Playing Precursors: A Waste of Space

well we're here this is a last stop for the Xena series and it's developer deep shadows this is the precursors and I'm going all-in on this one this is going to be perhaps an excruciating level of detail so watch it in chunks or otherwise get comfortable and for those who watch in chunks I've got timestamps in the description so you can get back to where you are if you're just joining us here the Xena series is an ambitious series of FPS RPGs developed out of Ukraine I've got videos on the former two entries a lot of elements in gameplay carry over so for full context I would advise watching those first they feature a blend of shooting and driving and much at a shooting and driving happens because of dialogue with a faction system influencing who you're driving towards and shooting at the combat is deadly in the healing system interestingly restrictive and in a cast of quirky strangely written characters and a lot of awkward ly handled but for their time unique gameplay mechanics and you have zenus this is a series that is ahead of its time for better and for worse so far boiling-point the first in the series still reigns as my favorite as well the course shoot and gameplay is worse every other element in game plain story stands several notches above but good precursors come out on top or will this initial charm continue to wane these are questions to ponder if you haven't read the subtitle regardless there is already a big shake-up underway while the first two entries took place in contemporary settings precursors isn't quite looking to rest on its laurels precursors is jumping the series into the far future a science fiction adventure featuring multiple worlds alien races and space fair and gameplay with a mysterious race of ancient aliens that we've all heard before but hey benefit of the doubt maybe they'll have a unique twist before we start the game proper I want to talk about this menu screen I mentioned how in white-gold the best music somehow ended up being used on the driving while in precursors it's somehow ended up on the menu [Music] the menu in general is bare-bones but great a large possibly alien-- structure with mysterious dark background set against triumphant bombastic music it puts me in the right mind for a nice big kopi space adventure what are the precursors I have no idea but I already want to blow them up I drew the game up and just let the track play for a minute or two because we're not gonna hear it anywhere else we open on a strange alien world as does our spaceship Alex are you high I think yes I'll check it out now it's not the time okay so much like white gold there are two dogs available and our favorite serve office workers returns in one of them anyway they remember that one of their number isn't wearing a helmet and is therefore likely a protagonist and this time it's not so Meijer wait where's this new guy priest crying whatever his name is I don't know maybe he was in the cabin oh [ __ ] look at this that creature is dragging tree there's no need to wallow here gameplay begins or to comrades round a corner and are instantly killed by acid spitting plants rest in peace Alex it's an odd start for one of these games we've got an assault rifle right out of the gate we're dumped right into combat and after mowing through some of the flora and fauna we're given a rocket launcher and if it wasn't obvious before it is now we're not keeping this gear still it's interesting that the third game in a series they settled on having a proper tutorial we come across another crashed ship this one surrounded by troops from the Empire big lads clad in power armor and aided by a mech I'm going to jump the gun a little bit but the Empire is a group that we can cooperate with later on putting them in here as suggested enemies is an odd move now I get why they did it this is a sci-fi game and they have the bulkiest most futuristic looking armor besides this there is a sort of embarrassing gameplay reason why they're here that I will explain much much later also you may be wondering why I'm a worse shot than usual well this game had nearly a full second of input delay on the mouse and I played for about three hours before fixing it but now you're just thinking I'm an idiot how did you not realize there's that much delay how slow are you oh well I realized it instantly but I was actually so impressed by how bad it was that I wanted to see how far I could get with it so yes I am stupid but I am also stubborn and still a terrible shot that's me it won't come up when I talk about the combat proper suffice to say the fix was turning off vsync we're told to thoroughly investigate the crashed ship by walking away from it into this cave at which point strange alien figures appear before for us our vision distorts strange voices speak to us and we see a loading screen its then revealed that we're in a simulation gone awry but your training program doesn't allow that such an error camp Creighton trace has somehow shut down the program through willpower but seeing as that program is clearly the precursors that may have well just been the precursors one of the scientists hints that certain individuals have the power to consciously influence quantum processes but before he can elucidate on what that means for us the gruff bloke gets bored pro-gamer here give me a like trace now graduated as a top-of-the-line pilot for his expertise in crashing computers could have gone to the older God on Casilla which we'll learn much later as his home planet due to a request from Captain ridiger a friend of Teresa's dead dad Greg he was instead assigned to golden glow' dan could hardly be called the planet a home on the edge of the universe however it was one of the last two planets belonging to the Ameren race think I should point out the Mons are humans and I only realized this fact way later I thought golden was going to belong to a strange alien species who would occupied the planet self the translation quality has taken another hit but that might actually just be because of the saying it was bad in white gold but that game took place on earth so I could fill in gaps in the world building because fortunately I to live on earth I could more easily make assumptions however now that shorty translation has to actually construct a fictional setting so I had a lot of misunderstandings throughout a lot of the story that I could only put together in retrospect the fact that humans are on Mars is just the starting point it takes me several hours to understand who ridiger is and what the elders are and the fact that roediger works for the elders and entire factions are so poorly explained that I'm actually glad their boiler plate in OneNote I'd have trouble understanding them if they had any nuance whatsoever now it everything was run by nvm hire for the Democratic Union the only thing that Chris was bred for what that IRA was also assigned to golden resistant IRA didn't expect anything special from Holden they were confident at everything that awaited them were major skirmishes in the desert and drunken brawls in the local bar Oh IRA she'd be the love interest if this game had any time for love still his father used to you'd think it might be worth introduced it didn't know much about him to find his father reducing her it sold early he remembered great Crichton and could tell a few impressive tales about him she's a fellow graduate I got comments on my forces video saying that the Japanese translation was better did more to explain things and was a bit more punchy and that sonic called infinite a mask prick I apologize if this is petty but I can't speak Japanese and more importantly right now I cannot speak Russian or Ukrainian a boring obvious note about translation it's not just about switching words to be an absolute closest approximation it's making it a best fit for whatever native speakers it's going towards it's translating intent more than words if you've ever watched any foreign language comedy and there was a pun in the subtitles that was not the joke you just heard when I praised or condemned the writing of a game originally produced in another language that comment has to be split between the original writers and the translators and translation is at times handled by a third party and not the original developers they'll likely oversee it but they won't be the ones doing it themselves it's not just words that change in translation parts of the story occasionally go with it and whoever was doing the job on the precursors may well have been doing this poorly it's not just sloppy in conveying the story the technical quality is also a train wreck rife with typos and grammatical errors there are two translations you can go with and I played parts of both the first was the one that came bundled in with the patch on the patches scrolls website and this is what I would recommend while still not good the more competent and legible of the two the downside is the cutscenes English audio is being puckered up I kept the patch but transplanted the translation you'd get with the steam version back in this once it's just short of being enough of a trainwreck to be funny both are very odd though that may just be the precursors itself grapefruits are bitter Burke's do not taste well pineapples have an unusual flavor apples will develop intelligence in a billion years wait back to my earlier point that may be a ukrainian thing that does not work in english or not I have no sodding clue but I enjoyed reading it this is the greatest shame of it all I want to see what the boiling point writers can do of a science fiction saying I've seen enough of them in boiling point and white gold to know that they can write enjoyable atypical characters and set up strange twists that I could not predict in a million years whether or not they're actually good twists is debatable but I couldn't see him coming and I enjoy it for that fact character does creep through the translation but with its poor quality it's not fully realized luckily some things are so ridiculous there's no way translation could tarnish it or on the other hand there's no way a translation could save it look the original script may also just be shite the point I've taken far too long getting to is that there is a layer of obfuscation in any game that has to be translated from another language so Golden's a desert there's one town at least that we get to see and the only things to do here are take drugs drink or buy into the latest cult I mean it's over that or going for a drive in a nearby countryside where you can become a bandit fight bandits or fix up cars shot by bandits or if you go really far afield you can go and join a small communist will come to you and you'll get to live with even less but I'm getting ahead of myself welcome to tava hime or Tama hime I wander around for a bit and Therese pretends to be a local I think yep being here is already affecting him and already so jaded you've been on the surface for what 10 minutes you bloody poser and where I like Tavor Heim it's a bit of a ripoff of a certain something but it has a nice atmosphere the locals have all gone off their rockers thanks to living here and you can tell from talking to basically anyone despite how the place looks it does feel lively thanks to the music mixing in robotic beeps and Boop's and near the market there's constant shouts from peddlers it has a good sense of place so I go about picking four bottles of vodka out of the trash and hoping a local insects are valuable getting some like tourism out of the way Treece even brought a camera yeah well whatever works and hey our knife is for some reason organic as well in summer the hiss at saks pear because it's the only way to save their belly from the disastrous heat Hermits who know this gather the pears afterwards and detach them having no way to finish their mating the hazard sacks remain consolidated and can be used as good knifes the blade is solid and consists of their heat resisting tightness wings I'd rather just some cutlery I both love and hate how this city is laid out it's a claustrophobic mazie mess not very big but cluttered and ugly even after ten hours spent on this planet I was getting mixed up neither the mini-map or the actual full-sized map was much help every couple of decades everything on the planet is burnt to a crisp as it orbits too close to the Sun meanwhile the inhabitants go off planet until it all blows over so I suppose at some point they just stopped giving a [ __ ] about City Planning supposedly Tavor hime is made of materials that will not melt to slag so really there's no excuse anymore it's here to stay and for no good reason for example about this city's layout one of the most important spaces the market behind which is the spaceport is access to fire a couple of small gaps between a big mess of buildings off of the main street this is very hard to spot it took me a while to kind of get to grips with it and I was constantly getting turned around plus I could not find anyone willing to give me directions this time instead I just turned random corners and Oh God so I like and dislike tava hime just due to sheer disorientation it's a poorly put together city and navigating it is a sodding nightmare you can't get to most places by car as besides main street nearly everything is in little nooks and crannies and alleyways it's got character in how inconvenient it is the residents of tava Heim seem to have all given up and the city reflects it speaking is a Londoner I appreciate cities that are all inefficient unwieldy and downright poorly laid out this is a city that only makes sense to the locals I think the real horror of gold inset in when I saw a water-cooler that was pay operated I saw this days before seeing that image of a real pay operated water cooler so precursor science fiction setting called at least one thing I head off to talk to captain roediger perhaps I can work my way back to Casilla sharpish it's from Riddick are we alone what sort of man Greg Creighton was an excellent soldier an ace pilot died when a mammoth fell on him when he walked near a foreign iceberg when he left us his ship and 20,000 credits in his will but after paying for education is only 500 left and the ship needs repairs and it's an older model so it needs a really specific Power Cell thanks dad we're then Raquel dove a story about when ridiger served on a base that was [ __ ] on by giant flying fish that's the zenus I'm here for and for a little bit we're a combination errand boy and strongarm for the state our first job is to collect a voluntary donation for the war effort from a local business owner so we visit sod he and he tells us he's unable to pay because his latest shipment which includes our Power Cell was taken by bandits we can opt to cover him but I don't in any other series I'd consider it but this series has been any sense of charity out of me wrong one successful job and Radhika is already talking about transferring us to a nicer planet and oh look it's IRA she's adjusting that's nice second job is probably the lowliest grunt work will ever do yeah also an insane step-up a shipment of spices meant for Radhika hasn't arrived and he wants his fried gleek me we sent to find out why and a rather incompetent delivery man named delivery man says nothing's coming from soon acts due to some troubles and says I should go get he tells us it's peaceful as he hands us a shotgun which is about a level of mixed message I've come to expect from this goon so we hop in a ship and are on soon acts right away it wasn't until many hours later when I had my own [ __ ] and access to a galaxy map that I realized helped bloody far away soon axes it's in a separate star system entirely I dislike the pacing of this part for a few good reasons but chief amongst them is this mission it completely undercuts how curious I am about actual space travel we've jumped halfway across the galaxy so an old man we just acted as muscle for canned stuff his face and this wasn't a quick and easy meal either we kill several packs of violent rapidly breeding sabre-toothed hell dogs to get a condiment and it's at this point I fixed my bloody mouse we deliver a water purifier to a small commune and they tell us of their bandit problems and it turns out it's these lads who likely have our Power Cell with plentiful enemies ahead let's talk about gameplay the overall flow of combat is much the same as white gold built mostly around medium to long range combat both you and the enemies go down fast at least on hard the health needle addiction and locational damage systems remain naturally it's not the exact same some adjustments and additions do say a part we have to begin on a sad note while still somewhat possible the ability to sprint jump like a coked-up kangaroo has taken a hit I can still build up some speed and here and there it's useful but I'm no longer using it all the time this is partly down to the replacement of certain speed up perks and to follow that up a second sadder note enemies now have deployable transparent one-way shields which they can shoot through but you either need to wear down to roll them into leaving or if you have the wheels speed on through if one lone enemy type had this ability they would be a nuisance they would be my least favorite enemy but I'd at least concede they'd be mixing things up however a majority of enemies have them I want to note that unless you pop the shield an enemy can just immediately redeploy it after moving and they are not shy or conservative in its use Iver why would they be and somehow Therese has never heard of nor has any interest in acquiring this tech the shield makes sense as a response to the far more open gunfights especially on golden enemies generally have less cover out in this desert so a shield ability like this seems like a good idea but all it does is make the combat dull and uninteresting it's worse in the actual mission segments where enemies have genuine cover and you have to approach them from a specific angle it does not mesh well with that it just gives them too many advantages zenus as a series punishes exposing yourself to enemies and it punishes it quickly a lot of combat is about finding good cover and then exploiting that to kill enemies giving them as little time to actually respond to you as possible however since enemies can attack through these shields and popping them forces you to be exposed for an extended period of time it's a feature that just forces you into taking damage it forces you to play the game in a way they also punishes there are times when you can get an angle on a shield but it's uncommon and unreliable and even then just serves to slow the combat down the change of setting has necessitated some new weapons but really humanity hasn't changed how they kill each other all that much an assault rifle got the job done in the 21st century and thousands of years later and not much needed to change they have standardized a bit mind only one weapon of each type really exists so a majority of enemies you'll face will be using the link on assault rifle and very rarely you'll see a shotgun or sniper the weapons of the future are a bit hit and miss seeing as the game only has one assault rifle they've just sort of made it a perfect all-rounder decently powerful accurate good or ranges thankfully it makes a good noise and has a good kick so the tool you'll be using for 90% of the game isn't a total letdown I do dislike the bulky dull yellow look they've given weapons but seeing as I have a distaste for futuristic guns in general I may just be hard to please in this regard I should just be fine that doesn't fire lasers you'll be using the assault rifle majorly besides as your other options aren't really that great the pistol is a peashooter it does have an interesting caveat however it operates on charge instead of ammunition making it a decent fallback option you only need to dedicate a modicum of inventory space for the shotgun is sadly abysmal I wouldn't say it's weak but it's effective range and well effect is inconsistent I'm serious when I say that I could never get a good grip on this weapon and sadly enough the assault rifle worked better at what should be its range the sniper at least works fine it's decently powerful and meshes well with a gun play even works as a decent shield popper if you have a room and ammo spare I do think the new high-tech scopes which need to load in aren't worth it you know sometimes the old ways are better this isn't all the weapons we'll see this is just most of the human gear this is also the first time I made great use of armor-piercing and explosive rounds they really just steps up in damage and nothing more interesting but that's always handy particularly with shields and enemies drop a bit of all free ammo types on death this ended up being the first time in the series I never had ammo was due to building up sheer surplus but is this a negative kind of it's weird how Cena sees me both annoyed by it and at times defending or outright asking it to be annoying in equal measure but that's what Xena says sometimes it's annoying in a good way other times it's just cumbersome earlier games had multiple kinds of weapon per category particularly assault rifles which had different ammo types and were used by different factions there's not only differentiate them it made weapon choice more meaningful something I find important in an FPS RPG it meant that you had to juggle ammunition for both which meant either making room for both assault rifles sacrificing room that could be used for something else or dedicating to one assault rifle entirely and making sure you could keep it loaded depending on who you were fighting this could complement or conflict with you in boiling point I prefer to stay or org but I didn't keep an ak-47 as a backup and in several protracted battles this choice worked against me since I couldn't scrounge munitions from an enemy but the orc had a scope it was useful at all other points I had made a choice it helped me at some points and hindered me at others it's another part of the earlier games making me feel like a mercenary that a very simple change can harm it also meant that every single enemy was dropping ammo exclusively for my weapon I had so many bullets surplus that I actually had to keep a stash of it it was eating into my carry weight this is also the first game where I delve into weapon upgrades at any great length since I realized early on I'm not going to be trading the link on in at any point they're not terribly interesting there's only one tier of upgrade per category upping things like fire rate magazine capacity or for some other weapons things like power or range the link on essentially turns into a bullet hose the sniper rifle got a bigger magazine and twice the fire rate and the shotgun was slightly less awful upgrades can be installed by the player a hefty chance of breaking them or you can pay a gunsmith to a fix them for 100 credits with no chance of failure which after the price of the upgrade itself is peanuts there's an upgrade to give their crafting odds without solid numbers so I didn't go for it since I was never going to get rid of my upgraded rifle it became an obsolete perk before long we've also got rocket launchers and I'm going to put it in the same category as the better armors perhaps unfairly but it's for the fact that they're too heavy to really use look at these here carry weight level ups your carry weight starts at 30 kilograms so plus 10 then plus 15 then plus 20 not accumulative that's 50 kilograms of weight in total which seems sensible that would actually be enough to have a healthy selection of tools it's a shame then that those two latter perks don't actually work Treece forgets to improve his backpack or biceps a good Armour can weigh 12 kilograms more than 1/4 of your space as does a rocket launcher and individual Rockets are also hefty vehicles are rarely enough of an issue to justify taking out of the trunk the armor thing is a real shame while still limited there have been attempts imaginative armors whilst Elfen lays a specialized shielding this is a double-edged sword I get that carry weight is supposed to limit use of powerful items like this I get it might sound like I'm complaining that the carry limit is doing its job it'd be pointless if I could be a one-man pardon but it's almost too limiting one very late-game mission required me to go and blow up enemy tanks the bloke handed treats so many Rockets that he couldn't move and the amount of rockets wasn't even enough to do the job it's a saving grace I also had a rocket buggy to do most of the work it's also a factor of money if you've been with me from the start of this series you know how spending is Armour breaks down it needs to be replaced is a non-essential if you like a game where every non-essential purchased sends shivers down your spine and you have to budget it and it can take 20 minutes to half an hour to recoup and you may well have to recoup that cost then this is the series for you vehicular combat is a lot more encouraged this time around every single car in the entire galaxy is an all-terrain buggy with at least a machine gun mounted to it even the civilian craft it's handy is extra hit points and the turret can clean up nicely but I rarely used it for one thing the crosshairs are still misaligned from the last game it's not hard to adjust but it makes on-the-fly shooting harder than it should be for another enemies seem to be expert marksmen when it comes to popping tires for a file I never found anywhere in the game to refill turret ammunition or buy new tires each one had a spare in the trunk but that was it I mostly just stole new cars where and when I could and spent the rest of the game worrying that I would exhaust the planets supply of tires as for the driving itself it's an upgrade from white gold and is therefore just utterly ok you point a vehicle in a direction and by Jove it goes that way without argument not very fast mind but that's what the motion blur is trying to hide not to mention it every vehicle in this game struggles so pathetically with Hills it's even worse when tires get popped which doesn't send the vehicle out of control note it just dramatically kills their speed eventually to a crawl I think my one good moment with a car was when I was assaulting a bandit base still getting used to those awful shields and they had a nice big choke point in which they could slaughter me I was having issues so I ramped a buggy down into their mine shaft and the turret carved a nice path in for me ironically the vehicles killed better in a cramped environment than than one and it's in shooting through this face we find our power cell ridiger sends it off to be installed and this will take some time maybe we should go out and actually explore for ourselves oh good precursors puts a bit more life into its wildlife and unlike white gold rose and fauna are going to respawn so we can actually go out hunting for goodies and get our tires blow now everytime we leave town the world feels a bit more alive again it is swings and roundabouts I had fun going out and running down Crockett's gunning down legions of pegs and then selling off the goods then we have the nose organ OHS organelles I'm just going to call them nose they are giant bipedal monsters who can run it near the pace of a car take a good handful of bullets to bring down don't flinch from shots and cantare for a car with ease and you much faster you have to watch yourself at all times outside of Tavor hein because you can go from Daddy to dead in a hot second the moment one of them catches up and lands a solid hit really it's a matter of like whether your car and you survive at that point and all of this would be fine with me were it not for oh good yeah pop in can be a little bit of an issue the hilly layout of golden really doesn't help and the speed at which nose act and the power they do it with means that death can be in front of you and you will not know it the hunt of warn me they needed to be wiped out and I wholeheartedly agree I am actually out here getting some revenge a hunt I did tasked me with gathering some of their claws and another bloke has me out here to prove that a local cemetery has become a nest for them yep this is an RPG so I am doing odds and ends for the locals here are some of these side quest highlights let's start strong I'm out driving around and I happen by a mine that has erupted trace notes to track down the owner and report the explosion when we do he forces hush-money on us and that's the end of the quest at one point I escort a drunk back home he's not under threat or anything his wife whatever reason just wants me to do it he's been an alkie for over a decade following an embarrassing silence related incident at roughly the same pace as continent or drift so the biggest test here is of my patience some bloke wants me to go and take photos for him taking pictures of several landmarks on the planet both in tava hime and without this includes the temple of the elders the area around the temple doesn't allow us to equip our weapons and those guys must believe cameras steal your soul or something because Treece is not whipping it out I did get the photo I just had to do it from a great distance speaking of landmarks there is some odd stuff out in the desert an artist wants me to defend a floating Rubik's Cube from bandits so he can get inspired by it he tells me to drop by an art gallery I could not find later it's just it's a ghost it's an actual sodding ghost and this is all he has to say about it Treece has no comment maybe we should find our dad and ask about the mammoths a service station ran by a man called Vinny [ __ ] Jones is having bandit problems they're stealing goods and therefore undercutting his prices so I Drive out to drive them out and they're away I checked back multiple times over the course of this game and they never arrived so Vinny's really got nothing to worry about he did waste my time however so I decided to take some payment for myself you see in an effort to make the interiors feel more lived-in food and drinks have been scattered around everywhere but they never got around to making people care if you steal anything nor does the AI care if you pick lock and steal cars it's just one of those things that shows the insane lack of attention to detail the side missions vary wildly in quality those were the ones I found amusing but when I found them amusing it was mostly for the sheer absurdity of the writing that's what made them in any way worthwhile the majority of them are just kill or fetch quests a lot of going somewhere and killing bandits if they indeed turn up or going and collecting something to bring it back the map has some landmarks but for the most part it's a desert and not that enjoyable to traverse I enjoy being given the quests more than actually doing them not to mention if you have any real depth to them this has never been a series that's massive on having choices only two or three missions in the whole series ever really had moments of you having a great deal of agency this game has none of that I did check out the bar that's where the factory recruit is usually wait and seeing as I don't know how the elders feel about moonlighting I'm willing to chance it there's one from the Empire and one from the Democratic Union Beaufort kg as they know the other one is there and think they're spying on the other more importantly though neither will recruit me and no I still haven't got a clue what either group wants or does they're saying they'll go to war over golden soon so both were here in an effort to win the local populace over before the conflict starts but all I can gather is that the Democratic Union sees the Empire is old-fashioned and the Empire sees the Empire is right a nearby drunk isn't much help I get it there will be a fight what does this mean to you and to me will they tax alcohol less I need to know these things to make my decisions we do get some highlights from him at least the local elders ascension is sketchy but I don't know who the local elder is and no one seems to know why it's sketchy so that's an odd suspicion and ridicule is well-liked but age is catching up to him the bobbin has his forts on the precursors and good god he could be describing any number of universes they are ancient aliens who left a bunch of crap behind and no one knows what any of it does but he suspects that their weapons and trees for whatever reason gets kind of argumentative with him okay this guy isn't at the bar but I have nowhere else to put this his daughter is sleeping at a friend's house and he's asking for advice and trace is the wrong man for the job what the [ __ ] is this Treece I am dodging the question on your behalf you flowery [ __ ] before we get to ridiger we've built up a good bit of experience and that means Treece has leveled up it's much the same as white gold an extra hit point so that by endgame we'll take another half gunshot and a selection of perks it's actually got some order to it for one thing perks are categorized and how they're laid out is a teensy bit more sensible and as for the perks themselves well nothing here as bad as unlocking a perk to look down your sights it's mostly just flat bonuses better pick locking odds greater accuracy great a running speed and none of the bonuses are observably large at least from the ones I took I did take the perk which made factions dislike me slower which just meant I could get away with killing more of them before they shot on sight it's an ability that doesn't improve tree so much as make the whole universe stupider you have to spend a level up just to equip the rocket launcher that book existed in white gold as well only there it was a book to equip heavy weapons namely the LMG and rocket launcher but the future is abandoned one of them so this perk just sort of awkwardly exists kind of cut in half one perk gives trees better vision in stealth mode and since it won't come up anywhere else stealth mode is sort of useless this time around there is so little of this game that actually facilitates you being stealthy I mean the helpful radar blips are still there so it's still handy in a firefight for tracking foes and as before blips are only on the compass and with that the ability to swap maps has been removed both the mini map and compass still exist but it changes with what dub I was using that's probably an oversight on my end but I'm not kidding that's the effect changing the dub had on me so when I switched to the worst steam dub I lost the compass and gained a mini map and stealth mode became completely useless one perk that stands out is Achilles heel which turns three percent of our attacks into instant kills and the reason it stands out is they actually gives concrete maps telling you what it does I know I know the backpack operates do as well but as stated those don't actually add up the perks are just overall sort of bland and I had trouble picking on level ups not because there were multiple interesting options but because everything seemed useless and the few that didn't did not give me enough info or numbers to make an informed choice on them while our ship is being repaired ridiger has a serious task for us to carry out a drug called dust has been hitting the streets and traces to unnerve the source and shut the operation down it's noteworthy a quest for a couple of reasons it's the first time I need to pay up to progress it's only a small fee but I can tell they're breaking me and gently it's also in the course of this mission that we get off first and last mandatory hacking gameplay in a dealers house the passphrase to speak with the supplier is written down on his computer the lock-picking in this game is based on a percentile dice roll influenced by difficulty which can be lessened with perks using up pick locks on failed attempts the hacking in this game is based on a percentile dice roll influenced by difficulty which can be lessened with perks using up hack sticks on failed attempts it may be due to more of them just lying around and the fact that no one remembers to lock anything it may be because I'm just stealing everything that's lying out in the open and fuss don't need to pick lock things but by the end of this game I'd built up a terrifying surplus of lock picks and hack sticks after getting the password we track down the dust to its source but we can't quite nab the supplier Treece decided not to tell this woman her boss just offed himself back there nor do we go and get a guard we report our findings to ridiger and he treats the news rather strangely and with this our ship is ready at the landing lad the elders need a pilot and ridiger put us forward with a head to nori station and report to Commander Keaton we got it it's it our ship name the Sun Queen we have our onboard AI Anastasia or a Z thanks to our dad she's gained true sentient or at least she says plus no I do not know if they're thinking of sapiens I make that mistake and I'm not poorly translated we head off into space and indeed we're piloting a ship this time this is the big new edition and I'm already under attack let's start with a big problem right out the gate other ships friend and foe can jump in out of nowhere and depart just as easily leading to a ton of ambushes the difficulty of encounters is static so it just starts off as incredibly threatening downright frustrating if you leap into space and I just instantly swarmed but eventually once you understand space gameplay and have a few upgrades it's more annoying than threatening I'll admit right now I don't play space Sims it's not a genre I'm into I think I can honestly say the last game I play that had spaceships and dog fighting was Battlefront 2 and I didn't care for it then and goodbyes however many viewers that cost me the point is unlike FPS is an RPGs and such I have got way less to draw on that said I am confident this is awful allow me to explain space is spacious and your ship is slow incredibly painfully slow you can however use hyper speed when in hyper speed you cannot turn so getting anywhere in any reasonable amount of time is switching on hyper speed letting go of the controls and just watching your ship fly through space and occasionally switching off hyper speed to readjust sorry right sounds boring but you may be thinking why don't I just hyper speed away from fights and such and that's because combat and being near celestial bodies or space stations forces it off sometimes it's rather inconsistent due to the frequency of attacks space gameplay is regularly interrupted with bowels and yes I say interrupted and I'd offer to leave planets only for a spaceship to be dropped in right next to me which could mean death or worse a hefty repair cost getting further out didn't help much incidents are dropped on you and demand attention when I say the ship is slow outside of hyperspeed I can't overstate it I get that it's hard to gauge distances being in space and all and a numerical distance pop-up exists to show you just how shaky and odd your movement is it honestly feels like everything in space is repelling each other even the simple act of docking in a space station is a pain because it feels like an invisible force is forcing me away from it the only way to keep pace with anything is the afterburner a boost with a tiny gauge or in the weird cases the game forgets to disable it by hyper speeding a big game-changer came when I started playing with the hyper brake a very poorly named manoeuvre I can't quite explain it's name is hyper brake so what do you imagine it does well it makes you strafe insanely fast to the right faster than the boost and infinitely at no cost if you guessed that then congratulations you've played precursors as well because you did not guess that and now I've explained all of that let's actually talk about dogfighting once your ship is upgraded you'll have four lasers none of which have any notable difference so just pick your favorite light show and four missile types slow and fast direct missiles and slow and fast homing missiles the lasers are on cooldown and the missiles need to be purchased or looted from downed foes the dogfights are merely matters of attrition hoping my shields and hull would outlast those of my enemies the game never demands a port any fancy maneuvers in fact they are in no way fast paced or friller this is because enemies when engaging you will stop moving completely they stop in place and just act as turrets large ships meanwhile just float in a straight line a pace faster than you can get without hyper speed and you can just barely keep pace with them with the hyper break the hyper break was such a game-changer for this reason I got killed a lot and early dog fights since tried to get into a range where my lasers were accurate was where I was getting killed but now I had to pull the utterly graceless manoeuvre of turning my ship to their side and violently drifting into range of them meanwhile bigger ships just got missile and laser spam oh yeah by the way the lasers like I said I'm meant to operate on a barb it can overheat but they always drain faster than the barb builds the bar doesn't actually do anything I would occasionally die but as time went on I'm mostly wooden dodging attacks felt like more a matter of luck than anything else paper breaking is the fastest I can move about hyper speed and I was still getting hit so there's not really much more I could be doing to dodge damage honestly if these battles were turn-based I don't think it would be much of a difference in the level of skill or input involved late-game most of my time in space would be spent doing nothing but getting interrupted out of hyper speed so I would type a break until the game decided I could hide the speed again by which point I would just reengage the hyper speed imagine finding the beat just so tedious you're annoyed when it stops you from doing nothing so off to the space station and before we get to Keaton I just want to say I really love this aliens design there's only a small amount of alien species in this title and only one of them can even move or do anything beyond talking so it's a bit of a wasted opportunity but hey his designs nice I like it he can just float there looking like that Keaton's got a small series of jobs for us protecting a caravan moving goods killing some Raiders on his behalf and then stopping a ship smuggling NIF Didion I suppose I should add by this point I was more than 10 hours into this game and about three to four of those hours were spent tackling the main quest and there is yet to be any whiff of an actual plot these aren't side missions these are actual story required missions I do appreciate that each game in this series has mixed up the structure in some way but this game is completely aimless for so long I originally wanted to point out that it does this without actually adding anything that we don't actually learn anything about the wider universe so this time in story terms is utterly wasted while it is still wasted this is a bit wrong it's just that we learn a lot of little things that then never get expanded on or tied to anything else soon axe is a spice planet there's a small village in the desert that needs water there's a drug called dust there's a war effort that needs money there's Nifty diem smuggling Treece had a dad all of these things come in but then do nothing and the Teresa's dad figures hilarious to me because it establishes early on I wonder what happens my dad and then he gets his answers five minutes in and he's done just bringing all this up before the next mission changes absolutely nothing people have been saying Riddick ax doesn't have good pilots so we've been entered into a race on his behalf so off we go we find our competition get into range the game takes control of my ship to line it up with the others and then nothing nothing happens my only option is to walk around my ship interior I can't get anywhere from here numerous retries yielded the same result staying at a distance and blowing up the races failed the mission at which point Keaton would fax an apology to Riddick ax and offer me the quest again you see when it comes to the main quest this is an RPG in much the same way Paper Mario is your options are yes or no I will pick yes later I thank everyone who put up with my stupid ass when we were trying to fix this I had a number of people reach out with potential fixes uninstalling and reinstalling different patches toggling options trying to find console commands to just clear the mission anything that might just circumvent this mission or get it to go but no matter what was done within the game or without I could not fix it I was planning on doing a video on precursors in November but for me this was an impenetrable barrier but not for skeleton his fix which speaks volumes about this game was a simple one I send him my save and he'll see if the race works for him which it did so he did it he won the race he said it wasn't fun per se but you have to bear in mind this was his first time playing the game it was a simple and slow race through rigged which until the last stretch would disallow weapons when weapons were allowed the a I would start firing but since lasers are forward-facing and since they're only AI if it could be called AI is to win the race and they're on a preset path they will just shoot forward gormless Li not even attempting to hit the player or each other skeleton took third and sent the save back my way and with that a big thank you to skeleton keaton is no longer in need of our services we're to report back to ridiger on golden captain permission to report the mission is accomplished and eve's cadet way to go trees how many Raiders have you shot down half dozen ships sir at last one piece of good news today let's go visit old man cache too late it's been ages since I've been to his bar and they're about to hit the ball but urgent summons from the elders put a hole on that all of the pilots are cool to the whole of the elders and there are grim tidings Casilla the home of our people has been annihilated and turned into cosmic dust we've just received a recording of the incident from the station Oh God dejara what are we gonna do now elder we're awaiting your orders the loss of Casilla is a terrible disaster we have no time to grieve we have to act quickly outside an elder tells trace about Falco an elder in exile he was the elder on Casilla who claimed that the planet was in danger but nobody believed him and he went into banishment Scipio and where is he now this Falco he's on the planet Glee he went into banishment elder have you gone senile anyway the pilots are getting sent all over the galaxy to uncover why Casilla blew up as no one knows why and trace is set to make contact with Falco you do need to buy fuel for the ship but it's only used for the hyperjump function used for jumping to other star systems you can either use the map or just point your ship in a direction and shoot which will not work there's no guide for doing this you do not want to treat space travel like firing from the hip trust me NASA don't do that you don't do that and for those wondering Casilla is in the Oman system we do have access to hyper jumps before Casilla is destroyed however a man simply just is it placed on the map until after this cutscene so you can't actually go there for now however we're off to the planet Glee in the Collatz system as we approach glee we have a choice to make we're going to have to ally with one of two opposing factions to track down the banished elder our options are the Democratic Union or the native class now I didn't quite know they were in conflict when I'd started yet nothing on this base could have possibly tipped me off I'd like to step back and talk about another feature that's gotten worse once again I've grown with time to really appreciate the factions as they worked in boiling point how they tied into the world gameplay and story if you had allied with a group there were numerous long-term consequences to doing so and fixing a soured relationship would take time and/or money and may just end up pissing off another group in the process depending on you go about it large stretches at a map can become no-go areas where showing your face would get a violent reaction you had to start sneaking into towns to trade the military would start setting up roadside ambushes for you which don't magically make your car a quarter as fast the plot accommodate admirers working with any faction he was tracking down his daughter and acting solely under his own motives the system is simplicity itself killing members of one faction would hurt your standing with them while raising it with their opposition white-gold had no random events and the map was now a string of islands factions were more separated from one another and the plot established that myers was being backed by a private company with assistance from a government agent joining criminal factions while still possible felt odd it felt that odds with the game and the factions overall were far less well realized precursors dodges the issue of us working with other factions someone we're looking for information and it's implicit we're to do whatever we can in the pursuit of that information Treece makes it clear that is only a mercenary for these groups which was true before but now there's a greater separation drawn by the elders and for the rest of the story each of the planets is comprised of two opposing factions ok free and Glee's case but well there's an allegiance going on so it's still a two sided battle the planets are far smaller and more sparse than realia and tend to be split half-and-half between the two factions it's the dullest take on the faction system so far and there's barely any long term consequences within it this chapter does not mean anything unless I come back to this planet which once I'm finished here I've little incentive to ever do by this point it's become a series of binary choices do you want to fight the fancy new enemy or keeps you in basic humans I ended up joining a Democratic Union I'm told that if I want to get to Falco who lives in a tree somewhere I'm going to need explosives only they can supply and they'll give it to me if I do some wet work for them so after stealing all of the food on their base and stashing it into my ship I get to work the first job is clearing a series of claps checkpoints on the road to the Collatz home town the planet of gleam may be my favourite at least in terms of looks it's fall is fleshed out in golden particularly if you go with the Democratic Union as they only have a couple of military bases and military themed side-missions to go with that the gameplay is much the same but the writing is far drier no escorting glacial drunks just finding trucks meanwhile the class have an actual village made up of wooden walkways and building suspended on the giant trees that make up the planet's surface its characterful and unique please a hilly wooded planet making a nice change from Golden's wide open spaces and long sight lines Glee is covered in thick foliage large trees and numerous constant changes in elevation the wildlife is a bit more dull the primary predation consisting strangely of giant spiders these little guys are cute though their feet don't sell for much the Collatz are Glee's indigenous species a primitive race of bipedal bird people they do actually carry unique weapons that do differentiate them somewhat from the Aman's and we can make use of that gear should we get our hands on it a couple of which are suitably alien in design and function it's a bit of a letdown that Klotz are incapable of flight and their AI isn't actually distinct from any other humanoid enemy but those peanuts compared to the really big letdown but this primitive race who live in trees and build out of wood are using those bloody shields you may be looking at their weapons and thinking they may actually be quite an advanced people these are lasers after all but that's because all of their gear is organic the tenna set gun is an electric shellfish which when fed protein pellets can discharge a powerful beam besides that their snipers are still using crossbows there's a beautiful sort of irony that the shields actually paired better with these weapons than with Amon ones the class can tear through you the most technologically advanced tool is a laser spear but that was designed by the Democratic Union for use by the class who swore loyalty to them my favorite weapon which I never used was the sinew du gun besides the fact that it's just fun to say sinew do when fit a certain type of spider it will fire green blobs which mess with the molecular structure of whatever it hits shrinking them down drastically after a few seconds they'll pop back up none the worse it takes in a couple of seconds but if you can land a shot with a Sununu gun you probably could have just shot them I realize that's a boring way of seeing it but this is the kind of game where it's better to kill an enemy rather than send them to the naughty corner there is something about the Collatz weaponry that doomed them however and ironically enough it's because of a positive and that reason is unlike a mine weapons they're not victim to weapon degradation wear and tear has been a feature since boiling point enemy weapons tend to be in a sorry state when you nab them making them prone to misfire and repair kits are expensive you're incentivized towards buying and maintaining your own gear the only real use of enemy weapons is unloading them for extra ammo and maybe selling them off and not for much since the weapon would be in poor condition however class weapons cannot degrade and offer us always highly valuable not to mention their primary gun the tennis ik technically has 100 rounds per magazine you get full mag when you unload a weapon so that's 100 bullets each of them selling for two credits that adds up this isn't even a species thing anymore it's just financially prudent to kill more class they're worth 800 a pop even at their best and the man doesn't fetch a quarter of that so Xena's proof that I am capable of great evil as I've got on my [ __ ] landed in the Collatz village and gunned down every guard I saw yeah the only reason I have footage of this village was because I ransacked it repeatedly then I lugged all the gear back to my ship and it was sold to the Democratic Union this was also the first zenus game where I had no money troubles so all those complaints about money on golden I was wrong but I didn't know it yet there are a couple of things I've omitted about space travel until now flush with cash and curious about space I decided to experiment more with space gameplay each space station is a terminal for cargo which are highly expensive commodities I figured that there must be a way to get some cargo without spending up and trading that's when I decided to go blowing up trade ships and hey there it is precursors makes it so much easier to earn money than I've a previous entry there's just a lot more to go around and I was annoyed when I finished the game and learned in the course of the story there were two times I needed to spend money to progress I did not even get to flash my cash and before you type your comment I'm well aware that's the stupidest complaint I've made the ship has a tractor beam which you can use to suck up valuables to sell off or just go about blowing up space rocks for tuppence the real cash lies in cargo it is much like the rest of this game as inconvenient as humanly possible the amount of cargo any ship carries is totally random and the crates are tiny and incredibly hard to spot I realized that it took me minutes following each ship I took down to find anything I realised much too slowly though it was because I had to wait for every bit of debris from the fight to de-spawn before I had any chance of picking out anything then getting the tractor beam to actually catch on to them is fidgety so much slow that my method of picking them up was just twiddling the mouse and mashing the pickup key a small but terrifying oversight is that space ships belong to factions however unlike the rest of the game this is rarely if ever signposted Anastasia has messages which pop up when a ship comes in range but only a handful of them tell you which faction a ship belongs to with no HUD elements to help you keep track even if you scan the ship the only tells you where the ship is headed which is completely useless information I had an issue far later on where I blew up a bunch of ships decided to get back on the main quest only to find out that I had accidentally literally torpedoed my reputation of the faction I'd sworn allegiance to and at Foster's locked myself out of progress I mean the fix was far easier this time reload an old save and just undo an hour of grinding it's still irritating because I had no good I did I was harming my allies since I had money I also bought ship upgrades the are actually tiered typically one to four tiers but there's no reason to not just save up and buy the top ranked upgrade since the earlier stages do not stack with later ones this even extends to what I feel should be individual upgrades for instance if you buy the fourth tier laser and missile upgrades you gain access to tier 2 and free as well so why ever buy them the game to its credit doesn't hide this fact from you I should also note that much like perks most of these are essentially invisible they're things such as shield strength fuel capacity and efficiency overall top speed which can still never be as fast as the hyper break I did not feel any stronger after installing a ton of these as I did at the start fuel library to perhaps are the only ones that had any discernible impact the most telling thing about the upgrades isn't what they did it's that I felt comfortable enough to buy them all this is the first entry where I didn't worry about scar say I had money and a ship I could not lose which had ample storage space aboard I was loaded down with a copy of each weapon spares to sell off loads of food a few spare syringes and a small nations worth of ammunition it's funny how in boiling point I made a big deal about how I ended up caring about my car considering it could be easily lost in a new one stolen but when a car is loaded down with loot losing it was a scary prospect but this is Tracy's dad ship with an AI that he nurtured and gave a stripper body for some reason yet I never felt that attachment to this ship because it can't be lost I can't get away from him and perhaps it's because I dislike the space travel anyway I was in good company with a democratic order taking orders from the rather vile Dogen here's an embarrassing Faculty of them I didn't catch on that they were a bit evil from the name alone in fact it was after my second village rate and after having done a few jobs for them I had to stop and realize oh wait but by then I was pretty deep in so I didn't think about it much more the Union is trying to force the class to adapt to their way of life or die though this mostly just seems like a pretense to kill them anyway a common sentiment amongst the Democratic Union is that the Collatz are undeserving of such a bountiful planet they are unapologetically imperialist and I'm their spearhead the plan they're working towards is opening a path to the Collatz village to launch a special operation we partake in a handful of missions to clear the way and make sure it all goes off without a hitch these are at least somewhat unique scenarios responding to an ambush and pulling a bit of key out of the river stealing a class egg only to plot it in a different clans village and snap a picture starting a civil war between the two groups I had to kill everyone in the base to get this photo but hey maybe it'll work both sides in the conflict - bird brains and after all this after committing I feel in my gut world war crimes we top it all off by planting an animal law in the Collatz nest and attracting all the local predators to their eggs [Music] and we flee back to the Union as their younger devoured and that's the special operation brought it that's not all we do Treece agreed to be a mercenary but he really ought to learn to say no during all of this he is also sent into space to destroy an experimental weapon the empire is developing and to another star system entirely to touch down on the planet of Yaran to find a lost Democratic Union squad the Yaran fight is a massive step up in difficulty it takes place in a ruined city with barely any cover a ton of enemies snipers in the buildings and a mech walking around is a struggle to gain footing I wouldn't say it gives the clots a break so much as puts a full stop on the pacing we learned they're developing some experimental gear from the squad we were sent to find sadly the one survivor has been turned into a kind of force meet in his suit so with his death he hands his job to us so I slugged my way across the planet grab it and then sprint jump as much as tree scan back to my ship previous games had us dealing with other people's problems to fund solving our own and it did it quite a lot precursors takes this and it makes it the main plot while it doesn't ask for money to progress it asks for the busy work we do get paid but this game has more money than any other anyway and there really isn't actually that much to spend it on in this one one weapon of each type enemies drop everything this is going to sound weird but compared to this I sort of missed the grind we're doing aimless work for hours at a time before I knew the pointless work would end when I had the money to progress now we're doing hours of busy work to be given a solution to very simple problems and there isn't enough story in these groups to interest me nor is the Casilla situation developing while we work I am NOT getting a bigger picture of the universe once again and the small scale isn't that deep Ivor anyway we do eventually get some explosives that we probably could have just requisitioned from ridiger before we can head for falco and empire squad airdrops in an attacks they're then killed okay oh I'm very concerned that these [ __ ] were attacked by those bastards we drive out to meet falco and run into a wooden game ah good thing we've got high-grade explosives and falco the rather young sounding elder has been awaiting us greetings elder falco my name is Therese Crichton I've come here on the orders of Elder in Lille in Wales a fool he was just as blind and deaf as any of them and now now it is too late yes but do you know why I'm here I do you want to find out what transpired on Casilla and I I was trying to warn the elders to save the planet they didn't listen to me elder falco they never should have touched the artifact of the precursors they shouldn't have let the empire carry out the experiment so this was a Empire experiment precisely watch did no one in the universe get a good shot of Casilla exploding anyway the head of the research operative got off Casilla in time and is currently being held in an empire lab in Rionda so that's our next port of call Treece tells Anastasia to contact IRA and have her head to a Space Station orbiting the planet and to look for mercenary contracts planetside trace gets two contracts and this will decide our faction on Randall it's the free traders or the Empire as I said the Empire is not an always hostile faction so why have they been the go-to enemy well like I said their armor is fairly intimidating but besides of this they are the bad guys in the tutorial for a very silly reason Empire troops are technically distinct from human enemies they will chain guns we can't use and they cannot use shields ironically despite appearances this means they are some of the flimsiest foes that you will face throughout the game especially since by the time I was on Rianne door I had more than enough armor-piercing and explosive rounds and the funds to get more I don't doubt that they have more actual health than other foes but the shield makes such a huge difference for whatever that amount of health is is meaningless and that's why there in the tutorial they're actually the easiest foes in a way I'm also not sure if it's a good idea to prime the player so much to dislike a faction in this way it could have been interesting if I had any reason to believe the elders dislike the Empire in any specific fashion also if the plot accommodated treats moving away from the elders but honestly I think they're just in the tutorial because they're both visually distinct and easy it would have made sense to put bandits in the tutorial but putting Empire troops here makes precursors look like it's putting its best foot forward it only bothers me after the tutorial anyway I'm sorry to disappoint anyone hoping I'm about to be a contrarian but I do join the free traders they smuggle goods shipping anything valuable regardless legality wall Rianne door is an awful planet it's kept alive thanks to the empire defending their top secret lab and a free-trader outpost much like the last planet we need assistance to progress and for our services the free traders will give us a way into the lab before heading down to the planet Treece meets with IRA she's going to airlift us out when we nab a prett off giving us a speedy escape from the lab she comes and stays on our ship IRA stay on the ship when I need your help I'll let you know stay in touch take care the free traders are the underdogs even their gates don't seem to work properly come on come on they trigger for a second so I don't know what's up all right get out hit the switch get in yep I have to do that every time I was coming or going so a lot of our jobs are running sabotage you're stealing equipment one of our first jobs is to steal a mech with the ability to turn invisible but I never see it do this pretty good then we switch it's invisibility offer and walk it back with barely any resistance the only reason I know it's capable of violence is because I'm attacked by this planet's own brand of giant spiders I returned the Mac to the traders and never see it again I was waiting on it coming back for a later mission but nothing in this game has really led into anything else anyway we're given too many rockets to walk and then we have to go and take them blow up some tanks and then would you like a head out into battle while the free trader forces have it out with the imps we get behind enemy lines and take out their surface-to-air missiles that were blowing up trader vessels this is very easy because after all I've done and I'm doing the Empire doesn't actually see me as an enemy yet I Farah Lee disliked Rhian door is by far and away my least favorite part of the game I've already said this is a mostly dead planet besides the spiders there is no organic wildlife instead there is a legion of unexplained killbots which attack everyone and respawn constantly well they don't have anything on the know in terms of lafalot it does mean there's nowhere on this planet you can go without having your tires blown out even they're [ __ ] wise to it it's a lucky thing I found a car dealer on this planet and I have enough money to start up a showroom it just means getting back from anywhere is a pain lay out wise it's pretty much the absolute distillation of the faction system the map is divided into two halves one belonging to the traders and the other the Empire running down the middle north to south is a big minefield flanked by soldiers of each respective side a lot of soldiers the mines are invisible so evasion is a guessing game I realized that the best way to navigate was this little road that only existed on the mini-map but had presumably been blown away and I can't decide with this game whether that was intentional and clever or I am the luckiest [ __ ] going the other option is to just drive so fast you outrun the blasts sneaking past the soldiers on either side is just shy of impossible there is no room to move past them especially so since if you're sneaking past them you're not moving fast enough to not explode and if you're taking that road well that leads right into the security checkpoint of the opposite side the minefield would be okay even a fun change of pace if you had to traverse it once or twice but during my time on Rianne door I crossed it more than 10 times and a majority of those times were for story progress however as I mentioned the imps are still cool with me so I only have to worry about the mines faction status may have a bar but it is really just a binary thing they like you or they'll kill you and the rest is just cushioning [Music] so I could just waltz into Empire territory without fuss and was pretty terrified by the prospect of that changing on jobs where I needed to steal something from them well they had no AI telling them to stop me no one else does they don't care who steals that giant truck as long as it isn't free trader scum they don't even raise an eyebrow as it crosses the minefield back into their territory well okay maybe they do but who could tell with the big masks I only did one side mission on Rianne door I apologize if that seems lazy but I had a good reason as mentioned I didn't want the empire on my case for as long as possible yet doing extra content would actually harm me the shame is that one side mission I did may well have been the most involved I've ever seen the game get a trader won't do dealings unless he has a crate of implants the issue is that crate is in an empire warehouse on the other side of the gulch and that warehouse turns out to be locked so I go and talk to the depot manager since I'm still friendly he's got a job that he'll hand over the keys for I need to bump off an imp commander who's been doing shady deals and he'll hand over the key to do this I need to give him a date of crystal containing a fake mission I'm to accompany him on then while he's just hovering there in his craft I'm to blow it up the impt nearby attack me but my standing is good enough that I can still go and talk to the depo manager I get into the warehouse hack the nearby computer to switch off the laser trip wire which by the way doesn't actually work the trip wires never actually go away also no I didn't just cut that I didn't make that skip that skit was in the game because it's spawning folks outside they will always trigger spawning a ton of guards outside and turning the base hostile besides the sheer number of enemies this is also our introduction to the one thing deadlier than nose tiny little flying drones capable of triggering dialogue mid combat or if the Empire already dislikes you just killing you instantly they are utterly silent and once they start tracking you they will never stop fortunately they go down in a couple of shots but in this cramped room they are horrifying and they also seem to be heavier than tanks this is the one time I got my hands on a tank and I found it clipping violently into a wall so it was nearly destroyed before I even set foot in it I did eventually fight my way out nabbed a car and flawed it figuring I'd kill two birds with one stone I decided to steal my objective on the way out as well and take it across the border after trying to approach the situation intelligently and failing each time instead just made a blind dash for the truck and let me say this I can't do it the truck was wrecked each time I don't have the ammo patience or resources necessary to carry this job out I would have to kill several tanks two mechs however many infantry and then make it across the minefield of the truck still intact even if I took it really slow I would have to kill everyone an entire base to get the truck out untouched I simply cannot haul enough explosives to do this task without several trips back and forth even if I make it to the minefield this truck is so large and so ill fitted to the bumpy terrain it is that I am guaranteed to set off some of those mines and take more damage and the cherry on top there are missile defenses on the air border and it's because of all of this that I reloaded an earlier save and none of that happened I stole the truck from a more indifferent Empire and because Treece doesn't know how to say no we're also sent on a couple of offworld jobs one of which is killing the most dangerous pirate in the galaxy who happens to possess the most advanced ship in the galaxy and Treece accepts this job rather casually I suppose it's been long enough I should briefly talk about Tracy since the meijer of both previous games were interesting protagonists both good at their jobs but socially not there seriously nobody in those games ever liked him they respected what they could do but that was it with boiling soul being a bragger and golden soul being a psychopathic whiny child who is tres well Treece is a lot more boring a lot of the time he's a military man straight-laced and objective oriented but that veneer occasionally cracks and underneath he's a pretentious weirdo like we saw of that concerned dad or when he walks up to this man and when asked his name he can just decide to lie and call himself Riddick to absolutely zero game I think my favorite trait of Treece is one that sadly only comes up twice occasionally Treece has the option of pointing out flaws in the plan of his mission givers even story stuff such as when the koto are free trader contact gives us a mission to kill a general who's planning an attack on his bass in every case the other party brushes it off and Treece does the job without further argument these dialog choices make no difference but I appreciate the trees tries after a wild goose chase across half the galaxy the most deadly pirate is brought down by strafing and spam I guess that was a boss fight finally after all of this we're told the traders will help us find the lab Therese even seems to have forgotten why he was here scientist Harris Wright knows a guy who knows away in the issue is is that this man is currently in prison for having been caught breaking in and yes is too late to defect to the Empire nonetheless Treece is still on board we do one little job involving going halfway across the galaxy to pick up a cold fusion reactor from a planet with its own giant spiders and ferrying it back we're attacked by UN forces planetside and then they ambush us aboard our ship when I left the planet and got a popup telling me to stop piloting or die I had a moment of genuine panic congratulations precursors you got me I guess it's a good thing ayran ever came out of hiding this would be the last time I needed to cross the minefield and finally the dam had broken the Empire disliked me so I had to battle my way across it losing my car and a lot of my health in the process I tried to sneak fruit I really did but here's the thing behind their perimeter is another minefield so I couldn't just sneak all the way fruit I had to fight my way south from the top of the map until I got to the main road I not only had to go through a ton of infantry but also a couple of mechs and I had no rocket launcher and they were actually quite fun foes they were a lot more mobile they pressured a lot more I actually had to use cover against them in an interesting way [Music] I'd say they were fun but really only one was the other one was a bit of a dull art and I guess it's a good thing they're not using their invisibility and I guess I can really say I'm happy I didn't have to do this more than once breaking into prison is relatively easy it's a very short section without many guards taking place in cramped quarters which bizarrely favored the player it's this late into the game that I learned something incredible one of the new trappings of this setting our electronic terminals to buy goods from there are food ammo and stimulant terminals and despite being machines they are affected by a haggling perk but that's not important right now stimulants are powerful health recovery drugs that lose efficacy with addiction Treece build tolerance which can be reset by a doctor not to mention they can be expensive the food and ammo terminals tend not to have much of interest in them only stocking a small supply of very basic goods meanwhile stimulator terminals are chock-full of each tear of health stimulant naturally I had assumed that hacking them would only result in a price cut but being a good way behind enemy lines I decided to give hacking want to go and stock up it doesn't reduce the price it gives you everything I was kicking myself for not testing this earlier with this one hack I had more health items than I could conceivably ever need the only reason I can't take them all is because it's too heavy and while it doesn't matter here we're hacking this machine is the least of my transgressions much like taking food and stealing cars the AI doesn't care I make my way to the control room where I didn't realize at first the prisoner release was just a switch and assumed I had to hack a computer which I do and I learn all the computers here are just the same computer as the one from the junkies house back on golden it then gave me the objective from something I had cleared 15 hours prior I was terrified i reloaded an earlier save I did not want to know what that might do to the precursors we hit the switch and this spawns a scientist on a nearby hill sorry to ruin the magic he tells trace that a key is needed to get past a laser barrier which he conveniently enough still has and when he's thoroughly assured Treece doesn't value his own life he hands it over I decided that you know since I mangled addicted to drugs weighed down by a ton of extra gear and thoroughly terrified of the minefield I'm just going to chance going straight to that lab which turns out to be a fortress of doom with a lava moat and a lot of snipers while imposing and definitely the toughest challenge faced so far it still isn't as hard as the level of difficulty boiling point or white gold reached the base is split into an inner and outer courtyard and there isn't good cover to approach any gunfight this is not an isolated incident throughout this whole game whenever there has been a linear structured set of enemies there would be very little cover in the players favor nearly every planned out more linear battlefield in this game is just an absolute slog because of it there is no good way to approach enemies in boiling point I praise the military bases for seeming impenetrable while actually being more than doable even quite fair the addition of the shield in this environment is a bit too much of an advantage it just excused things that bit too much this was the toughest battle on Rianne door because unlike everywhere else the imps fielded just as many normal human enemies who can use shields alongside those big power armored chumps and before I was halfway into this base I had gone through so many needles I didn't have track marks I had a [ __ ] railway I had even odds of dying to a headshot or an overdose still ice night my way through the inner courtyard into the base proper and then came to a rather interesting techno hallway a downwards ramp into the laboratory inside we see a strange floating segmented techno pyramid and beneath that there's a portal trees pays it little mind however as he just opens fire on a nearby guard grabs a prett off and a to make a daring escape a mech just barely missing them [ __ ] piece of junk and IRA comes in with the save good old trusty I trace thanks for getting the altitude Teresa's pistol has mind-blowing revelations but not me someone else would have done it the whole galaxy is in danger we don't learn how to use the artifacts of the precursors all the planets will perish not just one bastards that was your fault you switched on the device of the precursors that's why our planet blew up the artifact on Casilla had its self-destruct mechanism activated it turned out that our volunteer wasn't a pure-blooded mo only a genetically pure amon can resonate with the device of the precursors your speeches won't save you now doctor a per Tov oh but they will you need me what for don't you want to solve the mystery of the precursors oh yeah let's get started are you having a [ __ ] laugh right now my man I was so [ __ ] mad well done deep shadows you've done it you've made the actual worst ending I've ever [ __ ] seen what was that pyramid was it a precursor what was a precursor what does being a pure-blooded Aman me who were those [ __ ] in the tutorial why was the tutorial the most alien and interesting world we saw countries crash computers because he's a pure-blooded a man is he a pure-blooded Aman why were we and or prison cards going to golden to get their drugs it took me 20 minutes to comprehend that I don't comprehend it but at least I just decided to take it in I have to go and watch a few Let's Plays because I had to double-check that that was indeed the ending I had to reconfirm that my game hadn't just broken again I needed a drink and a lie down granted it was 1:00 a.m. so you know I needed a lie down anyway but I needed that lie down more so I don't think an ending has ever hit me so profoundly but that's it that's the end of deep shadows that's the end of zenus it raises a ton of questions in a matter of minutes then asks one final question read so poorly that it sounded bored I already knew this game was lazy the sheer amount of oversights the lack of attention to detail the SHA dienes of space gameplay the broken choir the AI not responding to basic behavior such as theft the fact that nowhere in the galaxy seems to sell tires this is a game that has been stapled together it's so fascinatingly broken you can see there won't be a pristine polished experience an hour in but it's only after finishing this game and looking at it as a whole but you can see just how little there is to it after I finish the game I reloaded an earlier save and I started exploring all of the star systems particular attention paid to the ones that the story never takes me to there are a lot of planets many of which have an orbiting space station but you can't land on any of them [Music] I realized that all the planets I could land on had a little symbol on them I then realized it was all the planets but the story had already taken me to and nothing else the rest of the galaxy exists as a backdrop to the free actual maps and free planets that are more or less dungeons the extra star systems don't have anything to them I saw an extra side mission in one to blow up some pirates attacking a ship and I don't doubt there are more of these but I also doubt they'd be worth it and what about the Space Station's well they all have the exact same interior with the exact same NPCs with only their factions changed based on location barely anyone inside can be talked to and the barman muses that he's a clone yeah cute sod off if there are a ton of side missions hidden in the copy-pasted stations off on the edge of space I'm sorry I didn't find them but I am NOT combing all of these those two people in the bar the D you and imp representatives never offer you jobs no matter how late in the game you are the Empire man will always say we're not scary enough and the Union fellow will always brush us off perhaps I'm assuming wrongly they're meant to be quest givers perhaps this is the most subtle foreshadowing that this game isn't going to work like its predecessors perhaps it's just a joke that I'm taking entirely the wrong way this is possible it's just that the pod was where you went to get work before I couldn't go to a man before the destruction of Casilla and their method to assure they didn't meet a model another planet was to just remove a button from a menu what the [ __ ] is IRA meant to achieve what about ridiger or Tracy's dad for all of the five minutes it feels like Treece is learning about his dead dad is going to be part of his character but he gets the whole story and it just sort of ends maybe he's embarrassed to learn how he died and that's so much of this in actuality on golden in particular it feels like each story mission is trying to teach you something is going on in the universe but then it just lets it hang it's like a game master teasing plot hooks and worrying he can't pack any of them up war effort spice trading drug rig and then when he finally settles on the precursors he scrambles to slow it down as much as possible since he has nothing prepared the saddest part is while I was shocked and appalled by both this ending and white Gold's I can't say that either of them was balling me really I was set out to find why Casilla had exploded even if I don't understand it I did learn why in white gold I was sent out to discover the source of coke and stop it and even if it ended just as a better story was starting I did learn the source and stopped it it's so weird they did exactly what they said they were going to do yeah I'm still mad these are games built on a foundation of side-missions funding the main quest or at least they were beforehand the concert dial M er of building money but needing to spend it to survive was accidentally or otherwise built into the plot it was just as meaningful as how much health you had the main character had a personal or professional goal but they needed money to achieve it so I've not really judged the stories as aimless before despite having just as long if not longer periods of busy work for multiple factions who at times oppose each other the fact is it was being done under my own motives that made it meaningful this is the first game where progress isn't gated behind money all that much I probably spent about five thousand in total progressing the plot far far less than normal that bloke who said money isn't everything was perhaps the most prescient [ __ ] going now we're just doing jobs to progress but it's made the story just fueled plodding and weird and he never gets annoyed or indignant that in his quest to find out why a whole planet exploded he's been roped into murdering a lot of people to further the goals of different factions all to achieve things the elders surely could sort out wait no actually both of those problems could have just been solved by using Teresa's spaceship and despite how much time we spend in the service of two or four factions we barely get any insight into the universe at large the real mystery of the precursors is why it's so short why it's so shoddy why it's so confused it takes roughly a third of the game for the plot to begin and then after hours and hours of gameplay you get maybe 10 more minutes of story in between broken up by admittedly very jobs let down by the most dull gameplay this series has had and the bigger mystery is I can't decide if I like this more or less than white gold I think the potential for fun is higher in white gold but precursors moves forward a more regular pace even if I don't understand that forward pace white gold is all ice broken but there's also less their precursors feels more complete but in pure these superficial ways wait wait hang on a second Darton I've never seen that before okay let me just launch game quickly and have a look no it's just a space station I'll have a look maybe it'll have something oh no no don't you come [ __ ] near me [ __ ] off white gold feels unfinished upon any close inspection precursors keeps that facade a bit longer and for all of how bad the precursors is there are elements that I find charming it's so busted and awkward that I have to beg a certain kind of person to play it the people like me who appreciate garbage if you want to see the totally unique ways this game will break on you then go ahead it might just be computer specific I had expectations going into this game but fuzzy confused ones white gold was shoddy and are fast and that game was reusing assets to save time and costs so what chances does a futuristic sci-fi game have it's not just new models it has a whole new type of gameplay so perhaps white gold was a stopgap a cheap sequel tossed out to make money while precursors was the real goal does that even make development sense in the slightest perhaps they're both just games that ran out of time or money or any number of things that could cut them short perhaps that ending was intended as a genuine stopping point for a sequel to pick up rather than a casualty of development I have an idea perhaps deep shadows were just hacks and all of this sympathetic trouble development talk I've been spewing is all wrong boiling point shows me that they were capable of finishing something but that had Atari backing all I can say is I don't know I'm sorry that's useless I'm only looking at what's there in front of me and as we wrap up zenus another thanks to skeleton and indeed everyone who helped with this video for all of my animosity to that ending I appreciate the fact that I reached that point and I wouldn't have gotten there without assistance the Xena series boiling point in particular is going to hold a special place for me in equal measures due to its ambition and its flaws when boiling-point released it was a genuinely huge game more than a studio of that caliber should be able to produce it was punching higher than quite a few others and I think fate was not kind to them it released buggy and by the time it was patched most major outlets had already reviewed boiling point as broken and glitchy and even if it was reviewed well it likely would have been niche their publisher Atari had already lost a lot of sway this was post driver free they had lately lacked the means to do Western releases and half-decent translation without their help and so they became relegated to Eastern Europe with later releases and less funds to work with I decided a good while ago that the remit of this channel when not doing something bigger and mainstream because I occasionally feel like doing something it takes my fancy is to make these sort of long-form analysis videos on games that would otherwise never get them dig into the weird and bizarre both to satisfy my curiosity and make sure that they are in some way documented boiling point is my ideal white golden precursors in a way are as well but not for a reason half as positive I don't know what became of deep shadows employees after this but I hope it was only the best for them I should also note as we're closing but while I do try to look at games objectively in as much as I can or really want to my phrasing and way of approaching games is emotional my observations are born from emotions it may sound skeezy to some but if I find something fun I work backwards from there to explain why and vice-versa trying to be as fair as I can while still being informative and entertaining and when it comes to a series in which I've played games prior expectations build over the course of this video I've put boiling point story factions and the feeling of being a mercenary on a pedestal and then critique white gold and precursors for being lesser versions for not replicating redoing these elements in ways I like I can only say if you feel that Sun fair of me to do yeah you've got me I may put too much stock in them how well the factions work with the map in boiling point for instance may well have just been a happy accident and when a sequel was made the team didn't consider it that important of facts are moving forward and I'm romanticizing things that never held that much meaning to them and that's all I can say really I don't know what the Xena series developers what deep shadows found terribly important I don't know if white golden precursors were the games they wanted to make but I doubt it and with that we close the precursors an utter waste of space if you enjoyed this video and want to support me in further episodes of playing please spread this video around and if you wish please donate to my patreon every little bit helps and at five dollars or more you get access to after four videos where I answer viewer questions test out things in the games they request and wrap up any minor details that didn't make it into the main video a thank you to my patreon Roomba San DBZ King one-one-nine noonim Sigurd 2mass Coase Armand ready Austin wag man on f4 games Samson alpha D Gonzales Martin Johnny Z corrupted cages John the owners Zeno Nick more Oh Jonathan Katara's rights Ella when the tried Piper bran Jonathan Hume Tom Hughes Jack Sain Rafe Andrea's Huber hate Gregorian I love Opie a Jojo reference Cody draga Pertwee Oded rrah psycho soda pop stove the Khajiit neo G similar dude MF music nerd here Liam s Co sentry down and David J Sellinger thank you all so much for sticking with me through this series and through this video my throat is killing me before I cut this [ __ ] down it was 1 hour and 55 minutes and I spent an hour and a half talking

Channel: Tehsnakerer

Views: 343,893

Keywords: Precursors, TehSnakerer, Precursors gameplay, precursors review, Waste of space, Boiling Point, White Gold, Precursors analysis, Precursors essay, xenus, xenus 2 white gold, Precursors game, Precursors PC, Playing Precursors, Deep Shadows, FPS RPG, RPG, science fiction games, Worst games, precursors critique, game analysis, game essay, precursors space, space simulator, first person shooter, Steam, videogame, precurser, games for pc, lets play, let's play

Id: fqBKhXVU5Fo

Length: 94min 31sec (5671 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2018