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DevastationZone Troopers |
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Developer: CGS Software Publisher: CGS Software Genre: Action > General Released: Jul 11, 2006 Players: 0 |
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DZT starts with a nicely presented flash style animation of your space ship on its way to the planet Ardanis, which has been occupied by the evil Rakkai Empire. As the main protagonist you play an almost indestructible death-dealing commando out to retake the planet for the glory of the Blue Star Alliance. I suspect English may not be the developer’s first language, but the somewhat predictable plot line can be safely ignored anyway.
The developer, CGS Software, claims to have an eye on the latest 3D technologies and it is certainly a good-looking 3D game with a great technological gimmick. Each level consists of a large flat play field segregated into a maze by raised, grass-covered walls. Your weapons can cut right through allowing you to create shortcuts in and out of hotspots. This feature is only really usable with the more powerful weapons, but it’s certainly a neat trick.
The player picks missions from a map and their completion earns money that can be used to buy upgrades. Again the story behind the mission text was sometimes tricky to follow, but the objective was always clear and missions alternate between wiping out specific targets, collecting keys, and shutting down installations. The in game radar shows the target location and you simply annihilate everything that moves (or doesn’t move) in that area. Although new and tougher enemies are introduced fairly regularly, the levels always look the same, just a different enemy selection and maze layout. The only real indication of progress is the mission difficulty rating going up, but there seems an endless supply of missions (50 apparently) and I had no sense of when the game was going to end.
Hunting for keys can be a chore, but you’ll soon get hold of the Doom BFG inspired photon cannon, which not only cuts through the mud walls that make up the bulk of the level, but also through the concrete bunker walls too. In the later stages of the game you can often ignore the requirement of a key and just knock the wall down instead. Although it does prevent frustrating key searches you are left wondering why they bothered with the keys in the first place.
Each mission starts with a flight down form orbit in a Space Harrier style sequence of dodging debris, flying through hoops and shooting mines. Once I figured out what was a mine and what was indestructible debris it was quite fun. Flying the same sequence before each mission and re-flying the sequence on failed missions soon becomes tiresome. You can however buy an autopilot in the shop after which you will never fly the drop ship again (even if you wanted to). It’s a shame they couldn’t have made more entertaining and different drop ship levels, flown less frequently, as then perhaps you wouldn’t need to skip it entirely.
Graphics:
The recommended spec is an Athlon XP with a 128MB GeForce4. My rig matches this spec and yet I still suffered regular and quite chronic slow down. When the battles really kick off there are some truly awesome light shows, but the developers seem to have let their enthusiasm carry them away. Luckily the game remains quite playable. Overall the standard of presentation was very high, although the enemy vehicle and soldier design was a little unoriginal.
Sound:
Probably not to everyone’s taste, the game uses industrial drum and base tracks from Exstus, the Phase, Tolgar and TodMiner, which I thought were great. I just wish they had included more, as the selection seemed quite small. I’m reminded of the fantastic 60 minutes of Machinae Supremacy on jets ‘n’guns. Sounds effects were functional.
Game play:
With simple shooters the control system is fundamental. The mouse/turn and WASD/strafe combo had very high mouse sensitivity causing the main character to flick very quickly from left to right making accurate aiming difficult. It can be reduced, but this also effects the menu screens and drop ship control sequence. Why can’t we have them separate? The next obvious choice is dual analogue pad with left stick to strafe and right stick to turn. My trusty thrustmaster dual trigger game pad was up to the task, but the game’s joystick configuration screen was not. I could only get a twitchy digital configuration on the right stick. Not good enough. Other minor niggles included an extremely challenging difficulty level, a poor camera that obstinately refuses to lift up when you back into a wall leaving you hidden from view and weapon impacts that push the player back, which gets out of hand when you come under heavy attack.
Value:
The game was quite stable and I only experienced one crash, which was when I tried to use my weak starting blaster to tunnel through a large area of landscape. Although the levels are fairly repetitive there are a whopping 50 of them. I suspect the repetitive nature of the levels will mean a lot of people give up once they’ve bought all the soldier’s weapon upgrades. The game is crying out for an online high score table or even an offline one for that matter. Without a high score to beat there seems little incentive to replay the game on harder difficulty settings. Still, pretty good value at $20.
Concept:
The ability to cut your own path through the level is quite novel. There were other touches of brilliance like the flying saw disc enemy that you see approaching by way of the grass/earth being thrown into the sky as it cuts a path towards you. Or the almost totally transparent traps littering the levels that can only be avoided by careful examination of your surroundings and whose accidental triggering regularly had me jumping out of my seat. This game play style of “go anywhere� 360 degree shoot-em-up has been tried before in games like Loaded and Millennium Soldier and delivers high adrenalin simplistic thrills.
Fun:
The addition of the shop and the four core weapons elevates this game above the mindless shooter. You can’t just upgrade one weapon, each had its uses and you had to learn to switch between them as necessary. Cutting a path around a waiting ambush and then spraying them with missiles from behind is very satisfying. The inclusion of a cheat code system should help anyone who gets stuck, but obviously I didn’t need to use it, honest J.
Overall:
Everything about DZT seems to follow the same path, initially mild confusion and then lots of excitement before a creeping sense of disappointment. I don’t want readers to think the game was bad, it isn’t, it just felt like it could have been so much more. I certainly look forward to trying their other games or perhaps a sequel to DZT. In the meantime I’d recommend you give the game a try, not quite in my top 10 all time indie greats, but for all its faults it’s still high up the list.
The developer, CGS Software, claims to have an eye on the latest 3D technologies and it is certainly a good-looking 3D game with a great technological gimmick. Each level consists of a large flat play field segregated into a maze by raised, grass-covered walls. Your weapons can cut right through allowing you to create shortcuts in and out of hotspots. This feature is only really usable with the more powerful weapons, but it’s certainly a neat trick.
The player picks missions from a map and their completion earns money that can be used to buy upgrades. Again the story behind the mission text was sometimes tricky to follow, but the objective was always clear and missions alternate between wiping out specific targets, collecting keys, and shutting down installations. The in game radar shows the target location and you simply annihilate everything that moves (or doesn’t move) in that area. Although new and tougher enemies are introduced fairly regularly, the levels always look the same, just a different enemy selection and maze layout. The only real indication of progress is the mission difficulty rating going up, but there seems an endless supply of missions (50 apparently) and I had no sense of when the game was going to end.
Hunting for keys can be a chore, but you’ll soon get hold of the Doom BFG inspired photon cannon, which not only cuts through the mud walls that make up the bulk of the level, but also through the concrete bunker walls too. In the later stages of the game you can often ignore the requirement of a key and just knock the wall down instead. Although it does prevent frustrating key searches you are left wondering why they bothered with the keys in the first place.
Each mission starts with a flight down form orbit in a Space Harrier style sequence of dodging debris, flying through hoops and shooting mines. Once I figured out what was a mine and what was indestructible debris it was quite fun. Flying the same sequence before each mission and re-flying the sequence on failed missions soon becomes tiresome. You can however buy an autopilot in the shop after which you will never fly the drop ship again (even if you wanted to). It’s a shame they couldn’t have made more entertaining and different drop ship levels, flown less frequently, as then perhaps you wouldn’t need to skip it entirely.
Graphics:
The recommended spec is an Athlon XP with a 128MB GeForce4. My rig matches this spec and yet I still suffered regular and quite chronic slow down. When the battles really kick off there are some truly awesome light shows, but the developers seem to have let their enthusiasm carry them away. Luckily the game remains quite playable. Overall the standard of presentation was very high, although the enemy vehicle and soldier design was a little unoriginal.
Sound:
Probably not to everyone’s taste, the game uses industrial drum and base tracks from Exstus, the Phase, Tolgar and TodMiner, which I thought were great. I just wish they had included more, as the selection seemed quite small. I’m reminded of the fantastic 60 minutes of Machinae Supremacy on jets ‘n’guns. Sounds effects were functional.
Game play:
With simple shooters the control system is fundamental. The mouse/turn and WASD/strafe combo had very high mouse sensitivity causing the main character to flick very quickly from left to right making accurate aiming difficult. It can be reduced, but this also effects the menu screens and drop ship control sequence. Why can’t we have them separate? The next obvious choice is dual analogue pad with left stick to strafe and right stick to turn. My trusty thrustmaster dual trigger game pad was up to the task, but the game’s joystick configuration screen was not. I could only get a twitchy digital configuration on the right stick. Not good enough. Other minor niggles included an extremely challenging difficulty level, a poor camera that obstinately refuses to lift up when you back into a wall leaving you hidden from view and weapon impacts that push the player back, which gets out of hand when you come under heavy attack.
Value:
The game was quite stable and I only experienced one crash, which was when I tried to use my weak starting blaster to tunnel through a large area of landscape. Although the levels are fairly repetitive there are a whopping 50 of them. I suspect the repetitive nature of the levels will mean a lot of people give up once they’ve bought all the soldier’s weapon upgrades. The game is crying out for an online high score table or even an offline one for that matter. Without a high score to beat there seems little incentive to replay the game on harder difficulty settings. Still, pretty good value at $20.
Concept:
The ability to cut your own path through the level is quite novel. There were other touches of brilliance like the flying saw disc enemy that you see approaching by way of the grass/earth being thrown into the sky as it cuts a path towards you. Or the almost totally transparent traps littering the levels that can only be avoided by careful examination of your surroundings and whose accidental triggering regularly had me jumping out of my seat. This game play style of “go anywhere� 360 degree shoot-em-up has been tried before in games like Loaded and Millennium Soldier and delivers high adrenalin simplistic thrills.
Fun:
The addition of the shop and the four core weapons elevates this game above the mindless shooter. You can’t just upgrade one weapon, each had its uses and you had to learn to switch between them as necessary. Cutting a path around a waiting ambush and then spraying them with missiles from behind is very satisfying. The inclusion of a cheat code system should help anyone who gets stuck, but obviously I didn’t need to use it, honest J.
Overall:
Everything about DZT seems to follow the same path, initially mild confusion and then lots of excitement before a creeping sense of disappointment. I don’t want readers to think the game was bad, it isn’t, it just felt like it could have been so much more. I certainly look forward to trying their other games or perhaps a sequel to DZT. In the meantime I’d recommend you give the game a try, not quite in my top 10 all time indie greats, but for all its faults it’s still high up the list.
By: Mark Featherstone
Posted: Friday August 11, 2006
Posted: Friday August 11, 2006
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