Review Left Behind: Tribulation Forces Developer: Left Behind Games Publisher: Left Behind Games Genre: Real Time Strategy Release Date: 2008 Platform: Review by Robert Washburne February 21, 2008		Buy this game at Trade for this game at:

Ulterior motives rarely work.  If you start a business for the sole purpose of providing great benefits to the employees, then it will probably go under before too long.  You start a business to sell a product you are passionate about and then, if you are successful, you can use the money however you want.  Games written to teach something or promote an ideology are rarely popular.  The games which everybody wants are the ones that are just fun to play.  If you have one of those, you can embellish it with whatever factoids or eye candy you wish.

Left Behind: Tribulation Forces (LBTF) was written with an ulterior motive.  The box cover says it is... “The first game in which worship is more powerful than guns!”  An interesting concept.  Perhaps even noble to promote spiritual striving over physical violence.  But also a risky one.  If the game comes away flat, then the players will be left with the impression that spirituality is lame.

LBTF is a resource management game (like Warcraft II or any of the Tower Defense games) which takes place during The Tribulation.  I explained what The Tribulation was in my review of Eternal Forces, so I won't repeat that here.  Just imagine what the world would be like if overnight about two out of every three people vanished.  And the nicer people were statistically more likely to vanish than the nasty people.  It would be chaos with those who were left behind trying desperately to keep the infrastructure working.  While this would be a bad place to live, it does make a pretty good place for a game.  So just how is the game?

I didn't like it.  But then, I didn't like the first chapter, Eternal Forces.  Fearing that I might be a bit prejudiced, I asked my gamer son, Jordan,  if he would play it as well and let me know what he thought.  The following is our joint opinion.

Setup – First, it took me two tries to get the game to load.  The game is large, coming on two DVD's, and requires a minimum of 4GB hard drive space.  So it takes a while to install.  And then it crashed towards the end of the install, so I had to install everything again.

Finally, the game was installed and I could start it.  The next thing I am told is that Disk one must be kept in the drive at all times.  Great, the game is copy protected.  This usually means that honest customers are plagued with reliability issues while those who pirate the game get cracked copies and have no problems.  What copy protection does not do is prevent the game from being copied.  It doesn't even slow the pirates down.  But what did it mean to me?

The game came up, played the intro, and crashed.

OK, so I reset the machine, made sure nothing else was running and fired it up again.  This time LBTF caused WinXP to crash – black screen, no response.  It required a power cycle to bring my system back up.  Now, let me say right here that my CPU, RAM and graphics card all exceeded the minimum specs for the game and everything else either met or exceeded the requirements.  So there should have been no problems.

We tried a third time and this time the game decided to play.

So right off the bat I must award a “D” for Quality Control and Playing Nicely With Others.

Graphics – The good news is that the focus and detail place the graphics into the Professional camp as opposed to the High School camp.  The bad news is that the low resolution of the textures and the repetition of the images barely keeps it there.  B-

Sound – A mixed bag.  The sound effects were annoying and told you nothing of what was happening in the game.  The ambient music was OK, but added nothing to the ambiance – it did not pull me into the mood.  But the voice acting was excellent, even better than many adventure games which rely solely on dialog.  For that I will allow a B.

Game Play – Ahh, now we are getting into it. First, last and foremost, LBTF is a Resource Management Game (RMG).  Take away the sound, graphics and labels and it is still an RMG. The point of every RMG is the same – devote some of your resources to generating more resources and then use those excess resources to build up a military force, all the while your opponent is doing the same. The game is won by the player who utilizes their resources the most efficiently so as to get the military advantage.

In an RMG the player is not so much concerned with aiming, dodging and clever moves as they are with information, updates and control.  The game is about Management.  So the player needs to know what is happening at any given time, needs to be able to get where they want to get to quickly and issue commands efficiently.  Let us compare a simple command, Upgrade Facility, in this game with the industry classic RMG Warcraft 2.

In Warcraft 2 you first locate your building on the map (which is easy to do because the landscape is so varied), select it and then click on the Upgrade button.  Short, sweet and you are on to your next task.

In LBTF you first locate your building (which can get confusing because the entire map is a grid of streets filled with buildings), then locate your Builder.  He's the guy in the light shirt and hard hat who could be anywhere on the map.  See the screen shot of all the people with the sparklers on their heads?  That shows that they are praying, which they must do a lot or they will backslide and leave the army.  Maybe if you zoom in close enough you can tell which one he is and select him.  Or you can just select all of them one at a time until you find him.  Once you have found the builder and selected him (always a Him, never a Her) you can send him to the building you want to upgrade.  You do remember where you left that building, don't you? Then you wait while he walks across town and enters the building.  This is about the time you notice that your builder is not sufficiently advanced to upgrade this building, so you must send him back to camp to upgrade himself. Then he can return and upgrade the building.

By the time we went through this exercise, the enemy had managed to build a HumV and was blasting our people to pieces.  So we sent a Worshiper over to convert the driver.  That was when we discovered that you can only convert people.  Equipment prevents the occupants from hearing you.  So we abandoned the Song Leader and went searching for a BMG (Big Monster Gun.  Yeah, that's what the M stands for.  Really.)  Worship may be more powerful than guns, but it appeared useless against cannon.

This is how the whole game felt to us.  It took much more effort to accomplish even simple tasks than was necessary.  Effort that we would rather have used for strategizing.

Now, to be fair, they did fix one of the biggest problems from the first chapter – having to constantly click on all of your people to get them to pray, otherwise they loose all their spiritual points and drop out of the Movement.  Now you can assign a Worship Leader to a group and they will keep them constantly prayed up.

But even so, there is just too much micro-management required to keep the game going.  You just can't concentrate on the Big Picture and lead your troops/congregation.

I think my son summed it all up when he said, “The game is playable, you can win it if you work at it, but it just isn't fun.”

Final grade?  The definitions say that a “B” should leave you wanting more while a “C” leaves you with a feeling of time wasted.  This game is definitely a “C”.

[UPDATE: I just received a note from Left Behind Games which indicated that I had misrepresented some of the features of the game. Please note the following corrections. I will let the reader decide just how much these corrections would have affected my playing experience and opinion of the game...

The game comes on 2 CD's (not DVDs) and although the requirements are 4GB, it only writes about 2.83 GB of data to the hard drive. CD1 doesn't need to be in the drive the entire time, only upon starting the game.

Also, drivers inside of Humvees can be turned neutral, but they may have 0 spirit points and it would take 7 worship leaders to turn that unit neutral. The review incorrectly states that equipment prevents units from hearing you.

Although you had a hard time finding units/buildings, the tutorial shows how to easily display types of buildings by pushing the H key, as well as finding units and buildings by pushing the CTRL-F keys.]

System Requirements:

• Windows® XP SP1
• Pentium® IV 2.0GHz processor or faster
• 512MB RAM Minimum
• 4GB free hard disk space
• 8x CD/DVD-ROM drive or faster
• 32MB DirectX9.0c compatible GeForce 4 MX440 or ATI Radeon 8500 video card or higher
• DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
• TCP/IP for LAN or 56 Kbps modem (2 player games) or Cable/DSL modem (3-8 player games) and an Internet service provider account required for Internet multiplayer
• Microsoft compatible keyboard and mouse.