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I did write that and think... um, MOAR/BIGGAR TANKS sounds pretty sweet actually. To clarify, I mean, commanding a increasingly huge number of units isn't of itself good.
been playing this for a evening or two and it comes with a massive gold star of recommendation from me. I might even award the Captain Janeway hat of general space game achievement.
It's quite like Star Control, if you remember that. You captain a ship with a few crew members, and warp jump from point to point on a little map of a sector until you get to the exit. Graphics are super basic, basically a top down view of your ship, and maybe a top down view of an enemy ship if there's one about. Sounds pretty lame I'm sure, but the gameplay is balls-out fun. You command your little crewmates to man the shield room, or the weapons room, and when the baddies turn up you can board them with teleporters, or disrupt their shields and target life support. You can breach the hull and send in firebombs that kill the crew, or escape by light jump if you're losing the battle. Tactics so far seem really adaptive, and do a fantastic job of making you think like a real ships captain. There's a lot of scavenging of scrap and using that to build upgrades to your ship, building new rooms, trading to get new crewmembers and weapons, or robot drones that can repair your ship or board another. The roguelike element works pretty nicely, as the game is short but very hard. It's a great time to try out different approaches, and luck of the draw of what items you pick up has created a pretty unique set of playthroughs. I suck at this game though, and expect I will for a while. When I do get a small victory and have lead my ship well though, I feel like an absolute badass. Sometimes I pretend I'm Cap'n Reynolds from Firefly. And then I get an erection. In space no one can hear you cream your pants. We have done everything we can within 2 GB of memory and 2 cores
That is literally the most ignorant thing I have ever read. I think I've got some sort of waxy mental build up which blocks such internet shit from registering in the forebrain now. I guess it's a trailer? Anyway SOE added the ability to hide your hud + weapon in the latest patch which makes this game ridiculously filmable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOtZA_Ge8_A And I liked it!
It taste like cherry chapstick. Seriously, though: No wonder this game gets such poor ratings. The graphics are fairly dated, but that's not even the problem. It's a mediocre military/sci-fi shooter that has Alien models instead of soldiers, typical generic gameplay and a ridiculously bad AI. It would probably pass as one of those games, but it since it takes on the Alien franchise and thus carries a lot of baggage, invoking expectations which it fails to satisfy, it has to be judged on different terms.
The strength of the Alien theme, the idea of facing a superior species, uncompromising and extemely deadly, is reduced to absurdity. Here, they are slow and weak fragbait that you can push away and QTE to death. Or maybe just walk past if the AI decides not to notice you. And what about the acid blood? Admittedly, the other Alien FPS games, especially the latest AvP, weren't particularly masterpieces either, but this one manages to set the bar to the lowest possible point. I didn't expect much, especially after that dumbass trailer, and was ready to blame it all on contemporary console bollocks/decline of the industry blahetc, but this game doesn't even seem to live 'up' to that standard. A proper Alien game needs the tension and suspense of being alone in a dark maze-like sci-fi environment under constant pressure; always having to be 200% aware of the surroundings and a single fuckup means instant death. Perhaps something along the lines of a blend between Stalker and Amnesia. Unlikely to happen, though. This one was okay. No improvement over DS2, but not worse, either. It probably could have used more variation in the environments. Apart from that I don't really have any negative impressions or complaints - though neither do I remember any part of it as special or outstanding. Gameplay was fun in parts and mostly routine. The game seems to lack one or more clearly distinguishable or definite 'highlights'. At least it concluded the story (unfortunately still with a backdoor for sequels).
Making some levels optional missions was a good choice considering the overall picture. Those levels reminded me of the side missions in Rage, they consist basically of grinding for loot and a few bits of background story. Surprisingly long play time overall. So metl, which levels did you work on? There were a couple of Rubiconish areas!? I think A:CM is quite good. I found one reviewer that gave it a 4/5. The graphics are a little dated, but the AI is quite good if you put the game on hard, and the level design is decent. Very decent.
I can honestly say that I don't regret paying �30 for it. The graphics in AvP we're a little bit more modern looking. But not by much. But the characters and story in A:CM is better. The voice acting is better too. The musical score is well implemented. I don't think it's bad at all TBH. I've been enjoying it. I've heard that the 360 version looks bad or is buggy or something. But playing it on the PC here (with Anti Aliasing forced on the GPU which runs nice and smooth too), it seems perfectly OK to me. And the levels are pretty, well designed, crafty in places and BIG. Maybe I'm biased. I like Aliens. I built prologue and chapters 14-15 start to finish, but i also did the LD block for 10, 11, 12, 16, and parts of 17 & 18, but those levels were handed off to other LDs after that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_588812&feature=iv&src_vid=3z2qVebxlUo&v=6lGXDM3LGnk
I still can't believe that a developer did this, it looks like all the dynamic lights and lots of the decals were removed from the final game. Maybe it was some performance pass because it was a multi-platform release. The demo looks amazing, the final game is worse! Now there's talk of an 8GB patch. That's crazy - the game is only 6.8GB or something. Still - maybe it will put a bunch of things back in that have apparently been stripped.
I must admit that Sock's video shocked me a little. You don't really notice that stuff but when you see it side by side you realise what you're missing. It's like they accidentally gave everybody else the WiiU version, and just canned the PC version completely. And now they apparently are cannign the Wii version completely. maybe they decided to not to risk falling into the doom3 trap where everyone hated how dark it was. the demo was much darker.
hadley's hope was completely ruined though. I would guess it's performance / multi-platform woes. I think it's common to run your tradeshow demos on a beast of a PC and sort out the performance later. The art looks damn good, bring on the next console generation and hopefully the rendering / post-processing will stop letting the side down.
So I don't play any modern shooters; here's some firsrt impressions.
Too many mechanics, some good most not, diluting each other. Sprint buttons suck. The bullet storm style melee insta-kill button is meh. Especially when there's a satisfying weapon (hammer) that does the same job. Iron sights make it harder to aim. Enemy design is varied, some are great... but again they threw in a generic shotgun trooper who could be from any game for no particular reason. The bigger an enemy is the better it's AI needs to be - not the case here :[ Where are the hordes? Spiders are cool, although the larger version is made pointless by the melee instakill. Despite all the niggles the game isn't broken, just has rough edges and seems to have lost some of its soul (hordes). Still the core mechanics feel good, and there's plenty of variety in the things to shoot at. Hordes are back, all is forgiven.
The melee mechanic now makes sense although sprint is still meh.
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