News: Modular Assault Vehicle Kickstarter and Greenlight
Posted on : 11-02-2014 | By : Cacophanus | In : News
Hardware: PC
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If you enjoyed Chrome Hounds, then you might be interested to know that there is a new PC game called Modular Assault Vehicle on the way. With both Kickstarter and Greenlight campaigns in the works, it all seems to be the work of one Chad Mauldin. Now we wish the guy luck and all but this is basically a full on remake of a recent 360 game. SEGA could quite easily kick up a fuss about this, as Chrome Hounds was a considerable investment for them. Will be interesting to see how this pans out though.
Spoiler
[flash http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W00hP8NRAXE]
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It’d be nice to have ChromeHounds back, but personally, I wish he could change it up a bit. It looks to me like he’s doing basically a pound-for-pound revival of the original game, which means it should have all the good parts in it, but (And especially after watching the gameplay video) also means it has all the bad parts.
I mean, call me a scrub, but I hated the fact that hiding the cockpit behind spacers was a viable build strategy, and this remake does nothing to address that.
ChromeHounds was an amazing game, and I’d still be playing if the servers were still up, but it was far from perfect and, at least at this point, it doesn’t really look like this gentleman’s making any effort to bring it closer to perfect.
Honestly that’s largely a preference thing. The Hidden Pits, to many, were the selling point of ChromeHounds- here’s a Mech game, where _you_ are directly responsible for protecting yourself from enemy weapons fire.
But I’ll tell you this as one of the long-time Alpha backers- with the specific armour and health values, and the way that damage works in MAV (if you lose a part, all parts attached are _gone_) it’s both smart to attach the pit directly to the legs (as I think you would consider ‘proper’?) and perfectly viable to have an ‘open’ build. The prevalence, and perhaps requirement of the Closed Pit builds in ChromeHounds was a direct result of the damage and destruction models in that game- and MAV has gone a long way to fixing this- Chad actually said he wanted to make open pits viable, simply because they look so cool.
And the game is somewhat far from being a pure ChromeHounds copy. Both from a Legal standpoint, and from the standpoint of the players, the game, between the campaign, new damage models, singleplayer, and many other factors… well, it’s definitely its own game. It has its own lore, it has its own quirks in building and controlling… It utilizes the fully modular mech building system that ChromeHounds pioneered- but saying it’s an exact copy is like saying that Loadout is an exact copy of Blacklight:Retribution because they both have customizable weapons.
If you’re still not convinced- well, check out the forums, check out the site. Look up some of the videos of the Alpha Community playing the game (you’ll be inundated with Battlefield vids if you just search MAV, so just do a search for “Bombdog Studios”). And if you think it’s worth it? Drop a dollar or two in the Kickstarter, or give it a Thumbs Up on Greenlight.