OK sweethearts, you heard the man and you know the drill!
Fight back against the intruders with your Nemesis: Retaliation rules & reference!
Who would have thought 7 years ago when Nemesis was released that it would spawn not one, but two standalone sequel games? The third, and apparently the last, in this mighty trilogy of space horror is Nemesis: Retaliation, and this time you get to tool up and fight back!
All three games share the same basic concepts, but the each of the two new ones adds new elements and tweaks and builds upon the formula. For example, Retaliation has the three-sector layout introduced in Lockdown, but now, instead of a game board, the corridors and rooms are set up within the boundaries of a number of border pieces with information and component spaces on them. But the main thing you’ll notice in this new game is the change of focus from survival horror to action horror – from Alien to Aliens, if you will. Characters start with more and better weapons, and most significantly, there are two types of ranged combat – shooting at an intruder in a room, which is tougher but usually doesn’t use ammo, and ‘bursting’ at intruders in an adjacent corridor, which definitely uses ammo but has a good chance of taking out multiple intruders in one go.
The Aliens reference is perfect, because it really does feel like that scene in the film where you’re blasting indiscriminately against hordes of advancing aliens – getting the hits of course, but eating up your your ammo in the process.
Another resource you can eat up is oxygen, a new concept in this game. Each of the sectors has a life support room you must activate to get the oxygen flowing freely again; otherwise you’re using it up every turn you take. So far this hasn’t had a huge impact on my games, but it’s another stressful variable to account for as you explore.
Like the games before it, Retaliation is at its best when the cooperation devolves into betrayal as players seek to achieve their own secret mission goals, and you get those hilarious end-game thematic moments of last minute backstabbery. They don’t always happen of course, and sometimes a player can be left on the sidelines while the others keep having fun; but it’s probably an inevitable consequence of so many random moving parts that sometimes they don’t quite mesh as well as you hope.
Despite this variability of experience, Nemesis: Retaliation is always great fun, and I think this version and Lockdown are my favourites; though perhaps the latter just edges ahead a bit because it keeps the survival horror feel of the original game. Still, it’s fun to be able to fight back! For lots more detail and further thoughts, watch out for my Nemesis: Retaliation full video review, coming soon!