Earlier this month we announced the next game in the LEVEL 7 series, LEVEL 7 [INVASION]. The same day we debuted the teaser we conducted a blind test of the rules here in our office. The images we tweeted that day showed off a lot of what the game looks like, but this is the first chance I’ve had to talk about what the game is actually about and how it works.
LEVEL 7 [INVASION] is the third chapter in the ongoing story presented previously in [ESCAPE] and [OMEGA PROTOCOL]. This time around, the game focuses on the wider world of the setting while progressing the storyline.
Dr. Cronos, the villain from the first two games, has many secrets, and the revelation of the biggest of his secrets is the focus of this game. When Cronos arrived on Earth and formed an alliance with the U.S. government, he portrayed himself as a refugee fleeing a plague killing his race. Yet this was only part of the truth. The detail he left out was the origin of that plague. Cronos’ people, the Ghin, had been losing a war against another race of aliens, the Hydra, and the plague was the Hydra’s greatest weapon against the Ghin. As the story of [INVASION] begins, the war Cronos fled has finally caught up with him.
In LEVEL 7 [INVASION], up to five players take on the roles of coalitions of Earth governments that have formed in response to the first waves of the invasion. These coalitions must work together to fight off the invaders while attempting to maintain their own individual existences. As the teaser trailer shows, the only chance humanity has of defeating the more technologically advanced forces of the Hydra is to work directly with Dr. Cronos.
Each player controls everything about his own coalition—from how its troops are deployed to which technologies it researches. Each player must also manage his coalitions resources, and each coalition has strengths and weakness that include varying access to certain resources. Each player therefore decides if he is going to trade those resources with his allies or keep them for himself, and those resources must also be shared with Cronos. Humanity’s only hope for survival is to support Cronos in completing his globe-spanning project to defeat the invaders.
LEVEL 7 [INVASION] is a semi-cooperative game. In fact, it has the most cooperative gameplay in the series, as the players’ goal is to work together to defend the Earth. But it also presents each player with decisions that force him to consider his own survival first. I’ll go much deeper into the mechanics of the game in the future.
The last thing I want to share with you in this Insider is a closer look at the game’s figures.
The first is the human soldier. Greatly outnumbered by the alien forces, these brave men form the base of your coalition’s defenses.
Next, we have the invader unit. Nicknamed “hammerheads” by the soldiers who have come face to face with them, these creatures tower over their human adversaries. As you can see, they use a mix of weaponry to achieve their objectives.
Finally, the Hydra dropship. These craft bristle with detachable pods full of invader units, and they act as the primary spawning location for enemies during the game.
That’s it for now. More glimpses into the [INVASION] of Earth are coming in the weeks ahead…