I'd downloaded the demo to consider it for our Sunday gaming group, but it's a fairly conservative group, and the female characters are pretty tarted up. Garnett Lee mentioned it on the final 1UP Yours podcast, so I thought I'd give it another trial.
It's pretty enough, and has enough skills and such to keep min maxers happy. But the camera is a bit of a pain and the combat is less visceral than Titan Quest. I'll probably buy it on sale some day, then never find the time to play through it.
I figured I should also try out Space Siege. I believe I downloaded the demo before PAX, and even meeting Chris Taylor in person didn't motivate me to bother actually playing it. It had enough variety in upgrades and play mechanics to show some promise, but again, the combat was kind of blah. Plus having to guide the character with the mouse pointer is a pain.
Titan Quest always felt like a dance. Start attack at range. Switch to melee and back as enemies are defeated and new enemies pour in. Hold shift and always be pointing towards the next target. Anticipate ranged targets' death and switch one shot early. Once the system was sussed out, it was simple and rewarding. Sticking and moving was even possible with many enemies. Both Sacred 2 and Space Siege feel clunky by comparison.
They felt so clunky, I elected to play Zombie Shooter on GameTap, knowing that it would give me the ability to shoot and move at the same time. Devotees may recall that I gave up on Alien Shooter: Vengeance because it got stupidly hard. Zombie shooter (on normal difficulty) was so easy, I assumed the final boss in the game to be the first of what would be many bosses in the game.
Like Alien Shooter, the game is sprite based. This allows for shell casings, bodies, and blood to cover the ground, often making it difficult to see. But the basic mechanic of point, click, kill worked well enough. It makes me laugh to think that most people in the enthusiast press would call this a dual stick shooter. In a sense, I suppose that's more accurate because the genre is generally traced back to Robotron, which did use two joysticks. But when these types of games came to PCs, nobody came up with a new name. Key mouse shooter doesn't sound as cool, does it?
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