So the first round of beta invites have been sent out and I wonder what you other participants think of it!
Please include what platform you're on since the experience is usually quite different from PC to consoles.
Preface
My feelings for the game post beta have been somewhat of a rollercoaster ride. Initially, I was really put off by the mech focus on the game since I've never liked mechs in games (albeit that's a different beast) yet I was cautiously optimistic because it's the guys who made the good cod games, right?
When the footage started dropping I felt that the titans seemed allright, they seemed to move like your average dude but you're a bit slower and bigger so I could live with that. What bothered me however was the bots. I was afraid that the bots would ruin my focus, that they'd be in the way. I talked to people who had (briefly) tried the game and they said they didn't mind them very much. I enjoy shooters a lot and with the decline of the cod franchise I was really looking forward to a good arcade shooter. The hype was building.
Impressions (I'm playing on the PC)
The golden ticket arrived!
..and man what a bummer it is.
It's not that it's a particularly bad game, it's rather about what it could have been.
Let's start with the good stuff, because boy is there some good stuff in this game. The mobility of your character is unsurpassed. It's what the Brink game wanted to be and more. It's what would happen if you took the movement from Mirror's Edge, streamlined it to arcadey goodness* and put it in a shooter. It's the hand-to-hand combat in the Batman games translated to movement in first person shooters.
Now I might be exaggerating a bit. But I've been into this parkour type movement for years and this is the first game I recall that pulls it off properly, which is why I'm gushing so much.
The combat in itself is very much reminiscent of the Call of Duty games and feels pretty good, there's not much I need to adress here beyond the auto-aim pistol. It's cool and some people seem to be using it against players as well but I feel like it's mostly there for beginners to easily pick off bots (it one-shots them but takes about three hits for a player to go down) and prefer regular guns to it.
*(don't get me wrong, I love ME, but the momentum-part wouldn't work in a shooter where you have to stop and shoot every few seconds.)
What bothers me the most is the ai bots. They are cannon fodder placed there to fill out a larger map made to accommodate all the titans. They're in the way and not discernible from the players clearly enough for you to decide on who to shoot first when they both show up in various quantities. When I play shooters I don't feel comfortable just leaving half the enemy population which is what I have to do here if I want to be useful to the team and not just kill bots the entire game.
One might argue that it's even stupid of me to play a game like this when I'm not into mechs but hey, it's not a lot of games coming out around these times, allright? Plus I really like shooters, so shut up.
When fighting titan on titan I feel about the same as fighting tank on tank in Battlefield: You might be able to go back and forth arond a corner whilst dumping on the other vehicle, but it's just pull the trigger (or fire the cannon) first until the other titan goes into a doomed state. The doomed state is basically a few second long emergency warning until the titan blows up, it's long enough to allow for the opponent to bail out into the sky and disappear, leaving me without a kill and the end of that encounter feeling very unsatisfactory.
The titan combat is not bad by any means, but it's just very uninteresting and I found myself spawning the titan and having it follow me around on guard mode while I was flying about the rooftops and shooting other people doing the same.
All in all I came away from it disappointed. The game itself is decent but holds no real interest to me unless they incorporate a player only mode where it's just me, my parkour and proper player opponents to shoot. I guess I just want a call of duty game with this immaculate mobility incorporated and I realize this game is not for me.
The disappointment comes from the fact that the movement is, again, so god damn good and I'm left with thinking about how a game would be without titans and the bots.
Log in to comment