Overload

Game Title: Overload
Released: May 31, 2018
Game Length: 8 Hours
Grade: B-

Expectations: A long time ago, back in 1995, a group of guys decided to make a new pilot game. Being able to move in all directions, they called this little gem Descent. It was rad. Descent II and Descent III were released within the following years, building upon the original conception. Come February of 2016, these guys wanted to make another one. They barely made their goal of $300,000 and released a demo with three small levels to try out. I'm not going to lie. The graphics of the new game looks way better than what we had all those years ago. My only hope is that they recaptured some of that original greatness.

Reality: The game most definitely made me smile within the first few minutes. Being able to move around in a 3-Dimensional space with ease certainly recaptures the spirit of Descent. There are secret areas to find, people in cryogenic tubes to save, enemy ships to destroy, and a reactor to blow up. The music is pretty decent and the ships are all cool to look at. The voice acting was really good and the audio logs were well designed. The areas are elaborate and properly reflect how a station would look like in each level. Yet every time I found myself suddenly enjoying the game, there was something that stunted my experience. It was all the technical choices they made around the game itself.

Controls: I guess the developers assumed you recalled how the original games worked, because I most certainly did not. The tutorial was overly lacking on the details and didn't really help explain all the controls to me. Your normal WADS controls with the Q & E buttons for rolling I figured out right away. Spacebar obviously made you go up. But for some reason it took me way too long to figure out that shift makes you go down. F summons your flare while H turns on your headlights. You could also summon a guide with the Z button. They made an unusual choice to have you rotate between your weapons by scrolling up on your mouse while scrolling down rotated between your projectiles.

Because of the vast number of options you have at your disposal, the numbers on your keyboard are set between weapon sets. 1 cycles between two energy weapons - "Impulse" and "Cyclone," 2 cycles between "Reflex" and "Crusher," 3 cycles between two ammunition-type weapons: "Driller" and "Flak," 4 cycles between electric-type weapons: "Thunderbolt" and "Lancer," 5 contains "Falcon" and "Missile-Pods," 6 contains "Hunter" and "Creeper," 7 rotates between two strong explosives "Nova" and "Devastator," and 8 activates two devices: "Time-Bomb" and "Vortex." No matter how hard I tried, I could not scroll to the right weapon fast enough.

Saving: So I'm not exactly a master pilot. At least I have the tools to help me, right? After blowing up the reactor in the second level, my game decided to crash to desktop while my ship was making its way out of the mines. I figured all I had to do was reload my game. I found out rather quickly that the game only saves automatically at the beginning of the level. That's when I learned that F8 quick-saves your game. When I died on the fourth level, I found out that my game was not saving properly. Well it was but it was saving in the bottom save slot. However, it was only saving the level and not the progress in the level? I read all kinds of speculation online linking to some compatibility issue with the drivers or how certain systems conflicted with the process, but without finding a solution I had to resort to manually saving the game from that moment on. That's alright, because there is no quick-load feature or ability to "continue" your campaign when you restarted the game.

Guide: Descent III was amazing to include a little guide-bot to show you where to go next. Overload included its own hologuide as well. As much as I enjoyed this little fellow helping me out every time I got lost turning a corner, it was problematic. First off, it requires you to upgrade your system so this thing doesn't use up your energy. No matter how many times you press the button, the hologuide cannot be re-launched or dismissed. It essentially remains active the moment you throw it out and will eventually come back to find you if you aren't following it. It will open doors and continue on without you! It will not show you where to destroy the button or where a reactor is that will disable a shield composed over a door and instead continue to mercilessly ram the force field until you do something about it. Once you obtain whatever objective it was seeking out, it will sit idly by "awaiting instructions" until you press the button again. There are times when it will decide to disappear to "conserve energy," but I never knew exactly what generated those conditions. It will not show you where the people in cryogenic tubes are. You have to seek out those yourself. They aren't required to complete the level, but they will provide you with an upgrade point.

Upgrades: At a certain point halfway through the game, I found myself being ripped to shreds. Levels 1-5 were decent enough, but the military operators on Titan from levels 6-10 were insane. At first I thought the number of enemies were overwhelming me, but it might actually pertain to me failing to obtain every available upgrade at that point. And trust me, there are a lot of secret areas where you could miss them. I had to knock it down from Hot Shot to the default difficulty of Rookie just to keep myself sane. The game initially sets up your ship as an old clunker where every system you have is flawed in one way or another. You can upgrade your speed, energy usage, how long power-ups last, reduce overall damage, inhibit impact damage, or increase ammunition capacity. Upgrading your weapons generally gets them to a fair level where you can compete with other operators without them being able to dodge them by being too far away or too quick for the velocity of the weapon to reach them. The weapons never seem to get to a point that they do enough damage to destroy them fast enough. Instead, you must rely on firing your main cannon as well as firing auxiliary missiles to stand a chance. I find that if a projectile isn't equipped to track down your targets, it can be rather futile launching them. Don't get me started on how long it takes to destroy the main reactor.

Levels: Learning about the situation from an AI before each level is pretty awesome. You can find audio logs scattered out and about that gives you the scientists' point-of-view on what went wrong. You move from the small sites over to Titan and eventually to a secluded location where you meet your final objective. Levels 12-16 is when the game decides to abandon all of your game mechanics. Because of the situation, your hologuide is disabled. You have to use electric-type weapons to activate power cores and open doors. Doors will only remain open for a brief time, which forces you to time your maneuvers carefully. There are no more upgrades to find or interludes where you can upgrade your vessel. The enemy ships generally compose of two types - a missile variant and a teleporting laser machine. They are very hard to take down without using everything you have at your disposal. This is when whatever fun I had left for the game completely disappeared.

Opinion: 16 levels ranging from 15 minutes to 45 minutes, depending on how long you spend being lost or finding upgrades, isn't that bad. The game feels great and does recapture the original Descent feeling. However, the game is marred by technical glitches and mechanics that don't perform as smooth as you expect from a modern take of this type of game. Enemies can become brutally difficult when their AI outperforms your clunky ship while you scrounge for better upgrades hidden deep within the levels. I suggest only those who are fans of the original series play this game.

 

11-30-2020