It’s the only time online where I felt incentivised to use my squad as more than just a ball of guns, as only they can carry the cores from point to point. One team of attackers must grab explosive cores and take them to designated goals while defenders work to prevent that from happening. Of its three competitive game modes, I’ve had the most fun with Retrieval. Disintegration does the rest of a crew’s aesthetic so well that it’s disappointing and a bit jarring to see this part missing. Looking at The Sideshows, a crew full of killer clowns a la Twisted Metal’s Sweet Tooth, you would expect some fringe, Joker-fied quips to match, or maybe circus music to accompany their rapid-fire sticky grenades. When you get into the action, all of the voice lines and sound effects are the same generic one-liners no matter who you’ve picked. I wish the aesthetics went beyond just color schemes and costumes, though. By contrast, the blue and orange King’s Guard are literal armored knights whose gravcycle features a charged bolt that is slow to fire but does big damage and slows enemies unfortunate enough to be hit by it. Gravcycle loadouts from crew to crew are satisfyingly diverse: putting on the pink and black leather of the Neon Dreams means you’ll be cruising through the arena with vehicle handling as sharp as your outfits, and its dual light machine guns and single-shot stun gun really spoke to me, as well. And since killing a pilot also kills their henchmen, aiming for anything that isn’t the floaty, shooty thing in front of me feels like a waste of time and resources.īefore each match, you select a “crew” that dictates the stats and weapons of your cycle, the abilities of your squad, and your snazzy dress code. Their unique abilities, like tossing disorienting stun grenades or doing big damage in a large area with a mighty ground slam, are very useful against enemy crews, but they largely won’t affect their pilots. Keeping them safe rarely felt possible, as I was often too busy sparring directly with enemy pilots to get them behind cover. In the most hectic of matches, it can become overwhelming to trade fire in the sky while also giving effective directions to my ground squad. Telling all of them to focus on an enemy, move to a designated spot, or interact with an objective is pretty much the extent of your control outside of a few activatable abilities. Disintegration’s one-button contextual pinging system does an adequate job of intuitively issuing orders at a moment’s notice, but your tactical options are also extremely limited when compared to something like a traditional real-time tactics game. This team features three or four robotic companions who range between balanced, assault rifle-wielding Warriors to heavy-duty Tanks that run headlong into the fight for melee attacks. While you’re chasing enemy hovercraft and dancing around oncoming fire, you’ll also need to issue commands to your ground units. Oddly, though, the selection of slower, tankier gravcycles don’t always feel more durable, and in my limited time with them often felt more like a liability than a force to be reckoned with. Faster gravcycles feel especially fun to blaze around in, as the speed really ramps up the pressure during some tougher chases. They feature plenty of tall structures to weave between and low overhangs to dip under and over when you’re trying to lose a pursuer. I’ve come to really like zooming around Disintegration’s three maps. Shotguns, for example, have that recognizable boom, but lack the recoil and devastating bite featured in most contemporary shooters – presumably because it’s mounted to a flying metal death machine and shooting other armored death machines. That said, it’s made more complex when you consider that there are nine different types of cycles to choose from, all with their own set of generally familiar weapons and maneuverability quirks to learn. The first-person floating and shooting can be jarring to even the staunchest FPS player, but the controls are straightforward enough that it only took me a couple of rounds to get a hang of sky surfing.
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