Overload Longplay - VR & HOTAS
7This here be Overload. Released on May 31, 2018 (holy toledos really?) by a bunch of refugees from Parallax and Volition. As such, what began life as a tunnel shooter for Descent's 20th anniversary evolved into a full-blown spiritual successor.
For those of you not in tune with the original barf-bag simulator, Descent was a first-person vehicle shooter released in 1995 that featured full polygonal 3-D environments and enemies. Old hat now days but unless your rig ran on pure nitro, Decent could bring it to its knees. You could even up the resolution to 800x600 if you wanted to give your computer a Viking funeral.
Graphics aside, Descent's real claim to fame is the player's ability to pitch, yaw, roll, and strafe in all directions referred to as Six Degrees Of Freedom (6DOF) and the level design took advantage of this. Labyrinthian took on a whole new meaning when up, down, and upside-down became valid options. Your vehicle still had limits to its rotation speed and acceleration which was key in selling the feeling of piloting a gunship rather than just no-clip slewing through the environment.
Fast-forward to 2018. Overload releases and it's basically Descent. Fly through claustrophobic bases and scrap any robotic fool dumb enough to land in your crosshairs. Along the way, uncover the mystery of what the heck this whole operation is supposed to be while rescuing anybody fortunate enough to turn themselves into popsicles before the robot revolution got to 'em (There are two endings to this game depending on whether or not you save enough cryopods).
Just like it's inspiration, the level design does have an emphasis on finding secrets and hidden caches, making good use of the cloaking and invulnerability power-ups was damn near mandatory in Descent. Those things do make an appearance here, but the real help is the addition of the upgrade system where you can find points to spend on adding permanent upgrades to your ship and weapons. Given my history of FPS games and secrets, don't expect me to get all of them.
I'll be playing on the Ace difficulty because I don't truly hate myself yet. In addition, got the ol' VR bucket and Thrustmaster T.16000 setup. You wouldn't think it, but this isn't the worst when it comes to simulator sickness. Cockpit games always have a mostly stationery frame of reference so that helps a ton. It does help that you can look where you are going when strafing and tri-cording (combining all your movement vectors to achieve max speed). The bigger issue is that manipulating 6DOF on a HOTAS setup does get my hands pretty knackered after a couple of hours.
For controls Pitch, roll and yaw is on my main stick + twist. Foward/Back on the main throttle, strafe left/right on the throttle rocker and strafe up/down on the middle coolie-hat under my left thumb. Weapon selection is under the main stick Hat. Overload barrows a weapon wheel mechanic that when active slows time down which gives the player a free moment to select and gives the game a moment to show off its bazillion particle effects that makes the Unity engine cry in a corner.
Chapter list:
0:00 Intro/Mission 1 Briefing
4:32 Mission 1: Ymir Outpost
16:32 Mission 2: Briefing
20:11 Mission 2: Tarvos Outpost
28:35 Secret Level Alpha
30:36 Mission 2: Tarvos Outpost (Cont.)
37:27 Mission 3: Briefing
40:07 Mission 3: Skoll Outpost
59:04 Mission 4: Briefing
1:01:36 Mission 4: Phoebe Refinery
1:09:58 Secret Level Beta
1:12:32 Mission 4: Phoebe Refinery (Cont.)
1:25:02 Mission 5: Briefing
1:28:11 Mission 5: Phoebe Complex
1:49:51 Mission 6: Briefing
1:52:20 Mission 6: Titan Observatory
2:19:33 Mission 7: Briefing
2:22:30 Mission 7: Titan Workshop
2:54:36 Mission 8: Briefing
2:56:42 Mission 8: Titan Forge
3:24:21 Mission 9: Briefing
3:26:55 Mission 9: Titan Collider
4:00:40 Mission 10: Briefing
4:03:30 Mission 10: Titan Harbor
4:24:54 Mission 11: Briefing
4:28:46 Mission 11: Tethys Lab
5:04:10 Mission 12: Briefing
5:06:33 Mission 12: Enceladus Depot
5:37:43 Through the Portal
5:39:01 Mission 13: Cygnusoria
5:52:43 Pilot's Log - Kodachi Gunship
5:53:54 Mission 14: Lyranicus
6:15:31 A Tale of Three Queens
6:19:13 Mission 15: Vulpecular
6:36:48 Return to Yimr
6:37:34 Mission 16: Yimrus
6:42:55 Beale Ending
6:44:28 Credits (With special guest appearance: Poppy! the wonder* cat)
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Naceo presently has 1,140 views for Overload across 2 videos, and about 7 hours worth of Overload videos were uploaded to his channel. This makes up 4.46% of the content that Naceo has uploaded to YouTube.