Angels Fall First

Lil bit of a learning curve and some jank but 100 percent worth the pricetag.

Great game, I do think it's lacking a lot of polish. Some of it's to be expected with some of the visuals, and way the gameplay feels. There is a lot that's just awkward from balancing and the current state of the game despite being full release. This game just isn't playable with a controller. It has controller support, but we're talking one shoulder button that will slide one direction on your weapons and gear, and you can't move the other way with the other shoulder button since that's for issuing commands. A simple selection wheel could easily fix this, or maybe dedicating one button to switching between weapons while you only slide one direction for ammo drops, grenades, multitool since those aren't as crucial in a situation. It's still okay with the shooting on controller, but it's definitely an afterthought since there's not a lot of care put into translating joystick aim in a way that makes combat not substantially out of your favor. Space combat similarly is absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥ on controller. It's so bad that I thought that the devs just didn't know how to make a good space flight game because of how aggregious the issues were. Warthunder for example isn't the best about controller support, but whichever direction you point, your plane will turn to meet where you're pointing. Here it's trying to make it so the further off center of screen is how fast you turn. It works incredibly well on m+k, but with controller you will be fighting to fly straight, let alone have precise aiming with attacking another fighter. Small nitpick, but it doesn't allow you to invert the y-axis for the flight vehicles exclusively, you have to invert the axis for when using infantry and ground vehicles as well. Ignoring all of this though, the actual gameplay issues have just been the weird balancing. It's tough for a small team, but it feels like some things weren't thought out very well. You move and jump and can strafe incredibly fast. Not anything that's too out of place, but it's enough where quick tapping side-to-side will make you impossible to hit. This isn't really too much of an issue, iirc either battlefield 3 or 4 had pretty quick movement that acted as a bit of a skill barrier and really that can be fun and a good time! Where this becomes an issue is that due to the nature of the game focusing on objectives in extremely small and tight spaces with the ships and buildings, you move fast enough that you can move across entire rooms in little-less than a second. Fights in these spaces get clunky just with the environmental clutter that blocks your way, having to turn to match the speed both of you are moving, and other teammates that could be there that you need to be aware of. So when you pack some of these areas with upwards of 64 players and ask half of them to defend this tiny room with the other half trying to push in? You can probably imagine how big of an issue that can get to be, even if personally I love how chaotic it gets with all the explosions and gunfire effects going off that it actually does drop the framerate of my pc like I'm playing metal slug in an arcade. Part of this speed issue also bleeds into weapon balancing, shotguns and knives dominate the balance currently, part of this is that the knife can one-shot lighter armored enemies, which when it has a bit of stickiness to make it easier to hit enemies, and everyone's fast enough it can be tough to register if someone is purposefully trying to get close to stab you it's a pretty bad problem. I did see the news in the updates about trying to tune down the knives soon, but it really just seems like a big part of the issue is the approach to the scale of the game when tied with how quick they want the game to be. Maybe the solution is redesigning some of these maps to be bigger, maybe it could work to slow players down, maybe also I don't know what I'm talking about. There's also a minor issue with the servers. I can't really tell if it's due to a low playerbase or the actual way connections are handled, but they are laggy as ♥♥♥♥. I have google fiber, but a quick join put me into a lobby with 30 other players and checking the board more than half had a ping from 80-120 with 6 people maybe that had something lower. Maybe it was just due to the server location of whoever set it up or something weird so maybe it's not worth bringing up, but I think it's something to mention if you're only interested in multiplayer. Expect a semi-low player base, or rough connections to whoever is actually playing. the game despite all the issues is incredibly fun. There's a lot of love put into the designs, the weapons, the environments, the ships, the everything. Space-combat is really fun and well done in a way that I didn't really get into, I really find the ai offline command system to be an interesting way to make this game work if there's no players. I do like the fast pace when it does click in some of the more open areas. I love the tutorial skyrim intro. It's all really great and I think people really should give this game a shot.