When I went to bed last night, I fully expected tonight I would be installing and playing a little PC title known as Crusader Kings II, and considering the chaos you can create in this title, I was rather excited. So why has none of this happened yet? Because our new best friends at Revival gave us something amazing to get even more hyped up for, a teaser demo of their upcoming game Overload.
So just who is Revival and what is Overload? Revival is the original team from Parallax Software and Overload is their attempt to modernize the style of game they created when they made Descent and Descent II back in the 90s. And to show they know what they are doing, they just dropped this demo on everyone with a steam account. I write now as I just finished streaming all three levels on my twitch channel.
And while it had a rockier start then I would have liked thanks to the joystick I tried to use not working quite right, the game proved to have the heart and feel of my old favorite DOS series. In fact on a keyboard and mouse (once I realized the mouse option was off and turned it on… who does that on a PC?) I was quickly able to describe what is here already as exactly what they wanted to deliver: old school Descent feel and gameplay with a much more modern look.
Literally it was all here from the fast-paced tunnel crawling to the machines following a similar design style, to even the maps feeling instantly familiar and at home. The only real change is a new coat of paint taking in what a modern machine can do.
Now for those of you who do not know Descent, the game was an FPS style game where your character was not walking, but in a ship that could move in any direction at will instead of just on the ground. From this perspective you flew through mines where the robots running them had gone insane and would kill anything that moves, shooting them to bits while hunting for the reactor in the center of the mine to set the whole place off, and then diving for the exit before the explosion took you with it.
And if this sounds great to you, I have both good and bad news. The good is that this demo requires next to nothing to run, even in it’s pre-alpha stage it’s in. In fact, it requires the following:
- Windows XP SP2 or higher
- SSE2 Instruction set supporting CPU (so literally if your PC turns on it probably has a new enough processor)
- Shader 2.0 and Direct X 9.0 supporting graphic card (so again, if you your graphic card is alive and by NVidia or AMD, it’s probably good enough)
- 700 MB hard drive space.
Obviously to run it better better hardware will help.
But the bad news is this is still a kick-starter project, and one with less then 3 days to meet it’s goal of $300,000 or lose the funding. As I look at the page now, they are closing on $200,000. And while the game will release on PC even if they dont make this goal, it will not be the complete vision the team is trying to make. Furthermore, anyone looking forward to blowing robots to bits on the consoles may well be left out since this was also the budget they planned on using to port and launch for PS4 and Xbox One.
So really, I have only a few things to say at this point. Get on steam and give this a go TONIGHT, and if you like it, you just might want to consider backing the project.
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