Review of First Recon

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kamaga

First Recon Review
By kamaga on 22 December 2010


Pros: It's not a 3D tutorial edit

Cons: Too much to list, read full review.

What am I playing?

The good things:
- It's not a 3D tutorial edit like half the 3D games on this site

The things that are kinda annoying but don't really matter one way or the other:
- The file is called war_game.zip and the game is cutscene1.exe. I was expecting, I don't know... first_recon.zip and first_recon.exe?

Suggestions I have from YoYoGames' community (because this game shares a few aspects with games I've made, I'm just repeating what people yelled at me for):
- The game has no crosshairs. Does a game like this need crosshairs? No, but people will complain about it sooner or later
- The AI doesn't flank and ambush you. Is that hard to program? Yes, but people will complain about it sooner or later
- The game doesn't have super amazing online support. Can a small indie game team create an online system to rival Xbox Live on their own? No, but people will complain about it sooner or later

The bad things, in the order I noticed them:
- It takes ages to load the small game
- The M16's barrel looks like it's unnaturally slanted to the side
- The M16's sights look like a stick. That's both unrealistic and very impractical for gaming
- The menu is very uninspired and if you're not paying any attention during the loading screen, you might not even notice the game finished loading because the backgrounds are identical
- The draw distance is very tiny, it should at least be doubled
- The lighting is very buggy
- The objective and compass nag the player. Nobody needs to be reminded of what to do every moment, that's as bad as driving the wrong way on a racing game and the game keeps yelling at you.
- The first objective is "get to cover", but you almost instantly die if you stand up. The objective doesn't tell you that you're perfectly safe as long as you don't stand up, but it implies that you have to hurry so you want to stand up
- There is no place to read instructions and controls. If you hit F1 you get a blank page with nothing on it.
- When playing, the mouse look will randomly stop responding so you can't turn around anymore
- Getting a headshot will say "+100", but then you die and the number is still 0.
- If you're moving right before you die, you completely miss the game over screen
- When you shoot, there's a very loud gunshot noise (louder than when the helicopter was exploding) and a very thick tracer comes out of the gun
- The tracer is below the hit detection. When the tracer collides into someone's chest, it's counted as a headshot (but the tracer is so massive that it's really just blunt force trauma)
- The gun never needs to be reloaded and it has infinite ammo
- Enemies clutch their guns and never let go once they die
- The enemies all die in the exact same way
- The shots from your gun are the only noise you hear during gameplay
- The enemies have 100% perfectly silenced weapons that never make a sound, have absolutely zero muzzle flash, and no tracers at all
- The enemies' draw distance is farther than the trees' draw distance, so you can see where an enemy is before the tree is drawn in front of them
- You can't shoot between gaps in trees
- All the AI are cripples and hold their gun above their head
- All the trees are bare with no leaves, no top, and somehow no insides either
- Depth error with the second helicopter, you can see the trees coming through the metal

Summary:
This game is good if you like the player character to be half blind with the ability to one hit kill targets that can't move, but even then there are enough bugs to make the game less enjoyable. At first I wanted to try the online feature since Orange said that online was buggy and I was curious. Then after I realized how many bugs the single player has, that Orange doesn't mention, I'm scared to play online.

  1. OrangeGames

    OrangeGames said about 1 year ago

    it only takes a few seconds to load the game for me...

  2. kamaga

    kamaga said about 1 year ago

    Oh! I kinda re-read my review. Sorry if it seems really hostile. I just like to thoroughly list everything I don't 100% like XD (you should see the changelogs for Alk and mine's games, like 90% of the stuff was from me complaining to him :P)

  3. OrangeGames

    OrangeGames said about 1 year ago

    online is basically single player, just slightly laggier :P

    Thanks for the review, you're the pro at gm fps games.

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