FWEE TWO PWAY! - Loadout

[IamLEAM1983]

So, yeah.

Dugeon Keeper Mobile sucks. Dungeon Keeper 2 is leaps and bounds ahead of its “modern” cow-clicking descendent. That's been established.

What about the Free-to-Play model? Does that suck?

Currently, based on the amount of in-App purchases available in free App Store offerings, it'd be tempting to say that yes, the model is killing the industry. It's so shamefully easy to use it to shell out a husk of a game, with all its systems tied off behind a gate of neverending payments. You pick a cash cow, dress it up in beloved accoutrements, shackle the player and then play the part of the sympathetic corporate genie, ready to bring walls down at the wave of a credit card. Betraying the trust of the franchise's core players doesn't honestly matter, not when your livelihood is at stake and when there's just so much money to be made by introducing unwitting casual players to the hypnotizing pace of the daily grind! It'd be easy to just bill EA as being evil, but the reality is far more depressing.

EA is short-sighted, like everyone and everything else on this damn dust ball. Immediate profit will always matter more than maintained good will. That triple-A market doesn't pay for itself anymore, so everything else has to come together in order to prop up the giants like Titanfall. Every cent the publisher makes keeps the guys at EA Mythic in their seats, and ensures that the big, bloated HD-fests we all crave on a yearly basis will remain potential realities.

Sad, but true, as Metallica says. You want to see who's responsible for the industry's current money-gouging approach? Look into a mirror. Or, you know, stick your wallet in front of a mirror. Whichever works.

There's a glimmer of hope, though. When a Free-to-Play system has no greater goal than to sustain itself and remain solvent, you just might end up seeing the emergence of actual fairness. The core gameplay elements might be free, the Premium currency might be distinctly ancillary in its importance – or maybe the devs are being so trusting of your judgment as a player that they'll throw in the option to subscribe to have the pay walls removed, or to purchase the thing outright.

We've mentioned a few examples, yesterday. Neverwinter certainly is one, Champions Online wasn't too drastic in its own measures, and Path of Exile leaves you free to dig into content that's far superior than Diablo III's, at no cost whatsoever.

I'd like to talk about Loadout, though.

Created partly through Kickstarter and privately-backed funds, the Austin-based dev called Edge of Reality used to work on Freemium games of the despicable sort : licensed properties that didn't exist as much more than an extra cash grab for franchises that didn't exactly need the help. Loadout is their first independent effort and it certainly does feel as though its mechanics are a form of emancipation from corporate mandates. Now indie, they don't so much shamelessly ask for your credit card as they offer you an extremely tantalizing buffet of cartoony ultraviolence – and then leave you free to maybe consider tossing a few dollars in the tip jar.

At the onset, there's not a whole lot to be impressed with, however. You play in some unexplained and utterly perfunctory “Space Western” concept, if Joss Whedon had crossed Firefly with the action heroes of yesteryear. Considering, your roster consists of Axl the Rambo expy, T-Bone the, well, Mister T analogue – and Helga. She exists as a surprisingly inclusive character, not your average lithe and muscular Space Amazon, but rather a swarthy damsel of some, er, generous proportions. Very generous. In any case, these three characters exist as interchangeable templates. They have the same base statistics and the same hitbox, even Helga being able to handle the men's surprisingly far-reaching leaps and bounds.

The tools of your trade are guns. As this is a third-person shooter, you run around and shoot people; typically in revised versions of classic game types like Capture the Flag or Point Defense. Deathmatch goes a bit more for the competitive route by allowing you to steal the rival team's kills, or snatching your team's own kill points before someone else does.

The catch is that Loadout is wholly centered on your choice of guns. Instead of being locked into a category or a role, you're entirely free to visit the game's Armory between matches. There, you'll realize that the game's free currency, Blutonium, is used to drastically alter the appearance and functionality of your template firearms. In some ways, it feels like Borderlands 2 prospectively would, if it allowed you to mix and match gun properties as you'd see fit. You'll start with a simple assault rifle, but will quickly earn enough “Blutes” to unlock, say, electric bullets. A bit later, you'll find yourself in the possession of an assault rifle that shoots electric bullets that bounce. A few matches more, and you can stick a stability-increasing stock to the rifle and replace its barrel with a sniper's muzzle.

You're not that much of a sniper? Keep the 5X Zoom and trade the barrel for a gatling gun's aperture, switching the trigger for the Corkscrew model. Hold down the trigger and you'll unload a stream of Tesla rounds that would make the Heavy proud. Should you need more accuracy, you can keep everything you've outfitted and swap out your weapon's chassis for a laser-emitting battery. Instead of bullets, now you've got electrified rays!

The short of it is that Loadout offers no classes to speak of, rather allowing you to forge or discover your own class as you'd see fit. Maybe you're a fan of bouncing healing mines, or somehow like the idea of booby-trapping first aid kits with... a healing property. It makes no sense at all, but the game is quite happy to let you try it out.

If you're more interested on going for the long term, the game comes complete with a comprehensive tech tree, which allows you to gradually unlock the game's gun parts depending on your preferred use of already available components. Everything you unlock from the Tech Tree is free – both in Blutes and Spacebux, the game's Premium currency. This means that with enough skill and patience, it's entirely possible to unlock Loadout's complete tool set. Once even a single branch of the tree turns free, you're able to go hog-wild creating new firearms for that type, with no actual game time or game points required.

The best part, honestly, is coming up with a combination you just know to be abortive in the context of an actual match, but still taking it to the test range for shits and giggles. A sniper rifle that shoots leaden mines that barely fall further than my own two feet? Why the fuck not?! If you fall in love with your monstrosity, you can save it and give it an appropriately offensive name. Because, again, why not. Anything's better than the legions of “Generic Assault Rifle” or “Meep!” I keep finding, out in the battlefield. As of course, you're free to momentarily swipe the guns of a fallen enemy. If anything, it's an opportunity to earn fresh ideas for your crazy gunsmithing self.

If you ever find a Tesla Mine-shooting double-barrelled sci-fi shotgun labelled “Dem Blue Balls”, you've just killed me. Insert moronic chuckles here, because I can't not design a stupidly impossible Sci Fi gun without making some juvenile comments about the male anatomy. It's the Internet, after all, huehuehuehuehue and whatnot.

So what can you pay for in Loadout? Cosmetics and boosts. That's it. I liked the game enough to plunk down twenty bucks so I'd be able to turn Axl into Species-Swapped Human Weasel. Or, you know, Vincent Vega's bald and glove-wearing alter ego, who's likely to give you the most ridiculous of all golf claps if I dominate your ass. You can also pay for XP boosts and Blute-earning extras, but I've found that this is actually counter-intuitive. Level up too fast, and you won't accrue much skill in relation to the game's matchmaking system. This leaves you with a higher number attached to your character, yes – but not the amount of actual ease or general surety of tactics that number should reflect. Playing vanilla, for someone who's as horrible as I am, feels like a mark of honesty. I suck, and I haven't tried to pay my way to better gun parts. I've used what I had, realizing that everything is constantly being tweaked in order to make everything a viably lethal weapon. Even that mine-lobbing useless sniper rifle of yours.

Honestly, the only problems I've encountered have to do with the community – which is actually fine. The problem rests in how some people are unable to take something as cartoony as this game without tacking some sort of arbitrary competitive spirit to it – as if every shooter were some sort of Call of Duty alumni, rewarding fleet-footedness and twitch skills over plain fun. If anything, Loadout makes it very clear its focus is all about the ridiculous, cartoony, good clean fun.

As the game has a custom engine, the death animations and damage models are glorious. With everything being largely exxagerated, you'll see Axls run around the map with large, gaping holes blown through their chest, a bit of intestine flapping behind them like a forgotten tail. You'll find chunks of an arm blown off cleanly, exposing nothing but a Chuck Jones-worthy set of bones. Survive a close encounter with Pyro weaponry, and your character might spend the rest of his current spawn looking like a charred steak, big, googly, white cartoon eyes blinking in the middle of a clump of person-shaped ashes. Survive a sniper round to the head, and you might keep going with nothing but a brain stem and two bobbing eyeballs still connected to their stalks. Death blows rip off arms and leave you to desperately try the “stop, drop and roll” tactic in case of fire, your character pounding the ground as if being cremated were more of a childish annoyance than an actual threat. Accidental or voluntary suicides tend to trigger the famous Goofy yodel. It's all mired in the sort of ultraviolence that would feel perfect in an Adult Swim show and continuiously reinforces the impression that it's just a freaking game. Those occasional squeakers you'll hear in the Push-to-Talk transmissions are clearly missing the point – nobody honestly gives a shit about your Kill/Death ratio.

As Loadout isn't Call of Duty, it's more Quake 3 Arena if that game had been imagined by the great wizards from the golden age of Warner Bros' animation department. It's cheerful, teeth-clenching death and dismemberment by the buckets, and a great parody of the supposedly super-badass conceit of the modern-day Gaming Action Hero.

This is what happens when a team looks to the Free-to-Play model as a means of enforcing the Rule of Fun. Forking cash becomes a pleasure, a sign of implicit trust towards a company that, insofar, seems to be doing well with its rebirth as an independent entity. You might run into connection niggles or potential lag, but the game's Steam forums make it quite clear that the devs are aware of the problem. As you can imagine, the Let's Players drove oodles of unexpected traffic to their doors, bringing their initially modest server architecture to its knees. Matchmaking is always being improved and, slowly but surely, actually staying connected up to the post-match statistics board is becoming the standard. I've had a few occasions where disconnects robbed me of my earned experience points and Blutes, but that's never been enough to severely impact my enjoyment of the final product.

Grab the client and give it a whirl, if you've ever fragged other people in the past. Worst case scenario, the game doesn't do it for you. In the best case?

Well, in the best case, I want screencaps of your death-spewing implements of Cartoony Pain and Suffering.