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KickStarter Overload - Six-Degree-of-Freedom Shooter from the creators of Descent

Leechmonger

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Leechmonger

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And why were the original Descent devs late to the party?

Also: nothing would make me happier than this being an actual Descent clone, rather than more decline.
 

Riskbreaker

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What's with the explosion of Descent clones lately?
What "explosion"?

Anyway, unlike Descent: Underground, this actually looks promising, has a singleplayer focus, and is made by original devs without Herve being involved in any shape or form.
So, 'tis no wonder that it probably won't get funded.
 
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What's with the explosion of Descent clones lately?
What "explosion"?

Anyway, unlike Descent: Underground, this actually looks promising, has a singleplayer focus, and is made by original devs without Herve being involved in any shape or form.
So, 'tis no wonder that it probably won't get funded.
This
Descent Undergrount
Sublevel Zero
Geocore
Some others i don't remember but show on steam related games
 

Riskbreaker

Guest
What's with the explosion of Descent clones lately?
What "explosion"?

Anyway, unlike Descent: Underground, this actually looks promising, has a singleplayer focus, and is made by original devs without Herve being involved in any shape or form.
So, 'tis no wonder that it probably won't get funded.
This
Descent Undergrount
Sublevel Zero
Geocore
Some others i don't remember but show on steam related games
Underground is MP-focused with only a promise of SP campaign that might or might not arrive at some unspecified future date, while Sublevel Zero is a rogue-lite with randomly generated maps. Neither of them scratches that Descent itch, despite some similarities in their premise and execution.
That leaves us with Geocore, which is something I need to look into - this is actually the first time I heard 'bout that game.
 

sexbad?

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It's fun to play until I run into streaming errors. It seems that texture loading is not optimized yet, so I'll go into a new area and stutter for ten seconds before I can get going again. But the weapons are satisfying, enemies are cool, and particle effects are fantastic. It definitely has something going for it already.
 

Leechmonger

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I can breathe a sign of relief then. As much as I was tempted to give them more money, I couldn't ignore past experiences with Planetary Annihilation and the like.

The gameplay seems solid so far. I like that they've already got doors hidden in the walls.

It's easy to get lost in caves without a map at the moment, but I assume the final game will have one.

Time to play Descent again.
 
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This originally was planned for a March release but it's been delayed till mid year.
Seems to have gone onto steam early access and recently put out their 2.0 version of their demo this month.
Also VR capable.



Older demo thats got more action.

 
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Durandal

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Have bought Overload on Early Access after trying out the updated free playable teaser, and my suspicions were confirmed: this might very well be the best first-person shooter released in years, and the first Kickstarter-funded spiritual successor to actually hold up to its source material. I'm counting 6DoF shooters as first-person shooters because 6DoF shooters need more love anyways.
It's made by the same guys who worked on Descent, as opposed to Descent: Underground which is being developed by some randos who got a hold of the IP and are doing whatever to it.
And already it ticks most boxes of what made Descent great, different enemy types with well-defined roles and unique AI, a whole load of weapons and missiles to play around with, intense box-dodging action in tight quarters, vertigo-inducing level design, and a whole lot of dodging/leading your shots in zero-G space.

Though the general structure from what I've seen is identical to Descent (fly into space bases, fight your way through hordes of violent robots, rescue people in cryopods, destroy the reactor, and escape in time), Overload does bring some changes with it. The afterburners and headlights are now default equipment, you no longer receive damage from ramming into walls, robot generators are destructible, and a whole lot of other stuff. One new addition is the ability to perform a Smash Attack by pressing the attack button while boosting, which lets you ram into robots without taking any damage, and deals guaranteed hitstun damage which can be quite useful, on top of serving as a satisfying finisher if you stunned a robot by shooting it with a missile. The missiles have seen a lot of changes too. Your standard go-to missile is a fast one which is more akin to the Mercury Missile but deals the damage of the Concussion Missile, there are missile pods which can fire a constant barrage of smaller missiles at groups of enemies, the Hunters which act like double homing missiles, the Creepers are like mines you shoot in a direction and home in to anything close which are incredibly useful, and the usual Devastator being a missile of mega destruction. New weapons like the Reflex bounce off walls, the flak cannon acts as an actual flak cannon destroying everything close to you with an inaccurate hail of fire, the Crusher being a satisfying to use shotgun, and the Cyclone being a bullet hose useful at clearing rooms.

Aside from a singleplayer campaign, Overload is also delivering on a challenge mode where you're thrown in an arena of endlessly respawning robots where you must survive for as long as you can or kill as many bots as possible within a time limit. And it's serious fun. There are already six challenge levels available with leaderboards, try getting more than 100 bots on Ace+. The singleplayer levels have careful pacing whereas challenge mode is unbridled aggression. After a certain period of time in challenge mode a super robot will spawn which is usually a stronger variant of an existing enemy with different attacks, more health, and more dangerous behavior, which can flip the tables on you if you're caught in a bad spot.

The new enemy roster is great as well. The Gorgon/Goblin function as your usual cannon fodder where the Goblin dies in one missile and can be easily dodged whereas the Gorgon lays down more suppressive fire on you. The Scorpion follows you around and often hides behind obstacles if he's visible in plain sight, but goes nuts on your ass if you turn your back on him. The Shredder is a bot with a big saw who constantly charges you head-on and is a blast to fight. The Titans are bitches who spam missiles way too much. Hitscan enemies are back in the shape of Ogres, but as they only attack with hitscan if they are close and can be outmaneuvered given their limited turning speed and not 100% accurate hit-chance, I'd say they are still fair.

Overload will also feature an upgrade tree, where you can spend upgrade points found by exploring the level or rescuing all humans. Though most of the upgrades pertaining your ship are rather bland, the weapons do seem to feature multiple upgrade variants. I've not spent a lot of time with the game, but from what I've read on the Overload forums these variants do change things up a bit in an interesting way, so the upgrade tree might not be completely hackneyed.

One thing of note is that the levels are a bit too dim. Descent was usually well-lit and quite colorful, whereas Overload is largely dark with bright individual lights, and that really strains my eyes despite playing in broad daylight. Even though you always have the headlights and have an upgrade to reduce headlight energy consumption completely, the levels are not that vibrant color-wise. The only other game where I had this problem was Gears of War 2, which largely took place underground with a dark brown-gray color palette.

This might very well be a genuine successful modern attempt at a retro FPS in YEARS. Keep an eye out for it.
 

Durandal

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Challenge Mode looks like an interesting mode, hope they will switch to counting score instead of total kills
 

Durandal

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Meanwhile for Kickstarter-backed projects which aren't turning out to be total scams:

We are pleased to announce the availability of Early Access drop #9, build 117 on Steam. This is our last planned drop before the release of the complete game!

Changes in this version include:

Additions:

* Level 7 (Titan Workshop). This is the last SP level that will be released in Early Access.

* Partial support for German, Spanish, French, and Russian. This is very new so it’s probably a little rough. Robot and weapon descriptions and a few other screens have not been translated. If you’re a native speaker of one of these languages, let us know if you see any problems.

* Challenge Mode leaderboards contain additional data: score, favorite weapon and game time. Leaderboards reset and rank is now by score, not kill count.

* Combo score bonus in Challenge Mode for rapid kills.

* Steam Cloud Sync (for pilots, saved games, & local high scores).

* Enhanced the Training Mission.

* Hologuide can now lead the player to enemies & to energy centers.

* Command-line Switch “-VRDisplayOnly” makes it so the game will render *only* in a headset, and not on the monitor.

* New difficulty level: Insane+.

* Updated enemy silhouettes on score screens.

* PlayStation and Xbox controllers icon support.

* New ‘Restart Level’ option on pause and death menus.

Removals:

* Removed Matcens from the automap.

* Removed pairing for axis mapping. (That is, if you map up on the joystick to forward, back won’t automatically be mapped to down.)

* Removed control to ‘Invert Y.’ Instead there’s a quick option inside the Tutorial Mission, and the menu option is still available.

* Removed 3 Achievements.

Tweaks:

* Changed Music tracks for a number of locations.

* Spiced up explosions a bit.

* Updated version of Rewired (controller library).

* Updated some robot animations.

* Tuned camera shake.

* Added Crunch texture compression (shrinks the game size down a bit and should help low-RAM systems a bit).

* Made Hologuide & Automap more consistent by *only* referring to them using those names.

* Hologuide now default maps to ‘z’ on keyboard when remapping.

* Changed the audio for a couple of pickups so that they’re distinct from each other.

* Updated some sign names.

* Decrease light from secret items a bit (so they’re more secret).

* Tutorial messages will only show up once per pilot now.

* Faster fade-off for damage flash.

* No more live-forever debris.

* Change Missile Pod pickup model.

* Renamed Checkpoint Saves to Autosaves. They are now created only between levels.

* Sticky Flares now limited to 10 at once

* Markers & Hologuide now match the HUD color.

Game Balancing:

* Changed some costs of upgrades in missions.

* Cyclone & Reflex use a bit more energy/shot.

* Tweaks to Variant Triton & Variant Harpy.

* Ammo pickups now scale by difficulty (like Armor & Energy).

* Slightly increased the health of fabricators (robot generators) on higher difficulties.

* Robots spawn a bit slower on CM Infinite.

* Armor/energy powerups give slightly less (20 on Trainee, 10 on Insane).

* Enemies do a bit more damage on Ace & Insane.

* Firing distance of enemies is now affected by difficulty level in CM.

* Some CM maps can have more enemies at once (mainly for the more open levels).

* Some anti-kiting changes in CM – enemies that have been around too long may change their AI behavior.

* Changed the enemy loadout in Pipeline.

* Tweaked Armor gain from smash attack enemies.

* Changed center tunnel in Centrifuge a bit.

* Redesigned Centrifuge and Pipeline a bit.

* Insane for CM now unlocked based on score instead of kills.

Fixes:

* Sliders/Throttles will now default with 0 as the middle (so they won’t need to be calibrated to use them to control forward/back movement).

* Corrected a few errors in backers’ names in the credits.

* Fixed an issue with switching controllers.

* Fixed an issue with ‘Apply to All’ in the Controller Axis Settings menu.

* Fixed some glitchy animations and added awaken animations for all robots.

Known Problems:

* Drop 8.5 saves will not work, giving an error when attempted to load.

* There are some text overlap issues in languages other than English.

* There are a handful of lines of untranslated text.

* We are looking for incorrect translations/mistranslations, and would appreciate help from multilingual backers.

NOTE: This release (Version 0.9 Build 117) does not support pilot files older than one version back; it will only load pilot files from from 0.8. If you have older pilot files, you can load them using Version 0.8 Build 94.

After the hell I went through on Insane in Descent 1 and am going through in Descent 2, Overload felt like a cold shower in comparison, and I'd never seem to run out of ammo even on Insane. But it seems that's now coming to an end.
Release slated for this May/June!
 

Blaine

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Grab the Codex by the pussy
Won't be long now. I've played through the demo a few times over the months; still not gonna buy it until release, because I want to play through it only when all of the levels are available.

There's no doubt that this game is one of the elite few ackshun inclines of the 21st century.
 

Jokzore

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I liked it better when it was a comedic evil simulator starring bad Sauron cosplay.
 

Blaine

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Grab the Codex by the pussy
GET HYPE

WHERE IS YOUR HYPE FACE
SHOW ME YOUR HYPE FACE

nY8FY9b.jpg
 

Durandal

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Pre-release stream of the game's intro and first three full-version singleplayer levels. Spoilers inside:

Lead writer for this game was the lead for FreeSpace 2, BTW
 

Durandal

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Today I will remind them.

Overload will be released in the 31th, and once it leaves EA it will be sold for 35 American euros as opposed to the current price of 25.
There's also an ongoing multiplayer beta which you can try out. Sites like these are giving away Steam keys in exchange for subscribing to their social media accounts with a burner account. Hop the fuck in.
 

Blaine

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Grab the Codex by the pussy
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH BOIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

7995260112.png
 

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