What boot knife?
I think it’s bound to “V” or “F”. It’s just a quick melee attack, kinda like Duke’s mighty boot.
I don’t play first person shooters by keyboard anymore unless I’m forced to! Luckily Ashes supports controllers.
Reporting back: Boot knife is not assigned by default, but the tutorial message that I missed tells you might have to reassign the button. But controller config doesn’t let you assign any buttons. So what to do?
Well, I discovered if you go under keyboard assigns, you can assign buttons to the mouse and the controller in that menu. So I assigned melee (boot knife) to B, which might have been a bad idea. I kind of have to stop aiming in order to press B. I might reassign that.
Overall the tutorial is balls hard. Having to melee all these enemies to preserve ammo is not fun.
Exactly what I needed! Thank you, @MrTibbs !
Y’know, with all of these retro-shooters lately, I’m beginning to seriously question if I ever need a new computer or video card ever again. These are the kinds of games I cut my teeth on when I bought my first PC in 1993. They were amazing back then, and they are amazing now.
After playing these newer AAA games with their photo-realistic graphics, QTE gimmicks, and needless complexity, I play one of these retro-shooters, and seriously, it’s like coming home.
I haven’t yet played it enough to quite make that statement, but Ashes feels really, really great, and I’m so happy right now!
Also, I skipped the tutorial.
Did I miss anything important by doing so, or does this play pretty much like I would expect?
I mean, so far it seems to be just like those old classics.
I already love the difference between the two pistols.
One goes bam bam bam
The other goes bambambam
Super cool game.
It feels fantastic.
Very retro! I remember this being the case in most shooters of the past. It’s definitely something I don’t miss at all. Half Life 2 was the era around which that changed dramatically, I don’t think I ever got stuck in a shooter after that. I did get stuck in Half Life 2 Episode 2, but I think that was a genuine bug (I got past it by using a noclip cheat code and getting past the obstacle).
Excellent to hear you’re enjoying it, Giles! Being able to just jump straight into the action is a key reason I keep going back to these kinds of shooters. Ashes feels like an ambitious long lost game from the 1990s. It’s got that punchy combat down!
What difficulty are you playing on? I’m an old hand at these old shooters, but I’ve always just played on normal difficulty, as I figure that’s what the devs will balance for the best.
Follow the ductwork into another room. There are boxes set up to jump on to get in. Once you’re up there, there are some narrow ledges. You’ll want to make sure ‘always run’ is set to ‘off’ going around corners there.
Some bonus areas can be gotten to by blowing up those tanks you see around.
Yes, these ‘boomer shooters’ (Blood comes to mind) were difficult, but that’s what I loved about them. And they weren’t unfairly difficult. There were definitely some light puzzle elements, and some of them didn’t seem so ‘light’ until after you figured them out.
Sometimes before I got accustomed to how level designers’ brains worked, I’d sometimes spend like 3 days just trying to get past an area. It was incredibly frustrating, but I was too stubborn to get help, so I’d just keep coming back until I got it. Only then did I realize that I was usually over-thinking it.
I think we’ve just gotten soft over the years by playing shooters that are more and more forgiving.
A few years ago, I went back and played Blood for the first time in 20 years, and that game kicked my ass. I sat there and couldn’t believe that back in the 90’s, I actually finished the damn thing!
Blood was famously hard, even when it was released. The advice even in between veterans, is to use the custom difficulty thing from the remaster to adjust the difficulty, lowering the accuracy of the cultists, but increasing their number.
In general yeah, these kind of games tend to be hard. It’s a product of being works made for fans, by fans, and because it isn’t a commercial product, there is no pressure to cater to a bigger audience.
Also, remember quicksaves are a thing here.
It does, for me. f2 is the save menu, f6 is the quicksave. The first time it shows the save menu to establish which slot is the quicksave slot, I believe.
Yes. It’s a spookily accurate reproduction of that era.
If you had told me I was playing a game originally made by Monolith or 3D Realms back in the 90’s, and that it was unearthed during an excavation of an office closet there, I would have 100% believed it.
Check your settings, then, maybe there is one to confirm overwriting saves that is affecting it.
Human enemies drop ammo. Mutants don’t. I don’t think that’s related to difficulty.
Just heard of Forgive Me Father, stil in EA, looks neat. Was on Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia’s list of 2021 stuff.
I splashed out for Ultrakill, and my goodness does this game get the ol’ blood pumping.
Just discovered this one, bought it on the spot, and god damn if it isn’t fantastic so far.
Night Dive’s Powerslave remaster, which I feel this fits this thread as it’s a remix of the PS1 and Saturn versions of the game and not just a straight-up port, is releasing Feb 10 on PS4, Xbox One, Swithc and PC.
The content is combined together and levels adapted to take the best of whichever either console. So level areas are either from the Saturn, PS1, or a mix of the two, as PSX was notably more cramped yet detailed, while Saturn was more open but sometimes sparse. Numerous graphical settings are provided so you can make the game visual style look like either the Saturn or PS1 as well, or a mix of both. There’s even CRT shader options. I expect Digital Foundry to be messing with them for hours. :V