I’ve played Shatterverse during the open beta test, it does progress a lot faster in coop, but it still suffers from [mmo disease, name pending] too much too-easy brain-dead grind followed by too-hard raid bosses with squad-wipe mechanics, with no way to train the boss mechanics alone*.
*ok you tehnically can reach the bosses in this game as a lone hero, but I landed multiple times in “fill the altar with blood” arenas that spawned exclusively do-nothing zombies.
I have a soft spot for the classics, still the only videogame recommended by a dean I’ve ever heard (along NFS Underground mentioned by another teacher, and Diablo 2 by a priest). They were technical marvels at the time, with dynamic lights and gimmick gravity-on-sphere and cylindrical arenas where you walk on spinning walls. These are missing from HD, it’s a very small amount of content but it does dot the i’s of how all modern engines gave up on physics. Here’s hoping for Box3D.
Revolution included a fan-made episode 20 years later like Quake, but it got overambitious with the map size and runs poorly (for me, only the new campaign had issues. I still liked it, I’m a sucker for beach holidays in retro shooters)
Double XXL is “of its time”, it’s an Xbox Live Summer of Arcade-y split-screen-y kills-an-afternoon-y Stacks-weapons-and-adjectives-like-Mothergunship-y capital I Indie game, small child scary world platformer, make clones land on spikes and use them as platforms, ride velociraptors lolrandom, secrets behind the spawn just walk backwards inhales thing. The fall of Devolver needs to be studied, I miss their snark, I guess they were ahead of their time with the “GAMING INDUSTRY SUCKS LOL!” messaging. (not that there’s an E3 for them to do their thing anymore…)
bah, sorry I’m a buzzkill on this, my favourite shooter for this year, another pioneer of retro shooters, made $6000; not profit like… in total. 600 ish unique players
- from the dev: Wrack Postmortem: Inside a Failed Game - YouTube*
- My steam review:
Arcade fun, the core loop is pushing you to learn sequences of the arenas and keep up the combo/ gib-spree. You could just play it in a quick-save-y liniar fashion, but then it’s just average, the enemies don’t do much. It takes too long to get the real rocket launcher, then it dumps all the weapons on you in the course of like, 3 maps. It really is the perfect mix of 2011 unreal 3 with all the quality of life we learned in the meantime, it’s a smooth experience without going into the modern zoomer-shooter tropes. Sword the size of a surf board with a parry window long enough to parry 12 tennis-ball sized bullets at a time. Bosses can be interrupted.
If nothing else, go listen to
*EDIT: the mad lad just said Wrack will keep going as a side project, somehow, because creativity is worth it/ “insanity pays off lol”