Total Chaos

Anyone play it? I played for about 15 minutes and it was definitely scary. Some dev gameplay decisions are frustrating, though; I may give it another go. Really does have great atmosphere.

Here is thread about it during its Alpha development: 

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I played it.

It was visually impressive and the authors can certainly be commemorated for their mastery of atmosphere & technical prowess; however, the gameplay was absolutely abysmal.

It's not very intuitive to play. The inventory system is way too clunky and 'sticky'. The enemies aren't remotely enjoyable to fight, neither are they fun to avoid because the levels don't allow much/any room for you to do so. The healing items commonly kill you with radiation quicker than they heal you, totally negating their effect. It's very easy to become 'softlocked' in an impossible situation due to inventory starvation and the game's inherent nature to tempt the player into hiding, trapping you in a room with enemies outside without any ability to break through... The list goes on.

Ultimately I'm very saddened by the end result. I was excited for it when we got early screenshots etc. This mod has the potential to be the very best of the best, but thanks to the gameplay it's something I'm never going to touch again. Having spoken to a few fellow Doomers over on Discord, I can say this sentiment is felt across many people, not many enjoyed the game for long and only stuck around as long as they did because it's pretty.

I imagine it wouldn't take that much work to rework the gameplay? It is such a shame. Coulda been such a bad ass project. I never saw the film Shutter Island, but the game reminds me of the trailer.

I think it was actually quite good, though certainly not perfect. It's definitely not Doom in any way, and the things that are great about it are very different from the things that Doom players tend to be looking for -- i.e. the combat and the flow of the level design are not fine-tuned in the ways that Doom combat is (especially after 25 years of constant refinement). It is extremely good at individual scenario design (as opposed to overarching level-design), and the way it allows you to approach the game with many different strategies based on playstyles and inventory management is very well done imo. The atmosphere is also very good, it has cool secrets, the radiation mechanic is interesting, etc.

The Cacoward judges were very divided, and I think I have a pretty good sense of why. Those of us who haven't played a lot of horror games and were approaching it as a new experience found it really engaging, whereas those of us who have played a lot of other indie horror games that were designed on their own engines found Total Chaos to be a bit lacking in comparison. On the other hand, Icarusliv3s seems to be into horror games in general, and he liked Total Chaos a lot.

In other words, whether you will like it depends on a lot of things, and I wouldn't necessarily take someone else's word for it. It's worth trying for yourself.

I got some kind of shader bug which made it unplayable: one of the effects from the intro movie didn't go away, a super opaque static effect; made it unplayable. May give it another look sometime.

I think total chaos is really good. There are just a few things that really irk me:

• There's no crosshair. This is mostly fine for the melee weapons ( it would be nice though) but for the guns, it's just stupid. It would have been fine if they were doing a day of infamy type thing where you have no crosshair but ADS, but you have no ADS either, which makes it impossible to aim.
• This is really nitpicky, but your character's hands are way too small. You can never see the weapon you're holding unless you crank up the FOV, but then it looks even more weird.
• Some of the encounters are so hard it's unfair. They get to the point where they just aren't fun and you just want to skip them.

I thought it was really good! I was actually getting way more resources than I needed just a couple hours in, and while the combat isn't groundbreaking, it doesn't feel like it was the dev's focus, so I can forgive them for that. Then again, I love System Shock 1 and 2 and Deus Ex, games that have lackluster combat but shine in other areas (no, I'm not comparing this mod to those games, it's just so you get my reasoning).

I want to like it but I don't. It's very bad with players losing sense direction, endless corridors, many non interactive doors, annoying puzzles, average combat and not the best learning curve enforcing trial and error.

But it's a marvel and very impressive looking. Atmosphere is great and just including a inventory system like it has amazes me.

I played it a bit. Broke the pick-axe on some boxes then got murdered by a zombie before I found wood to fix it with. It's pretty impressive looking with it being made with GZDoom. But it's not really a game for me.