Monday, February 27, 2012

Incoming--a Good WW2 Shooter Game

Incoming Review

This is a fun little game for WW2 shooting, that you can play right out of your browser right now.

Incoming just came out this month over on addicting games dot com. On Thursday it had 250 plays and now has hit 62,000 just over this weekend, so I am not alone in getting hooked on this thing.

The Nemesis has been trying for years to get me to finish plugging in his old X-Box and playing some of the games but I have been fighting the temptation to become addicted to these types of games - only to succumb to this one.

And you don't need any special machines or downloads, this you can play right now in your browser by clicking on that link up above. Just be sure you don't have any appointments for the next half hour or so when you do, because you won't want to stop shooting.

You are dug in to a bunker and waves and waves of German infantry come at you. They look like 10mm figures, in motion and with sound effects. You have a .45 caliber pistol to start out with seven rounds. When you hit them you will hear a thud, see blood, and they will grunt, before they fall. If they are scared they will go prone and are somewhat harder to hit. In bunches you can throw grenades, in range, or drop mortar rounds on them if you have it.

Once you have shot down enough Germans, you get dollars to buy an M1903 Springfield rifle, and can switch weapons when those five rounds or the seven Colt ACP rounds are used up. Then you save for an M1 Garand, a BAR, Boys Anti-Tank Rifle, Mortar, Bazooka and the fifty-caliber machine gun. You can use up to four weapons at a time and the lesser ones drop away as you upgrade.

Next rounds you will try to get enough dollars to buy a Tommy gun, then some grenades. These make it a lot easier to kill Germans, in the ever-larger waves that are coming at you.

Among them there are riflemen, Machine Pistol men, and worst of all for you are those with the Panzerschreck, because when they launch their rockets at your fort they cause damage until either you lose the round or else you kill them all.

Each of these are worth the dollar points you need to keep getting better weapons, and my advice is to buy each weapon as soon as you can, because you will need them desperately as you level up. The Germans get stronger and stronger, no longer just squads but whole companies.

These companies are reinforced by a few different kinds of armoured cars, halftracks,  and eventually tanks. There will be Pantera tanks, which must mean Panthers, and then there will be Tiger tanks. Each higher level of vehicle is harder and harder for you to kill, even when you get better weapons.

It is designed so that you have all you can handle, and since your weapons are constantly running out of ammo, the trick is to train your left hand fingers to efficiently switch weapons as each one is reloaded, while using the right hand to aim and squeeze the trigger.

Your eye is selecting targets while the corner of your eye tries to see when the Mortar is reloaded, or the Bazooka, or the Boys Anti-Tank Rifle, or the BAR, or ultimately the Ma Deuce, fifty-caliber machine gun.

That baby is fun to fire but when a 200-round belt needs to be changed, you need to switch back to the Mortar or the Bazooka, because it takes longer to reload than the BAR did, although it blasts even harder when it does.

At the higher levels you will have to shoot everything you can at those Tiger tanks because you have to hit them three or four times with the big stuff to bring them down, and tank guns shooting at you may be more damaging than even the pesky Panzerschreck rockets--I'm not sure because I was under too much pressure to study that at the time.

The rounds are set up as an 18-day campaign which you can finish in an hour or so, as you get better at efficiently blasting the highest priority targets at the fastest speed you can, before they overrun you and destroy you. If they do, you just continue at that level until you level up.

Day 18, the Whole Panzer Division

On Day 18 the highest level, if you are able to destroy all the last Tiger tanks and all the hundreds of infantry, then when you see four Tigers at once followed by four more and four more, the reward comes that you see the shadows of four-engine heavy bombers coming to obliterate everything on the field. That is the sign of Victory.

Try it, it's fun. Buy the best weapons you can, and learn to switch from one to the next with hotkeys 1,2,3,4.

They have 3000 other games there too but this is the one.