Nuclear Dawn

[Anery]

This game needs a steam sale.
At its current price it is a tad too much, I paid 16 quid for it and thats about 7 quid too much - just under 10 should be about right. Fixing the pricing should also mean that they get more people playing the game - a quick search showed plenty of servers but ony 5 or 6 of them actually had anyone playing on them and only 2 or 3 had any decent numbers on. Which is a shame really, because whilst this game is not exactly brilliant, it deserves a little bit of attention for trying to do what it is it does.
And what it does is attempt to mix the strategy of Battlefield with the fast paced action of Quake topped with a liberal sprinking of C&C and with a side order of unlocks.
I've only ever played as FPS, so I can only imagine how crazy the commander role can be. As a grunt on the ground it is your job to capture control points and hold them - these generate resource points for your commander to use to reinforce forward positions, provide aid to push attempts and generally act as some kind fo benevolant overseer. Of course it is not that easy, some turrets require power to be provided which means you often seen big red powerlines going up and down streets like some boring laser show.
The FPS side of things is relatively generic, there are four classes each with various subclasses; Assault - which comes with regular soldier, grenade spam or sniper - Exo - which comes as chaingunner or structure destruction - Stealth which is either assasin or sniper - Support - medic, engineer or BBQ. Seriously, it's called BBQ.
So far so good, this should have been a fantastic game. Unfortunately it is only an average game, the gameplay is stilted and the weapons feel insubstantial, the inclusion of invisibility for some classes is stupid and gives them a ridiculous edge (they stay invisible even whilst firing) and the unlock system remains a mystery.
That said, I have still been having fun playing this. I generally play as a medic which means I run about lobbing health packs at people with low bars and poison grenades at the enemy - which is pretty fucking awesome when you find a room full of em. Unlike Bacons I am not given massive machine guns, I am given a small machine pistol which barely sratches some of the heavier armoured classes - most of my points come from healing my teammates. I havn't really played any of the other classes long enough to comment on their game play, only those invisible cunts need to drop dead at their keyboards yesterday.
I would say give it a go but 16 quid for a game that treis but fails to hit the mark is a bit much.

[friznit]

Sounds like yet another reason why I will never go into game dev, despite having all the best ideas ever. However much effort you put in, you can still fail utterly because the fickle population just doesn't want to play your game this month.

That said, it also sounds like another one of those brilliant ideas that when put together and pulled through the dev-market cycle, ended up becoming Generic Shooter Release #100000 Nao Wiv Moar Invizilol!

Sad vaguely related fact: Digital Combat Sims recently released a high fidelity A10 simulator, which is an epic work of love and modelled to the tiniest detail. Yet way more people are playing Falcon 4 BMS - a free mod for a flight sim released over 12 years ago. Why? Because DCS forgot to make a computer game. See also: minecrack vs most MMOs other than that one (and the nips, but they don't count).

[buzzmong]

I did look at Nuclear Dawn, I think I either also read an RPS posting on it or listened to a TotalBiscuit review.

Seemed OK, but as you say, the invisibility part was mentioned as a near game breaker. Price was also a factor. With Beef3 on the horizon, I didn't think it did anything different enough or good enough to be worth shelling out to play.