Be Excellent To Each Other

Any one played the demo of this on XBLALOHA? It looks (a lot) like Halo, plays like GoW (3rd person, wall hugging and cover finding, ducking and diving) but then you have the added bonus of a rocket pack strapped to your back for flighty fighting and jumping like a loon! The flying is actually pretty good as you have good maneuverability and control. Might get a little repetitive after a while, but colour me interested.

I played it. I quite liked the flying. The shooty stuff was okay. A mixture of polished/unpolished/good/gash.

A bit like Dark Sector or something.

Seems alright though. I'll probably take a punt on it.

I don't think there was enough shooty stuff to say yay or nay to, but I did like the flying (like a bird might fly).

The best flawed game I have ever played.

I'll take a look at the DV demo.

How does it compare to Section 8 or Tribes?

I haven't played either of those; should I have?

Tribes, yes. Tribes 2 remains one of the most involving multiplayer FPSes ever.

Sold. (Maybe)

There wasn't enough jumping like a loon for my tastes. (also that it seems far too easy to kill oneself on takeoff is a bit galling.

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.

Exactly what I did. More than once, and often far away from a checkpoint.



Not RT, Click the right stick in. Then push them both in the same direction. It's sortof explained, but poorly.


I found that I could just shoot them down. Mounting them seemed to be a quick way to die.



Agreed.

It seems to have rubbed off on me, as I've explained what I was doing poorly too. I was pushing the right stick in and then jagging both of the sticks around. But nothing was happening. The message changes when you hold the right stick in, but then no matter what I did, it didn't do anything further.

I found it did stuff with both down, both left and both right.

Yeah, eventually it worked, but as I say it only seemed to happen through sheer dumb luck. It also worked when I was flying the hijacked ship.

Played more of the demo (which is to say, the demo, again). I really want to like this, the jetpack is so elegantly integrated into the GoW play. And the big AA gun shooting at me, I could fly right up to it and land on top of it and watch the AI go haywire trying to target me. And then the shield station, rather than fight my way in I just flew in (and finally appreciated the scale of it all as the door which is huge on foot is a tiny target when flying) and quickly changed to hover and landed.

Before the enemies could react I was down the narrow hallway, killed the one guard and blew up the console. The serpenty things came but I doubled tapped Y and then immediately hit A to do the briefest of brief flights over his head, and then I was back in the cargo bay. Hit Y twice again and scraped injuriously off the floor but managed to pull back and soar out the door to safety. WIN!

I fi#ound I had no problem with the maneuvers, it came up on the screen click RS to start, then move both. Okay, it didn't say keep RS held in while doing so, but as not doing so didn't do anything... As for shooting the ships down, I only saw the press b thing on the second play through, and didn't get chance to use it. I also didn't use a melee attack. I agree with you though, it does feel a bit clunky and naff, but I really like the concept!

I ordered this off ShopTo the other day for the grand sum of £3.99.

It came yesterday and I spent most of last night playing it and you know what, I like it!

I am easily pleased when it comes to Capcom games but I consider it good value for money. I would have spent more on a KFC and that wouldn't have lasted as long.

The achievements seem manageable too. That always helps.

I like flying in the rocket pack. There's a cool bit where you have to fly inbetween the legs of a walking AT-AT type bad guy. When it says fly, I'm sure it didn't mind if I scraped my face off the tarmac underneath it.

I never got this in the end. To the ShopTo-o-tron.

You'll have to let us know what you think!

I just maxed out Iron Man 2 which is a similar mix of shooty jetpackness and really enjoyed it. It's not for everyone but fans of the 'Void might like it.

Or hate it.

Really can't say.

You're a dark void.

Also what's happened to Perkies? Haven't seen him around in a long time....

He got fed up with shit injokes.

If you're really lucky and you're playing Crackdown 2, minding your own business when the planets are in a particular alignment, they say the ghost of Perkies will appear above you, hovering threateningly in an Agency Chopper.