A third-person shooter with Lego-like characters, 10-minute solo games and plenty of gore. This essentially sums up Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood, a newly released indie-game by Sakari Indie.
But beneath this simple shell lies a challenging and enjoyable game. A game that can fill those short time gaps where you want to play a game, but just don’t have enough time to play any ordinary PC games.
Does this new indie-game have a shot at stardom, or is it merely a mediocre shooter affair? And more importantly: do Lego characters mesh well with buckets of blood and gore?
I’ll answer these questions and more, after the break.
Setting
In Foreign Legion you are a soldier whose platoon has been wiped out. You find yourself in a desert town, which falls under attack by rebels who want to slaughter the town’s residents that are holed up in the town hall.
Your job? Hold of waves of enemy forces until a rescue chopper can arrive and fly the villagers to safety.
If you think that’s an interesting premise for a story, then you’ll be disappointed: that was the story.
But do not fret. Foreign Legion may not be a narrated miracle, but it does have some interesting gameplay features to offer.
Defend the town hall for 10 minutes to win!
Gameplay
At its core, Foreign Legion is an oldschool arcade game.You’re placed in 10-minute missions, on a single map, that have you defending a town hall against waves of enemies. The only objectives are to last until the chopper arrives and keep the villagers safe. If you’re more efficient, then you score more points, and you place higher on the global rankings.
The weapons at your disposal range from a pistol with unlimited uselessness ammo, a machine gun that is strangely more accurate than the pistol, a rocket launcher and a single-use air strike. There is also a minigun hidden on the map which offers an incredible rate of fire, but suffers from inaccuracy.
If you start running out of ammo, then you can run over to a tent and radio for fresh supplies. Two packages will drop, one is a red container that fixes any damage to the town hall fortifications, the other is an ammo crate. You’ll need both to survive, especially at higher difficulty levels. But the ammo drops in the middle of the map, which leaves you wide open and the town hall undefended.
The enemies come in three forms: a suicide bomber who can be terminated with a single shot at the bombs strapped to his chest, a machine gunner who tries to suppress you as the bombers head for the town hall and the rocketeer who is easily the most deadly but takes a long time to set up. Each enemy requires a different tactic to be dealt with, and they will not come at you one at a time, so you’ll need to take them out fast.
In an amusing twist, Foreign Legion has a rather extensive score-calculating system. You can boost your score by making enemies explode, or by hitting headshots. Both are tracked in a kill tracker on the screen. Another way to boost points is by killing chickens spread across the map (they don’t respawn, so one run is all it takes). Lastly, you can finish the game prematurely by wiping out all waves prior to the 10 minute mark, and every spare second counts towards your total score!
The Outer Shell
As you may have gathered from the screenshots, Foreign Legion is a stylized 3D shooter with very decent graphics for a modern indie-game. But the most immediately notable detail is the character design: all characters look like simple Lego figures and even move in a Lego-like manner: straight and sharp.
This mixes oddly well with the – literal – buckets of blood present in this game. Suicide bombers explode in a haze of glory and blood, headshots pop with big red clouds and you can see red splotches appear on your character as he gets hit by enemy fire. It is definitely not a children’s game, but the effect of such simplistic design and animation, with such violent explosions of blood, is very satisfying.
Sound design is solid. There is no voice-acting to speak of, but all the sound effects suit the game perfectly. For background music it seems to offer only a single track, but this track is formed dynamically based on what you’re doing, so it’s slightly different every game and never got on my nerves.
Suicide bombers explode with satisfying visual effects
Replayability and DRM
Let’s get the good news out of the way first: Foreign Legion contains no form of DRM. No keys, limited activations, nothing.
But in terms of replayability, the news is not good. As might be expected of a $6.99 game, Buckets of Blood was not designed with hours of play in mind. If you do not pace yourself, then the game gets monotonous very fast.
The reason for this is the complete lack of alternative game modes, maps or multiplayer. There is the single map in singleplayer in the one mode of play and nothing else. You can alter difficulty levels in between Easy and Veteran, but this merely alters the AIs accuracy and damage, and your weapon’s accuracy, albeit in a way that will be quite challenging at higher levels.
That still makes for a great game for inbetween slaughter fests, and you can aim for world domination on the highscore lists, but it would’ve been nice to see some more content.
Fortunately, Sakari Indie has expressed its interest in releasing extra content for this nifty little shooter. What form this added content will take is as yet unknown, but there are plenty of ideas circulating in the community: character customization (lovely coloured soldiers, I’m going for green), extra maps, new game modes and multiplayer have all been put forward.
Steam Achievements can also help pull you over for a little while. But, in keeping with the game’s accessible gameplay, its 10 achievements are easy to obtain. A decent shooter player will likely have all 10 of them accomplished in a matter of 2-3 hours. Personally, I prefer these attainable achievements over the nigh-impossible ones present in other Steam games, Team Fortress 2 in particular. But it does not help the replayability.
In the end Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood presents an entertaining shooter experience at a very low price point. Right now it’s even available with an extra 25% discount on Steam (even though the August 11th deadline has passed). This makes it a very attractive deal, especially with the prospect of future content being released by Sakari.
Casual players will certainly get their mileage out of this game, with its perfect gameplay for quick 10-minute sessions. More hardcore gamers might like to compete on the international highscore list for the various difficulty settings. I’m currently ranked 7th at Veteran level with 48500 points, see if you can beat that!
Try Before You Buy
Pros Cons + Lego and Blood - No singleplayer campaign + Very enjoyable gameplay - No multiplayer + Challenging difficulty levels - Limited replayability + Solid sound system - Simplistic gameplay + Low price point - Short, short, short… + Interesting scoring system
Personal Value Rating: 7.2
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