Omega Squad Reviews

EDIT: Developer increased the speed of all characters, and reduced the time required to repair the holes in the floor and destroy the spawners. This speeds up the experience and makes it more enjoyable. [i] My Experience [/i] I'm already a pretty big fan of top-down shooters, so [b]Omega Squad[/b] was on my radar shortly after its release. Although the game is obviously low budget, the "squad management" aspect of the game was something I hadn't seen before and made the game stand out a bit from the crowd. While I did appreciate the variety of weapons and abilities that I had access to by switching from one member of the squad to another, the squad mechanic became tiresome for me by the end of the game. Each squad member has a separate "fatigue meter" that builds as you play. Although I never let the meter completely fill with any of my squad members, presumably it would hinder their effectiveness if I were to let this occur. Therefore, you are encouraged by developer AstroMonkey to continually switch from one soldier to another and let each recover. Instead of making me appreciate the unique weapon and skills of each soldier, I just found it tedious having to continually monitor this meter. The biggest complicating factor here is that the game is just so [i]slow[/i]. I tried to do all of my movement with the Hacker (who has the highest move speed), but I still found myself trudging along from time to time with other squad members. A number of other factors slow the game down as well: [list] [*] Every door requires a key, so you'll often find yourself looking around for keys you missed or rooms that net a positive number of keys from exploration (for instance, a room that contains two or three keys but only takes one to open). You can buy keys at the shop, but this feels like a waste of money when there are generally enough keys in a level to open all of the rooms if you were to proceed in a certain order. I'd encourage developer AstroMonkey to just remove all of the regular (non-green or red keys) from the game. [*] There are holes in the floor that must be repaired before proceeding. It's not particularly quick to repair them, even with the Engineer. I would encourage the developer to increase the speed of these repairs. [*] It can be difficult to find your way around these levels sometimes, and many areas look similarly. You can get a "wide scan" at each shop of the area immediately surrounding you, but this was useless more often than not. What if the player could simply buy a map of each level at the shops present on that level? [*] Your squad members have different widths and can sometimes get stuck behind crates and level geometry unless you have turned them a particular way or have a certain soldier selected. [/list] I also found a few aspects of the enemies to be problematic: [list] [*] First off, enemies often simply don't pay attention to you, especially if they are melee enemies. There were many times that enemies would spawn right in front of me and then wander off in another direction. [*] It takes too long to disable an enemy spawning nest, even with the Demolitionist. I feel that a nest should actually be unable to spawn enemies if you are in the process of destroying it. [*] Certain enemies, that resembled floating balls of light, were just a pain to deal with. Rather than shoot them with whatever was supposed to be effective, I would often just pick my least favorite soldier (usually the Engineer) and run him into these enemies (they disappear and damage a soldier once they make contact) instead of trying to shoot them. It was more efficient than trying to kill them, and I would just worry about healing him later. Perhaps the gap in effectiveness between shooting an enemy with one gun and shooting it with another could be reduced. [/list] What would make the biggest improvement in the game would be to simply increase the movement speed of all soldiers (perhaps making all of the soldiers as fast as the Hacker). If this isn't possible, perhaps some of the issues that make the game play so slowly could be addressed. However, as it stands I'm not sure that the game's core mechanic really worked for me.