Eden Rising.
Feels like it could be a sci-fi Monster Hunter, but it would need work - Monster Hunter had 15 years to define and refine itself, Eden Rising would need a lot of time and resources to match the depth and refinement of MH.
Similar concepts:
- There's a variety of weapons, each with their own attributes and movesets, and you upgrade them with things you find out in the world, or drops from creatures. However, the movesets are far less complex and because you carry them with you everywhere (I guess in some kind of quantum hammerspace, considering your inventory is limited otherwise), you're probably going to be switching in the weapons best against the toughest things you're fighting at the time, rather than specializing. (It is also a far smaller variety than what you find in MH.)
- Likewise, defeating enemies is more about learning patterns and when it is safe to attack than it is overpowering them, since the weapon upgrades aren't significant in terms of increased damage. That said, monster AI is extremely simple and combat is very easy. No enemy that I fought tracked you during an actual attack, and most enemies leave themselves wide open for long periods of time during their attacks. Some of the bigger, more dangerous enemies, you simply avoid attacks until they faceplant themselves and are open to attack.
- Running around harvesting bits and ores to make your consumables felt the same, although again the selection of consumables is very limited. In particular, the basic healing item is found pretty much everywhere uncommonly, and can be upgraded to heal more using other found items. Overall, the selection of consumables is, like weapons, comparatively limited.
- Health feels limited compared to the amount of damage enemies do, and armor has tradeoffs to mobility/stamina vs. protection.
I didn't actually meet any significant "holy shit" type enemy encounter that would be even the slightest match for any kind of Great Beast from Monster Hunter. Just that the game they have, if given a slightly different focus or taken in a different direction, could join that genre.
The tower defense mechanics are mediocre so far as I saw. Towers are simple, weak (damage and defense), and slow - it is clear that the player is the one expected to do all the damage output. Maybe with a lot of turrets in a single lane they could handle a wave or two by themselves. It's somewhat nice to be able to use a tower or two out in the world if you need some help with something difficult, but again it only supports your damage, they don't deal much themselves. Maybe if the defense areas were made larger, towers made more important - something like an Orcs Must Die balance between player and tower output - and have the siege waves made fairly larger.
Combat is slow, stiff, and simple. Movement is more open than in MHWorld but also somewhat buggy - the jump is fairly liberal but sometimes jitters/teleports and slides on certain surfaces. Enemies regenerate health immediately if they cannot reach you, and usually just dive into the ground and blip back to their spawn point (or path circuit) when they reset - except during TD segments. Even outside TD, sometimes you can still 'exploit' pathing by using ranged weapons in areas that you can cross much easier than enemies, who have to circle around a more traditional valid path - ranged weapons are mostly weaker and slower than melee.
Crucible (the tower defense areas) upgrades are somewhat nice to limited some of the manual farming, but only one can be active at a time - I presume this disables the passive item generation in disabled crucibles. The tech tree is simple and serves only as a means of gating player power progression by limiting access to resources (some techs unlock the ability to harvest different resources from existing nodes). Although, I guess, I'm not sure what a tech tree might functionally do otherwise than gate player power.
The art direction is nice.
Disclaimer: I got around to activating the Fungal Preserve tower before quitting. I saw only potential in the gameplay, but nothing realized. There's some complaints about it being listed as "free to play" but certain areas are locked behind the ~$30 "ascended" pack, with people saying that the FTP version is basically just a demo. The devs counter that if you were to play on a server hosted by an "ascended" player you could still access all content. I'm not sure how true that is, because some of the weapons said they were only available to ascended, even though I could kill and get all the drops necessary to build them.
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Topic: Blurb on Games that probably don't deserve their own threads. (Read 328616 times)