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KickStarter Overload - Six-Degree-of-Freedom Shooter from the creators of Descent
- Thread starter Leechmonger
- Start date
this is why we cant have (many) nice things 
Oh well, at least this means they go out on a high note instead of going for a prospective Overload 2: Popamole Edition
Oh well, at least this means they go out on a high note instead of going for a prospective Overload 2: Popamole Edition
unfairlight
Self-Ejected
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2017
- Messages
- 4,092
That's sad. I suppose 6DOF shooters aren't as marketable as retrobait shit like Ion Maiden.
They made a truly old school game using deep knowledge of 90s game design principles, instead of a shallow modern game relying on a superficially "retro" style to bait hipsters. So of course it does poorly.
Ivan
Arcane
Bros, just started this. Fucking awesome, never played one of these type of games before. I was disoriented at first but level design is top notch. Glad to hear that there's more community content to look forward to.
Ivan
Arcane
I'm getting raped by monster closets in the final levels. But holy shit is the gameplay rock solid and tons of fun! Looking forward to the community maps now that the base campaign is through with.
Grampy_Bone
Arcane
Totally underrated game. I had a few friends try this at a LAN party and they were skeptical, by the end of the night everyone had bought it. Such a blast.
Oh, now I finally got something worthy to buy in this Steam sale. Thanks for bumping this thread!
orcinator
Liturgist
It looks very bland on the surface so I'm not surprised few people bought it.
Even when I played it often felt kinda tiring because of the similar looking space corridors and robot enemies despite the fact the gameplay was good.
catfood
AGAIN
Finished this game.
My biggest gripe with this game is that the levels were all very samey. You're essentially running around the same space station over and over again with little variance, save for a few caverns and ZOMG weird alien levels. Compare this to something like Forsaken (which I'm not saying is necessarily better than Overload) where there is so much level variety: a volcano that is about to erupt, a thermonukular power station that is about to explode, a bank, a sunken submarine, an abandoned subway, a space station, an aztec temple, etc; all of them are memorable in their own right. In Overload the only standout level was Tehthys Lab, which is a masterpiece I admit. The alien levels were also memorable but not exactly for the right reasons... Also they all ended in the same predictable way: get to the final section, find the reactor, try to destroy it while getting swarmed by infinitely respawning enemies, then make your way to the escape chute before the reactor explodes in 30 seconds. It got old fast.
The enemies were also kinda meh. Look I know this was a low budget title, and that that is supposed to be the spiritual successor to Descent, but all of the enemies are essentially the same flying robot with different weapons and one or two attack patterns (range or ramming). Again, I kept thinking back to Forsaken where you have flying enemies of varying degrees of mobility, tanks, turrets, mines and mine layers, and even rival bikers which were the set pieces on certain levels. The enemies sound design in Forsake was also top notch in that each and every one of them had their own distinctive engine and weapon sounds so if you listened carefully you always knew what waited for you around the corner.
Speaking of which in Forsaken there was this cool feature where you could select a bike at the start of the game. The bike came with its own set of statistics (which in Overload are even more customizable due to the upgrade system obviously), but more importantly each biker had his own voice or personality like the gruff biker dude, the robot, the sexy chick, the nerdy scientist, and so on. Also you could choose a voice for the bike's computer. Voice clips would play when something happened on screen, like you were low on health or you picked a power-up. They added a lot of flavor to the game IMO. Here in Overload they have VA but they use it to tell some generic story that I didn't even pay much attention to if I'm being honest with you. I think going with the Forsaken route with regards to the VA would have made the game more flavorful. Also they fell prey to one of my most hated things in action games: they liked adding these long dialogue sections right in the middle of an action sequence. Bitch I'm a tryina avoid gettin tastefully gang raepd by five different robots, I ain't got no time to listen to your bullshit life story!
Other than that the game is good, especially the shooting which is top tier. The weapons are good and satisfying to use and the enemies explode really nicely. Good job to the devs. The upgrade system I'm sort of on the fence about. On the one hand the upgrades are cool and even allow for the change of behavior of a weapon, so no boring +20% to damage nonsense. Also it's nice that it incentivize exploration to look for the upgrade points. But on the other hand it means that once you've upgraded one energy and one normal primary weapon you probably won't use the others very much afterwards. With the secondary weapons it was different because ammo for them was limited so you had to use whatever was on hand.
The difficulty was also refreshingly challenging. I played on normal and I can't even remember how many times I died towards the end of the campaign lol.
Anyway a solid game overall. The biggest letdown were the samey levels but it was a budget title so what can you do... Sad to hear there won't be any sequel.
catfood
AGAIN
these devs went to Volition to work on Soys Row LMAO
orcinator
Liturgist
Wait, what?
Depends on what roles they had, if they were just coderslaves or level designers then they wouldn't be able to do anything about the gameplay.
catfood
AGAIN
It says there in that screen capture that half the dev team went on to work at Volition.
orcinator
Liturgist
I didn't read the middle.
Looking at the mobygames profiles most if not all of them already did work for volition, either on Red Faction or the SR series itself so it's not a surprise they would go back (Though if you've read the lore you know volition laid off a lot of people when Agents of Mayhem Bombed). Jacques Hennequet has a lot of ___ director credits for volition games, is listed as a translator on Overload and Narrative Director on NuSaitnts (IMDB thinks this is important but I'm not sure how much work he did for the video game, though it's highly likely he had sex with the cat lady writer).
I assume nobody who was responsible for making Overload's gameplay good got into any sort of position that had control over NuSaints' gameplay so it's as shrimple as that.
Denim Destroyer
Learned
Overload suffers from the same problem Heretic had. Fun game cursed with poor art asset diversity.
Ash
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 16, 2015
- Messages
- 6,548
Just finished the game. 8/10. They did a good job.
Drags at the end and I expected a little more, but this is one of few modern shooters worthy of 90s succession despite its modest budget and design flaws.
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