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Review: Auroch Digital's OGRE is Almost Too Faithful to the Original

Published Sat, 03 Feb 2018 11:45:46 -0600

Making digital versions of tabletop games is hard, and no game proves that more than Auroch Digital's OGRE. While the digital edition of the game is pretty spot-on faithful adaptation of the tabletop game, that actually makes it a pretty terrible video game.

The things that make OGRE great on tabletop don't translate well to digital. The game's turn-based mechanics and targeting system really just translate to waiting and menus, which are not things that play well with video gamers, especially when you have really limited graphics.

There's nothing wrong with stripped-down graphics, but when your whole board is nothing but textured tiles with nothing but plastic figures on it, well, it leaves a lot to be desired.

Civilization uses a similar hex-grid map, but still has more visual interest than anything OGRE has to offer. And that's because OGRE is too faithful of a digital port. The pieces are designed exactly the way the tabletop boards are. The pieces even look like they're made out of plastic — from your tanks to your infantry units, they look like perfectly faithful reproductions.

Some of the UI elements fade into the background, but then prevent you from being able to click on the map beneath them. Your units disappear into stacks of identical hex counters when you drop multiple tanks on one plot, to the point where there is little difference between two tanks and twelve.

But that also means that they look pretty darn boring — especially when placed against the backdrop of 4K 60FPS PC gaming.

Moving away from the aesthetics, the rest of OGRE doesn't really help its case. The combat requires use of menus and sub-menus to target enemies, and it is easy to completely screw up your turn by not selecting multiple units to fire at once, because you do only get one or two firing phases per turn. And the pacing of your firing and movement phases are, well, a bit odd. You might be instructed to fire first, and then move. And the next turn have things the other way around.

Your AI opponents are also not the greatest. They don't play the way another player would, to the point where they are laughably easier than an actual opponent. It should only take about a match or two to figure out how to beat the computer AI every time, because its rules don't seem to make any sense. The AI doesn't take into account firing distance while moving and so will get within ramming range and then just sit there, waiting for you to take advantage. A weaponless enemy Ogre will flee to an open space instead of ramming the attacking Ogre. An attacking Ogre will take a long route to get around craters, and are pretty darn easy to corner and rush with multiple tanks, making them essentially pointless.

The multiplayer has some pretty detrimental bugs, like enemy units you can't target for no obvious reason, and random phase skipping. Roughly half the matches I played worked out pretty smoothly, while the other half had to be called due to the game skipping several phases for one player, meaning their opponent could absolutely slaughter them over inaction.

Now, if you love OGRE but don't have the friends to play it with locally, or don't have the space to keep all the miniatures and boards around, Auroch Digital's port of the game is pretty darn faithful. It includes all of the campaigns from the original game and many of the expansions. It is faithful to a T, and the single-player version of the game has been heavily patched.

But if you're looking for a turn-based strategy PC war game, I'd say give this one a hard pass.

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