Overload - Community Level Pack

A payed set of community levels may sound suspicious, but trust me, it is definitely worth a buy. The levels are not called a campaign in-game for no reason, as there is actually some storyline to tie them together rather than just leaving them as a set of unconnected maps. Visually the style varies from a more eye-candyish to a more "boring industrial" one, but all the maps look great nevertheless. Which is more important, the topology is really brilliant and although a skilled player will never get really lost on any of the levels, navigating them is always of much fun on it's own. As every level is designed by a different author, the style and gameplay aspects vary greatly from level to level, which is very atmospheric for a game where the players visit various installations built by different companies for different purposes. Unfortunately, there isn't much voice-acting involved (in fact, only one level has voiced log entries), but I don't think it is actually any big of a problem. The named log entries are not really professionally voiced, though it actually is only good for them as the author really sounds like a confused station worker describing the unusual events he encountered, so his character actually feels like a real human rather than a movie or a game character. There are two minor problems with this DLC however (although none of them causes much trouble). The first one is a pretty massive difficulty jump at the very beginning, as the very first level (the one you begin with only two weapons and two missile types) features a real war against a horde of various drones and even a bossfight. After that the difficulty drops down and keeps slightly rising throughout the campaign (while you can keep it down by upgrading your ship and equipment), so should you choose a higher difficulty setting, the start may feel pretty rough, unlike the remaining missions. The second problem for me was a single, non-recurring, crash upon ending the secret level.

Expect more of the same, but worse ever so slightly in execution. Many of the levels exhibit either sloppy texturing, odd lighting, long load times, bad performance or a mix of all of the above. More than that, the whole expansion doesn't come across as one coherent campaign despite the underlying story and the fact that the long missions follow after the short ones. For example, only two of the levels offer collectable messages, and only in one level are they spoken messages. Some of these levels also have some of the nastiest difficulty spikes of the entire game. In fact, the very first level might be the hardest, which again hurts the idea of this being a progressing campaign. With that said, there's fun to be had - it's still Overload after all - and some of the levels like SAO Outpost are on par with those of the main game. Given i payed less than 2 bucks, i can't complain too much. Just don't expect the quality of the main game.

Considering these levels were produced by the community I can only say that I'm really impressed. One level the chap even included narration which was FAB. If you loved Overload, then this is a no brainer really.

This first DLC map pack is a very average experience. Several of these maps are short, simple, and uninspired, and the whole 'campaign' feels exactly like what it is--a series of individual fan maps strung together and sold for a few dollars. These maps are noticeably poorer than the original campaign, and can't stand next to the Anniversary Map Pack which came later. For how cheap the whole set goes, of course grab this and spend a few hours on it--but keep your expectations lowered with this map pack.