I played through the first and second campaigns. Crashed once. Appreciate the zoom level change, the original is hard to look at without a zoom patch. But uh, where's the LAN play button? Also, skirmish is locked at the Soulstorm ruleset. Would have liked to be able to skirmish with different games (Dark Crusade). Haven't tried mods yet.
A tightly paced campaign where your desert crawler and it's forces steadily gain power over each mission as you salvage artefacts strewn across the desert. The plot is based around finding the guidestone, your giant desert crawler and hero unit support craft journey across the vast desert and the opponents within to reach it. Even during missions you continually move your entire 'base' across the map as you hoover up more supplies, constantly moving forwards. The deserts themselves make for good rts terrain, where controlling dune ridges lets you make or break line of sight with your enemies below at your leisure. In other cases, railguns seem to be the dominant unit across an open plain, unless they are swarmed by light attack vehicles. And at least in the context of the campaign, air support is the "need emergency damage here" button. The management aspects have been simplified, no longer needing different production modules built before creating unit classes or research modules to actually perform research. You simply research the new units or upgrades as they become available to unlock them. The carrier also gets to spend power allocation across 4 different systems depending on what you need the carrier to do at the time. Unit dialogue and idle dialogue is great. Really great, with different lines reads based on if the unit is currently in combat or not. Music is great. Only negatives would be sometimes worker units are pretty bad at keeping themselves busy. And trying to find and select idle workers is painful. Also Rachel's pathfinding killed her when running away from the exploding base one time, the pathfinding in general is passable but can fail sometimes when getting a move order through an impassable object. The only thing missing is some sort of semi-randomised mini campaign to replicate the feeling of progression across the desert, that could be tackled with any of the factions. Then a co-op varient of the mini campaign.
You die in one hit, and only have a melee weapon while enemies have guns. You will restart a lot and make little progress. Platforming sections sometimes require trial and error, and failing near the end will send you quite a few jumps back. The bullet time in mid air breaks the pace of the game and I do not like using it, but it seems like a key part of the game (maybe only if you are bad at the game). A better method of self preservation that didn't break the game flow would have been welcome. Even with assist mode (cheats mode), it's just constantly restarting tiny sections until you figure out the exact moves the devs wanted you to make. At least the restarts are blinding fast though, that part is spot on. I think for a relaxing time, some assist mode options / cheats I would have wanted would be: Enemies stay dead even after restarting Bosses hp does not restore when restarting (no idea if bosses do have health, but assuming they would) Button to skip the platforming / puzzle section you are currently on Besides the quick restarting, other positives would be the visual / audio presentation and titanfall'ish wall running.
Weapons: A serviceable set of weapons that inflict grievous damage on enemies. You can immolate enemies, chop them in half or explode them in various satisfying ways. Besides the ways they make enemies die, there aren't to many stand out features to the weapons. Level Design: Levels are mostly well designed. Where levels usually loop around so when you find a button, item or key you can quickly get to the place to use the item or key. And if you do need to backtrack, 'reminder' enemies can spawn near the place you need to take the item you just got. So just following the enemies can lead you to your destination. Marking the auto map with the locked door markers is also a great help. There are only 10 levels, but the clear times are usually around 30 minutes. My play time though on easy was nearly 6 hours. Features mid level auto save system after reaching a new areas to prevent losing large amounts of progress. The levels also make efforts to have the structures seem liveable. It seems each complex has at least one bathroom. There are also some occasional changes to typical kill enemies and key hunt gameplay. With short sections where you can work smelters to forge quest items, lite platforming elements and even a cool horrorish section near the end of the game. The only two parts of the levels that were unintuitive for me were: The dwarf fort, where I made a iron bar though I had no idea what for. I never realised there was a key inside the gate until I backtracked out of the fort then came back. Finding the secret magic slate to open the top most vines in the tree. The trigger to find it blended into the background, even with a guide telling what to look for it was still hard to actually see it. And other negative points would be in game dialogue is done via text run on a timer. So the lore dump in the middle of the game was pretty long. And there are a lot of doors that do nothing in some places, that look the same as normal doors.
Blazing Chrome: Pros: ----- Looks good. Sounds good. You can ride robot suits. Cons: ----- Lives system in 2019? And in easy mode? Why? The punishment of losing your weapon when you die is enough. No need to send the player back to the start of the section and waste their time as well. Just replace extra life pickups with defence bots. They are basically 2 extra lives anyway. As of writing, the Complete Mission 2 achievement is sitting at an "Uncommon" 20%. Complete the game on easy at 5%. That's a lotta game no one is playing. As a compromise, giving players their full set of lives at the start of each checkpoint (as least on easy) would help. Since at the moment, if you are going into a new section with one or two lives it's just better to suicide for a new set. A really long final boss with no checkpoints makes it a pain to play through. Contact death ninjas. In a game like metal slug, enemies needed to actually attack you somehow but here they just run over you. Even regular non melee enemies kill you on contact. Very annoying. Your weapons fire layer is placed on top of enemies weapons fire (example, purple tesla vs mission 3 elevator boss first spit attack) leading to enemy attacks being hidden from view. Another annoying one in mission 3. The giant worms that shotgun spit off the top of the screen in a high arc, making the position of their attacks invisible until they reenter the screen at high speed. A battletoads bike section. On bike stages, powerups can bounce over your head after they hit the ground. So you just miss out for no good reason. Power up boxes can sometimes give you nothing. Even if you really needed that shield robot. Misc Cons: ----- Unskippable company logos. Takes a while to get into the game after launching it. Intro movie is pretty dull.
Core game is fine, but it has too many gimmick stages like slow stealth or minecart rides to make it worth playing. When the tutorial escort died instantly I thought this was a game that wasn't going to waste time with that part of games that most people hate, "The Escort Quest" or the "Mandatory Stealth Section" When I got to the mine cart level I switched it off. If you have better patience than I have for forced minigames you may enjoy it. Possibly interesting to play multiple times to see if different dialogue choices effect anything.
