Selaco Review - The Best FPS of 2024?

[Music] flash you [Music] [Music] five [Music] anyone paying attention to the gz Doom modding scene or in the FPS scene for the past few years will no doubt have heard of salako they put out a few demos and I tried them and what was there was kind of mind-blowing not only one of the most detailed gz Doom games but one of the most detailed Shooters I've ever played topped off with some super satisfying combat against actually smart squad-based enemies and you had a recipe for a really good fear successor now after an agonizing weight The Early Access version is here and I'll cover what Early Access means for this later but for the most part you you've got a very lengthy detailed and feature complete game here you play as Dawn a human living in an underground facility named salako somewh off in space which houses the remaining humans after the fall of earth salako is invaded by aliens and the game starts off pretty much right here the only real information we have at the start is an email from a barkeeper named Sal telling Dawn to head to a Secret Workshop underneath the bar I'll start off with the environments sako's environments are staggeringly detailed every single room feels like it was built with proper love and care with nothing left at a Wayside there are props everywhere and in places they make sense lots of unique artwork and posters line the walls and give you an idea of the world you're inhabiting many things can be interacted with from small things like keyboards and hand drers to blinds and light switches which can drastically change the moods of rooms even full-on mini games like pool tables dartboards and arcade machines there's even yellow [Music] paint some interactives are more than just extra detail and can let you find upgrades or other goodies so it's good to interact with everything you come [Music] across the level design goes for a half lifestyle of pacing and structure in between combat encounters you'll do a lot of exploration or puzzle solving with many secrets to be found though sometimes they rely a little too much on these Barrel pushing puzzles levels are broken up between short load screens that can be traveled back and forth between even the complete level ends lead immediately onto the next Zone seamlessly I haven't seen a game pull off this style of halflife interconnectivity in a long time and it ends up feeling very immersive as throughout the entire campaign there's never a moment you end up in a new level or area without seeing how you got there first when exploring you can find things like that can be smashed for health armor or currency upgrades and upgrade materials are hidden in places or sometimes out in plain sight alongside cabinet cars which open up nearby cabinets for resources so you should always take the time to explore your environments you might even find permanent upgrades for Dawn which are extra rare the variety and levels is also excellent the game starts off in a large hospital but eventually you'll end up on rainy city streets which I always love there's bars and offices and there's a giant mall later on with lots of different shops inside all as detailed as the rest there are safe rooms to find too which will usually give you a bunch of upgrade materials and sometimes Tech chips which let you upgrade your weapons to higher levels the further along the game you go the weapon upgrade system is pretty cool you get the standard options like more magazine size or less spread but you can also find weapon upgrade kits which can change your weapon drastically and there are multiple of these per weapon for example you can find a kit for the SMG that will let you dual W it or one that changes its alternate fire into a taser Dart which stuns enemies [Music] it's always exciting finding these just to see how your weapon might change in the safe rooms later on you'll get access to a shooting range with infinite ammo if you feel like either testing your skills or just trying out weapons in a safer environment there's also train systems down here that let you backtrack all the way to and from earlier levels and is also completely seamless like the other level transitions backtracking is worthwhile as you'll get security keys for doors that you'll only be able to unlock with said backtracking and you have a map you can open anytime that will show important things on the map such as those doors the system is useful but I would like it if they could show information about those security doors and levels as you just kind of have to backtrack the levels and hope you picked one that has a security door there you also have a PDA that tracks a bunch of different things like data logs which are emails or messages people have sent to each other some of which can contain key codes for doors that you have to enter using a keypad most of the time though these are just well building logs and they're interesting enough none of them go on for long enough for me to get bored of reading them there's also Milestones which are just challenges like how many of a certain enemy you have killed or data pads found or so on these give you weapon upgrade materials for completing them so they're good to check every now and then best of all there's a cookie clicker style mini game you can play but with Burgers instead gaming combat encounters usually have you fighting several waves of small to medium Siz group groups of enemies there are other enemy types later but for the squads they'll yell out commands flank you throw grenades at you they like the squads from Fear except amped up in how much they really want to kill you the effects on this playay during these fights make them feel that much heavier dust will kick up everywhere windows will break grenades and explosions are loud and Powerful the game generously lets you know the radius of these explosions will a ring around them killing enemies will have them flod into Gibbs with stronger weapons they'll fly back and hit a wall and die from the impact or their lifeless body Will Roll Along the ground momentarily after death the impact sounds of ripping them apart are just super satisfying you can use different grenade types or shoot explosive barrels or fire extinguishers which can even be picked up and thrown as a portable explosive enemies will also get stronger over time as you expect the game has what it calls an invasion tier system which you can track with the PDA at certain points enemies will gain new abilities like being able to throw grenades deploy Shields or even have Squad leaders which enhance the abilities of all members of their squad until they are killed basically you will get stronger but enemies will also get stronger to constantly provide a consistent challenge to you they never get smart enough to stop walking into my land mine so with the pancakes those pancakes those are those are landmines [Music] I played on hard difficulty and some of these later fights kicked my ass in a good way I can see the hardest difficulty modes being insanely challenging I will say it does feel a bit unfair that enemies could always see me through dust or smoke while I can't considering how often there will be these clouds but I'm guessing it's probably an engine limitation thing if it's something that can be improved it'll be appreciated your Weaponry is a mostly standard Arsenal outside of their unique upgrades a magnum SMGs shotgun assault rifle grenade launcher through to things like a nail gun and a plasma rifle I'm 99% certain they are still Sprites but they all look great and they're animated really smoothly there's also animations for things like scanning your wristband or using key cards and Dawn will even keep the gun on screen but move her left hand away from it for these they call attention to detail the weapons all sound loud and impactful my favorite gun to use is probably the SMGs just because I like the Dual wiild them they're all pretty strong but Dawn herself can't take much of a beating before going down so it ends up playing more like a fast-paced cover shooter you'll slide or Dash to a wall and trade shots while throwing grenades over cover and watching out for any enemies trying to flank you you can run in there and deal out punishment if you want but expect to take some or a lot of damage trying to do so I tried playing this way for a good while and spent most of the early hours at low health because of it on the hard difficulty your health regenerates up to 35 as long as you stay out of taking damage for a few seconds you can find or buy portable medkits to use so these are good to look out for there aren't any human NPCs to meet in this game all of the stories either told to you through the previously mentioned dayto logs or just environmental storytelling I actually really like this approach there's never a point in the game where you're forced to listen to Exposition or long scripted events before you can proceed and the game ends up feeling very well paced as a result you can take as long as you want to explore or just move on on the control side you're actually kind of slow which surprise me I always felt like I should be just a little faster than I am I'd like it if they upped it by just a little bit you get a dash a slide to get around quicker or to use in fights the slide specifically can knock over enemies or send them flying into [ __ ] the problem with the slide outside of combat is that it just kind of looks silly constantly sliding everywhere to try and get around quicker and the slide and dash are stuck together on the same key dashing being any direction but forwards and I ended up sliding and dashing together at the same time a few times as a result I'd really like to see this also exist as two separate keybinds just for this reason and maybe allow you to dash forwards as well the music takes on more of an ambient approach for a lot of the game which suits the really well deep rumbling tones which feel like they could be coming from the bases themselves s all these Spacey pads soaka likes to let the environmental sounds do a lot of the talking this area is in lock down remain where you are and wait for further instruction it all comes together to create this really moody atmosphere and keeps you slightly on edge at all times I did notice several times that the Ambiance doesn't always Loop seamlessly with an obvious cut off points at the moment it restarts hopefully they can refine that sometimes there's not even any music at all which is used at just the right moments a good amount of fights don't even have action music similar to fear and I like it that way not every fight needs to feel like this bombastic encounter but sometimes just barely surviving it and walking away afterwards me sight Dr that's not to say there isn't music it's not a rare occurrence and when there is it fits right in with the rest of the game [Music] [Applause] [Music] keep your [Music] distance there is a secret level later on that does use Music a bit too much in some areas to the point it kind of takes away from the atmosphere and after exploring for a long time it ended up giving me a headache apart from that all is good performance- wise I had basically no issues whatsoever the game ran very smoothly from start to finish with no notable drops outside of explosions which didn't drop low enough nor for long enough to affect my enjoyment I didn't run it at the Mac settings but I reckon I could run it at that level and not have too much trouble I'm running a 380 and a ryzen 7 3800 x with 32 GB of RAM myself and the game was installed on an SSD I'm not sure how well it FS on Lower spec machines but it does seem pretty scalable the options menu itself has quite a lot of things you can change as you might expect from a game running on gz Doom gameplay options like different screen effects automatic picking up of items toggling of specific animations true iron sights and then accessibility options like reduced flashes and other more disorientating effects so what's left what do I feel could be improved well the grenade launcher lets you swap between different grenade types and it could be improved to more easily know how many of each grenade you have left without just repeatedly swapping through them some of the explosion sounds are far too loud not to the point I'd throw my headphones off but loud enough that it had hurt to listen to I know jezy Doom lets you have the map be a transparent overlay over the game playay so I'd like it if that could be reimplemented in the future the only thing I outright have a problem with is the shotgun which for a fear successor is kind of funny you see when you fire it there's also a lengthy time between the next shot where you have to pump the shotgun the problem is this can be interrupted by different things switching weapons throwing a grenade meleeing sliding these all stop you from pumping it and the next time you go to take your shot instead you'll end up pumping the shotgun now this is something I could never get used to no matter how much I played because you don't tend to pay attention to if you pump the shotgun while all kinds of other stuff is going down I'd get close to an enemy with the aim of shooting him in the face and instead would pump the shotgun and then get blasted myself got you the screen does say when the chamber is empty but honestly I somehow didn't notice this until hours into the game and even then I never actively noticed it afterwards I imagine this system exists so you can quickly switch to another weapon right after taking a shot but instead I ended up having a shotgun that wasn't even ready to fire in most situations it's pretty annoying and I'd rather they up the pump speed and make it forced because the fire rate on it is a bit too slow in general maybe there's an upgrade to increase it but I never did find one if they can fix this one issue with the shotgun I'd say it would fit right up there with the rest of the weapons so during the very recording of This review they updated the game so that you can at least switch weapons during a pump cycle so there's that at least as far as the label of Early Access goes like I said the entire thing is pretty much feature complete with a full base campaign including a secret level with its own progression system that takes up to 2 hours to complete which you should absolutely not miss out on the main campaign itself not including the secret level took me around 11 hours which felt like a pretty good length once still ey rolls around they'll be working on a second chapter that wraps up the story and plan to use Community feedback to fix or work on anything else that could be improved there's also Workshop mod support for the game which is really cool and will no doubt bring a ton of replayability into the game as far as replayability goes with its current offering you get a bunch of different modifiers for the campaign like a hardcore mode every level starting you off of ear a rifle New Game Plus and more you're getting a full package with this game even in its Early Access State and I can't recommend this game enough I'll be seriously surprised if any in the fs can top this for the rest of the year and it's definitely going to be on my top 10 less for 2024 thanks for watching next video should finally be my Turbo Overkill video leave any feedback in the comments and I'll leave you with this really cool fight get [Music] where ni we got the door make a move watch [Music] Target brece

Channel: FPSthetics

Views: 4,093

Keywords: Selaco, Review, Retro FPS, FPS, FPSthetics, First person shooter, GZDoom, Doom mod

Id: 0MYJJGfA6ms

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2024