GHunt
Theme
Ghost hunting in gmod. Suits the theme 100%.
Gameplay
It took me about an hour to get this working on the server. It could have been my scriptenforce/redirect messing up, in which case it isn’t the gamemode’s fault. But when I did manage to get the gamemode to work, I had to turn sound off because I received voice spam as soon as I joined which didn’t stop. (I think this was mentioned in the FP topic somewhere). There was no help menu or any clear objective, I was left with a top down view of my character in some sort of urban area with blue blobs moving towards me. After about 5 minutes I figured out how to move around properly (the controls are a bit weird to get the hang of), and I figured you have to shoot the blobs. And… that’s about it. I don’t know if it was a bug that stopped everything from working properly or what, but I checked the console and everything seemed to be OK. So after about 5 minutes of running around and killing blue blobs that kept respawning by grave stones, I stopped and let one kill me to see what happened. I died, and became a ghost - according to the message the chat box shouted (in caps) at me. So I walk around trying to figure out what to do now, and the blobs came after me again - but didn’t do any damage or anything, just moved up to me and sat there. I tried to kill them with my unknown weapon, but that apparently just shot bullets that did no damage. So after a bit more messing, I gave up with this.
Originallity
I can’t say I’ve seen many top-down ghost hunting games in my days of gaming, but since the game appeared to be broken or lacking in any content, I can’t really judge this criteria properly.
Bugs
Kinda already summed up in Gameplay. The voice spam was the only thing I would class as a bug, I can’t really tell if anything else is a bug or is intentional.
Aesthetics:
Used the standard HL2 health bar and ammo thing (which told me I had 27 alt, even though right click does nothing). Not sure if this was missing a lua file which controlled the HUD, since I recall seeing a screenshot with a red bar across the bottom.
Overall:
Kinda dissapointed, was looking forward to playing this when I saw it on FP - could be just a typo or a missing lua file that caused it to break. It could have had alot of potential - are gamemode authors allowed to fix and resubmit their entry late if it was just a typo or something?
The Changeling
Theme
The concept of this suits the theme nicely, as does the lake map and the general feel of the gamemode.
Gameplay
The first thing that came to mind when I played this is the requirement of 4 players. This eliminates the possibility of playing this singleplayer, and even in multiplayer, requires you to wait quite a while for enough players to join the server to start the game properly. Until 4 players were in, we apparently just killed each other with our pistols. Although this is better than just watching a “Waiting for Players” message, it would be nice to have something else to do too and/or some sort of twist to keep players occupied long enough to start the round properly.
When we got 3 players, I discovered you can vote to end the round and play the actual game anyway. Bug, or intentional??
The concept of this is sound, and when it works out, it’s actually quite fun. It’s quite funny being the changeling and being cloaked, watching all the other players stood on a hill pointing guns and each other and circling. Then running in with a knife, scaring the hell out of everybody and letting the humans shoot each other down. At one point, I managed to trick a human into thinking someone else was the changeling by knifing him then backing away quickly and they shot each other down.
However, I feel the changeling is a little overpowered. He is pretty much invisible with the knife, and the human stands no chance of killing the changeling when he is cloaked unless the changeling forgot to turn his flashlight off (which happened once, we were all gunning down this floating white sprite). The changeling also has a gun which is just as good as the human weaponry, so there’s nothing to stop the changeling from just gunning down all the humans from a distance.
I think the changeling should still keep his gun, but it shouldn’t be able to shoot (or it fires blanks). I also think he should be semi visible when cloaked and a short distance away, maybe influenced by how light/dark his area is? (So he becomes more visible when closer to a light source).
Also, the humans have a limited amount of ammo in theur guns and no other weapon, so when they run out of ammo, it’s pretty much game over - they might as well as suicide. Needs a rethink.
Other than that, it’s quite fun but gets boring quick - it would probably be well suited as a Fretta gamemode.
Originallity
Reminds me of The Stalker - a previous GMod gamemode. Dunno if this was a source of ideas, or if the creator of The Changeling even played it - but it seems pretty similiar to me.
Bugs
There were no gameplay ruining bugs with this (that I could find), and no lua errors (not clientside, not sure about serverside) - but we found the End Round vote doesn’t reset if the round ends of it’s own accord. Not a major issue but it means the vote system kinda gets borked at times.
Aesthetics
The HUD suites the theme and gamemode nicely. I didn’t find out that the screen went black and white more as the health goes down until about 3 rounds it - a nice subtle effect, but perhaps needs something a bit more precise - since the maps are quite dark, you don’t really notice greyscale colour changes much. I also missed an ammo indicator since the guns have limited ammo in them. Although the gamemode includes a help menu which scrolls with a nice effect, it’s far too slow - I would prefer a menu or some way of all the text being displayed at once so I can read it through without sitting there ages waiting for the next sentence to show.
Overall
Fun, playable gamemode - but has some balancing issues and other small things that could be easily fixed to improve gamemode quality by quite a bit and it gets kinda boring quick.
Penumbra
Theme
This suited the theme perfectly, hiding and killing ghost things with your flashlight - you couldn’t get more paranormal than that.
Gameplay
When I first setup the server for this, it was only me online. There was no help menu or anything, so I had to figure out for myself what to do. But this came pretty obvious when one of the ghost zombie things (I’ll call them ghosts for thr purpose of this review) touched me and killed me instantly. This was quite frustrating, as you died as soon as you touched one of the ghosts (or one of them touched you) - even if they didn’t even know you were there. It would be nice to have some sort of health bar and a system where maybe, they only do damage to you based on how you touched them. For example, they would kill you pretty much instantly if they leapt at you, but if you happened to touch one when they were facing the other way you’d only take 20 damage or something.
Once I figured out the game mechanics, I found the gameplay overall too hard when you’re on your own. However, things got better when players started to join and when we had about 4 players the game felt much more balanced and fun. What would be nice is some sort of system that controls the difficulty of the game based on number of players and other factors like an AI director - so when night first falls, only a few ghosts spawn and it’s not overwhelming. But as night wears on, things get tougher. The other frustrating thing about dying is that you lost $10 of your money - but you only got $1 from killing a ghost, and when there aren’t many players you usally only manage to kill 6 or so before you die. Another bad point about the ghosts is where they spawn - many times has a ghost spawned INSIDE me or right next to me and killed my before I even know what happened. There needs to be some sort of system that prevents them spawning in your sight otherwise it gets too frustrating.
As far as weapons go, they feel balanced and fun to use - the more expensive weapons are more powerful (I had to use some rcon hax to test them all without playing for 2 hours straight -_-) but all the weapons have a limited amount of usage and respawn fully at daytime so they definetly feel worth buying. It would be nice to see some weapons randomly spawn around the map that are single use only.
When we hit 5 players, the game was suddenly alot of fun. Teamwork was an important factor, what with us all covering each other’s backs and defending the player with low flashlight battery. The map was brilliant, and offered a few nice but not overpowered camping spots - keeping the pressure fairly high and encouraging teamwork even more. Of all the gamemodes, this is the one I spent playing the most - I was expecting to get bored quick but it actually has quite a bit of replay value. Given some more development and content, this could end up becoming the next Zombie Survival - I hope to see this developed further, and if not, I may have a go at it XD
Originallity
I’ve not seen anything else like this anywhere else, but the concept seems strangely familiar. I can’t quite place it though, so I got to say this is definetly original.
Bugs:
Other than the ghosts spawning too close/inside you, we found no issues with the gamemode. (There were some problems, but I wouldn’t class them as bugs but rather balancing issues).
Aesthetics:
The HUD is basic but does the job nicely - just like a good HUD should. The gamemode lacked a help menu of any sort however, leaving me and other players to find out what to do themselves. Just a panel with some text on (2 or 3 lines) would do. The daytime colour effect looks a bit cheap however - I don’t know if it’s to do with my hardware (I use medium settings mostly), but it looks like a white box with alpha just drawn over the screen. Some proper PP (Post Processing) would be nice, or if it already uses PP, it could do with improvement.
Overall:
This gamemode is alot of fun - when you got the right amount of players to play it with. It has it’s issues and problems, of course, but you can’t really expect anything more - I doubt the creator got chance to properly playtest this multiplayer.
UFO Abduction Frenzy
Theme
This gamemode doesn’t really seem to fit the theme of “paranormal” - it could just be me being fussy and technical (like usual), but paranormal means things that can’t be explained by humans in any way. UFOs can be explained, they are alien spacecraft. Having said that, it’s not completely unrelated - in terms of the filming/gaming industry these sorts of things are closely linked together and there is a vague connection.
Gameplay
This was alot of fun to begin with, I mean, who doesn’t want to fly around and abduct people and experiment on them and steal their cars? I especially like the sound effects you get when you abduct a person, they make me laugh every time. Need more funny sound effects.
The APCs are the obvious enemy and you know you have to avoid them without a help menu from the moment they shoot missiles at you. The missiles feel balanced, they are not overpoweringly damaging but can get nasty to dodge when several apcs fire at once (which is a good thing in terms of balance). However, my natural reaction to this was to try and blow them up by dropping cars on them - which wasn’t easy, and I don’t think it actually has any effect. It would be nice to see some way to take out the APCs (either by the method described above, or some other means). Also, if you were to develop this gamemode further, it would be nice to see more things to abduct! The city needs to be populated with all sorts of things to fling around, more vechicles, animals maybe, perhaps even small buildings. Include funny sound effects with all of these and you got an instant winner.
The gamemode does kind of get boring quick though, without extra content and perhaps a more competitive multiplayer aspect to it (such as stealing people from each other’s beams and flinging cars at each other’s UFOs) - but since it’s a Fretta gamemode, that’s not much of an issue.
Originallity
Top marks for this. You can’t find this anywhere else on GMod, and you’d have trouble finding it on google or anywhere else too. Really good idea here, well done.
Bugs
None found, the system works pretty flawlessly. If you did implement the system like you said you were going to with the custom entities system, it works brilliant!
Aesthetics
The HUD seems pretty standard, and does not detract from gameplay but nor does it enhance it. It would be nice to have some sort of counter of how many cars you have taken and how many people you have abducted as well as overall score. (And if you enhance other areas of gameplay, such as apc destroying, include counters for those).
Overall
Very nice gamemode, was alot of fun to play and has alot of room for expansion. Good work Devenger!
Overall
I posted on FP saying it will be interesting to see what comes out of this and I was right - some pretty cool stuff has come out of this. Generally, the gamemodes were fun to play and I enjoyed testing and writing these reviews. It was hard to decide which gamemodes were better than others, all the gamemode authors did very well on their work.
4th Place - GHunt
It probably would have been a nice gamemode to play, but it was too buggy to properly judge.
3rd Place - The Changeling
Fun gamemode, but got boring after a while and there are a few balancing issues.
2nd Place - UFO Adbuction Frenzy
Also a fun gamemode, but needs more content to keep the players engaged.
1st Place - Penumbra
Hit the nail on the head, needs some attention in areas but kept me and the other 4 players in the server
