Reload review

Reload is what you would get if a bowling alley arcade shooter crawled its way into your computer. Steam has recently encountered the issue of games slipping through Early Access and Greenlight while being poorly adapted for the PC, a buggy mess, or just plain bad. Unfortunately Reload has managed to wholeheartedly fit that bill.

Police Trainer was a classic arcade shooter many of us grew up playing in arcades, bars, and bowling alleys and Reload does its best to follow the model of arcade game while lacking what made it great. Reload strips down the genre to its barest, giving players a series of training scenarios where players must use their mouse and occasionally their keyboard to shoot their way through the clunky and ill designed levels. Mouse acceleration is a tremendous issue and in any game where pinpoint accuracy is an absolute necessity the quality of gameplay suffers greatly.

The game doesn’t follow through with its claim of being “a realistic weapons and tactics trainer”, everything the game presents claiming the opposite effect. During every ‘training’ scenario, excluding the sniper rifle scenarios, players must fire from their hip while utilizing the swaying reticle that zips across your screen due to the aforementioned mouse acceleration. Feedback from the weapons is exactly what should be expected from a mobile game: a large lack of recoil and dull sound design. When a game about guns has nothing but uninspired gunplay, what’s the point?

Reload is a game that belongs on the Google Play Store and iTunes for 99 cents, not on Steam for $4.99. Reload’s place on the Steam store might very well have to do with its history in Steam Greenlight and the promise to provide Steam Codes in exchange for votes to get the game into the store. This has been a practice used by developers to get their games up on the storefront in order to ship as many copies as possible before negative reviews pile up while Greenlight voters are given a copy of the game for being a helping hand. This practice in itself has recently become such a large problem that Valve came out and made a statement discouraging Greenlight Submitters to do giveaways in exchange for votes.