Overgrowth [Official Site, Steam, Humble Store], the spiritual successor to Lugaru from Wolfire Games has released the final beta version with a finalized story mode.
Here's their video to talk about Beta 6:
Direct Link
Release highlights:
- Added new finalized Overgrowth story mode
- Added improved difficulty select menu
- Added "Continue" option to reopen current story mode level
- Several improvements to the integrated combat and parkour tutorial in the Overgrowth story
- Made enemies react to victory in more interesting ways
- Added depth of field effect to dialogues
- Added true fullscreen and windowed-fullscreen video options
- Improved modding support
- Performance improvements
- A slightly improved version of the Lugaru story.
A slightly longer changelog can be viewed here, although if you want the full changelog which really is rather long that's here. This beta has so many changes it's quite incredible!
I decided to finally play it and one thing's for sure, the performance is a bit off. Giving it any amount of anti-aliasing makes the performance absolutely nose-dive. With it's turned off, it's at least playable, but there's still constant and highly noticeable performance drops everywhere. The performance is a real problem. Especially since my computer is an i7-5960X paired with an Nvidia 980ti. It is a Beta though, so hopefully the performance problems will be ironed out before the final release in a few weeks.
The actual gameplay did seem like it could be quite fun, although it's a little on the simplistic side. I was expecting to be able to throw punches and do combination attacks, but to punch you're just literally holding down the mouse button. You can catch an attack and roll an enemy, or kick them in the face while you're in the air, but for an action game it feels way too simplistic. Those are just some initial impressions though after a quick spin, I will have proper thoughts when it's actually a finished game.
For those that don't know: Humble Bundles were started by Jeff Rosen of Wolfire Games, until it was later spun into its company.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
QuoteI decided to finally play it and one thing's for sure, the performance is a bit off.
What part of the game did you play? The lugaru campaign was buttery smooth, but there were a few levels in the overgrowth campaign that I had to turn the anti-aliasing down for. During the alpha, at least, a bunch of those performance problems had to do with levels that didn't have pre-compiled shaders yet, so they were being calculated at runtime. Not sure if that's the case here, but we can hope that's all it is.
QuoteThe actual gameplay did seem like it could be quite fun, although it's a little on the simplistic side.
The second part of that sentence is ... I would say inaccurate. Sure, it has a low number of buttons, but it's definitely not simple. The damage algorithm is a bit more physics based (kinda similar to Mount&Blade), which means part of the combat is trying to attack/move in ways to increase or decrease the force of attacks.
As far as the actual combat moves go: pressing different directions while attacking performs different attacks; there are cancels, dodges, and counters; with practice, you can become an absolute monster. Learning how to fake an attack or block in order to trick the enemy into doing something you can exploit and punish is a large part of the game.
I spent a lot of time in the tournament mode during the alpha, practicing against increasing difficulty levels, and the battles can get very intense. The game is extremely difficult to master, though. I'm by no means an expert.
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