I wasn't really excited about this game until I heard one of the developers in an interview talking about the multiplayer. This guy is pretty clever, and really, really excited about this game, and he's actually selling me on this. If you've played the single-player demo, you know how it works... it sort of has this bullet-time mechanic based on slowing, stopping and reversing time. Unlike Max Payne, you can do more than just go into "slow motion give me time to aim like a pro" mode-- since you're running around at regular speed while stuff is slower, you can do things like get behind a guy, and when time is back to normal, he's all "where did he go?" and then you break his skull. When you freeze time entirely, you can actually run up and rip the gun out of a frozen guy's hands. To me, at least, it seems a step above old-fashioned "bullet time." There's also the ability to reverse time, which gets really mind-bending... since you can keep moving forwards in time. There's a scene where you have to run across a bridge, but before you get to the end, it gets hit by a rocket. So, you reverse time, and as the bridge is UNEXPLODING you run across it. Then you hop out of reversed time, and it explodes behind you.
While that stuff's cool, it doesn't really translate to a gaming experience that is really super fun... if every time people froze time you had to jsut stand there, it'd kinda suck... so they added these temporal grenades where the effect occurs in a "bubble" where the grenade goes off. The guy talked about what this means for a while, and I cant remember every example, but here are a couple of examples of the amazingness:
- You throw a "time stop" grenade and it directly hits a guy you're fighting. You run about 3 feet in front of the bubble, and fire a bunch of shotguns shots at his face. They get stuck in the edge of the bubble, which finally implodes, and he takes a zillion shells in the mouth.
- There's a guy who'd going around destroying everyone, but he's got a pattern in the way he's running through the level. You huck a stop grenade around a corner and fire a couple of rockets into it. He rounds the corner and either gets stuck in the bubble, or stops and pauses as he realizes hat's happening. You come at him from the other side and blindside him in case he doesn't get stuck, but if he does, rockets.
- The "reverse time" grenades sound almost like the portals from Portal, in that they can mess with your inertia. For example, you jump off a crow's nest sniper thing, and hit yourself with a reverse grenade on the way down, which makes you go backwards in time-- launching you into the air, towards the crow's nest again.
So, uh, shit. I jsut wrote a bunch about this. But yeah, this game wasn't on my "seriously, check it out" list until today. Anyone else hyped about this? Oh, and also, when it's raining and you freeze time it looks totally badass.
― Will M., Monday, 29 October 2007 21:26 (eighteen years ago)
Seems like a rental.
That's EXACTLY what I thought after playing the demo. Then I heard this interview... and heard about the multiplayer. A multi demo might get released... I'm waiting for that.
It sounds just like Prince of Persia but with bullets.
That's exactly what it DOESN'T sound like, in my opinion... Prince of Persia's time manipulation was basically an easy way to avoid re-loading a level and watching an intro at best, and at worst the one saving grace of a mediocre combat engine. That said, I still loved PoP, but this is really different, in my opinion. There are bound to be some really clever puzzles that manipulate time in the same way that Portal manipulates space.
It's basically just a better, FPS Max Payne.
Except that multiplayer game, which will be amazing.
Jesus, I feel like I'm on the street team or something...
― Will M., Tuesday, 30 October 2007 17:11 (eighteen years ago)
the only place time is manipulated is within these small spheres (the nade explosions), so what other people are doing is irrelevant to your own manipulations of time... unless you throw a grenade into another grenade's effect, where i assume it'd act like anything else (ie. if i throw a reverse grenade into a stop-grenade bubble, it just won't explode until the "stop" runs out of time, for example). I love the concept of running around, creating tiny areas where time's fucked up, and exploiting it in multi-combat... it's possible that this will end up being the thinking man's Halo.
― Will M., Tuesday, 30 October 2007 21:24 (eighteen years ago)
Multiplayer sounds neat, but I'm really, really unimpressed with what I've seen of the single-player- the level design seems so flat and ugly. And if the time powers are still "context specific," and especially if you can't use reverse time wherever you damn please but only in special situations, that is seriously weak. I know it's more complicated and there's more going on at once, but come on, Prince of Persia managed that ages ago.
― Telephone thing, Tuesday, 30 October 2007 23:31 (eighteen years ago)