definitely a Triple-B title, it delivers a potent Serious Sam like game experience, minus the cartoonish characters
The demo of the Empire published PC game left me flat, but others who downloaded it liked it. I picked up the retail.
While definitely a Triple-B title, it delivers a potent Serious Sam like game experience, minus the cartoonish characters. The starting weapon is basically the MG42 from call of duty, ammoless, in this game mobile, and sporting an under barrel grenade launcher. It's got the highest rate of fire of all the early weapons and you can basically fire it straight for 30 seconds before it over heats.
And even with this firearm of the gods, this game throws so many enemies at you that heat management of this weapon is a critical skill to manage. It’s the only one that lets you see a screen full of tiger striped scythes, hold down the left mouse button, tune out the screams of your NPC squad mates, and stagger out exhausted, with Halo-lifted shield system screaming failure, yet alive. I don’t think I’ve every played a game that’s so successfully captured the lawn-mower breastplate from Dead-Alive as some levels is Starship Troopers.
Even Serious Sam never put this many enemies on screen at once and I really can't think of a game that does since, like, robotron. The animations are crude, and it cripples the finest PCs money can buy, but the “blast missions against never ending hordes” are pretty bleeding edge simulation FPS. Some missions will drop you against an unending bug spawn, that you must actually push into and move past to advance the story. At night, with your flashlights on, and the bugs essentially black silhouettes, I gotta say it grabbed me as much as anything in FEAR.
Their LDs get credit for some ambitious set piece levels like the drop ship hanger on the orbital ships and the hot LZ. Even the base assault mission has these great in-game cinematics that respect scale of the level. One thing I noticed was the sardonic, gallows humor of the game. One mission objective was to "follow the trail of my best men's corpses".
Considering how solid their non-comical ranged mob-slaughter game style is, I'm curious why they paired with Starship Troopers. The game pretty crassly uses the movie itself as cinematic bookends to missions. I never knew if I was "playing the movie" like in Star Wars: Episode III or these were just "atmospheric" cinematics (though denise and dougie and all the rest are front and center). I almost wish they came up with some suitable new IP about space gladiators or post apocalyptic road warriors.
Strangelite might have something here.