Overload

Well, almost perfect. But I'll get to that later. So I never played the Descent games, so I can only say as a big boomer shooter fan, Overload ticks all the boxes. Here's what I enjoyed most about the game: - Insane weapon variety. You actually get a total of 16 weapons to use. That's absolutely nuts and is almost too much since there's not enough key bindings to dedicate to each weapon. Two weapons are bound to one key (the keys 1 through 8 by default). You can scroll through them quickly with mouse scroll, but I just used the number keys. They're all well balanced and unique. - Good character progression. So you can also upgrade your weapons and ship features (like damage taken, energy usage and speed) with upgrade points you find throughout the campaign. Each weapon has different upgrade paths, so you can tailor each weapon to how you wanna play the game (weapons with better tracking abilities, fire speed, damage, etc). - Incredible music. Each of the 16 levels in the campaign have unique music tracks and I loved every one. They have a heavy synthwave feel, kind of similar to Ghostrunner, Hotline Miami and System Shock 2's music. - Tons of different enemies. There's around a dozen or so different enemies with completely different tactics. Some will beeline towards you with melee weapons or to self destruct. Some might fire homing missiles at you and even become camouflaged and teleport around. Some you will shred apart and some are heavily armored, huge flying tanks. All of them are really fun to fight. Unfortunately, I have a couple problems with Overload. - Game runs perfectly except on levels 13, 14 and definitely 15. No framerate dips or crashes, but can stutter a lot during chaotic fights. - No upgrade points on levels 13-16. The environment changes a lot during the end, and exploration isn't incentivized besides for powerups and big ammo supplies. Ultimately, I just had too much fun to remove any stars on my review! Recommended!

I love this game. I don't know what else I can possibly say. It *is* Descent 4, made by all the same people and polished to a gleaming shine. Ship movement, weapon balance, level design, enemy behaviour, the music, the story and the graphics. All are perfect. It runs near-perfectly at maximum detail on my system (Ryzen 5600X, Radeon 6500XT), has an option to configure pretty much anything you might want and works with all sorts of weird and wonderful input devices. And to put the cherry on the cake, it has day-one Linux support. No mucking about with Wine here, it's native and runs perfectly. No problems with my joystick setup, which a lot of later (Unity engine) games choke on. It just works. Parallax got back together and made something truly beautiful here. If you have even the slightest appreciation for 6DoF shooters, get this game immediately. You'll be gleefully lasering killer robots in no time flat.

This game is finally the real Descent 3 with modern graphics. Again the most players will get sick if they aren't already. It's difficulty is hard too, but if you want the real Descent 3 you'll finally get it. Fly to live!

This game benefits from a beefy PC: either you have a card over $200 or you play in low resolution. It's more for video game nerds than noobs. If you're used to crouching and jumping in other games, bind those buttons to up and down in Overload and bind two more to rotate left/right so that you can maintain a consistent orientation and sense of up/down. Beautiful graphics. Excellent moody music tracks fitting for the moons of Saturn. Engaging story. I've played it all the way through three times. There's an excessive difficulty increase between "Hotshot" and "Ace": "Hotshot" is too easy for me, "Ace" is too hard after a few levels, but after dying lots of times I eventually manage.

I loved the original Descent games and this release lets me relive the nostalgia. It is superb!