Drawn to Death

[Reality]

I haven't heard about this in any of the gaming press, but I happen to be subscribed to David Jaffe's personal blog, and I saw him post about it a few days ago. 

David Jaffe was the director for the twisted metal games, and also God of War, and a generally chill dude. Drawn to Death is his very recent project.

It's not a car-combat game, but instead it's some kind of 3rd person shooter/arena hybird.

Just going to put my personal first impressions.

Aesthetics: Pretty nice, the game's setting is inside a notebook, and you  can see white sketched outlines of the gameworld /skybox that transforms into a "real" thing once you get closer to it. The game also shows the "hand" of the artist sometimes. Weapons and characters are all based on the "death metal" aesthetic that you see on Heavy Metal covers. Apparently there is some worldbuilding/story on the website, but I'm the wrong person to ask. At the end of the round it has a really funny scene (different for each level even) where the first place player poses/relaxes, and the losers have bad stuff happened to them- it's like the mario party / smash bros end screens taken up to eleven.

Sound Design: They decided to have a UT style announcer, but I think he's a too much in your face compared to the original. Much worse is the charather quotes, they work, but I think they underestimated the pace of the game! You'll hear our character specials every like 15 seconds.  A one liner like "Proud of damnation" and then a big attack works in league of legends, it doesn't work when you hear everytime you switch guns in a game where you are constantly in mtion.

Map design: I love the look of the maps, but I don't really like them as arenas, many of them have vertical areas looking down into wide swathes of the map, and the few closed structures, while having mulltiple entrances to give some flow, kind of feel off to me. Things are compounded by the (relatively)instant respawn option- You can see why David calls it more "brawler" than "third person". 

Gameplay: Emphasis on mobility, Uses Quake/UT style respawning powerups, but they have a nice adjustment where they turn holographic and have a visual indicator of when they'll respawn, instead of you having to time them manually. The devs claim that having "a long time to kill people" as being a design goal, I can see that maybe he has backlash against stuff like counter strike or other games where even one bullet is lethal. In practice it kind of works- using long range weapons tends to chip at people over a long time, but some of the splash and melee weapons can kill people at the blink of an eye.

Conclusion: The game is REALLY flawed and has been roasted by reviewers with an average score of like 4/10. Personally I see it as an extended alpha test and not a feauture complete game.... But even with that said, I think that while the game will improve considerably, 4p max FFA only goes so far, and I feel like high HP pools+fast movement is less interesting than Quake/UT's low HP+fast movement. Most of the conscouis deviations from Quake will make or break the game for people- I'm sure there are people who couldn't always enjoy quake who this game might be more approachable, but for me it just seems like a mistep, or at least, "a game for a different audience".

Edited April 11, 2017 by Reality
explaining who david jaffe is

[Flee Fleet!]

I assume the name of the game came from Drawn to Life.

Also, gee, that's a really low score. I've seen some screenshots though, and they kind of look cool.

[Zera]

Actually the Metascore is currently 55. Critics like the uniqueness of its art style, but think the gameplay is mediocre. Clunky controls or something. And apparently there are microtransactions as well, because everybody loves microtransactions.