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Act of Aggression by fabio 12/13/2015, 6:26am PST
Holy fuck no one but Bodybag has any idea how big a C&C Generals fan I was back in the day. This is the spiritual successor you say?

It's not so much the spiritual Generals sequel as it is the successor to Act of War, the FMV Tom Clancy RTS.


It's.....eh? Not as godawful and bland as Grey Goo but a bunch of rough edges and stumbling blocks.


2 things really sink this:

Everything is too small. They went with realistic scaling which means the only thing you can tell apart is buildings. It's very hard telling vehicles apart and infantry is impossible because they're all identical specks. No icons above the units to help. Nothing. This is made even worse by...

Too much redundancy. Generals had a tank, light scout vehicle, anti air/infantry vehicle, heavy tank, and one other vehicle depending on the side. Infantry was machine gun or rockets. AoA has three or four of each. It is impossible to tell their effectiveness apart (they give you stats but don't tell you what the stats mean). Each unit type is spread out over 3 buildings that look alike (one faction has half their buildings as helipads). Each unit has 3 or more upgrades spread out over 3 or more buildings. The upgrades refer to the vehicle name they effect, but fuck if you can remember the names of the 16+ vehicles for each faction. The Crusher? Sounds like some heavy tank. Wait no, it's the unarmed resource transport. Do I get this upgrade at the research facility, the stealth lab, or the building that produces the unit? There are 3 different types of resources. They cannot be seen or harvested until you send a worthless mineral survey unit to look for them. Each resource must have a refinery, plus transport vehicles, plus a drop off point. Each dropoff point can only hold so much and some can only hold a certain resource type. More baffling, each faction has a building capable of automatically producing one of the three resources, so they're boned if the other 2 run out? Huh?


Minor stuff:

They try to have C&C style cutscenes but the low budget kickstarter nature is painfully apparent there. No animated humans. Atrocious voice acting.

The nukes and large explosions still don't look half as good as the ones in 2003's Generals.

There's no humor or character. They went with the Tom Clancy seriousness of Act of War. I couldn't really describe to you the theme of any of the factions. One gets stealth refineries and APCs so they're the stealth faction? Wait no another gets stealth harvesters and helicopters. The U.S. is the least technically advanced faction? So they're the cheap low tech GLA faction? Wait no, another higher tech faction uses cheap drones. It's not the U.S. that uses drone strikes? *sigh*


There's potential for something in here but it needs a massive overall. The best thing they could do is just consolidate everything into a third: one-third the buildings, one-third the vehicles, one-third the infantry, one-third the resources. Then blow up the unit scale so you can actually see what the fuck is what. Yes, I realize that would make tanks half the size of an oil refinery. DO IT!
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Act of Aggression by fabio 12/13/2015, 6:26am PST NEW
    Oh yeah, and the lag by fabio 12/13/2015, 7:36am PST NEW
    Here's a good review by fabio 12/13/2015, 10:15am PST NEW
    Act of War by fabio 12/26/2015, 12:07pm PST NEW
        I've been having a ton of fun with this for months! by fabio 02/14/2016, 4:41am PST NEW
        GOG sale for $3 right now NT by fabio 02/20/2016, 1:05am PST NEW
 
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