On the Subject of Catching Up

Julie Soete

Now that I've got the girly pics out of my system, it's time to see what your esteemed Field Marshal has been up recently.

The Hunter

Still going strong, this one. It has reverted to full-on microtransactions now, with various new weapons and other bits and pieces being rolled out. At its heart is still the immensely immersive and surprisingly playable thinking-man's shooter it has always been. Rain has been re-implemented after early versions tended to crash the game, but now that I think about it I haven't had a crash in a long time. There's also a lot of statistics feedback, although I still don't quite get the correlation between an animal's score and what I see in-game, it seems a bit random.
Looking forward to them opening up the big island some time in the future.

Tom Clancy's HAWX

I finally got back into this after losing interest early on. Unfortunately I can't claim to have had some sort of revelatory experience but at least I've finished it now, and so I can move on to more interesting things.
It tries terribly hard to offer an involving storyline, but after the first couple of missions I found I was simply skipping all the briefings. They're not important, you just end up shooting at anything you can lock onto really. My biggest complaint, and probably a lot of people's, is still the shitty "assistance off" mode. Fortunately I found I could complete the game on "normal" difficulty without even having to use it. No doubt phags will immediately switch to the harder settings, and I can imagine dogfights might become quite painful, and possibly even impossible without it. It's so dumb though, all they have to do is allow for proper breaking and stalls from the cockpit views and it would be all good. I stand by my previous suspicion that they did it both to prevent the game being too easy (simpler to cripple the controls than develop better AI) and to show off the visuals.
Speaking of visuals, I wasn't exactly blown away. The ground detail in particular is shit. The game tends to look best during some of the big dogfights over large cities, where you're flying through multiple missile smoke trails illuminated by dawn/dusk sunlight. In the countryside/desert missions it's decidedly less impressive. In DX10 mode (which didn't even work on the Steam version for a long time) at least there's a slightly better sense of atmosphere.
So overall the game is fairly mediocre. The storyline aspects don't hold a candle to Strike Commander, it's a fairly straightforward arcade shooter with annoying control mechanics, and the graphics aren't all that great.

Cryostatis

Picked this up for free via an EVGA offer. In fact I had forgotten I had it until just now when I was trying to remember if there was anything else I had played recently. Not that I've played much, but so far my impressions are that the frame rates are bit low given the visual quality it offers. I'll try and remember to have another go and see if the actual game is any good.

Coming Soon

Overlord II should be a fun distraction if it's anything like the first. ARMA 2 could be a good tactical war shooter, but I'll probably wait until the price has dropped on Steam for that one. I might give the forthcoming free-to-play version of DDO a go, despite not having the most favourable recollections of the initial release. I've got a few more MMOs under my belt now, though, so perhaps it'll have something to offer.