PrettyDeadman
Guest
The weapons feel kinda week. Shotgun sound is just laughable.
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Incline Ion Fury (formerly Ion Maiden) - Build Engine powered FPS by Duke Nukem 3D mappers - now with Aftershock DLC
- Thread starter tormund
- Start date
- Joined
- May 13, 2009
- Messages
- 28,588
Looks good, but at the same time it's underdeveloped. I'll take a better look once it's closer to release.
Baron Dupek
Arcane
While we're in DN topic
https://forums.duke4.net/topic/9918-release-duke-nukem-total-meltdown-tc-v10/
https://forums.duke4.net/topic/9918-release-duke-nukem-total-meltdown-tc-v10/
Astral Rag
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 1, 2012
- Messages
- 7,771
Well worth a torrent this.
(Will buy if full version turns out to be good.)
(Will buy if full version turns out to be good.)
Last edited:
Ash
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 16, 2015
- Messages
- 7,055
The incline of the playstation version was the goddamn amazing soundtrack. Otherwise I haven't noticed any other notable differences between the PS and PC beyond the Plug 'N' Pray episode. Must be some though.
Astral Rag
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 1, 2012
- Messages
- 7,771
Encountered some HOM effects in unexpected places. Other than that no bugs to report so far except for the aformentioned drop in frame rate (wtf).
Sweet game so far. Definitely the best of the modern faux-retro shooters which is not really such a hard feat since all the others are hot garbage.
Sweet game so far. Definitely the best of the modern faux-retro shooters which is not really such a hard feat since all the others are hot garbage.
Last edited:
soulburner
Cipher
- Joined
- Sep 21, 2013
- Messages
- 843
The game is pretty good, but I have a few issues with it.
Performance:
- on my laptop (i5 3320m 3.1 GHz, 8 GB RAM, integrated Intel HD4000 graphics) the framerate is terrible, especially in the open areas. Not just the framerate, but there also seems to be a delay when shooting. Most often the shoot sound is heard a noticeable amount of time after pressing the mouse button, but sometimes the shot itself registers with some sort of latency.
- I know this is 2018 and all, but such a game should perform smoothly on a modern calculator
- there is no difference in performance between OpenGL and software(?).
Visuals:
- somehow it looks worse than the classics
Others:
- the audio is a little meh
Aside from that, it's very fun to play, it's addictive and I love it - although my initial impressions of the closed beta were mostly negative, I'm somehow having a lot of fun now.
Performance:
- on my laptop (i5 3320m 3.1 GHz, 8 GB RAM, integrated Intel HD4000 graphics) the framerate is terrible, especially in the open areas. Not just the framerate, but there also seems to be a delay when shooting. Most often the shoot sound is heard a noticeable amount of time after pressing the mouse button, but sometimes the shot itself registers with some sort of latency.
- I know this is 2018 and all, but such a game should perform smoothly on a modern calculator
- there is no difference in performance between OpenGL and software(?).
Visuals:
- somehow it looks worse than the classics
Others:
- the audio is a little meh
Aside from that, it's very fun to play, it's addictive and I love it - although my initial impressions of the closed beta were mostly negative, I'm somehow having a lot of fun now.
this makes me wonder whether Bombshell is any better now after a bunch of big patches
LESS T_T
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2012
- Messages
- 13,582
This reminds me of Sonic Mania's success, how enthusiastic modders get to make a worthy and "official" follow-up to classic games. (Well yeah Bombshell is technically a new IP, but a new commercial Build Engine game!) But unlike SEGA it seems like 3D Realms want themselves in the spotlight than modders...
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/featu...-and-the-art-of-the-first-person-shooter.aspx
3D Realms Talks Ion Maiden And The Art Of The First-Person Shooter
3D Realms recently revealed the new game under its hat, the pixelated and slapstick gore shooter Ion Maiden. We had the chance to sit down with Frederik Schreiber, the vice president of 3D Realms, and talk about the studio's approach to crafting an authentic retro shooter that doesn't fall prey to the whims of nostalgia, as well as the divide between modern shooters and shooters of old.
Give us the pitch on Ion Maiden.
Ion Maiden is an old school first-person shooter. It takes place in the near future. You play as Shelly Harrison, a bomb disposal expert in the near future for the GDF. The GDF is the Global Defense Forces and in Ion Maiden you have to hunt down a madman scientist gone rogue named Doctor Jadus Heskel who has created an army of cyborg brainwashed zombies who are taking over the United States.
The game is based around the old Build engine from 1996, which was the first licensed 3D engine for video games. It was used for Shadow Warrior, Duke Nukem 3D, and a range of other games. For this game, we took the original engine and expanded aspects of the engine so we could do new things. We wanted it to be a hindrance to us but we also wanted this game to be authentic, so it not only looks and plays like a '90s game with a lot of new elements to it – it is a '90s game. All the artwork in the game – the sprites for weapons and environments – are handcrafted. The authenticity meant a lot to us.
Retro shooters are pretty popular now. What makes Ion Maiden stand out?
For us, the most important part was to make a great first-person shooter first and foremost. The art style should not dictate the game itself. It is an art-heavy game for obvious reasons: we want to make sure it’s an absolutely beautiful game to look at but that shouldn’t dictate the actual gameplay. When we designed Ion Maiden, we designed it gameplay-first. What makes it a great first-person shooter? It has some elements of older first-person shooters we really loved and miss nowadays, part of that being hub-based multifaced levels. We love a lot of different crazy weapons and secret areas. Stuff that we feel is more lacking in modern first-person shooters, so we wanted to bring those things back.
The art style itself is something we decided on afterward. Nowadays you can have a game that’s appreciated for its art even though the art style is ‘old school’ even though that wasn’t the case 10-15 years ago. Where a game like that would just be “old.” Compared to many other retro style shooters, we wanted to take another approach, with the graphics and style coming second to the gameplay. So the appeal of the game is that it should be a kickass first-person shooter.
How long has it been in development?
Two years.
What connects Ion Maiden to Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior outside of gameplay?
The style of protagonist. All three games are very protagonist heavy, with characters who are very unique and exaggerated and stylized in their personality and weaponry. We wanted to go back to creating badass protagonists, protagonists that were basically action heroes. And we always wanted a great female action hero. Bombshell is a heroine we established years ago in another game, and Ion Maiden is sort of a prequel to that.
It was important to us to create a character that both differentiated itself from Duke and Lo Wang but also complimented them.
What can you tell us about the world of Ion Maiden?
It takes place in the future, in Neo DC, so a version of Washington DC. The main inspiration for the world is Blade Runner for its style and visuals. The music is way more synth-based but also still MIDI. So I guess you’d called it cyberpunk.
Why choose not to make a 3D shooter?
When you ask people often what the pinnacle of first-person shooters is, they’ll often say something from the mid-90s. So, y’know, Doom to Half-life. That time period. That was the golden era. After that, games started to be more linear, maybe a little dumbed down. So we wanted to back to the golden era and imagine “Well, what if we continued down the golden era road?” Instead of making games more cinematic, more cutscenes, more quicktime events, we went the other direction. We made the levels more open, we added more secrets. Things in one level will affect things in another. We added way more exploration-based gameplay where you have to look and think. You don’t get any text prompts that tell you what to do in Ion Maiden.
There’s this video from Egoraptor where he goes around in Mega Man X and talks about why Mega Man X has no tutorials at all but instead the gameplay teaches you how to play. And we took the same approach with Ion Maiden.
No offense to modern shooters. Those are way more cinematic and take you on a rollercoaster-like experience, where you have a lot of sequences that are fairly well put together. We go in the complete opposite direction and basically free you from those constraints and let the player figure things out themselves.
Do you think there is a compromise between these open-style shooters and more narrow cinematic ones?
Oh yeah, definitely. I think the new Doom is a perfect example of that. It’s a pretty hardcore game but if you just walk the path that the game leads you toward, it’s a pretty linear game. If you start looking alternate routes and paths, and stop and explore, the levels open up and reward you for that. So that’s a really good example of a game that does both really well.
What are some non-first person shooter influences on Ion Maiden?
Super Mario Odyssey, the way they approach moons, is a really good example. All the secrets in Wolfenstein 3D were secrets you couldn’t really find unless you were just combing walls and pressing square. Our approach is different, a bit more like Mario. You can always see an area that you might be able to get to but you have no idea how. You can always see what you have to get to, but how you get there is up to you. You can use physics or maybe find secret doors and buttons. It’s all teased at you at all time, and we have a ton of them in the game.
Do you think there is a large audience for this style of game?
I think the assumption worth challenging is that “there’s a style of game.” When we talk about retro-style games, we’re usually only talking about games that look retro. You talk about pixel art games. Yeah, they look like they were made for the Super Nintendo but they’re all completely different games. They could be 3D and they would be just as good. So that’s the first challenge. We’re trying to break out of that. Ion Maiden isn’t a retro shooter. It has old-school elements and an art style, but I hope we’re past this thing where just because it looks like that it’s getting put into a box with everything else that looks like that.
It’s like saying Doom and Uncharted 4 are the same game because they used physics-based rendering, which is not the case. Completely different games. They just both look beautiful.
Astral Rag
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 1, 2012
- Messages
- 7,771
PrettyDeadman
Guest
Haven't played Duken Nuken before (except 2d sequel) .
It's pretty good, but probably not as good as brutal doom.
Alright, after some high-octane SECRET HUNTING action and ending up with 26/33 total no matter how hard I mashed E, I decided to call it quits for a while.
It's very ok. It's super ok. It's ridiculously ok, astonishingly so.
I honestly prefer DUSK over this. Granted, DUSK already has 2 out of 3 episodes on EA whereas the mini-campaign released here features only 1 of the upcoming 7 'zones', and it doesn't quite nail the exploration and interconnectivity as IM, but its combat, gun feel and setpieces are more interesting than whatever there's going on in IM. And at a smoother framerate too, while running on the fucking Unity Engine!
If you were to ask me to summarize what makes Ion Maiden different from its ilk, I'd probably say "the bombs home in on enemies and the levels are more open?". To its credit, the levels in the (paid) shareware version are very detailed, very open, and decently paced. Some levels feature multiple passages to the next level to make the zones feel even more whole. Monster closets are handled rather tastefully by locking you in before the closets start opening.
The whole thing reminded me of Deus Ex in terms of setting and level progression, once you get underground you might start getting strong NYC underground tunnel vibes. There's loads of secrets, and I almost feel like there's too many secrets because of all the shit you can find if you do get to them, and secrets being shoved in for the sake of upping the secret count with no real regard for the difficulty curve. The abandoned train track has two secrets right next to each other where you can find a medium armor in one (which supercharges your armor to 100) and heavy armor a bit further down the road which supercharges your armor to 200. To their credit the secrets are very much secret, as some still elude me and require some devious solutions (I hope you like pushing chairs).
The huge amount of detail in the levels can also work adversely, as you end up with a whole lot of unopenable doors which are there solely to make the place feel bigger than it really is. Please never do this in your levels, people like myself will waste time interacting with it and try finding some secret to open it. World Tour had them everywhere and it was awful, at least have the decency to signify doors can't be interacted with at all through visual cues like barricades or the door being broken beyond repair. The presence of unbreakable glass everywhere is also incredibly painful against my destructive urges as there's nothing to suggest why the glass is resistant to every known weapon to man. Not even a forcefield to protect the glass or anything?
Because the backgrounds can be rather cluttered, you might have a hard time seeing enemies and items from a distance. This is also partially because item sprites are rather small and aren't that colorful, so they don't properly stand out from the background as much as they could've. All the visual detail sadly doesn't imply interactivity, so when you're rummaging around the company office you can't mess with printers or computers to play with yourself for example. For that matter, Bombshell has almost no special one-liners for environment interactions like shitting on the toilet or paying a hooker. I only recall one playing when you interact with a headless mannequin of Duke. The levels feature a lot of breakables, unfortunately there's no mighty foot or quick melee button to let you break things quickly without having to switch weapons all the time.
I think very highly of the thrown explosives in Build Engine games, so much that I have them always bound to RMB, IM being no exception. Blood's TNT is one of those cases which should belong in a museum, it being a perfect synergy of engineering and aesthetics, proving the universe that good throwables don't only need to have variable throwing arcs and satisfying explosions, but that the player character itself should derive pure joy from the immediate aftershock. In Ion Maiden, the role of thrown explosives are played by the Bowling Bombs, and as the name suggests, belong in a fucking bowling game. The gimmick here is that the Bombs home in on enemies, which makes them very neat for dealing with enemies around corners. The thing is that nobody plays a game of bowling where the lane is a staircase, with the hole being all the way up.
Unfortunately Bombshell's PE curriculum mostly featured bowling and treated baseball with contempt, so you can't even throw your bombs in a proper arc, but have to lob them over the floor. Your bombs will only detonate upon contact or when shot, and will only start homing into the closest enemy after the first bounce with the environment. This gets rather problematic when enemies are standing in elevated positions, as your bombs might have trouble homing in on them and end up fizzling out anticlimactically. Moreso since levels can be quite vertical. Throwing bombs in high arcs is also incredibly awkward and requires a lot of vertical compensation because of the low throwing arc, which is a pain when you're trying to throw them over a railing. Charging your throw merely increases the force with which the bomb is thrown, and doesn't increase the height of the throwing arc.
Charging your throw to max power also takes way too fucking long and the power you put in your throw won't rebound back to minimum after it has reached the peak, so you can't compensate if you accidentally charged your throw for too long. Your bombs end up incredibly lacking in versatility, which is especially painful considering these are supposed to be Bombshell's signature weapons. Some nerd with a crowbar figured out a long time ago that you can both lob and properly throw grenades, this shouldn't be too hard. There's also the explosion radius of the bombs being comparatively small to most grenades in any game, so you can't even gib two guys standing a bit apart from eachother in a hallway at once.
As for the weapons and enemies, it's all very basic, which are the main contributing factors for this game's overwhelming ok-ness. You got your revolver, your SMG, your shotgun, and your bombs. They do revolver, SMG and shotgun things. And uh that's it. There's a minigun but the preview campaign literally ends the moment you get your hands on it. The store page promised alternate fire modes but I don't see them anywhere. There's also reloading in the game, but I don't think it serves any valid purpose for any weapon other than the revolver. There are three main enemy types in the game. A technocultist which fires a burst of three bullets at you, but your position is only tracked for the burst at the start so you only need to dodge the first shot. It dies quickly to anything. The soldiercultist fires shotguns at you, but the spread is so tight it might as well be a single projectile anyways. It dies quickly to anything. The red cultist charges up its crossbow to fire multiple projectiles in a spread, but the spread of its weapon is so small that in practice this enemy is identical to the shotgun guys except that it stands in place to charge its weapon. It dies not as quickly to anything, taking two shotgun blasts to the body, but one headshot will take care of it (yes, shooting enemies in the head in this game deals more damage). There's also little cyberskullspiders, but they're there mostly for harassment and aren't a threat in any kind of capacity. Their death animation when you hit them with the shock baton is pretty cute, though.
None of the enemies are hitscan, and with how enemies are usually placed in more open spots with no cover to go around I'm rather grateful for that. However, the three main enemy types in the preview campaign are all essentially the same and are just variants of eachother, not just visually either, and so you deal with all of them in the same way. Each enemy attacks you in the same way (shooting a very fast projectile at you), you dodge them all in the same way, and you're free to kill them in the same way. Target prioritization is non-existent. There's no real reason to switch between your main weapons (shotgun/SMG) because of that. Had the crossbowman attack been modified to fire a wider spread of a bit slower but larger projectiles a la the Mancubus, and if the other two had different behaviors or additional attacks, then they'd at the very least be more visually distinct. I can imagine the shotgun guys moving in aggressively while shooting. The devs know mouse-aim is a thing and have designed the game around that fact since shooting the head deals more damage, and enemies don't necessarily have to stop moving while shooting anymore, people can handle moving targets nowadays, nobody aims with their keyboard anymore. If there's going to be actual enemy variants, then you're better off making them fly or something, like the flying pig cop cars and alien grunts with jetpacks in Dukem. I should also note there are two or three stationary turrets in the game which constantly fire at you, but they're usually conveniently surrounded by explosive barrels so you can take them out in two shots anyways.
The boss fight is a big joke, just keep hugging its back and it can't even aim at you. The turning speed of the Warmech is limited so you can keep positioning yourself behind it while pumping it full of lead.
The game's pretty easy. The enemies themselves aren't huge threats, and there's plenty of medkits and ammo to go around, even on the highest difficulty (Ultra Viscera). On top of that, you can carry around 10 portable medkits max, each of which heals you for 35 HP with a potential total of 350 HP. You honestly don't need them since you can rely on medkits on the ground, I never used them much either unless I was fucking around. Duke/SW had portable medkits, but they were properly rare and could only heal you for 100 HP. At least the maximum amount of portable medkits you can carry should scale negatively with each difficulty setting. IM doesn't have a lot of special things it can give you in the way of jetpacks or other consumables or power-ups, so it often gives you some armor or another one of these portable medkits, which can feel rather underwhelming after a while. When you've found a secret containing armor and there's another secret close by which also contains armor, then you should either cool it with the secret frequency or expand your item roster. There doesn't even seem to be any way of supercharging your health either. In Dukem you could find the RPG in the first level, I don't know whether they're just being restrictive with the secret item placement here because of this still being the paid shareware version.
It could use an additional difficulty setting or a gimmick mode like Nightmare difficulty in Doom or Damn I'm Good difficulty in Dukem where enemies would respawn (unless gibbed in Dukem, which actually made previously useless weapons like tripwires and the freezethrower much more useful). Here you do get another mode called Bombardier Trial, where you get infinite bombs and can't use any other weapon, but your max health is nerfed to 25. Still pretty easy though, but it also highlights the awkwardness and flaws of the bomb physics and handling if you actually try it. It feels more like a fun joke mode instead of a proper challenge mode. Strangely, this mode seems to have additional enemy spawns compared to the main singleplayer mode on the hardest difficulty. The amount of bombs placed around is higher too, but since you carry an infinite amount of bombs I do not see the point. It reeks of last-minute changes.
The voice actress for Bombshell does a pretty good job, especially considering these kind of power female roles and their performances often tend to fall into cringe territory unless spoken with a British accent. The lines and character itself are unremarkable, though. Compared to the rest she's just a generic badass action heroine, and Serious Sam already has the generic badass action hero role covered. You can't have more than one generic badass action hero, that's when they start becoming generic. Bombshell is supposed to be some kind of cop or demolitions expert or something? So why aren't her one-liners more cop humor oriented? Instead they could have also referenced Bombshells' explosive personality and her short fuse, kind of blows that they didn't. There's also playing up her femininity, but I recall that Bombshell (the game) had some rather poor vagina and PMS jokes which are only funny within cliques of female comedians.
It's just that compared to a misogynistic macho 80's american action hero stereotype, an Asian ninja/samurai/martial arts master stereotaipu with bad Engrish, and an undead misanthropic gunslinger, Bombshell doesn't stand out in the slightest other than being a girl. More importantly, she lacks edge. It doesn't have to go into borderline offensive territory (even though it claims to be a successor to the old-school shooters that did), but the alternatives provided aren't exactly enticing. She's played too safe, and feels boring as a result. It doesn't help that the references seem to be all over the place with no consistent theme (Deus Ex, Resident Evil, Alien, Hellblazer, Futurama, The Walking Dead, MTV). I figured the setting to be more cyberpunk-ish as it gives off fairly strong Perfect Dark and Deus Ex vibes, why start referencing Resident Evil all of a sudden?
Another very important detail forgotten by the developers: voice lines aren't played back in low quality. I don't know why, but that really made the oneliners stand out more.
While the artstyle is incline and the style of the level design is also very much incline, everything else about it from the combat in general, weapon and enemy roles, the music, and the player character are incredibly basic and barebones. Maybe all the cool stuff is present in the full version only, but I hope that when the full version comes out that the first zone receives another pass to make it proper difficult. Even for a 'shareware' 'episode' I'd hardly consider this enough to really sell me on the game, if it weren't for the facts that there's not much on the market being released like this and me having a kind of morbid curiousity for these revivals of classic first-person shooters like DUSK and Overload and this being released via Early Access.
It's very ok. It's super ok. It's ridiculously ok, astonishingly so.
I honestly prefer DUSK over this. Granted, DUSK already has 2 out of 3 episodes on EA whereas the mini-campaign released here features only 1 of the upcoming 7 'zones', and it doesn't quite nail the exploration and interconnectivity as IM, but its combat, gun feel and setpieces are more interesting than whatever there's going on in IM. And at a smoother framerate too, while running on the fucking Unity Engine!
If you were to ask me to summarize what makes Ion Maiden different from its ilk, I'd probably say "the bombs home in on enemies and the levels are more open?". To its credit, the levels in the (paid) shareware version are very detailed, very open, and decently paced. Some levels feature multiple passages to the next level to make the zones feel even more whole. Monster closets are handled rather tastefully by locking you in before the closets start opening.
The whole thing reminded me of Deus Ex in terms of setting and level progression, once you get underground you might start getting strong NYC underground tunnel vibes. There's loads of secrets, and I almost feel like there's too many secrets because of all the shit you can find if you do get to them, and secrets being shoved in for the sake of upping the secret count with no real regard for the difficulty curve. The abandoned train track has two secrets right next to each other where you can find a medium armor in one (which supercharges your armor to 100) and heavy armor a bit further down the road which supercharges your armor to 200. To their credit the secrets are very much secret, as some still elude me and require some devious solutions (I hope you like pushing chairs).
The huge amount of detail in the levels can also work adversely, as you end up with a whole lot of unopenable doors which are there solely to make the place feel bigger than it really is. Please never do this in your levels, people like myself will waste time interacting with it and try finding some secret to open it. World Tour had them everywhere and it was awful, at least have the decency to signify doors can't be interacted with at all through visual cues like barricades or the door being broken beyond repair. The presence of unbreakable glass everywhere is also incredibly painful against my destructive urges as there's nothing to suggest why the glass is resistant to every known weapon to man. Not even a forcefield to protect the glass or anything?
Because the backgrounds can be rather cluttered, you might have a hard time seeing enemies and items from a distance. This is also partially because item sprites are rather small and aren't that colorful, so they don't properly stand out from the background as much as they could've. All the visual detail sadly doesn't imply interactivity, so when you're rummaging around the company office you can't mess with printers or computers to play with yourself for example. For that matter, Bombshell has almost no special one-liners for environment interactions like shitting on the toilet or paying a hooker. I only recall one playing when you interact with a headless mannequin of Duke. The levels feature a lot of breakables, unfortunately there's no mighty foot or quick melee button to let you break things quickly without having to switch weapons all the time.
I think very highly of the thrown explosives in Build Engine games, so much that I have them always bound to RMB, IM being no exception. Blood's TNT is one of those cases which should belong in a museum, it being a perfect synergy of engineering and aesthetics, proving the universe that good throwables don't only need to have variable throwing arcs and satisfying explosions, but that the player character itself should derive pure joy from the immediate aftershock. In Ion Maiden, the role of thrown explosives are played by the Bowling Bombs, and as the name suggests, belong in a fucking bowling game. The gimmick here is that the Bombs home in on enemies, which makes them very neat for dealing with enemies around corners. The thing is that nobody plays a game of bowling where the lane is a staircase, with the hole being all the way up.
Unfortunately Bombshell's PE curriculum mostly featured bowling and treated baseball with contempt, so you can't even throw your bombs in a proper arc, but have to lob them over the floor. Your bombs will only detonate upon contact or when shot, and will only start homing into the closest enemy after the first bounce with the environment. This gets rather problematic when enemies are standing in elevated positions, as your bombs might have trouble homing in on them and end up fizzling out anticlimactically. Moreso since levels can be quite vertical. Throwing bombs in high arcs is also incredibly awkward and requires a lot of vertical compensation because of the low throwing arc, which is a pain when you're trying to throw them over a railing. Charging your throw merely increases the force with which the bomb is thrown, and doesn't increase the height of the throwing arc.
Charging your throw to max power also takes way too fucking long and the power you put in your throw won't rebound back to minimum after it has reached the peak, so you can't compensate if you accidentally charged your throw for too long. Your bombs end up incredibly lacking in versatility, which is especially painful considering these are supposed to be Bombshell's signature weapons. Some nerd with a crowbar figured out a long time ago that you can both lob and properly throw grenades, this shouldn't be too hard. There's also the explosion radius of the bombs being comparatively small to most grenades in any game, so you can't even gib two guys standing a bit apart from eachother in a hallway at once.
As for the weapons and enemies, it's all very basic, which are the main contributing factors for this game's overwhelming ok-ness. You got your revolver, your SMG, your shotgun, and your bombs. They do revolver, SMG and shotgun things. And uh that's it. There's a minigun but the preview campaign literally ends the moment you get your hands on it. The store page promised alternate fire modes but I don't see them anywhere. There's also reloading in the game, but I don't think it serves any valid purpose for any weapon other than the revolver. There are three main enemy types in the game. A technocultist which fires a burst of three bullets at you, but your position is only tracked for the burst at the start so you only need to dodge the first shot. It dies quickly to anything. The soldiercultist fires shotguns at you, but the spread is so tight it might as well be a single projectile anyways. It dies quickly to anything. The red cultist charges up its crossbow to fire multiple projectiles in a spread, but the spread of its weapon is so small that in practice this enemy is identical to the shotgun guys except that it stands in place to charge its weapon. It dies not as quickly to anything, taking two shotgun blasts to the body, but one headshot will take care of it (yes, shooting enemies in the head in this game deals more damage). There's also little cyberskullspiders, but they're there mostly for harassment and aren't a threat in any kind of capacity. Their death animation when you hit them with the shock baton is pretty cute, though.
None of the enemies are hitscan, and with how enemies are usually placed in more open spots with no cover to go around I'm rather grateful for that. However, the three main enemy types in the preview campaign are all essentially the same and are just variants of eachother, not just visually either, and so you deal with all of them in the same way. Each enemy attacks you in the same way (shooting a very fast projectile at you), you dodge them all in the same way, and you're free to kill them in the same way. Target prioritization is non-existent. There's no real reason to switch between your main weapons (shotgun/SMG) because of that. Had the crossbowman attack been modified to fire a wider spread of a bit slower but larger projectiles a la the Mancubus, and if the other two had different behaviors or additional attacks, then they'd at the very least be more visually distinct. I can imagine the shotgun guys moving in aggressively while shooting. The devs know mouse-aim is a thing and have designed the game around that fact since shooting the head deals more damage, and enemies don't necessarily have to stop moving while shooting anymore, people can handle moving targets nowadays, nobody aims with their keyboard anymore. If there's going to be actual enemy variants, then you're better off making them fly or something, like the flying pig cop cars and alien grunts with jetpacks in Dukem. I should also note there are two or three stationary turrets in the game which constantly fire at you, but they're usually conveniently surrounded by explosive barrels so you can take them out in two shots anyways.
The boss fight is a big joke, just keep hugging its back and it can't even aim at you. The turning speed of the Warmech is limited so you can keep positioning yourself behind it while pumping it full of lead.
The game's pretty easy. The enemies themselves aren't huge threats, and there's plenty of medkits and ammo to go around, even on the highest difficulty (Ultra Viscera). On top of that, you can carry around 10 portable medkits max, each of which heals you for 35 HP with a potential total of 350 HP. You honestly don't need them since you can rely on medkits on the ground, I never used them much either unless I was fucking around. Duke/SW had portable medkits, but they were properly rare and could only heal you for 100 HP. At least the maximum amount of portable medkits you can carry should scale negatively with each difficulty setting. IM doesn't have a lot of special things it can give you in the way of jetpacks or other consumables or power-ups, so it often gives you some armor or another one of these portable medkits, which can feel rather underwhelming after a while. When you've found a secret containing armor and there's another secret close by which also contains armor, then you should either cool it with the secret frequency or expand your item roster. There doesn't even seem to be any way of supercharging your health either. In Dukem you could find the RPG in the first level, I don't know whether they're just being restrictive with the secret item placement here because of this still being the paid shareware version.
It could use an additional difficulty setting or a gimmick mode like Nightmare difficulty in Doom or Damn I'm Good difficulty in Dukem where enemies would respawn (unless gibbed in Dukem, which actually made previously useless weapons like tripwires and the freezethrower much more useful). Here you do get another mode called Bombardier Trial, where you get infinite bombs and can't use any other weapon, but your max health is nerfed to 25. Still pretty easy though, but it also highlights the awkwardness and flaws of the bomb physics and handling if you actually try it. It feels more like a fun joke mode instead of a proper challenge mode. Strangely, this mode seems to have additional enemy spawns compared to the main singleplayer mode on the hardest difficulty. The amount of bombs placed around is higher too, but since you carry an infinite amount of bombs I do not see the point. It reeks of last-minute changes.
The voice actress for Bombshell does a pretty good job, especially considering these kind of power female roles and their performances often tend to fall into cringe territory unless spoken with a British accent. The lines and character itself are unremarkable, though. Compared to the rest she's just a generic badass action heroine, and Serious Sam already has the generic badass action hero role covered. You can't have more than one generic badass action hero, that's when they start becoming generic. Bombshell is supposed to be some kind of cop or demolitions expert or something? So why aren't her one-liners more cop humor oriented? Instead they could have also referenced Bombshells' explosive personality and her short fuse, kind of blows that they didn't. There's also playing up her femininity, but I recall that Bombshell (the game) had some rather poor vagina and PMS jokes which are only funny within cliques of female comedians.
It's just that compared to a misogynistic macho 80's american action hero stereotype, an Asian ninja/samurai/martial arts master stereotaipu with bad Engrish, and an undead misanthropic gunslinger, Bombshell doesn't stand out in the slightest other than being a girl. More importantly, she lacks edge. It doesn't have to go into borderline offensive territory (even though it claims to be a successor to the old-school shooters that did), but the alternatives provided aren't exactly enticing. She's played too safe, and feels boring as a result. It doesn't help that the references seem to be all over the place with no consistent theme (Deus Ex, Resident Evil, Alien, Hellblazer, Futurama, The Walking Dead, MTV). I figured the setting to be more cyberpunk-ish as it gives off fairly strong Perfect Dark and Deus Ex vibes, why start referencing Resident Evil all of a sudden?
Another very important detail forgotten by the developers: voice lines aren't played back in low quality. I don't know why, but that really made the oneliners stand out more.
While the artstyle is incline and the style of the level design is also very much incline, everything else about it from the combat in general, weapon and enemy roles, the music, and the player character are incredibly basic and barebones. Maybe all the cool stuff is present in the full version only, but I hope that when the full version comes out that the first zone receives another pass to make it proper difficult. Even for a 'shareware' 'episode' I'd hardly consider this enough to really sell me on the game, if it weren't for the facts that there's not much on the market being released like this and me having a kind of morbid curiousity for these revivals of classic first-person shooters like DUSK and Overload and this being released via Early Access.
Ash
Arcane
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- 7,055
Pretty damn funny...but you devs are the ones that setup this time-wasting interaction and tempted the player to begin with.
Game looks good and close to old school incline but it's possible the devs need to polish their monocles just a little. We'll see.
Game looks good and close to old school incline but it's possible the devs need to polish their monocles just a little. We'll see.
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- 99,685
I like that you can see the different armors. Taking some inspiration from this? http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...ed-posts-allowed.57009/page-1196#post-5455810
LESS T_T
Arcane
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- Oct 5, 2012
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- 13,582
http://steamcommunity.com/games/562860/announcements/detail/1674648628974416079
3D Realms & Ion Maiden at PAX EAST 2018!
We're happy to announce that Ion Maiden will be playable on the showfloor at PAX EAST 2018 taking place in Boston, Massachusetts.
At the 3D Realms Booth (Booth #23120) you'll be able to play brand new content, get your hands on EXCLUSIVE Ion Maiden swag, and hang out with the 3D Realms crew!
We'll also host a special "Retro PC Gaming" panel, which includes 3D Realms VP / Executive Producer and Slipgate Managing Director, Frederik Schreiber, 3D Realms Founder and Industry Legend, Scott Miller, Pat the NES Punk, and others.
Let us know if you'll attend below!
Ash
Arcane
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- 7,055
Icon in the bottom left changing based on what armor you have? The Quake games had that.
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- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 99,685
Astral Rag
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 1, 2012
- Messages
- 7,771
Iron Maiden is a cool game.
The hardest difficulty setting is reasonably challenging unless you're one of those subhuman savescummers. Real Men™ only save when they pick up key cards. Also, the difficulty will probably ramp up in later levels, this is just a glorified demo after all.
The game is very playable in 4K in OpenGL mode on my rusty i7 920 with 960 GPU and 16GB RAM. Frame rates are mostly stratospheric but there are some very noticeable drops below 60. These seem to happen when scripted explosions occur.
One thing I really dislike is how enemies don't consistently drop ammo/ weapons. I hope the devs reconsider this behavior. When I kill a shotgun wielding enemy I expect to pick up some shells goddammit, unless maybe when said enemy was gibbed by an explosion or melted by a plasma type weapon or some such.
Gunplay is really solid. The armory is currently limited but weapons that are available are all fun to use and even the basic revolver remains useful throughout the mini campaign, it doesn't have unlimited ammo but revolver bullets are everywhere. You can manually reload your weapons and there are portable medkits. Of course there is no health regen. I didn't find other "useables", no Steroids and such for Shelly but I didn't find all secrets so I may very well be mistaken.
The shotgun is awesome and the homing Bowling Bombs are a blast to use. The game is gory but it's all in good taste. You can play soccer with severed heads.
Mouse input is spot on but I would recommend disabling autoaim and Filter Input. I've seen people compare the mouse input to the awful mouse input of the DN3D and Shadow Warrior remasters, those people clearly have brain damage.
Level layouts are really good and all maps are highly detailed with many secrets strewn all over the place. I like how you have to push chairs in order to reach some hard to reach secrets. I like that there isn't only armor but also armor shards. There could be some more destructible stuff, I was surprised that I couldn't destroy normal windows and lights.
Enemy variety is currently on the low side but those that are present are cool. Some can kill you in a few shots.
Music isn't bad at all but it's not as memorable as the classics' OST. Sound effects on the other hand are really good. Bombshelly has a nice voice and she's pretty talkative. Her one-liners are alright but she's no Duke or Caleb. Perhaps she'll grow on me, I didn't play the isometric game.
There currently is a lack of humour in general. For example using the payphones resulted in a simple busy tone.
I'm very curious about the rest of the campaign and the multiplayer. This could be a classic in the making, especially when modders take an interest in Iron Maiden and mod in some strippers.
The hardest difficulty setting is reasonably challenging unless you're one of those subhuman savescummers. Real Men™ only save when they pick up key cards. Also, the difficulty will probably ramp up in later levels, this is just a glorified demo after all.
The game is very playable in 4K in OpenGL mode on my rusty i7 920 with 960 GPU and 16GB RAM. Frame rates are mostly stratospheric but there are some very noticeable drops below 60. These seem to happen when scripted explosions occur.
One thing I really dislike is how enemies don't consistently drop ammo/ weapons. I hope the devs reconsider this behavior. When I kill a shotgun wielding enemy I expect to pick up some shells goddammit, unless maybe when said enemy was gibbed by an explosion or melted by a plasma type weapon or some such.
Gunplay is really solid. The armory is currently limited but weapons that are available are all fun to use and even the basic revolver remains useful throughout the mini campaign, it doesn't have unlimited ammo but revolver bullets are everywhere. You can manually reload your weapons and there are portable medkits. Of course there is no health regen. I didn't find other "useables", no Steroids and such for Shelly but I didn't find all secrets so I may very well be mistaken.
The shotgun is awesome and the homing Bowling Bombs are a blast to use. The game is gory but it's all in good taste. You can play soccer with severed heads.
Mouse input is spot on but I would recommend disabling autoaim and Filter Input. I've seen people compare the mouse input to the awful mouse input of the DN3D and Shadow Warrior remasters, those people clearly have brain damage.
Level layouts are really good and all maps are highly detailed with many secrets strewn all over the place. I like how you have to push chairs in order to reach some hard to reach secrets. I like that there isn't only armor but also armor shards. There could be some more destructible stuff, I was surprised that I couldn't destroy normal windows and lights.
Enemy variety is currently on the low side but those that are present are cool. Some can kill you in a few shots.
Enemies are mainly humanoids and there is a creepy crawler thing. The mech boss was no pushover.
Music isn't bad at all but it's not as memorable as the classics' OST. Sound effects on the other hand are really good. Bombshelly has a nice voice and she's pretty talkative. Her one-liners are alright but she's no Duke or Caleb. Perhaps she'll grow on me, I didn't play the isometric game.
There currently is a lack of humour in general. For example using the payphones resulted in a simple busy tone.
I'm very curious about the rest of the campaign and the multiplayer. This could be a classic in the making, especially when modders take an interest in I
edit: Hadn't noticed this before, completing the campaign unlocks Bombardier Trial which let's you play through the game with just the Bowling Bombs 
Last edited:
- Joined
- Jul 7, 2017
- Messages
- 418
Ladies and gentleman, I present to you the very first Ion Maiden mod... a quickly slap-dashed together insert of our lord and savior, God Howard. Think of all the one-liners!
"Go back to the chess club!"
"Climb this!
"It just works."
And many more.
"Go back to the chess club!"
"Climb this!
"It just works."
And many more.
Looks like the cover was inspired by PSX version of Doom.
- Joined
- May 5, 2014
- Messages
- 1,677
Regarding difficulty, the Devs say they've yet to implement a Damn Im Good/Nightmare difficulty.
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