UPDATE: Massive recommendation now! Bots have been added, so you're able to play the game without needing lots of players to be online, and can use them as a testing ground for your different builds and loadouts. Now that you can pick up and play it, it's super super super fun. The possibility space in this game truly is huge, sometimes I boot this game up and then don't even do anything in an actual game for like half an hour as I just imagine and experiment with all the cool stuff you can do with the options available
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Old Review:
This game has a really interesting premise that I hella wanna try out more of. It can benefit from better implementation of certain things, but it NEEDS singleplayer bot support. (F2P playing against bots was what got me into AFPS games in the first place.) At the moment, whenever you're not playing with other humans, the only thing available is the parkour mode, and that's it. (Parkour mode is pretty neat though). IMO, to address playercount, a game like this would benefit from doing a free-to-play model like TOXIKK or does 'huge-selection-roster' games like Paladins or League of Legends, where the base gameplay is free, but other supplemental stuff is purchased (e.g. new weapons not on free rotation, visual customization, etc).
Dudes don't wanna drop $12 for a game with no players, which means there isn't new players, which means there aren't players to warrant new guys spending $12 on an empty game, which keeps the game empty, so on and so forth.
[h1] Pros / Cons: [/h1]
+++ TONS of gameplay possibility, with choose-your-own loadouts and mobility moves. Be a dude with a revolver and sprint and grapple hook your way around the map like you're playing Titanfall, or go full 'nothing personnel kid' and teleport behind dudes and backstab them with your knife. Absolute TONS of gameplay possibility with this, it's a very 'choose-your-own-experience' kind of game. Really interesting and emergent ability synergies too. For instance, you can pick up a health pack with a gravity gun, then launch it over to a teammate.
- Dunno how much of this is gonna be limited by the color damage system mentioned later on though.
--- 🤖 THERE'S NO BOTS 🤖
It's one of those games that because of its low playercount, you'd basically have to join their Discord and ping a wants-to-play role in order to play with anyone. That's neither here nor there, though this can present a problem whenever someone who is just getting into the game and is unfamiliar with everything about it, plays against someone with 100+ hours of experience and is mad familiar with everything, and just gets stomped by them. It's much better for a new player to familiarize themselves with the different game elements in singleplayer against bots, rather than to go against a 'sweat vet', get stomped, and then think the game sucks because they got absolutely screwed before they could even get any bearing of what was going on in the first place.
++ Literally everybody gets a gravity gun and a damageless blast jump. Tons of hypermobility and flying around with the blast jump like in Ratz Instagib. Rip off doors and windows and use them as shields, then launch them as weapons. This is implemented super well IMO
-- Even after purchasing the full game at full price, the vast majority of weapons and abilities still have to be unlocked by doing daily challenges. Whenever I was playing the demo I thought the greyed out parts were for stuff not added into it yet, but now with the full game, even *more* weapons are greyed out! huh?? 🤔 What's the point of having tons of weapons, but then not being able to use them? Why pay 100% full price when you can only access 15% of your arsenal?
Likewise, "Play a game" challenges can't be done unless people are online/pinged, so you can't unlock more weapons/abilities to try out before facing against human players. Also means your limited color choice selection can be exploited by people with more weapon diversity as well.
-- This 'color 1 does more damage to color 2 who does more damage to color 3' system seems a bit contrived and unnecessary, as well as ultimately limiting the kinds of loadouts that one can use. If someone doesn't want to specialize in a certain color, then they get the white color, in which they receive literally DOUBLE damage from every possible source. Sounds like it could be a definite diversity-killer, though I can't really speak from experience, cause 🤖 THERE'S NO BOTS 🤖
In the games I've played where different classes and weapon matchups counter other ones, it's always in a better manifestation than just flat damage (e.g. a fast class being harder to hit, but having less health than a heavy class). If you wanna do different weapons giving effects that can be played around, do something like what The Specialists does and have weapons adding to character weight, where certain mobility moves are only accessible in lighter weight classes. e.g. one dude can have this absolutely massive one-shot sniper, but they're super slow compared to the faster and more mobile classes, and can absolutely get dunked on whenever they're not the ones creating the engagement.
++ The parkour mode reminds me a bit of Hover and Celaria, which are both hella good games, so it's definitely something pretty good on its own. Not gonna play too much of it though, just so my gameplay doesn't go over two hours.
+ Aesthetically, this thing is pretty fresh, feeling like an early Y2K Dreamcast game.
For the time being, I only half recommend this, even though I so wanna recommend this fully, because it's really promising and novel and unique and super responsive. There's definite improvement to be done for it to be as good as it can be, which if done right, can be absolutely damned phenomenally fantastic.
