It came out in Europe tonight (1000 points), there's no deathmatch or local multiplayer, only online coop and competitive PvE (highest score wins). It's a nice swarm shooter, while enemy floods like in EDF are rare you will often frantically fight off enemies from every direction (at least in the levels that task you with defending something which means kill the bugs before they reach the static goal, in levels in which you attack enemies tend to be mostly in front of you because you cleared the area behind you already). Enemies have glowing green weakpoints that you can hit for MASSIVE DAMAGE (well, other FPSes have headshots so it's not all that strange...) but they also have armored parts that take less damage and the hardest parts tend to be on their front so in coop flanking might have some value (it's certainly easier to shoot the elephant artillery bugs in the ass than try to aim for the glowy bits you can see between their legs).
Of course since space is limited there's not much variety to enemies and environments, I'm in level 8 (out of 13 I heard) and there's only four major enemy types so far (but they each have recolored variants that are also bigger so you start fighting knee high bugs and later encounter EDF-sized ones) but that seems enough from what I've seen. The second boss is also a variant of the first but with different attacks. Environments are pretty much desert on the surface, caves with green glowy stuff underground. The levels don't seem to get reused that much, while a few missions so far shared the same map they took place on different parts of it (with the other part blocked off), only one was a direct reuse so far and in that one you drive a tank and race against time while previously you went through it on foot.
Oh and the game has a scoring system for shooting enemies and the health and time (or whatever else your objective was) left at the end of the level and also your highest combo. Combos seem to consist pretty much of hitting enemies so your combos are probably going to be limited by running out of enemies or ammo (haven't tried if switching your weapon is fast enough to continue a combo but I think it is).
Controls are fairly simple, the nunchuk controls movement with the a-stick and your left hand actions (wiping your visor, throwing a grenade, using the laser whip) by shaking (grenades and the whip need to have a button pressed so you won't use them accidentally), the remote controls your aiming and shooting (B button of course), weapon changing (d-pad), reloading (shake), the formation of your squadmates (A button, reminds me, Wing Island was made by Hudson too...) and entering the tank (minus). Wiping the visor is necessary because these bugs are filled with green acid blood and if you don't wipe it off you'll lose health after a few seconds (plus it blocks your view). It's fairly quick but you can't shoot while wiping and you can't wipe while reloading and such so you have to time it a bit carefully to not mess with your combo. Weapons are the usual shotgun, assault rifle, SMG, homing rocket launcher, hand grenades and laser whip. You have craptons of spare ammo (10 clips or so) for your four main guns and one common powerup will refill it fully, the laser whip recharges one swipe every few seconds (it's damn powerful so you can only use it for a few swipes, it's still worth pulling out in mid battle because it kills damn near everything in front of you). I still gotta practice my grenade throws, they seem to depend solely on your aim, not the motion you make with the nunchuk. All weapons have three variants of which only one is unlocked at the start, I haven't unlocked any additional ones despite getting S ranks in a few missions so I don't think it's rank based like that (I guess the differences will be in range, rate of fire, damage and clip size since those stats are displayed on the weapon select screen). The manual says all of them are available in ranked online matches though.
I didn't get to play any online games yet because the game just came out, a few players apparently got games going at midnight but I think I'll try if I can get a game in the evening. Oh and it needs a friend code thread (FCs are only available in coop, I guess they don't want you to play against a smurf to boost your rank on the score board).
EDIT: Okay, I got a ranked match going finally, those have all the weapons unlocked. Seems the variations are just plain better (usually more damage and ammo, sometimes more range, even labelled lv2 and lv3) so there are no tradeoffs to worry about. Kinda lame IMO. Also I finally managed to unlock two in the story mode, these things are hidden in crates that are pretty hard to find.
Topic: Hudson Announces Onslaught a 4 person coop FPS for Wiiware (Read 27873 times)
