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[Parsely]

Cool it.

[Sindain]

Rise! Rise from your slumber ye mighty old thread!

So. It's been released on steam. http://store.steampowered.com/app/252610/

Anyone got a hold of it yet? Any opinions?

[nenjin]

I've been playing the beta versions as they've been released. I think the last one I played was a couple updates ago.

The game is....random. It often had the feeling of being incomplete, not in terms of content but just how the different parts of the game were stitched together.

Like, your default method of play is just driving down the road while events automatically fire off. Random stuff. Soandso gets unhappy. You find a town, things like that.

The "in-scene" action, i.e. fighting zombies, has been the most complete feeling part of the game for a while. You walk around a town, thwap zombies and try to decide how far you can explore before you're inevitably cornered by a massive horde of zombies.

It all kind of felt anti-climatic where, one game, I just didn't really stop at all, for any events. Maybe stopped for supplies once. You drive drive drive...random stuff happens (maybe a character you picked up suddenly decides to leave) and then....you reach Canada and that's the end.

The game plays like it feels rushed. Not the development of it but how it's expected to play. You just go bam bam bam from road event to road event. Alerts happen and you're bombarded by weird, intentionally off-key sound effects.

I think I'll go give it a run through now to see what's different. But it was the kind of thing I'd play once for 20 minutes and set it aside for the next update. The randomness and weird allies and their abilities and gear are cool but I could never shake the feeling the game wasn't really gelling all that well with all its component parts. It also could be that the pre-release game was just so short that it was hard to get invested in it.

[nenjin]

Well here's what I came away with in a 20 minute game.

The game has multiple difficulty modes now, mostly making the trip take longer and changing the character pool (For example, custom characters or rare special characters.)

Character creator is in now. Can make up a pool of characters to find during the game. They have a trait specialty which boosts some of their skills, and a personality type which has effects on various things. Skills are like mechanics and medical and things like that which improve the more a character attempts them. You use skills to try and repair you car, fortify a campsite for the night, so and so forth. Character's stats and traits are all secret when you recruit them, they're only revealed by having those skills tested or by a couple other methods.

The traveling UI and flow seems better now. The time between trips is still basically a spam of messages about morale, food, gas, and things that just happened during the last event.

Lost the game when I got ambushed by raiders who demanded all our weapons. Really only had the choice to fight them. The RNG killed both the party leader and his friend in a dice-rolled event, probably because both were low on health. ><

There's two player coop now.

There's siege missions where you just gotta survive being attacked by a shit load of zombies in a small space for a minute or so. Combat isn't hard in this game as long as you keep moving.

Food seems to be the core currency of the game, and unless you have a lot of it, it's hard to support a full party without their morale dropping quickly.

The soundtrack is....energetic. It more than anything probably goes a long way toward making this game seem quirky.

All in all it seems a polished improvement over the last builds I played. A fun little random time waster that really leans on the memes and pop culture references. (Car broke down, had to walk for a while, discovered the truck from Dumb and Dumber as a new ride.)

Probably gonna play a little more just to see how hard it is to win on normal.

[nenjin]

After a couple more games....

This is a fairly challenging game, with a tendency for a little too much RNG bullshit. The closest I've made it to finishing is 4 days to Canada.

Basically, everything is bound to fail eventually. Your car, despite repairs, probably won't last more than a couple days. And once you get on foot a couple things tend to happen:

-You get "haha lose stuff" events you can't control for.
-You zombie events that just straight up take life from you, no chances to evade or resist it.
-You get ambushed by bandits constantly, which equals "haha lose stuff" or "haha lose life."
-You get put into a Siege Mission where the odds of all your NPCs getting eaten are very good.

There will always be another event to get another car, eventually. It's a matter of how many times you can deal with that level of adversity before you're just tapped out.

I went through....7 party members? In one playthrough, that's how fast you can lose them to hordes. The density and aggressiveness of the hordes just goes up the closer you get to Canada, to where exploring, which is the bread and butter of your resource gathering, starts becoming insanely risky. Your stats, your guns, none of that really holds a candle to just the sheer numbers of zombies that show up late game. It's very easy to get cornered and, if not lose an NPC, die yourself.

There's a meta leveling mechanic where the perks characters start with get more effective as you "train them" between games. The training doesn't do much for you during your playthrough but once those perks get leveled I can see a lot of the game getting a lot easier.

But for some bullshit events, at any rate. "Oh no, zombies! Drive around? "Yes." Op, you got lost for a day, lose a fucking week's worth of driving in gas." Ohoho, now your car is out of fuel and you're on foot. Ohoho, now you're raided by bandits. Ohoho, now you're dead.

Fun game except for that stuff.

[Salmeuk]

It feels a bit unpolished, after having played it for a few hours. Gameplay mechanics don't feel nearly as fleshed out as they should, like just a bit shallow, but then again I haven't tried Co-op so maybe that might be more interesting.

[Glloyd]

It feels a bit unpolished, after having played it for a few hours. Gameplay mechanics don't feel nearly as fleshed out as they should, like just a bit shallow, but then again I haven't tried Co-op so maybe that might be more interesting.

Which is odd to hear, because didn't this game get delayed a ridiculous amount of times?

[LoSboccacc]

It feels a bit unpolished, after having played it for a few hours. Gameplay mechanics don't feel nearly as fleshed out as they should, like just a bit shallow, but then again I haven't tried Co-op so maybe that might be more interesting.

Which is odd to hear, because didn't this game get delayed a ridiculous amount of times?

yeah convoy was bad in many similar ways but at least one didn't had to wait this long

[EnigmaticHat]

It was inevitable.

[nenjin]

Been playing a bit of this with a friend coop.

It's a better fighting/beat 'em up than I'd first figured playing solo.

The action was fun and satisfying solo but with a friend it really comes to the fore. You can kill hundreds of zombies in each level as long a you're patient, smart and have a metal weapon that doesn't instantly break.

Still haven't actually won a game. The final siege is just absolutely brutal. Managed to last to the point where it says you can leave but by that point the hordes are so dense that there is almost no way to fight through them.

The last couple patches have toned down the BS "haha you lose" walking events but it's still pretty touch and go. In our last game we went through 6 party members before we finally lost.

[EnigmaticHat]

Its counter-intuitive, but if you're running low on gas and you have a gas guzzler sometimes you should just walk away out of a city rather than waiting to run out.  The starting car or anything smaller can go a LONG way on fairly small supplies of gas, and while the walking events are brutal at the end of it you'll almost always get 50-100 units of gas.  If you lose your car in any other way than running out of gas, you'll usually have a nice store when you get a new car and the gas that comes with it.

Also since bandit battles are handled via event rather than actual combat, you kinda want to give into their demands sometimes instead of always fighting FTL style.  If you're low on something, its hardly going to hurt you to give away half of it... although the morale hit can be pretty brutal if giving in causes you to run out of food.  Still survivable if your morale at the start of the whole thing was good.

(not saying the walking events are fair/unfair, haven't played enough to be sure)

[kulik]

I tried to like it pretty hard but I failed. The action sequences are fairly entertaining beat-them-up sequences, but I feel as a victim of RNG gods in this game. Even the zombie oregon trail had options to drive slower to conserve gas and make decision about who and when to heal. The bartering system and car repair system were also superior even though they were only rudimentary.

[Neonivek]

If anything I think it is the Bandits that are the outright detriment.

Most of the time their demands are worse then fighting them off and in the end they just take health from you.

[EnigmaticHat]

I haven't found the road trip part of the game too brutal.  Maybe its all those hours on FTL, or those changes nenjin mentioned, but it seems mostly doable.  I've played like 6 games and only one of them felt truly fucked by the non-mission portion of the game.

I do find the AI isn't quite good at the whole "not dying" thing.  Its a pretty well designed AI most of the time.  God knows it could be so much worse considering its putting permadeath characters under AI control.  But it just gets stuck on things every now and again, or can't figure out how to make it through a dooR GOD DAMN YOU.

The "final boss", so to speak, seems ridiculously unfair.  I mean I know its like FTL where you're supposed to be prepping for it the whole game, and I know the game is supposed to be hard but like, geez.  Not only does it involve

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

at least 2.5 hours total of siege that I've seen + I've been spoiled and told that after that there is a 3 fucking hour siege

but one segment involves a siege in a cabin, which means you have to get your (mandatory to bring) allies through a tiny doorway while zombies are funneling through.  Which just... doesn't seem that doable.  Maybe they stop spawning after the siege ends, but evidence suggests that is not the case (although the spawn rate goes down).  I have no idea where I'm supposed to get enough ammo, or enough swole, to beat all that.

I also feel that game-relevant objects (players, zombies, walls/debris) could use some kind of distinctive outline because god if I have no idea what's going on in the lategame missions.  Just burned my whole party to death with a molotov a single day from Canada and I have no idea what the fuck I hit.

[nenjin]

At the end of the day, melee and speed seem to be king. At least my fried and I can fight our way through most things (average of 150 zombies killed per mission) as long as we don't have weapons that pretty much instantly break.

That said, I think the sieges make for a dumb finale. It should be one of those "running" missions dialed up to 10. The sieges are unfair because even after it ends there are at least 100 zombies blocking the doorway that you pretty much HAVE to beat to death to get out. The current finale feels like a "herp we ran out of dev time" ending to the game.

Don't get me wrong, I like death road and I think it's fun. But after reaching the end like 3 times and having no prayer of winning, I'm starting to resent its design a little.

PS: bartering with only food is dumb. The only reason I ever do it is for the mandatory "you must train X skill Y times so Z perk upgrades" mechanic. Otherwise you almost never have enough food for it to be a wise decision.

All that said I appreciate the game's humor. TLB being able do nothing but throw (virtually any) furniture and flex was both lulzy and the kind of asymmetric gameplay I enjoy.