Narcos: Rise of the Cartels - turn-based action strategy game based on the show

[Infinitron]

http://www.curve-digital.com/en-gb/games/detail/38/narcos-rise-of-the/

Spoiler

Publisher Curve Digital, in collaboration with Gaumont and developer Kuju, presents Narcos: Rise of the Cartels, a new game for PC’s and consoles based on Gaumont’s Emmy® and Golden Globe nominated hit series, Narcos. Narcos: Rise of the Cartels will release in Q3 2019 and follow the events of the first season of Narcos, in a story narrated by El Patron himself, where players will take the role of the Medellin Cartel or the DEA in a tactical turn-based action adventure.

 

[Biscotti]

What the hell is up with all these licensed tactical games all of a sudden?
Surely the average normie who's into this stuff would rather just enjoy theirselves some good old

 

[LESS T_T]

I think these days tactical games are more commercially viable than some third-person action games where these publishers most likely cannot match graphical quality that general audience of that genre expect.

 

[LESS T_T]

Welcome to Colombia, 1980’s - the fires of El Patrón's empire have been lit, its influence spanning borders, and expansion unabated. Influence and corruption is rife; cops, guards, politicians and those in between are falling into the pocket of the Medellín Cartel, and after years of production, America is finally taking notice.

Narcos: Rise of the Cartels tells the story of the hit Netflix TV series, of the rise and fall of El Patrón. Choose your side and ally with the DEA or conversely side with the Narcos. Explore recognisable locations from the show and take a role in pivotal world-altering events and battles that will define and shift the war on drugs.

Form your team from a variety of class-specific roles, join leading characters, upgrade your skills and take part in brutal turn-based combat, where your actions will have consequence.

Plata o Plomo?

• BASED ON THE HIT NETFLIX TV SERIES
  • 
    Authenticity is at the core of the Narcos experience and highly recognisable and iconic characters from the TV show are available to control and play, such as El Mexicano, Murphy, Peña, Primo and more. Every 'leader' character offers unique gameplay abilities and perks to help turn the tide of battle.
• FAST-PACED STRATEGY COMBAT
  • 
    Narcos: Rise of the Cartels takes turn-based strategy combat to a whole new level with units possessing the ability to move individually one after another or multiple times within one turn, meaning the pace always being ramped up. Plan your moves wisely but be cautious as there are always consequences to your actions.
• EVERY WAR HAS TWO SIDES
  • 
    Featuring two unique campaigns, Narcos: Rise of the Cartels allows you to see the war from both sides. Choose to side with the DEA and fight alongside Steve Murphy to bring down the drug empire, or choose to side with the Narcos in order to help found, grow and expand the empire under the watchful eye of El Patrón.
• COUNTERACT AND KILL-SHOT
  • 
    Innovative gameplay mechanics keep the turn-based genre fresh by allowing you to take third-person control of your units in order to engage enemies directly, giving you the opportunity to deal critical damage at optimum moments.

No strategy/management layer? Turn-based "action adventure", I see...

And no Spanish voice acting? Well looks like voices are trailers only, no in-game voice acting according to the store page.

 

[Belegarsson]

Is it me or the UI and presentation as a whole look awfully like Phantom Doctrine?

 

[PrettyDeadman]

Can you put babies into barrels with acid or decapitate hostages with a chainsaw in this?

 

[mondblut]

What the hell is up with all these licensed tactical games all of a sudden?
Surely the average normie who's into this stuff would rather just enjoy theirselves some good old

Hard to do a proper when you are smearing your greasy fingers all over your fagphone or fagpad.

I guess it's better than Jagged Alliance: Rape! at least.

 

[Grandlion1981]

I'm very curious to know more about this project. I like more modern settings.

 

[Perkel]

I think these days tactical games are more commercially viable than some third-person action games where these publishers most likely cannot match graphical quality that general audience of that genre expect.

Meanwhile Obsidian will still do only RTwP games and trash AA shooters.

 

[LESS T_T]

I think these days tactical games are more commercially viable than some third-person action games where these publishers most likely cannot match graphical quality that general audience of that genre expect.

Meanwhile Obsidian will still do only RTwP games and trash AA shooters.

Well wasn't it one of the takeaways from Saywer's Deadfire postmortem, citing D:OS 2, that turn-based games sell? And for AA+ games of course action games are generally more viable than turn-based ones, if you can afford to make them acceptable quality for the genre (Obsidian can, more so since the MS acquisition).

 

[Lady_Error]

TB got me interested, though it will be probably banal shit boring popamole anyway.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-narcos-...han-you-might-expect-of-a-netflix-adaptation/

The Narcos game is more adventurous than I expected of a Netflix adaptation
The turn-based Narcos: Rise of the Cartels is out next month.

Netflix’s push into games continues this month with Narcos: Rise of the Cartels, which publisher Curve Digital has today announced will release on 19 November. Based on drug war drama Narcos, the game translates the show's action into a cops-vs-gangs turn-based strategy campaign.

I recently got the chance to play a near-final build, and was pleasantly surprised to discover something rather more adventurous than you might expect from a TV adaptation. On the surface, it has the look of a straightforward XCOM clone: you build a stable of soldiers, send squads out on missions, and control them in small-scale battles with tough odds and permadeath. But rather than a typical turn order—you move all your guys, then the enemy moves all theirs—it has alternating activations, similar to many modern tabletop wargames. In other words, every time you do something, your foe immediately gets to do something in response.

Not only that, but on your turn you can activate anyone you like—it doesn’t matter how many times they’ve already moved. Theoretically, you can just pick your favourite soldier over and over, fighting a one-man war against the cartels.

That’s where the strategy comes in, though, and it’s a surprisingly different challenge to most turn-based games. Focus too much on one character, and they’ll quickly find themselves surrounded, but equally every time you activate a straggler to catch them up, you’re leaving your frontline motionless and potentially vulnerable. In the XCOM games, despite their tight difficulty, there’s always a share of undramatic actions—creeping this guy a couple of squares forward, telling this one to just hunker down and wait. In Narcos, there’s a tension in every turn.

Make a mistake, and you’ve no chance to compensate with the rest of your team—the enemy is going to take advantage immediately. And that cascades through the mission, with every turn spent retreating an accidentally vulnerable soldier into better cover being a lost turn of shooting from someone else, or a chance for your opposition to reposition.

To be clear, it’s not tactical perfection. The drug war set-up makes for a relatively dry theme for anyone not a fan of the show, and there’s a general lack of polish that leaves no doubt this is a budget title. But I left my demo intrigued to play around more with that core twist, and the promise of a story campaign that can be played in full from either side—DEA or druglords—is pleasingly ambitious. Don’t expect white gold, then, but I'm hopeful for at least beige silver.

 

[Infinitron]

This is out now:

 

[Infinitron]

Gets the shovelware treatment from PC Gamer: https://www.pcgamer.com/narcos-rise-of-the-cartels-review/

NARCOS: RISE OF THE CARTELS REVIEW
A disturbingly literal war on drugs.

I've only watched the first series of Narcos, but I know enough to know that it is a crime show: it features things like police work, with the DEA protagonists capturing Pablo Escobar's lieutenants, finding evidence, etc. Narcos: Rise of the Cartels contains almost none of this, and instead tries to tell the story of the Medellin Cartel exclusively through XCOM style turn based tactical combat. It makes the war on drugs a literal war.

Let's talk about the elephant in the room here: this is a fucked up way to depict police work. In the very first scene of the tutorial, the game asks the player to "bring a gang member in". This involves shooting him repeatedly because this is the only interaction that is available to you (until you unlock grenades). Occasionally missions will have objectives like "obtain some evidence" or "rescue a hostage", but just as often it's "assassinate a cartel leader".

Narcos the TV show was clearly trying to acknowledge the amoral tactics employed by the police, but Narcos the game only really does so via the fact that it contains clips from the show. The fact that you've gunned downed hundreds of people in the street over the course of the game is barely commented on. This is the peril of a 'real world' setting, it invites real world questions.

I'm not against depicting the drug war in a strategy game, but Rise of the Cartels doesn't really intersperse the combat sections with anything but cutscenes and levelling up your troops. It would help if there were some kind of strategy layer between missions showing the police doing actual police work (or the cartels expanding their influence), but even then there would probably be an extraordinary amount of bloodshed even for 1980s Columbia. As it is the most interesting parts of Narcos the show—Escobar's attempt at a political career or the wild card element of militant communists M-19—just don't fit within the game's narrow framework.

Playing as the Narcos makes things less morally fraught, as you are at least aware that you are definitely the bad guys, however the two campaigns are very similar. Both sides use reskinned versions of the same units, just joined together by different cutscenes and story missions.

The showcase change from the standard turn-based tactics formula is when the game quickly breaks into manually aimed modes for overwatch—called "counteract"—or 'kill shots', which offers a random chance to finish off an enemy on low health. While I can see the logic for adding them, they aren't really satisfying enough for anyone who actually wants a reaction shooter experience, and are far too intrusive for someone who wants hands-off strategy gaming. The most satisfying interactions are the comboing of various moves, which gives nearby allies extra movement, extra actions or extra overwatch shots. It was fun to build a cop/lookout unit that existed purely to run around and cheer his buddies on.

An unfortunate series of mechanics interact here. Every unit can heal one hitpoint a turn by not moving but, in between missions, it costs money to heal a unit up. As a result, the player is incentivised to hang back, slow play, and heal all their units to full before finishing the mission. This isn't helped by the highly defensive AI, which makes roughly the same calculation I just did and spends most of its time standing still and relying on overwatch, sometimes even neglecting to protect the objectives it is supposed to be defending. One thing that reliably gets the enemy to act aggressively is if you leave one of your men standing out of cover, leading to the bizarre strategy of intentionally exposing a sacrificial lamb as a trap to entice the enemy forwards.

It also has the unusual choice to do an "I go then you go" turn based system, but with no restrictions on using the same units over and over, often meaning one or two members of your team will get steadily left behind as there is no mandatory move to catch them up. Finally there's the bane of any licensed game, an automatic game over whenever anyone who happens to star in the Netflix show gets killed, a recipe for frustration.

I've spent most of the last year playing various XCOM-likes, and Narcos isn't the worst, but it isn't impressive either. More importantly there simply isn't enough variety here, once you've played a dozen missions you've seen basically all the tricks the game has, yet it expects you to continue playing with only a few new perks to keep your interest. Ultimately I found myself asking the dreaded question, "Why am I not just playing XCOM instead?"

THE VERDICT
41

NARCOS: RISE OF THE CARTELS
A mediocre XCOM-like in the form of a deeply worrying depiction of militarised police.

 

[Infinitron]

Eurogamer is more sympathetic: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...of-the-cartels-pleasantly-surprising-strategy

Narcos: Rise of the Cartels review - pleasantly surprising strategy
It's dope.

The hit Netflix show becomes a fun, if functional, turn-based strategy.

When I close my eyes and imagine a game based on drug kingpin Pablo Escobar's life, Narcos: Rise of the Cartels isn't exactly what springs to mind.

Whereas my imagination crafts a stealth-shooter with a bass-heavy soundtrack and slick bullet-time effects (yes, this is why I write about games and not for them), Narcos: Rise of the Cartels is an a more sedate affair, fusing an XCOM-esque strategy game with the true tale of DEA agent, Steve Murphy, and his fight to take down Escobar.

Unlike some turn-based games, Narcos: Rise of the Cartels limits each side to just one character per round, which means instead of cycling through and manoeuvring every squadmate, you - and your enemies - can only reposition or action one recruit at a time. In some ways, this helps balance the combat - I cannot tell you the number of times I've brute-forced a turn-based boss fight by sequentially targeting my entire team on one enemy - and it also makes things decidedly trickier, especially if you're operating across numerous deployment zones and your squaddies are lacking back-up.

There's the prerequisite story mode that takes you through the events of Narco's first season, and a number of side missions that can help pad out your virtual wallet and skill tree. Progress is tracked via a war room in which you'll have access to a map, intel board, and roster, the latter of which you can use to adjust your team according to the demands of your foes. You can select allies from a number of different specialisms - everyday Colombian cops, DEA agents, Spec Ops, and the Policía Nacional de Colombia's Search Bloc, and so on - and they each have varying skills, weapons and movement capabilities depending upon their class and how much you're prepared to level them up.

At critical points, Rise of the Cartels even delivers a little of the third-person shooting action I had been expecting. Unlocking additional skills - such as the ability to counteract assaults in real-time - occasionally offers the chance to finish off a member of the cartel (or DEA, depending upon which team you're batting for) on the fly. Mechanically, these slow-motion sequences are floaty and frustrating and hamper more than they help, but occasionally you'll luck out and take down a foe before it's your turn. Emphasis on occasionally, though.

Traits and Actions do help jazz up the gameplay quite a bit, too. For instance, DEA boss Murphy can gain an additional Action move after a kill or use Buckshot, an Action that deals +1 additional damage with his shotgun. Cop Reyes, on the other hand, can store an additional Counteract point, as well as automatically reload his weapon the first time he misses an attack (which they all do, of course. A LOT. RNG FTW). Trouble is, investing skill points in anyone other than Murphy - who triggers a mission failure screen if he dies and forces a do-over - is a gamble, and it's difficult to become emotionally invested in any of Murphy's supplementary team given they're easily - if not cheaply - replaced by the next cookie-cutter copper ready for selection. That said, if you don't throw them a skill point or two now and again you risk sending under-levelled agents into the fray. It won't be long before you'll realise default max health and movement capacities just aren't enough to keep your squadmates safe in the long-term.

The turn-based action inevitably slows things down, though, and moving your cursor around the grid system is sticky and imprecise. You're also forced through a couple of side missions before you can proceed with the main campaign and while that might not be a sackable offence, it feels very much like its merely a way to pad out the game's length and artificially truncate your progress.

Though, admittedly, expectations might have been a little low, Narcos: Rise of the Cartels is surprising in all the right ways. Its loading screens offer a stunning blend of animation and FMV straight from the show, and while the in-game graphics don't quite share the same slick polish and the combat can feel a little stale, Narcos: Rise of the Cartels is a thoughtful, unusual take on Escobar's legacy. Yeah, I'm a bit surprised, too.

 

[Galdred]

Strategygamer review is pretty negative, despite the final 3/5

https://www.strategygamer.com/reviews/narcos-rise-of-the-cartels/

NARCOS: RISE OF THE CARTELS REVIEW
BY MARCELLO PERRICONE 19 NOV 2019 0
NARCOS: RISE OF THE CARTELS REVIEW
Released 19 Nov 2019
Developer: Curve Digital
Genre: Turn-Based Strategy
Available from:
Steam
It pays to be up-front about this: Narcos is not your typical IP adaptation. The concept of law agents vs criminals is solid, the use of the TV series unique quirks creates a great atmosphere, and the production values are, surprisingly, quite high. Unfortunately, it is also severely undermined by two small design decisions that turn the whole game into an unfortunate slog.


Narcos: Rise of the Cartels is a turn-based strategy game similar to XCOM, but where you only move one unit per activation in an IGO/UGO style a la Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus. Featuring two campaigns covering the illegal enterprises of the Narcos and the legal overtures of the United States’s DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration -- not 'Agency', as the game wrongly states), the title allows you to alternate between both sides of the conflict at your leisure, using separate save games to keep things clean.

The first thing that hits you when you launch the game is how closely it tries to emulate the TV series. The intro video features an interesting montage similar to the Netflix show’s opening, narrated by someone who does a very good job of sounding like Agent Murphy in both delivery and tone. As soon as the main menu appears, the theme song by Brazilian musician Rodrigo Amarante kicks in, lending an undeniable air of authenticity to the proceedings.

Unfortunately, that’s about as far as it goes. The game itself is heavily focused on tactical engagements of the player's 6-man squad versus large numbers of hostiles. Unlike XCOM, Narcos only allows you to move and shoot a single soldier at a time through the use of only two 'resources' -- an action point for shooting, reloading, and using abilities; and a movement point for things such as moving or resting to regain health.

Narcos changes the formula slightly by replacing the now-classic Overwatch with something called 'Counteract': a charge-like ability that allows you to manually fire -- third person shooter style -- at any enemy that enters your field of vision. The mechanics of using this ability are a little bit convoluted; you recharge half of a full token for every movement/action point not used. The Counteract only recharges on one of the six units you have selected at the end of the turn, which makes everything unbelievably slow.

Alternating activations is a legitimate design choice for tactical games, like in Mechanicus. BattleTech uses it as well, but the key is to design around it to keep things engaging. Narcos’ limitations in terms of its own design choices make it much, much less tactical -- and fun -- than contemporary titles. By shoehorning dozens of abilities into two choices that are immediately reacted to by an enemy unit, the game forbids any sort of interplay, ambush, or tactical manoeuvre from being executed. Instead, it behaves more like high-stakes chess, and it ends up being a painfully slow, frustrating experience that discourages more advanced strategies.

The mix of 'one unit per turn' and movement/action point resources actually work against each other, and often means that you only move one or two units out of the six in your squad. Most enemies will start holding defensive positions and then charge forward as you approach, which makes it impractical to waste six turns moving six people into position as the enemy freely takes potshots at the person who ends up closest. This person is unable to do anything further without wasting the turn for every other member of the squad. This also means that once within weapons range, engagements become duels with very few options besides attacking or falling back.

The most annoying thing about this arrangement is that it slows down gameplay to the point where most missions are long, largely unexciting affairs. It’s like the developers played other tactical strategy games and took all the wrong lessons. XCOM is often hailed as a ‘gold-standard’ for games like these, and perhaps it’s a tad unfair to compare it against what is essentially a tie-in game designed to raise awareness for a TV show; but it’s surprising how easy developers in general (not just the Narco devs Kuju) tend to miss the point of what made XCOM so good. The constraints imposed by the design decisions feel very misguided, which is a shame because there’s still a lot to like about Rise of the Cartels.

The combat abilities are interesting and seem to be trying to make up for the lack of tactical freedom: Passive skills like extra Counteracts or free actions on kills, active items like frag grenades, even the ability to give Counteract tokens to surrounding units. In order to keep those all balanced, Narcos divides soldiers into six different classes that are mirrored on each side of the conflict (DEA’s Grenadiers are the Narcos’ Specialists, for example). The squad management part happens outside missions, in a token management layer called the 'war room'.

Comprised of a big map of Colombia, a squad roster screen, and some mementos, the war room acts as a mission selection and character update interface. Main missions are mostly linear, often requiring a number of side missions to be completed before they’re unlocked to be played. It’s a bit superficial, as roster size and level caps are tied to campaign progression, which in turn is limited by the number of missions available. This also means injured people that you don’t pay to immediately heal can be out of commission for a whole ‘chapter’. Like the tactical side, the war room is not as fluid as it could be, although it’s a nice touch how each campaign has its own war room.

In the end, Narcos: Rise of the Cartels is a game with good production values, let down by a tactical layer that doesn’t seem to have been fully thought-through. There are impressively few flaws here, but the ones it does have are so key to the nature of the game that they end up dragging down the whole experience. Like Pablo Escobar’s intrinsic arrogance which led to his downfall, so does Narcos’ rather basic assumptions ruin what could have been a very exciting tie-in game.

 

[Burning Bridges]

So it is shit?

 

[A_boring_GOG_bot]

So it is shit?

What did you expect ? Licensed game based on an overhyped series .

 

[Burning Bridges]

I expected it would be shit, just wanted to get a second opinion.