Red Alliance

game is good. period. gunplay is also good and kicks nicely. also I love the clumsy voice acting. not much there to say, a proper classic shooter.

as someone who didn't care a whole lot for half-life 2, I really enjoyed my time with Red Alliance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcL89vWEY80 30:07 load up the elevator, fall through the map, die, wake up, race a train I only discovered there was bhop around 10 minutes into the video and the video starts a bit after the beginning of the game. red alliance has a very good and forgiving autosave system. red alliance is a short but very rich experience. the game is packed with novel achievements but the level design itself is enough to warrant spending time looking in the nooks and crannies. fairly early on you can choose the look of your hands *36 minutes into the video* and its little touches like this that I feel go unappreciated. red alliance appears to receive criticism for more amateur elements of its design but I would probably disagree with most of what is brought up. voice acting? extremely charming and earnest. the boss at the end is a good performance and some of the female voice lines sound like they were recorded over the phone with a computer mic straight into the onboard sound, I love it. floaty movement? yeah the game has a unique feeling locomotion system which im sure the developer would love to talk about, I never took issue with this and if I had to describe its unique feeling, it feels weighted and as if you can feel individual steps more, shuffly, a dash of realism or sim perhaps and it matches the gunplay, it might also be related to the bhop system. people say they got lost or something? i don't really know how that is possible unless you have a terrible sense of direction because its pretty linear. weird stutter or something? this might have been the case but I forget since I'm not bad at computers and fixed it without looking anything up just by switching either vsync on or off, changing it from windowed mode to fullscreen or changing the resolution back and forth. the steam performance graph clued me into some oddity this game does have where the fps doesnt match the graph fps and this is where people are getting bad vibes. a patch would be good but it was such a small issue I truly cant on a bet or something say it was this game that had that weird frame discrepancy and slight stutter which did seem to affect the way movement felt in a negative capacity. red alliance has excellent gun play. the only thing I can think to improve it would be the inclusion of a freeaim system. the standard metrocop clone which comes in a few different loadouts, is a reasonably smart opponent and has all sorts of states, they will aggress, they will hold their position and they will fallback. they change their mind on the fly given their circumstance and mostly communicate their intention. when this doesn't go well they all gather up on some point, possibly your last known location or just some sticky pathing and this mostly happened in outdoor areas only where i was blowing past them with the bhop. there are some more enemy types but their behavior is rather basic and not that notable. back to the guns, i'm not a big fps gun snob but these are lovingly designed and mostly all feel good to use, I didn't spend much time with the shotgun because it was somewhat rare. weapons have slight variation as seen in a few other great titles such as contagion, so theres a chance to come across that rare skinned \ silenced dreamgun if you are looking around and theres an achievement for holding a bunch of different weapon variations. red alliance features at least 1 standout combat sandbox encounter, 54:25 in the video where you disable the 4 fuse boxes. this is the highlight example for the AI system in the game. this area itself could be replayed on higher difficulty probably 10 times before I got truly bored of it. red alliance is graphically \ visually cohesive and looks good. despite a lot of criticism I think the game has very few rough edges, garish qualities or totally blank areas devoid of any thought. I think any opinions that were held in that regard are of the viewpoint of someone who has no concept of bunnyhopping and that the entire game's outside area is shaped like some kind of race track or bhop obstacle course. I didn't drive the car very much because bhop was just way faster. its a super exagerated version of bhop where the slightest broad swipe has you going what feels like near top speed, very fun but hard to tell if that level of acceleration was intended. maybe this is why people think the game looks blurry? there are a plethora of options to change to help define the look a little better for ones own taste replayability - once you beat the game you unlock another difficulty and vortex mode which arms you with the games railgun and infinite ammo, the game is harder and its a 1 life no save situation. completing vortex mode has an achievement. if you are trying to complete all the achievements the game has to offer you as well as smell the roses here and there along with creating your own fun at times or invent your own challenge, this game is plenty worth replaying and could probably go close to 30 hours if you were expedient. my time isnt accurate since I got cards off the game first but I would say I played 3 shortish sessions. probably no more than 4 hours. boxes fold, bottles shatter, garbage explodes, monitors break. I would love to see the cream of this game focused into another experience with emphasis on the fear \ farcry \ crysis \ hl series style ai sandbox encounters. to bluntly mash a game idea. you bhop down the ubiquitous hl2 road scenery with progressing difficulty and obstacle layout geometry. each bhop section leads you to an ever increasing space and complexity of a few buildings with guys and generated objectives, fuse bos, rip off farcry towers, think of some other things, complete the stuff and move on to the next thing by bhopping. could make it a roguelite sorta thing whatever but I just wanna bhop then get into dense fighting with lots of decisions involving doorways, staircases, pathways that are barricaded by destructible objects, holes or damage in some wall for expanded line of sight, all of which are featured in red alliance but you can only drink only your own pee for so long

It plays like a lower-budget Russian Half-Life 2 clone from the 2000’s era. The game has decent gunplay, lots of secrets and easter eggs hidden around every corner and offers some replay value with different game modes. In my experience it ran without any technical issues and no crashes (which isn’t always the case for games like these) + there’s decent amount of customisation in the game’s settings, from FoV slider to being able to open developer’s console for further adjustments. On more negative side, graphics and art direction is rather inconsistent with some interiors looking really good even by today’s standards while some outdoor areas look like they’ve been made 20 years ago, I’ve also noticed few times how the enemies spawned right next to me and on few occasions AI just stopped working completely. Also the campaign/story is about 2-3 hours long and voice acting ranges from “okay” to “really bad” (which is understandable given that the game was made by like 5 people). I’ve bought it on a sale for less than £4 and I’d give it about 7/10 score at that price range, its worth checking out if you’re looking for some “oldschool” shooter to play for few days.

[h1]Rating[/h1] 6/10 [h1]Intro[/h1] A decent FPS inspired by Half-Life 2. It even goes as far as to include a driving section. Although, the lack of polish is very apparent. Still though, I recommend picking it up on a sale. [h1]Positives[/h1] + Good soundtrack. + Good weapon variety. + Spooky underground levels. + Weapons have good impact. + Good aesthetics and graphics. [h1]Negatives[/h1] - Enemies are super accurate while also dealing a lot of damage. - Horrid voice acting. Seriously, step away from the mic, so your lines don't peak so badly. - Unable to lean around corners. This isn't ideal in a game that encourages stealth when possible. - Weapon limit. For a game inspired by Half-Life 2, this strict five weapon limit feels out of place and limits your options.

The game's alright. The story is... there - I guess. The environments in the first half of the game look nice, the gunplay is decent (and could've been a lot better if the recoil wasn't so horrendous).

Its a janky but fun game, Voice acting is hilarious as well, They got inpiration from half life by Design and Style a bit,But its worh the price

As a Half-Life fanboy, I, of course, really enjoy Red Alliance. It doesn't try to hide its influences, nor tries to change a winning formula, it's just a really solid indie FPS, which has some issues one should expect from an ambitious project like this made with a small budget and a small team. These issues include some engine jank like physics going crazy and the game running internally at 60FPS despite having no issues with 144hz, so it ends up feeling... weird to play, you get used to it though. The (english) voice acting is atrocious but the writing doesn't make it cringe, I gotta give a shout-out to the main antagonist's actor who has some hilarious deliveries. I fully recommend this game if you're a fan of Half-Life 2 and shooters of this era, and even as a fan of shooters in general, I recommend it. It's a very good game. Congrats to the devs !