I had some pretty quirky jokes that I wanted to make involving EastWorks latest title in production, Gray Zone, but I felt like I wanted to get across the fact of how much I appreciate a game that I didn’t like. Now now, I know what you are thinking, but I promise you, this isn’t in any way a jab at Gray Zone. On the contrary really, as EastWorks has managed to make a genre of game that I am not familiar with, or fond of, and actually make me want to complete it in its entirety.
I would have never thought to play this game if it wasn’t for the fact that G.Round has officially signed me up as one of their writers, which I cannot say how much I am enthusiastic for, which means that I need to now “up my game” in writing and not just get better, but to get more consistent. At first, I would only do articles on games that caught my attention or looked interesting. But now, I am more motivated to just produce more work and content for those of you who read these articles of mine, because you will be seeing a LOT more of them. So what does this all have to do with Gray Zone? Well, everything. With this new mentality, I decided to download and play this game, and I have to admit, I was impressed with it.
First let's get the normal disclaimers out of the way, the game is alpha, so it’s buggy. Visuals are pretty buggy, controls are also a little buggy. And as always, as I love to say over and over again, this isn’t what I grade my decisions on in any game I play on G.Round. I try to visualize the final product and how I think it will look and I judge on what I believe the initial concept of what the developers are trying to deliver.
Now that I have that out of the way, I was fond of the artistic design of the game. Artwork looked pretty good. You play as a slave who is now trying to get back at those who enslaved him in a post apocalyptic world filled with mutants and other monstrosities. I do enjoy the story that they are telling in this squadron genre style of game. The soundtrack and audio was pretty good. It was appealing to the story, and even better, in this demo, they were able to give us voice acted lines. I wish more games, especially ones trying to tell a story, did the same thing. Being able to listen to the story instead of having to read it, is just a fantastic and comforting feeling for people like me who have ADHD amongst other things. Being an over the top view game, the biggest amount of graphics are going to be from the environments. This game does give that ruined world feel, and I really have nothing bad to say about it. Resolutions I felt were a little off, but I sum that up to being “alpha game”, so optimization isn’t implemented. You see this a lot when it comes to the “point of view” system, which I’ll get a little more into in a bit. Overall though, I feel the final product of Gray Zone will look and sound pretty well.
So EastWorks decided to put in a lot of functions into this game, and that kind of overwhelmed me somewhat. While certain controls like Inventory are obviously the usual “I” key on the keyboard, they give you the ability to hit the “G” key to throw a grenade. Hit the “J” key for stealth and many many other keys to use for many other options. This kind of threw me for a loop, even though I appreciate that there are so many options one can do in this game, I feel that the GUI and controls could be cleaned up a little better. It felt all over the place. Equipping gear I felt was convoluted as well. I had to click and drag over to the unit to equip something. If they already have something equipped in that slot, then I have to drag THAT item off the unit only to drag new items ON the unit. I know that seems like nothing, but it just seemed too much to do, where a simple double click on the item, to have it attach to the right slot and switch out whatever is in that slot, would just be better for the player. Now maybe this is a standard for these types of games, but it just felt like “too much” to me. I am not sure if this is part of the game, or another thing that is just a placeholder until the main game comes out, which will be cleaned up, but just something I wanted to point out.
A system I really did enjoy though, was the “point of view” system. This system allows you to basically play the stealth game if you want to. It makes it so that all objections you don’t have to bullhead through, even though that is EXACTLY what I did. Being able to slip through brush, you can sneak around with your squadron and dash from one bush to another. I was caught quite a lot of times because of the glitchy graphics not showing the point of view of the enemies very well. There were times when the green field that tells you if they see you or not, would glitch out of frames and when I thought I was safe, turns out, I was then caught and every mutant in the area jumped me. Despite that, I thought the system was a good touch to the game. Really put in that thought of “oh hey, there’s a lot of you and you have guns and sharp teeth while there are only three of us. Maybe I should stay in this bush and walk around”.
Gray Zone is shaping up rather well. It’s a game that I could see myself playing, even though I’m not fond of the genre. If I wasn’t so hard set in my major genre of RPG, I could see myself sitting down and playing this. I don’t know if there will be any multiplayer capability, but I feel like there might be. At the title screen there are so many other options that we cannot access yet, so maybe one of them are? Or maybe they are just different stories? I’m not entirely sure, but judging from their website it doesn’t look like it.
Eastworks has made it clear that this is a game where you are going to need to think about strategy to clear objectives. It’s a very tactical and thought provoking game and if there is anything I love more than great soundtracks, it’s thinking about how to achieve or complete all objectives with the best course of actions. That is the feeling that they went for in Gray Zone and well, it’s the feeling I got.
You can check out Gray Zone on steam early access, or, as always, you can play on G.Round by clicking the link here. Happy planning.
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