Halfway - turn-based tactical sci-fi pixel art alien shooter

[Loriac]

So this is apparently coming out on Steam in four hours, was there ever any further information on this game? I can't seem to find much about it online, hoping that it might be more than just a simplistic tablet type game.

 

[Galdred]

Some tablet games are not that bad, and many Ok to good wargames have been ported or written for tablets. I like the art, I'm usually weary of pure tactical games(they have a tendancy to end up being too repetitive to me) but some have turned out quite well (Incubation, Silent Storm, Shadow Company, Drums of War).

 

[pakoito]

Drums of War is good? I bought it but it's been sitting on mission 2 for months. DOS is scratching that itch.

 

[Galdred]

Well, I found it quite challenging. It lacks things to do outside of combat (compared to games like Blackguards for instance), though. It is hard to know whether you are doing good or not, though (a bit like Wesnoth in this matter : it is very tough to finish the campaign if you bleed too many veterans, and you never know whether you can carry on or whether your weakened roster will make it impossible). It might not be a classic, but I found it a pleasant surprise. I haven't finished it though ( I could not pass mission 20 something without losing too many level 5+ guys).

I just bought Halfway. It plays a bit like Shadowrun ( TB only after contact is made, same cover system), but I don't think it features xp progression ( hard to tell as I am just at the beginning), although you get better equpiment.
The line of sights are a bit less intuitive than in SR, though. I cannot say much yet. It could be good for what it is or not. I'll have to play it a bit longer to know.

 

[victim]

I played about 20 minutes, it pretty much is what it says it is as a tactics game. Not sure if I will keep playing it but I could see coming back to it sometime.

 

[Infinitron]

RPS review: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/08/01/halfway-review/

Wot I Think: Halfway

Halfway is almost there, but not quite. It’s also a turn-based tactics game in the vein of XCOM, but with a fixed cast of characters rather than permadying squaddies and none of that base-upgrading meta stuff. It’s set in space and often in between it; some mysterious calamity has sent the starship Goliath ricocheting in and out of hyperspace limbo, the “halfway” of the title. As the only surviving crew members, your ragtag group must reclaim the vessel from an unidentified invading force by shooting in their general direction over low walls and hissing with exasperation at the inventory system.

Though much hissing there has been, there has also been cooing. Cooing at the lovely, moody pixelart graphics, which obliquely project the desolate quarters of the Goliath into a neat grid, and at the soundtrack of eerie celestial synths. I like, too, the pace of its action, the methodical positioning of units to maximise crossfire, synchronising the timing of cooldowns to skewer a particular enemy with a trio of special skills. And then – hiss – my plans are scuppered by wierdo to-hit percentages, or enemies that I’m certain I should be able to see, but can’t. Coo, hiss, coo, hiss. My playthrough has sounded like a pigeon trying to fuck a snake.

Let us for the moment concern ourselves with those things which have kept the pigeon’s feathers plumped: the spaceship Goliath itself, with its lonely corridors and flickering lights is no novel setting, but it is an attentively detailed one. Although its halls, now emptied of people, are cluttered with makeshift blockades and scorched with the marks of battle, it feels like a once-living vessel – not the impossibly grim gunmental-and-girders space-squat of so many survival horror games, but a place which once served a colony of people’s needs in relative comfort. I enjoyed the little flourishes of detail: the stockpile of coffee mugs in one bedroom, the arrangement of pot plants in another, or, more grimly, the piles of shells trailing back from a broken barricade to an inevitable gory stain. Between each mission you return to the canteen you’ve converted into a base of operations, and witness how it has been colonised by new teammates: veteran jarhead Samuel directs a rescued cyborg to cut vegetables in the kitchen, while brooding gun-for-hire Jenna polishes her heirloom hunting rifle. In another corner, the group’s only class A citizen, a prissy professor named Shaffer, spats with a delinquent techie amid a nest of snaking cables.

During these time-outs from battle, you take control of just one character – grizzled crew-cut soldier, Morten – and can have brief conversations with each of your crew. These exchanges mostly keep to brass tacks, and the writing is rarely so flavourful or plentiful to allow much backstory to escape, but eventually intriguing motes of plot do waft out of these interactions. There’s no branching dialogue trees to allow you to really explore these people, and there are no mechanics by which to curry favour or cultivate relationships. No Fire Emblem, this; it’s clear the game’s budget has kept its narrative ambitions in check. What you get instead is a serviceable yarn of space peril, told in the most economical fashion – and though it struggles to draw you in, it provides a pleasant tonal and textural respite from the game’s combat encounters.

There’s a lot I like about the combat, but the majority of that is also, simply, what I like about turnbased tactics games in general. I like their method and I like their rhythm. Halfway has no stellar additions to this formula, but it is enough of an adequate imitator to scratch that certain itch. Units have two action points to spend on moving, shooting, lobbing grenades, activating special skills, reloading, healing and switching inventory. If you choose to shoot, and you want to hit anything, you should also bother to aim – at the cost of an extra point. You can also set your units to retaliate, which is like XCOM’s overwatch, only crap. Instead of being a shoot-on-sight command, it’s a shoot-if-you’ve-personally-been-shot command, which makes precious little tactical sense, and is kind of useless anyway, given that the retaliatory volley doesn’t benefit from that extra aiming action point. Your team-mates can be gunned down all around, but ol’ dead-eye Dick will just stand there peering down his iron-sights, waiting to be hit by a bullet. Hiss.

Each of your team has a unique skill, and working out the ways in which particular unit configurations can be synchronised to lethal effect is a joy. It doesn’t go far enough, perhaps – having units that could buff one another would make experimental combinations more exciting – but there’s still a significant pleasure in orchestrating a successful takedown by getting Josh to overload an enemy’s shield before Morten fires his guaranteed-to-hit Steady Shot, or using Shaffer’s scanning ability to reveal a cluster of hidden opponents before dashing a berserk Jenna into their midst.

Another neat, but not unique system, is the game’s use of recharging shields to block a certain amount of damage. There is an armor value too, although its role in the maths of damage mitigation is not entirely clear. In fact, that’s the game’s lingering problem for me: its numbers don’t add up in a way I seem to be able to intuit. To-hit percentages are consistently surprising, and it undermines the tactical effort of positioning your troops. If your plan hinges on you dashing out of cover and nailing the dude two squares away from you, standing in the open, it’s with some dismay that you discover you only have a 12% chance of hitting him at all. But the guy 15 squares away, across a chasm, standing behind a wall and two rows of low cover? That’s 30%. Hiss, and also hwuh?

Such a situation can occur, I guess, because the three classes of weapons have severe range restrictions. A post-launch patch made this more visible by stating the maximum distance each weapon can shoot, but it’s still not clear if there’s some sort of sweet-spot in the middle or how your chance to hit tails off either side of this Goldilocks zone. Other things puzzle me too: a sniper rifle is described as highly accurate in its flavour text, yet it has an accuracy rating of four, lower than a crummy shotgun that never lands a shot more than two squares away. What does that number mean? How does it interact with the range restrictions of the weapon? How does it interact with the accuracy stat of the person firing it? None of these things are clear, and – when combined with the fact that potential sightlines are so hard to read – your tactical decisions often feel too much like roulette.

A more clearly-writ trade-off is that the more powerful weapons come with a meagre clip-size. Not only is there a disincentive to spend lots of action points reloading, but the game quite cannily balances its weapon classes via its universal ammo economy and the fact that every clip takes up a precious inventory slot. Having a sniper rifle that can only fire three shots before devouring another clip is a big sap on the limited resources your team can heft about. Only one character in the game has more than eight inventory slots, and after you’ve accounted for medkits, shield cells (which you can use mid-battle rather than wait for your shield to recharge) and a grenade or two, snipers risk only having a handful of shots to spend across an entire battle.

It’s a tense but fair compromise, and the inventory system has the one usability perk of letting you swap items between units regardless of where they’re standing – so ammo-rich characters can resupply others in battle, albeit at the cost of an action point. The inventory system otherwise manages to be a colossal ball-ache, alas, with a fussy menu system that only permits you to dig into one character’s pockets at a time. It has mad little quirks: because you can never leave a character without a gun it’s impossible to get two of your units to swap weapons unless you have a spare weapon to trade in and out of their inventory slots. And because inventory space is always at a premium, picking anything up invariably involves a slightly tedious bout of pass-the-parcel.

If I seem overly preoccupied by snipers in this review, it’s because they are really the only viable build until the midpoint of the game. The opening missions see you quickly acquire three characters – none of whose stats obviously bias them to one role or another, and none of whom can withstand more than a few shots. There’s no obvious tank here, and the enemy AI, particularly at the start of the game, is predisposed to swarm your weakest units. Since there’s no way to draw aggro, you might as well focus on thinning out the numbers at range. Eventually, your missions have you rescue a full complement of squadmates: eight in total, and one of them with a large enough health pool to suck up the pain and powerful melee attacks to boot. He can also teleport to any location visible to him, allowing you to dollop him right on top of the enemy. And yet, even he struggles to stay standing under the combined fire of the weakest enemies – you’ll need a huge supply chain of medkits to fuel this strategy, and it never seems altogether economic.

Nonetheless, the game’s systems slot more easily into place at this point. Levels start to deny you long range sightlines, forcing you to re-specialise some characters with close range weaponry. A steady supply of stat-boosting stimpaks lets you even out some of the annoying unit imbalances presented by the early game, and your team, now touting high-level armour suits with an array of buffs, becomes vastly more capable and versatile. Suddenly, a smattering of side-missions open up, giving your campaign strategy a cursory sense of freedom, excavating little moments of plot and relationships between characters. It’s ironically apt given the title, but the game comes into its own halfway through. It feels like it was balanced for the resources, manpower and capabilities that you find at your disposal only then – and haphazardly hacked back for the opening hours in order to generate a sense of progression.

But even as it threatens to take off, Halfway stumbles, repeatedly bushwhacking you with post-cutscene enemy spawns, who sometimes get to attack you first in open ground you would not have chosen to stand in. I’ve had one squadmate of a two-man squad downed outright before I even touched the keyboard. Never do this, games. Never do this. Least of all in a game – in a genre – whose joys are principled upon planning. And that’s Halfway’s fatal flaw: undermining its own potential for tactical reasoning, whether that’s via abrupt enemy spawns, unknowable hit-percentages or those frequent instances when the cursor tool-tip stubbornly claims an enemy is out of sight in defiance of what appears to be the case on screen.

Given the recent patch, it may be that the devs will continue to make the game’s calculations more transparent. I hope they do, and drag-’n’-drop some love to the inventory system while they’re at it. But even with all its flaws, Halfway has some considerable charm. I so love its mood and its detail. The heft of a critical sniper shot that smears an enemy into dust. The way shell casings clatter to the floor about a character’s feet. The pigeon may be dead, but the snake is pregnant.

Halfway is out now and costs $13 direct from the developers or on Steam.

 

[Severian Silk]

Why can't they write full reviews?

 

[Surf Solar]

Really adore this games look and feels, also eyeballing xenonauts. Which one should I get?

 

[Don Peste]

Someone said in the first page it has a tablet interface, but it instantly remind me of Temple of Elemental Evil. And how wonderful it would be if someone could port TOEE to Android...

 

[Surf Solar]

Bit the bullet and bought it. First impression (after it crashed on me for some reason) - very very good atmosphere, flavor and music/sfx. Lovely graphics as to be expected. Will play some more later on this evening, maybe write a mini review later on.

 

[victim]

Bit the bullet and bought it. First impression (after it crashed on me for some reason) - very very good atmosphere, flavor and music/sfx. Lovely graphics as to be expected. Will play some more later on this evening, maybe write a mini review later on.

the reviews that decry the horrible interface to equip your characters are not embellishing. It is that bad. I'm not even sure I ever understood it. The problem I had in combat is that there were too many different damage types and too many resistance profiles for each enemy. Something a little lighter to basically just let you advance the story seemed called for. I haven't gotten far enough to say if the reported difficulty spikes are a major pain or not.

But if you set aside the dodgy combat I agree that the atmosphere/flavor/graphics/etc were major plus points and probably enough to make me play the game through to completion. Its a neat/novel concept and executed well.

 

[Surf Solar]

The game constantly crashes on me. It is very promising but I think I bought it a bit too early, what with all these CTDs..

 

[Galdred]

had no trouble completing the game, but they removed some of the problems relative to difficulty spike (the opponents teleporting in, and gunning one of your squadmate before you could do anything about it).
The game system is simple but serviceable. There are a few problem with the game itself :
The range of all weapon is quite short, making the sniper rifle the only good option. I spent all my +aim stimpacks on the characters with good combat abilities (starting character + the mule + sniper girl + telepath girl), which worked quite well
-It happens in a spaceship, so most fights do not leave much room for maneuver (you can usually fall back to a better position, or storm the opponents, but flanking is usually not an option).
-The UI is not very well thought of (especially the inventory, but there are other issues, like not directly seeing the cooldowns on powers).
- there is nothing to do with the second AP most of the time (ie, you don't want to advance, but retaliate is usually bad, and you cannot hunker down or overwatch).

Overall, I really liked the game atmosphere and art direction, and had an enjoyable ride.
I'd say it's good for what it is.

 

[Surf Solar]

Really want to play the game, but it still crashes like a motherfucker for me..

 

[Infinitron]

Released on GOG: http://af.gog.com/news/release_halfway?as=1649904300

 

[Shaewaroz]

I'm really enjoying playing this, great little game. The only thing that bothers me is that all characters have only 2 action points, at least this is still the case after some 10 missions. Not sure why even indie devs nowadays think that counting to three is too difficult task for modern gamers.

 

[roshan]

I've just started this, quite interesting way to pass time while waiting for this years big releases! Are there any other recent 2D squad tactics games I've missed out on?

 

[pakoito]

Steam Marines

http://store.steampowered.com/app/253630/

 

[roshan]

WOW what an amazing game this is. Totally underrated gem. Let's go through it:

1. Fantastic art and music. The music is nice, really sets the tone for the game. As for the art, enjoying it a hell of a lot, I expected every area would use the same tileset, but was surprised since different areas of the ship look different depending on purpose.

2. Story is really great so far, sci fi is really underutilized in RPGs. Really enjoying talk of mini black holes, ships jumping, neural implants and so on. Great stuff, really does help motivate you to keep on going.

3. Combat system is excellent, actually very similar to Dragonfall, but in several ways, better. It's the same two action point system, with the same cover mechanics, and grenades too, but there's more flexibility, for example, your characters can shoot while behind walls by peeking out, and then take cover again. Due to this, and due to the often enclosed spaces in which you fight, positioning and cover are much more important. There's an armor mechanic too, similar to Banner Saga, but here there is only one kind of attack, and you only take HP damage when your armor is 0. But every certain number of turns, your shields recharge, armoring you up again.

4. Missions are mostly about killing stuff, but are thematically very different. There are missions about collecting information to know more about the plot, about raiding for ammo, supplies and food, and of course the main story based missions. This keeps things interesting.

5. Itemization is really fucking EXCELLENT. Every +1 point of damage matters, so when you find something that gives you a big boost, it really has meaning. I can't believe how much joy I felt when I got hold of the hunting rifle and gattling gun. Same with armors, they make a difference, and you have to constantly weigh them up against each other because the numbers are important. Armors can boost your main stats (health, agility and aiming, all of which are important), they also differ in terms of damage resistance provided, shield amount, and shield recharge time, this is really interesting as different armors will suit different characters or jive with different weapons. As for weapons, there are three broad categories, snipers, assault rifles and short range weapons, they're all really different because the long range weapons have very significantly long ranges, and are more accurate towards the end of the range range, but are less accurate overall, so you have to balance things party wise.

6. You slowly find more characters as you go through the game, but must pick your party before each mission. The choice of companions is really interesting because each of them have a different active and passive ability, and these abilities actually make a big difference in combat. They aren't pussy ass stuff, but things that are game changing. Due to this, every characters feels different. You can build them up with stimpacks, but there is a 5 stimpack limit before there is a chance the characters may suffer deleterious effects when taking them. Even if you stop using some of the companions, there are missions where for story purposes you need to take them along. This keeps things fresh.

Overall, such a great little game, like Banner Saga and LOX, another gem overlooked by the Codex in favor of overproduced leftard turds like Pillars of Eternity. Yes I quit that crappy game in order to come back to this.

 

[Infinitron]

From the top-rated Steam review:

Although this 8-bit game doesn't reinvent the turn-based strategy wheel, it does change things i feel are for the better. Unlike X-com, your squad doesn't level up based on combat experience. There are stims which increase attributes and weapons to be found on almost every map. No one dies, they are rendered unconscious until combat ends, (which doesn't always mean ending the level)

What kind of grognard are you

 

[Jack Dandy]

Thanks for reminding me about the game. How long did it last you so far?

 

[roshan]

From the top-rated Steam review:

What kind of grognard are you

Well this seems to be the case with every game nowadays, be it the Shadowrun games (I think those games did not have autoresurrection, but dead characters would be transported back to the base? Can't remember, things are a bit fuzzy.), POE, Banner Saga, LOX, and yes, Halfway too.

I think of course all these games have to be judged on their own merits and how they are balanced!!! based on the resurrection mechanics. In Halfway, battles are sometimes very long, and characters can actually get taken down very quickly, and so losing them for the rest of the battle is quite a punishment and makes it much more likely that you will end up with a TPK.

Next, once they're up, they have only 1 HP, which means you need to use medkits to make them viable in combat again, and you can't carry so many of those. Your characters only have 8 inventory slots each, which you need for backup weapons, shield kits, med kits and also for any loot you find. Basically you're entering missions with at most one medkit per character, and then you rely on medkits you can scavenge from containers.

Furthermore, there is no saving during missions, which means once you start, you have to win, otherwise, you repeat from the beginning. Due to these factors, I would say that despite the autoresurrection, the difficulty level is just about right.

 

[roshan]

Thanks for reminding me about the game. How long did it last you so far?

Based on the ship map, I'm about halfway through the game, I don't have steam but if I were to guess, the whole thing might be about as long as the Shadowrun Returns OC. I think you would be better off going into the game not expecting much, it's very "lite" and somewhat basic mechanically, but IMO what there is is interesting and quite well executed.

 

[SCO]

I like this game.
Resurrection after battle or not this aint no pussy-ass game - medkits occupy expensive inventory real estate space and the game regularly (as the norm really) puts you in multistage missions with multiple enemy waves and no restocking except what you find. And resurrection wouldn't give your HP back anyway. I often switched a 1HP toon to longrange sniping role due to previous fights wrecking.

Also all enemies can attack twice unlike a certain game i could name

You'll be hitting a brick wall mission about midway when you go to recover 2 new shipmates, it's a series of interconnected fights (5 or 6 i forget) without going back to 'base' - the first retrieval requires a trick to survive - hint,

Spoiler

enemies can't stand on downed party members

- and the last part is especially bad, with long range snipping - bring lots of medkits, and that girl that can heal herself once a fight and has +medkit skill.
I played in the supa dupa hard / + loot mode thou.

Anyway the only thing i didn't like was the end, those two missions were lame. Cliffhanger ending obviously.


In comparison with shadowrun returns, i like the cover system in this more, especially the corner cover (which is completely missing in SR). It's not infallible from oblique angles, but from long range it's very useful. This game also has a 'overwatch' mechanic which is a bit lamer than the one in SR so i didn't use it as much - it requires getting shot at before shooting back, so it's more like the street samurai counterattack spell on that game, i don't recall what's the advantage.

 

[roshan]

Whoa, I didn't know the game had a "+" mode! Should be fun for a replay! Linda (the medic) is one of my favourite characters, the self heal ability is awesome, but I also built her up as a short range character, with high agility so she can run down and blast apart snipers. I also like keeping her behind the other characters to shred any enemies that come too close.

The short range weapons are much more accurate than sniper or assault rifles, with a damage level between the two. I've read a lot of stuff about people going with all snipers, but at least in normal mode, I think a mix is much more preferable.