Urban Strife - Feedback and One More Day
 

White Pond Games gives a little feedback of Steam Next Fest, and makes the demo of Urban Strife available one more day.

More information.

I tried a lot of demos during the Next Fest, and this was the best one imo. Anyone who likes squad-based tactics should try it while it's still available.

I loved playing the prologue demo and can't wait to play the full release in 2022.:clap:

Haven't played the demo, but it looks like something I'd love to play when it's out.

Fingers crossed that it will be complete and relatively bug-free!

Nod, I'm the same, I don't do demos these days. A friend tried this out and remarked that it played quite like Dead State, except a bit better and less clunky.

I haven't tried that many demos this round and this one was the only one I immediately liked and wanted to mess with for any length of time.

Seems to have a lot of potential and a nice look and feel. And yeah, here's to hoping it gets finished with a bunch of content to go with that look and feel.

This is already on my wishlist, even without playing the demo. Nice to hear it's still sounding promising.

"A bit," he says. I feel like this game is going to accomplish what Dead State set out to. They were *really* hampered by the Torque engine, I think.
I'm finding it harder and harder to get enthused by complex RPGs but this one does have my attention.

I had hundreds of hours in Dead State and the combat demo in Urban Strife has that portion of the game beat hands down, but once I was able to buy the .50 cal it was game over for the leagon and the bikers. One thing I really liked was you could loot EVERYTHING on the bodies, so when I wasted the biker trader I was very suprised to find his full inventory to loot.

What will make or break the game will be shelter management and character advancement, but since they have gotten the combat right I will give them the benefit of the doubt on the rest.

I finished the demo today and I'll share few impressions (I wrote these impressions in the respective Steam discussion forum for Urban Strfe):

• The demo hit all right buttons for me. The game is inspired by Jagged Alliance 2 (of course) as well as by The Walking Dead. I couldn't help but think of Shelter as Alexandria :) (Note: some players also compared Urban Strife to Dead State but since I never played the latter, I won't).
• Combat is very well done but I seriously think the devs should tone down Molotov Cocktails, they are very OP. Also: I don't understand how shotguns work. I know they fire a cone of bullets but most of times I put my team far from the enemies and the shotgun's spray of bullets (both mine and theirs) hit each other team unerringly. Sure, shotguns are lethal in close range but mid-to-far range !?!?
• I will follow other players' suggestions I've seen on Steam forums and ask for an improvement when we're looting. E.g.: vehicles have two "containers", the trunk and engine hood. This requires two mouse clicks on the same car (fornt and rear). In my opinion, small/medium vehicles (sedans, vans, pickups) should be lootable as a whole with just one click, with the possible exception being cargo trucks and buses due to their size;
• The inventory should automatically close once we press the "Take All" button;
• A minimap indicating all the exits from the district/section where we are would be convenient;
• But to me, the worst part is moving from one site to another. I found it unnecessarily cumbersome. If we are in Little Italy and we wanna get back to the Shelter, we have first to walk to the exit leading to the Villa, then once there we have to go to the exit leading to the Shelter (and these map exits are never close to each other, make no mistake)
• I couldn't see our team members "leveling up" or "improving their skills". I don't know if this was done just for demo purposes only.

All in all, I think the game is shaping up very well. Sure, inventory management and looting mechanics have to be improved. Let's just hope the devs don't drop the ball.

Yes, without a compass and a mini-map, it's a bit awkward. First I thought the Sun could be used together with time to get an idea of orientation but it's not the case, so the player has to pan the camera to find the exits and deduce the orientation, until they're familiar with the layout.

Just a compass would be perfectly fine for me, I understand they don't want to play with minimaps and pointers (except the big map showing the city, but that's realistic and it doesn't reveal any position).

The inventory is a bit clumsy too, but it's not a huge problem. Having to click 10 times to give 10 items feels tedious though. Or having to drag the whole stack with the mouse.

Those are the little improvements I hope we'll see, even if they're minor. Other games do the same, for ex. Solasta never bothered to show the orientation on the map either, it's guesswork.

I've read some of the player's opinions about Urban Strife and everyone mentions thtat inventory management needs to be improved. E.g. inventory has no sorting. Inventory management may not be a huge problem but it is a needless chore.

But this is what demos are for. To show the work done so far, which is great nonetheless, and to gather constructive feedback from players. Of course the game is not ready yet and things can change.

One thing I forgot to say: I think that the crafting part is great. It's very intuitive the components and parts we need in order to get something crafted as well as the components/parts we gain when we disassembly items. The demo already brings a lot of craftable items (without the necessity of looking after recipes, etc) which is great.

As for the base (Shelter) management, it's a feature we have yet to see (the demo doesn't show anything about it) but I believe this could be nice.

I'm surprised that some people were having a hard time with orientation. The maps are fairly small imo.

I wouldn't object to a compass as along as it's unobtrusive and only shows direction. Definitely no mini-map though. I don't see how that would add anything other than a distraction.

I was! Everytime I had to scroll to the edges of the map only to know what's the correct exit to the Shelter or to the Old Port or to Little Italy etc.

One thing that I wrote in Steam discussion page which I didn't here:

"Sometimes my mouse takes a lot of effort/fussing only to get the screen scrolling, I don't know if this is a problem on my side. This is so frequent that I opted to scroll the screen by pressing the arrow buttons instead of using the mouse;"

I don't know if this is an issue with the detection of my mouse movement, I am not game developer. I use a good gaming mouse here (Logitech G403).

All that (the 5th bullet above coupled with the italicized paragraph) plus my 6th bullet made navigation thru the maps a cumbersome experience in my very humble opinion.

You ask me: Would you still play the game even so? Yes, I would! I liked the demo. But I believe the gaming experience could be a little less painful than it currently is.

But of course, opinions, opinions.

I've had that issue in other games, and it drives me nuts. I already dislike using my mouse to pan the view to begin with. I didn't really notice it here though because I was using WASD to move the camera.

If I had to change just one thing about the game it would be the zoom function. It only lets us zoom in a small degree. I'd like to be able to bring the camera a lot closer at times.

I only replaced WASD by arrows, which I always prefer to use. I'm used to it since my gaming days on my 1st computer, a MSX Expert (see the set of blue arrows to the right of keyboard).

As for the zoom, I agree with you. A closer zoom in would be nice!

I don't like omnipresent mini-maps either (I wrote "without a mini-map", that was a poor choice of words). I'd be fine with a map the player has to open, which enough info to get oriented, or just a small compass - preferably not constantly shown on the screen.

It wasn't a hard time but it was annoying for me at the beginning. Maybe because I saved at some point, then when I reloaded another day I had to reorient myself to get to a new area, panning the camera around to find it. But yeah, they're not big.