What I like about Gengis Khan campaign is that again, you are tasked to recover a relic, but in fact there are two: one is held by a hostile tribe, and another is hidden away.
Other than that, it’s pretty similar to Saracens campaign, except instead of building camel riders and camel throwers you build horse archers and more horse archers to make a porcupine impression out of anyone who disagrees with you.
The first mission that really annoyed me is the Great Chinese Wall one. Not because Chinese are actually a great counter to the mongols with their rocket carts, arbalests and lance cavalry. But because you’re never told that one of the 4 AI opponents is building a Wonder, that triggers a timer until mission fails (go figure the logic behind it). And that opponent is on an well protected island, so you really need to know what you’re doing.
I ended up using the French strategy to beat this mission. Instead of building a base behind the wall as intended, I transported all my peasants to the island, then fast-teched into Castle Age and built a castle: islanders don’t build rams or trebuchets. Once Wonder was not an option anymore, I moved back to the mainland. Still, it probably took me a good hour to beat the other 3 factions into submissions and hunt all their villagers. Who. Would. Not. Relent.
After this mission beating Russia and Persia is easy, despite the supposed need to control two camps at once. And I expected that the final mission for holding the bridge will be the toughest, because in previous one you are tasked with building three castles, which is a lot, and on my first try Bohemians actually destroyed all of them. But this mission is the easiest, Hungary barely attacks, and then you are given a ton of legendary units.
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Category: Aleosha Blog
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Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition
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Tacticus
Rukkatrukk from its event (I think):
Actus and Exitor-Rho from pulls:
Those two are considered good, but I’m still missing Tan Gi’da for full Mech team.Tankmasha from farming the shop:
Finally Titus from the shopping event.
Titus is the one I wanted since I started playing, he’s incredibly powerful for being able to ressurect if he kills an enemy with his Vengeance.
The shopping event also brought me much closer to obtaining Marneus Calgar, most expensive Ultramarine character. He’s farmable, but the closer the better. I’m now 430/500 shards, which means it’s possible to farm him in a couple of weeks. -
Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition
Second campaign I play is for Barbarossa (Teutons).
It plays exactly as you’d expect: toughest buildings in the game and toughest infantry, so you just overpower your opponent as long as you have the Castle to build your Teutonic knights.
It felt too similar to France campaign, though, so I decided to try Saladin instead. The story is a strange propaganda how Saracens are so much better than Norman crusaders, but anyway.
For some reason, camel riders are efficient against cavalry. And the special unit is a camel rider tha throws swords? But it’s a simple game plan: you build a lot of fast camel cavalry and destroy your opponent that programmed to use cavalry as well.
The only interesting bit is that in the last mission Richard Lionheart deploys unique trebuchets against you, called Bad Neighbour. -
Abasolo whiskey (Mexico)
1st from the Advent Calendar.
When I was picking a whiskey advent calendar last year (actually, it was this year, in January), I decided not to go with Scotch whiskey, as there’s a good chance I would be familiar or even own half of it. So, despite not being a fan of anything but Scotch, I bought the World Whiskey Advent Calendar by Drinks By The Dram.
First one is a corn whiskey from Mexico. I never ever heard of Mexican whiskey, and only had corn distillate in bourbons. The color is very light, and the taste is surprisingly good, despite 43% (at least not 40%!).
You can taste the actual corn, it’s smooth and quite sweet. And for 43%, it actually hits pretty hard. For 39GBP, that’s actually pretty good deal. -
Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition
As a kid, I played a lot of Age of Empires, but for some reason despite marvelling its graphics, I never played Age of Empires 2 enough to understand its mechanics.
Here I am, with the remaster, humiliated by its new tutorial.
The original tutorial for Celts and Joan of Arc campaign, which I remember, are bearable. The amout of campaigns in Definitive Edition is ridiculous: more than 25?! I plan to do only the original campaigns, called here Age of Kings, and even in that I’m not sure.
What I like about the French campaign is that you’re given an objective to destroy 3 castles, but there are 4 castles, actually. So you can not only pick the order, but also which of them to ignore. What I don’t like is that the castle objective is a bit repetetive, as you aren’t allowed to build trebuchets, your only way is to mass rams.
I also didn’t understand that scorpions weren’t a siege weapon. They’re more of a support weapon.
Speaking of siege weapons, once you get trebuchets, it’s over for AI. The only response to them is to build your own trebuchets, or to deploy bombard ships, which AI micromanages with suprising efficiency.
Completed France’s campaign, which, I must say, was chaotic, as you’re usually pitted against 2-3 enemies, and due to the number of alerts you get, you can sometimes miss that a band of rainders is killing your peasants.
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Old News Alligator Wine, Randers Bryghus
This barley wine I found in Aarhus airport by complete coincidence. While often barley wine is akin to Imperial Stout, this is more of a belgian quadrupel. Amber in color, with no head (expected) and no sediment (unexpected). The taste is also less sweet than expected, with a bit of bitter aftertaste. For the price, it’s an absolute banger, if only it was exported.
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Crimson Skies
Completed Crimson Skies.
I stopped enjoying the game by Hollywood. First you need to beat a ton of though enemies and pick up a car with time limit. Then you have a mission where you need to fly into a tiny hangar and blow up its doors, while there’s still a chance you will be killed by debris. Then you have a race through the same hangar.
Planes in this game have ridiculous number of guns. In MechWarrior, having many hardpoints made sense, since you could combine weapons into firing groups. But without those, extra guns is just extra ammo, which means there’s no point into putting anything but the highest caliber. Same goes for the turrets, as those have infinite ammo, it seems. Speaking of ammo, explosive ammo is the best ammo type, with no downsides, which makes all the other types of ammo pointless.
Downing a zeppelin with torpedoes sounds cool, until you try. First, the torpedoes fly slower than your plane, you can literally overtake them. And they are armed only after 300m , meaning you can’t use them too close. The real problem? There’s no distance meter in the game, as far as I can tell. So I had to take the heaviest bomber, just to make sure I have spares.
I was sure that the mission in New York where you need to destroy a warehouse is bugged. You need to destroy 6 beams, which are tiny, and I’m not sure if they were made to withstand multiple rockets, or if rockets splash damage isn’t big enough.
The only way I managed to beat the warehouse mission is to create a plane specifically for it, with maximum armor possible, because all enemies focus on you, and multiple guns, because I was literally running out of ammo by the end.
The game has a bug where it sometimes would load key structures at wrong coordinates. The problem with that I discovered that the New York Police Station is basically not in Manhattan, but beyond map limits, half way through a mission where I had to pick up yet another tiny person.
It’s ironic that the final mission is one of the easier in the game, as there are plenty of allies and not that many enemies, and the final boss is just a regular plane, so it’s basically a joke.What didn’t work out for me in the original game, compared to High Road to Revenge, is how unpredictable some of the mechanics are. I already mentioned that during the firsrt half of the game, most of my deaths were due to my wingman ramming into me. But even during firefights, the hit detection seemed pretty random. Sometimes enemies would destroy me within seconds, sometimes I would finish the same fight unscated. Only to bump into invisible geometry. It’s incredible how many times a game with such an unforgiving collision detection would either make you fly through very narrow spaces, often at 90 degrees, or give you a single try to pick up a tiny moving object.
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Crimson Skies
From the 3rd mission, you already get a Balmoral bomber with two turrets, front and back. And plenty of missiles. Also interesting that you have not just one, but 5 wingmen, although only one is configurable. Unfortunately, it also means more planes to ram you as you about to complete the mission.
Using just the keyboard is suprisingly simpler than I expected. One thing the game loves you to do, though, is pick someone up from a plane/zeppelin/train. Almost every second mission makes you do that. And that requires matching speed. This is pretty annoying to pull.
What’s strange is that you can’t refit your plane. If you want another gun arrangment or armor distribution, you have to sell one plane and buy a new one.
Storywise, first few missions are about hunting after Drake’s treasure. Then we rescue our scientist friend from russians, and his daughter from Americans, alongside an experimental plane.
Maybe I don’t understand some mechanic, but the first Hollywood mission is brutal. You have to hit tiny police cars, then fight off two waves of superior enemies, then pick up a tiny car risking hitting the ground. Not fun. -
Crimson Skies
Original Crimson Skies for PC is a very different beast from its Xbox sequel. The tone is immediately set as a pirate treasure hunt. There are no cutscenes, instead we have radiodrama-like briefings. And the biggest difference is the plane setup. Like in Mechwarrior games, you have weight limit, and you can chose the type of your engine, distribute armour across 4 regions, and most importantly, choose weapon for each of the 6 hardpoints. And for each weapon, you can even pick multiple ammo types.
Bullets have trajectory, indicated by tracers, and aren’t infinite. Missiles are even more finite. I complained that missile stock in High Road to Revenge was much lower than in Ace Combat games, although it could be refilled during mission with pickups. Here, you have 4 missiles, and that’s it. You can also see them on the aircraft belly, which is really cool.
The enemies go down quickly, though, and are few in numbers, so I’m yet to feel need for ammo.
Collisions are quite deadly. I died a few times at the very first seconds of the mission simply because my wingman flew out of the airship right after me, and rammed my plane. And 2nd mission requires you to follow a bomber, which I rammed by mistake as well, downing it and failing the mission.
The game uses Mechwarrior 3 engine, which is obvious to anyone by it’s quite unique picture-in-picture mode, that’s used to track enemy aircraft. That’s pretty neat, as you don’t only get to see their relative direction, but also which way they’re facing. That’s the only good thing I can say about those visuals, though. The lighting is flat, and so are the textures. There’s 3 years difference between Crimson Skies and High Road to Revenge, but the technological gap is vast.
I didn’t manage to make my Xbox One controller work with Crimson Skies despite multiple guides. And I had to use RivaTuner in order to limit FPS, otherwise the game runs at 4x speed with 240FPS.
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Tres Diablitos beer, Coolhead Brew
I mourn for the day I’ll find a barrel aged stout I don’t like. Today is not that day, though. Despite Spanish name, this Imperial Stout comes from Finland. It has a complex taste, with a warm aftertaste of chillies.
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Limehouse to Dalston
We went up the Regent’s canal to Victoria park.
Got some chai masala in the market. No mushrooms stall today, though.
Bought some personal cakes (it was a filled scone for me, actually) in Violet bakery. The scone was a disappointment.
Then we went to Hash E8 in Dalston. We had a reservation and even arrived on time, but they didn’t have it in their system. So we had to wait 15 minutes to get a table. Although both the owner and waitress apologied to us, so no hard feelings.
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Operation Finalle
This isn’t what I expected, as most of the movie isn’t actually dedicated to capturing Eichmann or to dramatising the escape. Instead, it’s a dialogue between Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley.
Melanie Laurent is best known for Shoshanna in Inglorious Bastards. So seing her play another Jewish lady hero is nice.
But I’m not sure what point this movie was trying to make, unlike “Munich” or even “Golda”.
Which is strange, because Oscar’s character arc is solid: he’s this egoistic, rash and haunted by his past failures agent, not the first to be picked, and not the one expect to handle interrogations. And in the end he fights to keep Eichman alive, and almost sacrifices himself in order to let others escape Argentina.
I think I mostly don’t understand Kingsley’s Eichmann. Is he a calculated and violet wolf hiding among sheep? Is he just a German bueracrat judged for crimes of the entire nation? It feels like instead of being ambigous, he’s just confusing. -
Golda
The cigarettes are a common motive. Golda smokes all the time, and so is her cabinet.
The meeting of the cabinet is almost comical. No, it actually is comical, as Ariel Sharon steals two pieces of cake on his way out.
This is all filmed within just a few rooms: Golda’s apartment, the cabinet, courtroom and hospital, with Golda’s visit to the frontlines being played alongside real historical footage of her, and all the action replaced by real historical footage as well.
Despite a couple over dramatic cancer scenes, I really liked the dialogue. It does gives an impression of a chess game, where one side not understanding it mahave won if only just.
Lev is too handsome to play such a slug as Kissinger was, but I still liked the “torture by borscht” scene. -
Nobody
All I knew about this movie is that fight scene on a bus. It is amazing, though. In the way it tells a character story without many words, and with “burglary gone south” trope made fun of.
Strangely, it reminded me of Hurtlocker, the same theme of a veteran trying to live a regular 9to5 life.
Of course it turns into RED, although I’m not sure how many people even remember this Bruce Willis movie.
I talked about picture quality over the last year (although it hardly says anything, as I don’t watch movies in the order of their release), but this one surprised me with the audio quality. They really make the point in the veteran tattoo salon, when the sound of the tattoo machine follows the camera, but it’s just great overall.
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Ace Combat Assault Horizon Legacy
Completed Ace Combat Assault Horizon Legacy.
I was wrong that they excluded aircraft due to it being old. You do get access to F4 later. Not sure why you’d want to fly an inferior plane, though.
By 21st mission, you get the F15M (doesn’t exists in real life, it’s a tribute to Macros anime). And this mission, which was quite tight in the original is laughably easy. And while I didn’t managed to complete cruise missile chasing Last Resort on the first try, I did it on the 3rd, not 30th like with the original.
First time I see wingman actually completing objectives. In all other games I remember only value was that they would distract some enemies. -
Black Mass
Most people don’t understand what “informant” means. This is probably the best depiction, how working with FBI allowed a small time Irish criminal become Boston kingpin, killing tens of people in the process.
I don’t remember why I wanted to watch it, maybe because I watched “Legend” or maybe was impressed by Joel Edgerton from “The King” (here it’s much weaker role).
After doing some reading, the bit that surprised me the most is not Bulger (although going for Johnny Depp was an overkill, he’s nothing special), but how sympathethic Flemmi is depicted. In reality, he strangled not one, but two of his girlfriends, then dismembered them. Also, the fact that Flemmi was an informant before Bulger is completely reversed.
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JoJo Rabbit
It’s amazing, and obviously very sad. It is funny, the writing is great, and over the top acting fits the atmosphere well.
Scarlett Johanson really surprised me, as I was sure she would be just a prop, but she actually steals the show. How she delivers “you don’t know him, he’s a fanatic” speaking of her 10 years old son is incredible. Or how she plays the missing father. There is so many levels to that single episode.
Everyone always mentions the double shoes scene. But frankly, almost every scene is amazing with it’s asymmetry.
Strangely, or maybe not, the scene that hit me the most was the Russians executing the Nazis, and how that goofy, over the top German soldier sacrifices his life to save JoJo.
And maybe the subtleness of the rabbit in the winter scene. Since we see JoJo scrapping garbage bins for food we expect that the next scene he’d be eating the rabbit. But this isn’t about it. It’s about holding long enough to survive.
And yeah, maybe the movie was about surviving the “Nazi Trump” first term for some. I don’t care. I think that’s what makes a great art, when you can find something for yourself.
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Fletchers Red Oak cider
I rarely drink cider. This one we found while visiting Ludlow, and turns out it’s a very local brand, that doesn’t even have a proper website.
Barrel aging makes everything better: whiskey obviously, beer, and even cider. It’s delicious, smooth, with almost no gas and a lot of body. Hits pretty strong too. -
Life is Perception, Blackout Brewing
First time I’m trying beer from Romania. It’s a very solid Barrel Aged Imperial Stout, aged in Palo Cortado (special sherry) barrels for a year.
Zero head, tastes like sour cherry, leaves you energetic. At 12GBP it’s not cheap, but worth it.
Would try some more Barrel Aged from Blackout Brewing when I get the opportunity. -
Blood West
Completed Blood West.
Third episode bumps the stakes again. Enemies are so “meaty” I have to buy the unique revolving buffalo rifle, and gunpowder horn that saves 40% of its very expensive ammo. The whole idea of the episode is that you descend into this “radioactive” canyon (at least you don’t need gas mask filters, but you do need to craft a “gas mask” sort of), towards the huge demon skeleton that carved this canyon.
One episode I didn’t enjoy much is raiding the indian village for one of the totem figurines. It’s swarming with invisible enemies called Broken Screams. Since they are invisible, it’s hard to sneak past them, and I ended up almost running of ammo. Had to use the chain revolver that holds 28, so I don’t need to reload so often.
There are nasty enemies called Boo Hags, skinless women that can only be killed with a instakill or fire. One of them is talkative and asks to bring her skin back. She also mentions that the night is endless, which is never explained.
There’s very little explained in general. We climb the mountain, summon totem of souls (which was previously a ram head on a stick), which is a bubble, that turns into a dragon. The boss fight is fine, but least inventive out of the three bosses: it telegraphs where “mortars” will land, and has a “flamethrower” pattern attack. You shoot it with buffalo rifle until it dies, which doesn’t take long.Despite story being lackluster, I enjoyed this game immensely. One of the best experiences of 2025.
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