If there's one thing I can't get enough of, it's shooters. Gloriously bloody shooters that like me tear through enemies and Apocryph [Steam] has plenty of that. Inspired by the likes of Hexen, Heretic, Painkiller and Strife which is clear from the style as well as the gameplay.
One thing I was worried about when they released the Linux test build was performance, which I'm sad to say they haven't really made any improvements on. If a first-person game like this is struggling to hit even 40FPS with a decent processor and graphics card, the developer has serious work to do.
They also misslabelled one of the controls in the menu, which claims you can crouch but it actually makes you sprint forward. The AI is bloody stupid too, all they ever seem to do is making a straight line towards you to their death. Some of them, like ranged enemies might sometimes try to get a little distance, but half the time they ended up facing a wall. Other enemies also sometimes seemingly got stuck, as they just stood there while taking a beating.
On top of all that, the keyboard input doesn't feel quite right, possible some Unity issues like other games have had recently. Sometimes it seems to hold an extra key press, feels sluggish and just not good. I've noticed others have also seen these problems. Then when you die, even if you have a saved game, the continue button just doesn't seem to work. This brings me to the next issue, the brightness and contrast gets messed up when you load a game making it a lot darker than it's supposed to be, with no way to re-adjust it.
The developer said they're working on a content update planned for around the end of this month and they told me they're are hoping to continue to expand it with free updates after that too. I'm glad they're going to continue working on it, as right now it's a bit of a missed opportunity. It has some great presentation, some rocking music but as a whole it ends up feeling quite sloppy due to how extremely rough it feels. At one point, the language suddenly switched to Russian too, which was weird.
Find Apocryph on Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
What a mess.
And what a shame.
Guess we'll have to wait some more for a proper next Painkiller.
Last edited by Shmerl on 9 May 2018 at 12:50 pm UTC
PublicNuisance May 9, 2018
Quoting: ShmerlNice, but unfortunately Steam only. itch.io has only the Windows demo: https://bigzur.itch.io/apocryph
If you haven't already you can vote here for a DRM free release:
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/apocryph
It's not Itch but it's something.
Last edited by Shmerl on 9 May 2018 at 3:26 pm UTC
GustyGhost May 9, 2018
https://bigzur.itch.io/apocryph
EDIT: Looks like you guys beat me to it.
Last edited by GustyGhost on 9 May 2018 at 4:01 pm UTC
It's a shame that Apocryph is looking somewhat disappointing at the moment.
Last edited by g000h on 9 May 2018 at 6:20 pm UTC
They rushed to release the game because a lot of people wanted the game to be released NOW, GRAB MY MONEY etc!!.
Developers saw the demand and decided to release the game unfinished and in a high price for 3 levels in order to grab the money.
What developers actually should have done to gain trust and support from their clients
1. Release the game as EARLY ACCESS and state that ONLY 3 levels are currently completed and the game is still not optimized.
2. State that price will be 9.99 as Early Access - The price will change to 14.99 in a period of 3 months - and at the end after the game is finished the price will be 19.99
With this everyone should be happy, this will give you time to develop the game and gain trust from your clients and in addition you will have more sales.
Most of the developers thing that there game will become the game of the year or it will be like PUBG or Fortnite or Cuphead.
Is not easy but also is not impossible Apocryph had the potential to do this but at the moment they screw it up, hopefully they will learn from their mistakes and do their best to fix all the issues like Slain:Back from hell.
Are they just so loaded up with layer upon layer of abstractions, filters, and post processing that they can actually lose track of whether simple keyboard and mouse inputs are being properly processed or not?
This seems like an issue that almost no oldschool games had, and it's slowly been getting worse and worse with each new generation of engines.
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