Yeah, Chaos Earth is fantastic. It's even grittier than Rifts (Rifts always had that touch of "comic flavor" with Juicers and Crazies and whatnot), plus it has awesome rules for animals fighting the supernatural and helping humans detect and evade threats. The Roscoe is probably one of the best OCCs in the Megaverse, and does a lot to help give the game a feeling of post apocalyptic survival/rescue, rather than the feeling of trying to carve out a reputation and a living that Rifts has.
Just so I don't completely stray off the original topic (c'mon people, this is a great review, and shouldn't be buried under Chaos Earth hate)...I bring this question up again, since I'm unclear on what was "promised/expected" of the game: what were most people expecting out of the large combat rules? I wasn't really reading every detail of the press releases regarding this game, so I wasn't even looking for those rules, but were they supposed to be something like large groups fighting other large groups, or was it going to be a few characters vs a horde of zombies? As it is, the Zombies in this game are extremely tough to kill (not my personal preference, but it is what it is, and it will hopefully make the characters think twice before attempting zombie exterminations), so if you're facing a large group, you're probably at a huge disadvantage and the rules would only really help the GM eliminate the PCs faster (with less rolls
).
Most Palladium games have never really had "mooks" or one-shot kill fodder that you can find in other games (like All Flesh Must be Eaten, or Mutants and Masterminds), so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised when the classic quick kill threat (the zombie) turned out to be much tougher (requiring two or three extremely tough shots to take out). Sometimes I run games much looser and have my own set of "ninja horde" rules, but that is only for games where the players don't want to think too much and just want to have some arcade style fun with the dice rolls. The zombies as written require better tactics and strategies to survive or escape, so things like large combat rules would probably be really tough to create for it, and would only really be usable in extremely rare situations. Perhaps there could be some type of brainstorm in the Rifter forums to create a set of large combat rules for the game.
The dumbing down of the thinker is something I agree with you on, though. I'm not mad at the decision, but I was thinking of something diabolical and cunning that the players could actually have some type of creepy dialogue with, making the hordes even creepier when the conversation basically keeps coming back to the players being torn to shreds to feed the "family". I mean even in the original Night of the Living Dead there were "ghouls" that used rocks to bash in windows, so personally I'd like to see a little smarter "thinker" that can perhaps learn to do things like reload a gun (scary), or learn from previous encounters with the PCs and not fall for the same traps. Nothing like a military tactical genius or anything like that, but smart enough to pick up on overused traps (fool me thrice...shame on me).
