Sad news. Though I guess I wouldn’t have expected high sales based on how few game players remember Descent when I ask about it. I guess it can’t have been everyone’s formative FPS.
Dammit. I almost bought this so many times, I loved Descent back in the day, but some of the discussion here scared me off (difficulty wise) so I never quite pulled the trigger. I’m still going to pick it up at some point of course, but I feel kind of bad I didn’t grab it at launch.
Descent is definitely a niche game. The movement in every direction is one hurdle, but personally, I find a purely robotic world uninteresting. It’s silly - it’s just a theme - but I can’t get past my dislike for a game where I just fight robots in enclosed spaces.
I know what you mean. That used to really bother me back in the Descent 1 and 2 days. Then by the time Descent 3 came out many years later, I didn’t mind as much, it was almost nostalgic to go back to fighting robots in an era where games were doing so much more. And of course, that was again the case with Overload. But yes, if Descent 3 and Overload had come out in the mid 90s, I would have been much more bothered by the cold robot nature of it all.
You know, that’s a great point. The enemies were robots in the olden days because it was easier to make enemies that could be represented by relatively few flat polygons. But that’s not really an issue these days. Would Overload have had a wider appeal if we found monsters down in those caves? Maybe.
-Tom
Trying to dissect my own feeling about fighting robots: Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that having that synthetic setup implicitly means there’s no narrative content in-mission – all I can expect is a Doom-like experience. If these robots were sentient to the point of having personality and conversations, I think I’d have more interest in it.
Imagine if all these ships I’m fighting had pilots inside, and that you’d actually have a real plot per mission, with surprises and narrative arcs and what not. It’s mostly that I just don’t care about these hunks of metal because they don’t matter to anyone, and on top of that the game also lacks a theme that could hook me, like kicking alien butt while chewing bubble gum or surviving in hell.
Robots are boring enemies, because they don’t have animations, or hit register animations or shouts when you fire at them, and they all look more or less the same.
Overload is finally available for purchase on Xbox One!
I’m downloading my copy right now. I notice that it doesn’t seem to have the Community Level Pack DLC available for purchase that the Steam version has, but I do hope that it becomes available in the near future.
Now that the game is officially out, I fired it up again last night. I’d done the tutorial 6 times already hoping to get the achievement for completing the tutorial, but it never popped. I was hoping the official release meant that achievements were finally enabled.
I finished the tutorial. Ba-bop! Achievement Unlocked.
Sweet. Now I can move forward on the Xbox version.
Just noticed this was on sale at GOG if one prefers that flavor.
$22.49
What’s been weird about where I am now in the game is that I’m not necessarily stuck. I’m just an indecision paralysis type situation. You see, back at the end of January when I finished the last level, I had 10 super upgrade points and 7 upgrade points.
That gives me a LOT of options on what to upgrade for this next level.
So here’s what happens: I choose a particular upgrade of guns, a particular upgrade of missiles, and I start the level. And I play until I die. And then another day, I choose to upgrade different weapons, and I don’t save the game, I keep playing until I die. And so on.
Today I reloaded and I ignored the missiles completely. I upgraded my bouncing reflective gun (I forget the name) and I also upgraded my impulse cannons so they take less energy. And I played for a while.
It never feels like “aha, I’ve found it, this is the ONE combination that will help me win”, so I continue to be in paralysis mode on what to pick.
I thought I’d try one of these upgrades, and I would fall in love with it, and I’d go YES, this is the one. But that never happened. So I guess I just need to pick a couple of upgrades and just move forward.
@MrTibbs reminded me that I got stalled in this game because of indecision on what to upgrade, as posted above. I really do need to just pick something. But I suspect I’ll come back once I’m done with Rebel Galaxy Outlaw.
Oooh, I had missed this part:
– THUNDERBOLT –
Thunderbolt+: The shots now pass through robots and can hit multiple enemies in succession.
Thunderbolt++ [MX]: Maximum power , charging rate, and projectile speed are all increased. Refire time is also reduced slightly.
Thunderbolt++ [RT]: Shots now track towards robots slightly.
It never occurred to me that the Thunderbolt could be made into an actual useful weapon, I’ll have to try this out next time I load up the game.
Well, that first upgrade of going through enemies sounded good to me for crowds. So a thunderbolt that goes through robots and also tracks slightly sounds like a good combination. Or the other one, if it goes through enemies and has a faster fire rate, charging rate, projectile speed, that sounds like a good combination too. As a base weapon without upgrades it definitely sucks. Especially as a weapon that is introduced so late in the game.
Yeah, same here. Overloads you say? Hey, that’s the name of the game. Maybe the whole game is named after the Thunderbolt cannon’s action.
Ok, I got home and tried it.
First I upgraded the Thunderbolt twice to the MX path. This is way better than the base weapon! I also upgraded my Falcon missiles to the top form where they fire faster and do more damage. The combination was nice, but even with the reduced energy use, I was quickly short on energy using the Thunderbolt.
So this time I spent it on upgrading to the top energy consumption reduction for my ship so energy weapons use less energy across the board, and this time on the second Thunderbolt uprade I went with tracking.
Oooooooh. I really like this one. I never noticed this before today but there’s an indicator on my reticle that tells me how far the Thunderbolt is charged, and after I fire it, it has really strong tracking! So I can shoot it down a corridor, where two enemies dodged in different directions left and right, out of my view, but my two thunderbolt energy beams split up and followed them both, and my HUD said I got two kills! Holy smokes! That was so cool.
I think I might be out of analysis paralysis. I might go with this combo.
I think I made it most of the way through Tethys lab last night thanks to those Thunderbolts. It not only made the level more manageable in terms of difficulty, it also added a layer of fun to the game that wasn’t there before. Trying to time my thunderbolt shots getting hits is kind of a blast. I found the level 1 keycard and then the level 2 keycard before calling it a night.
One funny quirk that this game has in common with Doom 3 is that it has all these audio logs that no one cares about. Obviously in both Doom 3 and Overload, someone was in charge of actually writing these logs, and getting voice actors who said these lines, and yet I can’t decide if it’s a waste of resources for Revival and id software, or if it has some minimal baseline background redeeming value. Even though you might not pay attention to the audio logs because you don’t care about the story in a game like this, it does at least maybe ground the game in a sort of fiction so it’s not just an arcade game where you’re fighting a series of robots. Instead, you’re … I don’t know what you’re doing honestly, I don’t pay attention to the story, but you’re definitely a character who is doing something, as opposed to Pac man.
The narrative bits that grabbed my attention were the names of the people you rescued (?) from the cryosleep chambers or space coffins or whatever they were. Doesn’t it show their individual names, or am I misremembering? Who were those people? Were the names the names of the devs? Were they referenced in the audio logs I couldn’t be bothered to read/listen to? Why was the game showing me their names?
-Tom
I finished Tethys Lab. My go to weapons now are a combination of various things. Cyclone obviously when I want rapid fire. Driller when I want accuracy and distance, and Thunderbolt when I want a fairly versatile weapon that’s good against small enemies and heavy enemies.
Gosh, this game is so fun. One of the times that I have the joystick plugged in for Rebel Outlaw, I should try the joystick for this game again, which I haven’t tried since the demo. At this point I’m so used to the controller I’ll probably suck with the joystick in comparison.