Morbo513 最近的评测

Good:
+ Excellent core mechanics - Mine minerals and complete your objectives while fighting off bugs, manage your ammo and supplies, and get out alive. Use the minerals and credits you earn to unlock weapon and equipment upgrades as well as cosmetics.

+ Accommodating difficulty levels, ranging from "walk-in-the-park" to "you're probably going to die" - and even more variability within those difficulty levels based on terrain generation, enemy types present and any mission mutators.

+ Satisfying combat with diverse weapons and enemy-types, tight gunplay and good hit feedback. Most bugs have armour that can be shredded through, or negated by hitting their weakpoints, or just by blowing them to pieces or burning them to ash. Killing them is just fun. They also have plenty of different ways to do you in.

+ 4 classes which each have a distinct set of weapons, tools and equipment. They all play very differently but synergise very well.

+ Good progression system - A new player with nothing unlocked isn't going to be significantly less effective than if they had everything available (with some exceptions).
Each weapon has multiple upgrades across several tiers to choose from, allowing you to optimise it according to the specific role you wish to fill.
This has been expanded with Matrix Cores and weapon Overclocks. More cosmetic options (armour skins, pickaxe parts/skins, weapon meshes with unique skins) were added through Cargo Crates and Lost Packs, which each have fun gameplay implications too.

+ Best destructible terrain since Red Faction - Theoretically you could mine out the entire map, but you won't have enough ammo.

+ Randomly-generated maps with no visible seams - each map type will follow a similar pattern based on the mission type, but will be distinct from one another.

+ Decent variety in mission types and environments. There are six biomes each with a distinctive look and unique hazards; There are five mission types which involve a mix of exploration, gathering, assault, point-defence and self-defence.

+ Completely viable to play Single-Player (But nowhere near as fun) - standing in for a Dwarf teammate is the floating robot companion Bosco, providing illumination, supplementary firepower, a limited number of revives for the player and most importantly, can mine minerals and dig tunnels for you.

+ Excellent synth-wave soundtrack that somehow fits perfectly.

+ Space Dwarves

+ The best player-base for a game I've been a part of. Had maybe 3 negative experiences with random players, and I've pretty much only played with random players.

+ Early-access done right - the game's received consistent support and major updates throughout this period, many of the additions and changes being guided by player-feedback. It feels like the game is made for you to have fun much more than the dev/publisher's profit.
The devs have committed to adding further content and continuing support post-release, and I see no reason not to believe them.

Room for improvement:
~ Variety in enemy-types. While the current roster is "good enough", it needs a few more additions to be fully fleshed-outl. #1 on my wishlist is a bug that can create tunnels of its own.
A new enemy faction (eg. evil cyborg space dwarves) would make for good DLC.

~ Variety in mission types. Again, "good enough", but the existing ones can get a little stale and more is always nice. Escort, territory control, extraction as some examples.

~ Deep Dives - a major feature introduced alongside Matrix Cores (as the main avenue for earning them), Deep Dives and Elite Deep Dives are a weekly pre-generated set of 3 missions each with 2 main objectives, strung together in a sequence with players' ammo and health carrying over between.
They're much less fun and rewarding yet more time-consuming than the regular missions. The only (gameplay) incentive for the player to participate in them, beyond novelty, is earning cores which are a big factor in late-game progression.

~ Weapon Overclock balance. Most are fine, but a significant number stand out as either incredibly overpowered, make the weapon plain worse, or are simply redundant.

~ Weapon/class balance in general. Some classes' capabilities are made largely redundant in the presence of others.

~ Perk Balance. Beastmaster is incredibly overpowered.

~ More difficulty-levels would be nice - Hazard 5 is currently the highest, but it's generally too easy with an experienced and cohesive team.

~ The current meta favours digging "bunkers" to fight off waves - forcing enemies through a single, linear chokepoint that they're practically incapable of overcoming - which is boring to me. The Oppressor enemy was added as a countermeasure, but it accomplishes little in disincentivising or mitigating the effectiveness of bunkers.

~ With pings greater than roughly 50ms, traversing terrain and especially using the grappling hook can be a crapshoot.


Bad:
- I've heard, but never experienced, that cheaters can essentially break the game for players they host for or join - unlocking everything for everyone they're lobbied with, giving them invulnerability and infinite ammo. To my knowledge this hasn't yet been resolved.

I've heard SBTF described as "the only true Aliens game" and I'd have to agree. Board a derelict station, download all the data, rescue who you can then blow it to pieces before the SPACE BEASTS can stop you. Find the nearest corner to cry in when they do.

Pros
+ Strong retro-futuristic aesthetic, good particle-effects and audio design.
+ Co-op. You'll need those friends as meat-shields. Also has SP if you got the minerals.
+ Difficult and punishing, but almost always winnable if you're coordinated enough.
+ The HUD, FX and environments serve to make the game feel incredibly claustrophobic. Good for the BEASTS. Bad for you.
+ Random ship layouts, plenty of customisation/randomisation options keep it relatively unpredictable.
+ A good upgrade system that, instead of simply making your weapons more powerful or your character able to survive more hits, simply gives you more/better tools to survive, and maybe even complete a mission.
+ You can still make your weapons more powerful, but it means trying to escort civilians out of the infested hellhole you want to get out of yourself.
+ I haven't experienced any bugs. There have been some out there, but it seems they're quickly fixed when reported.

YMMV:
~ Actively developed, with sometimes-long hiatuses. Almost every update has improved the game in big ways though. This does however mean a lot of things have changed, though the core experience has mostly persisted.
~ The current respawn system trivialises the otherwise do-or-die nature of gameplay. It can be disabled though.
~ A lack of expected weapon archetypes like flamethrowers and grenade launchers. What weapons are there are fairly unspecialised (except the shotgun), but satisfying to use and plenty adequate.
~ Instant permadeath. A beast touches you, you die, and lose all your upgrades regardless of whether reinforcements are enabled. Personally it's what I like about the game though - There's almost always something you could've done to have avoided it.

Cons:
- The FOV effect is nauseating, and muzzle-flash intensity can cause you some eye-strain, but again there are options to disable/mitigate them.
- No in-built voice-chat. Being early-access and due to the nature of the game I would assume this to be coming eventually. But for now we have to rely on external platforms for voice comms.

This game does a lot of things right, wouldn't have put as much time into it otherwise. But that's when it works - being a game that demands a lot of investment, when it breaks, it can go from innocuous to incredibly frustrating depending on how (un)lucky you get. I've recently experienced a bug that rendered the game practically unplayable for me.

TL;DR, if you already know you like this type of block-building-spacey-game and are alright with bugs potentially ruining the experience, it's worth a go. If you want a tightly-polished, well-balanced experience, this isn't the game to look at.



So what does it do right, exactly?
It's essentially a more basic Space Engineers, but with an actual purpose to the building - you're not just doing it for the sake of it. There are NPC factions to fight, facilities and derelicts (ie dungeons) to raid and explore, and of course, hunger, health and resources to manage. There's a lot of different elements to the gameplay, with just enough depth to keep it all entertaining.

- Good core gameplay-loop. Gather material and supplies > build > fight/explore > gather material/loot/supplies, repeat.

- Accessible building system. No "plumbing" involved, though there is a little bit of that if you feel it's necessary. Otherwise, stick an ammo box on your ship, put some ammo in it and your guns just work.

- Fun exploration. It has flaws, more on that later, but finding and often fighting your way through all the different "dungeons" is cool.

Cons:
- Counter-intuitive gameplay concepts. You need to find or craft a certain piece of equipment to delete/remove blocks. You can't break down components back down to the ore/material it was made from. The blueprint factory however will convert anything to their pertinent material.

- The actual purpose and effects of some components aren't properly explained. Eg. I'm still not sure if a ship's turn/yaw/roll rate is entirely based on how many RCS modules it contains vs its mass, or if thrusters factor in too.

- Arbitrary restrictions on which vehicle/structure types can use what equipment, and in what environment. Eg. can't add drills to a small vessel, probably to force dependence on the hovers to a degree. Can't use anything but the most basic Capital turrets in-atmosphere.

- No collision damage. You can slam your ship into a planet from orbit at terminal velocity and bounce right off it. Past a certain point collision damage can be frustrating, but none whatsoever is way too forgiving. But that's a godsend, considering:

- Wonky controls and physics for vehicles. Hover-vessels especially are a complete pain to use and will frequently collide with terrain stopping you dead. Vehicles accelerate way too quickly, and as mentioned bounce off things easily. There's no way to bind separate controls for vehicles and on-foot.

- No loot scaling with more difficult planets/environments. There are several types of dungeon, but each of them is exactly the same regardless of which planet/orbit it exists in, its loot "chests" are laid out the same and use the same loot tables. You can get end-game equipment, materials and supplies on the starter planets.

- NPC factions are a non-threat. One of the three you start off hostile to, and they'll periodically send raids against your base if you have one. However, with the most basic defences (or even just a rifle and a handful of ammo), they're inconsequential. Beyond that, you're only ever fighting offensively. You never get surprised. The drones and some of the turret types defending some points of interest or enemy facilities can't even engage targets above them, and are extremely passive until you get into range to trigger them.

- Limited view distance. This makes finding POIs, objects in space (including other players and their ships/stations) a practical impossibility, without being explicitly told those locations. There are currently no real options to detect anything from beyond visual range.

- Lacklustre "story" content. A friend and I found a teleporter to a derelict ship - an impressive construction for sure - that's infested with aliens. Without spoiling anything, there was no real conclusion to it, just "here's a weird thing, and the teleporter to go back home". It had less rewards than an abandoned drone-base.

- Unsatisfying vehicle weapons, and not enough control over them. "Gatling guns" that fire at ~300rpm (presumably for performance's sake) as an example. You can't set weapons to groups, but instead can only fire a single type at one time. You can't set turrets to hold-fire, or set a specific target for groups of weapons (You can tell each turret what types of ship and what components to target generally though).
Weapons that should have a lot of splash damage have either none, or too little to matter.
You need to construct, or have, a turret family to know what ammo types it takes.
Some weapons are hitscan, meaning you can't evade them. Projectiles are, on the other hand, too easy to evade.

- Bad FPS controls, and poor gunplay. There's some weird mouse-acceleration thing going on that makes aiming a nightmare, and with some of the weapons you're better off sticking to the starting survival tool. The only fun ones to use are the "epic" ones, they at least feel like they do some damage.

- Terrible vehicular combat. For whatever reason, most types of cap-ship weapons aren't allowed to work in-atmosphere (which is where you'll find the majority of NPC bases etc). Presumably for balance, whatever. But combat basically amounts to moving your ship into range of what you want to kill, and sitting there watching your shield go down. Run away, re-charge, rinse-repeat until the enemy is dead or you start taking damage. NPCs are nowhere near numerous, threatening or mobile enough to necessitate anything more. The game's mechanics do very little to encourage player-player interaction or PvP combat.

- The bugs. The most egregious I've dealt with is having parts of some of my ship replaced with doors. It was hilarious the first time, but having to rebuild, arm and fuel the ships it's effecting from scratch each time it happens has got too painful.

That's a lot of negative points compared to few positives, and I have even more I can't be bothered articulating. In its current state the game can be a decent amount of fun but so far there's always some kinda catch. I'd recommend waiting to see whether it's improved substantially, or playing other similar, more polished games for the time being.

Creepy Uncle Roadtrip Sim rides a fine line between fun and an unplayable mess of bugs. Sorta reflects the car you spend the entire game driving - you can get decent mileage out of both if you're willing to put up with their respective types of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

TL;DR - If the concept appeals to you, and a tenner isn't a massive expense, this is a tentative recommendation so long as you recognise the game has flaws.

The good:
+ A cool concept with decent execution. Get to point A-B using a car of questionable reliability - deal with all manner of breakdowns as you smuggle and steal lost goods to sell to unscrupulous petrol station attendants; pilfer abandoned wrecks for replacement parts, supplies and more goods. Use the funds you raise to repair, refuel and upgrade your ♥♥♥♥-mobile to continue the loop.

+ Satisfying physics and vehicle handling, and how weather and terrain interact with it.

+ A story that's fairly simple and a little bit cryptic, serves to give the whole thing a little bit of weight.

+ Interacting with each component and control of the vehicle is fun, when it all works.

+ The game's still receiving updates (mainly bugfixes from what I've skimmed)

The bad:
- The game is fairly bug-ridden. Most of the ones I've experienced are related to manipulating objects. The most common one I had was that fuel-cans won't seem to deplete as you use them, or fuel tanks/cans won't get filled. Just recently I had one that made it impossible to drop objects without getting into the driver's seat.
Fortunately there seems to be ways around the ones I've had - as long as you can get to the next town and sleep in the motel, restarting will fix them.

- Performance issues. 1050 and Q9550, 8gb RAM - for how simplistic the game looks, it's surprisingly demanding. For the most part it would run fine, but enabling mirrors and especially being in towns would cause substantial FPS drops for me.

- Little replayability. While all the routes are randomly generated, it's just the same few different sections of road repeated in different combinations.

- Poor AI pathfinding/response. The few drivers that share the roads with you are invariably complete arseholes, and you'll be paying for it. They don't attempt navigate around your stopped vehicle, or even stop until they've rear-ended you, and often they'll clog up roads unable to untangle themselves.

- Some mechanics aren't adequately explained - how to sell items and the fact you can push the car along by interacting with the steering wheel from the outside.

Room for improvement:
Controls to shift your view up/down/left/right would be helpful, sometimes you can't see the road over the bonnet of your car as you crest hills in particular.

Better descriptions for vehicle parts in the catalogue would be great. As it is right now, you can only get stats by looking at an object that exists in the game-world.

Manual gear-shifting would add a bit more challenge to the driving its self. I don't know if the real Trabant was an automatic though.

Personally I hate how the handbrake is applied the second you run out of fuel or the engine otherwise fails. That should be a decision for the player to make.

I'm not sure if in reality, letting gravity carry you down-hill while idling the engine would cause it to rev up or consume more fuel. But this seems to be the case in the game.

Being able to bribe the border guards would be nice, though I've never consciously tried to smuggle. My understanding is that they'll confiscate any banned goods if they check and find them, and fine you accordingly.

A surprisingly good little game, not devoid of problems, but well worth the price and your time if you enjoy games like Door Kickers and Infected Planet. A lot of comparison is drawn with XCOM, but the only real parallels are that you fight (primarily) non-human enemies in instanced missions, carrying your team and equipment over between each. There's no "race against time" mechanic - you go about pretty much everything at your own pace, and failure isn't punishing.

The good:
- Style and presentation are great for how basic its plot and premise are. All units are voiced, and while they're re-used quite a lot, it's well-done.

- A nice variety of weapons, equipment and units. I'm not going to say that the game caters to many play-styles cause of this, but there are a lot of different choices to make which determine how suitable your force is to the particular mission

- An equally nice variety in missions - fairly standard stuff ranging from "kill everything", to "rescue troops" to "convoy escort", some of them are particularly challenging in their layout, particularly the ones in the tight micro-colonies.

- Not overly punishing: The only thing that can set you back is getting all your troops wiped in a mission. Otherwise, you can recover their bodies and resurrect them at the base - but you do have to go to the effort of recovering them in the first place which is a cool mechanic in and of its self. I'm not sure if this holds true if a unit dies of infection though, since they're then transformed into an enemy.

- Being able to force-fire and designate sectors for troops to cover. This allows you to manage your units' firing-lines and avoid friendly fire, engage specific targets, or pre-fire corners you or the enemy are about to round

- The "Helibase" mechanics. In most missions, this allows you to deploy your troops anywhere, participate more directly by using its weapons, re-position troops quickly or abort/extract at will.

- Some procedurally-generated missions on top of the hand-crafted ones add a bit of replay value, in addition to trying different unit and gear combos to complete ones you've already done.

The "take-it-or-leave-it":
- No planning stage, all execution is real-time-with-pause - but most scenarios don't require either. Still, it's difficult to sequence a set of orders for when it'd make a big difference.

- The morale system. While it's a cool concept, I find it rarely factors in to the outcome (Except the "Deep Six" and "Xenophobic" negative traits, which cause troops to throw frag grenades when panicked, or fire on infected teammates, respectively). At most it usually means having to spam move orders at panicked troops to keep them in the desired position.
That said, an interesting twist on it is "♥♥♥♥-mind", pills your troops can take to induce their negative morale trait, which can be used to good effect with certain unit types.

- No line-of-sight/fog-of-war system - If there's an enemy or an object on the map, you can see exactly where it is unless it's under a roof (more on that later).

- Enemy (Strain) variety is okay, but could do with more ranged and/or erratic-behaving types. You got your typical weak swarmy-types, your fast tanks, your big hulking bullet sponges and a couple statics.

- Infection mechanics - Again, a good concept, but quite trivial in practice. Detox pills are extremely cheap and make dealing with infection trivial (except where you have troops with the "Xenophobic" trait), but it's cool that it exists.

- Many levels are content to let you have your troops sit in place until you're killing more strain than their hives will spawn. This is especially true of the more open maps.

The bad:
- Rooftop culling is dependent on having troops underneath them. This gets awkward in a few particular missions, and generally makes a mess of fighting enemies inside a building from without, other than just letting your troops sit there and fire on whatever comes out.

- Grenades are indecipherable. What you think might bounce off the inside a door-frame and into the target room instead clips the opposite side and nukes one of your troops. If you're not facing the opening straight, or not in open ground, using them is more risk than it's worth usually.

- Controlling units can get a bit awkward - there's no way to maintain a formation beyond giving orders to each individual to reform it, no way to have them move at the pace of the slowest unit. Switching between units with 1-5 can often take a couple presses to work properly too.

- Disjointed progression - You earn Research Points for completing missions and secondary objectives, and credits for kills, mission completion and selling off recovered gear and items. You can unlock and buy new weapons, equipment and troop types using research points, but they cost way too much for how many you gain through each mission - you'd need to complete the game several times over (or grind to hell on the procedural missions). Many of the advanced weapons can be acquired through buying troops that come pre-equipped with them, then selling those troops after you've stuffed the gear in your helicopter's storage. The only upgrades really worth getting are the ones that allow you to increase the inventory slot size on each troop.

- Redundant mechanics in the consumable food and morale items; The latter restore health, the former mitigate morale reduction, but more often than not aren't worth the inventory space - which could go to grenades, secondary weapons and decon pills - or even the effort to use them.

- The healing mechanics are kinda wonky. There's a class of troops that are medics, who have a passive healing aura dependent on their morale being above average. But the only way to actively heal units is them using a healing item from their own inventory - there's no item or "weapon" a medic troop can use on another to heal them directly, making them glorified mules with worse accuracy.

There's more I could say good and bad about the game, but overall it's a fun time-waster with some novelty to it.

F:GW is a barely-functional translation of Mount & Blade-style "Build an army, (join a faction), take over the map" gameplay into a modern setting. It succeeds as a proof-of-concept but falls desperately short in many areas.


The key issues:


AI
The game's AI are, again, barely-functional - this isn't helped by how awkward the command interface is. They can organise themselves into one of the few formations you can assign them, some of the time; they can move between waypoints, they can shoot at enemy bad guys, just about. But beyond that, they have no sense of self preservation. Use of cover/terrain to their advantage is either completely incidental, or a pre-determined spawn position in a building (which I don't think has happened since the last time I played

Your troops will frequently get killed, and the enemy will make themselves easy targets, for one of or all the following reasons:
They attempted to adhere to their formation, disregarding terrain, putting them in a vulnerable position
They were unresponsive to an order to move back
They failed to spot or react to enemy in close proximity
The enemy has grenadiers
You couldn't give them orders fast enough through the clunky command UI
They overextended from their squad
They pushed toward enemy from a hilltop despite no move order

The enemy's tactical AI is mindless - From what I can tell they're just given (a) waypoint(s) and will follow them until dead. Usually they will just try to close with your troops until one side is dead, usually theirs.
Their individual AI is also unresponsive - if you're outside their "visual" range (which is even shorter at night), they will not react to you shooting at them.
They will start to go prone, get up, move, go prone again (sometimes) once they're fired on (and they can detect you/the shooter), but suppression? Small-team movement? What are those?

AI in general can see (and shoot) through foliage, grass and even objects and seemingly terrain too.

The game's core challenge is positioning your squads such that your troops have more guns on the enemy at once than vice-versa. The hard part is using its command UI to do so.


Gunplay
Recoil is very heavy in a way that's actually pretty fun to manage, making single-shot and auto weapons quite distinct. Single shots are ideal except up close, and even then it's easy to miss automatic bursts. Guns shoot where they're pointing, and they fire projectiles that have travel time, but seemingly no drop. Scopes are picture-in-picture IIRC which is always nice to see. This is probably the single strongest part of the game, but it has problems;

A lot of ironsights and reddots are slightly misaligned. This can be compensated for somewhat by the player, but it makes long-range shooting especially unreliable and frustrating.
There's no ability to zoom without a scope - "Realism": Zoom bridges the gap in visual fidelity between your eyeballs and a screen-view with limited FOV and pixels, when dealing with distant objects. It's a lot of pixel-hunting otherwise.
Single shots or 2rd bursts are preferred, but weapons don't have alternate firemodes - It's easy to fire more shots than you intend with a single mouse-click.
Most guns' models range from "okay" to "pretty decent actually", but they aren't animated very well. Visually, they're adequate overall.

Lack of polish and QA
Random trees you can frequently get stuck in
Many sights are terrible and most are, as mentioned, misaligned with the point-of-aim
UIs are awkward to navigate


Scenario and Terrain variety
"Guerrilla Warfare" it isn't. Instead of setting up ambushes, conducting hit & run attacks and raids, you only ever fight pitched battles and assaults on towns (which, in practice, are also meeting engagements - just with buildings and control zones).
There's no real depth to the conflict or how you factor into it; You don't build the loyalty of the people, recruit volunteers or anything like that, troops are just a readily-available commodity. You fight only for your survival/profit, then that of your faction, then for territory held by the others.
There's no politics beyond "X is/is not at war with Y", nothing to give the game's world life.

Battles boil down to: Meeting engagement on hilly arid/temperate/snow map, or map with buildings #1-#5. You deploy your troops, go to the best of the many hills or towards enemy spawn, wait to see the enemy. You kill enemy and, if outnumbered/outgunned, maneuver your teams as necessary for them to do the same and/or avoid dying.
Depending on the map and the time of day, you'll frequently expire the couple-minutes countdown until the enemies' positions is revealed.

There are no weather conditions or anything else to shake up combat; Just the enemy's composition, yours, the map and the time of day.

Night is obnoxiously dark, dawn and dusk too. It looks nice, but is horrible to play in - To the AI, the latter two are still considered daytime and they'll have no trouble seeing you.


Mods
The mod tools are apparently broken/inadequate, the only really major mod I see on the workshop has been broken by post-release updates. The mod scene for this game is apparently dead. Whether, with proper modding tools, they'd be able to resolve any of these issues is anyone's guess.

Audio Design
Is quite lacking. Guns, hits and explosions sound sufficiently punchy, but that, the footsteps and rudimentary voice acting are all you'll hear if you disable music - which you will because it's boring and repetitive. No ambient wind noises or anything like that.


Skill System
Armour proficiency? It's just dumb, I can't put it any other way. From the realism side, you don't need to be fit or strong or smart, or even a normal weight, to wear a modern armoured vest, and even the dumbest of idiots would be capable of figuring out how to put one on.
On the gameplay side, it means the armour you can actually make use of depends on the troops you're using - If you have troops of mixed types, you'll often find yourself trickling down the armour you as troops level up and you get better vests & helmets to equipment with - But the one you took off that guy can't go on this unarmoured guy because his level isn't high enough.
It's tedious to manage, even as someone who usually likes this sort of stuff. In practice it means you'll end up with a lot of unarmoured troops, despite having armour available - or you'll just restrict yourself to troops that have a high starting armour proficiency.
Some troops' maximum proficiency isn't enough for them to wear mid-tier armour.
Marksmanship - Each gun has a minimum marksmanship requirement, which increases the better the weapon. Again, this means you'll have unarmed or inadequately armed troops despite having guns to put in their hands.

These could've been done better, for example low armour skill diminishes the troop's movement, reload etc. speed if theirs is insufficient for the vest they're wearing. Using a gun without high enough marksmanship again, reduces their performance with it.
But ultimately, the weapon skills don't really matter except for locking you and your troops out; Assault rifles, SMGs, Shotguns and anything explosive rule the day, regardless of what the units you have are best at.


Inventory management is just a ♥♥♥♥♥. I could elaborate, but I don't even want to think about it.
Overall the skill system tries to emulate that of M&B but doesn't connect enough of the dots. The only skills/attributes that really matter are the ones that determine your unit size and the weapons and armour you can use.

As for the things I like?
It's still functionally M&B with guns. You can equip all your units. There's a separate inventory section for food.


Overall it's a lot of things coalescing to make FGW an often exhasperating and disbeleivable experience. On paper it's one of my dream games, so it pains me to dump on it because it proves the concept could work.

If you're looking for a realistic ("realistic") shooter in the same vein as Red Orchestra, you won't find it here. Weapons are hitscan and have cone-of-fire mechanics, jumping does not prevent you from firing accurately. It plays like more like Call of Duty or Day of Defeat than anything else. A twitch shooter where coordination and positioning matter little in comparison to your personal ability to align the centre of your screen with another player. Which is a shame because in all other aspects, it's really quite authentic.

AFF is the answer to the question "What if we took Unreal Tournament's Assault mode and mixed it with Starwars Battlefront?". Fans of the latter game, as well as those of Battlefield (Esp. 2142), and Wolfenstien Enemy Territory/ET Quake Wars will probably find the most fun out of this, as there are lots of parallels.

So, you got your ground battles. They play out like something between UT's Assault and SWBF - There are both objectives and cap points, shifting the battles across the map.
There are several vehicles to put to use in these scenarios - A jeep, APC, Tank and Gunship for each side, standard fare though lacking some archetypes, particularly air transports as well as anything particularly novel
Then you got the space battles - they have elements of the ground maps in that there is infantry combat in some space stations, but the meat of it is capital ship combat, with players able to take bombers and fighters to attack and defend theirs respectively. But wait, there's more - If you can get a dropship to an enemy capital ship, you can board it, allowing you to destroy its subsystems from the inside and generally disrupting its performance by killing its crew, if not outright destroying it.
What else? Plenty of customisation options allowing you to fulfil pretty much any infantry role you want, good bot support and a great overall look and feel to the game

The game still has a long way to come though. Unfortunately, its biggest shortcoming is a small playerbase, which is a vicious cycle - People aren't playing, so people who might otherwise want to play don't. Furthermore, the UI is pretty terrible, amounting to information overload. I'd bet that's the easiest part to change though. Last, optimisation is poor. My computer's a piece of ♥♥♥♥ by this point so it's not really representative, but it ran pretty much fine when I played it as a UT3 mod. Now I'm lucky to get a framerate in the double-digits, and refunded the first time around as a consequence. Such is the nature of early access though, and I'm sure these will be addressed by the time it's fully released (They're currently overhauling the UI, what I've seen so far looks great). Hopefully the team will be able to get it some attention when that comes.

One of the most criminally underrated and unknown games out there.
You play as the last functional Adaptive Cruiser, the Antaeus - a vessel capable of building combat units from scratch with its on-board Creation Engine - fighting on behalf of the global utopian society that had abolished war. Your advesaries are the Cabal, the "old guard" of tyrants that had once ruled the world, and seek to do so again.

Pros:
- Great voice acting, the characters... have character. They'll chat to one another during the missions, complain if you put them in their least favourite type of vehicle, each have lines for calling out specific enemy units, reporting their vehicle's status, even whether or not they're able to engage an enemy they're being attacked by.

- A pretty interesting plot, narrated by Tom Baker no less. Nothing amazing, but the worldbuilding and the way the plot progression influences the gameplay is.. cool.

- Simple arcade-vehicle gameplay but with a relatively deep strategy/tactics layer on top.
You can spend the entire mission just ordering your units around from the map and watch them do their work (Though the "RTS" view is not Real-time), or build a unit without a soul-chip (ie an AI pilot) to use for yourself. You can also take direct control of any vehicle piloted by your NPCs, which is another thing they'll comment on.
You have a lot of freedom to set your own objectives and tackle them in whichever order you see fit. Some mission-critical objectives require you to act pretty fast, but generally speaking you can go at your own pace.
The enemies will have their own production facilities meaning you're almost always either attacking, or defending your resource operations. Sometimes they go hand-in-hand. You can destroy their energy production which will (after the reserve power runs out or is destroyed) prevent their facilities producing vehicles, or go straight for the buildings themselves. You'll have to watch out for the million flak cannons that are in each mission though.


- Diverse "cast" of vehicles, weapons and components; Shields, Armour, Cloaking, Long-range precision Lasers, Howitzers, Missile launchers, Helicopters, Hovercraft, Tanks. Each combination of weapon, vehicle and component(s) can be effective.

- Likewise, lots of enemy stuff to destroy. They have Tanks, Self-propelled Guns, Mammoth tanks, Attack and Scout helicopters each based on real-world designs. There are emplaced AAA sites, howitzers, autocannon turrets and bunkers. Each poses a differing level of threat to each of your units. They're.. "upgraded" later in the game, and ultimately replaced by things much more sinister.

- Simple in-game ordering system. Though the interface/controls for it are a bit archaic, after a few minutes using it it becomes muscle-memory. Order all your pilots to follow your vehicle and engage targets at will along the way, tell a specific unit to attack a specific target etc.

- Resource system: Instead of a mine or forest you gotta tell your little people to chop down, there's only really one way to gather resources in this game: Blow ♥♥♥♥ up. The enemy vehicles and facilities you destroy will be turned to debris, which you must harvest either with a helicopter sling-loading it to your carrier, or by a dedicated Recycler unit, the Scarab. Some of the situations you'll find yourself in will prevent you from keeping a resource collector at a source Later in the game, you will gain access to a vehicle that can carry out both this and a combat role at the same time.
Most missions will have areas full of pre-existing debris, or empty structures for you to harvest, but they will only net you so much energy before you have to move on to the next.


Cons:
- The game has poor replayability. There's no facility for loading a specific mission after you've completed the game (Unless you save for each one - however there are only 9(?) save slots and more than 9 missions), there's no skirmish or multiplayer modes. That hasn't stopped me coming back and playing through it again every couple years. For the asking price now, that shouldn't be much of an issue because other than that, the game stands as it is.
That said, there are cheats that let you skip through missions and access the entire tech-tree in any mission, but I'd advise against using them your first play-through.

- Slightly archaic control schemes - As I mentioned earlier, this mainly extends to the command interface - When you're not using the map, if you want to order a unit to do something, you press the appropriate number for that unit, and use W/A/S/D/Q/E to navigate the menu. The problem here is those are also the controls you use to move. This results in 1: the unit you're controlling stopping dead while you issue the order and 2: Possibly inadvertently issuing the wrong order because you were also using those buttons to move.
If you really need something done at that specific moment and the unit you're controlling is going to die if you rescind control for even a second, you're better off just going to the map screen and issuing orders from there since it pauses the game. Not a huge issue, but it's probably the most prevalent throughout the game. Otherwise, it's easy to get used to.

- No difficulty levels. The game is sufficiently challenging, but there are a couple of missions, one too easy to the point of tedium and one that's pretty damn hard. Fortunately the latter one is later in the game, so hopefully you'll be prepared for it.

Neutral:
- This game doesn't hold your hand. The first three missions serve as a tutorial essentially, letting you get to grips with the resource collection, combat and ordering mechanics. Beyond that, the only direction and help you'll receive is from the mission briefings by Church and Walker - And what they say is almost always relelvant.

- Mandatory stealth mission. Yeah, one of those. The mission fails if you're detected (Up til you've completed a particular objective), but as above, the guidance offered by your superiors will help you prevent it.

- Little music. There are a few tracks, but they're reserved mainly for the main menu, the briefing and cutscenes with none during gameplay, bar one (short) mission.

- Graphics are obviously dated, but still serviceable. Probably one of the better-looking games of its time.

dystoopo a prety good