Completionist 2014: Nation Red

Another one for the books. Gonna try to keep this brief, I'm kinda noticing I'm going into full review mode sometimes.

Nation Red was a game I got from a friend many Steam Sales ago. Speaking of which, SUMMER SALE! YEAHHHH!! Erhm. Anyway, I finally beat the campaign missions for this game. It was pretty short, but the true power of this game is to play it with a bunch of friends. But meh, a wins a win.

Nation Red is a top down Smash TV style shooter. You can definitely tell that this game was riding the Zombie Wave thing. Is that done yet? Is it? I think I saw dinosaurs or some shit was the next hotness. ANYWHO, you kill zombies. They drop power ups and weapons. Power ups can range from match long passives to temporary buffs. There's a good number of weapons that can also drop. They let you take your pick by letting you keep one ranged and one melee weapon. Melee has a lot more risk, but the damage difference is significant. Personally, I liked using the melee weapons on non-melee bosses like the Minigun zombie or the Grenade zombie.

There is also a level up system for killing zombies and Boss zombies. The levels do not transfer and they are restricted per match. Leveling up allows you to pick from 7(? I think it was 7) different passive abilities (Perks). In single player, you can press "Space Bar" and it will pause time so you can take a look at what each perk does. I can't remember, but I believe you don't get the chance to stop time in the multiplayer versions. I could be wrong, I haven't actually played the COOP since 2012. The perks listed per levelup are randomly generated, and they do have some interesting effects. It feels like you could actually combo certain perks to create a particular play-style for yourself. Personally, I just had a priority system that went something like this.

1. Auto-kill perks (Hand of God, Seekers, Pulse Wave, etc.)
2. Auto-EXP buff (Only if its early in the round)
3. Reload buffs
4. Damage buffs
5. Health Regen
6. Grenade generator
7. If it gets this far, I got a shit set of perks. Pick whatever looks fun

All-in-all, I really liked their level up system. It made for some interesting combinations and there were occasions where the right fun perk showed up at the right time. I enjoyed Nation Red a lot. Campaign was a little short, but that's really not what the game was meant for. OH WELL!

SCORE++;

>SCORE = -20

God. Steam sale is on. Guessing this score will be going down a lot.