Most of you know I'm a sucker for HUGE explosions and the demo of RF:G did a pretty good job of satisfying my lust for destruction.
The demo points towards a pretty basic sandbox style 3rd person action game. The USP is the GeoMod2.0 engine, which basically means that everything (save for enemies and the ground itself) can be broken, blasted and shot into itty bitty pieces. OK so that doesn't sound like much to hang a game on, but my initial impressions are that this is a lot more compelling than other sandbox games because here you really are given the sort of freedoms that other games *cough* GTA *cough* allude to.
The good news is that the developers have absolutely nailed the physics. Think Boom Blox, but on a much larger scale. The environmental destruction can be used as a means of attack, distraction or escape, but at no point do you feel like the game is directing you to play in a predetermined way. It's pretty much up to you how you approach it, with my personal preferrence being an all out assault tacking down as much infrastructure as possible in the process.
My feer though is that as good as the physics are they're probably not enough to carry the game alone and I worry that this will fall into the same pile as other sandbox games I've dabbled with, sort of entertaining for about an hour, then a drop off a cliff into dull blandness. It will likely come down to how well the environments are designed as to whether the game can hold interest for longer than the initial 'let's experiment' phase. Hopefully the Mars setting will unshackle the design constraints imposed by trying to replicate real life environments and result in some really creative design, fostering even more creative thinking from the player as to how to bring it all crashing down to the ground.
Man, you've got the same illness as me.
Having played Red Craption (as I wittyly called it on the PC) I think I even exhausted in the demo the possibilities, at that time it was a fairly generic FPS with the GEOMOD thing, where basically I bored (pun intended) a hole from one room to another a cave up and along abit and that was about it.
Its an idea that does really have a place other than a technical inquizitron. Maybe now they are out of the caves its more sustainable?
I finished the full game about a week ago and it's pretty solid throughout and the mecha handling was done very nicely I thought. The only thing that took me by surprise, for a mainstream game, was how stingy it was with upgrades initially and how you were expected to make do with what you had early on.
The story is obviously total balls though.
Jib it's a lot better now that they have ditched the 'drilling' concept of the first game. The truth is this gen probably has the grunt to realise the original concept in a manner that is actually fun to mess around with.
I think you'd enjoy the demo even if it's only from a tech point of view it's pretty impressive. I imagine the engine will be licensed out to other devs too, so I'm sure there will be a swathe of these games trying to eek a bit more gameplay from the tech.
Cacky, I think I'd almost be dissapointed if the story wasn't total balls. It's got that sort of cheesy Summer blockbuster feel to it, like a bad 80s Sci-Fi romp.
What do you get at the start of the full game? In the demo you get the explosive charges, the sledgehammer and an assault rifle. More than adequate equipment. How does the upgrade system work with the salvage units?
What do you get at the start of the full game? In the demo you get the explosive charges, the sledgehammer and an assault rifle. More than adequate equipment. How does the upgrade system work with the salvage units?
It's the same setup initially and that's fine in Parker but in Dust and Badlands it's harder as the scrap to upgrade ratio is a bit stingy. It's not a criticism at all though, as I prefer to work for something in a game but I was just surprised to see it in such a mainstream title.
The demo I think is based in Dust. I really can't justify a purchase as I have a nasty backlog of stuff piling up, but I'll probably pick this up when it drops in price.
The fact you have to work at the upgrades really places the emphasis on creating as much destruction as possible
This is around 15 squiggles at the moment, had another chew on the demo... I'm not sure "Grand Theft Auto-y" it might become, repetitive tasks, boring landscape. The reviews I have read imply the AI are complete swines and you have to be vigilant at all times... as you'd expect if you were a terrorist in a war.
Thats scraping the realism a bit... there is something I like about this, at least in demo form... I'm just not sure where that effort is going and what kind of progression there might be?
I think part of the appeal for me is the full frontal nature of the game. You really can pile in full force and just smash your way through to the objective. Still haven't picked up a copy though