Anyone else feel like Ten Hammers is worse than the original?

[Samz]

Unfair enemy AI with blatantly higher reaction times than your own troops.
You die in one shot always despite the cover system now working less as well as the inclusion of Permadeath mechanics.
Your M203 Gunner will happily blow themselves up instead of stepping around cover to fire.
And going prone if caught in the open was removed despite the fact it's literally in a Ten Hammers trailer.

I'm honestly surprised so many positive reviews exist for Ten Hammers, even replaying it I'm honestly having less fun than replaying the original.
I do wish the original FSW was less basic for lack of a better word but any good Ten Hammers adds is removed by how often you're loading checkpoints due to the game essentially cheating/being badly designed.

[hel45]

Yeah, I also have mixed feelings about TH.

[SodaGuzzler]

I feel it.
I like how you put it here:
"I do wish the original FSW was less basic for lack of a better word but any good Ten Hammers adds is removed by how often you're loading checkpoints due to the game essentially cheating/being badly designed."

The game's got all the promises of a great/cool sequel with added new features--on the surface (with more control over your team, commandeer-able Bradley IFV (which is actually awesome and I love--dunno what's going on with inaccurate roadwheel setup though (with 1 extra per side))... but the changes to the core squad gameplay as well as map/encounter design feel unpolished (and even untested at times, to borrow someone's word).



I guess I'll be preaching to the choir, but I'll list my grievances (played on normal) here anyway.
-Your guys go through ammo at weirdly fast rate when split into buddy-teams (pretty fast even without splitting)

-"HOT" doesn't work as well as bounding movement in the original, a lot of cover and/or enemy placements are bad and can expose your men to enemy fire when it shouldn't (in a way you didn't have to worry about in the first game). Wouldn't have been as big of a issue if buddy-team mechanic worked better without ammo-consumption rate bug thing n such (still wouldn't be ideal).

-infinite enemy closet. Huh? ......INFINITE ENEMY CLOSET?!?!? It's just lame/lazy game design. And the closet is sometimes destructible and other times... not? An annoying inconsistency in game mechanic (usually a bad thing).
I fired a lot of 40mm grenade at a particular door in the Art Museum level as Brit, but could never tell if I actually hit the door... or if the spawn could be disabled to begin with. Enemy spawn is (seems) literally infinite. (In the first level, I thought it was just a tutorial mechanic... but nope!) And, though this is more of a nitpick, when you get near the thing and look inside, it's just a wall behind a door with no visible connection to anywhere). I think it shoulda been made clearer what is and isn't destructible, and also when it is and isn't destroyed. In the Art Museum level, there's an enemy closet by the gate you can open. The guy that spawns there sometimes take cover inside the closet, but if you run to a cover near him quick enough, he'll go and take cover inside the enemy locker with nowhere to go.... and if you approach the locker, he's just gone!... Somehow. It's like magic! lol

-Really mean and unfair enemy spawn in some places that nullify all available covers and kills your team (ala part soon after the start of Tien Hamir bridge where you have to cross the wide automobile road... seemed as though smoke-nade spamming was the only viable tactic there, and even that didn't work very well. And I knew where the enemy was gonna spawn (behind me at that, just beyond some invisible walls). I do concede the possibility that I wasn't creative enough there, though.)

-Inconvenience switching to any extra teams (why do I have to open map and click on a tiny icon to control Bradley... where did the popup team switch menu from FSW go?)

-Map you can't (seem to?) zoom in and less useful than in the original.

-Dumb friendly AI that needs total baby sitting (won't shoot a guy running towards you from behind, just because he's outside the fire sector? Come on!)

-Enemy AI who can apparently dodge bullets when running out in the open.

-Lack of menu option to restart from checkpoint which requires you to kill your guys and watch slow-mo death animation every time to restart)

...and so on.

But among all these, I think the biggest fun-ruiner for me was the fact that cover system didn't work well and the one-shot death mechanic made it worse. You can probably counter unreasonable spawns, maybe even those clown closets too, if the game had functional good covers that would allow you to have a team (or two) to cover arcs and provide suppression for the maneuvering element, but the poopy combo of level design and gameplay mechanics results in your guy that looks covered getting hit or the only available covers don't work against the enemy. Neither is fun (for me). And in some instances, you get this absurd situation where you have an infinite enemy locker you must disable by flanking and getting close (in order to proceed in the level), but when you try to flank, new enemy spawns where they can kill the guys flanking them...

It's like they didn't do enough play testing to see if the new, more open and less linear maps worked with the cover system/game mechanics of the game. Maybe it's not as unreasonable as I think it is, or that I'm taking a wrong approach, but it sure seems unreasonable. First game I think is fun because it rewards you for finding the right solutions to the problems (granted, that's probably easier to implement when the map is more linear). Ten Hammers on the other hand, does have some "right" solutions, but the game throws luck into play and make your solution not work at random.

I really like the added features at least on paper (I think Bradley is pretty much perfect as is) and I simply like the idea of "more FSW", so I really wanted to like this game, but the added cons simply outweighed the pros for me. Just Too. Many. Checkpoint. Reloads. Oh and the perma-death and the game not replacing some solider types discourages me from continuing the mission when someone gets shot. (I lost one of the TLs in earlier chapter and the slot just remained empty until game switched to Brits) discourages me from continuing the mission.)]

[Samz]

Originally posted by SodaGuzzler69:

I feel it.
I like how you put it here:
"I do wish the original FSW was less basic for lack of a better word but any good Ten Hammers adds is removed by how often you're loading checkpoints due to the game essentially cheating/being badly designed."

The game's got all the promises of a great/cool sequel with added new features--on the surface (with more control over your team, commandeer-able Bradley IFV (which is actually awesome and I love--dunno what's going on with inaccurate roadwheel setup though (with 1 extra per side))... but the changes to the core squad gameplay as well as map/encounter design feel unpolished (and even untested at times, to borrow someone's word).



I guess I'll be preaching to the choir, but I'll list my grievances (played on normal) here anyway.
-Your guys go through ammo at weirdly fast rate when split into buddy-teams (pretty fast even without splitting)

-"HOT" doesn't work as well as bounding movement in the original, a lot of cover and/or enemy placements are bad and can expose your men to enemy fire when it shouldn't (in a way you didn't have to worry about in the first game). Wouldn't have been as big of a issue if buddy-team mechanic worked better without ammo-consumption rate bug thing n such (still wouldn't be ideal).

-infinite enemy closet. Huh? ......INFINITE ENEMY CLOSET?!?!? It's just lame/lazy game design. And the closet is sometimes destructible and other times... not? An annoying inconsistency in game mechanic (usually a bad thing).
I fired a lot of 40mm grenade at a particular door in the Art Museum level as Brit, but could never tell if I actually hit the door... or if the spawn could be disabled to begin with. Enemy spawn is (seems) literally infinite. (In the first level, I thought it was just a tutorial mechanic... but nope!) And, though this is more of a nitpick, when you get near the thing and look inside, it's just a wall behind a door with no visible connection to anywhere). I think it shoulda been made clearer what is and isn't destructible, and also when it is and isn't destroyed. In the Art Museum level, there's an enemy closet by the gate you can open. The guy that spawns there sometimes take cover inside the closet, but if you run to a cover near him quick enough, he'll go and take cover inside the enemy locker with nowhere to go.... and if you approach the locker, he's just gone!... Somehow. It's like magic! lol

-Really mean and unfair enemy spawn in some places that nullify all available covers and kills your team (ala part soon after the start of Tien Hamir bridge where you have to cross the wide automobile road... seemed as though smoke-nade spamming was the only viable tactic there, and even that didn't work very well. And I knew where the enemy was gonna spawn (behind me at that, just beyond some invisible walls). I do concede the possibility that I wasn't creative enough there, though.)

-Inconvenience switching to any extra teams (why do I have to open map and click on a tiny icon to control Bradley... where did the popup team switch menu from FSW go?)

-Map you can't (seem to?) zoom in and less useful than in the original.

-Dumb friendly AI that needs total baby sitting (won't shoot a guy running towards you from behind, just because he's outside the fire sector? Come on!)

-Enemy AI who can apparently dodge bullets when running out in the open.

-Lack of menu option to restart from checkpoint which requires you to kill your guys and watch slow-mo death animation every time to restart)

...and so on.

My suspicion is that (I know this is true of some games) is that Ten Hammers is one of those games where single player/multiplayer use the exact same code.

An early trailer for Ten Hammers actually shows British troops going prone when out of cover like in the first game, a mechanic that's removed in the final game.

My suspicion (though not proven obviously) is they designed the levels around a more forgiving combat system (Possibly still being able to take multiple shots, more forgiving cover angles and other stuff from the first game) but then people found multiplayer frustrating due to the inconsistencies. (such as another player managing to luck out and have a soldier survive getting shot so they could get in a flank position and start mowing down the other player's troops before they could react.) but then made the game more "consistent" for the sake of the multiplayer without actually testing how it effected single player.

That's my guess at least.

[matxbox360]

i found ten hammers to be far easier than FSW, mostly because of the manual aiming system, needing to constantly tell my squad to point fire only to see them miss a tango behind a trash can for a few seconds until he wipes out the squad is meh, that is when i remember to tell them to point fire and they don't stand still looking at said tango shooting them dead, in ten hammers i would have killed him eons ago by taking aim and shooting him, multiplayer doesn't seem that attractive to me.

that is my opinion, of course.

[LordKainofNosgoth19]

Yep. Everything I said about it was in this thread. Ten Hammers is more artificial than the original with the difference in spawns and inferior A.I. behavior of the squads, not that the A.I. was ever perfect, but it was definitely not improved in Ten Hammers. FSW had a good gameplay tutorial system before players got to the real fight. It worked nicely and felt believable versus dropping the player right into the battlefield, or having to just load up battle drills. The voice work was well done and some enemies spawned and ran out of different places. Some enemies would not spawn all of the time, and others would. it had a sense of realistic situations to unpredictable results. However, once an area was cleared of targets, it stayed clear, unless new mission objectives in the same area would change that with new spawns somewhere else.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/4530/discussions/0/5946474365643262454/?tscn=1718183824

[SodaGuzzler]

Originally posted by Samz:

My suspicion is that (I know this is true of some games) is that Ten Hammers is one of those games where single player/multiplayer use the exact same code.

An early trailer for Ten Hammers actually shows British troops going prone when out of cover like in the first game, a mechanic that's removed in the final game.

My suspicion (though not proven obviously) is they designed the levels around a more forgiving combat system (Possibly still being able to take multiple shots, more forgiving cover angles and other stuff from the first game) but then...

Interesting theory... That would explain the lackluster level design, if they changed game mechanic at some point but didn't change the levels to fit that. And yeah, now that you mentioned it, I have never seen my guys go prone, unlike in the first game.

[SodaGuzzler]

Originally posted by matxbox360:

i found ten hammers to be far easier than FSW, mostly because of the manual aiming system, needing to constantly tell my squad to point fire only to see them miss a tango behind a trash can for a few seconds until he wipes out the squad is meh, that is when i remember to tell them to point fire and they don't stand still looking at said tango shooting them dead, in ten hammers i would have killed him eons ago by taking aim and shooting him, multiplayer doesn't seem that attractive to me.

that is my opinion, of course.

Precision fire thing is indeed very useful, although I don't feel that TH is easier than the first game. Average difficulty feels (to me at least) way higher in Ten Hammers than in the original for reasons mentioned above and elsewhere, especially in the later levels. Compared to Easy Difficulty of the first game, TH's Easy feels like Very Hard (in a bad way) in later part of the story. Part of that's probably skill issues, but some of it I think is definitely due to poor designs (mostly level). I do like some of the added features, though, especially the Bradley/BMP (both weird looking, lol). I appreciate armor and infantry having to support each other and it's genuinely fun at times (although, then again, I find it often not working like it should due to the weird designs of the game). Kinda makes me sad and angry all the more, thinking about how much more fun it could've been... lol

[SodaGuzzler]

Originally posted by LordKainofNosgoth19:

Yep. Everything I said about it was in this thread. Ten Hammers is more artificial than the original with the difference in spawns and inferior A.I. behavior of the squads, not that the A.I. was ever perfect, but it was definitely not improved in Ten Hammers. FSW had a good gameplay tutorial system before players got to the real fight. It worked nicely and felt believable versus dropping the player right into the battlefield, or having to just load up battle drills. The voice work was well done and some enemies spawned and ran out of different places. Some enemies would not spawn all of the time, and others would. it had a sense of realistic situations to unpredictable results. However, once an area was cleared of targets, it stayed clear, unless new mission objectives in the same area would change that with new spawns somewhere else.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/4530/discussions/0/5946474365643262454/?tscn=1718183824

Artificial is a nice word that describes my feeling towards the difficulty of this game. Infinite enemy closets, map design that doesn't let you flank enemy, etc. Things that feel unfair. And yeah, the battle drill thing is... I'm not a fan. I've realized something, though, once I stopped my Medium difficulty playthrough on the Tien Hamir level and started playing on Easy. The game straight-up tells you, mid-mission, where to place your teams to get through a hard part. I'm undecided if that's a bad design or simply a necessity owing to game's more complex gameplay (in this particular segment). But then, they don't do the same when you can use a nice reminder on some rarely used game mechanic (like the ability to deploy smoke screen in your armored vehicle).
Also, yeah I agree the voice lines aren't as good in this game (shame you don't get to play as the squad from first game as much, not that they have much dialogue here anyway), and it's also very choppy and cuts off mid-speech almost all the time.

It also reminds me, in the first game your men each had different looks. Some had green woodland helmet covers, some wore woodland PASGT vest, others wore desert camo ver or plain brown one, etc. It felt kinda realistic, and also made each character visually distinct. (US infantry in 90s-2000 wars in middle east didn't always have a uniform look, as not all units got the proper desert gear and some got new stuff early)
In Ten Hammers, you still have some variations in their gear in the form of load-bearing gears (some wear old ALICE rig, and others have LBV etc), but they all have the same single desert helmet cover, as well as the identical desert PASGT vest look. Maybe it's due to them not having enough time, maybe to simulate the men receiving the proper desert gears, but I find it visually less interesting for a video game and kinda makes me sad.