Sure there's something I don't see alas I can't check again the tutorial. I can select the cover button, then choose one direction, but then I'm stuck. If I just select another soldier by touch, before end of turn I come back later to the soldier. If I use the "skip" button to pass to next soldier, I lost the cover setting of the soldier. The only way I found is have the soldier be the last in turn then I have the end turn button and then the soldier will keep the cover setup. But then I can have only one soldier that cover. If someone could explain me that would be helpful.
Haha, it doesn't "cheat" as such. But I know what you mean. Been in that situation many times. Actually at one point I had this huge spreadsheet with all the units statistics (health, power, AP and so on) and a bunch of calculations going on. So it is (to a degree) balanced so when you THINK you're about to die, you can usually survive one more blow.
Yep, this is a bit unclear at the moment in the game. We realize that, and we're looking into fixing it. The first time you tap you set the direction, then you have to tap again to confirm. Hopefully in the next update we'll make it more obvious when you're in opportunity fire mode (or rather, make it more obvious when you're NOT).
After finishing the game and having time to reflect, I think my biggest wishlist item to add (besides the obvious "More campaigns!") would be a difficulty setting. I'd really love to be able to play through the game at a normal/standard/default difficulty setting and then after getting a lay of the land and some game specific strategies down give it a go at a hard setting. My only real gripe about the game is that it felt a bit too easy. Which is what puts me on the opposite side of a lot of the suggestions so far in this forum. It seems a lot of people are looking for ways to make their run through the campaign easier via more inventory, more control on opportunity fire, etc. Now, my off the hook Christmas morning wishlist item would be to take the game's engine and convert it into some kind of asynchronous multiplayer deathmatch arena game. Add in some capture the flag scenarios and I'd pop 20 bucks for that beast! Okay, I'm dreaming, but this game has shown me that my holy grail game is possible. My main problem now is trying to find something to calm my TBS woodie until the next campaign sees the light of day. After Tactical Soldier, nothing else seems to satisfy. I may need to look into getting Incubation running on a modern day machine.
Yes perhaps I got confused a bit by that feeling, but also it was dodging when it was last hope and the mini boss spreading a lot the attacks on different soldiers. Which help a lot because one death is fight lost.
TS:UR got a pretty poor review over at Pocket Gamer, scoring just 6 out of 10. I would be interested to hear the developer's comments on the negative points raised in that review, namely incessant double-tapping, poorly implemented camera, combat imbalance caused by shoddy probability algorithms and a poor save system, amongst others. Generally speaking, this is a very positive thread (nothing wrong with that), but I was hoping the developer would address some of the issues surrounding the game at present. I'm sorry if the issues I mentioned have been discussed already; I have not read every post in this thread. Thanks.
I've just noticed some discussion on the PG review a couple pages back. But I'm still interested in the developer's response to the specific issues raised and whether there are any plans to fix them in the forthcoming updates. For the record, I take all reviews with a pinch of salt, whether they be for apps, films, books, whatever.
Not sure if you care to hear a gamer's -- rather than a developer's -- perspective on that review. As far as I'm concerned, PG missed the forest for the trees, as they often do. There really is no problem with the algorithm; the reviewer simply doesn't understand how probability works (this is not the place to get into it). Double tapping is the basic mechanism to control the game (once to select, once to confirm) and while it does take a bit to get used to once you do it becomes second nature. The camera is fully controllable by the user, though it does sometime switch during enemy turns for dramatic/emphasis purposes. This is very much a hybrid-genre game and folks who are inflexible fans of one genre or the other are going to find reason to complain. Gamers who are willing to take the game in it's own terms (rather than X-Com's or Jagged Alliance's) will discover that there's something very special about Undead Rising.
As we said earlier, it's not really our place to "argue" with a review... it's one persons opinion. In our defense though, we still DID get 6/10 points! Which looking at this particular reviewers track record probably isn't quite so bad. (even though the text did slam us pretty hard, hehe). In either case, I'd take the word from the itunes reviews (which are way more positive than we could have imagined! Thanks people!) and peoples comments in here over any one review. Anyway, back to the question at hand; We're definitely listening to what YOU people are saying! (much more so than any reviews, so keep the comments coming!). We were hoping to have an update submitted earlier this week, but we realized we've done some pretty "disruptive" changes so we need to put some more testing into it and make sure we didn't accidentally break anything. heh. It's coming though. I don't really want to be too specific about what will be in it (since it's not entirely done yet, and someone will surely take what I say as a "promise" and I'll pay for it later ), but we're looking at what people are saying and going by that. Some things will get changes, some won't. Some of the things we've looked at so far is the camera, it will hopefully work a bit nicer. We've hopefully gotten rid of some of the "hitches between actions" some people have seen, some issues with the save system will be worked out. We've been looking at the random rolls too, and it actually turns out that it works exactly as intended but we'll be looking at making it a bit... less random and more "fun". I'd like to tell the back story of the random rolls if I may; It USED to be purely random, but some of our testers had the same comment as the PG review, it didn't seem right. You could get long streaks of misses for no apparent reason. After many, many shots it WOULD even out statistically though, but that's not how it was perceived. So in the released version we use what we call "perceived randomness". Basically it generates 10 rolls ahead and makes sure it's statistically correct within those 10 rolls. This SEEMED to work okay when we tested it, but apparently it's still not "good enough". The issue here is of course that while it now WILL be correct after 10 shots, you generally don't get to take 10 shots in a row, and it's perceived as being wrong. (i.e. people have no need to put it to their mid-term memory how many times they hit the last turn, all you remember is how many times you missed just now ). My point though is; we're looking at it and trying to work out a solution that makes it "more fun". As for the double tapping, that will most likely stay (more or less) as it is. Some things may get streamlined and made more obvious (like if you're in opportunity fire mode or not for example). But the general principle seem to work okay (most other similar games do the same thing really), it's simply needed because otherwise you'd just get frustrated with making moves you didn't intend to make. So, it's "bad" either way. Just have to pick the least bad one here.
Part of the problem here may be that what one person considers an issue and in need of a fix isn't regarded as such by another. What you label as " incessant double-tapping" if removed would result in me complaining of way too many miss taps causing actions I didn't want to tap. If a single tap resulted in movement or firing the game would be near unplayable I think. The double tapping works perfectly in my opinion. Nothing there in need of fixing, except for maybe the lag which is said to be fixed in the upcoming update. The "poorly implemented camera" works great but does have a slight learning curve. By the end of the tutorial I was winging it around and zooming right where I wanted to be. "combat imbalance". I do think the percentages shown in game may be slightly faulty, but I don't think this causes any kind of imbalance. If the game was extremely difficult to win perhaps I could understand the statement, but if anything I think the game is rather too easy and could stand to have the difficulty ramped up a bit. "poor save system". There are checkpoints you reach along the way that once you pass you can go back and pick the game up from any of those points along the way. Not sure what is faulty about that, unless you're one of those gamers that needs to save between every move in case something doesn't go exactly like you want it. To me, that's pretty much the same as cheating not to mention takes away any risk of trying something out. I'm not saying the game is perfect (though it's darn close for me) but what you're saying Pg is calling issues and things that need fixing are things I like exactly the way they are. So I don't think they are issues, as in bugs, but simply choices made in game design that they don't agree with.
I have seen this pocketgamer reviewer mark down games before because they were a bit hard and he couldn't do the particular skill needed to play the game effectively. Unbelievable. The camera does take a bit (2 or 3 turns) of getting used too, but then it becomes second nature and I wouldn't have it any other way. They must only give half an hour or so to review games or expect all games to be so simple you can pick it up in seconds. I'm all for immediate game play but sometimes I want a more nuanced experience. My fear is the industry will start listening to a reviewer with the attention span of a chav smashed on cheap cider. Then we will only end up with crappy bird flinging/swooping clones.
It should be pointed out that blikstad's attitude towards a negative (and in my view unfair) review is remarkably mature and very much appreciated.
We really have nothing to gain from trying to "argue" against a review. That particular person didn't like it, oh well. Life goes on. (we'll make sure to notify them when the next update get released and hope they change their minds... all we can do really. ) Had EVERY review been saying the same thing (including those from our actual players) we would have been feeling pretty bad I suppose, but it's difficult to fell too bad with all the nice things people say about the game.
I came to this forum because I bought your game and love it ! I have over 100 games and it is very good in my opinion. About the random rolls I think I can propose a solution: instead of hit/miss make a grid based on the roll. Let's say at 20meters a shotgun shot will do 50 DMG for a roll between 80 and 100 then less for 50-80 and marginal damage for 20-50 and the pellets will bounce on less than 20 and miss ... This would make it less all or nothing at every shot if you add more diversity in the outcomes. Some weapons like shotgun should deal maybe less damage with distance but be almost guaranteed to hit (maybe for lower damage) because of the spread ? About the saves, add a menu (maybe in the cartoon style) to be able to start at any checkpoint you unlocked ? I find it a bit frustrating that you cannot hold a secondary weapon (Pistol) you cannot hold more items in a backpack and you cannot see the items on he ground before to pick them up. In a scripted part where one character is busy fixing something and you have to protect him, you cannot access his inventory and he had all my grenades. These are only personal suggestions and my main language is not English ... Anyway just wanted to tell you that I like your game and if you add campaigns I would love it even more !
I believe the shotgun already does less damage over distance... But don't quote me on that. Would have to ask my programmers. There already is such a menu! Although it somewhat ended up in a slightly confusing place. If you click "campaign" on the main menu and then click the first campaign you will get a list of all the checkpoints you've passed and you can start from either one of them. Yep, yep... Working hard on campaign 2....
About my previous post my main point is that people get frustrated because of the misses but if instead of miss and hit, you make the misses less frequents and add a probability of a partial miss (you could say that you hit the zombie on the arm) where you would do only 50% DMG or make the damage formula dependent on the roll check (the higher the roll the higher the damage) it would feel less frustrating. I am on my phone but maybe tomorrow I will try to explain what I mean for a suggestion. Thank you the reply
I've been playing Ghost Recon on the 3DS and that's pretty much how it plays. In that game you can't miss at all, so I guess variable damage by distance is used to compensate. Being able to miss is one of the things that makes this game work as survival horror, IMO.
Yeah, as an idea it's a pretty good one basing it more on damage reduction rather than flat out missing, but that's most likely a too big gameplay change to make at this point. (and would require us to rebalance to whole game etc...). We'll figure something out though. There are a few ideas we're kicking around, so we'll see where we end up.
