Boot the hub, install the app on the coworker's phone, fiddle with it's wifi settings, connect to the hub, connect my phone to the hub...
Not a whole lot of options to setting up a game, but both devices join and get into the game easily. The countdown to the beginning of the game is /way/ out of sync between the two devices, but once in-game the time seems to catch up... The Indoor Skirmish seems straightforward enough, being a free-for-all with timed respawns. It allows you to pair the grenade, but it doesn't actually do any damage. If the host exits the game, the other players get kicked out, and they get a scoreboard, but the host doesn't. In Outdoor Skirmish, the grenade seems to function as expected. There seems to be some feedback via the app when you hit other players, which is neat. The back button is supposedly a voice chat button, and it makes a chirp when you press it, but I can't actually hear anything coming out of either device when I talk into the other while holding the button down.
After running around outside with it for a while, the only notable weirdness we ran into was that the voice chat thing never seemed to work. We brought in a third device, and all three of them just gave static on the other devices. When you get close to the edge of WiFi range(Which is actually surprisingly hard to do, we were a good 300-400 feet away from it in a straight shot), it warns you to return to the area. If you don't and actually manage to leave WiFi range, it will pop up and say you're disconnected from the hub, and to check your wifi connection and get closer to the hub. At this point, I did have to reconnect to the hub's wifi network manually, but once I did, it put me right back into the game. While in the "edge of connectivity" and "disconnected" states, you don't appear to be able to take damage. We didn't check whether you could still give damage, but I would assume(Or hope, at least) not...
We did play with the grenade while outside, too. It's... Rather underwhelming. It does the ten second countdown, and then does a single burst of damage(About a segment and a half of the health bar?), and... That's it. It's still blatting out a /ton/ of IR, but you don't take any more damage from it for the rest of it's 45-second firing spree.
None of the devices we played with had an accurate compass in the game. We would have to move opposite to the way it told us to get to the respawn zones. This is... Kinda annoying, because so much of what Recoil has to offer needs you to be able to navigate to an invisible point in the real world. There's ammo boxes, health boxes, special ammo types, extra armor, airstrikes, and probably other powerups scattered around the world, but if the game can't guide you to them easily, you're just going to get frustrated with it. When you're "killed" in an outdoor game, you need to find your way to a respawn zone, and it gives you a compass arrow and a range. If the compass arrow is useless, you're left with a range, and both of us had to wander back and forth a bit to figure out which direction we needed to go.
Perhaps the coolest feature we found, though, is that even if you miss a player, if you're aiming in their direction, they'll hear shots whizzing past them from their phone.
All in all, we're pretty impressed with what the system has to offer so far. There's a few issues that need worked out, but for as short a period as we've been testing it, and how thoroughly thought out everything's been so far, there's a pretty good chance they'll manage to fix the rest(Well... Except the no-functionality-without-a-phone bit... That's something that can't really be worked around, at this point.).
No comments:
Post a Comment