Stark wrote:
Amusingly, DEHR is a recent adventure shooter, and those logistics elements are actually lame. Searching for bullet in the setting is lame. Exploring whole rooms or hidden areas that contain nothing is lame. Having to read the shit map to progress the story is lame. Even the inventory system is lame.
That's because DEHR is set during the global bullet shortage. You get more bullets in Dead Space, and that's a game where managing your limited ammo reserve is an intentional part of the design.
The original Deus Ex was, without being particularly more open or freeform, more rewarding to poke about in because you got things like weapon mods and upgrades that felt significant, rather than "great, more Neo Geo cartridges with totally pointless viruses on, whopee shit!". Poor implementation, rather than design, was the problem in DEHR. Still, sold loads and nerds loved it, so maybe more people will copy it Alpha Protocol now.
It's pretty trivial to ensure that kind of positive feedback: the DEHR guys must have either run out of time or forgot to run the auto loot script over the levels. But if 'adventure' or 'exploration' or 'freedom' is just the ability to ransack peopel's desks, can we be surprised it's streamlined out? Maybe people are too young to remember old shooters that would literally stop if you missed an item or couldn't open a door, completing killing the pace until you worked out what you were 'supposed' to do.
Alpha Protocol is a good example of adventureness, but because it used hubs and fast travel people probably don't like it. Not 'free' enough to wander Taiwan aimlessly, etc.
Finally got hold of this and IMHO is it a worthless piece of crap. All my earlier comments were based on the assumption that the core gameplay mechanics, while annoyingly non-plane-like, were at least playable. They are in fact horribly broken and annoying. I have never seen a dev team optimise their efforts so well for looking good in trailers while utterly neglecting actual players. I didn't like HAWX 2 very much, but playing through that was vastly more fun than sitting through this gameplay abortion. The core gameplay actually resembles a broken beat-em-up more than anything else, in that you are supposed to input stupid stick-waggling and button combos in particular timing constraints, but with a distracting and irrelevant 'plane flies close to scenery for no reason' video in the background. It is an endless string of quicktime events with pointlessly obfuscated button cues. Of course only the scripted dogfight paths have good ground scenery, elsewhere it is thoroughly sub-par (by 2011 standards).
While the aircraft segments were the most painful, because of the utter buchering of the former (fun) AC gameplay, the helicopter segments were the most amusingly pathetic in that almost every other current-gen game I've played that included helicopters did them better than Assault Horizon did. Just Cause 2, Mercenaries 2, Bad Company, in fact I had about twenty times more fun turkey-shooting cars with the Apache in GTA:San Andreas than I did playing this. It takes a special kind of suck to simultaneously break the controls, obfuscate the targets and have dull repetitive combat situations. The whole game has awful pacing in fact, previous AC games usually made good use of tension in frantic dogfights vs desperate chases vs breaks in the action. Assault Horizon just constantly spawns enemies at you. Even the AC-130 sections are screwed up compared to HAWX, jerking your target box around excessively, target placement that is simultaneously unimaginative and unrealistic, and making the SAMs sufficiently hard to find that levels degenerate into 'replay until memorise which spots of terrain to shoot before you die' (admittedly, I was playing on hard).
By contrast I also played through Dark Void over Christmas and was pleasantly surprised. I went in with very low expectations but both the gameplay innovation and the art direction really impressed me. The game is rough, unpolished and unfinished (the glitches with health regen in the escort missions were very frustating), but I felt the developers were doing a good job and just ran out of money. I had a lot of fun with it and the plot while cliched was still vastly more interesting than Assault Horizon's fake-Clancy clone-plot.
They just totally lost it after Ace Combat 6 and have been going backwards ever since. The player now no longer has control of any of the mission objectives, all of the missions and events that happen in them are all over dramatic, overall design of the mechanics has regressed with the game's aircraft now at an all time low in character and uniqueness.
Pull the plug on Project ACES. Let em go out of business, get sacked, and get cannibalized for personnel and equipment.
