Gametrodon

Category: FPS

  • Tyr

    Tyr

    Despite games being my primary hobby, every now and then I’ll find myself tumbling into a subgenre of design thats been around for two decades, and that I’ve never touched. Tank games are one of those. Despite decades of banner ads, I’d never actually tried World of Tanks/Planes/etc, as no one had actually recommended them to me.

    For various reasons, Tyr appealed more to me than other entries in genre, and so I actually did end up clicking on an ad for the game. And I’m glad I did, this shits great. Along with some friends, we’ve all ended up playing 50+ hours of this over the last few weeks.

    Gameplay and Mechanics

    Tyr a 8v8 tank shooter played in 10 minute rounds. Players are spawned on two opposing sides of a semi-symmetrical map, and a team wins by either eliminating every tank on the opposing side, or reaching and holding a capture point. There are also various tiebreakers if time expires, but I’ve never actually seen these come into play, as they mostly exist to force one side to make aggressive moves at all points in the game.

    Okay, this is all fairly standard sorts of shooter stuff so far. What makes Tyr great is how the tank combat works. I’m not sure how much of this is genre specific vs game specific so I’m going to go over all of it.

    First of all, the shooting. Since everyone is driving a tank, a giant armored vehicle, it is entirely possible to shoot, hit the enemy dead on, and do absolutely no damage, because you shot their armor. Instead, you have to find angles where you can actually inflict damage. Going a step further, it’s also possible to shoot enemies and temporarily take out sub-systems on the tank, like shooting their tracks so they can’t move, or around their gun barrel to stop them from firing.

    The Mauler. Note that almost everything is black, indicating that those shots won’t do anything.
    The Kestral with weaker plating is something I can actually shoot.

    Additionally, aiming uses a focusing mechanic. Your targeting reticle starts out as a fairly large rectangle, and your shots will end up somewhere in that rectangle. However, waiting will slowly scale down the size of the rectangle, and waiting long enough turns it into a point. Combine this with the fact that reload time can be over 10 seconds, it’s much more important to actually take your time to hit your shot.

    Second, fog of war/camouflage. It’s a standard in MOBA’s, but I hadn’t seen it done in an FPS before. The way it works is that you always have vision of the terrain/map, but each tank has a spotting radius, and if an enemy tank is outside of everyone on your teams spotting radius, or hidden in a bush, even if you can see the location they’re in, you can’t see them. This doesn’t mean you can’t shoot them, but it does make it much harder to actually hit them.

    From this distance, I can only see the larger tanks.
    Driving closer reveals the rest of the crew.

    Finally, in addition to having a general variety of stats (HP, Armour, hitbox, top speed, etc) all the tanks have some sort of active ability which uses energy to activate. I mostly play Phantom and Mauler, so I’ll use those two as my primary examples.

    Phantom is a light tank with high mobility, and almost no armor. It’s a hover tank, so it can aim well from cliffs, and is quite fast, but it can also get one-shot in the wrong situation. It’s active is a temporary cloaking, making it invisible for a short period of time, allowing it to reposition and scout while remaining undetected itself.

    Mauler is a heavy tank. It’s slow, heavily armored from the front, and it’s active ability is a ram that does heavy damage, smashing into and knocking back the tanks it hits.

    And the abilities are fun! Ikarus can temporarily turn into a little plane(AeroGavin eat your heart out), Arbalest gets to temporarily turn into a super long range sniper, Fortis build walls, Ark plants shrubbery, and Tempest can teleport around a bit.

    Why I like it

    The end result of all the mechanics is a much, much more deliberate shooter then anything I’ve played recently. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old, or maybe it’s because I’m bad, but as much as I love things like Deadlock, I just can’t seem to really play twitch FPS these days.

    It’s also incredibly fun to play in a stack, with folks calling out flanks, or having one person scout ahead to set up for snipers, or just have everyone go Ikarus, and attempt to dive bomb the enemy. (This does not work, do not do it if you want to win.)

    The tank abilities are also fun, and feel unique, even if it can be a bit of a learning curve. I’ve found that my friends are much better at finding good opening routes then I am, so I tend to copy their strategies.

    Some Small Complaints

    Tyr isn’t perfect. My biggest complaint about the game, small party sizes, is actually fixed now, leading to my second biggest complaint: ping only communication. For a game that’s so heavily based on coordination, having to sort of vibe your way throw that isn’t great.

    I do also kind of wish there were more gamemodes then just the “1 life and dead” primary mode, but I suppose they probably don’t want to split the playerbase.

    Also, I don’t love the leveling system. Some tanks are just much, much worse before you get them fully leveled, and while this doesn’t take a particularly long amount of time, it’s annoying to fully level a tank to discover you don’t really like it’s play pattern.

    Overall

    Tyr is good, I like playing it, and oddly enough literally everyone else in my friend group also likes playing it. It’s a very different type of shooter then most other FPS’s I’ve played, but I can’t say that I know how to compare it to other entries in the genre, as I’ve never played them.

    It’s a very deliberate, patient experience, and I enjoy that about it. There’s a fun tension of carefully waiting, or having to actually think through if taking a shot is worth it, as opposed to just going for a spray and pray.

    Tyr’s free to play on Steam, and I unlocked all the tanks after about 40 hours or so. I don’t know if you can spend real money for progress. There are some cosmetics, but they’re pretty limited. If you’ve ever liked FPS games, I recommend giving it a shot.

  • Battlefield 6 is fine, but too expensive.

    As we approach the end of the year, I’m pretty tired. I have a bunch of cool writeups I should finish up (Blue Prince! Omegathon!), and a few posts like my writeup of Horses that could go up, but I’m somewhat hesitant to actually post, because they’re both A) slightly soul scouring and B) I think Horses purely as a video game is pretty banal, and not some sort of incredible and transformative piece of interactive media. Wheels of Aurelia was more innovative in its mechanics and narrative.

    So while scrounging around for something to talk about, I remembered that I’ve played 100+ hours of Battlefield 6. So let’s talk about that real quick.

    A quick confession.

    I loved Call of Duty. However, just over four or so years ago, I stopped playing Activision-Blizzard games. If I wasn’t clear enough, when Diablo 4 came out I made some statements that will probably prevent me from ever being invited to certain press events. Really, the kick-off for all of this was when Blizzard censored a Hearthstone player protesting for Hong Kong. I really don’t like it when companies bow to authoritarians of any stripes, so I stopped playing their games. No Overwatch. No StarCraft.

    But I missed Call of Duty the most. I loved me my stupid gun shooty game, and I’d fire it up every day after work on my travel laptop. There’s some deep think-pieces on the the soft power image control of the military gun violence fantasy, or the jingoistic nature of the campaigns in these games.

    I don’t think I’m qualified to write that piece and frankly, I’m not very interested in trying to write it. I didn’t even play the campaign in Battlefield 6, because I’ve never understood why you would play the campaign in one of these live service shooters. I’m just gonna talk about the game as it is for me, which is mostly Call of Duty methadone.

    The General Overview

    I was gonna joke that I could just copy my Battlebit review across for this part, but I actually can’t. My general take on Battlefield 6 is that once you’re in a game, the experience is pretty good.

    Guns work well. Movement feels good, and a lot of the weird secondary gadgets are quite useful. Maps are mostly even and pretty well designed.

    There are definitely weak points. The map pool is a bit anemic, and pretty much every game mode reuses the same maps. I wish the engineer class had a second gadget that was actually useful in modes without vehicles.

    But once you’re in a game, it’s a good time. Everything that isn’t the game though?

    It sucks.

    The game is $70, with an in-game cash shop and battlepass. The battlepass has it’s own mini-battlepasses, with timed challenges for maximum FOMO. If there’s a way to make more than 3 loadouts for a class, I haven’t found it in the labyrinthine menus. Getting the game to even launch for the first time is a pain; not a huge pain, but a pain.

    Every update also seems to make the game slightly worse. The most annoying one for me is that helicopters seem to have some sort of animation culling turned on now when they’re far away from me, and given that helicopters are in the sky, they are usually far away from me. It makes it look like a Pokemon game.

    Also, now it’s time for the longer set of complaints

    Battlefield isn’t realistic, or super memorable.

    If there’s anything I’ve learned from reading ACOUP, it’s that I don’t know anything about war. And if there’s anything else I’ve learned, it’s that games will almost always sacrifice fidelity for fun. By default this does not annoy me. When Battlefield 6 added the cash shop, I wasn’t pissed because someone could now play as their fursona, I was pissed because I had already paid $70 fucking dollars for this game.

    That said, for a game about high troop number combat, you would think there would be literally any way to meaningfully communicate with the other 28 people on your team. I’m pretty sure modern war isn’t conducted by taking 32 dudes, giving them thousands of dollars in military hardware, and then pointing at a burnt out mall and saying “Go fuck em up!”

    But wait, you say. “You said 32, then 28.” Those are different numbers. Yes, they are, because you do have voice chat with your squad, but you only have text chat with the rest of your team. I have used the text chat maybe 4 times total in 100+ hours. The only time it had any measurable impact was when one teammate was complaining that a challenge was too hard, that they could not overcome it, to which I suggested that “through jesus christ all things are possible”, which was followed by a series of “amens” from other team members.

    They managed to complete their challenge.

    Side Note: I suspect that the Lord, if real and in the habit of intervening in the mortal world, has better things to do with their time then help someone get three air vehicles kills in one match, but what do I know.

    I also mention this because in 134 hours, it’s the only memorable moment I’ve actually had in the game. There’s no building, so there’s no real opportunity for anything clever or tricky, just destruction. It’s a bit of a bummer.

    The lack of communication would bother me less if the classes were less obviously synergistic. The assault’s spawn beacon is the only reasonable way to make extended pushes across the map, but you can’t push with one person. The engineer is the only class that can reasonably deal with vehicles, but without extra rocket rounds refilled by the support, it’s going to do have a very hard time doing that. Recon can paint vehicles with its gadgets, enabling faster lock-on for the engineer, but without that engineer to followup, it’s pretty much useless. Support enables everyone to do their job better, with extra gadget and grenade usage, but can’t do any of those jobs particularly well on its own.

    It’s just aggravating for a game where communication is key to have no communication. Now, if I remember correctly Battlebit did have local voice chat, and the result of that was every game started with a cacophony of racial slurs, Free Bird, and Fortunate Son, but at least it was possible shout “Rez me” at someone.

    Overall

    I personally enjoy Battlefield 6. I don’t really recommend it though. It’s a pain in the ass to get running, it costs too much too much money, it’s lacking quality of life features, and goes hog wild everything that’s bad about modern live service games.

    I don’t even think it’s a bad game. I just think you can get more better games for $70. For that sort of money, you can go buy Titanfall 2 and Blue Prince, and a lot more if you’re willing to wait for a sale.

    Battlefield 6 is that one restaurant in town that’s just a bit too pricey, but no one in your friend group hates. It’s a good place to hang out, chat, catch up, but if anyone could really make a choice, you’d all go somewhere else.

  • FragPunk

    Wikipedia says that Chess has been around 600 years, which coincidentally is the same amount of time I would need to play it to really review it. When a game is popular enough and played at a high enough level, I don’t think there’s much point in critiquing it as tourist, unless you’re specifically trying to observe the new player experience.

    I feel a similar way about Counter-Strike, and as a result, its strange progeny: FragPunk. The tactical shooter as a genre, like Chess, is one of those things that people have been playing forever. As such, if you’re the sort of person who knows what ‘tactical shooter’ means, and likes the genre, you are not going to get anything from this writeup. There is nothing I can say that will tell you if you’ll like FragPunk or not.

    You’re excused for today.

    The main thing that separates a tactical shooter from its other FPS cousins is the primary game mode: bomb defusal. It’s played with two teams of five across several rounds, with one team on offense, and one team on defense. Players only respawn after a round finishes.

    The team on offense needs to reach one of the two bomb sites, plant the bomb, and then defend it until it detonates. The team on defense needs to either stop them from planting the bomb or, after the bomb is planted, defuse it. In addition, offense wins if they kill every member of the defending team, and defense wins if they kill everyone on offense before the bomb is planted.

    This, then, is the starting recipe for the genre, one that every designer then makes their own variations on.

    Counter-Strike has an interesting economic system of buying weapons and equipment, occasionally putting teams into positions where taking a loss in order to pool resources for a stronger round later is the right strategic choice. Valorant takes elements of a hero shooter, turning each character into a specialized agent with special abilities.

    FragPunk has cards.

    At the start of each round, teams can spend a resource called Crystal on activating cards. Activated cards have an effect that lasts through that round. Cards range from “neat” to “what the hell.” My personal favorite is probably the one that lets defenders pick up with and run away with the locations the bomb is supposed to be planted at.

    I will say that after playing 40 hours, the cards feel less random than they did at the start. I’m not sure this is a bad thing, but the sense of “Wow, they covered the map in grass and made us crabwalk!” has been replaced with a sense of “Yup, they popped big heads. Guess I’ll try to avoid peeking down long corridors.” The magical has become the mundane.

    Finally, this is a F2P game, so let’s talk about the elephant real quick: In-App Purchases.

    Macrotransations

    FragPunk doesn’t feel much greedier than any of its peers. On the other hand, no single mosquito sucks less of my blood than any other, so that doesn’t count for much.

    There’s a premium battle pass, and there’s an even more premium battle pass. There’s a gacha draw system for weapon skins.

    I paid for the ($20) battle pass, as I did play like 40 hours. But I kind of hate the lootboxes. I’m not sure why I hate them more than I usually do, but I do.

    Overall

    I like FragPunk. It’s nice to play a tactical shooter where everyone else hasn’t been grinding it since before I was born. I’ll probably keep playing for a bit, or until everyone else in the friend group drops off. If you like first person shooters, and don’t have a compulsive urge to gamble, you could do worse then checking out this F2P game, since games are apparently going to cost $80 in the near future.

  • Strafe could have been great

    It’s been a struggle to find something to write about this week. Plucky Squire comes out later today, but I don’t think I can finish it before tomorrow. UFO 50 has a similar problem.

    I was trying to finish every game Tom Francis ever made, and make that into a bit. But Morphblade is too short and I’m bad at it, while Heat Signature hasn’t grabbed me the same way Tactical Breach Wizards or Gunpoint did. I still intend to play it.

    So instead I’m going to write a bit about Strafe, technically now called Strafe: Gold Edition on Steam.

    Strafe wants to be a combination of a roguelite and boomer shooter, I think mostly in the Doom vein. I say “Wants to be” and not “is” because a lot of the meaningful roguelite mechanics are missing. There’s no 3-pick-1 upgrades, or branching paths. Its obvious roguelite features are just some light map randomization and permadeath.

    I only have one complaint about Strafe. Unfortunately, it’s a big one, and I’m going to illustrate it with a million different examples.

    Here it is: Strafe sucks at letting the player have fun. It has the fun moments, and boomer shooter experience, but it hampers its own gameplay in a bunch of stupid little ways. Lets go through them shall we?

    A million little issues.

    Let’s start with the guns. Strafe has maybe a dozen different guns. They’re all kind of interesting. They’re all fun to shoot. Cool! These sound like good things.

    Except all of them have the most miserable ammo pool I’ve ever seen, and you can’t pick up extra clips for them. The player can shoot them until they run out of ammo, at which point they are useless. (The primary gun excluded)

    There might be legitimate reasons to only give the player 8 rounds of rocket launcher ammo, but why do I only get a single clip of bolt pistol rounds? What exactly was the train of thought that went, “Hey, in our game with a dozen different guns, let’s not let the player ever really use more than one in a run”?

    Also, it makes me run into the hoarding issue. Because I have limited ammo, I never end up using anything but my primary.

    I’m just taking images from their press kit because I can’t be bothered to boot the game again.

    Next up: Enemies. Strafe’s “thing”—if you want to call it that—is that the game makes it really easy to bunny hop. You basically jump around, gaining speed, to traverse maps quickly. So most enemies are fine. They either shoot projectiles, or chase the player, and are generally non-obnoxious.

    Except there is an entire category of enemies that spit acid onto the floor, or spawn acid spewing orbs. The player loses health when they step on acid, and many of these enemies are semi-immobile and obnoxious to deal with. So the movement design says “Run around fast!” and the enemy design responds “Yeah, so you can step in the acid you stupid idiot.”

    Speaking of things that make running around fast suck: dark levels. Why are they here? Did a single playtester ever say “You know what would make this fast paced permadeath FPS even better? Not being able to able to see anything.” Or did that just come to the devs in a fever dream?

    Please note the 2 remaining rounds on this gun, after which it will be repurposed as the world’s least efficient club.

    Also: Key Hunts. Strafe is heavily inspired by Doom, so of course it has doors that require keys to open. Keys that must be picked up. Do you know what I really don’t enjoy in my fast paced boomer shooters? Walking around a map for 10 minutes having killed all the enemies trying to find a single corpse holding a keycard.

    Even the secrets are infected with this weird “Get in your own way”-ness. One minor one is the ability to pick up a Superhot style shotgun, making it so that time only moves when the player moves. It’s an enjoyable, clever Easter egg, that adds a cool level of control to movement. It’s incredibly fun pickup.

    And it has 25 rounds, and you cannot switch off it to other weapons, or pick up barrels to throw while using it.

    The End Result

    Many games are bad because something about them is intrinsically broken. Bad art, bad narrative, bad mechanics. Strafe is bad because every single time it looks like it’s going to let the player have fun, it gets in its own way.

    I don’t know why this is. Maybe the developers felt that they had to make the game difficult. Maybe they brought across design principles from Doom without questioning them.

    I also don’t know that I really care. I don’t recommend Strafe. It’s not just fun enough to be worth playing.

    But whatever. At least I got a writeup out of it.

  • Deadlock Preview

    This isn’t a review.

    Deadlock isn’t out yet. You can’t even play it without a closed beta invite.

    They’re not hard to get, but still.

    By the time Deadlock is out, it’s likely that it will have morphed into something completely different from what it currently is.

    That said, even in its current state, I’ve already played 80 hours. So I do want to talk about why, and why you might enjoy this game enough to try to play it now.

    Why You Might Like Deadlock

    Deadlock is Valve’s most current semi-public project. It’s a MOBA/FPS hybrid, taking elements from both genres, and adding a few new elements of its own.

    And that’s the first reason to try it. Most of the folks I’ve been playing with are Dota 2 and League players. If you really enjoy those games, and generally like FPS games, Deadlock might be for you.

    The other big reason is if you have an appetite for novelty. There hasn’t been a game like this in a long time. Monday Night Combat and Super Monday Night Combat servers went down ages ago, and Deadlock offers a much greater depth from its MOBA elements than those games ever did. There’s also tons of weird interactions to discover, tricks to find, and just general space to play and explore the game’s systems.

    This is a game where (at least at my skill level) it’s possible to win a fight with expert positioning and the ability to click heads. It’s equally possible to just have a good enough sense of the map to farm everything out, and show up to the fight with flush with items and wipe everyone out with abilities while being unable to shoot anything.

    These are the things that make me love it. But they might not work for you.

    …and Why You Might Want to Wait

    Deadlock is unfinished. It is probably not quite balanced yet. And it can be kind of buggy. And has a bit of a learning curve.

    Most of these (outside of the bugs) are positives for me. But if you’re the sort of person who gets really annoyed when someone on the enemy team shows up and kills you in two seconds, you may have a bad time. If you’re the sort of person who gets annoyed when a creep wave bugs, and doesn’t push properly, you are going to suffer.

    And there is a big learning curve. Just like Dota, this game has dozens of items to learn, many of which have activated abilities. It also has one of the densest maps I’ve seen in a MOBA, and even after the 80 hours I’ve played, I only have a general sense of where everything is.

    Also, the art, while quite good, is not up to the Valve standard just yet.

    Overall, Though

    Deadlock is likely to be my most played new game of the year. It’s entirely possible it actually replaces Dota 2 as my “lifestyle” game, a slot that Dota 2 has occupied for almost 10 years.

    There’s no reason to rush to play Deadlock just yet. It’s likely that it will be a much more complete game by the time it reaches a full release. But while there isn’t any reason to rush in, I really cannot overstate just how fun I’ve found Deadlock to be.