LF2 Hetero Clash v14 - Final release

[rewlf2]

Introduction
Initially being a rip-off of R-LF2, LF2 Hetero Clash (which means a battle of dimension and new features) is a version which literally redesigns everything a LF2 has. This version includes new combat system, AI improvement, original background and interface, challenging stage mode and several extra mission modes.

Description
The combat system:
1. AI reinforcement
A system called AMAS (Alternative move for AI system) is implemented.
Computer players can use majority of moves in certain conditions.
(The AI is designed purely from Data changing so expect it to be different from Hex editing)

2. Retaliate system:
Two moves are added to major characters which are triggered by:
2.1. Auto retaliate - Defending a blow when close to an enemy
2.2. Manual retaliate - Defending a blow and pressing D again when it hits
They are not powerful but are versatile moves as their cost are low.

3. Redesign of all characters:
Every move and property of all character are redesigned to add the following features:
Ultimate move - has large cost, though powerful it is not imbalanced and is compatible with combos
Large number of new properties - for example, temporary powerups, attacks that damage enemy lying on ground
A completely new combo system

4. Character balance:
5 characters with strength near fighters are added.
Strength of Bat now matches fighters.
3 new bosses are added.
All bosses now have roughly equal strength, approximately equal to 2.5 fighters.
BatEX, a variation of Bat can only be selected by players, has about strength of a boss.

5. Single-Sided Infinite Defense System
Purely done by Data changing, this system is installed in Boss characters (and a knight)
The system boasts extreme defense of a character as long as he faces his enemy.
The only ways to break the defense are rear attacks, defense piercing, or sometimes when the character is walking.
This system is intended to also greatly strengthen the AI system of the game, and provide valuable boss fighting experience.

6. Weapons
Majority of weapons are removed. Some of heavy weapons are dropped but cannot be picked.
The game focuses largely independent of weapon.
The reason is powering up characters render using common weapons unnecessary.

7. Background effects
Each background has unique effect that is triggered as time passes.
To not interfere with fighting most of them have minimal effects,
some have very large effects and they are mentioned in readme file, so that you will not get annoyed in combat by choosing the wrong map.

Graphics:
My skills in designing characters graphics are not good, however I strive to provide both original and properly credited content.
Thus some character graphics may look like rip-offs but their sources are mentioned inside Credits file.
Many graphics look like poorly designed from Paint, but I attempted to at least give good synergy with their respective moves.

I think my graphic strength inside this game lies inside Background and interface designing.
So aside from a complete new Psuedo-transparent orange interface,
I designed over 10 new backgrounds. Some of them are also ripped but I also credited them.

Stage mode:
Five stages with each including at least 9 substages are included.
Effort has been made to make the stage not insanely difficult (they even have some resting points)
and not tedious. Each stage can be completed under 40 minutes.
Stages are packed with both fighting and puzzles. New types of battle also awaits.

Extra mode:
The Extra mode in LF2 has been split into three extra modes in the game.
You can move your character over the number appearing in the stage to choose your mission.
Thousand Kills - Enemy spawn in multiples of ten. Some trepassing pawns may also randomly spawn.
Survival Mode - Same as that in original LF2
Boss Rush - Fight bosses in a row. Additionally only one character can enter Boss Rush, and only Easy to Hardcore difficulty can be chosen.

Other notices:

The complete movelist and character properties are included inside Readme and Game Intro files.
Credits are given in Credit file.
All three files are written in HTML, including a Chinese and English version (the latter has suffix Eng)
Some issues of the game cannot be resolved. They are included in Game Intro file.

Screenshots

Screenshot (Click to View)

Promotion video
Youtube video


Download
Mediafire

Credits
Credits are given in Credit file.

Also you can see below:

Hong Ba by Kan
Sword and character pictures of Hong Ba has been used.

BanditEX made by Freezen, Youejeen, Kaworu, Minggg, Kasper
The character pictures (without hoe) has been used.

Forbidden Tower Top by Dexploed
This background with some changes has been implemented.

Volcano background by Conrad Leung
The ground with some changes has been implemented.

Dark City by Lo Chiu Chun
This background with some changes has been implemented.

Free graduation-clock Clipart by FreeClipartNow.com
The clock image with changes has been implemented.

Blue box elimination inside Champion mode – Hex editing by Surik
The editing technique is provided by Surik and implemented by me.

Reinforced LF2 by Conrad Leung
Crazy-LF2 by LF2Crazy
This LF2 modification is initially inspired by them.

[STM1993]

I gave it a quick play/look at; I might review it more thoroughly in future.
(full disclosure: as of this post I made it to stage 1-5 with Woody, tried out Davis to Firen & JulianR in VS)

The description above may be quite misleading or long, so here's a summary:

What you can expect:
* Despite being inspired by R-LF2 and using quite a fair lot of opoints, this is NOT a long range projectile-spamming mod.
* Doesn't actually have ddraw.dll custom AI, author simply used a lot of hit_a/j/d tags. This is a purely DC mod.
* All characters' basic stats are generally nerfed - generally low jumps, lower damage, some are slow at walking, and all of them will auto-counter on blocking. You can expect a lot of fall -1 or fall60 attacks and a lot of opointing (even if it isn't long range projectiles).
* Projectiles generally have very limited z-axis.
* Boss characters have a lot of state 7.
* Heavy weapons drop from the sky as obstacles that cannot be picked up. (classic falling stones, exploding crates, C4s, a box that clones itself when hit etc)
* Don't expect vanilla LF2 combos to work here. There are also no milks/beers.

Stage Mode
* Each stage lasts for 9-10 substages. There are no milks or any equivalent; you are strictly reliant on the heal between substages.
* Stage loves to spam random projectiles in very high volume at you as obstacles.
* "Extra mode" is just Survival, but at the beginning there is a number that will change every few seconds; just walk over to the desired number to trigger a different survival stage.

It'd take a while to get used to the rather awkward controls and a bit of reading to know what you're doing.

---

Okay, I just played through stage 1 to 4 on Hardcore(Difficult) solo. I didn't clear stage 1-9 and didn't get past stage 2's firebird section while playing as Davis, then played stage 4 as John. I think its a terrible mod, mostly because it feels very random and inconsistent.

I find that I simply CANNOT melee boss characters. They have state 7 all the time (SSID), always able to face you and combined with the autocounter system, allows them to always be able to counter you in a fist fight, while you yourself cannot simply defend and counter with your own anti-defend attacks due to automatically using autocounter (and its very hard to press D correctly for manual counter). Even then, I find that the autocounter & manual counter attacks are useless against the bosses because of their SSID defense. Because of this, I find that the optimal way to play the game is to just pick John and abuse his DvA all the time against AI, and never use characters who lack unblockable attacks.

//Characters:
Deep/ Louis & Dennis walk really slow.
John is probably the best character to use, if only because he can simply abuse his long-range good damage indestructible bdefend 100 DvA attack.
Henry & Rudolf feel more or less the same I guess.
Firen's fireballs are extremely inconsistent and don't chain well into themselves.
Freeze sometimes punches once, other times twice.
Woody can no longer do his D^A >JA combo. Instead he has a strange followup with fire shadows that will burn and then often pull the enemy back towards you in injured state.
Davis feels very awkward to use. His punch hits twice which is confusing when you're trying to figure out when you need to punch again and its apparently in arest. He can't leap from rolling or use specials from running, and his uppercut has a very weird and easily missed itr where he lifts enemies with sonata and then opoints shadows that deal damage. Apparently his D>A balls' z-axis cannot be controlled.
I noticed that Julian & LouisEX cannot face backwards while in the air, and they look really weird if they were to jump forward and then dash backwards.

All in all the characters are nothing like their vanilla selves, and they feel awkward to use.


//Onto specific parts of stage mode:
The beginning text at the start of each stage is long-winded. If I've read it once, I don't want to read it again and just want to proceed to the next part of the stage, especially frustrating if I'm restarting a level.

A lot of the stage BGs have very limited z-width too, so there's not much room to dodge at all.

You are reliant on purely the HP restoration between substages to heal because there is no milk. This actually makes higher difficulties even more difficult since you lost too much healable HP, but the author had the foresight to make the substages short and split the stage into many separate substages.

Stage 1
Mostly a series of fights against individual heroes, coupled with a minion or two and projectiles being spawned to make things difficult.
All is well until you fight the first SSID boss in 1-6: the boss knight. It is here that you learn that its best to just abuse unblockable attacks or you'll have a hard time. You'd also find that he has a lot of invincibility frames.
Then you fight Bat in 1-8: another huge difficulty spike. Because the stage spawns like 10 bats against you from the right side of the screen, on top of Bat himself spamming a LOT of bats against you, especially when his HP is low! He even has a vampiric grab attack that lets him regain 200hp! Chances are you'd be left with rather little HP. You also can't exactly block the bats.
Finally in 1-9, you fight ALL of the heroes together at once, another difficulty spike, with very limited HP restored from the previous substage. The biggest problem is Bat spamming bats at you, and which would then allow the other heroes to juggle you to death, especially the boss knight's high damage output.

Stage 2
This stage spams a LOT of meteors all over the stage. You are also expected to destroy some statues to proceed to the next substage - however these statues are very durable and can only be damaged by physical punches. It doesn't help that the meteor spam happens constantly with no room to dodge nor any respite for the player to land hits on the statue; you'd have to be incredibly lucky to have the statues be in safe zones for you to punch them.
In stage 2-3, there's a timer and a lot of Jacks will spawn from the left (who love to juggle you with their flipkicks). You're supposed to survive for 2min - there's no indication that this is a SURVIVAL phase as opposed to a "kill all enemies within 2 min" phase.
I died in the firebird stage, I think its stage 2-5. I was completely drained of HP and I had to deal with a firebird that constantly spawns from the right. I didn't see any obstacles I could attack though I saw that there are enemies I'm supposed to attack, and I thought I was supposed to attack the firebird. Projectiles didn't help, using Davis' uppercut didn't help, and using jump attack got me killed.

Stage 3
The BG is EXTREMELY narrow, and you constantly have to deal with magic walls. Apparently you're supposed to attack the magic walls that keep spawning sometimes in the middle of nowhere within a 400 pixel range, but you cannot get too close because it'd then knock you back, but you also cannot use certain projectiles because they'd likely be reflected. There are also more statues to break occasionally.
I also got constantly attacked out of nowhere with no warning by teleporting green bandits with scythes which I can't seem to block. These guys are responsible for killing me twice in the stage, but fortunately my mandatory allies cleared the stage.

Stage 4
Forbidden Tower! This is probably the best stage so far because there are no gimmicks and its based off vanilla Stage 5. The main difference is that Firzen joins you and after stage 5-4 you'll be facing fake Julians multiple times all the way until the final stage 5-10 where you face the real Julian.

After clearing stage 4 and seeing Stage 5-1 spam Jan's demons from the sky, I decided I had enough.

I rated it a 2/5 in the poll. I can see there is a lot of effort in this mod, but it simply doesn't feel good to play at all. At least in R-LF2 you would be wowed by the cool factor and gameplay-wise you knew you could just spam projectiles and win. Here? The moves frankly aren't particularly cool, while gameplay-wise it doesn't feel very deep nor is it obvious what you're supposed to do; in fact it feels confusing. Even if it were well-thought out, it is a mod that takes too much thinking to figure out good combos to use.

[firzen35]

I've tried many versions of this mod before. First i thought it was a great mod (lots of new moves and stuff). Then i kept getting confuser and confuser as the version goes up. Like, you change things a lot (literally, every version is so different from the others), and because of the Chinese readme.txt i couldn't get a clue of what was going on.
Well i haven't tried this tho. But glad to see someone who is so passionate about LF2 like you (this mod first started 4-5 years ago i think). Cheer

[empirefantasy]

I tired it and looks a nice game.

Anyways i have to check all character moves and stages. I only played stage 1,2,3 and most of default heroes.

[the lf2 fan]

dude.......seriously 108MB........