![]() ![]() Armor Points: The second installment shows the number of armor points while building a ship.Shield piercing weapons can be stopped from bypassing existing shields with the Hard Shields device. The piercing effects of guns with the Armor Piercing mod can be negated by heavy and Xentronium armor, but neither can protect against an attacker equipped with an Achilles Targeting Unit device. Armor-Piercing Attack: In MoO 2, some weapons can be made in armor-piercing variants (and some in shield-piercing, for that matter) so that damage that passes through armor/shields is applied to the target ship's structure/internals immediately.However, all weapons in the Master Of Orion series do have a maximum range that's not a direct function of ship's hit probability. Arbitrary Maximum Range: In MoO 2, lasers and almost all other energy weapons have range-based damage penalties due to bloom, but mass drivers, gauss guns, Disruptors, and the Stellar Converter do not.This prevents players from having a fleet entirely made up of Doom Stars. Played straight with Doom Stars in Conquer the Stars, where any player is limited to one at a time. Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Generally averted, since the game allows you to have more ships than your command points allow, although it comes at a hefty economic penalty.All There in the Manual: While all of the game manuals contain backstory that has little to no effect on the game itself beyond establishing things like Orion (and later the Antarans), the manual for MoO 3 includes an expansive and intricate history of the galaxy, complete with a complicated system for establishing the galactic date, leading up to the events of the game.The Alliance: Confederation governments, an advanced form of the Feudal Future.Acceptable Breaks from Reality: MoO 3 demonstrated very well just why many aspects of running an empire are simplified or abstracted in 4X games, and almost as well why the rest aren't.There's some use of the third dimension in the third game, but nothing that absolutely requires it. 2-D Space: In the first two games, the galaxy maps and space combat all take place on a 2D plane.Sadly, the ‘prototyping’ label defines Master Reboot a little too well since, if anything, the game feels like a proof of concept for a much more grand endeavour rather than the end result that falls short of such lofty ambitions. Texture-less models and environments abound throughout the game as sparsely-detailed bodies pass through solid objects with the sort of alarming frequency that it makes you question quite how rigorously the game was tested prior to release. While elements of dread do exist in Master Reboot, they are few and far between and the frustrating tendency for the music to cut out (or not even be there in the first place) does a little to foster the level of engagement needed with the player to make the atmosphere significant to the proceedings.Īll that funny business with the music is sadly symptomatic of a larger problem Master Reboot’s presentation leaves a lot to be desired.įrom a visual standpoint, the game apparently leverages Epic’s Unreal Engine, yet when you see it in motion, it seems almost as if Master Reboot never made it out of the prototyping stage. Let down by some poor presentation and a seemingly tenuous grasp of how to keep the audience on tenterhooks, Master Reboot atmospherics tend to be compromised by a blunt force trauma approach that opts to fall back on traditional and generic jump-scares, instead of the sort of creeping horror that should be synonymous with a game of this ilk. With the puzzles and narrative forming two parts of Master Reboot’s essence, the last piece of the whole is the atmosphere after all, a psychological thriller will pretty much live and die by how completely it enraptures the audience. When collected, such clues manifest themselves as visual fragments such as letters, e-mails, diary entries, scrawled notes and as there isn’t any real dialogue in the game, they function well enough as one of Master Reboot’s chief storytelling devices. Schizophrenic puzzle difficulty aside, credit must at least be given to the developer on account of the variety of worlds on offer as players will experience numerous locations ranging from parks and schools to airplanes and even the pulsating, Tron-like core of the SoulCloud itself.Īlso, it isn’t just puzzles that are found in each of these worlds, as tucked away in the nooks and crannies of each are little blue toy ducklings that conceal clues about the girl’s identity.
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