I recently played through the original Descent and Descent 2. I was very excited about Overload. - What made Descent great was the combat and the movement. What this game completely misses is how important the clear color coding and sounds of the enemies were. Here everything has the same bland dark color, there are no audible wakeup sounds. Instead you get bloom² and shiny explosions. - Everything about the combat sounds is muffled. - Constantly maxes out the CPU, making the fans spin loudly. Yes I tried vsync but I guess my system is too slow. - Terrible performance for no apparent reason. Yes, my system is 5 years old but it can run games with similar graphics and complexity without breaking a sweat. If this was not so bad, I would probably give one more star. - Mission briefings have the worst kind of skip, the text fades in so slowly and if you don't want to sit through that painful process you can only SKIP, missing the story. - First mission already introduces 4-5 enemies and tactics against them. Who is gonna read all that and then even act on it? Descent did this so much better, slowly and carefully, level by level. This gave a great sense of progression and excited me. - Vital story bits seem to be hidden in secrets... - Lots of lights and unnecessary details that make it hard to concentrate in all the sharp, base parts. On the opposite side, the rock sections look very smoothed and unrealistic with no interesting changes in their textures at all. - The automap has an fade-in and fade-out animation that takes a second every time you open it. Dear god why?! - Automap navigation is utterly bad. - To even finish the first mission, I had to watch a playthrough. No, you don't have to do anything with the BRIGHT RED FLASHING reactor or even think about the BRIGHT RED FLASHING exit door. Instead, you have to fly to a specific position high up the rock area, because some reason.
I loved Bastion but compared to Transistor what made Bastion so great to me was its gameplay in *combination* with the story telling. Transistor, at least in the beginning, is all about a mysterious, pretentious "something happened here, something is going on" vibe with shallow, unpolished gameplay mixed inbetween. This bored me so much that I stopped playing after an hour or so and then promptly forgot about it. :(
Paid 40€ and did not regret a single cent. No idea if I can see my total time but I guess it was about 30 hours? The few negatives I felt: - Hearing the same music over and over again gets boring - Camera angles suck in some levels, especially if there is big elevation differences involved. - The loading times are really annoying. Play 5 seconds, get seen, load 20 seconds. - The pacing of the cutscenes was videogames standard, very awkward and boring. I found myself clicking to skip the audio a lot. - Sometimes I got annoyed by the pixel hunting but only rarely. The positives are hard to list! I liked the style, the gameplay, the controls, the setting(s), all the various specialities of the levels (snow, night, rain!). I fully recommend this if you are intrigued. Play on the highest skill level straightaway, you won't regret it!
