KickStarter Overload - Six-Degree-of-Freedom Shooter from the creators of Descent

[PrettyDeadman]

how did i miss the fucking kikestarter for this

now i gotta wait for a sale cuz i'm a cheapskate

It's on sale right now.

 

[Makabb]

It was

 

[Darth Roxor]

It's on sale right now.

oh wait it really is

i did find it weird how it was much cheaper on steam than on zog

well then

 

[Darth Roxor]

dis game

it's bretty

fucking

GUUUUUUUUUUUUD

 

[Makabb]

Overload: Freespace, when ?

 

[Blaine]

Overload: Freespace, when ?

Void Destroyer 2 is breddy gud in terms of flight mechanics. It's got no hard speed limit, very respectable and smooth 6doF controls, and the ability to "drift" and maneuver without automatic assistance.

I may start a thread about it at some point when I've played it for more than a few hours. I do know that the guy making it has coded it himself, and as a result it's packed with a surprising amount of features that all actually seem to work properly, including a tactical zoom-out overview in local space where you can drag selection boxes around ships in your fleet, issue basic orders, etc. Yet despite the RTS-like elements, the cockpit-centric and fighter-style gameplay is extremely solid also.



Yeah I know, it looks fucking weird with the outlines and cartoony shit, but actually you can turn both the outlines and the cartoon textures off, and the ships (of one faction, there are tons of ships) look like this. I made this to show a friend the other day:

 

[PrettyDeadman]

Played some overload.
Eze but enjoyable. Did 2 missions.

 

[praetor]

Yeah I know, it looks fucking weird with the outlines and cartoony shit, but actually you can turn both the outlines and the cartoon textures off, and the ships (of one faction, there are tons of ships) look like this. I made this to show a friend the other day:

why do half the ships look like potatoes with guns, a cockpit and an engine glued to it?

 

[Darth Roxor]

Fucking scorpions

This game is really much good. Very refreshing to finally play a shooter that is good, period, and not good for what it is.

I also like the oldschool secret levels that teleport you to BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD bullet hells that bash your face in instead of being quirky memes or just upgrade pinatas.

 

[Lazing Dirk]

why do half the ships look like potatoes with guns, a cockpit and an engine glued to it?

Read the descriptions on the right hand side. They're built around asteroids.

Fun fact for Overload: The amount of spin your weapon imparts to enemy ships doesn't just depend on the weapon/enemy stats, but where you hit them relative to their centre of gravity. Hit them right on the edge for maximum effect, and keep hitting that same side. It's a bit trickier than just going for centre mass, but it'll disrupt their aim.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Fun fact for Overload: The amount of spin your weapon imparts to enemy ships doesn't just depend on the weapon/enemy stats, but where you hit them relative to their centre of gravity. Hit them right on the edge for maximum effect, and keep hitting that same side. It's a bit trickier than just going for centre mass, but it'll disrupt their aim.

Yeah, I noticed this just today too. Was pretty amazed.

 

[udm]

Wish I wasn't a poor bastard so I could afford that delicious KS-exclusive boxed copy

 

[HansDampf]

I finished playing Overload and replaying it on NG+/Insane+. It's legit the best 'pure' FPS released in the past decade.

...

Having finished Descent now I'm looking into Overload, and your review is much appreciated. I've tried the demo, and the first thing I've noticed were the smoother controls. This might actually be better played with mouse and keyboard? What are your thoughts on the auto-aim option? Is that really necessary if you are playing with a joystick?

 

[Durandal]

Having finished Descent now I'm looking into Overload, and your review is much appreciated. I've tried the demo, and the first thing I've noticed were the smoother controls. This might actually be better played with mouse and keyboard? What are your thoughts on the auto-aim option? Is that really necessary if you are playing with a joystick?

I've only ever played the games with KB/M, but AFAIK you could kick ass in Descent just fine using a joystick setup without any kind of auto-aim. There's several multiplayer legends (on the Overload Discord) who can wreck your shit using a joystick setup or even using only a keyboard. Mouse-aim helps for aiming more accurately with precision weapons such as the Driller/Vulcan, but overall joystick controls supposedly work nicely in Overload/Descent. I guess turning with the joystick also feels more natural when your maximum turn speed is limited.

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[Darth Roxor]

Just finished Tethys Lab. The level design is just out of this world.

This is the best shooter of the last 10 years hands down, maybe even more. The levels, the enemy design and AI, the difficulty, the mechanics, the controls and responsiveness, it's all just way too fucking good, holy shit. My only two points of criticism would probably be that some of the guns could be a wee bit better (impulse, reflex and flak are very meh IMO, especially reflex which seems to only be good for trick-shooting secret switches) and that the maps could have slightly fewer but more involved secrets - an average of 15+ secrets per level where most of them are just "the ceiling opens, revealing bonus missiles" sorta turns into a lawnmowing sim where you fly around all the walls of every room to see if anything opens.

 

[Durandal]

This is the best shooter of the last 10 years hands down, maybe even more. The levels, the enemy design and AI, the difficulty, the mechanics, the controls and responsiveness, it's all just way too fucking good, holy shit. My only two points of criticism would probably be that some of the guns could be a wee bit better (impulse, reflex and flak are very meh IMO, especially reflex which seems to only be good for trick-shooting secret switches)

The reflex' bounce homing ability can be useful for clearing out enemies around corners or just scouting ahead, and the flak when upgraded to DX is incredibly useful for going full rip and tear up close because of how brutally that thing can stunlock everything. Impulse sadly isn't as useful later on, though it's probably the most energy-DPS efficient weapon. If only the overall energy drain for everything was a bit higher...

 

[HansDampf]

Performance is weird with my GTX 970. The framerate tends to drop below 60 fps in certain spots, and I lose another 5-10 as soon as I shoot a flare, even with everything turned to low or off. The only thing that seems to improve the framerate at all is to disable screenspace reflections, which has barely any visual impact anyway.

I've tried the first few levels with both M&K and J&K. Nothing beats the precision of a mouse, but it's much er playing it with a joystick. There are also extensive options to adjust joystick controls. You can balance overall axis sensitivity with max turn rate, and also add the equivalent of mouse acceleration for quick turns (not sure if useful). I'm going to play through the campaign on Hot Shots and try to git gud with a joystick, then see if I'll have to switch back to mouse for Insane.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Finished. Great shit.

I liked how it stayed fresh to the end with the xeno-ops and alium worlds. Not being able to smack down Gabe was a bit of a disappointment though, and the final level was sorta meh, but it served as a nice closure to finally take that exit tunnel out.

 

[Jaedar]

My performance is flawless and smooth at 140 FPS capped, except for one thing: intermittent stutter, in the form of a hitch every 5-8 seconds. This only occurs in some Unity games for me and in no others, regardless of how graphically demanding they are.

That's where the part of your post I bolded comes in. There's a thing in computer science lingo called "garbage collection": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science)

That's what the developers are talking about. Unity's handling of garbage collection is absolutely fucking hideously bad. It worsens at higher frame rates and with better graphics settings. Query "Unity garbage collection stutter" in a search engine if you care to know more.

Bit late to the party, but can I just point out how insane it is to build video games (or any program that depends on low latency) in a language with garbage collection?

Truly unity is really bad.

 

[HansDampf]

Finished Hot Shots, no quicksaves.
Joystick controls are a challenge. I prefer higher sens for Y-axis than X-axis, otherwise I get problems with vertical tracking. Overall movement is a bigger issue for me than precise aiming, but I'm getting there. To compensate I'd invested in lots of upgrades that "track towards operators". Worked well enough in Hot Shots. Next I'm going to try Insane though. We'll see...
I've also missed lots of secrets and upgrade points. There are too many secrets for my taste. Most of them have just one ammo pickup. I would have preferred fewer secrets but each one with more rewards.
I don't remember where I've read this, but someone mentioned the enemies in this game have more character than human enemies in many other FPS, and I agree. Some bastards will take a few shots, then hide or try to attack from a different angle. Want to hunt them down, probably alerting more enemies in the process, or sit there getting paranoid? The goliath boss also had noticeably different movement than other enemies, strafing around pillars to take cover and shit. It was a fun fight. Though overall the bosses were easy.
The last few levels, I didn't like as much. No reactors to blow up. And all the enemies I'd learned to love were gone, replaced by seemingly random purples. I've also failed the final escape twice because I didn't know exactly where to go, until I remembered this game has holo guides! That was the first time I've used one.
Best level was Tethys Lab. That felt like the real culmination of all the regular reactor levels.

Spoiler

I didn't expect the reactor to be that far down. On the way out I've also used a time bomb, not sure if it actually saves time, but at least it gave me more real reaction time to make it out of there.

 

[Darth Roxor]

The last few levels, I didn't like as much. No reactors to blow up. And all the enemies I'd learned to love were gone, replaced by seemingly random purples.

What I primarily disliked about the last levels, particularly the one with the final boss, was bullshit artificial difficulty that kept spawning bots all around you each time you pressed a button. It felt like a cycle of savescumming to me, where you charge up a node, find yourself surrounded by 4 inviculuses, get disintegrated in a split second, reload, try to push it from a slightly safer spot.

I didn't expect the reactor to be that far down.

I remember when I got the level 3 keycard and feared I'd missed 3/4 of the secrets in that map because I had only 2 upgrade points collected at the time.

Turned out I'd actually missed 3/4 of the map itself.

 

[Ezeekiel]

Best level was Tethys Lab. That felt like the real culmination of all the regular reactor levels.

Spoiler

I didn't expect the reactor to be that far down. On the way out I've also used a time bomb, not sure if it actually saves time, but at least it gave me more real reaction time to make it out of there.

Haven't played this yet, but that map you posted reminds me a bit of that one Jedi Knight map with similarly crazy verticality (for the time) where you just keep going down further and further through the fuel tanks.
I think it (or part of it) was featured in the Jedi Knight demo as well.
Wish more shooters and games in general would do stuff like this with their map design tbh.

 

[Durandal]

What I primarily disliked about the last levels, particularly the one with the final boss, was bullshit artificial difficulty that kept spawning bots all around you each time you pressed a button. It felt like a cycle of savescumming to me, where you charge up a node, find yourself surrounded by 4 inviculuses, get disintegrated in a split second, reload, try to push it from a slightly safer spot.

It didn't bother me quite as much because of how consistently it happened throughout the alien levels, without exception. As soon as I saw a node I knew it was it was time to pull out a time bomb or Devastator. Though a more elegant solution would have been to spawn enemies outside the room in question and have them patrol about randomly.

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[HansDampf]

On Insane I've noticed the roles of individual auto-ops become more apparent. The first few levels on Hot Shot, Goblins, Ogres and Krakens would all sort of blend together as cannon fodder. On Insane they have more health and are therefore getting more screen time. I don't remember Ogres being this annoying, and Krakens are like early tanks that require at least 3 Falcons to kill. Auto-ops in general are more aggressive, fire more shots, and are better at leading their shots. Basic circle-sliding around an enemy will end in pain! But they are also better at dodging your own projectiles. Firing a pair of hunters at an enemy won't necessarily result in a guaranteed hit. Combined with their higher health pool this turned Spiders and

s into more serious threats. I also gained more respect (paired with frustration) for all enemy types that use "direct hit" weapons. The first time around, I didn't even notice the Taurus boss uses a Driller. I wasn't prepared...

Spoiler

The first dip was Valkyries.

Inviculus were also responsible for 90% of the damage I took during the last few levels. When they are chasing you around a corner they will fire instantly the moment you are in their line of sight.

Once again, I played with joystick, and no quicksaves. It was a steep learning curve, but I think I've gotten the hang of it now. This time I've spent my upgrades more on precision tools like the Driller, or Thunderbolt with fast charge and high damage instead of tracking ability. I also kept experimenting with the control options throughout the campaign. The better I got, the more I wanted to raise axis sensitivity. I'd say it's best to set it as high as you can handle and can still comfortably strafe around close- to mid-range targets. My biggest problem still is "panic control", getting out of precarious situations without bumping into walls all the time.

The options menu is a mess, btw. Why aren't all the joystick options on one page with a curve showing exactly what each option does - for joystick noobs like myself? I still don't understand all of it. There is basic calibration and axis sensitivity. But tucked away in (general) advanced options are settings like "Joystick/KB Turn Speed" which also changes the overall sensitivity? Then there is turn speed limiting which simply cuts turn speed off after some fixed point, and turn ramping which I assumed worked like mouse acceleration. If enabled you will get an exponential response curve instead of a linear one. This will again raise the maximum possible turn speed. I think it's worth getting used to ramping, as it allows for even quicker turns and doesn't affect the low-end precision that much. I've also tried aim assist later on (which is found in yet another menu) but didn't notice any difference at all.
Whatever.

I'm looking forward to Insane+. You can reallocate all super upgrade points, and the first enemy to greet you is a Phantom. That's my fetish. But I will save this for later. First, I need a break.

 

[Durandal]