Loadout

[Mr. Analog]

Well I gave Loadout a shot today, it's a free to play FPS where you can build your own custom weapons

On the plus side it gives you a lot of ways to customize your weapons, that's the real fun part. Take your own playstyle and amp up the parts you do best right in the guns. The downside is that being free to play you have to grind to get xp and gold to unlock new options and buy them.

The downside is the combat feels sluggish (maybe it's a low level thing?) and finding a server can take a while (was over a minute this afternoon).

Also the character customization while rich requires gold to actually use and there are only a few base models everyone looks kinda samey at low levels.

it's fun, but maybe not as much fun as it could be. I guess we'll see how it matures

[suspicious]Oh yeah, if you want to play my name is "MrAnalog"[/suspicious]

[Mr. Analog]

Played some more last night with our friends at Super Awesome Gamers.

Well I learnt that I enjoy objective maps more than arena maps for this game at least.

CTF mode is kind of fun if you have people working together, the main problem is getting people to work together. This is old school CTF where if the other team has the flag you can't score, this happens a lot because the game in general doesn't really lend itself to defence. I mean you COULD stand around your own team's flag but you're going to be by yourself, so when the clump of enemies rolls up you're just going to die. Most of the fighting happens at mid but each map has multiple paths to the flag and hardly ever any mid crossover. So what happens is both teams get the flag and can't score it so the flag bearers and support seek each other out at mid to try to get their own flag back. Did I mention the flag is a giant one shot kill hammer? I think if there were fewer lanes and some kind of defensive structures you could set up and leave this mode would work better.

The other game mode we played was CP, this was a lot more fun, there were 3 CPs to cap, you could cap them in any order and it flowed a lot better than CTF. The maps in general are maze-like but not hard to navigate (especially the low gravity maps), this mode felt the fastest and had a good flow and forced players to group up. I think so far that's my biggest problem with the game so far is players spawn in all directions and very rarely team up to get things done, this is the play style I think they were going for because there aren't a lot of incentives for helping your team out (other than winning and earning in-game currency). I did find with CTF/CP mode people would play the objectives and naturally group together, so covering the flag bearer or healing team mates capping a point from a safe spot starts to become a factor and teams would come together.

Like any team based FPS if you work as a team you win more games, something like TF2 kind of forces your hand into making decisions about where and how you fit, this game you just never know what people have on them so it's harder to sort out where people fit in a team. You could be a combo demoman / medic and unless you dispense da heals or plant some sticky traps nobody on your team is going to work with you strategically.

Again, the only other thing I can say is the game feels slow, sure you can run, but you can't gun while you run and overall for a game where everything is 90% offence you want to run crazy fast. I'm not sure if there are speed boosts at higher levels or what but the gameplay feels a lot less frantic than I expected.