a good time to explain the basic mechanics of the game. You start the game with a camp, two followers (I will be using the
G.C. Peacekeeper terms for this Let's Play. Not planning to play as the Trib Force until my next update.) and a builder. The purpose of the followers is to recruit random people walking down the street to your side by lowering their spirit level (The Tribulation Force, obviously, raises people's spirit level). You can then take these newly converted civilians and send them to various buildings to be trained in a task (Soldiers, builders, rock stars etc.). The builder, on the other hand, buys empty buildings for you so you can convert the buildings to whatever you need. Banks for money. Housing to raise your unit cap, etc. This civilian recruiting mechanic might actually make for an interesting game if it wasn't implemented by a group of crack addled monkeys.
However, this game is a micromanagement nightmare. For one thing. You need to make all your units pray (or curse if you are the G.C.) every couple minutes or so in order to keep their spirit level high or low. If the spirit level of any unit gets too far from your side's preference, he will desert and become a civilian again, losing any training you gave him. This game play mechanic serves no purpose whatsoever other than to piss you off when some group of guys in some forgotten corner of the map end up disappearing because they didn’t pray enough.
In addition to this, the units are all stupidly small and hard to see, giving you the option of either being zoomed in to see them, but being unable to move them or interact with the huge ass buildings, or zooming out to be able to see your buildings, but be unable to do anything with your guys. Resources are gained based on how many cafes (for food) and banks (for money) you have, with you gaining a certain amount per tick. However, the game neglects to tell you how long a tick is, how much your buildings give you, and how much upgrading the buildings will increase your income. Finally, the interface is ridiculous. You actually need to turn aggression on on every unit in order to make them attack the enemy. You also need to actually crew your vehicles to make them move. All this without mentioning that the graphics are god awful (This game was made in
2007).
Now that all that game play info is out of the way, I can get back to the fun stuff, of which there is so much that I am worried that I will leave something out. First off, all the civilians wandering down the street are either male or female. However, when recruited, the only roles women are allowed to fill (As both G.C. and T.F.) are disciple/follower, nurse or musician. Doctors, builders and all varieties of soldiers are male only. How wonderfully progressive.
Second. The game is set one and a half years after the Rapture itself, yet there are still piles of wrecked vehicles littering the streets. One would think that those would get cleaned up, seeing as less that 1% of the world's population was taken, but apparently we simply cannot operate without Born Again Christians (The game specifies that they are the ones who get Raptured).
Third. As you could likely tell, the teams are functionally almost identical. However, there are some small differences. For one thing, while the forced of the antichrist use colleges to train people, the Trib Force uses a mission training centre. Anti-intellectualism all up in this bitch. Also. while the Trib Force does worship atchurches, the G.C. chooses instead to worship at gadget stores. The names of various units are also changed. The final upgrade to a follower for the G.C. is the
Secularist (Horror!). Finally, for some reason, the G.C. tank is far weaker and cheaper than the Trib Force tank. While the G.C. uses the T90 (for the obvious reason that they are COMMUNIST!), the T.F. Is able to use the M1 Abrams (Which they build in small workshops, somehow.
An additional note, which I found infinitely hilarious at the time, was that when you build a second unit without moving the first out of the way, they glitch into each other, giving us awesome things like
TANKCOPTER!
All this pales in comparison to the game's voice acting and unit dialogue. Whenever the G.C. recruit someone, the new convert says, in a manner not unlike Robotnik in Sonic SatAM “Sounds GOOOOOD”, while the peacekeepers love to spout lines in a terribly 'evil' voice including:
"Fear is my ally"
"Pain is my Power"
“Hate brings me fullness”
"Sure. Yippie kay yay" (in a hilariously bored manner)
"Live and let die."
"Survival of the fittest"
"Might. Makes. Right."
"Head huntin' time"
The secularist also has some fun lines, like “MY lack of faith guides me!”
Eventually I managed to launch an attack on the Tribulation Force, finding that upon death, they spawn angels that proceed to ascend into the heavens.
My game was cut short, however, when an army of demons appeared out of nowhere and started massacring my men for no reason.
Finally. For your enjoyment. Another couple loading screens containing terrible arguments for god. The first is the argument from irreducible complexity, also known as the argument from 'I can't figure out how it could have come about naturally, therefore nobody else could, and god did it'. They go so far as to use the eye, whose 'irreducible complexity' was debunked by Charles Darwin
in The Origin of Species. The second page contains inane rambling about how micro evolution can totally never lead to macro evolution displaying a complete inability to comprehend either.