Horror Show: USX - Modern Day Heroes

 

Ever heard the phrase “having is not as good as wanting”? Well, I recently had an experience with this.

You see, some time ago, I stumbled across some minis for a game called “USX: Modern Day Heroes” that looked kind of cool, when I was looking for more stuff for Zona Alfa and a few other things. After I bought some, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to have another minis game, right? And this one has robots, magic, Mythos monsters, and zombies, even vehicles, so what’s not to like? Well… It would help if the damn thing was complete! In short, I feel like I got ripped off.

I’m not kidding. All this book gives you is rules. Which is great and all but without stats for any of the models in the line. And the game uses square 30mm bases, which is more common with fantasy or historical games, because of the old “rank and flank” style of games. There’s one other modern game that I’ve encountered that uses square bases, and I know the reason this game uses them is because they have a fantasy and historical games that use the same system as this game. 

 Anyway. It does have rules. And those rules are… Okay, I guess? But they’re not exactly user friendly. There’s a mix of letters, numbers, and other symbols like &, #, @, etc and you have to compare things on a chart. For example, if you have a melee combat, you would compare Melee Attack Class and the Defense Class (which would be letters) to see how well you’re going to do in a fight. And you do the same for ranged weapons. It’s a bit insane, as you could have just used numbers, as it makes more sense to more people. At least, I would think so. I wonder if they were worried about getting sued by GW or something? I mean, yeah, that’s always a concern in this space but this is a bit of unnecessary nonsense. Moving on. When you compare the numbers between the attacker and defender, you get a multiplier for the damage dice of the weapon you’re using (between ½ and 2, but mostly 1) and then what number you score the hits on when you roll the dice (between 4+ and 6+), and then roll the dice from your weapon and see how many hits you scored. This is needlessly complex. It gets even worse when they start getting into autofire weapons, as you can make multiple attacks, but you drop one dice as you make further attacks. This can mean that you’re rolling upwards of 20 dice for a single attack, if you get really lucky. Because everything is d6 based, of course. 

 It gets worse, as they have a morale system. There’s going to be a longer post about this, but I really do not like morale systems in skirmish level games. I don’t have a problem with it in larger, army sized games, and there’s all kinds of tactical levels to those games. While the system is designed to go up to true “wargaming” scale, with that good ol’ Rank and Flank stuff, you shouldn’t have it be a core element of the smaller level game. It would be fine if it was confined to using horror, as the Cthulhu Mythos has fear and horror as a core element, but it’s not. There’s also a magic system, such as it is, which also calls for morale checks, but there’s no reason to make it sure a core element.

One of the major problems with RAFM continuing to sell this game is that the game requires you have the model’s character card. And, of course, there’s another problem here, because you can’t find the cards anymore. They don’t sell them with the models, even in the boxed sets, and the links on their website are long dead. So, they’re selling a poorly designed game that you can’t even play! There are a few sample cards in the back of the book, but not nearly enough to break it down to figure out how much things should cost. Oh, and that’s another thing, the point costs. A zombie costs 950 points. A minor grunt costs 1,470 points. That’s insane. That means that a small game would probably have a points limit of 10k or so. Another factor in selling cards for the minis is that you’re going run into a really cool mini that has crap stats. And you won’t know that until you buy the mini, as the stats aren’t in the book.

 Sure, the PDF on their website is only $5, but it’s a literal waste of five bucks. Assuming you get it, which I have a story about. I saw a physical copy for $12 on eBay, down from the full sale price of $20. As I’d bought a lot of the minis, I thought I would pick it up. But I thought I might buy the PDF of it first. So, I go to the RAFM website and find out that they do have PDFs of the game. I order it, but I did it without making an account, so I made the account and I still don’t have my PDF. I’ve thought about sending an email but it’s not worth it. So you, before I bought the PDF, I ended up buying that physical copy… And after reading it, I decided it wasn’t worth it to waste my time for a game I couldn’t even play, much less ask for a refund.

There’s just so much wrong here. There’s so much missing, even weapon templates, and there’s no support for it online. It’s garage. It’s incomplete. Even if this an expansion, as it’s technically “Universal Soldier EXTREME” as their system of games is called Universal Soldier, it doesn’t say that it requires the other books. You shouldn’t be selling this if it isn’t ready to play from the start, unless you say that you need other things, too. A hot mess doesn’t even begin to describe it, I swear. It really sucks because under these broken things and missing content, there’s almost a really interesting and unique game just waiting to come out. The latest edition of the this game is from 2008, plenty of time to cook up a fix, or even release the stuff you need online. It’s just frustrating.

However, with all of my complaining and anger, I do want to say that RAFM’s models are great and you should totally buy those if you want them. Just save your money and don’t buy this game.