Developer: Dark Amber Softworks
Publisher: Dark Amber Softworks
Platform: PC
Avenging Angel – Preview
Avenging Angel is a story-driven First Person Shooter developed by Dark Amber Softworks. This adventurous game is set in a post-apocalyptic Steampunk world in which you have some freedom of discovery like open-world games. The game is currently on Steam as an Early Access Game, which means that bugs and glitches are bound to happen but the concept of it is great and most of the execution is fantastically done.
As Avenging Angel is story-driven, the game features a great narrative in the long run but at the start it’s quite questionable as you are not given much information. Anyhow, the story takes place in the Northern City States roughly ten thousands of years from today. The character you play as is Vincent Recraven, an Associate of the Inventors Guild. As the freelancer adventurer he is, he gets dropped in the Atlantic Ocean to do a routine maintenance job. However, the longer your time on the island, the more is becomes clear that the mission is much more than a simple routine job. Slowly but surely, you’re being pulled into a web of personal and international conflict and conspiracy between mechanical beings.
You’ll be in awe upon seeing the super realistic “loading screen” but once in-game the realism is gone for the most part. The foliage is still stunning to say the least but the rest of the visuals could have been better. However, the overall conclusion is that the visuals are simply great if you look past the various glitches.
While Avenging Angel is not a horror game, the game does feature some quite dark areas where even the flashlight isn’t providing much help. This, in combination with non-mechanical mutated-looking creatures that pop up randomly behind you, will provide many jump scares for the lighthearted gamers. The change of scenery is a welcomed change however.
Additionally, the camera can cause motion sickness if you are prone to have those during “simulation” games. I personally had some trouble with it when running and while you can certainly tinker with the settings, it’s hard to get rid of it. The slow and clunky walking-movement does not seem to help with that, and ascending stairs can be a pain in the ass. The rest of the animations are fine. A nifty visual feature is that your Goggle Glass will reveal cracks when your health is deadly low but this also comes with impossible to work with cameras, which will only increase the motion sickness.
Enough about the visuals, let’s jump to the gameplay. Moving around is simply done with WASD while you can look around by moving your mouse. The spacebar is reserved for jumping, crouching is done with “C” and running is done with “Left Shift”. These settings are fairly standard settings for FPS-games. Accessing your inventory and journal is simply done with the shortcuts “I” and “J” but there is no shortcut for the maps and these are not visible in the UI either so this can be a tad annoying.
Furthermore you can use items or perform an action with “E”. The game has a feature where you can “search” lockers, which is great, but there aren’t that many lockers or crates you can actually search – even though the areas are generally scattered with them. Having more lockers and creates to open would be great, and even if these would contain useless junk, the sense of exploration would be greater.
While the game is an FPS, it also features RPG-mechanics such as a leveling-up system and a workbench where you can craft items as well as “upgrade” your weaponry. Currently it’s not as advanced yet and there is no real explanation on how the attachment system works but this can be excused as part of an early access version.
The secondary RPG-part of the game is the fact that you can accept missions from various NPC’s. Most of these “quests” require you to discover certain areas in the region and pick up items, which you can then trade for items you require for other quests. Of course you can always skip the quests and venture through the areas anyway.
So far, we’ve discussed that discovery, interaction and survival are key but there are two ways of how to fight off the less than friendly steampunk-like robots and non-mechanical creatures from hell. The first one being a melee fight, although I can’t advise this as the creatures do hit hard. Using ranged weapons is the second way, be it with pistols or with a grenade launcher – or even both as you can dual-wield any kind of weapon. The fire rate of your pistols does seem unbalanced as you will need at least eight bullets for a regular robot and about five for a small mechanical spider. While the number of bullets needed to die is not necessarily bad, it becomes an annoyance once you realize ammo is fairly sparse.
Besides all of this, you can equip and modify your Goggle Glass and use it to your advantage to discover hints and secrets invisible to the naked eye. Additionally, you can download information and read journals that are found all over the place.
Conclusion
The concept of Avenging Angel is great and most of the execution is as well once you look past the graphical glitches in this early build. Still requiring plenty of work, the game does already offer plenty of gameplay hours, several areas to discover and a decent variety of enemies. Fans of Steampunk and the Bioshock franchise will certainly love this title and rightfully so.
Note: The unbalanced fire rate may be part of survival but in general it feels like it is simply unbalanced. After putting sixty bullets in a creature, only to be killed by it because it refused to die feels more like an unbalanced gameplay and not a means to “figure out how to survive”.
Avenging Angel - Preview,
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