Back to GAR.
What makes it so special?
After sinking about an hour into it: Nothing whatsoever. It's on the mediocrest mediocre edge of late-90s commercial shooters. The whole "you are roaming freely, not following a track" actually makes the game less interesting.
Okay, so it's like this. Every time you blow up an enemy base or a giant blob, it takes one or more of your weapons, rejiggers the neural net, and produces a knockoff that works a little different. You can hold three weapons at once; you have to swap a weapon out to pick up a new one. When you sell a found weapon for cash, you get a standard "three parallel shots" weapon to replace it.
Which would be kind of cool, except that it's a lot like other games where you can change your weapons except that:
- You don't even have a secondary weapon or anything, you can only be firing one at a time. No missiles, no combinations.
- Most of the weapons SUCK SO HARD and are totally worthless.
- Different weapons all have the same fire rate and damage, the only difference is the shot spread.
- The free-ranging nature of the game, and the ability to shoot in 360 degrees, means that a weapon which fires backwards is not even different than one which shoots forward.
- You can't upgrade your ship meaningfully--you can buy upgrades that boost -all- ship components at once, but all ships are just scaled versions of each other.
- You can spend XP to enhance certain ship systems, and reassign these whenever you like, but it's balanced very badly.
- Enemy ship AI, not very good.
- Pirates, aliens, and giant outer space blobs all aim for you and ignore each other...I guess that's standard, but in a free ranging game, disappointing. No vulnerabilities or anything--your weapons have different colors but they are just for show.
- Quest system. Hey, go kill ten pirates in this sector. Now go ten aliens in the same sector. No, you can't take them in any given order, or have more than one at once, just do what I told you.
As a proof of concept, the weapon spread thingy is interesting but it doesn't improve gameplay at ALL. If the neural nets could tweak fire speed or damage, or if it was a track game and not a free range game, it would be more fun.
Did I mention that the default weapon you get when you sell stuff you pick up is the best weapon in the entire game, with better range and better ability to focus your fire than anything you could find? That's why it sucks. That, and if you find an alternate weapon that is actually good in some circumstances...well, now it takes up a slot so you can't haul as many weapons back to sell. And if you sell it because it doesn't fit your tastes right now, you'll probably never see it again.
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Topic: Galactic Arms Race (Read 2893 times)