Hunters 2 - (by Rodeo Games) - Universal App

[eAdvisory]

Originally Posted by devensega

Mate, there are many hours of gameplay in this.

i got a big back log, ill buy this later

[JJay]

This game is great! I'm not a big fan of turn based games but this game is just brilliant.
For the guy asking about the campaign. It's only I think about 7 missions but there is so much more to the game than the campaign.

[trystero]

I swore a dev said there were more melee weapons than the hammer. Are hammers it again??

[C.Hannum]

Originally Posted by trystero

I swore a dev said there were more melee weapons than the hammer. Are hammers it again??

Well, technically, the Caius hero has a sword, so that's two, but since Caius actually sucks by the time you are strong enough to beat the end boss and his gear can't be changed, eh, it counts as "more melee weapons" but not so much.

[VaporKnight]

Hi all,

Maybe I'm blind, but I can't find anywhere in the game or on the wiki that describes the differences between the classes. Where can I find this info?

Ie: Stalker vs Arbiter vs Annihilator etc. I only played the first mission. Now I have 15k credits I don't know what to do with because I don't know every hunters' strengths.

Thanks

-VK

[gankoba]

Is there any way to delete characters? I like my characters having specific skills, mainly combat, vengeance, or scout. My other characters are just wasting space on my recruit list

[C.Hannum]

Originally Posted by VaporKnight

Maybe I'm blind, but I can't find anywhere in the game or on the wiki that describes the differences between the classes. Where can I find this info?

It's just a fancy label for the combination of talent trees available to that hunter. Each hunter gets a selection of two of the five talent trees (combat, vengeance, scouting, survival, and support).

If a hunter has scouting and survival, it's a stalker, but if a hunter has scouting and combat it's a charger.

[C.Hannum]

I've had the game two full days, completed the campaign, and played through most of three days worth of daily contracts so I figured it was time for a proper review.


PART 1 (yes, it's that long )
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Not counting the campaign (I'll get to that later), from a macro perspective, Hunters 2 is little other than the same game Hunters: Episode One was. You control a team of hunters, you play through a series of randomized daily contracts, level up, get better gear, just get better, rinse, repeat, repeat. If the fact that H:E1 was little more than an endless series of skirmishes on randomized combinations of map parts, tile sets, victory conditions, and bonus objectives was something you strongly disliked, it is unlikely that Hunters 2 is going to change your opinion because that is, once again, the core of the game. However, if you mostly enjoyed the design of the first game, you are likely to love what they've done with H2 because they've tweaked the bejesus out of that core.

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Some of the big changes:

- No more distinct armor and health (and with it the bonus objective to not lose health). Essentially, armor is your hunter's health, when it's gone, so is the hunter. I rather enjoyed the way H:E1 handled this, but this is simpler and easier to understand while not actually affecting gameplay.


- Similar to the no more separate armor and health values, there is no more distinct impact and fire damage resistance. All damage is resisted by armor equally based on a single DR value. This is a big improvement. It was a needless complication that didn't add to gameplay and due to the frequency of 90% fire resistance once your team started getting around level 7, it harmed variety since rocket launchers and flamers were reduced to S&Gs status. Additionally, DR is handled differently under the hood anyhow, so it's no longer quite so effective, but when the die rolls do go your way, it's amazing.


- No more vanilla do everything hunters and no more equipment (and no global leadership talents). They completely revamped the whole way talents are handled as well as folded equipment into the talent system. What it breaks down to is this: all hunters have access to the full array of "equipment" talents (better accuracy, more armor, stimpacks, medkits, etc.) and two of Talent talent trees similar to (but heavily streamlined) from H:E1. Additionally, nobody gets heavy weapon training for free, each type of heavy weapon (rocket launcher, mini gun, plasma rifle, and sniper rifle) requires you to spend a talent point to use. The biggest consequence is that everything is now an individual game, no more leadership talents that grants bonuses to everyone and no swapping of equipment between missions.

You've got to pay more attention to who you recruit, build up, what weapons you equip relative to talents, etc.. With only 9 points in all to spend there is a lot of give and take (and probably a lot of $50,000 credit respecs until you're satisfied). It's not really better than the system used for H:E1, but it is deeper and more thoughtful and, based on the number of continually occurring bugs from the global leadership talents in H:E1, probably just easier to account for and handle for Rodeo Games

Perhaps most importantly, if/when they raise the level cap, this current system will continue to function just fine as-is.


- No more weapon and armor levels relative to the hunter levels. H:E1 opted for a never ending series of gear swaps with every weapon and armor aimed for a specific level hunter. Every level up involved a new gear optimization phase that was both micro management that became tedious after a while (aggravated by the interface in H:E1) and, more egregiously, made for some crazy power creep in the game. The damage done by a level 10 weapon of the same type as a level 1 was magnitudes greater. Now everybody can equip any piece of armor or weapon (assuming they have the requisite talent), you're limited by the quality of the gear and armor you can afford or loot, not the hunter level.

On the plus side, with the power spread now being tighter (e.g. a white quality common assault rifle does around 400 base damage, a cream of the crop gold legendary assault rifle only does around 1000 base damage), the game is now more even as you play through it and you won't be trapped into so much micro management to keep hunter levels balanced. The shifts in power balance now rely more on talent configuration than simply buying the next level of gear and gaining an extra thousand damage "just because".

On the other hand, the sensation of getting more powerful does take a hit. Although it didn't have much game effect since enemy health and armor was similarly boosted, there was a sense of satisfaction watching a sniper at higher levels in H:E1 deal tens of thousands of damage in a single shot. Still, for a game meant to played long term and repetitively, this change (particularly in light of hardcore mode) is definitely a net positive.


- No more point values for hunters and no more difficulty slider for missions. Although not well explained, H:E1 used a system where daily missions were balanced via a point system cost for each hunter and a variable difficulty slider. Although moderately complex, it did allow for some great customization where you could give yourself a greater or lesser challenge and play around with everything from a solo hunter on a giant map to bringing all nine hunters loaded for bear. Well, whether you liked it or not, it's all gone. Although there seems to be some behind the scenes tweaking of the overall difficulty, missions are now balanced more through limited spawn points relative to the map size and victory conditions. Given that maps now appear much better in general anyhow, I can live with the new system as it makes for interesting tactical choices.


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In addition to those mechanical changes from H:E1, it cannot go without mention that the interface for gearing up has been improved greatly. There was so much clicking back and forth through hunters and gear types in the first game to evaluate and swap gear that seeing how they pulled it all together for H2 is itself almost worth the upgrade.

The other big improvement in my mind is that map quality seems to have gone up a notch. Although the majority of the tile sets are recycled from H:E1, the actual map pieces used and the way they are put together seems much better, and combined with the limited number and varying locations of spawn points increases the playability.

In general, weapons have been rebalanced and everything so far seems to have a genuinely viable use unlike in H:E1 where past midgame shotguns, flamers, and rocket launchers were near useless, and hammers were highly situational. H:E1 was basically three weapons: SMGs, assault rifle, and sniper rifle. The overly flexible SMG is now gone, and plasma rifles and mini guns are now added to the line up. Everything has a nice set perks and penalties to make you think about who and where each weapon is appropriate. The change to the to-hit mechanics for burst fire weapons is another nice improvement to weapons in H2.

Another nice improvement is we finally get to fight something besides other hunters with the inclusion of the alien "Xenomorphs", sometimes even getting maps with both human and alien enemies that create three way conflicts. It's not a mindblowing change or anything, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

The last improvement I'll mention is the addition a toggle for choosing one of three game difficulties and a permanent choice of making a particular save slot hardcore or not (if you choose hardcore, dead mercs stay dead and their equipment goes bye-bye). With three save slots, multiple difficulties, and hardcore mode, everybody should be able to play around and find something they feel is a fun challenge for them.

Otherwise, outside of the campaign, this is still basically the same game as Hunters: Episode One, just greatly improved and polished. I've had my share of crashes (will be sending some crash logs to RG shortly), but nothing too egregious for 1.0 release and, notably, no memory related terminations by the OS so far on my 4G touch (/knock knock knock ). And I've also seen completely bizarre bugs: e.g. on launch day there was a "Destroy the Reactor" mission with the bonus condition of "take no casualties". Evidently one of the reactors was spawned as a player class and was promptly destroyed by the AI hunters on the first enemy turn, doing part of my main objective for me but causing me to lose the bonus objective.

[C.Hannum]

PART 2 (last part, yay!)

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Of course, the most stark difference between H:E1 and H2 is the presence of a campaign centered around a "hero class" hunter, Caius Black. The campaign is 8 missions long, completing it gives you a random piece of high level gear (I think it's always legendary, but don't quote me on that), and you can reset it to gain additional pieces of high level gear as much as you want to play through it. I enjoyed the campaign, it was nice to see what RG could do with deliberately designed maps, hand placed enemies, and event triggers. OTOH, it also showed the limitations of what this AI can make believable, but it worked pretty well for what it was.

Seven of the eight missions are pretty straight forward and, for good or ill, won't give you much problem if you've played enough Hunters to know what you're doing. That's not to say the devs didn't pull some interesting tricks (including one mission that actually has a form of stealth mechanics), but they're still straight up affairs. The eighth mission is a bit of twist: it's a boss battle, and it's done pretty well. How easy or hard you find it will depend on a number of factors, everything from the gear you bring, to how bad the RNG gods hate you with the high damage resistance of the boss's armor, to where the "hammer thugs" randomly spawn relative to your hunters. Even if you've coasted through the first seven, it's likely you'll be replaying this one at least once (and probably more unless you've been playing the daily missions in between the campaign missions to level up). Regardless of whether you have to "work" at beating the final mission, it's still not going to take you that long to complete the campaign - even with real life impeding my time for gaming as well as making sure I tried to complete all the daily missions, I still finished the eighth mission less than 48 hours after I first launched the game.

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Now, here's where the game could stand to improve:

- The weapon and armor manufacturing is nowhere near as good as was promised in pre-release information. Unfortunately, the maximum stats you're allowed to craft are often considerably lower than you can find for store purchased gear, yet the cost is prohibitively expensive relative to store purchased gear. With store gear being as good or better than crafted gear, and legendary gear better than either, I just don't see the feature as justified currently.

- Caius Black is actually a bit pants. For all the vapor hype of hero classes during the H:E1's era, finally getting to play with the single hero class hunter available for Hunters 2 is a bit of a letdown. Caius is nothing special beyond the novelty factor of wielding both a melee weapon (significantly weaker than a decent hammer) and a ranged weapon with a shorter range than anything but a shotgun and doing only moderate damage. If we could upgrade or otherwise change out his gear that would be one thing, but with fixed weaponry of meh, he's just a dead spot on the roster.

- Speaking of dead spots, we should be able to "fire" and move our hunters around in the roster list. The new "two trees only" talent mechanic gives a lot of padding to the process of building the perfect team for our respective play style, but the inability to remove and move hunters on the roster list is going to make for a hot mess of navigating our active hunters in the midst of the all the unused hunters before long.

- Still not sure why there's no button for toggling through hunters with unused AP. Finding all your hunters isn't exactly the height of excitement with the way they get spread out on some of the bigger maps. The "next idle unit" is such a staple of the turn based genre it's surprising it's still not there.

- I miss the ability to get basic information on the enemy units. In H:E1 if you selected an enemy unit you were told their weapon and armor. For vets of the series, the ommission of this information isn't a serious issue, but it is unfriendly to the new players who aren't going to recognize at a glance that, "oh yeah, that guy's got a Rocket Launcher and is wearing heavy armor, he can either move or fire but not both, and can only move 3 squares".

- The new lighting engine at times gets to be a bit much. Things are downright washed out some of the time it's so bright.


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Conclusion (or the TL,DR; synopsis):

Like it or not, Hunters 2 is little more than the same game as Hunters: Episode One but with all the adjustments to the game mechanics the devs would have liked to have put in place if H:E1 had made enough money to justify doing so. That's not to put H2 down; in every way that matters, Hunters 2 is the definitive version without any major and/or gamebreaking flaws out of the gate. The structured campaign is short, but also a nice proof of concept that this game engine and rule set can be used for more than just basic skirmishes. Hopefully we'll see more structured content released down the road.

So, if you haven't played the first game, but are intrigued, Hunters 2 is undoubtedly where to start. If you played the first game and liked or loved the general idea, Hunters 2 is probably a worthy upgrade. However, if you were disappointed how Episode One was little more than an endless series of randomized skirmishes masquerading as content, the 8 mission campaign is unlikely to impress you sufficiently for the asking price.

[heringer]

Thanks for the review but... what's up with people measuring the game's length by "days"? That does nothing to give an actual idea of the real length, since a day game's time could go from 30 minutes to 5 or more hours.

At least give us a ballpark in hours.