Trying the Boundary demo, game (mentioned in Games You're Looking Forward To) that's a multiplayer shjooter in Earth orbit, astronauts in bulky suits flying in chairs shooting each other with assault rifles. It's... okay. It's a niche thing I had thought about a long time, I'd proabbly get it anyways as long as it has a player base, but it claims it's "tactical" and it is as far from tactical as you can get. What tactical really is is vague, but we all know what sort of characteristics that usually means. Things like short time to kill (often one shot kill), gameplay structured around objectives instead of kills (with expectation of using chat and squad tactics), etc. Some games can be both arcade and tactical at the same time, Titanfall I'd argue was a tactical shooter whenever Titans were in play (taking them down or piloting them), but pilot vs pilot and pilot vs bots was pure arcade.
Well, this plays like Titanfall meets Call of Duty, sort of. Is what I think of as a "clusterfuck shooter," a shooter that's a clusterfuck because you get spawnkilled every other second. The movement system is exactly like Prey EVAs, which I guess must just be standard controls for games like that, you don't actually stay in motion but movement does have momentum to it, you can roll (so you ideally want to always orient yourself as you're moving so you feel like you're the right side up relative to "the floor"), and in general you can move fast. That's the Titanfall part, it's not wallrunning, but it's a similar sort of gameplay that's driven by being a radical departure from boots on the ground. And here that really matters a lot, because guns often fire just a bit slow, so combined with full freedom of movement in 3D, leading a target becomes a real art, it gets very disorienting very quick keeping track of what's going on, and you can break things off by dodging behind obstacles all over (the maps are basically all different kinds of space stations that have been shot up and filled with debris). As for the guns, it seems that the best results come from camping a wall (like a long solar panel) and sniping from afar and using sidearms if you're anywhere out of sniping range, because the assault rifle and shotgun are pieces of shit.
It's solidly
okay. I think they need to fix the fucking spawns, maybe slow it down some. If it's supposed to be tactical, well, it's not. I kind of had Rainbow Six in space in mind, and I don't think it'd be real hard to make that - give some environmental destruction features like breaching into stations and some objective to seize - and I think a person could, in principle, do Battlefield in space with small warcraft. But as long as Titanfall is dead from the hackers, I guess this is acceptable. I think the devs will regret, just like Titanfall's original devs did, not bothering to make a campaign.
It really needs music too. Another challenge for any movie director or game creator is whether or not to do sound in space. Here it’s done in muffled fashion. I’d rather have music and no sound than sound and no music, lack of sound is itself one of the interesting tactical features of space warfare (can’t listen for gunfire to position enemies) and music (light Sovietwave) would add a lot. Games not Soviets cs Amerixans, it’s modern corporate wankery, but the aesthetic still works.
Edit: Purge mod is basically space Counterstrike. But good luck getting a match that isn't 5 on one side, 1 on the other side. Fuck this
