Played the demo. Best way to describe it is 'weird'.
After a highly advanced looking menu system, we find our hero, Cliff 'The Rocketeer' Secord working on a biplane in a cave. And, much like the Rocketeer, he then notices a strange rocketpack.
Enter his disturbing, fat, bearded, shirtless noble savage friend, Tabi(sp?).
"Oh no Cliff, you can't use the rocketpack, it'll kill you. I still keep it just sitting here for some reason."
"Foolish and worrying Tabi, I'm a dashing hero! I scoff at your protests!"
"In that case I completely withdraw them, go and kill yourself!"
"Hah-HA! I shall!"
And sure enough, Cliff goes outside and decides to activate the rocket pack. And sure enough, he is launched straight DOWN the rock face, into the side, breaking his spine and dying instantly. Oh Tabi, you were right. Never again shall I feel your warm hairy embrace.
I try it again, and this time Cliff blasts unsteadily into the air. I note that, even as he gains experience using the pack, the takeoff seems to overwhelm him. I fly around a bit, and blow up some radar dishes. Cliff seems rather pleased. A voice indistinguishable from Tabi's comes over the radio and mumbles something about Bravo Delta capturing transport. No idea what this means, but the game says 'to start a maneuver, hold RT'. So I do. It then says 'Now use LT and RT together.'
And do what, exactly? Click them? Nothing happens. Move them around? Nothing happens.
I flew around that fucking canyon for 20 fucking minutes and NOTHING would happen. Eventually, and through sheer luck (and on the brink of just giving up) I hold RT in, and then pull both sticks down and Cliff does a quick loop.
NOWHERE is this concept explained. The graphics shown at the top for 'click stick in' and 'move stick downwards' and nigh-on identical, the game doesn't explain WHY you're doing this or what you are trying to achieve. Not impressed.
An AA gun appears, and I blow it up. The gun must have been waiting to see if I could figure out the ridiculous instructions or not. Then, enemy ships appear. Given the rocketpack's guns can apparently blow up radar dishes and AAA, I see no reason why they shouldn't kill ships too. It doesn't seem to happen, and after a while I notice a 'B' icon appears of nearby enemy ships. I push it, and a QTE kicks in where Cliff somehow lands on the ship and scrambles around the outside, dodging the gun turret while pulling a panel off the engine as slowly as possible.
He takes so long doing this that I have to dodge around the outside several times, and often I suddenly just die for no reason (I assume the enemy pilot scrapes me off against the side of a wall or something). Eventually Cliff succeeds in removing this panel. Outraged, the pilot emerges from the cockpit, and after comically pushing his gun back and forth Cliff throws him to the floor, steps on his neck and shoots his face off. The ship is now mine. I now try and kill the enemies.
Alas, the radar scope isn't very easy to read, and unlike the ground targets there don't seem to be any little arrows around the edges of the screen to direct me at enemy ships. There is, at least a 'padlock' button to turn the camera towards the nearest enemy, but the controls are so fast and fiddly that you can't really keep the padlock view on and shoot at things with it (unlike flight sims like IL-2)
Finally all the enemies are dead, and a doorway on a nearby floating station opens (previous I couldn't get in). Cliff has apparently decided to discard his powerful ship and is again wobbling along with his jetpack. I pull up and switch to hover mode, and slowly descend onto the floating platform, firing at the enemies below. This feels EXTREMELY cool. I near an enemy, and try pushing B. Cliff hurls the enemy to the ground and crushes his head with the button of his rifle. Nice. The other enemy suffers a similar fate.
Inside the station, silvery enemies await. I start trying to use the clunky cover system but find just sidestepping out from behind crates is just as effective. A message flashes up as I lunge at an enemy telling me 'hit them back! Push 'B' to melee!'. Well, no shit, I've been doing that for the last five minutes!
Enemies murderized, I proceed downstairs and into some narrow corridors. Another bad guy is easily seen to, and I spot a control panel. B encourages me to destroy it, so I do. But now I can't find my way back out. All the walls are horrible dull grey/brown, the camera is constantly shifting distance due to the tight surroundings and now these weird mutant trill things are crawling along the floor at me and biting.
I manage to get back out to the main cargo bay where more enemies await. Shooting them doesn't seem to kill them nearly as effectively as meleeing them. However, melee attacks seem to work exactly like they did in the tragically awful Turning Point - you have to hit B at the right time and in exactly the right position for the little animation of Cliff brutalizing his foe. Otherwise nothing happens. And nothing keeps happening, as I hammer B until I hit it at just the right time to score a hit. Compared to other FPSes like CoD, Halo and GoW, this is very shoddy. I do note that I can jump and then hit 'A' again to engage the rocketpack for an afterburner-assisted jump, which is cool. I get back outside and fire up the rocketpack for flight mode. Cliff blasts unsteadily off, scraping his face along the floor until I get him airborne.
A weird cutscene of little men escaping from the forcefield ensues, and a strange robot shoots them. And then it ends.
Like I say, it's weird. And inconsistent. The melee controls suck. The cover system is really stiff. And the jetpack - how come when I'm upright, using the boost to jump uses up all the boost in a matter of seconds, but if I go into 'fly' mode I can fly straight upwards for as long as I like without having to boost at all? There's too much reliance on borderline QTE stuff - pulling loops, hijacking ships, meleeing. Yes, it looks cool, but the same canned animation 20 times over loses the thrill.
On the plus side, it's a great idea. It really does feel like flying around once you get the hang of it and, dangerous takeoffs and illogical hoverboosts aside, the jetpack soon becomes an integral part of the way you move (just don't accidentally go into fly mode indoors!). It looks decent and the voice actors seemed okay.
Better than Tribes or Section 8? Not really the same sort of game as far as I can tell. Both of those games limited your flight time by having your jetpack overheat, whereas here it's so crucial to your progress that you need to have unlimited flight.
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