Hellstorm Archon wrote:On-topic: The kickstarter goal has been reached, and then some.
I'm not surprised, there seems to be quite a bit of hype over this game, Romero probably helped with that. I should probably quit trashing on the game, though, at least not until after it's released. Then I'll trash on it with impunity.
The pre-alpha does not seem encouraging, IMO. The level design isn't awful, because at least they're embracing verticality unlike Retroblazer, but I greatly dislike the fact that I can only carry one weapon, and the enemy designs are boring and hard to actually hit. Plus, the ragdolls feel wrong, and dead enemies absorb gunfire, which becomes really distracting when you can't damage a robot behind a zombie because the zombie keeps getting in the way despite being dead.
Unfortunately if you don't have dead zombies to shoot around you can box yourself in with suddenly deadly floor from a monster and a spawner blood splatter (oh god why does the SPAWNER bleed a mess)
So I'd just grab a barrel and throw it right? I've chucked so many of those into my feet already I've started to ignore them entirely.
wildweasel wrote:The pre-alpha does not seem encouraging, IMO. The level design isn't awful, because at least they're embracing verticality unlike Retroblazer, but I greatly dislike the fact that I can only carry one weapon, and the enemy designs are boring and hard to actually hit. Plus, the ragdolls feel wrong, and dead enemies absorb gunfire, which becomes really distracting when you can't damage a robot behind a zombie because the zombie keeps getting in the way despite being dead.
The death screen also appears to be highly buggy. I couldn't do anything except alt+f4 my way out of there and you could even sort of make the gun you're holding appear on the bottom of the screen by pressing buttons, like the game had a delayed realization that you're dead and not supposed to be able to do that.
MetroidJunkie wrote:I know it's in Alpha but you'd think making a functioning menu wouldn't be overly difficult.
If I had a quarter for every time I heard a game programmer say that menus and UI are the shittiest, dullest and most painful part of development, I'd be able to buy a nice lunch for two. If I also had a quarter for every time I heard them complain about Unity's included UI libraries I'd be able to upgrade that to dinner for three.
I just downloaded the alpha and gave it a try. I tried to keep my expectations low since this is, after all, a pre-pre-alpha. I saw the trailer last month and thought it was great. The idea of Quake-style gameplay with procedural pseudorandom level generation excited me. Unfortunately, after a few minutes with the demo, I wasn't impressed. Here are a few of my impressions:
- The gameplay feels really slow and sluggish. This is probably a combination of the relatively slow movement speed, stilted animations, and the surprisingly low frame rate I experienced - possibly due to the fact that it only runs in windowed mode. For starters, they could try speeding up the player's run speed to the same as the Doomguy.
- The controls need to be tightened up a lot. I felt like my character wasn't responding quickly enough to my inputs.
- The enemies aren't varied or unique. In a game that is 100% focused on shooting things, it's pretty important to make sure that the enemies are interesting and present a reasonable challenge. Hopefully the developers come up with some cool ideas for unique enemies over the course of developing the game.
Sure, this is a pre-pre-alpha and the finished game might well end up being completely different from what it's like now, but the major weaknesses seems to be the core mechanics of the game play... they need some serious work.
Maybe the developers should sit down with ZDoom and OBLIGE for some inspiration! Speaking of which, I think I'll go do that now!
