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Hands-on with the Titanfall Beta

Posted by :Meroka On : February 24, 2014
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Category: Preview, Shooter, Xbox One

This past weekend saw the test drive of Respawn Entertainment’s upcoming Titanfall, and I consider myself lucky to be amongst those able to get to grips with it.

Titanfall is the first title developed by Respawn Entertainment, a company comprised largely of staff from Infinity Ward, the team responsible for the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series, so the game already comes with an excellent pedigree, and the team’s roots are very evident in Titanfall.

titanfall_fracture

Titanfall is, at its heart, a military shooter, and yet manages to stand out and be different in what is rapidly becoming a saturated genre.

Set in the near future, Titanfall sees war raging between the factions of the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation and the Frontier Militia. The player takes the role of a pilot, a rare person skilled enough to control huge mech-style robot walkers called Titans in a combat scenario.

And it is these, the eponymous Titans, which differentiate this game from the countless other military shooters which are so commonplace these days. Battles within Titanfall are a decidedly asymmetric affair; teams of six pilots will begin on foot, accompanied by countless expendable NPC grunts to battle over objectives. As the match progresses, players will be able to summon the massive titans and begin wreaking havoc on the battlefield.

Each player has a timer at the end of which, they can call for a Titan to be dropped from orbit onto the map. This timer can be accelerated by eliminating enemy players, or to a lesser extent, the enemy NPCs. So your performance will be directly tied to how fast you’ll get to play with the good toys. Even if the enemy beats you to the punch, pilots are still capable of holding their own against Titans.

Anti-Titan weapons will put a serious dent in their sides, particularly if they’re distracted and you can get an ambush. Additionally, an agile pilot with a high ground advantage can even leap atop one and ‘rodeo’ it, whilst shooting it in the circuits. In spite of the Titans’ size and firepower advantage, it never feels like an unfair fight.

Injecting a new breath of fresh air into the age-old run and gun formula are the pilots’ parkour abilities. Each player can easily run along walls and scale tall buildings, and combine these with a jet pack assisted double jump to get almost anywhere within the maps.

TF_AngelCity_Pilot_0

See a window high up that building? If you plan your path well, there’s a pretty good chance you can use that as your way in, giving you a tactical edge. It can be tricky to get to grips with, and personally, I’ve had more than my share of humiliating thuds as I land on the floor absolutely nowhere near where I was hoping to be, often in the midst of a pitched gunfight.

But when it goes exactly right, and for some people this will obviously be more often than for others, it’s an incredibly satisfying experience. This it seems, is the core of the whole thing, and what keeps me and many others coming back for more.

The spectacle of everything is such that you always feel like the hero. Whether you’re leaping gracefully across rooftops to reach a strategic position, hanging on for dear life to the back of an enemy Titan attempting to disable it before everything explodes. Even when you’re on the losing side, the game provides one last hurrah, as a dropship comes in to land to escort surviving players out and you’re given one last chance, a brief window of opportunity, to make your daring escape from the field of battle alive.

This would all be pretty compelling in and of itself, but the whole package is wrapped up in stunning visuals. The levels on offer were set amidst the wreckage of a disaster-ravaged futuristic city, and if you dared to tear your eyes away from the combat you would have been treated to some stunning landscapes surrounding the whole affair. The map designs themselves were equally well made.

Of the two on offer in the beta, neither of them was symmetrical, yet neither felt in any way imbalanced; the differing terrain never served to give any team a distinct advantage, and there was never a dead end in sight to interrupt your fast paced parkouring across the map.

In short, the Titanfall beta was one of the most compelling gaming experiences I’ve had in recent times, and now I, like everyone else, must wait patiently for the game to make it’s way into the world on 11 March. It will definitely be one of the most important titles this year.

Via The Yorkshire Standard

Free2Play Spotlight: Bullet Run

Posted by :Meroka On : August 11, 2012
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Category: Free2Play, Reviews, Shooter

Bullet Run is a brand new first-person shooter from ACONY Games and published by Sony Online Entertainment.

Honestly, I almost thought I wasn’t going to be able to review this game; the install process was distinctly nontrivial. Between installing punkbuster, patching and setting up an additional Sony Station account to be able to play it took far longer than strictly necessary. And then the launcher helpfully puts an animated bar next to the Play button that looks akin to a loading bar at a casual glance. I waited at the launcher for about half an hour before I realised patching was complete. Oh well, you live and learn, I suppose. It worked eventually.

So what is Bullet Run? Bullet Run is a modern shooter set in the near future where you are a contestant in the hottest new reality TV deathsport. Stop me if that sounds familiar. To be fair these have been doing the rounds for years, after all that was the fundamental premise of Unreal Tournament some thirteen years ago. Unfortunately at some point since UT, someone decided if we’re doing reality TV, we need commentators. This works fine if you’re Uber Entertainment and your writers are fantastic and you have enough dialogue that it rarely repeats itself. ACONY hired two painfully American voices to do a handful of corny lines which get spouted over and over dozens of times per game. It starts to grate, if I’m honest.

The gameplay is in the same vein as Battlefield and CoD, going for gritty realism and high lethality. From this you’d automatically assume I’d hate it, being a staunch opponent of the two, but I don’t. It borrows enough elements of other games as well that it’s more interesting. For starters Battlefield and CoD punish accuracy of weapons while not looking down the sights so harshly that you may as well not be shooting, whereas Bullet Run’s weaponry is still reasonably effective firing from the hip. It’s probably not everyone’s cup of tea, but as an old-school shooter fan, the ability to fight without needing to crawl around on my belly staring down a scope works for me. Fulfilling the ‘near future’ part of the description is a bonus array of gadgets to play with to spice up the combat. You get 4 gadget options with a choice of two in each slot. The basic one is a minor healing device or an adrenaline boost for minor combat performance (okay, I don’t know what that is, I couldn’t tell what it did). You unlock the remaining three over the course of a match by performing well. These include a small explosive or stunning drone, pretty much guaranteeing a single free kill if you get the jump on someone, sentry guns and gatling guns among others. By their limited nature you won’t see a lot of these, but they add a little extra flavour to the old ‘run and gun’ from time to time. Another feature lifted straight from a popular modern title is that of the ‘Active Reload’ from Gears of War. Pressing reload will begin a progress bar with a little notch on it. If you right-click just when the bar reaches the notch you’ll get a fast reload, but if you miss you’ll jam your weapon. This can make a or break a heated firefight and once again, manages to mix things up just enough so that things aren’t always boring.

Progression within the game is on similar system to that of Cod or Battlefield wherein you start with basic gear and unlock better stuff as you level up. It mixes this with a typical free-to-play system too, though and you don’t get to play with your new toys until you buy them with in-game currency. So without further staving off the inevitable…

How free is it?

Here we have the same old, same old. The two currency system of ordinary credits earned by playing and ‘Station Cash’ primarily earned through real money transactions. Station Cash is a currency used universally among all SOE’s free-to-play games, so if you also play Everquest or Pirates of the Burning Sea or DC Universe or anything else by SOE then the currency is cross-compatible. Probably of minimal use to a majority of players but nice to have as an option nonetheless. In terms of credits you start with 10,000 and earn about 500 per match. Low level guns will run you about 14,000 credits and high-end guns are nearly 80,000, so prepare to grind a bit for those if you’re playing for free. Cosmetic items run you anywhere from 3000 to 15,000 (and one silly viking hat for 50k) with a lot of items frequently on sale, so you should be able to earn these reasonably easily. The game incentivizes you to buy cosmetics with a ‘style’ system. For every item you buy you earn style points which correspond directly to a percentage multiplier to your experience and credit rewards, with a cap of 50%. Style decreases by 1% per day (as your wardrobe gets stale, I suppose) so you’ll need to keep buying new items to keep your multiplier up. In real money terms, weapons cost anywhere from £1.60 to £16 and cosmetics cost from about £0.80 to £4, which at least as far as the vanity items go is much fairer than some games on the market. Whether you think a single in-game gun is worth £16 though is more debatable.

On top of all this is a $15/month or $90/year subscription plan offer. Providing a huge array of perks including but not limited to credit boosts, store discounts, bonus station cash and no level restrictions. This is presumably the domain of the person that really, really loves Bullet Run. That’s not me.

That’s not to say I don’t like it. It takes a lot of the successful aspects of other games and makes a really solid product out of it. But equally, it doesn’t have a lot terribly original about it feeling like a bizarre Frankenstein of Battlefield, Unreal, Gears of War and APB. It’s entertaining but has very little merit of its own, unfortunately.

Bullet Run, by ACONY games is available on Steam or from Sony Online Entertainment.

Shoot Many Robots

Posted by :Meroka On : July 28, 2012
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Category: Action/Adventure, Reviews, Shooter

Shoot many Robots is all about the American dream. Living in an RV, drinking beer and shooting killer robots with a rifle.

 

 

 

Okay, I’ll admit I could be a bit hazy on the definition of ‘the American dream’ there. But it plays up a lot of the American stereotypes and I still haven’t figured out if it’s supposed to be ironic or not. You play a bald, grizzled American redneck type character. Your pickup truck is immediately destroyed by robots, shortly followed by your house. Seeking vengeance, you set out armed with a submachine gun, rocket launcher and quantities of health-restoring beer and narrowly save your RV from the same fate as your house and truck. Fortunately it’s the ultimate hybrid of house and truck so you’re pretty much sorted. Beyond that, the plot hopes to merely propel itself on a wave of machine wreckage. No twists, drama or character development, not even the merest token effort, just destroying thousands upon thousands of robots because they wrecked your truck.

So those robots had better be really fun to destroy, right? Alas, not so much. There’s a variety of weapons and upgrades available via a shop housed inexplicably in your RV’s bathroom. There’s a bit of variety in the weaponry too, but a considerable part of the arsenal is just upgrades on the previous model, and honestly, I just keep coming back to the same gear. Fully automatic weapons just chew through most enemies pretty quickly and pretty much the first hat you unlock raises your weapon crit rate to 60%. It’s so overpowered as to make everything else redundant. I suppose you could easily artificially raise the difficulty by simply not using said items, but since when did any gamer volunteer to nerf themselves?

 

Interspersed throughout the standard levels are a handful of survival mode levels. These are a bit more challenging and will throw wave after wave of enemies at you until you succumb to the hordes or kill them all. This will put even an overpowered loadout to the test and it’s quite a lot of fun, too.

The game is a 2D platformer/shooter. Kind of like the old Metal Slug games. Jumping around on platforms shooting at anything that moves. It’s a bit more fluid than Metal Slug though so it plays less like memorizing a sequence of moves and more like an actual game. The graphical style borrows heavily from Borderlands with an industrial, almost cel-shaded look. Unfortunately, the game gets stale pretty quickly. You can mix it up with different loadouts, but once you’ve smashed a few thousand mechanoids it starts to feel like a bit of a grind. It doesn’t even have the same visceral satisfaction that Orcs Must Die! had, and that was a similar principle; at least orcs had the decency to walk into giant whirling blade traps with a sadistically delightful squelch.

Ubisoft keep catching me with my guard down. They keep publishing games that if I didn’t know better I would have called indie. Rather original looking concepts with a low price points, and it’s hard to take issue with that. The idea that it has a publisher at all is poor grounds to make a complaint, no doubt. The problem I have with publishers is that the game never stands on its own merits. I’d heard of Shoot Many Robots before launch, and I’d assumed the hype was due to it looking pretty decent. In retrospect it’s obvious that it was due to Ubi digging into its deep pockets to make sure people heard of it. I mean, that’s their job, right? The faux “indie” stuff Ubisoft keeps publishing never quite lives up to expectations though. They build hype and follow through with a less than stellar offering. From Dust never quite lived up to the promise, either. Sans-publisher these games probably wouldn’t fail outright; they’re well polished and quite entertaining, but they’d struggle to stay afloat amongst much better indie titles.

Shoot Many Robots by Demiurge Studios is available on Steam, XBLA and PSN

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.

Posted by :Scribble On : July 20, 2012
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Category: Action/Adventure, Indie Gaming, Puzzle, Reviews, Shooter

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is your standard 2D adventure platformer with a lot of bite and a harsh organic style. You’ll traverse, submerge, and blast your way through an infected alien Sun that’s spreading its shadowy organic filth all over the rest of the solar system!

Through the twisted catacombs, lakes, voids, pipes and caves you’ll find may different changes in scenery. All are strikingly coloured and each presenting new obstacles and bosses to thwart. I love the atmosphere between environments. The style mostly boils down to layered silhouetted 2-D gears teeth and lots of spikes. Coupled with impressive visuals, that’s seriously all it needs to be to look fantastic. The spaceship itself is 3-D, which allows for some nice tilting movement while you’re going around corners or dodging incoming projectiles. It makes ITSP look a lot less static than it could have been and doesn’t stick out quite as much as it does in a lot of 2-D / 3-D crossovers.

For its type there’s a surprising amount of gizmos for your space ship to play with. A scanner, lasers, guided missiles, circular saws, shields, grabbing arms, etc. Each is found throughout the adventure and all are necessary to find hidden extra features. The scanner is the key to figuring out what in seven bells you have to do. Given that there’s no text or dialogue in this game either. But mostly you’ll only have to scan new obstacles once to get the hint. After that it’s just a case of using the gizmo or weapon available, or having to come back to that section later once you’ve found said gizmo or weapon. You’ll quickly recognise the task at hand the second time you fly past it. There’s a lot of re-playability in this game. Finding artefacts, concept art, getting all the weapon and shield upgrades, having to track back to access areas previously closed off to you.

I’ve never encountered anything less threatening.

Enemies correspond with their settings, the Organic Zones have plenty of plant-like spore creatures, that sometimes explode.. The Ocean Zone carries plenty of large and dangerous sea life, as expected.. And the Ice Zone which is full of “@$%ing Snowflakes! All are brilliantly designed to mess up your spaceship.. Manoeuvring to avoid or buy time to engage a specifically effective weapon is the only way to evade crashing into a multitude of creatures and environmental hazards.

All Bosses are fixed solidly into their environment, and it’s definitely not a case of blasting every spiky crevice with lasers. Experiments are required to find out how to beat each boss, all the while you looking like a delicious appetizer from some giant toothy gaping maw. Everything needed to finish each battle is within your grasp, knowing what you have to do is half the trick, and sometimes it involves being closer than is comfortable to large and hungry shadow beasts.

The multiplayer feels like more of an after thought to be honest. It’s more of the same takes, only they generate a score and you benefit more from having the extra players to watch your back. However, if multiplayer is your thing, you’re gonna want some physical people to play Local with. Since I’ve seldom encountered another player in the online mode, it’s just not quite captivating enough to hold your attention.

Organic amazingness!

But unfairly, my major gripe with ITSP is its connection to Windows Live. I’m all for signing up to another service if I feel I’m going to get a lot of mileage out of it, however, I’m not personally a Live user. There’s utterly no benefit for me using this service except to link up ITSP’s multiplayer . But I’m more prone to playing these locally with friends than setting up and online match. Which suits me find because there’s seldom anyone else hooked up to the online multiplayer. Not only did I feel reluctant to have to sign up to Live after already purchasing it with Steam, it managed to link up with an Xbox Live account that I’ve never heard of and is certainly not mine. I can only apologise to this user and hope he / she appreciates whatever points I’ve given them while trying to formulate an opinion of the game. To give it credit, I’ve not actually received any junk mail from Windows Live, like I would have anticipated, and it hasn’t actually hindered my experience of the game. It only left me slightly bewildered. I may not be so reluctant to try this again when next encountered.

There may not be a lot original about ITSP, save for its painstakingly animated environments, but that doesn’t diminish its enjoyability. It takes a lot of common features that are fun in their own aspect and gathers them in one place to provide an entertaining, long-lived and challenging gaming experience.

GFG

~ Scribble

Free2Play Spotlight: MicroVolts

Posted by :Meroka On : July 8, 2012
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Category: Free2Play, Reviews, Shooter

MicroVolts, by NQ Games is a title I’d seen before. It took me a while to realise it, though. Almost two years ago today a trailer for a Korean game appeared and made some waves in Team Fortress 2 communities. It appeared to advertise a class-based shooter and on the face of it was an exact copy of TF2 with the mercenaries we know and love replaced with dolls and toy robots. The trailer very obviously lifted scenes straight from the TF2 launch trailer. The game was H.A.V.E. Online. MicroVolts is H.A.V.E. Online re-branded for a western audience.

If you’re still reading after that, do not be dissuaded because, for all that the trailer sells the game as TF2, it doesn’t really play as TF2. What MicroVolts actually is is a fast-paced third-person shooter with a diverse set of weaponry available to all players because – and this is the important distinction – it’s not actually class-based. Yes, yes, I saw the trailer, and that very much looked like a scout and a soldier and a heavy and a sniper and a demoman to me, too. But the way it actually works is that every player is given access to all seven weapons so you can mix and match to suit the situation.

Matches are incredibly fast-paced. Fights rarely last longer than a couple of seconds and respawn times are less than five seconds. Keen eyes and quick wits will serve you well. If the players moved a little faster I’d be quite content to make the comparison to the arena shooters of old: Unreal and Quake and their ilk. As it is, it still comes close, the thrill of running around with a ridiculous arsenal on your person blasting others to bits is recreated nicely.

The style is essentially that of Toy Story. A lot of toys running around in oversize environments. Usually. For some reason a few of the levels decide to not stick with the toyland theme and are scaled to a normal size. Weapons are all rather toy-like and mêlée weapons include silly things like pencils and hotdogs. There are four playable characters, two of which need to be bought initially; a hip hop action figure, an anime girl doll, a scantily clad demoness doll and a toy robot. These are all extensively customisable through the in-game store.

Which obviously leads us conveniently to the usual question: “How free is it?”

The store, like most f2p games, uses two currencies, in this case Micro Points and Rock Tokens. Micro Points are earned after matches, typically earning 100-200 points depending on the length of the game and on your performance. Rock Tokens are the premium currency with 10,000RT costing £6. A new character costs 20,000MP, weapons cost up to 18,000MP to unlock permanently and costume items are 22,000MP. Lower price points let you use the weapon or item for a shorter time frame. Items bought with Rock Tokens are unfortunately undeniably superior, however costumes cannot be unlocked permanently, with 3000RT giving you the item for 90 days. The advantage any given item provides you is on the whole pretty negligible, with only minor buffs to damage and stats, but with all premium items stacked this would give you a 12% speed boost or 24% extra health. That’s not an insignificant edge. The cost of this full max-power set would put you back about £30 for the weaponry and £10 for the costumes, with the costumes needing to be re-bought again in 90 days, making it a £30 up-front cost and £40 per year subscription, essentially. That is of course assuming you feel the need to buy an edge over your competitors, when a lot of people won’t be buying into this system.

From a personal standpoint, it is a lot of fun, given that there’s not been a good arena shooter since Painkiller, and I could quite comfortably see myself spending a small amount of money on this game. The fact that any costume piece worth buying expires after a time limit rather reduces the appeal somewhat, though, so I’d probably stick to the weapons.

It’s well worth a look, particularly if you’re sick of trudging slowly around brown military environments. And it certainly isn’t the Team Fortress 2 reskin that the launch trailer prophesied. At the end of the day it has failed to escape its Korean stereotype roots, though and the person with the fattest wallet will likely still win.

MicroVolts is free to play now on Steam.

Free2Play Spotlight: Moon Breakers

Posted by :Meroka On : May 30, 2012
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Category: Free2Play, Indie Gaming, Shooter

My last Spotlight showcased Super Monday Night Combat. Uber Entertainment return this time in a publishing role, playing host to Imba Entertainment’s Moon Breakers. A company I’ve been able to find precious little information on, the game shares a number of credits with those of SMNC which, in addition to the naming similarities, leaves me wondering if they aren’t in whole or in part the same guys.

That’s an aside though. Irrespective of who actually made it, it’s available now on Steam and Chrome and it’s free to all who would partake, so that means it’s up to me to poke it with the review stick.

Moon Breakers is a space-based dogfighter with a WWII-era dieselpunk aesthetic. In layman’s terms, you fly in around spaceships that look like old planes shooting each other. In its genre there’s not a great deal to compare it against. Back on the N64 there was a Star Wars game called Rogue Squadron. Aside from its later Gamecube sequels it’s really the only similar game I can think of (I guess there was half of a level in Halo Reach, too). It feels like an apt comparison anyway, because it does feel very similar in terms of gameplay.

Pew Pew!

Your basic ship is armed with laser blasters and missiles. These are both projectile weapons and all your targets will be zipping about in three dimensions so you’ll need to get good at leading your targets with your shots quickly. Games consist of 32 players, 16-a-side with one team representing the government and the other being space pirates. Matches are your standard online multiplayer fare of team deathmatch, capture the flag and the like. Your justification for the conflict is the old SF trope of fighting over Helium-3, which is as good a reason as any.

Moon Breakers is straightforward enough to just jump in and get into the action quickly, but it feels like there’s a lot more to the combat that can only really be learned through experience. Dodging a hail of fire not only from the enemies but also from the numerous mounted cannons on the enemy’s flagship is as tricky a business as hitting things flying through space in the first place. Arenas take the form of an array of interesting asteroid fields, including one looking very much like a shattered moon. Aside from looking impressive these can be used tactically to take shelter from enemy fire or just as cover to try to slip through to the enemy base undetected. These are just my first impressions, too, I’d be quite confident in saying the more experienced players probably know a few more interesting tricks that haven’t even occurred to me.

That's no moon! Okay, I guess it was once.

After a game you will receive ‘creds’ depending on your performance. I’ve received anything up to 3000 creds from a game but a better performance would probably net you more still. This rate of return is good for buying cheap upgrades to your ship but unfortunately saving up for a new, better ship will set you back anywhere from 180,000 to 3,000,000 creds. A bit of quick mental arithmetic and I get an estimate of 15 hours of gameplay, in which I perform well every match, just to unlock the single cheapest ship. By extension, that big one? 250 hours! You can probably see where this is going. Cred boosters can of course be purchased using your real money offering up to 10x return on the payout each game. That valuable He-3 you were fighting over? It turns out that you can just buy it with a credit card. $2 will net you 350 units of He-3 with, as usual, price breaks at higher quantities, and then that He-3 can be used as an alternative currency to buy ships. To put it in perspective, that 3,000,000 cred ship is instead 7500 He-3 and will set you back $38; the cheapest would work out at under $4.

So then how free is it? Technically, there’s nothing in Moon Breakers that is locked to free players. I stress the word ‘technically’ because it is such a colossal grind to unlock anything at all without spending any real money that it may as well be locked. It’s a shame then that after working so closely with the UberEnt guys they didn’t learn anything useful from SMNC’s pricing structure.

Stuck between a rock and... another rock.

As a game, it’s solid. There’s plenty of fun to be had in spaceships, more so taking down enemy flagships, Death Star style. For me it’s a lot more enjoyable played casually, just cruising around not playing for keeps. If you’re determined to be the best of the best though, you will either have a long grind ahead of you or be prepared to open your wallet.

Moon Breakers by Imba Entertainment is available for free now on Steam and Chrome

GLHF

~Meroka

Free2Play Spotlight: Super Monday Night Combat

Posted by :Meroka On : May 3, 2012
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Category: Free2Play, Indie Gaming, Shooter, Strategy

I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been back and forth on this, debating whether to review Super Monday Night Combat or not. I’m biased. Well, I feel biased. It’s not like I work for Uber Entertainment, or even that they’re paying us for advertising or sponsorship. I’m not even a prominent enough player to be one of the lucky chosen few to go to PAX as one of Uber’s exhibitors. But goddamn do I love me some Monday Night Combat. So take the following with a pinch, nay an entire shaker of salt.

Monday Night Combat started out as a DOTA-style class-based shooter on the Xbox Live Arcade. Somewhat successful, it was ported across to PC on Steam. As predominantly multiplayer games with smaller marketing budgets – and by extension fanbases – than things like Call of Duty tend to do, the game’s community dwindled. It disappeared off the radar for some time until PAX prime last year with the announcement of Super Monday Night Combat. And that’s what we’re here to throw our free2play spotlight on!

Let’s start at the beginning. I wrote about DOTA not so long ago, so I won’t go into the fundamentals again. It’s a class-based third person shooter. Being a free shooter is relatively new territory to begin with, so kudos for pioneering, there. Whereas the original MNC had 6 classes and they all played to greater or lesser extent like TF2 classes, SMNC ups that to 15 at launch and there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on with them. Notable newcomers include Cheston, the tommy gun-toting gorilla thespian who throws barrels like Donkey Kong; Captain Spark, the superhero raised and trained in martial arts by hyperintelligent electric mer-eels; Karl, a reconnaissance cyborg programmed by his upper class creators to believe he is human, with a monocle and moustache to match; and unveiled at PAX East, Leonardo freaking da Vinci, cloned from the DNA extracted from a fingerprint found on a sketch of a badger-powered military tank (to save on war elephants). Enough said, I suspect.

For anyone still in any doubt, the whole game is just as over the top. Set in the not too distant future in a heavily capitalistic state (MNC implied totalitarian too, though there is less allusion to this in SMNC) you’re fighting primarily for the purpose of televised entertainment. Money acts as experience and money will buy you many advantages, from traps to healing and buffs to additional bots (the DOTA creeps). Bullseye, the MNC mascot will appear periodically and shooting him will make him drop money and prizes. Chickey Cantor, a giant cyborg chicken, will appear later on to fight players and defeating him will reward the entire team with a variety of buffs. Oh, and bacon is the most powerful powerup in the game. The whole affair is tied together with commentary from two charismatic hosts, GG Stack and Chip Valvano. Some lamented the loss of Mickey Cantor from MNC. Oh hell, I lamented the loss of Mickey Cantor, but it didn’t take long for these new personalities to grow on me. Clearly the product of the same excellent writing, the voice acting may be different but the dialogue is just as hilarious as their predecessor’s.

The game’s been in beta for about 7 months now, so testing and balancing has been extensive and it’s come out of it well. Sure, some classes will always be strong against others, but that’s just how class-based games tend to work. There are plenty of moves that will undoubtedly be called “cheap”, but nothing you can’t avoid if you know what to look out for. On the whole combat is considerably less lethal than pretty much all other shooters on the market so tactics and teamwork will give you a much-needed advantage and you can stay alive more if you don’t run in alone. Of course, some classes work better that way but you’re still going to struggle to take on a crowd by yourself.

The one critical question, I suppose is “how free is it?”. Quite free. Out of the 15 pros (characters) 6 or 7 will be available to play for free each week. The others can be unlocked permanently for a fee. Most pros are $1.99 and a few of the pros demanding more skill to play are $7.49. After each match, you’ll be awarded with “combat credits” and if you save up enough of these you can buy pros with these without ever having to open your wallet. Really, the only things you’ll find with only a real money price tag on are cosmetic items, ranging from $1.99 for reskins to $14.99 for the really cool stuff. You can sometimes get these after games in a similar fashion to TF2’s random drops, too. Obviously if you have your heart set on the cool demon wings specifically you could be waiting a while, but hey, you wouldn’t be prepared to pay if it were so easy, right? There’s also combat credit and experience boosters to purchase, but as is fortunately becoming the popular trend, they have no actual impact on games themselves, only serving to help you unlock new stuff faster. Personally I’ve bought a few of my favourite pros and a new outfit for my main, the Assassin. About £20 in all, I reckon and half of that was on cosmetics. But I’ve sunk a lot of time into this game and will continue to do so, so I feel like that’s not an unreasonable price tag for the entertainment.

So that’s Super Monday Night Combat. If you’re looking for something new to play and you’re strapped for cash you could do far worse than SMNC. I’m not sure you could do much better, either. I don’t know why you’re still reading; I mean, it’s free to go and have a look, isn’t it?

Super Monday Night Combat is totally free on Steam on PC.

GLHF,

~Meroka