tl;dr the game lovingly apes a bunch of really good shooters, executes on its vision in a questionable way, but is still very fun and worth a look EDIT: now up to a bit over 30 hours. I feel mostly the same. I think there are some definite balance issues to be addressed before this could ever be taken seriously as a competitive game, but it's a (generally) fun sandbox for the moment and a good deal of content seems to be on the way. Have you ever wanted to play a movement shooter where the movement doesn't work properly and the maps aren't built for it? How about a tactical shooter where everyone has wallhacks and the guns don't shoot bullets where you point them? What if you could remedy any of these problems, but only by using limited customization slots that you can only fill properly after a good 50 or so hours of gameplay that you'll mostly spend getting bodied by the same two dozen players that have already unlocked these things and theorycrafted the most obnoxious possible builds from an incredibly bloated skill tree? Don't get me wrong: the game can be fun. Extremely fun. When you actually do start to accumulate customization options for your loadout and unlock enough points in the skill tree to actually enjoy some of its passive bonuses, you can access some intriguing combinations. The game feels like a love letter to a bunch of really good, genre-defining shooters of the last two decades, and the audacity of trying to cram so many mechanics into a single shooter is commendable in some sense...but that doesn't save the experience from some strange design choices. The game has Titanfall-esque movement like wallrunning and sliding? Great, except OoA adds unnecessary extra inputs, stamina bars, and slow transitions between maneuvers to a system that was already one of the best in the genre. The game has GunZ-like dodging and melee weapon quick-attack dashing? Great, except you need "aerial maneuver charges" to do most of it and you only get two charges by default. The game has aerial somersaults like in the trailer so you can do insane trickshots? Sick, except that requires using a customization slot that could be used for one of the many overpowered tactical buffs the player can unlock. You might be noticing a theme here, but we'll come back to that. The weapons are mostly generic and about what you would expect given OoA's obvious inspirations. Big, cumbersome sniper rifle that can one-shot to the body (at least sometimes)? Check. Multiple flavors of submachine gun that are incredibly overpowered at the game's typical midrange? Check. Shotguns tuned so they beat submachine guns at what you'd expect to be the submachine gun's dominant range? Check. The best part is that the game uses both ballistic simulation (at least for bullet velocity) AND everyone's favorite, random spread while firing. If you've ever played a shooter with spread gain instead of firing/recoil patterns on non-hitscan guns, you know that this is an awful combination; it's especially egregious here given it even affects precise weapons from the first shot. I've only played 16 hours at this point and I can't even count the number of perfectly lined-up shots that have just... gone somewhere else because I wasn't running three different customizations to mitigate spread. Doku also saw fit to throw in a bunch of special ammo effects as their own form of weapon customization, and even the ones that are accessible without -- you guessed it, a wholly different customization -- feel a bit overwrought. Shoot through walls harder with faster bullets? Drain your enemy's stamina bar and slow them at the same time? Apply a bleeding debuff in a game where the default form of healing is a very poor medkit on a long cooldown? I hope you enjoy dying after you've escaped or killed your foes, or trying to use the huge array of cool movement mechanics only to have them shut down by someone clipping your foot with a round or two. Oh, and the wallhacks? Yeah, everyone gets wallhacks that disable their guns -- but still, wallhacks. There are also customizations to get more wallhacks, longer-range wallhacks, or wallhacks that work while using your gun (and did I mention some of the guns can shoot through walls? And get customizations to do that better? It's asinine). And although it's not directly related, I sincerely hope you don't want to use sound cues to navigate, because enemy footstep sounds are borderline nonexistent regardless of the enemy's loadout -- so maybe you need the wallhacks. The skill tree is also... something. It isn't so much a tree as a fat, tripartite bush, and rather than spec into specific things you just dump upgrade points into each of the three branches and get both passive bonuses and various customization unlocks. This, of course, means that you can't get any of the more interesting components of your loadout without playing a decent number of hours -- nothing too excessive in general, but quite excessive given how much the skill bush investment constrains what could (I'd argue should) as easily have been basic gameplay functionality. Most of the mechanical problems seem to come from wanting to do too much cool sh*t at once and suffering a serious identity crisis as a result... so at least these issues exist for a good reason and not just because the developers are lazy or idiots or something like that. The game has an amazing skeleton. It's got high replay value even as-is. The community contains some elitists -- unsurprising for a game with as much mechanical depth and skill expression as OoA offers -- but most people seem friendly. It's fun. I'd recommend buying the game. If nothing else you can easily get some hours of enjoyable play out of it, even if you find the same things frustrating that I do. And who knows? It's Early Access -- I think at least some of the above will end up changing for the better by the time the game rolls around to a full release. If so, OoA could easily take a place among its inspirations, and I think that's worth supporting.
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