It's just a fancy label for the combination of talent trees available to that hunter. Each hunter gets a selection of two of the five talent trees (combat, vengeance, scouting, survival, and support). If a hunter has scouting and survival, it's a stalker, but if a hunter has scouting and combat it's a charger.
Game Impressions I've had the game two full days, completed the campaign, and played through most of three days worth of daily contracts so I figured it was time for a proper review. PART 1 (yes, it's that long ) ----- Not counting the campaign (I'll get to that later), from a macro perspective, Hunters 2 is little other than the same game Hunters: Episode One was. You control a team of hunters, you play through a series of randomized daily contracts, level up, get better gear, just get better, rinse, repeat, repeat. If the fact that H:E1 was little more than an endless series of skirmishes on randomized combinations of map parts, tile sets, victory conditions, and bonus objectives was something you strongly disliked, it is unlikely that Hunters 2 is going to change your opinion because that is, once again, the core of the game. However, if you mostly enjoyed the design of the first game, you are likely to love what they've done with H2 because they've tweaked the bejesus out of that core. ----- Some of the big changes: - No more distinct armor and health (and with it the bonus objective to not lose health). Essentially, armor is your hunter's health, when it's gone, so is the hunter. I rather enjoyed the way H:E1 handled this, but this is simpler and easier to understand while not actually affecting gameplay. - Similar to the no more separate armor and health values, there is no more distinct impact and fire damage resistance. All damage is resisted by armor equally based on a single DR value. This is a big improvement. It was a needless complication that didn't add to gameplay and due to the frequency of 90% fire resistance once your team started getting around level 7, it harmed variety since rocket launchers and flamers were reduced to S&Gs status. Additionally, DR is handled differently under the hood anyhow, so it's no longer quite so effective, but when the die rolls do go your way, it's amazing. - No more vanilla do everything hunters and no more equipment (and no global leadership talents). They completely revamped the whole way talents are handled as well as folded equipment into the talent system. What it breaks down to is this: all hunters have access to the full array of "equipment" talents (better accuracy, more armor, stimpacks, medkits, etc.) and two of Talent talent trees similar to (but heavily streamlined) from H:E1. Additionally, nobody gets heavy weapon training for free, each type of heavy weapon (rocket launcher, mini gun, plasma rifle, and sniper rifle) requires you to spend a talent point to use. The biggest consequence is that everything is now an individual game, no more leadership talents that grants bonuses to everyone and no swapping of equipment between missions. You've got to pay more attention to who you recruit, build up, what weapons you equip relative to talents, etc.. With only 9 points in all to spend there is a lot of give and take (and probably a lot of $50,000 credit respecs until you're satisfied). It's not really better than the system used for H:E1, but it is deeper and more thoughtful and, based on the number of continually occurring bugs from the global leadership talents in H:E1, probably just easier to account for and handle for Rodeo Games Perhaps most importantly, if/when they raise the level cap, this current system will continue to function just fine as-is. - No more weapon and armor levels relative to the hunter levels. H:E1 opted for a never ending series of gear swaps with every weapon and armor aimed for a specific level hunter. Every level up involved a new gear optimization phase that was both micro management that became tedious after a while (aggravated by the interface in H:E1) and, more egregiously, made for some crazy power creep in the game. The damage done by a level 10 weapon of the same type as a level 1 was magnitudes greater. Now everybody can equip any piece of armor or weapon (assuming they have the requisite talent), you're limited by the quality of the gear and armor you can afford or loot, not the hunter level. On the plus side, with the power spread now being tighter (e.g. a white quality common assault rifle does around 400 base damage, a cream of the crop gold legendary assault rifle only does around 1000 base damage), the game is now more even as you play through it and you won't be trapped into so much micro management to keep hunter levels balanced. The shifts in power balance now rely more on talent configuration than simply buying the next level of gear and gaining an extra thousand damage "just because". On the other hand, the sensation of getting more powerful does take a hit. Although it didn't have much game effect since enemy health and armor was similarly boosted, there was a sense of satisfaction watching a sniper at higher levels in H:E1 deal tens of thousands of damage in a single shot. Still, for a game meant to played long term and repetitively, this change (particularly in light of hardcore mode) is definitely a net positive. - No more point values for hunters and no more difficulty slider for missions. Although not well explained, H:E1 used a system where daily missions were balanced via a point system cost for each hunter and a variable difficulty slider. Although moderately complex, it did allow for some great customization where you could give yourself a greater or lesser challenge and play around with everything from a solo hunter on a giant map to bringing all nine hunters loaded for bear. Well, whether you liked it or not, it's all gone. Although there seems to be some behind the scenes tweaking of the overall difficulty, missions are now balanced more through limited spawn points relative to the map size and victory conditions. Given that maps now appear much better in general anyhow, I can live with the new system as it makes for interesting tactical choices. ----- In addition to those mechanical changes from H:E1, it cannot go without mention that the interface for gearing up has been improved greatly. There was so much clicking back and forth through hunters and gear types in the first game to evaluate and swap gear that seeing how they pulled it all together for H2 is itself almost worth the upgrade. The other big improvement in my mind is that map quality seems to have gone up a notch. Although the majority of the tile sets are recycled from H:E1, the actual map pieces used and the way they are put together seems much better, and combined with the limited number and varying locations of spawn points increases the playability. In general, weapons have been rebalanced and everything so far seems to have a genuinely viable use unlike in H:E1 where past midgame shotguns, flamers, and rocket launchers were near useless, and hammers were highly situational. H:E1 was basically three weapons: SMGs, assault rifle, and sniper rifle. The overly flexible SMG is now gone, and plasma rifles and mini guns are now added to the line up. Everything has a nice set perks and penalties to make you think about who and where each weapon is appropriate. The change to the to-hit mechanics for burst fire weapons is another nice improvement to weapons in H2. Another nice improvement is we finally get to fight something besides other hunters with the inclusion of the alien "Xenomorphs", sometimes even getting maps with both human and alien enemies that create three way conflicts. It's not a mindblowing change or anything, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. The last improvement I'll mention is the addition a toggle for choosing one of three game difficulties and a permanent choice of making a particular save slot hardcore or not (if you choose hardcore, dead mercs stay dead and their equipment goes bye-bye). With three save slots, multiple difficulties, and hardcore mode, everybody should be able to play around and find something they feel is a fun challenge for them. Otherwise, outside of the campaign, this is still basically the same game as Hunters: Episode One, just greatly improved and polished. I've had my share of crashes (will be sending some crash logs to RG shortly), but nothing too egregious for 1.0 release and, notably, no memory related terminations by the OS so far on my 4G touch (/knock knock knock ). And I've also seen completely bizarre bugs: e.g. on launch day there was a "Destroy the Reactor" mission with the bonus condition of "take no casualties". Evidently one of the reactors was spawned as a player class and was promptly destroyed by the AI hunters on the first enemy turn, doing part of my main objective for me but causing me to lose the bonus objective.
Game Impressions PART 2 (last part, yay!) ----- Of course, the most stark difference between H:E1 and H2 is the presence of a campaign centered around a "hero class" hunter, Caius Black. The campaign is 8 missions long, completing it gives you a random piece of high level gear (I think it's always legendary, but don't quote me on that), and you can reset it to gain additional pieces of high level gear as much as you want to play through it. I enjoyed the campaign, it was nice to see what RG could do with deliberately designed maps, hand placed enemies, and event triggers. OTOH, it also showed the limitations of what this AI can make believable, but it worked pretty well for what it was. Seven of the eight missions are pretty straight forward and, for good or ill, won't give you much problem if you've played enough Hunters to know what you're doing. That's not to say the devs didn't pull some interesting tricks (including one mission that actually has a form of stealth mechanics), but they're still straight up affairs. The eighth mission is a bit of twist: it's a boss battle, and it's done pretty well. How easy or hard you find it will depend on a number of factors, everything from the gear you bring, to how bad the RNG gods hate you with the high damage resistance of the boss's armor, to where the "hammer thugs" randomly spawn relative to your hunters. Even if you've coasted through the first seven, it's likely you'll be replaying this one at least once (and probably more unless you've been playing the daily missions in between the campaign missions to level up). Regardless of whether you have to "work" at beating the final mission, it's still not going to take you that long to complete the campaign - even with real life impeding my time for gaming as well as making sure I tried to complete all the daily missions, I still finished the eighth mission less than 48 hours after I first launched the game. ----- Now, here's where the game could stand to improve: - The weapon and armor manufacturing is nowhere near as good as was promised in pre-release information. Unfortunately, the maximum stats you're allowed to craft are often considerably lower than you can find for store purchased gear, yet the cost is prohibitively expensive relative to store purchased gear. With store gear being as good or better than crafted gear, and legendary gear better than either, I just don't see the feature as justified currently. - Caius Black is actually a bit pants. For all the vapor hype of hero classes during the H:E1's era, finally getting to play with the single hero class hunter available for Hunters 2 is a bit of a letdown. Caius is nothing special beyond the novelty factor of wielding both a melee weapon (significantly weaker than a decent hammer) and a ranged weapon with a shorter range than anything but a shotgun and doing only moderate damage. If we could upgrade or otherwise change out his gear that would be one thing, but with fixed weaponry of meh, he's just a dead spot on the roster. - Speaking of dead spots, we should be able to "fire" and move our hunters around in the roster list. The new "two trees only" talent mechanic gives a lot of padding to the process of building the perfect team for our respective play style, but the inability to remove and move hunters on the roster list is going to make for a hot mess of navigating our active hunters in the midst of the all the unused hunters before long. - Still not sure why there's no button for toggling through hunters with unused AP. Finding all your hunters isn't exactly the height of excitement with the way they get spread out on some of the bigger maps. The "next idle unit" is such a staple of the turn based genre it's surprising it's still not there. - I miss the ability to get basic information on the enemy units. In H:E1 if you selected an enemy unit you were told their weapon and armor. For vets of the series, the ommission of this information isn't a serious issue, but it is unfriendly to the new players who aren't going to recognize at a glance that, "oh yeah, that guy's got a Rocket Launcher and is wearing heavy armor, he can either move or fire but not both, and can only move 3 squares". - The new lighting engine at times gets to be a bit much. Things are downright washed out some of the time it's so bright. -------------- Conclusion (or the TL,DR; synopsis): Like it or not, Hunters 2 is little more than the same game as Hunters: Episode One but with all the adjustments to the game mechanics the devs would have liked to have put in place if H:E1 had made enough money to justify doing so. That's not to put H2 down; in every way that matters, Hunters 2 is the definitive version without any major and/or gamebreaking flaws out of the gate. The structured campaign is short, but also a nice proof of concept that this game engine and rule set can be used for more than just basic skirmishes. Hopefully we'll see more structured content released down the road. So, if you haven't played the first game, but are intrigued, Hunters 2 is undoubtedly where to start. If you played the first game and liked or loved the general idea, Hunters 2 is probably a worthy upgrade. However, if you were disappointed how Episode One was little more than an endless series of randomized skirmishes masquerading as content, the 8 mission campaign is unlikely to impress you sufficiently for the asking price.
Thanks for the review but... what's up with people measuring the game's length by "days"? That does nothing to give an actual idea of the real length, since a day game's time could go from 30 minutes to 5 or more hours. At least give us a ballpark in hours.
Keeping in mind that being a turn based game, one man's ten second turn is another man's ten minute turn of carefully evaluating every possible enemy move and future LOS, this is my guesstimate based on my play speed. The *campaign* is short, eight missions. The absolute biggest mission, the next to last, took me around 70 turns, so that was probably, what, 35 minutes on the outside. If you sat down with an already leveled and geared team so you never failed and/or needed to go play daily missions for credits to gear up, I'd guess you could probably finish all 8 missions in about 3 hours. Starting from scratch, repeating some missions due to not knowing where they placed a gun turret (just an example ), taking time to go play daily missions, etc., probably going to be around 6 to 8 hours invested in all. But, that's the campaign, and if you're buying this game for the campaign I can all but assure you that you will be disappointed. The game proper is still the randomized daily missions to improve your team, and that game can eat up as much time as you want to put it into it. If you're just looking to experience a good story driven TBS, there are better choices than this one.
Problem with the Support tree I'm not sure if this is intended to be like this but when a hunter is on guard they will waste any action points instead of firing on visible enemies. For example, I set a hunter equipped with an assault rifle on guard, he has four action points. An enemy wearing heavy armour comes around the corner and my hunter fires on him. The enemy moves one space closer and my hunter fires again. The enemy is now out of action points and stops moving. My hunter on guard still has two action points he could use to fire on the clearly visible enemy in front of him but instead does nothing and the action points are wasted. The worst part of this is that two skills in the Support tree are designed to save you action points while on guard. There seems precious little point in saving action points that will just end up being discarded.
Excellent review, Chip. I agree with it completely. I have a few questions: Does anyone know exactly what changing the difficulty does? Tougher enemies? More enemies? Both? Maybe it's because I'm playing on an iPad 1, but I've noticed a couple of textures change to super low-res during play. Specifically, the 'power core' you can pick up, and open doors. Has anyone else noticed this? Also, Guard doesn't always show the full range of squares that are guarded. For example, if a hunter is three squares up and two squares away from a door, the door square is guarded but the blue square typically doesn't show up. The XP reward for each hunter for success on a mission doesn't seem to make sense. As it is now, on Hard difficulty each hunter gets 7500 XP for completing the mission successfully and 3500 XP for surviving. But the only hunters who get the mission completed reward are those who survived, i.e. a hunter either gets both rewards or he gets neither. So why have two different categories? Guard is working properly; it's only supposed to be activated upon movement or attack. It was the same in H:E1. I think switching guard to the way you suggest would be far too powerful, especially against melee enemies. As for the skills, they definitely have their uses. They're especially good with heavy and long-range weapons, which are pretty much the only weapons you'd want the support tree for, anyway.
As the moose said, it's working as intended. Guard is only reactionary. To put a bit of a twist on your example to show you why the talents are useful: For example, you set a hunter in light armor on Guard with an assault rifle, he has 4 points to react to enemies on their turn. An enemy comes around the corner and your hunter fires on the enemy, who also has an assault rifle. The enemy returns fire and hits your hunter, because the hunter didn't have training to hold position when under fire, he "ducks" and the remaining 3 AP vanish leaving your hunter to take fire from the enemy that came around the corner and any other enemies that move into range on their turn. For the record, I've never played a game where overwatch/guard worked the way you were under the impression it should. It's a balance thing: you have to decide whether to act now on your turn where you're in full control or to risk investing AP in an automated future action on the enemy's turn that you may or may not get to make. The investment can pay off incredibly if your sniper gets the drop and one-shot kill on an enemy, or nobody might move into your LOS at all and now your whole turn was "wasted". That's just how it works.
If it works like the slider did in H:E1 it's both. As you raised difficulty you got slightly more enemies but at higher effective levels with better quality equipment. I haven't actually played around with it yet, but that's the assumption I'm working from. I have found it takes some futzing to get facing "just so" with guard. Never trusted it to cover something I couldn't get to light up. Hadn't noticed this until you pointed it out, but you're right, it's an all or nothing affair in the 1.0 release. Either a bug or a redundant feature still in the game from an earlier design I assume. EDIT: Nope, not a bug, just a bit of an odd duck with the way the game usually plays. I was replaying the campaign today and noticed with mission 7 (that has 3 sequential objectives) that hunters will get the objective bonus for those they were alive to get but not ones where they were dead, so it actually is working, and there actually is a function for the split... on campaign mission 7 There might be another one, but, in general, with only one main objective per mission, it is one and the same, but it does allow for them to have more complex missions like campaign 7. So, there you go. Compared to the first release for H:E1, I am quite pleased that the only things I can complain about are so minor.
It's definitely guarding the squares it's supposed to. (I've never seen the hunters fail to respond appropriately.) It just won't light up consistently; sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.
I find moving your finger slightly away from the hunter when rotating him for guard makes it much easier to get it "just so".
Holding out for hopes of this changing before I buy... IMHO, iCloud save syncing should be a fundamental requirement
Not to be too critical, but it can't be more than a single digit percentage of users who give a crap. You not only have to find someone with two iOS devices in constant use (not even a major percentage of the forum users here, and we're already so far outside of what is mainstream it's amazing anyone cares what we think ), but someone who uses both for gaming enough, and switches on and off enough, and is *always* online enough, that this matters. So, nice feature to have? Sure. Fundamental? Not even close.
Replayed the campaign and got another legendary, so it would appear you'll always get legendary quality stuff, which introduces a nice farming aspect to the campaign. You also only have to play missions 2-8, the tutorial one which acts as a prologue is marked as completed when you reset, nice. The gear I want is whatever the enemy hunters are packing in the stealth mission. I got it in my head that with my current team I'd just take that mission head on and kill them instead of pussy footing around them. That was a mistake On the up shot, they seem to always drop a reasonably high level piece of gear if you do kill them, but it's going to be a while before I can clear that map.
Fudge cross-device compatibility The reason I always look for iCloud support in games that last for longer than a few hours (which, incidentally, are the only games I play. Paradoxically, as I barely have times for ANY games at all ) is that my save files will remain online, regardless of what I might do with the app or the device, allowing me to wallow in my misuse of power as I delete at a whim, babble incoherently and froth at the mouth as I subject my device to perversely innovative experiments, and forget about games all together, just to return in a year and pick up from where I left off when I last rambled drunkenly on into the opposite of the sunset. Fundamental, no, perhaps not, but my guess would be far beyond single digits. Thanks fer the write-up, by the way! Only one question remains in my mind: have Rodeo done anything to expand upon the tactical options and available actions in combat? If my memory serves, in the previous installment, moving, attacking and overwatch were the only three possible actions each turn, a very sparse number for a hardcore TBS (a group to which Hunters might not belong, but since I will be choosing between Hunters and games like Ravenmark and FFT, the comparison bears weight for me), leading to gameplay which felt bare-boned and limited (unlike many others, my criticism of Hunters 1 included not only bugs, the low number of maps and mission types, the lack of a campaign, and the lack of promised updates, but also in-combat variation and lack of strategic depth).
