AgmLauncher
14-01-2005, 23:45
In this review I'm going to more speculation than anything else. I'm going to give a synopsis and opinion on the key aspects of the game based on what I've seen in the demo.
Graphics
Likes:
Amazing detail in the graphics. The units, buildings, shadows, and terrain all fits. It really draws you into the game. The unit voice response voices are also "normal". I use that word in comparison to those in Dawn of War, which were EXTREMELY obnoxious. Not much to say really, the graphics are stunning. Suprisingly the game runs very smoothly. I thought it was going to chew my system to pieces but it doesnt.
Dislikes:
-The water looks too opaque, not real enough. Could be a graphics card shader problem, rather than the game.
-The way planes drop bombs is a little odd. They fall horiztonally and it just looks fake and akward.
Interface
Likes:
The HUD is clean and easy to navigate.
Dislikes:
Lots of problems with the interface. To start with, there needs to be an option for Left click action, basically to reverse the action buttons. Left click to select, left click to move and attack. There also needs to be a way to deselect the units you have selected. It's extremely annoying to give the wrong set of units orders. In a Left-click interface, this should obviously be reserved for the right mouse button. In addition to the right mouse button deselecting the units, it should also be used to scroll on the map in a LINEAR direction system. In otherwords, when you right click, hold, and move the mouse to the right, the screen moves to the right. Dawn of War, for some stupid reason, was the opposite. When you moved your mouse in one direction, the camera would pan in the opposite direction, as if you were dragging the map rather than the camera. This is just not intuitive at all. The reason why rapid mouse scrolling is crucial is because it allows you to keep the cursor in the middle of the screen where it can easily access units after scrolling. If you move it to the edges of the screen, you waste a ton of time and your unit selections will be considerably slower, hurting micromanagement capability. If you use the arrow keys on the key board, then you have no way of quickly selecting or creating hotkeys for your units. On top of this, BOTH the current key scroll and mouse scroll are extremely slow. The maps are huge and it takes you forever to navigate unless you click directly on the map, losing valuable unit selecting and targeting time. Another thing I dislike is the camera height. Given the immense size of the buildings, the height differences in the terrain, the fact that planes fly so high, the camera really needs to be able to be zoomed out a tad bit more. Tooltip windows that pop up to give descriptions seem to be a bit too large as well. Im talking about the box that pops up on the right hand side of the screen (like when you move your mouse over the button used to select an air unit to follow). It's just too big, even when you mouse over it for a brief second it's very distracting. I would say that interface is the biggest negative of the game. It's very clumsy for an RTS game. The units move relatively quickly and it seems like the interface isnt streamlined enough to keep up and use them efficiently.
Gameplay
Likes:
This game features AgmLauncher approved gameplay. For anyone that knows me from CnCReplays, I'm EXTREMELY picky about how the game "feels". Not a single RTS game since CCG or CCG:ZH has managed to impress me or convince me that it would be worth dedicating my time to except this one.
For starters, the range scale is very well done. Units have acceptable ranges, not like in Ground Control II where they would engage something halfway across the map and you couldnt even see what was happening or which units were shooting at which. Secondly, the damage scale is very good. Unlike in Dawn of War where units would sit there for an hour and hardly do any damage. Units die relatively quickly in this game, almost too quickly, but I'll get to that in "dislikes section". There is actually just so much to list that I like. I like how you can add units to buggies to change their effectiveness, I like how you can make infantry crawl to become stealthed, I like how you can garrison just about anything, I like how you can make infantry units take cover and hide in a clump of trees for added damage. Really really good stuff that people who are into micromanagement (like myself) will enjoy using. There are no squads which is awesome, base building is very similar to Generals. The only difference is that you dont have any dedicated builder units. A drone BECOMES a building and to build another building you need another drone.
The economic system is really cool and based on what I've seen, will add quite a bit of strategy. Once you've got the close combat upgrade, only certain units can actually "create" PoWs. If you use Heavy Snipers as your only anti-infantry solution, you wont be able to get PoWs. You'll need to mix in normal infantry to prevent enemy units from being KIA instantly. In terms of micromanagement what this means is that if you have a mixture of normal infantry and snipers, you'll have to have your snipers hotkeyed so that you can run them away before you engage another set of infantry (or have them attack vehicles or somthing) so that they wont kill any potential PoWs. You'll have to be careful about how you play. Very cool IMO.
Dislikes:
-Hopefully online play wont start you off with so much money. That just leads to mindless spamming. There is SIGNIFICANT strategy involved in planning a balance between base production, unit production, and upgrade research. With enough starting cash to do whatever you want, it becomes so easy that a monkey can play.
-Getting back to what I said about damage scale, I noticed that Heavy Snipers rip up vehicles in virtually no time. That has the potential to seriously encourage spamming of Heavy Snipers and discourage proper unit mixing.
-If the multiplayer maps are as cluttered as this demo map, the game wont be much fun to play. The details are nice if you're trying to showcase your graphics engine, but the bottom line is gameplay. If you dont have ANY room to move units about and you can hardly see them because buildings are in the way, you take away too much potential micromanagement. I hope the multiplayer maps are more wide open. Obviously urban combat is a staple of this game, but there's too much of a good thing.
-Im not too impressed with TFT's reliance on aircraft bombardments. Im not going to speculate on whether it's overpowered or not because that will only be determined in a MP environment, but they seem to be too easy to use and dont offer enough controlability. This was a fear of several people. I thought they were going to be more special abilities that you had to earn through gameplay, but if you purchase them, you should have more control over them.
-The lack of a point system is kind of a let down. It's nice earning experience points in game that can contribute to access to more units/special abilities.
Replays
There had better be replays in this game. That's a standard for RTS games now. No replays = no strategy development/sharing = no serious community interaction = dead game. Take it from me. I administrate the most active multiplayer community site for C&C Generals: Zero Hour. Despite imbalances, cheaters, and bugs galore, that site has held the MP community together for this long almost single handedly. If there arent going to be any replays for AoW, the game will simply die off. Replays increase the overall skill level of the community. Sure there are a handful of talented people who come up with BOs on their own, but replays assist them in seeing where they went wrong and how they can improve, and they assist the rest of the community for playing by a certain standard. This makes the game more enjoyable for the whole community because you dont have extremely good players and extremely poor players getting trampled on. Good/experienced players dont get as bored, and bad/newer players dont get frustrated. They have a way to learn to get better.
This is absolutely crucial. I cant emphasize it enough. If Eugen has no plans on a replay feature, then they might as well not even bother releasing the game. The RTS MP community wont even consider the game, and that's a lot of potential customers that they'll miss out on.
Overall
This game is a great game despite it's main shortcomings. What's good about the shortcomings is that they're all minor polishing fixes. No major design overhauls need to be done to make the game fun to play, it's already great as it is. Now this was not a review of the demo itself, but of what the game is like based on the demo. In short I would say that the demo simply sucks. It needed a skirmish mode so that we could fully explore all of TFT's weaponry. It did NOT give a truely good depiction of this game's potential.
Graphics
Likes:
Amazing detail in the graphics. The units, buildings, shadows, and terrain all fits. It really draws you into the game. The unit voice response voices are also "normal". I use that word in comparison to those in Dawn of War, which were EXTREMELY obnoxious. Not much to say really, the graphics are stunning. Suprisingly the game runs very smoothly. I thought it was going to chew my system to pieces but it doesnt.
Dislikes:
-The water looks too opaque, not real enough. Could be a graphics card shader problem, rather than the game.
-The way planes drop bombs is a little odd. They fall horiztonally and it just looks fake and akward.
Interface
Likes:
The HUD is clean and easy to navigate.
Dislikes:
Lots of problems with the interface. To start with, there needs to be an option for Left click action, basically to reverse the action buttons. Left click to select, left click to move and attack. There also needs to be a way to deselect the units you have selected. It's extremely annoying to give the wrong set of units orders. In a Left-click interface, this should obviously be reserved for the right mouse button. In addition to the right mouse button deselecting the units, it should also be used to scroll on the map in a LINEAR direction system. In otherwords, when you right click, hold, and move the mouse to the right, the screen moves to the right. Dawn of War, for some stupid reason, was the opposite. When you moved your mouse in one direction, the camera would pan in the opposite direction, as if you were dragging the map rather than the camera. This is just not intuitive at all. The reason why rapid mouse scrolling is crucial is because it allows you to keep the cursor in the middle of the screen where it can easily access units after scrolling. If you move it to the edges of the screen, you waste a ton of time and your unit selections will be considerably slower, hurting micromanagement capability. If you use the arrow keys on the key board, then you have no way of quickly selecting or creating hotkeys for your units. On top of this, BOTH the current key scroll and mouse scroll are extremely slow. The maps are huge and it takes you forever to navigate unless you click directly on the map, losing valuable unit selecting and targeting time. Another thing I dislike is the camera height. Given the immense size of the buildings, the height differences in the terrain, the fact that planes fly so high, the camera really needs to be able to be zoomed out a tad bit more. Tooltip windows that pop up to give descriptions seem to be a bit too large as well. Im talking about the box that pops up on the right hand side of the screen (like when you move your mouse over the button used to select an air unit to follow). It's just too big, even when you mouse over it for a brief second it's very distracting. I would say that interface is the biggest negative of the game. It's very clumsy for an RTS game. The units move relatively quickly and it seems like the interface isnt streamlined enough to keep up and use them efficiently.
Gameplay
Likes:
This game features AgmLauncher approved gameplay. For anyone that knows me from CnCReplays, I'm EXTREMELY picky about how the game "feels". Not a single RTS game since CCG or CCG:ZH has managed to impress me or convince me that it would be worth dedicating my time to except this one.
For starters, the range scale is very well done. Units have acceptable ranges, not like in Ground Control II where they would engage something halfway across the map and you couldnt even see what was happening or which units were shooting at which. Secondly, the damage scale is very good. Unlike in Dawn of War where units would sit there for an hour and hardly do any damage. Units die relatively quickly in this game, almost too quickly, but I'll get to that in "dislikes section". There is actually just so much to list that I like. I like how you can add units to buggies to change their effectiveness, I like how you can make infantry crawl to become stealthed, I like how you can garrison just about anything, I like how you can make infantry units take cover and hide in a clump of trees for added damage. Really really good stuff that people who are into micromanagement (like myself) will enjoy using. There are no squads which is awesome, base building is very similar to Generals. The only difference is that you dont have any dedicated builder units. A drone BECOMES a building and to build another building you need another drone.
The economic system is really cool and based on what I've seen, will add quite a bit of strategy. Once you've got the close combat upgrade, only certain units can actually "create" PoWs. If you use Heavy Snipers as your only anti-infantry solution, you wont be able to get PoWs. You'll need to mix in normal infantry to prevent enemy units from being KIA instantly. In terms of micromanagement what this means is that if you have a mixture of normal infantry and snipers, you'll have to have your snipers hotkeyed so that you can run them away before you engage another set of infantry (or have them attack vehicles or somthing) so that they wont kill any potential PoWs. You'll have to be careful about how you play. Very cool IMO.
Dislikes:
-Hopefully online play wont start you off with so much money. That just leads to mindless spamming. There is SIGNIFICANT strategy involved in planning a balance between base production, unit production, and upgrade research. With enough starting cash to do whatever you want, it becomes so easy that a monkey can play.
-Getting back to what I said about damage scale, I noticed that Heavy Snipers rip up vehicles in virtually no time. That has the potential to seriously encourage spamming of Heavy Snipers and discourage proper unit mixing.
-If the multiplayer maps are as cluttered as this demo map, the game wont be much fun to play. The details are nice if you're trying to showcase your graphics engine, but the bottom line is gameplay. If you dont have ANY room to move units about and you can hardly see them because buildings are in the way, you take away too much potential micromanagement. I hope the multiplayer maps are more wide open. Obviously urban combat is a staple of this game, but there's too much of a good thing.
-Im not too impressed with TFT's reliance on aircraft bombardments. Im not going to speculate on whether it's overpowered or not because that will only be determined in a MP environment, but they seem to be too easy to use and dont offer enough controlability. This was a fear of several people. I thought they were going to be more special abilities that you had to earn through gameplay, but if you purchase them, you should have more control over them.
-The lack of a point system is kind of a let down. It's nice earning experience points in game that can contribute to access to more units/special abilities.
Replays
There had better be replays in this game. That's a standard for RTS games now. No replays = no strategy development/sharing = no serious community interaction = dead game. Take it from me. I administrate the most active multiplayer community site for C&C Generals: Zero Hour. Despite imbalances, cheaters, and bugs galore, that site has held the MP community together for this long almost single handedly. If there arent going to be any replays for AoW, the game will simply die off. Replays increase the overall skill level of the community. Sure there are a handful of talented people who come up with BOs on their own, but replays assist them in seeing where they went wrong and how they can improve, and they assist the rest of the community for playing by a certain standard. This makes the game more enjoyable for the whole community because you dont have extremely good players and extremely poor players getting trampled on. Good/experienced players dont get as bored, and bad/newer players dont get frustrated. They have a way to learn to get better.
This is absolutely crucial. I cant emphasize it enough. If Eugen has no plans on a replay feature, then they might as well not even bother releasing the game. The RTS MP community wont even consider the game, and that's a lot of potential customers that they'll miss out on.
Overall
This game is a great game despite it's main shortcomings. What's good about the shortcomings is that they're all minor polishing fixes. No major design overhauls need to be done to make the game fun to play, it's already great as it is. Now this was not a review of the demo itself, but of what the game is like based on the demo. In short I would say that the demo simply sucks. It needed a skirmish mode so that we could fully explore all of TFT's weaponry. It did NOT give a truely good depiction of this game's potential.