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I fought a boss that was five miles across, and took me 16 hours to beatSARGON THE GREAT LAUGHS AT YOUR SO-CALLED “BOSSES”
SARGON THE GREAT LAUGHS AT YOUR SO-CALLED “BOSSES”
Think you’re big then, do you, Whale Dad off ofFinal Fantasy X? Fancy yourself as a bit of a gigantus, hm? What about you,Half-Lifemissile silo monster? You reckon you’re fairly large, don’t you? Oh, and hark at Yhorm over here inDark Souls 3, who’s awarded himself the title “The Giant”, like a child giving themselves a medal made from the lid of a milk bottle. Honestly, you make me laugh, the lot of you. Big bosses, eh? Big disappointments, more like. I used to think you were all impressive, of course. But this week, I beat a boss big enough to fill an entire river valley, and the scales fell from my eyes.
Nebuchadnezzar Launch TrailerWatch on YouTube
Nebuchadnezzar Launch Trailer
You are now, no doubt, standing from your desk and roaring in furnace-hot outrage, that I have been such a deceptive little horror. “A city,” you bellow, so hard that one of your vocal chords snaps and pings out of your mouth like a rubber band, “cannot be a boss!”. You try to snarl the word “clickbait,” but it just comes out as a grating, painful honk; I have the stage once more.
I would have agreed with you, until recently. A boss in a game, surely, is much like a boss in real life: an entity of unreasonable power, which stops you from advancing through the world until you develop the strength or skill to annihilate it. In practice, this usually takes the form of “an extremely large bloke”.
Here is an ogre.
But this definition opens the doors of boss school so much wider, since it no longer requires a boss to be a single, malevolent entity. Hence, Akkad.
Sargon the Great (as portrayed in Civilization VI), the man who put the “Chad” in Nubuchadnezzar.
“BUT IT’S NOT THAT SIMPLE”, booms Sargon the Great, as he bursts through the wall with a hearty, malevolent laugh, and the smell of sandalwood billowing from his disconcertingly perfect torso. And indeed, he is right.
Nebuchadnezzar’s maps are smaller than they appear at first glance, meaning you have to be very canny with where you put things, and it gives you a punishingly slim margin of error, compared with other city builders.
If any of your citizens go without the things they love for even a minute, they will pack up and leave immediately, leaving you with a labour shortage - and therefore a diminished ability to make new things for your remaining populace. To complicate things further, increasing your population of peasants past a certain point requires goods that only sneering millionaires can make, and so on and so forth.
This is how Akkad looks at the start - all that inviting, arid land waiting to be made fertile. But you’d be surprised how fast it runs out.
And for whatever reason, the Akkad mission basically gives you a room made entirely of wells and skeletons, and unleashes a coach tour full of pissed-up hobbits into it. After five missions of running you through the basics, on maps that give you enough space to be a bit sloppy with your granaries and your brickworks, it gives you just what you need to succeed, and nothing more.
“IT WAS A BOSS!” announces Sargon, grinning through a beard like a sack of brown sugar, and with a twitch of his bicep, pops the head of the lion he has been holding in a headlock the whole time we’ve been talking.
Once again, Sargon is right. I approached Akkad exactly as I would a particularly punishing foe in a soulslike: I psyched myself up to have a fresh go each day, only to quit in frustration each time as whatever new strategy I’d come up with fell apart. But eventually, the accumulated weight of all the shit I’d eaten during my failures gave me the momentum I needed, to finally punch through that barrier.
Reader, it was a heck of a feeling. And now I am stuck on level nine.
