well, it is a good if not great game and i would give it 5 stars IF i knew how to finish the game without quitting. i guess i want it to bee easier to see the controls, cause i got 1000 kills and wanted to beat the high score and i quit: lost all my score. but i guess thats just clumsy me :) great game!
Reviews for "Arsenal Online"
Most game modes are playable but actually trying to beat the lava minigame legitimately makes me nauseous. In order to have a chance I have to constantly switch between one half of the arena to the other, back and forth, in less than a second. When that's combined with the fact that my inner ear doesn't feel any change in motion, I start feeling motion sickness. You seriously need to halve the spawn point area for this game mode so I don't have to shake my camera all over the place to compensate.
Bullets still have minor hit registration glitches even at the lowest settings.
EDIT: Fullscreen helped fix the motion sickness issue. While I have to pan the camera a bit I don't have to shake it nearly as much as before.
WilkinGames responds:
Try putting the game in fullscreen!
Hmm, feeling kinda conflicted and confused with this one!
Don't get me wrong, the game aims to impress with a very slick and polished look and feel to it, especially with the menus/UI which are intuitive and good-looking all-around. I also appreciated that I could play as a guest without having to go through all that setting up an account jazz. There's certainly a lot to like here, and I should be a shoo-in with this type of game as I love gun-centered firing range games like Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades, Receiver, Police Trainer Arcade, and so on.
But as I played, I just really failed to see the allure of this game. Playing as this floating, disembodied gun and shooting at dumb targets just felt really awkward and unsatisfying.
All of the games, apart from some of the more exotic ones like War, felt like the same minigame of shooting dumb targets copy-pasted with the smallest of differences between them. Compared to something like Police Trainer which had all sorts of minigames that test all sorts of skills, this game just felt so padded with no real variation, ultimately feeling pointless.
You'd think for a game that's all about gun porn it wouldn't do such a bad job with it: how am I supposed to admire my gun when I have to aim at targets so far away that I can't even see the gun in action? Even when I can see the gun, it's so far away, it doesn't have any fancy reload animations that differ depending on whether it's dry or not, and I can't see any unique qualities of the gun like bolt manipulations: where's my HK slap?
It has to be said that the first impression was absolutely terrible as well. I was waiting so goddamn long for the game to finish loading so that I could play: there were three separate loading sequences which lasted multiple minutes each! It's a miracle I didn't just quit instead of waiting, but again, credit where it's due, the game has a professional look to it that makes me want to give it the benefit of the doubt.
There's also some confusing aspects like how holding down the trigger will have the reticle grow bigger, making you think you're losing accuracy, but yet the bullets will continue to fly like lasers down the center of the reticle: what's going on there?
Still a big fan of your games like Dinogen and I like the effort put into this, but this felt like a big miss to me, which, as said, is super odd because I'm usually into games like this. If I had my way, I'd love if this game got more into gun porn, like following in Receiver's footsteps and assigning buttons to all the different actions of handling the gun and making you master their usage: everything being so automated and simple in this just makes every gun feel the same when the allure should be showcasing all the differences.
good game
==REVIEW==
Things I enjoyed:
• Game looks good. Guns look nice and UI is intuitive.
• Firing range is a very handy buy-before-try testing ground.
• Variety of game modes, which all play very differently and encourage different builds and weapons
• The rewards for accuracy and headshots encourage building a balanced gun over maximizing DPS or burst damage
• The super weapons look incredibly cool and just owning them feels good
• Gameplay is engaging because of the constant loop of unlocking stuff.
• Attachments are for the most part well balanced where every one has a niche of some kind
• Credit system is far less hassle than the shard system of previous games
Things that can use changing:
• Lava is far more difficult than other game modes. It's very difficult to keep up with the multiple-per-second rain of targets at only ~50 kills. Some move fast enough to cross the screen during the 1 or 2 seconds required to reload an assault rifle. Making things worse is that accuracy is graded harshly against fast-moving targets, and headshots are almost down to luck with the constant rotations.
• Shotguns feel nearly useless. The fact that each pellet counts as a shot fired means they'll destroy a game's accuracy rating. Each round expended should count as a shot, not each pellet. Also because of their long reloads, low piercing and wild spreads, I've found shotguns are less powerful at close range than high-caliber pistols. They could use either a statistical buff or a game mode devoted to close quarters where they can shine.
• Underbarrel secondary weapons aren't appealing for their high cost because the ammunition is limited, which limits them only to game modes with a very short duration. There should be a way to reload them. The simplest way I can think of is that firing them when they are empty will trigger a reload animation. This would have to be balanced against their clip size, of course.
• One-shot weapons do not benefit from shock-damper, rapid-fire or grip attachments (the last is on the boltcaster's lance). Those could be removed.
• The m203 and the mk13 ELGM are pointlessly similar and there's no reason to buy one if you have the other. Same with the XM25 and the XM29.
• The bipod attachment is strictly superior to the grip. There's no reason to consider the grip if a bipod is available.
• I only found the zoom in ability useful during the Sniper game mode. All others have time and situational awareness pressure that discourage zooming in.
• Hitting heads with launchers does count as a headshot for the purposes of unlocking attachments but 1) it doesn't notify you when you do, which is an oversight and 2) it doesn't count towards challenges, so challenges to headshot with launchers are literally impossible.
==SUGGESTIONS FOR NEW STUFF==
• Game mode: Skeet. Dummies are thrown in a ballistic arc so that they land near the player's weapon (sometimes overshooting or undershooting by a decent amount), bounce high once, then disappear. The game ends when ten dummies disappear this way, similarly to lava or defender.
• Game mode: Close up. Dummies appear close to the player weapon in a 360 arc around them, then disappear in a few seconds. To discourage spraying, some are -Red Dummies- that give a score/credit penalty if destroyed but count as a normal kill if allowed to disappear. Game mode lasts 60 seconds and targets gradually increase in HP like with Hardened. Finally, a use case for shotguns.
• Launcher: Starstreak HVM. Each shot fires a cluster of three high-speed darts that follow the player's cursor for a few seconds, then stop homing. One shot, decently long reload.
• Ammo attachment: Hot load. Bullet moves 2x faster. Effectively increases accuracy against moving targets at long range. The boltcaster's lance would have this effect too by default, because that just makes sense.
==GAME GUIDE==
• White/green/blue targets have 100 HP. Armored (gray) targets have 500 HP. Headshots deal 125% damage base, 225% with Hollow Point. Some overkill is okay if you have piercing, because each pierce-through deals less damage. Keep in mind that Hardened, Defender and War modes start at these values but gradually increase the HP of targets.
• Score is based on accuracy, kills and headshots. Credits are based on kills and headshots only. Headshots are worth about twice as much as kills on both measures, so focus on your headshots.
• Piercing is important in most game modes, it improves your accuracy (which counts hits made vs shots fired) as well as your damage. I recommend 3-5 on fast-firing guns, and as much as 8 on slower guns.
• Speed loader is a fantastic mod that will halve total reload time. However, if you add the extended ammo mod, that will also proportionately increase the reload time, so don't use them together.
• For most purposes, 90% accuracy will let you get headshots on nearly anything. If you reach that but still have trouble hitting stuff, try reducing recoil instead.