He's got a watch with a minute hand, millennium hand and an aeon hand.

Why does Particle Fleet suck so bad?

[I am writing this mostly just to write *something,* because college and the internet have done a number on me and I need to learn how to write like a human being again. Also I'm going mad.]

I really don't like Particle Fleet: Emergence (henceforth PFE). I am in the minority among fans of PFE's developer, Knuckle Cracker. I've noticed that overall reviews for PFE are worse than Knuckle Cracker's previous game, but within the Knuckle Cracker community the consensus seems to be that Particle Fleet is better than any of the Creeper World games.

Having waited about a year and having swallowed a sizable dose of "different strokes for different folks," this still seems absolutely bonkers to me. It is time for me, the only objective observer, The Angry Game Smasher, to rip Particle Fleet: Emergence a new one.

Shortly after the game's release, there was a call for fans to write positive Metacritic reviews because the only reviews for the game on that site were negative. I am hesitant to say that "please spread the Good Word, fans" is necessarily bad, especially for a company as small as Knuckle Cracker. Their (non-PFE) games are excellent but niche. However, brand loyalty is always a terrible reason to write a positive review of a product I didn't like, so I can offer no justification for the fact that this is exactly what I did. Eventually I dropped my score from a 9 to an 8 after the game's promised update never came, but the words of my review still betrayed that this number was inflated from my real opinion. I suppose it's safe to admit that part of my motivation for writing this post is as penance for this horrible, lying deed.

I would first like to focus on things that I think PFE does well, before descending into a storm of negativity.

The graphics are mostly better than any other Knuckle Cracker game. This isn't saying very much, since ChopRaider was stylized to look like whiteboard scribbles and the original Creeper World looks like someone spilled blueberry jam on a circuit diagram, but in terms of "objective" measures of visuals, I think the game is solid. (This is separate from art style, which I have a few more negative words to say about.)

I like that the characters are more racially diverse than previous games. It does seem like a smidgen of tokenism and appropriation (characters are named for mythological figures), but I'm not familiar enough with those topics to pass judgment. I feel comfortable revealing that it was an explicit goal by the developer to make the game more multicultural, as previous games drew almost exclusively from Norse mythology for naming. Considering that white nationalists often use Viking symbolism and imagery, I saw this change as a good way for Knuckle Cracker to quietly but unambiguously distance itself from evil groups it has accidentally shared symbols with.

I like the upgrade system in theory. I'll get into why I don't like it in practice, but I think that a bad system was built on top of a brilliant idea and that a future game could take the same basis and make something great out of it.

The review I wrote for Metacritic contained the sentence "The music is the best oo-mox I've had in years." This is probably the only sentence of that review I still stand by today, at least in terms of it having the implication "this is good."

Unlike any of the previous games by Knuckle Cracker, full custom map sharing support was in the game from day one, as well as a nice pile of custom maps created by alpha and beta testers.

I think that's about it. Let the complaining commence!

We should start with the part of the game that the most people will probably play through: the main storyline campaign. Basically, it sucks, and it sucks for an incredibly stupid non-reason.

Basically, to build anticipation for release, Mr. Knuckle Cracker himself, Virgil Wall, created a page for Particle Fleet before it was done. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this. He listed September 29, 2016 as the release date, which seemed worryingly close, but I assumed he had a plan and a schedule. Except... he didn't exactly. Instead, he revealed that the date was arbitrary and he had to put something in the field, and had assumed it would not be visible. "When it is finished" is apparently a perfectly acceptable release date to Steam, so why it wasn't to Virgil was a mystery (especially considering frequent queries about release dates on his website would always be met with "when it is finished" anyway).

Fortunately nothing was left but the story campaign, but this took a worryingly long time to finish, to the point that the final campaign mission was only available to beta testers two days before release. Rather than delay the release, the end of the campaign was rushed.

Here are some minor spoilers for PFE's story. I'm actually going to spoil the entire plot, but the plot is so awful that its totality doesn't deserve to be considered major.

The game takes place in the Creeper World universe sometime between Creeper World 2 and 3. These two games take place several billion years apart, so the literal year would be meaningless. The closest thing to a governmental body is the Trump Foundation Galactic Corporation, who puts DRM on spaceships and makes people pay to use them. The vast majority of ships in the game are military ships created by GalCorp, but it's never explained who or what these ships were intended to fight, or what outside threat GalCorp used to justify having such firepower. Virgil told me that they were often used to suppress worker rebellions (is that "worker" in the Texas textbook sense?) but this isn't in the game anywhere so either it might as well not exist or I'm terrible at subtext.

Most of the game takes place outside the reach of GalCorp, sort of. You see, there is a giant forbidden part of the galaxy that nobody is allowed into because GalCorp said so. GalCorp is allowed to seize everything from anyone who enters Redacted Space because corporations are people and you can't infringe on people's freedoms, and it's completely different from a government doing the same thing because GalCorp is not a government and ought to be rewarded for its success. (Please ascuse political snark, I have to make this plot interesting somehow.)

Before the first level begins, we're treated to an ingame cutscene of sorts. In it, CEO Varro and COO Lakshmi, who we have never seen before, discover a MacGuffin Cache, the contents of which we are not privy to. They transmit the contents back home, then nobly sacrifice themselves even though they could easily have played the fake level more defensively and eventually jumped out of the system. ("But what if I WANT to commit a tactical error and kill my entire crew?!")

A major problem with this is that "Varro" is a character in Creeper World 2. This is a different Varro, but where the game takes place within the grand universe-spanning timeline of the Creeper World games is never revealed until mission 14 of 16, and is intentionally vague. Part of GalCorp's propaganda advertising states that theirs is the second space-faring human civilization, rather than the 145th, and things seem fishy to those familiar with Creeper World lore sometime before the big reveal, but opening like this is... misleading. A major theme of the Creeper World games is history repeating itself, but Particle Fleet is the first game to feature "important people at historical turning points have the same/similar names in different civilizations" as a part of that theme (and something I can't quite put into words just seems fundamentally off about it.)

The first real level is a tutorial in which we learn that Ticon Corporation is setting off into Redacted Space, having received a message from within it. This message confirms that the Particulate that everyone suspects is in Redacted Space... is, in fact in Redacted Space. And it's dangerous and that means we should go there.

The rest of the game basically revolves around getting deeper into Redacted Space and finding the "Origin World" from the previous civilization. There is an ongoing MacGuffin chain of scattered caches, which combined can be used to reconstruct an important record. More important to the gameplay are technology from the wreckage of failed expeditions into Redacted Space. This is mostly licenses that increase your build limits rather than actual new technology. All the schematics to build the advanced and secret technology later on is stored in your HQ ship already, you just don't have permission to use any of it.

After collecting all the MacGuffin caches, you go to the Origin World and find it in ruins. You collect the final MacGuffin cache and read a wall of text. Then, instead of warping home with your discovery, you try to write it to an empty MacGuffin cache in the middle of Redacted Space and send a message for someone to come pick it up. You can't fabricate your own cache because (mumble mumble) but also everything is bigger in the future and MacGuffin Caches are the size of some of your ships for no adequately explained reason. Maybe I should start a competing MacGuffin Cache business to un-forget MicroSD. Instead you have to find one sitting in the middle of a Particulate trap. You write to it, warp it away, and get killed by Particulate. It turns out that cache was the one that Varro picked up in the intro because there's a final, terrible, pointless epilogue dialogue that basically only says "yup, Varro got a call on the rift-o-phone." It also uses Kevin Macleod's "Epic Unease" track, which there's nothing wrong with, but in my mind that track is "The Eronev Mansion Trailer Music" and can't be anything else, so it was a bit odd and disorienting.

The problems with this story are numerous and should be self-explanatory. Our expedition isn't really that important. We might as well have played as Varro's expedition or the one before us that sent the message to Ticon. Everyone dies at the end and it's weirdly triumphal about that, even though it takes another dead team after us to recover the message and send it back. It feels completely pointless, and seems very circular (how many transmissions until literally everyone is dead in Redacted Space?), and the menu is circular, so I assumed this was a cycle of death that kept repeating. But Word of God has confirmed that my hopeless interpretation is incorrect even though it's vastly more interesting. I'm not being petty. Shut up!

There's actually little linking the missions storywise, since it's all just a scavenger hunt of specific artifacts. Also, the Particulate begins to emulate human technology over the course of the story. This doesn't make sense because the explanation for this was "many repeated encounters of human technology over the years" rather than "increased knowledge based on this expedition alone," so the most advanced emulation should be right next to GalCorp's territory and the most "feral" particles should be the ones surrounding the Origin World, since so few human expeditions make it that deep into Redacted Space. I get that Knuckle Cracker has always let gameplay drive story rather than the other way around, and it makes no sense to start the game with all mechanics and then remove most by the end, but your story explanation is nonsense, dammit!

Variety in the campaign is significantly less than in Creeper World 3. Most levels had some sort of gimmick created with CRPL (the game's built-in programming language) or at least are designed to teach potential tactics for the new units introduced in that level. Here are the CW3 levels and what is notable about them, and I must stress, this is FROM MEMORY. These levels are mostly memorable in one way or another.

Tempus (tutorial)
Carcere (disregard bulk, rush down the inhibitor to win)
Telos (terrible level, 1/10)
Far York (emitter suppression, multi directional)
Starsync (anticreeper very strong here)
Seedet (strafe distant creeper to relieve pressure/prevent overflow)
Flick (slip emitters indestructible until main emitter killed)
Ormos (finite creeper but huge amounts at map start)
Jojo (non-void island hop, I adore this sort of mission)
Tiplex (digitalis, use 2 bases)
Lemal (moving blocks of frozen creeper)
Ruine (no creeper threat, constant air raids, must kill spore towers with remote construction)
Defi (really showcases power of terraforming)
Choix (creeper appears at random positions)
Chanson (slip emitters and little robots that shoot your units)
Mistet (all creeper is attracted to an orb that circles the map)
Crosslaw (pointless waste of time)
Vapen (restore the superweapon, then it wins the level for you)
Meso (lost relics that generate shields and anticreeper)
Krig (major remote assault, plus random creeper spawning in an area)
Otrav (creeper attractors roam the map, destroy beacons to make the area safe from them)
Farbor (this level is my waifu and I don't care what you think)
Arca (the ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny)

I had to look up the PFE levels because they weren't really memorable except in a few cases. For an early-game level without much challenge, Insanity (level 4) is pretty good; so are Potential (8), and The 145th (14). Origin (15) gets special mention because its ideas are good and it's clearly throwing back to Farbor, but it does so mostly superficially and it isn't fun to play. Duty (16) is full of custom scripting that makes it unique, but the level itself is boring both conceptually and in actually playing it. The rest of the levels are very boring and sort of blend together. They just feel like "more generic Particle Fleet levels."

A lack of gimmicks doesn't mean that the levels are bad, so long as the base game mechanics can carry them. After all, Creeper World 2 had no scripting system and had an excellent campaign (with the exception of The Tide, screw that mission with a pitchfork). The problem is that the base mechanics don't carry the game very far. Whenever you unlock a new feature in the campaign, it'll typically be "oh no, a new enemy type!" followed 15 seconds later with "hooray, something new that directly counters this enemy type!" and you beat the mission mostly the same way as the prior ones. The main exception to this is level 10, which introduces the upgrade system and you're left to decide what upgrades to use to progress, but the mission is just not very good (through both its own design and the upgrade system itself.)

The only scripting gimmicks are some particle teleporters on levels 6 and 14; some bombs on level 7 that basically act like a slightly modified version of a built-in unit; some cannons on level 9 that are the same thing; field manipulator things on levels 7, 10 and 14 that collect particles and then release them; and a few elite enemies (anti-ship artillery, periodic mega chain maker, giant cubes of doom, struc generators, ore ships) on levels 15 and 16 that I think ought to have been explored more and/or introduced earlier. Not only would introducing them earlier have meant that the final levels were less of a difficulty spike, they would make the story seem a bit more consistent with its special enemies.

These final levels introducing so many new things makes them feel sloppy. The cubes of death in particular (ha) could have been replaced with standard emitters without compromising the final level's design, for instance, and would make it feel more contiguous with the rest of the campaign. During beta there were 18 spaces for missions on the menu, and Virgil claimed to have planned out the entire campaign from the beginning. Presumably the last two levels were simply chopped out of the game somewhere, probably between 15 and 16, and would have better explored these advanced enemies and the powerful ships you get near the end of the game.

It's also been traditional for the final mission to give the player some sort of superweapon (Thor in CW1/3, the Dark Beam/Conversion Bomb in CW2) that is orders of magnitude stronger than anything yet encountered. I don't by any means consider this a requirement and would love to just use the same tools as the rest of the game and my wits to overcome a seemingly insurmountable challenge for once. Instead the game gives us a ship called Varro (of course), which yes is more powerful than any other ship in the vanilla fleet, but it's not fundamentally different from them. That's a drawback of fully modular units, I suppose. It feels sort of like seeing fancy loot with an orange name in an RPG, but then you mouse over it and the modifiers are lackluster. It's a lame superweapon trying to wear bigger pants than fit it is what I'm trying to say.

However, these levels' sloppiness is completely eclipsed by the Codex. I was astonished that this actually made it into the game, and that more people weren't complaining about it. The Codex is the MacGuffin Cache recovered on level 15. Between level 15 and 16 you can read a conversation in which the game characters read it. This is done via a shitty UI on an ugly background.

Just in case you thought I was kidding you. This is the worst non-bug thing in any game I have ever played or even observed. I call it a "non-bug thing" because to the best of my knowledge it is supposed to be here, but calling it a feature is an insult to mobile game wait timers.

Fortunately, the irrational and disproportionate loathing I feel for the Codex does not extend to the rest of the game (or really anything else with the exceptions of genocide and TADS manuals, like seriously, what am I missing, they don't explain anything), and the Codex is just a tiny, horrible sliver of a mostly just lackluster cake. In another post or perhaps two I will explain what I believe to be lacking with the game mechanics, some elements of the UI and audiovisual experience, and the game's editors (map and ship). These flaws aren't as bad as the very bad parts of the campaign, but they weren't fixed by user content as I had hoped they would be on release.