Évaluations récentes de Hyper

It’s a pain in the ass to get working on modern-day hardware, and pretty much nothing is explained to the player, including many of the core mechanics which weren’t a part of any other game at the time and generally still aren’t today. That said, after about an hour of troubleshooting and familiarisation, you’ll be able to properly play what I’d consider to be one of the best tactical shooters on the market.

It’s leagues above any entry to the Rainbow Six series, and as much as I like Ghost Recon, the urban CQC setting of this game does just enough to carry it to the top of my list. Where Rainbow Six was more about planning an approach, SWAT 3 is much more about improvisation and coming up with solutions on the fly. Instead of a pre-arranged route, you get a wide range of commands you can issue to your squad, who you’ll have to rely on at least a little in order to successfully accomplish your mission. The one thing these three franchises truly have in common is that they all need to be played in short bursts.

The main campaign has sixteen missions. Most of them are pretty generic, but they get the job done. No clue what the devs were smoking when they designed that sewer level, though. On top of the main campaign is a secondary ten-man campaign added in the GOTY edition. It features two new maps, both of which have their own merits, but the rest of the campaign is just recycled maps with very simple objectives. Surprisingly enough, there are also nine bonus missions you can’t find in either campaign, and honestly, these are some of the most memorable ones in the entire game. Pretty strange design choice if you ask me.

Aside from the technical issues I alluded to in my opening sentence, the only real problem I have with this game is that there’s always at least six people screaming over eachother at any given moment (You, your team, and TOC). That aside, it’s a good game. Now all we need is for Microsoft to tell Activision to tell Sierra to release SWAT 4 on Steam. God, what a mess.

I don’t see how people can say this isn’t a Shelter game. Sure, it doesn’t have the same circle-of-life motif as the other mainline titles, but it really doesn’t need it, and every other piece of the equation is there; it combines the point-a to point-b pathing of Shelter 1 and Paws with the open world of Shelter 2 and Meadow, all while keeping the maternal survival gameplay of the mainline series. The achievements are the most manageable they’ve ever been outside of the original game, which didn’t have any, and it has more content than any other game in the series, although you need multiple playthroughs to see it all. Many of the bugs and performance issues from the previous games have also been fixed, although I did notice a few small frame drops throughout the course of my playthrough.

The main issue with this game is that it’s extremely slow. Your herd’s hunger bar is shared with the stamina bar, so in order to keep all of your elephants alive, you’re gonna be walking a lot more often than you will be running, especially if you go the desert route like I did. Most predators can’t be deterred so much as avoided, as far as I can tell, and many of the mechanics aren’t particularly well explained, which resulted in half of my herd dying before I even reached the first landmark on my initial attempt. Aside from those few issues, and the once again quite steep price point, it’s a pretty good game. Far better than Shelter 2, which I still don’t understand the hype for.

Yeah, this feels rough. Most of the parts needed for a good tactical shooter are there, but they just aren’t assembled correctly. I genuinely think the maps are quite good, and I like the half-stylised half-realistic visuals, although they do look a bit outdated for a 2014 release. You can’t lean whilst moving, teammates often get stuck on walls and doors, friendly AI kills hostages even when no enemies are nearby, there’s a pause between swapping characters, which often ends in your entire team getting wiped out before you can even take control of the second unit, there’s a bug where the sound sometimes just stops working, there’s a bug where the run button stops you from moving entirely (Which is particularly annoying when you’re playing a high armor class as they can’t sprint), and the game often crashes on the cargo ship level, which is one of the hardest in the game. Enemies don't hesitate and have pinpoint accuracy, plus everyone including the player can be one-shot if hit anywhere BUT the head. Given the nature of the bots, and the wide surface area of the Achilles’ heel, this makes it extremely easy to die. As a result, the five missions this game has to offer, each of which should ideally take ten minutes to complete, ultimately took six hours of attempts. With a little bit more polish, I really think this game could’ve been a spiritual successor to the earlier Rainbow Six titles, but it didn’t even meet that bar, which if you’ve read my previous reviews, you know I consider to be quite low.

I wanna start off by giving props to the developer. The game runs on a proprietary engine he coded himself and is quite smooth gameplay-wise. It’s got a great visual style, and the sound design is pretty solid, albeit imperfect.

That said, this game has many flaws. Movement is fun in open spaces, although limited by an ominous fog which I assume is there to save on rendering power, but every other level is indoors with staircases that destroy your momentum by flinging you into walls, and you lose momentum between levels while you wait for the door to open. Turning your camera too fast also seems to reduce momentum, which I think could easily be fixed by implementing a sideshift mechanic similar to the one in Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, and would also add an extra step to the mastery of movement in this otherwise quite simple game.

On a base level, the sword is fine. The faster you are, the more damage it does, and it’s always active assuming you’re in mid-air. The power attack, on the other hand, is problematic. It’s meant to be used as a last resort if you’re out of shotgun ammo and don’t have any momentum, but it is by far the slowest attack in the game, the animation taking almost two full seconds to complete. You’ll rarely have an opportunity where you need to use it, and when you do, it likely won’t come in handy. Instead of a power attack, a limited-use boost ability, maybe one which recharges over time, might suit the game better. It would serve the same purpose combat-wise (I.e. attacking without momentum) and would also add another movement mechanic for the players to master.

Another weapon-based issue is that the shotgun doesn’t feel powerful at all. It can one-shot unarmored enemies without needing any momentum, but it does very little to armored enemies unless you fire multiple shots. The issue here is that unarmored enemies don’t really pose a challenge when you have no momentum. You can run down a hallway, turn back, and you’ll already have enough momentum to finish them off with the sword. It can be useful for killing ranged enemies, but one of the two ranged enemies the game has to offer is armored, so once again, you’ll be using multiple shots to finish them off. Lastly, shotgun jumping isn’t a thing in this game, which is both disappointing and unexpected given that the game is so strongly built around momentum. My opinion? Buff the shotgun so that it one-shots all enemies, make it require a large amount of kills to recharge so you only get a few uses of it per-game, and implement shotgun jumping as a traversal mechanic.

Overall, I didn’t find the combat very satisfying. Your reward for killing an enemy is a blood splatter and maybe an item of some sort, and hitting them without getting a kill just nudges them a little. Pair that with enemies who seem to aggro at random, confusing map layouts with many overlapping layers, and handful of keycard-holding enemies with no distinguishing features that you need to kill in order to progress, and you get this game. One thing it does succeed in is making me want an an HROT-style King’s Field game set in an alien megastructure.

It took about half an hour to complete, the other twelve minutes of gameplay spent stuck on the surprisingly long loading screens, and the world record speedrun is just over four minutes, of which you could probably shave off about fifteen seconds by taking an alternate route on map four. I’d say buy it for a dollar, but it’s never been that cheap, so you might be waiting awhile.

This is my third time playing through this game, the other two being on the PS4 when the game originally released, then once again last year when I discovered the GOTY edition. Before I continue, I’d like to emphasise that I’m by no means an expert on Middle-Earth lore; I’ve seen each of the movies a handful of times, and the best I can do is place the story of this game somewhere between the two main trilogies. The plot, in my opinion, is painfully dull and full of forgettable characters. So why do I keep coming back to it? The gameplay. There’s a very strong sense of progression evenly spread over the course the campaign, and while most missions are quite repetitive, the combat and traversal mechanics are satisfying enough to keep you engaged all the way through. Pair that with the nemesis system, which in my opinion is one of the best sandbox mechanics of all time, and you get a very strong gameplay loop which can be dropped and picked up again at a moments notice. Most of the base-game achievements can be acquired casually, but thanks to the GOTY edition becoming the new standard on Steam, more experienced players looking for a challenge also get free access to the various Trials Of War DLCs. It feels like a seventh-gen game in the best way possible, and the only thing that would make it better is if WB lifted the patent on the nemesis system so that other companies could implement it into their games instead of having it just sit there collecting dust for the next decade. A man can dream, though, a man can dream.

Much in the same way that DF2 was just extra content for DF1, Task Force Dagger is just extra content for Land Warrior. It has some of the most unique mission objectives in the series thus far, but otherwise is business as usual. On top of the recoil introduced in Land Warrior, this entry brings about weapon sway, which can be reduced by going prone, and the almost non-existent bullet dropoff from Land Warrior has been reversed so that it’s now even more intense than it was in the original game. While I do think this change was for the better, tracers have also been visually overhauled so that they’re now practically invisible at range, making it quite difficult to eliminate distant targets. I think overall, I’d place this as my second favourite entry to the series. It doesn’t have the same annoying difficulty spike that the middle two games did, but it’s not as visually appealing as the first instalment.

Eh, it’s alright. There are far fewer bugs than in DF2, and gameplay seems pretty much the same as it was in the previous games, only recoil has been added and bullet dropoff/fall damage have both been drastically reduced. More equipment has been added for the player to choose from, but your previous loadout carries over through missions unless you manually choose the recommended loadout on the briefing screen, so I never actually realised there were new options until playing Task Force Dagger. Visually speaking, it makes a ton of what would’ve been considered improvements at the time in terms of both UI and environments, but in the modern day, it just feels more generic compared to the unique look of the previous games. As with the previous game, the last few levels have a sheer difficulty spike in the way of pinpoint-precise enemy accuracy and limited visibility due to fog and time of day, or more accurately, time of night. For this reason, I had to start actively using the quicksave function which I had previously ignored, and by doing so, I learned that the default load button is the same as the Steam screenshot button, which is extremely annoying as you can’t change keybinds mid-game. I can't say whether I prefer it to DF2, but I can say for sure that DF1 is still top-dog.

My opinions on this game are mixed, but my overall impression is that it feels like a rushed sequel. You can now interact with the map to change your approach on the go, and there's some new equipment available for the player to pick from, but for the most part, it’s just more of the original game. The gameplay and visual fidelity are almost identical, although unlike the first game, this one is plagued by rendering errors, frame drops, and random crashes. The AI somehow feels dumber than it did in the original, and I would often encounter enemies trying to shoot me through walls. The implementation of fall damage makes the game seem a bit more realistic, but it also makes it much harder to traverse the voxel-based environments. Final verdict? It’s a fine but ultimately inferior successor, up until the last few levels where a sharp difficulty spike basically guarantees getting onetapped by invisible enemies from across the map.

Pretty fun. It’s kinda like Ghost Recon without the RTS mechanics. The AI isn’t great, and it may be a little simple by today’s standards, but the voxel-based environments are some of the most unique in any shooter I’ve ever played, and the rendering technique used by the engine is likewise is quite distinctive. You don’t get anywhere near as much control over your teammates as you would in other tactical shooters like Ghost Recon or Rainbow Six, but as far as I’m aware, it’s the earliest example of a non-hitscan FPS game having bullet dropoff, which makes for some very fun sniper gameplay. It’s quite possibly my new favourite early tactical-shooter/milsim, and it’s only made me even more excited for Dagger Directive.

Solid game. Very simple, but also very fun, and it can be surprisingly difficult depending on RNG. Runs well on modern hardware, and there’s some degree of replayability due to the random item/NPC placement. Worth the money for sure.