Angels Fall First

[h1]Loosey Goosey[/h1] [i]There will be a TL;DR at the end.[/i] ~ If you are excited about the title, you don’t have to look too far or hard to find reasons to give it a shot. Offline mode with bots ensures that this thing won’t get killed as easily as industry standard titles - commendable and everyone should be doing this. Loads of different weapons, vehicles, and kit to play around with. Sprawling maps, space battles, and squad based theatrical combat a la [i]Battlefield[/i] Lovingly baked for an entire decade by passionate developers. But if you’re starting to smell something burning - it may be because the rock-solid concepts that remain at [b]Angels Fall First[/b]’s core aren’t actually as consistent as they should be. Big maps, lots of ways to brutalize the enemy, dynamic space battles, familiar gameplay, fast paced action, hand crafted setpieces, an arsenal of weapons, loadouts for miles, vehicle customization, directed team management, and much more! [b]Angels Fall First[/b] knows [i]exactly[/i] what it wants to be, what it draws inspiration from, and how it wants to blaze a trail through time. But everything within is a rough approximation. The things within are vague suggestions of a thing that would otherwise be a tangible thing. [b]Angels Fall First[/b] may be a good game - great even - but you’ll never know aside from the flickering glimpses of its glory, contrasted by the shimmering quagmire of insufficiency and strange oversight. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3768724786 Everything down to the visuals. Initially, I was a bit excited. The graphics were nothing special - but we should honestly be excited to see games that put more effort into content over graphical fidelity, right? As time moves on, the inevitable [i]”but”[/i] sinks into place. It’s not that the graphics are dated or basic, it isn’t that the engine is aging, it’s the sad fact that the elements therein are painfully generic to the point of meaninglessness. The characters are wearing power armor - but unlike the titles that this experience is trying to emulate ([i]Planetside, Battlefront, Titanfall, Battlefield,[/i] etc.) the armor lacks any and all personality. The weapons themselves don’t have a distinct soul or striking visual profile. It’s just a generalized, rough approximation of what a futuristic power armor might be. The visuals themselves are almost like a half-lucid dream of what things should look like. Movement itself is the same way. Wonky, a bit awkward. Sometimes it feels slow, sometimes you’re leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Sometimes your vehicle phases through the bushes, sometimes they don’t. When you see an enemy and take aim, do you think you are shooting at them? What you see isn’t exactly where they actually are. It is a vague approximation of where the player actually is. Bullets clip through arms and models, then they register even when you miss. Net code? Maybe. Choppy through and through. Projectiles register hits and misses faster or slower than the physical tracer fired. It’s just a general suggestion of what is actually happening. The loadout system is [i]bee ayy dee[/i] [b]BAD[/b] - with starting characters hardly being able to equip a single worthwhile weapon system, and after leveling up a bit having more access to quality kit and growing more versatile. It’s the “pick 10” system from [i]Black Ops 2[/i] but mismanaged and only [i]vaguely[/i] balanced. Players who are in the game more will always have more weapons, better weapons, and better armor than newcomers. The damage tables themselves are not concrete - and are subject to the curse of “Euuhh whatever”. You never really know how much damage something is gonna do because models don’t follow linear growth like in other titles - especially when armor is brought into consideration. You can take aim with the biggest, slowest sniper rifle available, hitting someone in the chest 3 times - they will then turn around and spray at you with their SMG killing you in a blink. Damage tables are all over the place - Plasma blast from a powerful rifle can kill with 3 hits. Rockets from an anti-tank fighter craft also need 3 direct hits. ???? Sniper Rifle can kill with a single good headshot. OK. Assault Rifle can reliably kill with 4 body shots. OK. The Revolver needs to land about 6 shots to kill. Uh… what? The tank auxillary cannon needs about 8 shots. Huh? Oh - the tank’s cannon needs 2 direct body shots to - nevermind. It doesn’t make sense. It’s just a vague suggestion of what a damage table should be. The maps themselves aren’t exactly built to specs outside of “lovingly crafted by an indie dev”. Spawn camping is common. Many maps have murder holes, choke points, and “supposed to lose” phases. The maps are what someone thought might be a generally good idea - but are far from refined. It becomes very stomp heavy - one team is almost always steamrolling the next. Good things [b]can[/b] happen - comebacks and close matches often don't happen - more often than not you’re looking at steamroll central. Funnily enough, even with all of these inconsistent elements, it oftentimes comes down to the people (and the AI) which are all over the place. Following orders is a big thing but are generally not followed ([i]Natural Selection 2[/i] PTSD) Skill Disparity is a huge factor. You can be on a team that is being harassed by enemy aircraft and will do nothing about it, being picked off and slaughtered. When you get into a vehicle, the entire enemy team switches to guided rocket launchers to kill you. You’ll coordinate well with teammates and support them, while watching the enemy foolishly not revive allies or repair structures. Sometimes the AI is fundamentally useless, other times it’s cracked and snipes enemies from a mile away while doing kickflips. It’s just a loose interpretation of what the experience should be. Yet it doesn’t stop there. UI and menu are all nonsensical trash. Buttons dedicated to leaning are basically useless - but different attacks in vehicles need toggles and don't have dedicated inputs (EW!) Lots of quality-of-life aspects established well before 2008 are sadly on display: you have to be sitting DIRECTLY on the capture point for it to work, you can’t be in the zone (Leading to space battles having tons of little spaceships parked over an objective) There is no compass. The minimap is basically useless. Even after 10 years of this thing burning the house down from being in the oven so long, these aspects are almost vestigial: rough gestures of features that were never truly integrated. Look at Space Combat - one of the key marketing items from the game: Space combat is awkward. The controls are alright, but it’s also strangely tangential to the rest of the experience. Boarding parties are a staple of the tutorial, but less than 6% of players have experienced it. Time, sadly, did not appear to be on this project’s side. The long tail is in full effect, and even though the product was launched after 10 years, it was clearly burned to a crisp in the oven long ago. Other Reviews glaze the game and extol the virtues that it has, but folks are cheering the game 2 years or longer before 1.0 launched. Ignore them. In spite of everyone’s hopes and dreams, it doesn’t seem to be really worth the time. ~ [h3]TL;DR[/h3] [b]5/10[/b] [i]Angels Fall First[/i] is an [b]Average[/b] game. If the idea of this game was a steak, it sadly burned up sometime during its 10 year stay in the development oven. There is still some meat around the bone beneath the char, but you won’t be enjoying the steak itself - more so enjoying the loose, vague approximation of what a steak [i]could[/i] be. There are just better things to do with your time.

Very classic inspired FPS. Reminds of the older Battlefields. There is even a commander mode. Its a bit complicated, especially the loadout system, its better to modefy the default loadouts instead creating a whole host of new ones. Even the Vehicles have loadouts. There is a ground and a space mode. I like the ground mode with vehicles the most, its pretty big fights that allow for all kinds of playstyles. I like heavy armor with a machine gun, but I've seem players zip and zoom around too. The space one has you fly around in a space ship the lion part of the time - its not my cup of tea, there is boarding tho and fighing in a space station is wonderful, you can even see the fight outside through the windows! You can use all the weapons and equipment from the start, the progression is out of the way, only enhancing how much stuff you can take with you. It also runs pretty well on linux mint, which is always a plus.

US servers are dead. Seen one EU server at 32/32 but the ping was 120+. I had no PVP experiences as I tried to find a decent server for this advertised multiplayer PVP game. If you enjoy controlling bots and playing against bots maybe give it a try.

Not in a good state yet. I wouldn't recommend this until several more QoL updates come out. Settings menu is in a completely anemic state. Not all crucial keybinds can be rebound (example I noticed just in my short time playing was the vehicle countermeasures keybind). Graphics menu could do with more customizable settings than *just* antialiasing. Graphically, there's virtually no visual clarity. It's hard to identify players against background elements, and there's a *lot* of UI clutter making things even more unreadable. It's hard to identify where a bubble shield is, so I'll be magdumping into thin air and not understanding why my shots aren't connecting. It was difficult to understand *where* was out of bounds or why. One part of an open facility that makes for good firefights was perfectly okay to stand in, but a few steps further in an otherwise open area and I'm taking tick damage without understanding why. The UI fails to convey *important* information while overloading you with unimportant info. The gunplay is *okay*. Feels like planetside with more toys (notably leaning around corners). This unfortunately still isn't great as a basis, as it feels just as feels clunky, unfun, and unresponsive. It needs a lot of work to get to a more enjoyable state. I love the concept, and I want to play it, but I just haven't been able to enjoy the execution yet. I'm going to take more time to play it and hope it grows on me, but my first impression of this game was a bad one. It inherits all the flaws of the era in which it was developed that seriously *should* have been ironed out 10 years afterward.

This game can be quite fun but it is ultimately riddled with things that make it unfun. It does a good job at being a mixed scenario fps where one second you are in space battles to then boarding enemy frigates. But unfortunately this game took too long in development and isn't particularly like a modern fps, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Between the abysmal UI and the somewhat extensive loadout choices that are fully unlocked, it is hard to find something that seems effective and correctly balanced and the floaty combat just makes that worse. Players with more game time under their belt have more loadout budget to work with and can create more effective loadouts that leave newer player in the dust, it is power-crept like crazy. On top of the extremely varied loadout choices the very high ttk with high movement is a death sentence for the multiplayer population, between the zooming knife players and the scary fast mechs that all seemingly take no damage I just don't want to play in public servers anymore. I want to like this game more than I do and I wish I could give it a mixed review, and I hope the devs can balance out some of the quirks. The only saving grace this game has is that you can play bot lobbies solo and in today's gaming landscape that is a rarity.

space combat controls suck, why is it so zoomed out. how am i supposed to see anything? the camera itself is just sickening in general. weapon range isnt visible with weapon selected, there is no aiming circle half the time for the small fighters. there is no map destruction so fences and trees and small objects will cause you to get stuck, there is like no hit feedback, everyone feels like a damage sponge with no reactions. people survive direct hits from rockets and tanks, yet infantry explosives seem to hurt more than the supposed tank cannon.

This game is for specific audiences. I'm not the audience. There is ALOT in this game the feel of the gameplay is nice it really is. But its TOO much, its to the point of being bogged down by too many menus and customization. Its overwhelming for a general audience. I really want to like this game but I don't have the ADHD brain for this.