Slak : Mech Trekking

I'm writing this review/critique in with the perspective that this a dev's first attempt at making a beginner project game for their benefit.. Not bad, not great. It could definitely shape into a promising game given more time and effort: Overall, it's a broken but ok first attempt at a game of this scale. UI: pretty bare bones, but it's functional and gets the job done. Nothing special, no pizazz, just a functional UI. It doesn't feel clunky, overbearing, or unnecessary. I would have liked to have been able to turn off screen shake. The "slider" for the frame rate adjustment isn't a slider at all, or at least it wasn't for me. A bug perhaps? I could manually type in the frame rate, but I was not able to slide it like the interface design language implied to me. I would definitely make the tutorial level optional. I'm also not sure if the mission select screen is bugged or not. I think there is only one mission per stage, and if that's the case, then the mission select screen is bugged and will only show up to stage 3 for me and I have to play through all missions from that point forward even if I've beaten them. The layout seemed very on-par for a mech game, but it lacked any sort of in-game or pause menu map. Not that big of a deal for map sizes with this scale and lack of visual clutter, but If there were more aspects of the game to manage, a map might be nice. It's more like a first person shooter where looking and aim control is concerned instead of tank controls like in Mech Warrior 5, so facing with respect to where you going isn't so much of an issue. Gameplay: You start off on a mech loadout screen. There's only one mech to choose from, and every other enemy mech has the same mech as you. They all seem to have the same loadout as well. You can choose between several different weapons, but seeing as how there's no weight limits or heat generation to consider it wasn't really worth it to try anything more than the default loadout of gatling guns on the arms and swarmer missiles on the shoulders. I tried the projectile laser and the rocket launchers, but they were worse than the gatling guns in terms of range, accuracy, and rate of fire that I didn't see the point. There's no ammo consideration either, so again, using anything other than the default loadout didn't make sense. I used the swarmer missiles for a little while just so that I could have some indirect fire capabilities but I eventually switched to all gatling guns. I'll get more into the weapons shortly. You start off every mission on-foot outside of your mech which you have to run to. It's very refreshing to see this mechanic in a mech game. Once you get in the mech, the controls are very simple. You can fire the arms (left click) or shoulders (right click). There's no way to have individual or customized fire control. For a game of this scale, it isn't a problem. If I had to think about heat and timing weapons fire it would be necessary. You can jump and use jump jets to get a better vantage point/ take pot shots behind a building or part of the landscape. You can also run. Again, heat generation isn't an issue here so you can run the whole time if you want. Jump jets have depletable fuel, but restore at a decent rate once you let go of the jump button. FALL DAMAGE IS A THING. The enemy AI is very basic, but serviceable. Nothing fancy, they mostly wander around till you enter their line of sight (even at a considerable distance). The gun towers cheat sometimes as they can sometimes been seen shooting through terrain, but I have never noticed any damage from these shots. The mechs, gun towers, buildings, and all other destructible elements are relatively flimsy in terms of health, but you are too, sorta. The missions are very straight forward and simple. One of the latter night mission stages with 6 mech, 10 stationary targets, and a single waypoint has a game breaking bug: It asks you to destroy 10 stationary targets, but there are only 8. I cannot for the life of me find the other 2, nor are they on the radar or HUD. I could not progress past this level because of it. The most memorable and unique mission that I don't see often at all in mech games is one of the latter missions where you have to fight in a vertical conical tunnel. That was a very interesting map and it was fun to play on. I almost wish I couldn't use the distance to my advantage, but it was fun to experience nonetheless. As a side note, I found the small towns to be charming. I enjoyed the overall design language. I liked looking around at how you set the towns up. It seemed well thought out. Sound: Again, like the rest of the game, it's very bare bones. Nothing special, no music, but it does its job. Overall thoughts: it's a great foundation to build up much more; a promising proof-of-concept. I can tell you put a great deal of effort into it. I'm disappointed that one of the latter missions for stage 3 was bugged to where I couldn't continue, but I'm sure that it could be easily fixed. For an amateur game developer, I rate it 5/10. I recommend buying it if you want to support and show love to a new, small developer. To the dev: You have a lot of work to do, but this is a solid attempt. I'm proud of you for getting this far, keep going! If you can do this, you can do so much more. You have great potential! May God bless your efforts

If I just have one thing to say about this one is that it feels like the McDonalds toy version of MechWarrior. This would be one of the most intriguing titles for a game that would randomly appear on my screen while scouring the 'mech' section on Steam, 'Slak: Mech Trekking.' Whenever my internal monologue reads this one it takes on the voice of an aging and gruff southern trucker. SLAK MECH TREKKIN'. Now I'm not quite too sure what exactly a SLAK is at this point but because mech media really doesn't like to use the term mech in universe I'm running on the assumption that these big machines of war are called SLAKs. Like the pants. Maybe because they have legs instead of wheels. The game boots to an ominously silent main menu. Simple boops establish button presses as the dark light of the background is filtered through your cornea, preparing the brain behind for some sort of action packed future sequences. We make our way through the settings menu to establish confirmation that this game understands that our hardware is ready for ultra graphics settings. The sound settings are checked but the input menu is only glanced at as we can't hold back the anticipation to start. Level 1. The Tutorial. Except, wait, hold on, we've got a loadout screen before every single mission. As far as I can tell there's only actually ONE controllable mech, here. It shows MC under the word SLAK so I guess we're driving McSLAK today. The loadout selection is unlocked from the start, a collection of weaponry equippable to both the right and left hands and also the right and left shoulders. Beam lasers in the pulsed or non-pulsed variety, gatling gun. A flamethrower that sounds really cool but turns out to be a huge disappointment, a projectile laser and different forms of artillery, missiles and rockets. First mission, first thing I notice is that I'm not in the pilot seat yet. I get to run around as the little dude in first person mode. I can just get in and out of my McSLAK anytime I want, and that is pretty awesome. A lot of games seem to skip this part but I always feel like its a solid addition into any of these games. It really helps to contextualize that YOU are in a BIG machine when you're able to run around it's feet like an annoying little chihuahua. Downside here, SLAK does absolutely nothing with this gameplay wise. There is no reason to ever leave the mech. This portion just serves as a short intro in every level. I wish there was purpose for this feature, ya'know get out and unlock a gate or shoot some other guys on foot or... I dunno. SOMETHING. Tutorial goes pretty much as expected besides this. Move around, shoot some, peep your eyes around the screen at the user interface. We've got objectives, a map, target status, our own stats. I particularly liked the addition of a speedometer near the aiming reticle, despite its variable accuracy. We learn how to jetpack and the jump animation does this weird graphical lag sorta thing when we land back on the ground. We also get notified that arm damage limits firepower while leg damage mitigates movement. While I played this game I didn't really notice this doing much as it always seemed much more pertinent to simply shoot the enemies in the body to destroy them as fast as possible. There isn't really a lot of room for tactical decision making as this as a whole is a very light experience. Anyways, our objectives. Defeat the enemies, destroy the buildings. Mission Complete. The second mission seems to continue the objective trend which we'll continue to see. Destroy some targets. Destroy some mechs. Got it. I do like the environment presented in this level. The lighting gives a nice dusty orange tone to the conifer forest, nearly matching the brown dirt tones underfoot. The beauty of a boreal dusk. Something I noticed here is that when you run into the pine trees they don't bend to and fro, they don't go flying or rolling across the map. They fall straight down like a controlled demolition. Also they lack sound effect. No crunching of branches. Just a silent fall. While we're paying attention to the sounds here it's pretty noticeable that there is no music. personally I kinda like this minimal approach. The focus being strictly on the game with no distractions... however I do notice that similar to the lack of sound for trees also the sound seems to randomly stop for other things, like my weapon firing. I don't like that part. The missions continue onwards into a beachside city map. This one I thought was pretty cool. I always love stomping through a neighborhood in a big mech suit in all of these games. Easily my favorite environment. Along with this I started to switch up my weapon choices each level to see what they were all about. The unique missile type weapons per shoulder felt awful. Oh yeah, and before the quad-laser setup we do of course have to give a quad gatling gun a go since I seem to be quite a sucker for that one. Now I've already established the game lacks ammo several times over but it does sorta replace this concept with a heat mechanic. Fortunately, quad gatling guns induce zero heat for some reason. That is strictly a mechanic for ONLY the lasers and can actually make you blow yourself up if you take it too far. Around this point I ended up in a big desert canyon level and noticed the enemy towers shooting their lasers straight through the walls. Bummer. Going further is probably my favorite map. This downward spiraling quarry. It's a shame the weapons don't have limited range as I think if they did, or had a variety of ranges this sort of map design could be a lot more intriguing per gameplay. Running circles around this, going up and down, watching the enemies on the other side as you tried to bait eachother into coming within line of sight would be a lot more blood pumping than the most effective tactical action of sitting on a ridge at the top and sniping everything straight down before running to the end of the empty helix shaped trails. The final level I got to play, level 10 I believe, follows up this underground cave base with the standard objectives we've seen before. Go to waypoint, destroy 10 targets, destroy all mechs. The problem here is significant as the destroy 10 targets seem to be unable to complete. I've stumbled around here blowing up everything I could and two of the ten seem to be glitched. I can only manage to successfully destroy 8. This is a gamebreaking bug and I am unable to see the further 15 missions that were promised in the game description. Judging from the trailer, it seems the last 5 missions take us into a polar snowy mountain and also some sort of base built in the middle of the ocean. Now a lot of people probably turn up their nose at this sound of game anyways, just based on how simplistic it is compared to the triple A behemoths on the market but I actually kind of liked it. Now, not only did I kind of like it despite its jank but I think sometimes we need gaming experiences like this. It's not trying to deliver a grand story or have the most indepth and complicated number crunching mechanics. It's not asking for you to throw down every moment of free time for the foreseeable future... it's just a quick and simple and easy play. It really takes me back to spending hours playing simple browser based flash games after school days or turning on a parents work computer to find it came pre-installed with WildTangent games like POLAR BOWLER and FATE. Sometimes things like this can maintain charm despite being flawed, I think most peoples favorite childhood blanket wasn't the newest and fanciest one but one that is the comfiest and probably even has holes in it and you know what? Sometimes its still nice to find that blanket and wrap yourself up in it for five minutes. full review on video here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zZoHd4lQfg

For $3.89 CAD, I'm not gonna complain, I pay more for coffees. But man this is spare. It could use "more" in just about every department, but again, for this price tag it's juuuust about fair. Gets a thumbs up as encouragement to the dev. Players: just be aware this is TOTALLY barebones.

I hate to give someone's first attempt at a game a negative review, but I can't recommend this game. Let's start with the lesser of my gripes. There is no reason to run any weapon setup other than four gatling guns. They deal the most damage, have infinite ammo, and do not overheat. Given that this is a single-player game, I could forgive the complete lack of balance if that was the only flaw. Unfortunately, it's not. You literally cannot progress past mission 10. There are 2 turrets that do not count towards mission progress when destroyed. Since the Steam page lists 15 missions, that means that the last 1/3 of the game is unplayable. If the dev fixes it so that the game can actually be completed, I will happily change my review to positive. What I could play of it was fun.