[Review] Receiver 2

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Game information
Devolopers: Wolfire Games

Realesed: 14apr,2020
Genre: Adventure,casual,free to play,action

Platforms:  PC

THIS IS NO ARCADE SHOOTER, THIS IS 100% GUN MECHANIC REALISM Receiver 2 simulates every internal part of each firearm based on manufacturer schematics and gunsmithing resources. Learn exactly how each sidearm works, including how to load and unload them, clear malfunctions, and operate their safety features. NOT YOUR ORDINARY FPS You won't find any loot crates or bullet sponges here. Every enemy can be destroyed by a single well-placed shot, using ballistic simulation based on data from shooting incident reconstruction textbooks. Practice the Receiver virtues of resilience, focus, and courage to resist the Threat. FEATURES Sidearms modeled down to every spring and pin Enemies with physically-based damage models Ballistic modeling of ricochets, penetration, and bullet drop Train your mind to defend against the Mindkill Become literate in how guns actually operate FAQ What is Receiver? We created the original Receiver game for the "7-day FPS" challenge to explore gun handling mechanics, randomized levels, and unordered storytelling. With Receiver 2, we are doubling down on the aspects that made the original stand out: the detailed firearm controls and the tense, surreal atmosphere. Why are you so obsessed with guns? Love them or hate them, firearms are everywhere in our culture. If you want to understand it then you must understand them as well. While many games include firearms, we felt it was time to have a game that is actually about them. Are there people or animals to shoot in Receiver? We don't believe so. All our information suggests that the Threat will only dream killdrones to attack you after the Mindkill, but there's no way to be sure. How is Receiver 2 different from Receiver 1? Receiver 2 has the same basic gameplay structure as the first, but more of everything. There are many more sidearms available in Receiver 2, and while Receiver 1 simulated several moving parts for each gun, Receiver 2 simulates *all* of the moving parts. Does Receiver 2 have online multiplayer or VR support? No, Receiver 2 is designed to be a single-player experience played on a monitor with a mouse and keyboard. What is the Mindkill? You are not yet ready for that knowledge. Only a Receiver who has truly Awakened can understand the nature of the Threat. MATURE CONTENT DESCRIPTION The developers describe the content like this: Receiver 2 has detailed simulations of real firearms, and themes of mental illness and self-harm.

If you get your gun out too quickly in Receiver 2, you’ll shoot yourself. Pop a bullet through a window while you’re standing too close, and you’re asking for a shard to slash through your jugular. Or maybe for the debris to jam up your rounds, leading to deadly miscalculation the next time you run up against a turret. Bleep. Click. Dead. The slightest mistake can be fatal, and this is what makes Receiver 2 one of the most captivating games I’ve ever played. You need to intensely examine your environment. That’s how it sucks you in, how it demands every drop of your focus. You’re crawling through apartments and arcades, across rooftops, warehouses and deserted scaffolding, eyes and ears peeled for a telltale whirr or splash of blue. A turret can kill you in a second if it takes you unawares. You can’t afford to drop your guard. To progress, you need to find five cassette tapes without dying. They’re discreet little bastards, tucked amongst shelves or strewn about the floor, lurking in overlooked corners. These cassettes will tell you what you are, what your situation is, and lecture you about the finer points of gun safety. They’re stepping stones along the path to enlightenment, and work best when they’re cryptic and vague. This is how you deal with the Mindkill, they say: this is how you’ll beat whatever’s trapped you in this dream of metal and death. And very fiddly guns. You start off with a straightforward revolver. Easy mode. To reload, all you need to do is open the chamber, tip out your spent cartridges, whack in each individual bullet, then slam the chamber shut. You can flip the hammer down too, if you’re feeling fancy. Every step demands a different button press, one more move in a convoluted tango. So many games have got me comparing combat to a dance, but only Receiver makes me apply that to reloading. Collecting five tapes rewards you with a slight change of scenery, and punishes you with a new gun. You’d think a semi-automatic pistol would be an upgrade, but that’s because you’ve been playing with the magic weaponry packed by every other videogame. Do you know how many ways a Glock 17 can misfire? You will. You’ll have to deal with stovepipes and double feeds, and sob over incomplete seals on injection ports. At first these problems will be all-consuming. You’ll learn, though. You’ll surprise yourself, whisking through a mid-fight fix as if you emerged from the womb wielding a Colt M1911, and possessing innate knowledge about how to keep it properly oiled. The sequences get drummed into your muscle memory, freeing up vital bandwidth to focus on one of the many other things that can go wrong.

Those turrets? They’ll go down in one shot, if you hit their camera or their feeding mechanism. If you hit that mechanism then they’re helpless, even if they don’t look it. The first time I plucked up the courage to save my ammo and walk into the yellow glow of a disabled turret, I felt like a god. The second time, I got shot dead because I’d overlooked the bullet remaining in the turret’s chamber. That’s the magic, right there. The predictable yet unpredicted consequences of carefully modelled systems, spelling out disasters you didn’t take the time to read. It’s logical. It’s fair. It lets you learn where all the spikes are hidden, pushing towards mastery over a world that will kill you the moment you take your eyes off any part of it. Even loading in with your finger on the trigger isn’t safe. Playing Receiver 2 is like holding the blade of a kitchen knife between your fingertips. You can always feel the weight of it, the threat. Every encounter is an event, a mountain to be climbed and descended from with caution. It demands your total attention, then plays with it in clever and excruciating ways. If I ever find out who’s idea it was to leave poppable, panic-inducing balloons floating around the place, I will punch that person in their face. And then buy them several drinks. I’m very close to calling it a masterpiece. Everything I’ve mentioned so far is cruel but reasonable, and succeeds because it asks so much – but sadly, that doesn’t apply to the pacing. Unless you get lucky, stumbling on the tapes you need can take forever. That turns progress into an unwelcome test of endurance, where the slightest slip up can undo everything. I might only die to one turret in twenty, but that’s enough to keep me at the bottom rungs, where they’re the only enemy that spawn. I can see why, but I know I’m missing out. With turrets, the pressure always comes from within. You can stay behind cover, with all the time in the world to sort out whatever calamity has befallen your firearm. That’s not the case with the terrifying flying buzzsaw drones, where any faff is fatal. I’ve only brushed up against them a couple of times, and they have turned my brain to jelly. I relish that mind-melting panic, and wish those drones appeared earlier, as they do in Receiver 1. Locking that terror behind hours of perseverance is a missed opportunity, and making it so that quitting the game undoes some progress is an infuriating misstep. It’s far from a dealbreaker, though. I’m enthralled enough to keep trying, to keep trawling through familiar corridors. There is still suspense in every moment, because I know how easily each moment could go wrong. I can still revel in the discipline required to shoot a turret, recognise that I’ve disabled its firing mechanism, and stand still as it turns around. I can still freak out at inspired surprises I won’t spoil, and delight in paying attention to every little detail.

The result was a tense and tactical shooting experience, one where you had to think carefully before pulling the trigger. The premise for Receiver 2 is essentially the same, but more. It offers a larger canvas, more guns, and more detail on each of those guns. Prior to playing Receiver 2, I had one major reservation. While Receiver’s concept was original at the time of launch, today there are about a half-dozen VR games that offer a similar basic concept, with more tactile fidelity and nuance than Receiver’s keyboard-based controls could possibly offer. Hence, I was concerned Receiver 2 would launch as an anachronism, that its gun simulation would feel clunky and dull compared to games that let me mani[CENSORED]te weapons with my own (virtual) hands. Click to enlarge As it turns out, such concerns are needless. Receiver 2’s gun simulation is incredibly satisfying. Your starting weapon is a Colt Revolver, which is aimed and fired using the mouse like any other FPS weapon. However, every other working part of the gun has its own unique control. You need to press E to release the chamber, press V to remove the shell casings, press Z to insert new bullets, then press R to replace the chamber. You can also depress the firing hammer with the F key, which makes you shoot ever-so-slightly faster. The weapons also feel *fantastic*. That tiny Colt Revolver is terrifyingly powerful, cracking like a bullwhip whenever you pull the trigger. Later weapons, such as the Colt 1911, the Glock and the Desert Eagle are equally well-designed. It’s also surprising how quickly you become accustomed to what seems like a complex control system. After the first half-hour or so, you’ll be able to complete the reloading process in a matter of seconds. Click to enlarge So, the guns are great, which is good news. Sadly, I have issues with basically every other aspect of Receiver 2’s design. Structurally, Receiver 2 is less an FPS and more a survival horror. The premise is you’re in a city afflicted by the “Mindkill”, a debilitating psychological phenomenon that afflicts people in terrifying ways that I won’t spoil. To safeguard yourself against the Mindkill, you have to listen to “Receiver Tapes”, cassettes scattered around the game’s procedurally-generated environments. Standing between you and these tapes two types of enemies, stationary turrets, and flying drones that kill you with a powerful electric shock. There are no human enemies in Receiver. Personally, I find this quite disappointing, although I understand the creative reasoning behind it. Receiver is not a fast-paced action game, and these two enemy types act like guards in a stealth game. The turrets squat on a position, forcing you to come up with a plan to either deal with them or go around them, while the drones chase you around the level, creating tension as you fumble with the controls to make your weapon fire-ready. Click to enlarge They’re also as intricately designed as the guns themselves, with multiple components that can be disabled by shooting them. Shooting the rotors of the turret disables its ability to turn, while shooting the light on the barrel disables its capability to identify targets. You can even shoot the ammo container, spilling bullets onto the ground that you can pick up and use yourself. Nonetheless, wandering around shooting the same ol’ turrets gets dull pretty quickly. It doesn’t help that they’re so small, which makes them unsatisfying to shoot, a big problem in a game fundamentally about shooting things. Yet this is only a minor issue compared to the progression system, which is one of the worst I have encountered in a very long time. To summarise, collecting 5 tapes on a level results in level completion and an increase in your rank, which provides access to new guns and harder challenges. But when you die, it doesn’t just send you back to the start of a level, it actually reduces your rank, equivalent you throwing you back to the start of a previous level. Click to enlarge It’s an unbelievably hostile design choice.

Not least because you will die a lot playing Receiver. Not only are those turrets surprisingly tricky considering they can’t move, there are also plenty of opportunities for accidents in Receiver. For example, holstering your Colt 1911 without putting on the safety can result in a misfire, giving yourself a fatal bullet wound in the leg. That’s a cool idea. Having a misfire cost me two levels of progress is absolutely not As if that wasn’t bad enough, you also lose all your progress on restart. All of it. Now, Wolfire has said its going to address these progression issues, but at the time of writing they’re very much present and very much unwelcome. I don’t mind restarting a level on death, but constantly losing ranks just makes me want to quit the game and knowing that I’ll lose all my progress on quitting makes me not want to play it at all. Click to enlarge Even if those progression issues were completely resolved, I can’t help but feel that Receiver’s interesting mechanical ideas are hindered by a lack of scope. It needs more enemy types, more environment variety, and just a bit more depth to differentiate itself from the original.

 

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System Requirment :

MINIMUM:
Operating system and 64-bit processor required
OS: Windows 7/8/10 64-bit
Processor: Core i3 2.4 Ghz
RAM: 4 GB of memory
Graphics: Intel HD 4000
Storage: 500 MB available space
Disk space: 22 GB of available disk space
Sound Card: DirectX compatible

Network: Broadband Internet connection

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RECOMMENDED:

Storage: 500 MB available space
Disk space: 22 GB of available disk space
Sound Card: DirectX compatible

OS: Windows 8.1+

Processor: 2Core i5 2.8 Ghz

Memory: 8 GB RAM

Storage: 500 MB available space
Disk space: 22 GB of available disk space
Sound Card: DirectX compatible

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Edited May 16, 2020 by Naser DZ