Campaign impressions of Achron

[chitti r]

The thing that most stuck to my eye was the overall cartoony vibe of the art direction. The comm-pictures and the pre-mission cut scenes seemed like they are obvious stand-ins for the real deal but then again they seemed somewhat honed as if that was the intended final product. I expected the art to be something close to SupCom, StarCraft or even Metroid Prime. I look at the campaign knowing that the release is closing and I get the feel that at this point it should be more complete. But it does provide genuine value the times that I get myself not to pay too much attention to its shortcomings.

[RockOn]

On the cut scene art direction, I think it's fine. Not perfect certainly, but definitely satisfactory. I mean what were we expecting: photo realistic pre-rendered CGI cut scenes and fully animated talking portraits? That being said, the gameplay definitely has a certain grit to it that is absent in the cut scenes. Maybe if you had your artist go back in and add a bit of texture onto the portraits and animatics you could recapture some of that atmosphere without redoing everything.

[Squibbit]

It's interesting, but the pacing does seem a bit wonky and it is hard to tell how Holloway is feeling about things, so it can be hard to tell how I should react (not enough information to decide who I like).

[Wyvern]

I liked the art style of the cut scenes for the most part. Darking out character portraits to indicate who is speaking feels kind of clumsy though. Not sure why. I do agree that the player is not given enough information about recent events at the start of the game. It might also be a good idea to mention that there were alien ruins on Remnant before humans ever settled there, as that doesn't seem to be made clear. The first 4 missions are good. They slowly introduce achronal concepts and gameplay to the player and create situations where they make sense to use them. But then they stop doing that, and force the player to simply fight their way from one end of a map filled with enemies to the other. Through long, narrow, windy corridors. Why? You guys know the limitations of your game and the issues that units have with pathing.

[ApplePowerPC]

My thoughts exactly same here. This is also the first issue a play tester would notice. Map 9 is the worst offender, with corridors too narrow to fit 2 of your units through while you have a dozen to move. Another source of annoyance is the system of area denial triggers, manually ordering your units to move back and spamming messages.

[MacIntel]

What i would like would be more "history" dossiers at the beginning of the missions, like the ones about the colonies rioting. Though that might be only me enjoying the fictional history and the way the worlds work more than the actual stories being told inside them. I don't know about others, but i would greatly appreciate more history on the CESO, smaller sections of it, the system, technology, and all that stuff. And those dossiers at the beginning of the missions are a very good way to implement that, in my opinion. Maybe i just like getting dossiers about stuff in games that is just so cool.