Earthfall Preview

Influenced greatly from Left 4 Dead 2, experience a new take to the co-op survival genre with a twist. Fight unique and deadly creatures at a fast pace, heart-pounding, non-stop action pace. Earthfall attempts to create a new experience with the concept of common enemies and special enemies by implementing alien creatures.

Earthfall Preview

Introduction 

Earthfall is a first-person shooter focused greatly on the gameplay aspects of Left 4 Dead 2. Loot around a linear sandbox to try and fight against the ever growing alien horde. Team based, you and another three players work together to complete mini-objectives to progress through the story. The player is challenged with surviving the alien invasion while keeping their fellow teammates alive. This game is molded around teamwork as some special aliens will render you useless and will try to spread you out from your team. This game punishes lone-wolf type of play and shows that the player can only be successful with good teamwork. 

Earthfall is available on Steam for 14.99 (USD).

Story

Earthfall Preview - average scene
The story of Earthfall focuses around four survivors and their attempt to try and fight off an alien invasion.   Aliens have invaded Earth in extreme numbers with only one objective in mind, to eradicate all humans off the face of the Earth. Not to mention the origin of the aliens come from a catastrophic meteor striking Earth. As stated above, Earthfall follows the same story mechanics as similar games like Left 4 Dead 2 in which the story is very lose based and with this game I'm talking very lose based. All this game truly does is raise more questions on how did the aliens get here? What do the aliens want? Well, for the most part, these questions are greatly ignored and the story is barely even there. There wasn't much of a motivation to try and continue throughout the game to try and figure out what is going to happen next in the story. Although take this critique with a grain of salt as games like these focus less on the story and more on the gameplay of it. If you're looking for a game with a great story, look elsewhere.

The character development of this game is dreadful. The characters themselves seem boring and just so bland. There are four players to chose from with it being Roy, Danny, Maya, and Jonas. Other than that, there's nothing really interesting about these four. Even the voice acting is awful, it's just so cliche and at times kind of cringeworthy. I found myself getting angry at the game for the terrible character design as funny as that sounds. With a game like this, it can be seen as crucial to create likable characters that the player is able to relate to or even just like. With this game, there's none of that, the characters even attempt to make jokes but even those are awful. If you're looking for a game with fun and interesting characters this is the worst choice.

Gameplay

Playing this game tested my patience with the annoyance of a complete clone. There's literally nothing different about this game other than it being aliens. The developers seem to have completely ripped off Left 4 Dead 2 and reskinned it with aliens and stale maps. It's as if Left 4 Dead 2 let Earthfall copy its homework, and asked Earthfall to change it up a bit so it doesn't look too identical. The guns, enemies, framework, all of it all basically reads like a complete reskin. There isn't much of a creative expression within this game nor is there any true enjoyment.

Another mention is just how awful the mouse support is. There's an odd mouse acceleration that makes it seem like your mouse is off during the game. It's as if the mouse tracking is slow and can't keep up with a high DPI. I even swapped mice to make sure it wasn't hardware issues and I still had problems with it. This caused for a huge toll on the pleasure of the game as it had a huge learning curve with dealing with the awful mouse support. Sad thing is, this game is made, (currently), just for PC and with the awful mouse tracking it shows that little to no effort was made to creating a quality product. I found myself missing headshots on aliens when my reticule was right over their head.

The monsters are pretty dull as well, yes they're aliens but the aliens just seem so artificial. They don't look deadly nor do they look intimidating. They just look like copies of other monsters from other games, there isn't a unique monster within this game. Just like Left 4 Dead 2, there is the common alien, then the special aliens that have abilities to kill you faster. There's an alien that blows up to attract other common aliens, one that strangles the survivor and pulls you away from the team, one that tackles you, one that's a massive tank. Greatly similar to Left 4 Dead 2 with little to no difference other than the alien-like reskins. I even found myself calling the special aliens boomers/smokers..etc..etc.. Although Warhammer: End Times follows this same concept of cloning special enemies and gameplay, they simply clone similar concepts but portray it in their own way. Even the alien that blows up is massive and green like a boomer.

Earthfall review, so much smoke
The guns of the game seem to be underpowered and the recoil follows an odd pattern. It's as if the dual-pistols are the most powerful weapons within the game. Not to mention that the gun sounds were so unrealistic and low-quality it took me away from the little immersion I had within this game. The guns are also generic in feeling. There's nothing interesting about them, they look like so bland, even the shotgun is awful compared to the PC. Which is a shock as in games like this the shotgun could be seen as a crowd control gun to wipe massive hordes of aliens. Not so much in this game, the reload times for the shotgun are so excessive that the firepower of it isn't a good tradeoff for the reload time. I found myself ignoring primary weapons as they weren't as powerful as dual-wielding pistols.

There was a strange mechanic this game tried to implement which is a tower-defense type mechanic. It felt wrongly implemented to make the game feel different than the others. There were ways to reinforce walls/areas and plant turrets around chokepoints. But these features were so situational that I found myself ignoring the reinforcement and turret aspects of the game. The map layout just didn't work fluidly with these implementations. I will give the developers praise for trying to add a level of synergy between a four-man group, but it just doesn't work efficiently.

Optimization on this game is some of the worst optimization I have ever seen in my life. Between maxing out and lowered to the worst settings I received the same amount of frames. I even turned off shadows and anything possible to regain some frames but I had the same awful 30FPS. It's as if there's a soft cap for frames or the coding is so bad that it cannot work with higher-end computers. I even checked my drivers to make sure they were up to date and nothing would change my frames. I also monitored my CPU usage and it seems as if this game cannot efficiently use a processor to its fullest extent.   

Co-op was the true saving grace for this game, it was the only thing that led me to keep fighting through the awful mechanics of it and painful FPS. Thanks to my friends it allowed me to have fun within the game, but that's mainly because I and my group of friends try and do the most idiotic things in co-op games. Like other co-op games, they are meant to practice unlimited levels of shenanigans and this makes for a good party game. After an hour of play though, we decided to go play the better version of this game Left 4 Dead 2. It seems as if this game is an homage to that and only that.

Graphics

The graphics for this game odd enough, suck. Between low/ultra, there really isn't much of a difference as the game itself is pretty ugly. The aliens don't have much detail to them other than just being blobs of just aliens. The map design was generic and even the tank like zombie was basically a blob of intimidating mistakes. These aren't your jaw-dropping next-gen graphics, they aren't the worst yet they aren't the best. They're just simply there, to give you a more "meh" looking game. The guns don't look too exotic either, you'd think with a game involving a huge focus on aliens that they'd take advantage of this and add alien like guns. Bring attention to the alien arsenal and allow for the player to see some interesting alien technology. No, not in this game, I almost forgot I was fighting out-of-space beings and just killing mutants that drank radiation barrels.  

Earthfall Preview - boomer?

sound

The one thing this game does "alright" is that the aliens do have different sounds to them. They do for the most part sound like aliens but other than that the sound for this game is pretty awful. The guns sound fake, the voice acting is terrible, the music is repetitive and annoying. The music was actually pretty loud when I first started up the game, so be aware if you have strong headphones that the music will be deafening on start up.

Conclusion

This game is a failed creation of a Left 4 Dead 2 clone, it's so bad that it actually is funny to try and play. The developers practice shady methods in which when the game first released on steam, it was 29.99 (USD) then after a week of a backlash they lowered the price to 14.99 (USD). This is unfair for people who purchased it for the higher price as they weren't even compensated for the difference. Changes like this are a big red flag on staying away from a shady company. This game is just a trainwreck that attempts to steal money from players by stating that they're a revolutionized Left 4 Dead 2.

Pros Cons
+ Can Play with friends – Terrible gunplay
+ Interesting concept  – Boring 
+ Decent gore  – Tedious 
– Awful Voice Acting 

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