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Ah yes, *ahem* waiter! Yes, I’d like a main dish prematurity of with a heaping side of pretentiousness please!
My wife worked for a brief time on a rather unstable game team lead by a self-bloated egotistical idiot. His game was going to be the game to end all games, the alpha and the omega. It was going to have the relationship structure of the Persona series but it was also going to be an intense top-down bullet hell, but it was also going to be a game where time passed on a calendar but it was also going to be…
Needless to say, she and most of her workers quit that team rather quickly.
While it was a pity that the team leader was too much of a biggot to see past his own ego, the real tragedy was that he had some real skill underneath working for him. Most of them were colleagues of my wife’s who were all college-trained game creators in their own right. Regardless of the quality of the team’s leadership, I’m sure that whatever they created would at least look good, even if it was absolute trash–I’d seen firsthand the kind of artwork, both 2D and 3D that they were capable of creating. E.T. Armies… is the kind of game that my wife’s team would have created if they had not smartly disbanded.
So you’re probably looking at some of these screenshots and thinking, “You know what, these don’t look half-bad.” And you’d be right–they aren’t. Maybe they don’t have the highest polygon count and some of the human models might look a bit funky when you get a close-up view, but no, the visuals in this game aren’t the problem. Whatever producer made this game had to some degree talent working for him (or her) that relatively knew what they were doing. The problem is the rest of the game.
It plays itself up constantly as if everything is dramatic, but nothing is happening. It acts like it has a grand story to tell when there’s no story at all. It uses big dramatic pauses in line delivery, hard and gritty imagery involving war and blowing up the world and a lot of talk about “the enemy” and how they’ll come to kill again but it’s just stupid. It’s incredibly pretentious, very vague and I didn’t even need to play more than a few minutes to know this game had nothing but smoke and piss–but it was going to try to put on the biggest razzle-dazzle-’em show that it could so that you wouldn’t realize it.
Artists and modelers this team had. Gameplay designers, level designers, story writers, dialogue writers, actors, animators and quality controllers, they did not have. Or at least not very good ones. There are typos in the subtitles. The lines themselves are awkwardly and childishly written. Oh, if you were interested in the plot, it’s “WAAAAAAR! WAR BLEW UP THE WORLD! And now the world is coming back to get ussssssssss.” Enemy AI and animation is laughable. If the enemies aren’t floating sideways to get in shooting view of you, they’re stumbling into walls or walking right out in the open as you hold your gun at head-level and click once for each target. The problem is though, is that other times they are like aimbots, doing nothing to protect themselves but immediately knowing exactly where you are and filling you full of lead with concerning accuracy.
Just take it from me. Don’t play this game. Just don’t. It may look like a sort of visually interesting FPS but that’s it. If you like looking at things, just play a walking simulator. At least then you can’t squint to see between the polygons, revealing the image of a lead designer screaming “MAKE IT BIGGER. MAKE IT MORE PRETTY. IT MUST BE LIKE I DREAAAAAAMED,” all the while the artists are shaking their heads looking for their next job while the game designers are out for their sixth coffee break before lunch. A friend gifted this one to me because apparently he obtained a couple copies of it for free. When I asked him why he sent it his response was something like, “I don’t know. I didn’t know what else to do with it.” Don’t play this. As far as I know, he doesn’t either. It’s just not worth it.
