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Overgrowth, the vaporware bunny homicide simulator - no longer vaporware, too bad it sucks!

Jazz_

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Is there multiplayer pvp in this game? and is it fun?
 
Joined
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Messages
296
Is there multiplayer pvp in this game? and is it fun?
There's local multiplayer, and it's fun in sorta the same way as something like Gang Beasts or Towerfall. Really fast, sorta random, and lacking in the depth of a more traditional fighting game but good for some laughs.
 

Alienman

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
We are witnessing history here. The first Early Access scam game might get released!
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/01/23/overgrowth-review-early-access/

Premature Evaluation: Overgrowth

overgrowth1.jpg


Every Monday we send Brendan into the early access fighting pits to face all types of terrifying wildlife. This week, the rabbit kickboxers and ultra strong wolves of Overgrowth [official site].


Overgrowth is a game that has been eight years in the making and still isn’t anywhere near finished. An anthropomorphic fighting game of swift kicks and raw punches to the side of the head, it is beautifully animated, pleasingly ragdoll, and Bruce Lee fast. There also isn’t very much to do. There’s a lot of pleasure to be got from executing the perfect series of kicks and punches against its tough, intelligent opponents, especially when they’re armed with heavy one-hit-kill swords. But unless you reeeeeally like that, the joy of it soon dries up.

Part of this is understandable. The reason it has taken eight years, and will likely take even more time, is because all the programming has been on one man, David Rosen of Wolfire Games. Which makes the creation of the complex combat, the physics, the parkour, the AI and the levels an impressive thing. But it doesn’t mean there’s any real game here yet. It has had an Arena mode and two-player Versus mode for some time but last month it added a campaign mode, based on the story of its predecessor Lugaru. I felt like this was enough to finally give it a taste, and while it’s admittedly very gamey (nyuk nyuk) it’s still undercooked.

overgrowth2.jpg


Your rabbit, Turner, is said to be a martial arts master. He’s living in a nice grassy village when suddenly it comes under attack and his wife and child are killed. At this point, it’s time to join Max Payne and the ten million other protagonists on the same bloodthirsty quest for revenge. This almost exclusively involves being plopped into a wide open level with a set number of guards to knock out or kill. Successfully batter them all senseless and then it’s on to the next area – lush valley, desert dunes, snowy mountainside.


The first thing I noticed was how concrete hard it quickly gets. Even before I hit the levels with multiple foes, I had to go back into the tutorial to learn the finer points of fighting and stealth. And even there the sparring partner, once unleashed from his programmed state of “allow all incoming knuckles”, thoroughly kicked seven shades of rabbit droppings out of me, not to mention slicing me to bits over and over again like a psychopath as I attempted to learn how to disarm and throw an armed opponent. By the end of this tutorial I looked like a raspberry.

overgrowth3.jpg


After boxing, jumping and falling my way through that, I headed back into the story, where any level in which I had to take on more than one foe at a time left poor Turner repeatedly battered and bruised. You do get a default knife early on, which you can unsheathe and sneak up behind enemies for a quick throat-slit. But often, due to the open levels and space between enemies, you’re in plain sight of another baddie. Once the jig is up, you’re often faced with three or four relentless thugs, who will not hesitate to kick a rabbit when he’s down. Once, as a result of my poor aggro-ing skills, I was chased by five rabbits across the desert. I was beaten very badly that day.

overgrowth4.jpg


In one sense, this is where the combat shines. The AI is designed to be ruthless. You need to dodge knife slashes, block blows, interrupt throws and – when you do get whacked to the sand – scramble as quickly as possible to your feet with the roll key. Each punch can be blocked by holding the right mouse button and hitting the corresponding direction key as it comes in, but you also have to dish out your own strikes in between defensive posturing, putting an opportunistic boot into any downed enemy before he himself rolls away. Even if you survive all this (you probably won’t) you’ll still see Turner holding his chest in pain, dripping with blood from cuts and gashes all over his head and torso. It’s a remarkably fast-paced and brutal combat system.


overgrowth5.jpg


But Turner’s pain as a fighter is often your pain as a player. This isn’t Arkham Asylum, there’s no blinking symbol or brief pause to show your enemy is about to hit low or high or attempt a grab, no tell-tale signposting save the motion of the enemy rabbit’s body as he actually goes for your skull or your legs. Because all of this happens at a lightning pace, it often feels like most of your successful blocks come down to luckily mashing the right keys at the right time. I can often handle a single opponent without getting too badly hurt. But the instant a second bunny joins the fray, my chances of survival plummet. And that’s before any knives, staves, swords or spears are introduced.

You can disarm a foe of their weapon, but like many manoeuvres in this scrappy game it is frustratingly hard to do. You need to dodge and then quickly throw them, a doubled-up move that’s much harder to pull off than it sounds. Meanwhile, it’s a move that comes supernaturally easy to the AI, so any weapons you do get a hold of can often be lost just as quickly as your life.

overgrowth6.jpg


There’s also a button to throw your weapon at the enemy. On paper this is a fun way of dealing with multiple baddies – burying your knife into one bunny’s skull from ten feet away, before drop-kicking the other in a ferocious attack of action movie proportions. In reality, you throw the knife at the targeted rabbit, and eight times out of ten, he will simply catch it, like a smug Bond villain, and then storm at your limp body, which has failed to land the required dropkick on the second bunny and is now lying, for that important half-second, in a vulnerable heap on the snow. Slash, slash, stab. You’re dead, wabbit.


overgrowth7.jpg


Someone else will revel in the high difficulty of the combat, in the hardcore details of a brawler in which even landing awkwardly can knock you out cold and end the level. But at level 14 of 22, I had to give up on the campaign mode, whose occasional dialogue was nothing more than a half-hearted excuse to go from one environment to another. This isn’t necessarily very important. Most levels are just setups for a fighting scenario but this isn’t to say there’s zero variety. Some could be approached in a more stealthy way (one had me cutting the throats of multiple desert sentries with impeccable timing, honed after twenty previous attempts to do the same thing). Another involved a single unarmed wolf, animals which are impervious to all normal hand-to-hand blows and have to be dropkicked a few times in a row with perfect accuracy. Fouling up a single dropkick and landing badly can lead to terrific pain. When you’re on the ground and a rabbit kicks you, you sometimes fly a couple of yards in reaction. When a wolf boots you, Turner goes wheeling through the air like he’s been launched from a catapult. Wolves are ferocious. I do not like them.

overgrowth8.jpg


There’s something funny and appealing about that, I know. But when all of this exists outside of any other system or mechanic, never mind outside of any decent storyline, it quickly becomes tiring. Neither the stealth nor the parkour (you can wall-run and wall-jump) are robust enough to integrate well into the game, and there are currently no signs to help softcore fighters like myself. There’s not even a means of quickly telling how much “health” the fragile Turner has left. Only his bloodied bodily state, which is a neat visual addendum but isn’t very easy to see in the midst of a fist-filled melee.


overgrowth9.jpg


Like its lagomorphic antagonists, Overgrowth is a strange beast. It is fast, tough and impressive in many ways. When you look at videos of someone playing it, especially the (unsurprisingly) well-trained developer, it seems incredible. Even with a small set of moves, the fighting seems fluid and fierce, the ragdoll physics makes knocking out a rival a work of art. But even if you find the limited combat easier than I did, or if you stick with it long enough to become a master of reading the enemy movements, it still often feels like an empty world, like a gorgeous and terrific tech demo.

overgrowth10.jpg


The developer has said that a new campaign will be added in the next few months, and it’ll be interesting to see how this is formatted. Will the levels be more than a single scene in which to have a bust-up? Will there be an easier mode for the softies among us? Will there actually be an environmental reason to use the parkour during a fight? It might turn out to have some amazing updates. But at present, that’s too many questions without a clear answer. Right now, Overgrowth is like that one fight you had in school. You thought it looked amazing, but really you were just aimlessly slapping a kid on the head, as he aimlessly slapped you back.

Overgrowth is on Steam early access for £22.99/$29.99, Humble Bundle for $29.95 and direct from Wolfire for the same price. These impressions are based on the first beta build.
 

Haba

Harbinger of Decline
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Codex 2012 MCA Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2
Here is a preview for the game
But it doesn’t mean there’s any real game here yet.

But hey, we're totally releasing the real game in a few months! Even though we haven't shown anything about the real game ever before.
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
Joined
Aug 27, 2009
Messages
27,792
These guys cashed in on the success of Humble Bundle and God knows what they've been doing with their free time the last several years. It's pretty obvious they have little passion for this game otherwise it would be in a more complete state by now. Shitty one-scene fight montages like Lugara had isn't acceptable for Overgrowth. They promised an open-world type game with fully fledged environments.
 

almondblight

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2004
Messages
2,549
They promised an open-world type game with fully fledged environments.

Not really:

Will Overgrowth be an open world game?

Many people have asked this, and everyone seems to have a slightly different definition of what an "open world" is. You can expect the Overgrowth single-player campaign to be fairly linear like Lugaru with hopefully a few major decisions along the way to spice things up.

It seems like what they've been making is pretty close to what they were advertising:

How will Overgrowth be different from Lugaru?

While Overgrowth will be inheriting the spirit of Lugaru's tried and true combat system, it will also benefit from every cutting edge feature that our new Phoenix Engine has to offer. Fans can expect better graphics, better physics, more characters, more moves, great mod support, and co-operative multiplay.

"I'm pissed off they made the game they said they would make and not the imaginary uber game I was telling myself they were making."
 

Merlkir

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Oct 12, 2008
Messages
1,216
It's not even the same developers anymore. They basically threw this away and another team picked it up. The only notable thing to come of it is a remake of Lugaru. Which is fun, but not at all why I backed the game way back when.
Bloody pathetic.
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
Joined
Aug 27, 2009
Messages
27,792
They promised an open-world type game with fully fledged environments.

Not really:

Will Overgrowth be an open world game?

Many people have asked this, and everyone seems to have a slightly different definition of what an "open world" is. You can expect the Overgrowth single-player campaign to be fairly linear like Lugaru with hopefully a few major decisions along the way to spice things up.

It seems like what they've been making is pretty close to what they were advertising:

How will Overgrowth be different from Lugaru?

While Overgrowth will be inheriting the spirit of Lugaru's tried and true combat system, it will also benefit from every cutting edge feature that our new Phoenix Engine has to offer. Fans can expect better graphics, better physics, more characters, more moves, great mod support, and co-operative multiplay.

"I'm pissed off they made the game they said they would make and not the imaginary uber game I was telling myself they were making."
Too bad they edited those answers over the years.
 

almondblight

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2004
Messages
2,549
Too bad they edited those answers over the years.

Archive of the page from 2009:

How will Overgrowth be different from Lugaru?
While Overgrowth will be inheriting the spirit of Lugaru’s tried and true combat system, it will also benefit from every cutting edge feature that our new Phoenix Engine has to offer. Fans can expect better graphics, better physics, more characters, more moves, great mod support, and co-operative multiplay.

What kinds of characters will there be in Overgrowth?
We are planning to include 5 character types in Overgrowth: rabbits, wolves, cats, rats and dogs. The main character is Turner, the rabbit from Lugaru.

Will Overgrowth be an open world game?
Many people have asked this, and everyone seems to have a slightly different definition of what an “open world” is. You can expect the Overgrowth single-player campaign to be fairly linear like Lugaru with hopefully a few major decisions along the way to spice things up.
 

Baron Dupek

Arcane
Joined
Jul 23, 2013
Messages
1,870,765

Beta 6 will be last one before release. That's right, it's coming out.
Since 25 November 2008, Wolfire Games has released new Alpha tests every 2–5 months, containing most of the features so far implemented in the game. These are available to people who have pre-ordered the game.
9 years...
They started Humble Bundle? Wonder how they include it to buy...

Too bad it looks like average Unity cash grab with store assets. How ironic when it started when this piece of shit Unity was created...
 

Haba

Harbinger of Decline
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Codex 2012 MCA Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2
The whole campaign is out there, yet absolutely nobody is talking about it.



TL;DR

Story is crap. Loading times are horrible and performance is trash even with the relatively simple maps.

So yeah, you'll get your discounted copy sooner than later.
 
Last edited:

Haba

Harbinger of Decline
Patron
Joined
Dec 24, 2008
Messages
1,871,744
Location
Land of Rape & Honey ❤️
Codex 2012 MCA Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2
Like pointed out earlier, there is something genuinely creepy about those guys.

The #1 feature they showcase in their last beta highlight video is the impalement. They even end the video showing the rabbit slowly getting impaled on the spears.
 

Merlkir

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Oct 12, 2008
Messages
1,216
That's normal, the game's always had a slowmo cam for when someone gets brutally murdered, or falls, or is thrown against a wall.
The recent updates have been better, actually, it looks like we'll get a campaign after all.
 

the_1990

Educated
Joined
May 23, 2015
Messages
81
I should put the animals from Overgrowth in the Uniforms from Holdfast.

Napoleonic Furrys
 

Jasede

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2005
Messages
24,793
Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut I'm very into cock and ball torture
Like pointed out earlier, there is something genuinely creepy about those guys.

The #1 feature they showcase in their last beta highlight video is the impalement. They even end the video showing the rabbit slowly getting impaled on the spears.

I told you all years ago this is being made by a furry pervert with a gore fetish. You should trust me in these matters, I'm an eggspert.

Also the guy was actually given grant money to develop this gornography...
 

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