Quick Look: Sublevel Zero

This game is rad, music is cool.

a 6 dof...fuck that got me good

Always invert.

14 years ago, I made a Red Faction multiplayer map named Sublevel 17. I should sue.

The music, the look. Love this.

@gundogan: Inverted Y-axis is the truth.

This looks really cool but man something about the barrel rolling wigged me out. Which is odd since I managed the centris QL mostly fine.

On my wishlist now. I was really disappointed by the Descent multiplayer announcement, that is definitely not what I do when I Descent.

That railgun thing Jeff hated looked awesome though, and I want to know what it's alt-fire is. If it's chain fire left and right it's the best of every world

"Bearings"??? In a SUBLEVEL?? REALLY JEFF???????? God, learn to REVIEW!

@gundogan: you speak truth. Inverters unite! Also white site scheme is the best. :F

Re:the game: can't wait to get motion sick again!

Man, I can get behind this game.

@gundogan: :never

I invert nothing ever, and won't apologize for it!

Digging this music.

Anyone know if this works with a flight stick?

The ship icon or whatever it is in the middle looks like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

Oof, watching this gets my motion sickness going. Looks cool though.

Yo, this game looks gangster as fuck.

Same here. The art style looks really nice and distinctive, but won't stop me from blowing chunks.

I want to get on Sub-Zero's level.

This looks like that old game Drew showed off once, anyone remember what it was? It's driving me nuts.

Descent?

I bought this game a few weeks ago. It's a lot of fun for a while but could use some more replay value somehow.

Too bad Jeff didn't manage to finish the level after he filled up the nanite bar. You get to choose a perk!

@anupsis: @mister_v: Yeah, he did try Descent in VR on a UPF once right?

Uh guys... I think there is some problem with the buffering of videos. This and the Starcraft quicklook vids take unrealistically long time to load and display. I haven't really found any of the other videos on here to be as bothersome so not sure whats going on.

Halfway through the video and I'm sold. Currently downloading. Thanks for showing it off, guys!

"I like dumping. I'm here to dump. I dumped on that guy. He is dead."
Jeff aka MC Skat Kat?

This seems cool, but not something I'd probably pick up.

this is a fantastic game. recommended for anyone with a Descent fondness, a roguelike fondness, or a fun fondness.

Really want to like this, but the randomly generated modular levels are a big problem. Descent was all about clever level design to me, it's what made both the exploration and the combat interesting.

This looks pretty fucking rad.

coool, Pulsar!

Also Trichording

The 6 Dof is watching....

Anyone figure what happens when they filled the blue bar? I am curious...

Something about the faux-8-bit music and presentation in this game just comes across as incredibly twee

bloom....blocks?

Sublevel Zero would be your underground lobby. All the 'finest' evil scientist volcanoes have a plush sub-lobby for greeting guests. I'm certain that is where you end your journey on Elon Musk's Hyperloop.

Love it...except for the randomly generated levels.

Well-designed levels >> randomly generated.

I can't un-see the ship in the HUD as a fat little happy marshmallow looking guy with an emote face and his arms spread wide to hug.

Just to be entirely pedantic, in Europe, the ground level is Floor 0, and the next floor up (what would be floor 2 in the USA) is Floor 1.

@visualizer: That makes sense compared to the ridiculous G/L/M/1 we get here in the States!

@visualizer: in the UK we alter it again, instead of 0 we use 'G'. Although I've noticed some larger office buildings adopt the US system for uniformity I suppose?

As for this game, I bought it a month ago and found it impossibly hard. I was playing with a flight stick, though.

This seems ok but I just could not be more tired of the "roguelike elements indie game" trend that won't seem to die.

I've never found a control layout for a flight stick that makes sense in Descent-style games.

Flight sticks make sense in games where you have constant forward motion and you're primarily controlling the pitch and yaw (i.e. aim) of your craft. Here you need to control both your aim while making very quick changes in movement in 6 directions.

I've tried mapping forward and back to throttle and sliding/strafing (both vertical and horizontal) to hat switch, but it just never feels natural or usable at the speed these games demand.

Twin stick gamepads are a slightly better fit, but I don't even find them to be ideal, because there's never any good way to map vertical strafing on them as Jeff and Drew discussed. I always end up using WASD + mouse, and then putting vertical strafing on space and control (i.e. typical controls for jump and crouch [vertical movement] in first person shooters).

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Sublevel Zero seems way better than the last Descent-alike I tried: Retrovirus. Retrovirus was too hard for its own good. It was the Descent equivalent of a cover shooter. It had recharging ammo and shields that drained very quickly and enemies with hitscan or extremely fast projectile speed. All of this conspired to severely limit the time you could be flying around and blasting things. I spent the bulk of that game peeking around corners or poking in and out of hallways/tubes, killing one or two enemies and then ducking back into cover. It was laborious to play, which is a shame because it had nice style to it. With some re-balancing it could have been a fun game. This one seems to be much more like Descent, slow projectiles that can be dodged pretty easily, but hit hard.

The enemy design is the only thing that puts me off of this.

I've seen some people use dual joysticks with the trigger and thumb buttons for up/down control.

This game was my first experience after putting on an Oculus.

...I'm really glad I don't get motion sick

I could live with the procedural levels (snap-map!), because I don't think that you can replicate Decent's original confusion and feeling of being lost in the 3D levels today. We're too adapted to those things now.

But the other thing Descent had was some really great enemy design for it's day. I had nightmares about the claw robot. What I'm seeing here is some pretty bland enemies and dull AI. Maybe they get better later on, but combined with a roguelike progression means being really bored with every restart.

(Also enemies that blend with the background seems infuriating on a game with no shield / limited health / permadeath.)

I'd definitely agree the early enemies were really bland and boring (Spheroidal I think Drew called them) but Jeff only got past the first level once, right? Then he met up with drill bots and space tanks so I've got some hope for it. If the roguelike formula holds true it might get truly crazy in the later levels. This is probably a get-it-on-sale game for me but looks worth checking out at least.