First Impressions

[gamerbase 1]

I've been playing now for a day or so on the PC, and having played the Amiga version back in the day, I have to say there is a lot of promise here. Much better than I anticipated.

Some initial thoughts though (based on playing the campaign):

1) Enemy AI. OK so I can accept that the enemies are very stupid and have no control, but please give them a chance. Needs big improvement.

2) Walrus AI. Please fix! If I set way points I expect the walrus to figure out how to move without getting stuck on a gram of sand. Whats with the 742 point turns??? This is very frustrating and needs to be improved. I rarely use AI now to control walrus' as its just too annoying.

3) Some roads are deemed to be muddy terrain, and walrus moves slow. Why? Roads should be fine, especially prevalent on Treasure.

4) Map Overlay. Please can we have a map overlay button so when flying/driving around the islands we can see where we are going?

5) Map Mode. Why cant I control the vehicle when in map mode? I can see in the top right hand corner, so why cant I move it? Having the vehicle stop and not be able to control as soon as I change mode makes no sense. The control keys should remain with the vehicle and only the mouse should move the map.

6) Compulsory Time Warp. Really? Why? Just give us an accelerate time key as an option. I want to fly around the carrier while moving between islands, have a play, have a bit of fun. But no. I have to do the time warp. I know its back to the 80s but really.

Well done though, I do love it. Now, just bring on the multiplayer!

---------- Post added at 10:06 ---------- Previous post was at 09:42 ----------

If you want to try out this game before buying, hmv Gamerbase are running a promotion with the Publisher in the UK.

Come down to the gamerbase centres in London, Manchester, Edinburgh or Glasgow and you can try out the game free of charge on one of our gaming PCs or XBOX 360s. This promotion is running for the next 2 weeks.

We also have it installed and ready for play today for those that cant wait.

On launch day (Fri 28th), the publisher is running a competition in store where a lucky gamer can win an xbox 360 in each of the 4 stores listed above. In London, we will also have an Amiga on hand, with the original game to play too.

Full details here http://www.gamerbase.com/?a=post&id=136803

[kylania 567]

Congrats on the official release BIS! :)

[scareya 1]

Yes, I would like to buddy up with kylania: Congratulations on the release.

My first impressions of the final product are actually very good. The recent Beta 3 scared me a lot, but the release version feels smoother. There are many things to be discovered, the new islands are very nicely designed (the ones I conquered so far at least). Ok, I haven't started the campaign yet - for me the strategy part is more important.

There is only one thing that stroke me instantly: There is no way to start a game with each side owing just one island. That is a must, please add it!

[jedra 11]

First impressions are good so far. My only concern is the FPS portion at the start of the campaign. I have to say that it is not that great and I am hoping that once it is done with, we don't have to 'get out and walk' again. If it is nostalgia you are aiming at then I suppose it fits as it reminded me of FPS games from a long, long time ago. It is somewhat cheesy to say the least. Is it the same voice actor as in Crimson Lance (BAF DLC for Arma)? It sure sounds like it - it keeps reminding me of that campaign anyway!

To counter this though I would imagine that most people (me included) bought this for the strategy game anyway, with the campaign just being a useful introduction as to how to play the main strategy element.

Anyway, I am going to play through the campaign and hope it gives me the tools necessary to better in the strategy game than I did in the beta!!

[krunkert 1]

First impressions here are good as well. I'm looking forward to long strategy sessions and 'thinking' which is hardly required on any game any more. Like everyone else I have a couple things that need to be addressed.

-More options in the strategy game setup!

-each player starts with x islands (where x can be different for each player)

-Ability to fight more than one computer. You're gonna need this for a multiplayer patch anyways.

-The computer is pretty stupid...nuff said

-Time warp button (don't know how this will apply to multiplayer but that's what we pay you guys for)

-Got into a carrier fight on the other end of the map and both carriers were JACKED!! I had to wait what felt like 15 minutes for a barge to get to me so I could limp back home.

-Carrier upgrades

-RADAR- I knew the enemy carrier was around one of my islands but couldn't find it...very annoying. Could be a late game or very expensive upgrade (going to need this for multiplayer too);

-Cruise missiles -again, late game or each missile is VERY expensive. Can control it like a manta?

Things that I may have missed.

-Can you set groups? Like F1 to select Manta1and WalRus1? Id like to have each walrus guarded by a Manta but don't know how to set that up.

-Can you select a unit without jumping into it? I'm controlling a Manta and like to tell walrus 8 to go kill bad guy but I hate how I have to jump in walrus 8, issue command, go back to Manta.

Okay turning into a wall of text at this point. At any rate its a good start, I think with a couple of tweaks and add ons the multiplayer for this game will be killer.

[Suranis 1]

YOu can have each walrus guarded by a manta by setting the Manta to "assist" the walrus.

You can order Units by flipping to the map issuing the order then going back to the FPV on the walrus

[Krasny 0]

The most glaring problem so far is the Walrus AI.

It's quite hilarious watching it try to negotiate it's way through rocks. Let's hope the Mars rover has better AI.

Another problem is Manta control, which seems to be sluggish and not like an aircraft at all.

Overall my first two hours of play have been quite positive.

[Mortem86 10]

Wait until you come into the mountainterrain..THEN your are going to HATE walrus...its just plain stupid.

I wish those walruses could turn on the spot...and dont have to do alle that back and forth driving to turn...its just GNAR.

On some Islands its pretty cool with the walruses...but the moment its gets to tight you are screwed. Mountainpass...heavyforrest. After playing for more then 5 hours, walrus AI forced me to ragequit.

[turin turambar 0]

The campaign starts with a bad impression.

The graphics. They seem a weird mix of good and bad graphics, the islands are nice, the lightning is nice, but the generic scifi art is bland as hell and some specific art assets done for the campaign are ugly.

The first FPS part is incredibly bad. Thank god is not very long.

It's like a badly done old school fps. The movement is bad, I played a looot of FPS (From Doom 1 onwards) and believe me, there is something wrong with it. Like, the movement speed code is kind of bugged or badly coded and it isn't stable, it depends in some way from the turning speed if you are turning and/or the strafe speed. Some times you move at normal speed, sometimes at a faster speed.

The view turning speed is very fast, like a old school game, there is no iron sights, only zoom. But if you use that zoom, the turning speed is decreased by 10X. And you can't jump. The slow key (shift) is useless, as it's too slow. And btw, the movement sounds while you are walking are wrong, it really doesn't seem like the correct ones.

Some more comments:

Animations and voices are mediocre.

Bland weapon.

Really bland enemies with bad AI.

Geometry collion while waking can hurt you.

Bad directing in cutscenes.

Cheap bombastic orchestral music and bad use (no, don't put an epic chorus each time an enemy appears)

Lack of indications in the campaign. It seems sometimes the goal indicator won't appear in the hud. Other times, it really felt as there isn't enough instructions, at some moments I only knew what to do next because I played the beta.

Bad stuff seen in beta and maintained in the final game:

-Slow "time tunnel" while traveling between islands. Really, what's the point.

-No abstracted "quick docking", Homeworld style, when you leave an island. You have to wait like 3 minutes while the slow Walruses reach the carrier. Why? Because the devs hate us. No other explanation.

-At the most basic level, the game consists of controlling vehicles (staying in the tactical map is rare), a land vehicle and an aerial vehicle. In island after island, it's the same. Walrus, Manta.

But there aren't very fun to drive. Say, they aren't as fun as a jeep in Halo or a little bird in Arma 2. The walrus is a clumsy apc, the manta flies kind of weird.

[Dajunka 10]

Congratulations BI , I hope sales go well for you.

And now...........

Let the fun begin.

[eJay 1]

First hour of CC is godawful, it's the worst FPS game this year. Happily, next hours are better and strategic mix of action and RTS works well, although AI sometimes sucks.

I love dynamic weather system, visual quality is good.

[Gnrl_Grad 1]

I haven't played the campaign yet. I went straight into the strategy game and I'm very impressed. Lots of stuff in there that wasn't in the betas, really enjoying playing it at the moment. Haven't finished first game yet or met enemy carrier, early days with all those islands now! Loving the different deck guns, the main carrier cannon and the sound it makes, all very cool. It seems a lot better than beta3.

[jedra 11]

You are really going to have to work on the Walrus pathfinding - at the moment it is absolutely suicidal to try and let the Walrus' go anywhere on their own. A lot of the time they can't even navigate around the carrier and most of the remaining time they are just spinning round in circles trying to avoid a tiny rock. It is especially frustrating when you need the Walrus' to bug-out in an emergency (maybe because they have become damaged) - to watch them do a forward-reverse dance with each other almost leads to rage-quit territory.

If you set 4 Walrus' off to a single waypoint you can almost guarantee that they will take a few minutes to get there, getting split up en-route with half of them unable to find a suitable path.

[Suranis 1]

It was nowhere near that bad in beta 2. What changed?

[Mr Butlertron 10]

Are there really only 2 vehicles - the manta and the walrus? Changing turrets doesn't make them less ugly.

[sammyf 1]

I thought the only problem with it was the collision detection (especially for shots, as the collision mesh are not even remotely concave). It is semi-realistic, as in "you can't jump", you can not run at 20km/h and the weapon has a solid feel to it without being a BFG9000. The visuals while not groundbreaking in terms of effects work also quite well to convey the feel of an alien world.

** WARNING - VERY SMALL SPOILERS INCOMING **

Additionally it is *very* forgiving difficulty wise, which brings me to my next observation : IMO (And the devs can definitely contradict me if I am wrong), the whole point of the FPS is to make the world real to the player. You get to visit a base ~in person~, even get to drive a walrus directly (yes... it is exactly the same as steering it remotely, but the context is different), you get to control one of the androids, but even more importantly you get to visit parts of the inside of the carrier, instantly making it *a real place* instead of some abstract idea which might have been a giant inflatable Spongebob doll for all it is worth.

As a player, the whole strategy bits in which you carefully plan how to attack which island (while praying your walrus's won't get stuck) becomes a lot more real and personal once the ship stops being an empty shell.

** END OF MINI SPOILER **

I only finished the first mission (Arachnid), so I can't comment much on the campaign (Although : "yay for british speaker in a non-fantasy role!" ;) but so far I liked what I saw and really enjoyed the experience :)

[Suranis 1]

Are there really only 2 vehicles - the manta and the walrus? Changing turrets doesn't make them less ugly.

Yes, though they change their look depending on the armor you load on them.

And seriously, only having 2 units is not that big of a deal. It allows you to focus on the strategy rather than picking the "best" unit 90% of players will exclusively use because they are the "best"

And yeah the FPS was just to get you into the action. It was fun to run around a command center for a bit after playing the beta

[harbinger 1]

Completely horrendous Walrus pathfinding, the 250cc engine parallel twin Kawasaki engine noise, mouselag, and 12fps made me ragequit.

I'm going to have a look at some settings, see if I can find anything wrong - but so far Beta 3 was a much more pleasant experience. I've only tried the Strategy part so I can compare with what was in Beta, but really awful performance issues on my rig that weren't there before. Not saying it's the game or the Dev's fault (apart from the pathfinding and sounds of course) but something is very, very wrong.

Edit

Fixed that performance issue for the moment. Stuck everything on a Ramdrive and it seems to work a lot better. The intro movie still judders and goes low-res, but I've learned to ignore that.

Just tried the campaign bit now too.

Urm, whats up with dying when I walk past a rock? Or some no-name character getting killed that I can't even see? Or getting squished by a walrus that charges through a dead one? I'm all for challenging environments, but the campaign game neither gives you any feedback as to what your objectives are, nor give you any idea where you are going wrong until you die. It's not explorative - if I want to walk down past a rock, and see whats on that beach, why can't I? I think the FPS bits are on rails, and the game won't let you deviate from those, which kind of defeats the entire point :(

Kind of saddened now.

Edited September 28, 2012 by Harbinger

[sav112g 10]

I was looking forward to this when I got my new machine next year but this sounds dated already and poor. :(

Made the mistake of getting into PS2 and watching how it was developing and it looks a fantastic open world multi-unit game on a massive epic scale, to me this looks quite tame and boring now and I was a huge fan of the original that I played way back.:( Back then having vehicles you could control around each other was something special and made the game so fantastic:cool: but things moved on light years and this game looks to be clinging on to more of just the idea of the classic but has hindered it.:butbut: The original did four units for each class why with quad core PC is this still the same. We should be seeing 40 units and being able to pick what one if any we want to pilot or drive. In the end it could be a wrong impression but to me it lacks what was needed and that was to not only improve on the original but bring it into the modern age.:eek:

Sadly four manta's versus I guess only ever four others kind of tells a rather sad tale.:o

Edited September 29, 2012 by sav112g

[GrillsBears 1]

Bought this game because I loved the original when I was a kid.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to play a lot because of current rendering issues (if I can't use 3 screens and 3dvision, I play it on a tablet - we don't live in 1988 anymore after all...).

Other than that, I think the original games concept is still unique to this date and I appreciate the fact that soemone picked it up :).

A few notes:

- Wasn't interested in the FPS part to begin with, but actually played it to the point where you take control of the carrier. Really odd design decision - people bought the game to play carrier command, not a dull FPS that would have been called bad 6 years ago. Why annoy the heck out of everyone with that sequence (especially the terrible train part)?

- Complete lack of setup options for the proper game: After having been completely annoyed with the campaign, I was hoping to setup a game where all islands are neutral and both parties start out with just the carrier on random points on the map (and 64 islands, just like in the original). Really that couldn't have been much work, except if the AI doesn't go above punching ball levels.

- Walrus pathfinding: Watching it is more depressing than watching someone undergoing a seizure. Especially bad if you're not interested in the unit-control part of the game and just the logistic/strategic part.

- Console Interface.

I really loved the original and that's what will keep me going for a while, but I hope some of the issues will be addressed or at least the game will be highly moddable.

[jedra 11]

I have played this all evening and I have to say that I am really enjoying the campaign so far (other than the Walrus path-finding which I think you will have got the gist of the complaints by now!). So far I like the fact that I don't have to deal with the other carrier and can just go through each island at a time. I'll probably play the campaign through before moving on to the strategy game.

To build on my previous post I am now of the opinion that you should drop the FPS part from the beginning of the campaign. It's a shame you didn't have this as part of the P&C beta because I think that you would have got the idea that it wasn't really needed. The problem is that it doesn't really set the scene, and it doesn't add anything to the game - it doesn't really fit at all. In fact I would say there's a real danger people will see this bit and dismiss the game outright even though it only forms about 20 minutes of game time. I hate to say it, but it is not even that well done. If you wanted to introduce the whole idea of how we are in a carrier, you could have just used a cut scene.

So niggles apart (path-finding is a rather large niggle) it's a great game so far. I think it will serve as a solid base for mods as well - looking forward to seeing what tools you deploy for this.

[Sardinia 10]

Got no response in my main thread.. my main problem besides pathfinding is I cant time warp while sitting still.. forces me to waste fuel in strategy mode to wait for stuff to build

[Suranis 1]

At least the FPS bit was pretty easy so you could get through it pretty fast. Aside from that, and the blah blah Walrus pathfinding, I really enjoyed the couple of Islands I played through today. Looking forward to getting deeper into the campaign tomorrow.

Really good game you have here guys.

---------- Post added at 02:05 ---------- Previous post was at 02:00 ----------

Got no response in my main thread.. my main problem besides pathfinding is I cant time warp while sitting still.. forces me to waste fuel in strategy mode to wait for stuff to build

That was asked before. Essentially just being able to enter timewarp at will would screw over some physics and other variables and they could not implement it. I recomend you manage yoru Islands a bit though to get the most out of your Islands. A ratio of 500 minerals to 1 production is a good baseline to experiment around.

Also build stuff one at a time and then some fuel as the fuel does not use much minerals which will allow them to build up and you can get a head start on the next big build. Otherwise you are literally building at the rate your minerals come in, which is inefficiant

[Sardinia 10]

At least the FPS bit was pretty easy so you could get through it pretty fast. Aside from that, and the blah blah Walrus pathfinding, I really enjoyed the couple of Islands I played through today. Looking forward to getting deeper into the campaign tomorrow.

Really good game you have here guys.

---------- Post added at 02:05 ---------- Previous post was at 02:00 ----------

That was asked before. Essentially just being able to enter timewarp at will would screw over some physics and other variables and they could not implement it. I recomend you manage yoru Islands a bit though to get the most out of your Islands. A ratio of 500 minerals to 1 production is a good baseline to experiment around.

Also build stuff one at a time and then some fuel as the fuel does not use much minerals which will allow them to build up and you can get a head start on the next big build. Otherwise you are literally building at the rate your minerals come in, which is inefficiant

Thats too bad.. guess ill keep purposely running out of fuel and building then.. the enemy carrier has me pinned and my units seem to get raped when I attack an island so guess you have to turtle to win

[dannofdawn222 1]

Apart from the crashes I encountered, I think I can enjoy this game potential. But the crashes are preventing me from getting that.

1. Can't order Manta to use hook, I'm a bit disappointed with that, but I'm pretty good at doing that manually now.

2. I think fuel runs out a bit too fast IMO. I pretty much have to order a supply run with fuel non-stop while I hop between neutral islands. Then I need to have non-stop supplies once again when I had to head all the way down from top to bottom when the enemy attack one of my island. While I enjoy the idea of more carefully planning your fuel, the map screen doesn't exactly tell you how much fuel is needed, and because the ship don't have a proper inventory screen, I can't tell how much fuel and fuel pack I need to optimize my supply runs.

3.Walrus pathfinding is dumb, but thank god I don't have much problem with that so far. I just like using hooks to extract my walrus.

4. Tooltips on weapons are too minimal.

Overall I like the game, had it not been crashes, I would have been playing this non-stop. But ATM I barely managed to invade 2 islands in 1 save game. I'm having the same amount of content I can access in a full game as I was playing the beta, that is sad.