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[nenjin]

On normal campaign? No. In special missions or on higher difficulties? Yeah I can see that being a thing.

[motorbitch]

rotating mini map makes me go crazy. i have to open full map all the time because there mini map is just useless for orientation.

zooming within the fullscreen map makes the map focus jump around like crazy. there seem to be 3 zoom levles: to close, to far out and ok untill you want to take a closer look.

bots always want to stay within the door i want to lock. no matter how i kite them, one dude will always move into the door frame if i look at the console to close a door. so annoying.

some doors cant be opened after being hacked closed. if there is a way to tell this before closing them, the game didn't tell me.

companion bots are 10/10 mongograde retarded and often passive, i cant play without bots i have to babysit.

its a decent shooter, grafix run nice on my old hardware.

4/10 to many fuckups.

[nenjin]

Agreed on the AI, it is piss poor and almost non-existent.

Small “man-sized” doors can’t be unblocked, only smashed down. The larger double doors can be blocked or unblocked, but can’t be smashed down.

[Kagus]

For another FPS installment, has anyone here played Space Hulk That Is Not Space Hulk?

I figure the similarities in style and setting at least are worthy of mentioning.

[nenjin]

Time for yet ANOTHER Space Hulk game.

Behold Space Hulk: Tactics. Being published by Focus Home Interactive, who gets all the Warhammer IPs these days, being dev'd by Cyanide Studios. (Of Bloodbowl fame.) So both publisher and dev are familiar with making GWS games.

In a nutshell, it looks like Space Hulk: Ascension. A vaguely XCOM looking set up.

In Tactics you can play either Terminators or Genestealers. You can kit out your squad, customize their looks, etc and so forth.

In addition there is a "Card" system when you can acquire playable cards to use in missions for various benefits.

It certainly looks sexier than Ascension, featuring a top down view with optional first person view and glam cam.

That's about all you can get from the video. The game is out sometime this year. Playing as Genestealers might prove kind of interesting. I wonder how you can kit them out versus Terminators, if you can get them different bio-adaptations or something.

---

Haven't had a chance to play much Deathwing EE yet. I'll make some scribblings on it some time soon.

[Mephansteras]

More X-com like games I'm a fan of. Cyanide...not so much. Bloodbowl is fun but both 1 and 2 show a lack of polish, and the fun aspects are more Blood Bowl itself than anything Cyanide did with it specifically. That and the camera on 2 still drives me crazy. I don't feel like they particularly care about their player base any, which makes me leery about anything they are involved in.

Still, worth keeping an eye on at least.

[Retropunch]

I'm hoping they make more of a proper game than just a sort of board game simulator. The previous Space Hulk TBS games have been alright, but more puzzle games than anything else.

[nenjin]

Gather 'round brothers, and listen to my tales of the Deathwing. For I have been within the dank halls of the Olethros and seen the full magnitude of horrors within.

So yeah, got some time put in to the Enhanced Edition, and have played some multiplayer.

First off, most of the annoying low level bugs in the SP campaign have been cleaned up. The campaign appears largely unchanged but at least it's clean now.

Secondly, they've added a lot more new enemies to the game. From the Genestealer type that is full of bioplasma and explodes when it gets close to you, to other types that vomit poison, bioplasma, or swarms of tiny tyranid life forms, to the over muscled hybrids wielding bone swords or what I'm thinking is a grav cannon, there is far, far more dangers to combat in both the SP campaign and MP campaign than in the previous edition.

And if playing solo in the single player is a tense dungeon crawl punctuated by moments of intense combat.....MP is an endless swarm of high intensity combat, while trying to wrangle team mates who behave and react like they're inside their own personal tank, which they are.

In plain English: holy shit, MP is hard. Unforgivingly hard. You don't get bots in MP so you are at the mercy of whatever randos you can get. My friend and I tried to duo the first mission and after two wipes and 40 minutes of tense, corridor by corridor fighting back to back, we got wiped during the final stand at the mission's end by a Broodlord.

See, if MP is already difficult, what with hordes coming at you 90% of the time non-stop, exploding genestealers dropping out of ceilings on you, packs so dense a single Terminator, even the Heavy weapons users, can't hope to cut it all down alone, teammates who are happy to just barge deeper and deeper in to the space hulk and away from the objective, completely consumed with killing lust, the team getting separated because one member nobly tries to seal a door behind them while the rest march off and leave him to the tender mercies of the genestealers.....if all THAT wasn't enough to make it difficult, the Broodlords are just the bullshit icing on the cake. They're huge, take insane amounts of firepower to bring down and they love to headshot terminators. I have seemingly be one shot by one of the Broodlord's attacks before when it hit me directly in the head. On occasion the Olethros was generous enough to disgorge TWO Broodlords at the same time.

Friendly Fire is also a server based setting. I cannot even imagine playing this with FF. The sheer discipline and skill every player would have to exercise would be unreal. One trigger happy moment with a Plasma Cannon in a small corridor would be the end of the team. Or your melee guy going berzerk and laying in to friendly terminators as much as genestealers, because melee is a chaotic mess.

So while MP is pretty goddamn fun and intense, it is hard to finish an entire mission. Things can be going alright and then wham, a Broodlord hits you in the flank and ganks two people before anyone really realizes what's happening.

The saving grace of this is that you earn renown even if you fail the mission and it feels proportional to how much of the mission you completed or how long you've been in it. It definitely feels more generous than Vermintide 2 in failure, which is nice because even on the normal difficulty levels most teams I've been with get trashed.

Given that MP is way, way more difficult than SP, suddenly the customization system seems a lot more appealing. 10% more damage doesn't feel like anything when you're not challenged, but when you're getting your ass kicked six ways from Sunday it feels like a blessing from the Emperor himself. So for me the customization system, despite not being that exciting on paper, is becoming a valid draw for playing more.

MP isn't all sunshine and bioplasma though. There's bugs, and some really fucking annoying ones. Like randomly not having your rez timer count down. Which when you're the apothecary and possibly the only one who knows what they're doing, kills entire runs. Occasionally I have found myself unable to fire my weapon, even though it's not jammed. (Finally saw my first weapon jam after like 20 hours of playing the game.)

The game is a little more fleshed out in MP than in SP too. In MP there's classes, and they each get usable abilities just like the Psyker in SP. In MP there's the heavy class, the tactical class, psyker, apothecary, assault and interrogator chaplain. Generally they get abilities to support their roll, everything is on a cooldown and there's no ammo for any of these abilities. (Unlike the Apothecary in SP.)

If you die during the mission, you automatically respawn near your team after like 3 minutes. A couple classes also have abilities that automatically rez downed players. There's no Psy Gate for the psyker in MP (I believe.) Instead, Psy gates appear periodically near mission objectives once you complete it. Other than possibly instantly rezzing dead teammates, and healing you to full, I don't see a lot of use for the psy gate in MP, because most people play with Codex rules on so you can't change loadouts or classes once the game starts.

Perhaps it's because, unlike say Vermintide 2, Deathwing doesn't tell you what you have to play with. You can roll with 4 of the same class in your party if you want to. Although playing with no Apothecary seems like suicide. A good team playing tight can avoid damage for a long time, but it is inevitable at some point. And you can die shockingly fast to a Broodlord or a tight pack of exploding genestealers or a point blank Hybrid Heavy Weapon. I should know, I've been playing Apothecary and even with an AoE heal over time, I simply can't save my teammates most of the time, assuming they're even next to me. I'm there to save them from attrition.

So all in all.....I'm way more impressed with this game in MP. The SP campaign is dry and almost like a classical DOOM campaign in depth and execution. But MP is where things come alive and you can have the support of other players and the varied class abilities and customization perks. The difficulty and intensity of the game is obviously dialed up for MP and I won't be surprised if there are some patches that dial things back a little. I'm not claiming to be good at Deathwing yet or anything but I'm competent, and there are times the game simply squashes you like a bug. and 99% of those times it's a Broodlord that does it.

Is it worth $30? Yeah, if you have friends to play with. But the game might need a couple more patches to iron things out and make it slightly less ball busting to play.

[nenjin]

So I think this game is secretly excellent.

1. It's got an amazing atmosphere, either solo or in MP. Hands down the best looking, most faithful 40k adaption ever. EVER.

2. Combat is satisfying, it's just a different kind of combat than Vermintide 2. Honestly, I think DW has unfairly been compared to VT2 and I've been guilty of it as much as anyone. But they are two different kinds of games with different flow and priorities.

3. Tactics matter. Due to the level design, the horde frequency, the balance of player abilities....how you move, who is covering who, what routes you take, what doors you seal or don't seal....I feel like this game requires more communication than your average 4 player game. It's just so easy to zone out killing genestealers and lose touch with your team, and the next thing you know you're dead.

4. Friends make this game about 50% more fun to play. When you have people you can coordinate with, it becomes a great squad based game. For example, I was playing Apothecary and was stuck in the middle of the group most of the time. Being the least killy member of the team, my job was to cover people's flanks, heal them and basically play team captain. Without a face full of Genestealers and the ability to observe both our route and our progress, it fell to me to check the map, keep us moving in the right direction and most importantly....keep people from opening gaps up in our line. Slowing down the person in front, or getting the rearguard to backpedal more, turn corners, etc.....I actually felt like a captain, doing the thinking for my teammates so they could focus on icing genestealers like professionals.

By comparison, VT2 feels like a game for the lone wolf. Obviously you don't get very far without your team in VT2 but I've seen single players carry a whole team before. Not so in Deathwing. Here you need friends to cover your blind spots and to kill wave after wave after wave of genestealers that there's pretty much no way one person could kill or fend off by themselves. There's no room to move or flee the horde, they're faster than you except when you're sprinting. There's no side-stepping and dodging a horde until you whittle it down to manageable levels. In DW you need friends to lock doors for you, heal you, form body shields when you're low on health, and most importantly....to handle genestealers that you can't. In VT2 one person can wreck an entire horde with the right class and skills. In DW that is not the case. It makes for a completely different feeling team experience, one where your performance as a team comes first, your personal performance comes a distance second in importance.

It's also just more tactical and predictable in general. VT2 is like, here, let me pop 4 special on you in the middle of a horde and completely ruin your run that was going flawlessly before. In VT2 it's about speed first, positioning coming in second in most players minds. In VT2 if you're out of position you just slay, dodge, bunny hop and block push your way back to your team.

In DW, it's the opposite. Speed kills, positioning is everything and if you're radically out of position chances are you're not going to get back in to position without help. If you go too fast, you open gaps between players and genestealers will pour in to that gap. If you don't move when your group moves, you get left behind and eaten. You can see threats coming, you can see the level in front of you and possible angles of attack, you're not hampered by ammo or resource limitations....it's all about moving, shooting, moving, shooting, supporting, moving, shooting, until the xenos lay dead before you.

Played 5 or 6 campaign missions back to back with a couple of friend last night and we had a blast. Double bonus points for the impromptu Interrogator-Chaplain RP that happened, which I wish my screen shot of it had saved.

Both of my friends have put 20 or 100+ hours in to VT2 respectively...and they both came away saying they think they like DW better. It may not have the randomness and pacing and visceral combat of VT2, but it's better at making you feel like a team and giving you a predictable, if dogged, path to victory. It's also far less goofy than VT2, DW plays everything straight. It has nothing on VT2's audio engineering or banter and dialog between characters (VT2 has actual characters while DW basically has faceless Terminators), but unlike VT2 you feel compelled to watch your teammates closely and cover their weaknesses. Whereas in VT2 you're basically slaying for yourself, because it feels good, because it's where your energies are best spent.