I’ve reviewed a fair few free-to-play titles on this blog over the last couple of years. Planetside 2, Tribes: Ascend, Mechwarrior Online, War Thunder, Hearthstone – no matter how grindy or grasping their economies turned out to be, what these games all had in common was an engaging core experience. Any one of them was a game I’d have been happy to sink a large quantity of my free time into on the basis that playing it, even without paying for it, was just so damn fun. This is the key to PC free-to-play: you have to make that core gameplay element – the one that exists outside of the level treadmill and continual trickle-trickle of soft and hard currency that forms the cornerstone of any F2P economy – fun for everyone who plays it, not just those who have paid money. If people are having fun, and spending a lot of time in your game as a consequence, then spending money on it will seem like the most natural thing in the world. Each of the above games (with the possible exception of Tribes: Ascend) grasped this concept, and grasped it well. Along with World of Tanks they convinced me that PC free-to-play was a viable model for both players and developers who weren’t Valve, and since then I’ve been happy to give other free-to-play games a spin without any prejudice whatsoever in the hopes that they’ll provide me with even a fraction of the fun that their predecessors did. This is how I came to play Hawken, and after several hours with it I kind of wish I hadn’t.

Hawken is a free-to-play FPS where you pilot various models of giant robot suit and try to shoot other giant robot suits right in the face. It’s often called “Call of Duty with robots” and now that I’ve played it I can see why; Hawken’s sin isn’t that it’s bad, it’s that it’s utterly and unremittingly average and unimaginative in every single way that matters. It’s a stock FPS that criminally reduces its giant robots to window dressing only and barely even tries to distinguish itself from the hundred other multiplayer FPSes out there vying for my attention.

I’m going to use Mechwarrior Online as my baseline comparison here since no matter what else can be said about that game I think it really nailed the whole giant robot concept. It’s ‘Mechs had a real sense of momentum, weight and scale, while the ‘Mech weapons felt meaty and powerful and correctly communicated the force of their impact to the player whether they were they shooting the guns or inside the cockpit of the ‘Mech unfortunate enough to be hit by the rounds.  Once you’d accelerated your 50-ton Centurion up to top speed you knew you weren’t turning that thing around any time soon, and it balanced the different classes of ‘Mech by situating ‘Mech weapons in places that made it difficult for larger ‘Mechs to target smaller, fast-moving ones. ‘Mechs could get weapons and limbs blown off and still continue functioning at a reduced capacity. In short, when you play Mechwarrior Online you can tell you’re in a giant robot suit because that’s exactly what it feels like and how the game plays. It’s not like a traditional FPS at all. That’s how Mechwarrior Online distinguishes itself from its competition. It’s in the name, for crying out loud.

My complaint about Hawken isn’t “It’s not Mechwarrior Online”. Hawken wants to do smaller, more agile robots than the lumbering behemoths of MWO, and that’s fine. Hawken doesn’t want to overwhelm the player with engine output and ammunition storage and balancing weapon heat, preferring a simpler set of loadouts for its robots that simply allow you to choose from a primary and secondary weapon on each arm (the secondary must be unlocked through either grind or by paying Hawken bucks, naturally) which have unlimited ammo but which overheat when fired too much, and that’s fine too. If Hawken were a comparatively simple take on giant robots but still managed to carve out its own identity in the marketplace, that would be great. I’m all for that.

No, my problem with Hawken is that rather than being a simplistic giant robot game, the fact that you’re supposedly piloting a giant robot suit is utterly irrelevant to how the game plays and feels. Hawken’s robots control like any other FPS character; they can run, sprint, strafe, dodge and even have the capability to do instant u-turns. The only concession to your robotitude is that you cannot crouch. Hawken’s robots have a single health bar for the entire robot, and when you get damaged you just run behind a piece of cover and push the “Repair” button and then watch as your robot repairs itself back up to full health – again, just like any other multiplayer FPS, except with an extra button involved. Hawken’s weapons are the stock genre machine guns, shotguns and rocket launchers, with none of the blat-blat lasers and meaty cannon that so characterised MWO.  Hawken has utility items that you can stick on your robots tho give them special abilities, but these special abilities are nothing that hasn’t been seen a thousand times before in every other FPS under the sun¹: cloaking mode, berserk mode, fire more accurately while moving mode – it’s like they were running down a list of what other FPSes did and picking and choosing what they wanted to include in Hawken, without any thought given to how they could strike out in their own direction. Hawken’s level design is also really weird, with most maps being made up of a collection of identikit geometric shapes that blend into one another and completely fail to give any sense of scale to the environment. Some of them actually reminded me of Mario Kart 64’s Block Fort level in terms of visual design, which is not a comparison I want to be making to a modern game in 2014.

In terms of game modes, if you want to play competitive multiplayer there’s just three: deathmatch, point control and Siege, which is a slightly unusual take on King of the Hill where you scrabble up energy to launch a battleship and then sit on top of an AA point while it lays waste to the enemy base/try to get control of the AA point to shoot it down, but which ultimately plays out much the same way since the ancillary trimmings have little impact on the actual mechanics. This isn’t a particularly fair criticism since MWO didn’t do much to innovate here either, but it had its other strengths to fall back on. All Hawken has to complement its run-of-the-mill objectives are its identikit game mechanics, and as it is that’s really not enough. Compounding this dullness is Hawken’s matchmaker, which seems utterly incapable of producing anything resembling fair and balanced teams. There’s six players per side, and while you do respawn in Hawken there doesn’t really seem to be much point when it’s stacked all the experienced players on one team and a bunch of blithering idiots who don’t even understand that you have to stand on the point to win on the other. I think that out of the 12-14 Siege games I’ve played (each lasting twenty minutes or so) exactly two of them had both teams getting the enemy base to below a third of its hit points. The rest were one-sided stomps that aren’t fun to be on either side of.  That’s a pretty damning statistic, and one that doesn’t bode well for Hawken’s long-term potential.

Does Hawken do anything that I actually like? I’m struggling to think of anything here; the menu music was pretty good but you only hear that in the brief moments you spend trying to customise your robot in between matches. The starter robot is also pretty good despite looking like a washing machine on legs; it has a decent mix of health, power and mobility and can hold its own against the pay-for/grind-to-unlock robots. In fact the range of robots in general seem to be pretty well balanced, with each filling a specific role and no one class being significantly better than the rest. That’s a pretty decent achievement, and one that should be praised; it’s just unfortunate that it’s married to this gameplay experience that’s dull as ditchwater. If I hadn’t gotten a few different robot types to try out as part of the Steam pack I bought I doubt I would have even made it this far into Hawken, it’s so insipidly uninspiring. I’ve heard that Hawken isn’t doing that well financially, and that its Steam release (coupled with a big balance patch that seems to have dumbed everything down into its current state in an attempt to give the game broader appeal) is the last throw of the dice. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe it’ll appeal to people who aren’t me, and it’ll turn out that what the CoD-playing masses really wanted was a similar game skinned with giant robots. Somehow I doubt it, though; the result is a bland, characterless mess that I really wanted to like – if only because I needed a giant robot fix to tide me over until Titanfall – but which in the end couldn’t even sustain my interest for five hours. Yes, it’s free-to-play, but so are all the other, better games I mentioned at the start of the review. When the only investment you have to make into a game is the time spent playing it, and Hawken isn’t even worth that, you know you have a stinker on your hands. I’d avoid it if at all possible.

The post Thoughts: Hawken. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I cannot figure War Thunder out for the life of me. It’s a pseudo-arcadey free-to-play game in the vein of World of Tanks, except in this one you fly a variety of WW2-era aeroplanes around maps that are unfailingly gorgeous trying to shoot down the opposition and bomb enemy ground targets. It’s also a grognardy¹ dogfighting simulator where you have to worry about altitude and air speed and the actual combat part is limited to split-second high velocity diving gun runs at enemy aircraft. Each is accessed through a different game mode, and how they’ve ended up being so wildly different despite using exactly the same engine and the same assets is worth taking a closer look at.

There’s actually three game modes in War Thunder: Arcade, Historical Battles, and Full Real Mode. Full Real Mode approaches the insane level of realism seen in games such as A-10 where your view is locked inside the cockpit and you have no game HUD making things like target identification and tracking easier. It is, again, an almost completely different experience to Historical Battles and Arcade, and its complexity results in it having a very high barrier to entry that I have no hope of clearing, and neither will 99% of the people who play War Thunder.  Historical Battles are a somewhat more gamey compromise between realism and accessibility; third-person view is always available and you can switch through a series of alternate view modes, and there’s also a detailed HUD telling you where the bad guys are (as long as your pilot can see them – more on this later) meaning it’s not quite as claustrophobic as Full Real Mode. However, there are plenty of other restrictions: you only get enough ammo for a few seconds of fire from your machine guns, and once you’re out of ammo you have to fly back to and land at an airfield to rearm. You also start quite some way from the actual contested points on the battlefield and have to take off and fly there at the start of every battle, and since having an altitude advantage is basically the key element of winning a historical-grade dogfight it ensures that the beginning of a Historical Battle is nothing more than four to six minutes of slow climbing up to your flight ceiling. Then you can start looking around for bad guys to shoot.

This is basically how it worked in WW2² but it doesn’t necessarily make for a fun game experience. The very few times I’ve tried to play Historical Battles what’s happened has been that I’ve spent several minutes climbing to combat altitude, flown over to the target and then immediately been attacked by players in aircraft with better climb characteristics than mine. Combat in Historical Battles consists of a high-speed swoop out of the sun with little time for the target to react, and usually by the time they realise what’s going on their plane is shot up to the point where they’re easy prey for their attacker on a second pass. It can be tactical, with classic dogfighting manuevering like the Immelmann and the split-S making its way into the equation, and the question of altitude and velocity is always at the forefront of your mind, but that’s only if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t know what you’re doing – and I never figured it out despite half a dozen attempts – then Historical Battles are just an exercise in masochism. Unlike a lot of the stuff I diss I think there’s actually a good game in there if you have the patience to learn how to play it; it’s just that that barrier to entry is still set quite some way above what I’m willing to tolerate from a multiplayer game.

It is a very good thing, then, that Arcade mode exists. This is War Thunder’s excellent bread-and-butter game mode which attempts to address many of the complaints I just made in the previous paragraph: planes spawn in the air so there’s no tedious takeoff phase, and while your ammo hoppers are as tiny as ever it’s not necessary to go back to an airfield to rearm, instead having to wait out a fairly long reload timer that’s nevertheless a great boon to the pace of the game since you don’t have to spend precious minutes landing, waiting for the reload and then taking off again. You also get a limited number of respawns when you get shot down; War Thunder steals World of Tanks mechanic of having purchasable hangar slots for your active aircraft, except this time you don’t just take them into a mission one at a time. Instead you take all of your hangar aircraft into an Arcade mode battle, a gameplay change that has a huge, huge impact on how the thing plays out.

War Thunder’s planes are just as fragile in Arcade mode as they are in Historical mode, you see. The damage model is complex and satisfying, with shot-away or burning aircraft components having a significant effect on how the plane handles and a chance for every bullet to be a one-shot kill if it hits the pilot, and the only real change that’s been made is a handling buff so that you don’t rip your wings off by going into a high-speed dive that the plane can’t tolerate. Don’t let the “Arcade” moniker fool you into thinking that this mode is in any way forgiving, since Arcade for War Thunder actually means occupying that odd middle ground between a conventional shooter and an actual simulator that World of Tanks does, and it takes a bit of practice to get the hang of its little foibles. Being able to respawn in the middle of the fight helps a lot with this, as it takes the penalty out of death and greatly speeds up the learning process; it also keeps the tempo of the fight feverishly fast as new planes constantly spawn and dive into the fray.

Thanks to the game mechanics it’s inherited from Historical, though, Arcade mode is about as far from a mindless spawnfest as it’s possible to get without being Historical mode. Because every player has five or six planes to fly battles rarely end in the annihilation of one team or the other, and instead hinge on each team’s ability to complete the mission objective. This is usually destroying a bunch of AI controlled ground vehicles/ships which slowly advance towards and fight each other while you’re dogfighting with the enemy airforce, or else capturing contested airfields by landing at them. It’s possible for one team to be very, very good at shooting down aircraft and yet lose the battle because they didn’t focus enough on destroying ground targets, which I feel is as it should be because otherwise the bombers would have nothing to do.

Ah, the bombers. There’s several classes of plane in War Thunder and the developers have actually done a damn good job of making them all viable – the higher tier jet fighters obviously massively outclass biplanes, but since you’re only chucked into battle with people flying planes in a similar tier to yours this is a matchup that will never happen.  Biplanes are slow and have weak guns, but they turn at a phenomenal rate and are extremely maneuverable, meaning that if your monoplane fighter gets into a turning fight with one close to ground level you’ll have at least a fifty-fifty chance of losing because you won’t be able to get them off your tail. Instead you have to use your superior speed and climb power to hit them quickly and then zoom away before they can retaliate – so you do have something of an advantage, but only if you’re intelligent enough to use it properly. Meanwhile the bombers are insanely tough targets, able to soak up multiple belts of MG fire without being significantly inconvenienced and always with at least one AI turret gunner to make life difficult for any fighter with the temerity to actually try taking one on. Bombers also often have a height advantage that makes even reaching them in the first place a massive pain the arse; if you want to kill a bomber and he’s not accommodating enough to come down to you, you’ll have to finish him off very quickly before he dives away – and despite their huge size bombers actually have a very respectable dive speed. Shooting one down in a fighter is therefore appropriately difficult – that is, unless you happen to be flying the Beaufighter.

I admit I’ve fallen in love with the Beaufighter a little bit. It’s a huge heavy fighter that handles like a brick but which makes up for it by being armed not with dinky little rifle-calibre machine guns, but instead mounts a pair of beefy 20mm cannon. The cannon have even less ammo than normal guns and take twice as long to reload, so you have to be a very precise shot, but oh my god they do so much damage. High explosive ammunition makes a big difference in the world of War Thunder; instead of putting a neat hole in somebody’s aircraft a single round now has the potential to explode an engine or blow off a wing, and the damage potential is so great that even bombers have to respect the firepower that a lumbering Beaufighter can bring to a fight. It’s a sitting duck for any fighter smart enough not to take it on in a head-on pass (I’ve lost count of the number of fighters that have tried this and instantly exploded), but its cannon allow it to absolutely wreck anything in its sights.  I know that higher tier aircraft will come with cannon as standard, but for now they mark the Beaufighter out as something special because it’s one of the few aircraft at its level with access to them.

As far as tiering and free-to-play grind goes, War Thunder is a bit of an odd one. XP grind is starting to kick in now that I’ve reached tier five (of twenty) but the game is staggeringly generous with free cash and repairing your planes after a battle is always cheaper than the reward you get for finishing it in the first place. After fifteen hours of play and more than fifty sorties, I have yet to feel any need to spend any real money on the game. There are simply no restrictions on my play beyond having to level up to get access to more aircraft, and I’m actually perfectly happy to keep playing in my current planes because Arcade mode is really fun; its as accessible as the game will get and the high skill ceiling means it hasn’t even started getting old.  While I’m told the cash grind increases significantly at higher levels I’m still wondering how on earth the developers are hoping to make any money on War Thunder when it’s an unrestricted high-quality game that they’re essentially giving away for free. From a business point of view, it seems like madness. From the point of view of a player, though, I couldn’t be happier with it; it’s not without its flaws, but the complete and utter lack of pressure to spend makes me forgive the occasional bit of jankiness in the interface and the low intelligence level of War Thunder’s playerbase³.  It won’t be for everyone – if you didn’t like World of Tanks I doubt War Thunder will change your mind on the concept unless you really really like aeroplanes – but it’s one of the most solid free-to-play titles I’ve played so far, offering both short-term fun and long-term depth and absolutely chock full of holy-shit-did-you-see-that moments as something explodes prettily or a crucial piece of your aircraft falls off at an inconvenient time. I’m very pleased with it.

———————————————————————

The post Thoughts: War Thunder. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

The best thing about MechWarrior Online is the startup routine your pilot goes through every time they enter a match. When it begins you’re treated to a first-person view of the cockpit interior of your unpowered mech, with no HUD or other visual accoutrements apart from a pair of hands pushing buttons, flipping switches and even test-waggling the control stick while a calm, computerised voice intones the following:

“Reactor: Online. Sensors: Online. Weapons: Online.”

“All systems nominal.”

The second best thing about MechWarrior Online is that it’s a free-to-play multiplayer MechWarrior game and it doesn’t completely suck.  It’s still in beta and as such is very rough around the edges in some places, while there’s others that are simply incomplete or not implemented yet, but even with just the basics working I have to say it’s looking somewhat promising. Not very promising – it’s not quite blowing my socks off with how awesome it is – but definitely encouraging. Part of that assessment is doubtless going to be influenced by my latent MechCommander fanboyism; however, as the first proper MechWarrior game in a decade — if you don’t count the Living Legends mod for Crysis Wars – the franchise could have done far, far worse.

So the whole MechWarrior thing is that it’s the far future and everyone now fights wars ensconced inside what I must assume is the supremely comfortable cockpit of a giant stompy robot, called a ‘Mech. The ‘Mechs come in a range of sizes ranging from tiny twenty ton Lights up to hulking hundred ton Assault behemoths. Some of them are fast. Some of them are slow. Some of them can take a lot of punishment before falling over, and some can’t (usually in inverse proportion to how fast they are). Some of them have jetpacks. All of them have guns, whether in the form of lasers, armour-piercing cannon or long-range missile systems. The single-player MechWarrior games took you through a campaign where you’d go on missions trying to achieve set objectives while fighting it out against everything from tiny armoured cars to tanks to aerospace fighters. Since MechWarrior Online is a multiplayer game, though, clicking the “Play” button just stuffs you into a battle with fifteen other human-piloted ‘Mechs.

For better or worse MechWarrior Online is using the World of Tanks free-to-play model. The idea behind this is that you will at any one time have two or three ‘Mechs available to take into a match. You pick the one you want to play, outfit it according to your particular tastes and then let the game’s matchmaking system find a battle for you. These are universally 8v8 affairs at the moment, with only two game types: straightforward base attack/defence and a monumentally awful control points mode, set over a variety of maps in different environments – desert, ice, nighttime, in the middle of a blizzard and so on. No matter which mode you’re playing a typical MechWarrior Online match will consist of two to three minutes of jockeying for position followed by the actual shooting part. Unusually for a modern multiplayer game even light ‘Mechs are fairly resilient — and assault ‘Mechs can absorb dozens of hits before dying — so it can be anywhere up to five minutes before the match transitions to the cleanup phase. If you get taken out early in the fight, though, you don’t have to wait around for things to draw to a tortuous conclusion. You can simply quit the match; it’ll carry on without you and you’ll still get whatever money and experience is coming to you, leaving you free to jump into one of your other ‘Mechs to play a second game while the first is still resolving itself.

This elimination of what has always been the most tedious part of single-life multiplayer games was a masterstroke for World of Tanks, and it works just as well for MechWarrior Online.  It means the player spends all their time either in a ‘Mech shooting other ‘Mechs, or else in the Mechlab tinkering with their loadout and deciding what to buy next, which is a key step in keeping you interested in the game: there’s no real getting around the fact that MWO is a bit grindy – it’s free to play, after all, and the more time you spend playing a free-to-play game the more likely you are to oxymoronically spend money on it – but they’ve at least made enduring that grind somewhat less painful. MechWarrior Online also improves markedly on World of Tanks by eliminating any XP or skill requirements to drive ‘Mechs and making cost the sole barrier to entry. New players will not start with any owned ‘Mechs but they’ll always have access to four trial models with stock loadouts that can’t be altered, as well as receiving a hefty monetary bonus for the first twenty-five games they play (often doubling or tripling the amount normally received) which guarantees they’ll be able to buy at least one ‘Mech of their choice in short order even if it’s a top-of-the-line Atlas.  It’s a much more generous start than just about any other free-to-play game, and it’s made possible by MechWarrior Online’s combat system.

MWO manages to do something I that thought would be very, very tricky to pull off: it makes every single ‘Mech class a viable combatant with a useful role to play on the battlefield. Light ‘Mechs have less armour and pack less firepower and can be taken out by a single well-placed autocannon round – if you can hit them with it as they dodge and weave around the battlefield. Not only are larger ‘Mechs lumberingly slow but most of their primary armament tends to be nailed to their torso, which usually has a glacial traverse speed that makes tracking fast-moving targets a nightmare. And while they don’t have the tonnage to mount the largest weapons available light ‘Mechs can still pack a respectable punch with the mid-range stuff, especially if it’s fired at vulnerable back armour. I pilot medium ‘Mechs thanks to an ongoing love affair with the Hunchback and its oversized AC/20 cannon (that once holed a Dragon clean through its back plating in one shot) and I can usually make Heavies and Assaults regret tangling with me, but I’ll be lucky to survive against a determined Light.

The larger ‘Mechs on the other hand have survivability and an obscene amount of firepower as their primary selling points. Their role is to provide heavy fire support and soak up damage, and they are remarkably good at the latter job. It’s funny considering that all the ‘Mechs in MWO are being driven by people and not scripted AI, but when one of the death’s head Atlases arrives on the scene everyone switches their fire to try and take it down simply because it’s the biggest, scariest thing on the battlefield and you just want it gone. Other ‘Mech variants are less tanky and provide more specialised fire support, with the Catapult functioning as the premiere sniper ‘Mech with either long range missiles or particle cannon, and the Jagermech being able to mount dual AC/20s, the largest gun in the game. When you see one of those two you want to get out of their firing line and behind a solid piece of cover very very quickly; they may be comparatively weak for Heavies but they pack a hell of a punch.     

The other Heavies and Assaults tend to bleed into one another for me (one of MWO’s problems is that the ‘Mech designs have moved away from the admittedly somewhat goofy but distinctive ‘90s style to this generic blocky and bulky look) as most of the time I’m driving too fast to really take much notice of what I’m firing at. I favour supercharged Medium ‘Mechs that are fast but nonetheless extremely resilient; their only problem is that they don’t pack that much firepower so they’re highly reliant on movement to stay in the fight long enough to put an opponent down. I usually die, but there’s no repair costs in MWO and I also usually output enough damage to feel like I’ve made a contribution; it’s hard for that Atlas to concentrate on taking out our firepower when it’s getting hit in the side of the head with a large-bore autocannon round every four seconds. That’s what the Mediums seem designed for: to lurk around the edges of combat and either take advantage of distracted opponents or open up similar opportunities for the main force.

What I’m trying to get across here is that all ‘Mech types are capable of coexisting in the same game if you build them right; while an Atlas probably could one-shot a Commando if it was standing still, everything else is tough enough and/or fast enough to survive in a brawling firefight – at least for a little while. This is why MWO doesn’t feel the need to lock away bigger ‘Mechs behind money or XP barriers and instead does the nearest thing a free-to-play game is capable of to throwing open the doors and handing you the keys to the shiniest robot in the showroom. It can afford to do this, and while you’ll only get enough bonus money to buy one or two ‘Mechs before having to start the slow grind that characterises free-to-play it’s a refreshing approach nevertheless.

The combat itself is a complex beast. From what I understand it suffers a bit from trying to cram rules designed for tabletop play into a first-person ‘Mech driving simulation, and so I’m not sure I’d call it balanced as such (there are weapons and loadouts that are unambiguously better than others) but it’s certainly functional. Each ‘Mech is modelled as a collection of components housed within discrete regions of the ‘Mech – arms, legs, right torso, left torso and so on – each with its own armour rating and internal structure. To kill a ‘Mech you first have to crack through the armour of one of these components by hitting it really hard; then you have to wreck its internal structure (ballistic weapons get bonuses for this in the form of a chance to critically hit) to destroy that region of the ‘Mech. If it was a non-essential part – an arm, say – then while the ‘Mech will lose whatever weapons were mounted on that arm it’ll still fight on with the rest of it, and if you angle your torso right (and your opponents are spectacularly bad at focus firing) you can take a shocking amount of damage thanks to this redundancy. I once lost both arms, both side torso components and a leg and was still hopping long firing at the enemy with the medium lasers mounted in my centre torso. To take a ‘Mech out for good you need to do one of the following:

• Destroy its engine. This usually means taking out the centre torso, the most heavily-armoured part of the ‘Mech.
• Destroy both legs. Much harder than it sounds because they’re constantly moving and your weapons can only depress so far.
• Destroy the cockpit. It’s only thinly armoured, but the head hitbox is tiny compared to the rest of the ‘Mech and you’d have to be very accurate – or lucky – to score a hit.

This is the reason why it’s so hard to kill even a light ‘Mech in MWO; in the hurly-burly of combat your damage gets spread over several body parts and it only needs three of them to keep on fighting.  There’s also the ever-present heat mechanic, which is the method by which the MechWarrior games balance the various weapons and heat loadouts: your ‘Mech is only capable of dumping a given amount of heat every second, and when every weapon you fire causes heat buildup a prolonged firefight carries the very serious danger of having your ‘Mech shut down temporarily because the heat level spiked too high. Lasers have unlimited ammunition but cause rapid heat buildup; ballistic weapons need their own ammo supplies (which carry the separate risk of an ammo explosion if your ammo storage zone is blown out) but generate less heat. Lasers fire instantly but must be kept on-target over a period of about a second in order to do their full damage. Ballistic projectiles have a flight time but deal full damage if they hit. Lasers are useful for shooting small, fast targets and as backup weapons for an ammo-dependent ‘Mech. Ballistic weapons do more burst damage but are harder to aim, making them most useful against big, slow-moving stuff.  Most weapons have a niche in the game somewhere, and you can spend literal hours in the Mechlab trying to outfit your ‘Mech to maximise both redundancy (you don’t want your biggest gun in a compartment that’s easily destroyed, which is a big problem with the Hunchback) and its ability to target different ‘Mech variants at given ranges.

MechWarrior Online’s basic gameplay is mostly well-thought out. It’s one of the friendlier free-to-play games out there and the ‘Mech battles that form the meat of the game are both relatively deep and unfailingly pretty¹ As I said at the start it’s very limited right now, though, and while I’d feel bad kicking it for failings caused by the fact that it’s not full-tuned yet they’re still worth mentioning because it’s not guaranteed that they’ll ever be fixed at all.  For starters the matchmaking system is incredibly wonky, not just in terms of player skill but in its tendency to produce an 8v7 game where one team has an additional Atlas assault ‘Mech, which is enough to unbalance things to the point where it’s a one-sided stomp. This isn’t helped by the client’s frequent tendency to disconnect somebody as soon as the map loads, leaving one team or the other a ‘Mech down; 8v8 matches are small enough that this really does matter, and there needs to be an option for larger player numbers introduced at some point. Some maps are much better suited for some ‘Mech loadouts rather than others. Alpine Peaks in particular is a sniper’s paradise, which is why it’s so annoying to get that map when you readied up in your short-range brawler ‘Mech.

These three factors together tend to result in a lot of one-sided matches which are no fun for anyone. It’s not that the gameplay is at fault here, it’s the underlying systems which have yet to finish their long journey from beta to full release, and I do hope that they eventually reach a point where MWO can reliably present me with a somewhat even matchup where nobody is booted from the game in the first couple of seconds of play, but it does mean that right now MechWarrior Online is a game that I’m more likely to pick up and play every few months rather than an ongoing concern.  What worries me most about it is that after a year or so of closed and open beta it’s yet to approach the level of completeness that World of Tanks displayed when it went into open beta back in 2010; the game is very grindy but it doesn’t actually go anywhere at the moment, with a nonsensical XP system and a matchmaking system that ends up being rather repetitive because of the limited number of game types on offer. Unless you really like stompy robots beating the crap out of each other MechWarrior Online is unlikely to hold any long-term appeal for you. But hey, it’s free, it’s fun and… well, it involves stompy robots beating the crap out of each other.  That counts for a lot in my book, so why not try it? At the very least it’ll make you want to play those free releases of MechCommander and/or Mercenaries again, which makes it a win-win as far as I’m concerned.

—————————————————————————————-

The post Thoughts: MechWarrior Online. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Ever heard of a Skinner box? You must have at some point; it’s one of those behavioural experiments where an animal is taught to perform a certain action – usually very basic, like pressing a switch — in return for a simple reward such as food. I’ve drawn unflattering comparisons between Skinner boxes and the mechanics of several of the games I’ve reviewed this year, and nowhere is it more apt than in the case of Tribes Ascend. Nowhere is it more regrettable, either, because staggering beneath the weight of the enormous piles of equipment unlocks and the experience point grinds required to obtain them is an extremely competent multiplayer shooter that’s struggling to escape the shadow of its free-to-play genetics.

Exactly how much of Tribes’ unlock system is directly attributable to being free-to-play is a matter for some debate. Unlock systems are a staggeringly effective way of retaining a playerbase for your online game and so you’d have to look very, very hard to find a game that didn’t utilise them in some way; they’re even starting to bleed into strategy games such as Total War and Wargame. The defining line between a retail game and a free-to-play game isn’t whether or not it has an unlock system in the first place, therefore, but rather how obnoxious this unlock system is. How much time do you have to devote to unlocking something? Once unlocked, what sort of impact does it have on the game? If the answer to both these questions is “loads” then the chances are you’re playing some kind of free-to-play game that’s more interested in keeping you in thrall to its reward system than actually letting you have any fun.

Tribes Ascend is built around an incredibly solid core of skill-based gameplay so it’s taken a little while for the symptoms of its F2P heritage to show. I’ll be honest, the last game I had this much fun with online was the almost-totally-ignored Section 8: Prejudice, which itself took several pages out of the original Tribes’ book. Most of what you’d expect to find in an online shooter is here – vehicles, bases, flags, a variety of light, medium and heavy classes – but there are two unique elements that mark Tribes out as being very different from its peers. The first is that there are maybe four or five hitscan weapons in the entire game. Everything else fires a projectile which has some kind of travel time, from SMGs to machine guns to grenade launchers to the ubiquitous spinfusors (Tribes’ equivalent to a rocket launcher), and the blast radius on the vast majority of explosive munitions is very small. Tribes is a game that rewards precision over twitch-shooting, where the ability to accurately predict where an enemy is going and lead your shots accordingly is what makes the difference between success and failure.

This is a pleasant departure from the norm, but it wouldn’t have anywhere near as significant an effect on the gunplay if it wasn’t for Tribes’ unique selling point: skiing. Holding down the spacebar in Tribes will turn off friction for your avatar. If you’re on a slope you will begin to slide down it, gradually gathering speed. Eventually you’ll bottom out and go on to hit an upward slope which will rob you of your momentum, so at that point you trigger your jump jets to smoothly glide over the next hill. If you time it right and angle yourself just so, you can hit the downwards slope on the other side with little to no loss of speed from the original slope. Chain together several of these hills in a row and you can reach some truly ludicrous velocities; even heavy classes like the Doombringer can hit 140-150 kph if they do it right, and light classes built for speed hurtle around the map at speeds of up to 300kph. (Going faster is possible, but difficult to accomplish without spending a lot of time setting up the run.)

This is why I say Tribes is, at its core, very much a game of skill and precision over spraying bullets and explosives around willy-nilly. You’re trying to hit fast-moving targets that are constantly changing direction with projectile weapons that take a second or two to cover the intervening distance while you yourself are likely travelling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of sound. This is, in a nutshell, very tricky, and it’s something that can take an hour or two to get used to. Eventually it clicks, though, and you start to appreciate what a truly exhilarating game Tribes is. Since nobody in this game is standing still unless they’re on flag defence, duels with enemy players have more in common with aerial dogfights than they do ground-based firefights, with both players trying to retain their momentum while getting onto a movement trajectory that’ll make hitting their opponent relatively easy. And flag chases are an incredible sight, with the pursuers streaking across the landscape in a series of long, loping jumps frantically trying to take down the capper (and anyone with him; no friction means you can fire at pursuers while moving backwards with the only handicap being that you can’t see where you’re going) before he gets the flag back to his stand.

Classes and equipment are reasonably well thought out. My favourite class is the Technician, a utility character with a repair tool and deployable turrets who focuses on keeping the base facilities going. Most of my time is spent trying to keep enemy infiltrators and raiders out of my team’s generator room; if that goes down all base defences – not to mention a lot of deployables, like the aforementioned turrets – power down and won’t work until the generator is brought back online, so keeping it up is important. I also occasionally moonlight as the Doombringer, a big fat lump of armour with a chaingun and a set of forcefields that can be used to stop any would-be flag cappers dead in their tracks. More offensively-minded players get the Pathfinder, an incredibly fast class with a grenade that both boosts his own speed and forces enemy flag carriers to drop their flags, making him good for both capping and chasing. It’s good design which promotes teamplay; as the Doombringer I can keep most players off the flag, but I have no chance of catching a Pathfinder should he slip through and grab it. I need my teammates to do that. My forcefields will go down if Technicians do not keep the generators up; I could protect the generator myself but that would mean I wouldn’t be watching the flag, which is my job. Everyone has a well-defined role and the tools to help them do it. Except the Soldier. Screw that guy.

Anyway, it all makes for very entertaining back and forth gameplay in Capture the Flag mode, and if that were all Tribes Ascend was I’d be praising it to the heavens. Unfortunately we’ve gotten to the part of the review where the other shoe drops; the free-to-play shoe, which hurtles towards Tribes and smashes this core gameplay into itty-bitty pieces.

The free-to-play aspect of Tribes comes in two highly unattractive parts. First there is the experience grind; while you can in theory unlock everything in Tribes without paying a penny, in practice the prices for the most useful items are so exorbitant as to make them effectively prohibitive. For example, the Technician’s second unlockable weapon is a grenade launcher, the Thumper. I hear it’s very useful in precisely the sort of close-range fight I tend to engage in while trying to defend my generator, but it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever get to find out because unlocking it will cost me a whopping 100,000 experience. For reference, playing a twenty-minute round of CTF will net you about 1000 experience. Experience boosts and one-time bonuses help that along a little, but I’m still looking at something like 15 hours of play just to unlock one item. This is completely untenable, of course, which is why the developers of Tribes also give me the option to buy the Thumper immediately for the low low price of 780 gold, or about £7 in real world money.

Now, as it stands I cannot really complain about this. They’ve given me the game for free, and they’ve given me the option to acquire everything in the game without spending money. It might take a while but it’s definitely possible, and in the meantime the base weaponry is good enough to keep me competitive. This is what you sign up for when you accept the terms of the free-to-play package. It’s not my real problem with the game. My real problem with the game is the new weapons Hi-Rez periodically introduces as a way of continuing to generate revenue. The thinking behind them runs like this: if we release a gun that is worse than what players already have, nobody will buy it. If we release a gun that is only a sidegrade, or a slight upgrade, then only a very few people will buy it. If on the other hand we release a gun that is so sickeningly overpowered it gives the class that uses it an effective “I win” button, everyone will buy it.

This is how weapons that are completely at odds with the skill-based nature of Tribes – the Plasma Gun and the Jackal – have made their way into the game. The Plasma Gun is a spinfusor with a multi-shot clip, a high fire rate and an incredibly large hitbox that makes it child’s play to hit players in the air (in Tribes players spend 90% of their time in the air). The Jackal is a three-shot sticky grenade launcher that has inexplicably been given to the Infiltrator, a class that not only already has sticky grenades as his utility item but which can also fire all three grenades and detonate them before his cloak has fully dropped, effectively giving them carte blanche to one-shot anyone they see in the generator room. I have died more times to players wielding these two guns than every other weapon in the game put together. It doesn’t matter how smart I am, or what class I take; they’ll kill me five times for every death I manage to inflict on them. What makes it especially insulting is that Hi-Rez obviously spent a lot of time trying to avoid exactly this kind of pay-to-win bollocks in the design of the basic game. It’s like watching a horde of malevolent children attacking a work of art with a potato and a pot of acrylic paints; you can still see the original work peeking out from underneath the sticky handprints smeared across its surface, but for the most part it has been compromised and defiled.

That’s why I can’t really recommend Tribes Ascend. Or at least, it’s why I can’t really recommend you spend any money on Tribes Ascend. Free is free, after all, and what doesn’t cost you money can’t really hurt you. It’s certainly worth downloading and trying if you’re in any way inclined towards online shootery, but you do need to keep in mind that beneath the skiing and the duels and the desperate flag-chasing the basic reason for Tribes’ existence is to part you with as much of your hard-earned cash as possible, and it’s willing to compromise the fundamental nature of its game balance in order to do so. While it may be attractive to look at and undeniably fun to play, Tribes Ascend is a game with a rotten soul. You can try it, and you may even enjoy it, but I wouldn’t get too invested in it if I were you.

The post Thoughts: Tribes Ascend. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.