Incline Ion Fury (formerly Ion Maiden) - Build Engine powered FPS by Duke Nukem 3D mappers - now with Aftershock DLC

[skacky]

I finished it. Damn, this is really great. I love the game so far, really can't wait to play the rest. If this is any indication of what's to come, then we have an excellent Build shooter worthy of the Holy Three. The level design is kickass, multi-layered and on a grand scale, the game looks great, the one-liners are pretty good, the weapons are awesome, especially the homing grenade which is a lot of fun (though I'm not a huge fan of the SMG), and the music is fantastic. The monsters lack a bit of variety so far, but I imagine there will be a lot more later on. The smoke effect that comes with the explosions can tank the framerate when there's a lot, though.

That's...a bit ridiculous and indicative of easy game difficulty. Each secret is a reward, which therefore makes the game easier. So the game better be designed around finding a portion of these secrets mandatory, or make it so they don't all reward health and ammo and other such major difficulty economy influencers.

I won't say anymore without having played it though.

The first level is enormous and the game can become quite difficult even with secret items.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Wait, this is actual good for real, no joke?

 

[Anthedon]

It's 2018 and a Build engine shooter has just entered Early Access. What a time to be alive.

 

[Tehdagah]

I was looking for it but watching some videos the game seems to be filled with hitscans enemies

Meh. They really don't need to bring back the bad thing about 90's shooters.

 

[Lyric Suite]

There's nothing wrong with hitscan enemies in and of themselves. You just can't revolve your entire gameplay around them.

 

[Durandal]

Enemy types mostly fall under 'shooting projectiles so fast that it might as well be hitscan', but you can actually dodge their shit with some free space as their tracking isn't magnetic. You can circlestrafe as much as you want.
There's checkpoints where the game will automatically save because the levels (or the level? It classifies itself as a zone and features a lot of interconnected areas with multiple paths allowing you to skip shit) are so fucking huge, but you can still savescum like a little bitch if you want to.
There's also reloading for some reason.
Your throwable bombs home in on enemies. The only problem I have with them is that you lob them instead of throwing them in an arc, so trying to throw bombs over a railing becomes finnicky. I wish it also had more modes like timed, on impact, proximity, etc., like the TNT in Blood.
Weapons feel just right, but lack real difference function given the current roster of enemies.
Level design is hueg, very exploratory, with some tweaks it wouldn't feel out of place in Deus Ex. Loads of secrets errywhere.
The VA manages to pull off a tough police officer lady without making me want to kill myself upon hearing it. One-liners aren't ridiculously cringy either. A stunning feat in the history of videogame voice acting.
There are some FPS drops here and there when there's loads of shit on screen. Poor Build engine has some trouble handling all this fancy shit.
All the sprite art is (comparatively) very high-res, but as a result a lot of detail is lost from a distance, and you'll have a hard time telling what the hell this enemy sprite is supposed to represent from a distance as opposed to other shooters.
Pick-ups aren't very noticeable from a distance either as their sprites can be rather small and ambiguous as a result of the aforementioned detail loss.
Combat is whatever because the enemies are whatever, though there are some neat encounters here and there.
Store page touts alt. fire modes, but I don't see them anywhere?

 

[PrettyDeadman]

The game is fun but it manages to tank fps during large amount of enemies and bossfight against a mech...

 

[Astral Rag]

Time to get a Pentium bro.

 

[skacky]

The only time my framerate takes a hit is when there are multiple explosions on screen, the smoke effect seems overkill in that regard.

 

[Durandal]

Also the developers should have known given their target audience how much this could end up triggering people's autism. All glass windows are made of bulletproofium and you can't break anything glass, there are crack textures everywhere but they're there for aesthetic purposes rather than signaling that something can be blown apart by a pipe bomb, and there's no mighty foot for easily breaking breakables since switching to your shock baton takes some time which in this case feels infinitesmal. Also some invisible walls to prevent you from jumping on geometry which you could have normally clearly landed on.

 

[Boleskine]

 

[PrettyDeadman]

Also the developers should have known given their target audience how much this could end up triggering people's autism. All glass windows are made of bulletproofium and you can't break anything glass, there are crack textures everywhere but they're there for aesthetic purposes rather than signaling that something can be blown apart by a pipe bomb, and there's no mighty foot for easily breaking breakables since switching to your shock baton takes some time which in this case feels infinitesmal. Also some invisible walls to prevent you from jumping on geometry which you could have normally clearly landed on.

You can break some of the glass.

 

[Tehdagah]

There's nothing wrong with hitscan enemies in and of themselves. You just can't revolve your entire gameplay around them.

Unavoidable damage is wrong.

 

[skacky]

The enemies so far aren't hitscan, though, it's just that their bullets move very fast but you can still dodge them if you're fast enough.

 

[JBro]

I hate hitscan, but I have trouble holding it against games too much, considering even Doom had them.

 

[Maggot]

Game runs like shit for me in either OpenGL or Software mode but the maps look really nice.

 

[Ash]

"The soundtrack kinda sits in the background [and is quite subtle]"

Noooooo. A kickass, highly memorable soundtrack is imperative not only to 90s shooters, but 90s games almost across the board.

 

[Turtle-Zone 3000]

A neat thing of note is that the music is in XM, so you can examine its innards in a tracker.

 

[Moonrise]

A kickass, highly memorable soundtrack is imperative

Decide for yourself.

 

[skacky]

I really like how they're using trackers for that, suits the futuristic aesthetic very well.

 

[udm]

skacky How long is the EA right now?

 

[skacky]

It's two huge maps and a boss arena. It took me maybe an hour to finish, but I only discovered about 15% of the secrets.

 

[Turtle-Zone 3000]

 

[skacky]

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Admit it, even the title of this game is cool as fuck. Total incline and you know it!

"Puns are the odor given off by a decaying mind." Randall Garrett