You know where you stand with a heavy weapon. Usually out in the open with a manic grin on your face, Spent bullet casings cascading in slow motion while your gun kicks and howls like a banshee.  Enemies running in front of you and tripping the dance macabre.  I played the Heavy weapons guy again, we may be slow but we deliver.

I played Level 7 Omega Protocol for the second time last Thur. It’s s fun Heroquest/Descent type game with one group of players squaring off against one evil overlord (unusually not me this time). The setting is an xcom / futuristic swat versus an alien experiment out of control sort of thing. Perfect. I’m all in

Players can choose from a variety of trooper types.

The game plays out as you would expect with the evil player laying traps in various rooms and making it downright awkward for you to complete your mission.  By you I mean your team. Don’t worry it’s semi co-operative, but it’s no sesame street.  A number of times we we’re reminded that only half the team have to survive to win.

The missions are fairly standard stuff and advance the story arc. In this case it was get in. Rescue a scientist and get out with him alive. For a clever bunch those scientist are constantly getting themselves in trouble.

Now what makes omega different is the use of adrenaline. Adrenaline points are action points. Move a dude it takes adrenaline points. Fire. Open a door. Activate something and so on all take adrenaline points and each of your dudes have a limit of how many they can use per turn depending on their stance.

Stances are picked at the start of a round so it might be cautious advance, normal move or iggy pop it. These stances vary from character type to character type so there’s a nice bit of variety in there.  Snipers get to lay prone but are more open to attack.  Heavy weapons dudes get to plant their feet and let rip with extra firepower.

At the start each character gets a certain amount of build points to buy extra war gear. Cue military music as you snap on grenade launchers and better armor.  Certain types have access to different equipment.  This is pure video game stuff.

All set to go you kick open the door and stomp into the first area saying things like “this looks easy” and “reckon we have this beat”. Now. That’s a mistake. You don’t and in the case of last Thur all five of us armed to the proverbials didn’t do it. We got close, but no cigar.

In our defense we were acting the maggot and not really listening to our commander during the briefing concentrating more on quoting lines from Aliens and generally looking out for ourselves. More Medipacs and not saying things like “they can’t harm me over here” would have helped too.

So about three thirds of the game in we were in some real pretty shit now and it was game over man

It didn’t matter we had a lot of fun

The game takes a bit of setting up not as much as say Mansions of Madness but while the evil overlord setsup the scenario our crack team had time to enjoy a swift game of Age of War

The adrenaline mechanic is clever.  every point used by the “goodies”  at the end of the turn gets handed over to the evil overlord and they get to spend it on various actions that will ruin your day. Activate clones. Summon more. Commission a new bad guy logo that sort of thing.

This mechanic allows the game to scale nicely with however many good guys are on the mission. Furthermore the actions open to the bad guy (Bg) vary from scenario to scenario.

It’s a neat game. The whole dungeon bashing game has been done time and time again but this is different enough to be worth a look

The only reservation I’d have is I’ve become spoiled by the build quality of fantasy flight games and this isn’t a FF game. The models are fine but not Descent good. The board is good but it’s not as good as say Space Hulk. It’s also a little pricey but it’s suitably different to be exotic.

Definitely worth a try and I was so taken by the last game I offered to paint some of the models.

Definitely up for another game so all good

Huzzah!

Vic