Cartoon Network and DC Comics Team-Up for Superhero Adventures
http://www.tvguide.com/News/Cartoon-Network-DC-1031019.aspx
Sweet!
God damn it Gearbox. Looks like Duke Nukem Forever is starting the delay cycle again. Will it resurface in 2025? Who know.
[quote]grayman19 wrote:
God damn it Gearbox. Looks like Duke Nukem Forever is starting the delay cycle again. Will it resurface in 2025? Who know.[/quote]
I don’t pay attention to anything Duke related unless it has a buy now button next to it.
They are just hyping it up even more delaying it. I personally think the game will be mediocre at best. I’ll eat my words once it comes out if ever.
[quote]Soulja874 wrote:
Hmmmmmmm. Not sure.
Seems like the effects especially are a bit outdated (may not be a big deal though)… But what I’m actually worried about are the controls.
I don’t know if that’s a PC or Console vid, but the guy playing does seem to have some real trouble getting his crosshair to stay on target… Either that’s not mouse-controlled or there is some delay built in or so to make it feel like you’re controlling an actual big ass robot.
But it looks like a fairly standard shooter overall, not so much a mech sim in terms of gameplay… So making targeting unnecessarily difficult is likely a bad idea.
Just some thoughts based on previous mech games I’ve played…
[quote]Davinci.v2 wrote:
[quote]Stern wrote:
[quote]Cephalic_Carnage wrote:
[quote]Davinci.v2 wrote:
The Witcher 2 is going to dominate DA2, I’m sure of it. [/quote]
Probably… Though it’s a somewhat different kind of game…
I want Baldur’s Gate 3 or Planescape Torment 2…
Damnit.
[/quote]
The Witcher looks fantastic but yea, very different game from DA. Reminds me of Thief really…a much better looking Thief.[/quote]
Did either of you play the first witcher? Both witcher 1 and 2 are nothing like any of the thief games (I played the entire series as a kid). That witcher clip I posed was simply a mission where you had to escape from a prison and they were showing off some of the stealth. The witcher is much more like DA but without the party. You can pause the game, decide which weapons and spells to use against which opponents, select missions and make choices through dialogue and mission objectives. You can even zoom way out to a more top down view. I guess I posted a poor video representing the game.
Check this out if interested. Sorry it’s not embedded, I couldnt find this vid on youtube.
[/quote]
I played through the first witcher. Yes some of the gamplay is similar, but as the other poster said, it’s not exactly party driven for one…
[quote]Cephalic_Carnage wrote:
Just some thoughts based on previous mech games I’ve played…
[/quote]
Man, that reminds me of MechWarrior. I used to play it back in the day - I loved that game.
[quote]undecimber wrote:
[quote]Cephalic_Carnage wrote:
Er. Okay, that post was kind of long.
[/quote]
It was a very good read though, you could easily write reviews.
I agree with your writings about DA:2 and the earlier stuff about Bulletstorm.
If possible when Crysis 2 is out - could you please write another ‘long’ post?
[/quote]
Possible spoilers for Crysis 2:
Played Crysis 2, but I’m not yet all the way through. PLEASE NOT THAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT THE SINGLE PLAYER GAME, I HAVEN’T PLAYED MULTI YET.
Also note that I played it on the PC, got it via steam. It’s uncut even, despite me living in Germany. Cool. Everything was in English too, thank god. I hate playing games in German, even though it’s my primary language…
Graphics:
So far… The game really does run very well considering it’s graphics. I can’t play it on 1920x… But that’s to be expected (again, I really want to kill the idiot who thought that giving such a crazy high native resolution to a gaming laptop is a good idea, what the fuck?).
On 12xx it runs fantastic, no slow-downs, all details on max (download the graphics settings tool for it, for some obscure reason Crysis 2 does not normally let you manage individual settings at all… What is this, a damn console adaption?).
It actually reminds me quite a bit of fear 2 (better obviously)… In terms of where the developers cut details to speed things up, and where they went all-out.
Not much more to say… It’s not really the “wow” fest I thought It’d be, but it does things very well regardless. Some minor things that bother only if the pace slows down and you get to look at things close-up: The char models are a bit low poly and not too well constructed sometimes (marines, alien infantry). At least that’s what it looks like to me. Not too big a deal.
The alien designs aren’t my thing… Especially their “heavies” who look like they were taken right out of Halo (hunters I believe they were called there 
Another thing is that battles between humans (cell or marines) and aliens… Look rather old-school in terms of animations and how the models interact with each other in combat when you aren’t directly involved… Bit of a shame really.
The game environments feature a lot of scripted effects (bridge collapsing, smoke and dust all over the place, fighting in that environment then) which add to the atmosphere, but you are also pretty much on a railroad throughout the game… No more truly open environments (you usually have more than one way to approach a major situation, but those paths are situated fairly close together. It doesn’t really harm the game much, but it also does take away some fun things you could do in the original game…
For example, I got tired of the Viet Ko… Pardon me… North Vietna… ahem … North Korean patrols in the first game and just swam several kilometers at the bottom of a river running in the right direction, sometimes stealthed, navigating the murky waters with the map/compass… Felt all navy-seal like and shit.
Can’t really do that anymore of course… And the few shops/flats you go through in the ruined city in Crysis 2 feel very generic mostly, they don’t really make you think “whoa, I’m creeping through the ruins of NYC, people used to live here man…”.
Gameplay:
-Okay, the weapons are much better than in the first crysis in terms of how they feel, the damage they do vs. enemies (with the occasional exception) and you actually being able to hit something that isn’t running right towards you.
So weapon physics are better too.
That being said, I have one major complaint, and not just about crysis 2 (also homefront, more on that in another post):
WHAT THE FUCK IS IT WITH THE LIMITED AMMO CARRYING CAPACITY IN SHOOTERS LATELY?
I do not want to have to rearm every 20 seconds! It breaks the damn flow of the game.
Apparently the guys who developed the kick-ass nanosuit I’m wearing forgot to add more than 4 magazine pouches?
Problem is that many weapons here fire rather fast, and while enemies can take a lot less damage than they could in crysis 1, they still eat up the ammo in direct combat (aliens especially).
If I fire 20-30 shots full auto to kill some guy or alien (happens, you can sneak a lot of the time though but it gets boring eventually) and I only have like 4 reloads or so… Well.
It’s of course fun to go for stealth head shots and such, but sometimes you just want to let loose and see the graphic effects at work, right? Especially with a damn m60! It has a 100 round mag, and 100 rounds for reloading, that’s it… You go through those rather fast…
The worst offender is the SMG/PDW (forgot the name, looks like an mp7 or something roughly in shape)… When using an extended mag mod, you have 45 bullets in the magazine, and 90 in reserve. It fires VERY fast and does very little damage. You always have access to heavier weapons with more ammo. They may not sound as cool, but yeah.
Against humans it’s so-so. Against aliens, even basic ones, it has literally no purpose. You will run out of ammo after killing 3 or so in direct combat.
This makes me wonder why the developers put it in the game at all, or why they did not make it more useful… I mean, there is like no reason to pick it up, ever, and you only get it mid-way through the game I think.
Another thing is that, oftentimes, I pretty much stuck with one weapon and ignored everything else because that’s all you need. M60, sometimes the heavy assault rifle (whatever the name was) whenever the m60 was out of ammo or I got bored, the scar whenever nothing better was around… Sometimes the auto shotgun (you get a regular one too) for fun. And the HMG.
Oh god, the HMG. That’s the '50-ish gun you see in the trailer. Fires slowly, got 150 bullets fresh (can’t pick up more, gotta get a new one). Kills standard enemies in a few hits at most.
You can use your cloak with it, but can’t grab ledges or jump as high.
You can get it by tearing it off it’s mount on a vehicle or sandbags or chest-high wall (there are a lot of those…) or some such.
And while it’s fun to use at first… It’s fucking everywhere. I swear you have access to these for 90% of the game. Which makes all other weapons (except maybe the sniper, but you don’t really need it) obsolete except in some rare situations against heavies and such.
It totally unbalances the game in my opinion, I ended up using it more than any other weapon… And you can’t even restock it’s damn ammo, you always have to pick up a new one when you run out…
You pretty much need it on higher difficulties in situations where you are swarmed by enemies and have no really reliable cover…
One more thing: Heavies usually need multiple hits from the rocket launcher or multiple packs of c4… That’s honestly annoying and you may as well just keep shooting at their heads/necks with the m60 or HMG until their helmet’s fall off, then shoot a little more and they die. That also seems to freeze them in place… Overall, it feels like explosives and rockets don’t really have enough power behind them… You pretty much only use them against big enemies, and then they really just don’t do the damage you’d expect. Not very satisfying to use.
Oh well.
Let’s get on with this… The suit.
Okay, apart form it’s strange lack of ammo carrying capacity (it can envelop your weapon in nanites to cloak it along with you, but cannot “build” pouches?), the way the suit works now is quite the improvement over the crysis one suit.
One thing that bugged me in the first crysis was that despite your super-cool high-tech nano-suit, you could, even on lower difficulties, pretty much take no more damage than your average enemy soldier. (when using the assault rifle and hitting him center of mass)
That’s rather comical, no? I mean, even in armor mode. Your suit energy will run out so fast that it really feels like you aren’t, ah, wearing protection at all haha
And you walk 3 meters in stealth mode and there goes your energy. Well, not quite, but sort of.
In crysis 2 your suit energy is still limited, but esp. with some suit upgrades you can stay in stealth mode, even walking instead of crouching, for quite some time…
If you fire when stealthed, you will lose all your energy and decloak though. (hint: quickly switch to armor mode before hitting the trigger, that way you don’t lose all your energy and you are ready for return fire, then you can switch back to stealth after the kill and you should have enough energy left to run or re-engage from a new position).
The controls are MUCH improved… You no longer have to use the damn radial menu, you can just hit “e” for stealth mode and “q” for armor mode (with default settings).
Strength mode activates automatically when high-jumping, dashing, using a power attack in melee etc.
This makes gameplay much more fluid, you are no longer getting your ass shot off while trying to select stealth mode from a bloody menu.
Armor mode is also different now… In Crysis one it was the default mode, you switched back to it automatically when your energy ran out or such (I believe, has been a while though).
Now it’s “maximum armor” mode, so an improvement over base-armor, and it does drain a little energy to keep it activated (plus it makes you loud and heavy as fuck, but feels cool, like you are the fuckin’ terminator). It drains additional energy when you get hit, but it’s not much of an issue and you can upgrade it for cheap.
Stealth mode drains energy somewhat faster, but again, with upgrades (more expensive though) you can stay in it longer.
There is plenty of cover in the game, so cloaking yourself when in the open and recharging energy while in cover works well.
That being said… You can pretty much stealth kill almost everything in the game, or just plain sneak past most enemies. That can be cool, but… Hmmmm. Gets tedious after a while.
Normally you de-cloak when you shoot and it drains your energy completely (as I mentioned before), but add a silencer to a compatible weapon and the energy drain becomes less, allowing you to stay in stealth mode for more than 1 shot usually (it doesn’t always seem to work right though, sometimes the silenced sniper lets me get off only 1 shot despite full energy).
Combining the HMG with stealth mode and then armor mode whenever you want to kill something is pretty much the way to break the damn game though. It makes things too easy, even on higher difficulties. You can’t manipulate objects or even access your visor (for tactical view) or your upgrade menu or anything while carrying the HMG though… You always have to throw it to the side (apparently, it’s not possible to just set it down the normal way… Whatever), do what you want to do, then pick it up… But all that is is an annoyance.
Another suit function is the nano vision… Pretty much a kind of heat vision. Makes everything look ugly but allows you to identify targets even through smoke/dust, at night, or when driving a vehicle fast and when everything looks a little too same-ish on the screen.
Unfortunately, this vision mode drains energy slowly. And whenever your energy is being drained, it obviously is not recharging. This really limits the usefulness of nano-vision… If you want to stay stealthed and you don’t have the right upgrades yet, nano-vision will really cut your stealth time short, especially if you have to jump and grab a ledge while you’re at it (power mode activates quickly on top of everything else and drains energy).
Using it by itself is rarely useful (in combat on higher difficulties you’d get killed without stealth or armor mode on, but nanovision would limit your energy too much), for example when you just ran into cover cloaked and you now want to check where the enemies are… But you also want your energy to recharge so all suit modes and nano vision must be off… You’d think that whatever generates electricity in your suit would be strong enough to power some damn goggles and still recharge it’s batteries at the same time, no? Or can’t we just use AAA batteries for the goggles instead of the suit power supply?
Really now developers… I could understand this if nanovision actually gave you a huge advantage, but please… It makes the game look ugly and you don’t see where the hell you’re going/driving so it’s a big trade off already!
Multiplayer would be a different situation of course…
Suit upgrades are bought with nano-whatever, which you pick up from dead alien grunts or heavies. Problem is that the stuff disappears after a while, so I ended up not sniping aliens from a distance and just walking in, steamrolling them with the HMG most of the time, and then quickly collecting the nano-stuff.
It should be noted that you can only have one suit upgrade active from the 4(or 5?) branches… So 1 armor upgrade, 1 stealth… Etc. That plus the fact that only some of the upgrades are truly useful (the threat tracer which makes bullet trails more obvious just makes them look annoying), such as the lower drain from armor and stealth, means that after getting those upgrades, there is no point in collecting more nano-crap.
So then you can snipe to your heart’s content… Although by that time you will likely be knee-deep in aliens all the time anyway… HMG time. AGAIN.
Overall the gameplay becomes rather same-ish throughout the game… You can change your approach any time (stealth, outright combat… Though to be honest, at high difficulty the latter is rather dangerous due to the often great numbers of enemies which at times get replenished infinitely until you move on from the area… So stealth is kind of forced on you at times)… There are only a few different kinds of enemies, and the 2-3 basic ones are what you see for 95% of the game.
While it’s true that the weapons are a lil’ low on the ammo side and sometimes still take a few shots too many to kill something depending on the weapon and enemy, you will practically break your shins on the ever-present ammo-crates throughout the game… You can’t go 5 meters without running into one… So in the end, you never truly run out (except with special weapons which only refill if you walk over another of it’s kind)… This combined with stealth mode, sniping, the HMG or m60… Means that enemies are, despite all the attempts at balancing, rather easy to defeat by and large.
Play on the easier difficulties and they’re practically push-overs, only endangering you if your suit energy runs out and you can’t find a quit place to recharge.
I won’t spoil the story, except to say that it’s pretty standard stuff as usual. No big deal, but yeah.
At least the game feels reasonably cinematic overall with it’s scripted scenes and everything.
Overall I believe that this is definitely a superior experience to the old crysis… Not really perfect or anything, but it’s a better shooter than many recent ones… Campaign also feels longer than the old one…
I’ll report back after finishing the last mission or two…
[quote]RSGZ wrote:
[quote]Cephalic_Carnage wrote:
Just some thoughts based on previous mech games I’ve played…
[/quote]
Man, that reminds me of MechWarrior. I used to play it back in the day - I loved that game.[/quote]
Me too man. Too bad they turned the fourth one into mech-quake with worse graphics than the third.
Hey, the new mechwarrior game had a trailer out ages ago which looked reasonably good… I wonder how that will turn out? I hope it plays more like MW3 in terms of how the mechs feel…
Is that still in development?
[quote]Cephalic_Carnage wrote:
[quote]RSGZ wrote:
[quote]Cephalic_Carnage wrote:
Just some thoughts based on previous mech games I’ve played…
[/quote]
Man, that reminds me of MechWarrior. I used to play it back in the day - I loved that game.[/quote]
Me too man. Too bad they turned the fourth one into mech-quake with worse graphics than the third.
Hey, the new mechwarrior game had a trailer out ages ago which looked reasonably good… I wonder how that will turn out? I hope it plays more like MW3 in terms of how the mechs feel…
Is that still in development?
[/quote]
Honestly, I lost touch with that game years ago. If they made a new one I’d seriously be up for it though.
[quote]RSGZ wrote:
[quote]Cephalic_Carnage wrote:
[quote]RSGZ wrote:
[quote]Cephalic_Carnage wrote:
Just some thoughts based on previous mech games I’ve played…
[/quote]
Man, that reminds me of MechWarrior. I used to play it back in the day - I loved that game.[/quote]
Me too man. Too bad they turned the fourth one into mech-quake with worse graphics than the third.
Hey, the new mechwarrior game had a trailer out ages ago which looked reasonably good… I wonder how that will turn out? I hope it plays more like MW3 in terms of how the mechs feel…
Is that still in development?
[/quote]
Honestly, I lost touch with that game years ago. If they made a new one I’d seriously be up for it though.[/quote]
Switch to HD after the ad.
I think this is just a very, very early version though… It’s an old trailer.
Going to do a little review on Homefront single-player, but have to go to the gym first…
[quote]Cephalic_Carnage wrote:
Switch to HD after the ad.
I think this is just a very, very early version though… It’s an old trailer.[/quote]
Definitely looks like it has a long way to go, it doesn’t excite me in the least.
[quote]RSGZ wrote:
[quote]Cephalic_Carnage wrote:
Switch to HD after the ad.
I think this is just a very, very early version though… It’s an old trailer.[/quote]
Definitely looks like it has a long way to go, it doesn’t excite me in the least.[/quote]
What do you feel is missing? The gameplay seemed like standard mechwarrior (except for the urban environment I guess), no?
I’m not sure about it either, but that was pretty much the trailer used to announce the game like a year ago or so… And still no release date that I know of, so yeah.
[quote]Cephalic_Carnage wrote:
[quote]RSGZ wrote:
[quote]Cephalic_Carnage wrote:
Switch to HD after the ad.
I think this is just a very, very early version though… It’s an old trailer.[/quote]
Definitely looks like it has a long way to go, it doesn’t excite me in the least.[/quote]
What do you feel is missing? The gameplay seemed like standard mechwarrior (except for the urban environment I guess), no?
I’m not sure about it either, but that was pretty much the trailer used to announce the game like a year ago or so… And still no release date that I know of, so yeah.
[/quote]
I’m not sure, I guess that since gaming in general has come such a long way I’d expect them to make it look a lot more appealing, if you will. Perhaps it’s just the clip and scenario they chose for the preview.
It’s another playing the game too, but I think I last played Mechwarrior about 15 years ago.
POSSIBLE HOMEFRONT SPOILERS AHEAD:
Okay… Homefront single-player campaign, just played through this on a friends’ PC.
I actually just wanted to test it out for a few hours.
I ended up finishing it, very unexpectedly, in like… 3 to 3 and a half hours total.
Huh?
Graphics:
Older generation engine and all that it seems, but it gets the job done…
Not much to say really… Some of the environments are surprisingly detailed though, nice touches here and there…
That’s pretty much it.
Gameplay and story:
Very damn repetitive. Feels like call of duty (including helicopter mission, though you can actually steer the thing… And you apparently cannot crash or anything) pretty much, except that you have to pick up a new weapon every 5 enemies or so because the protagonist is apparently wearing a defective crysis-2 nanosuit (read: he has like 3 mag pouches and that’s it and can only hold 2 weapons at a time. It makes more sense in this game because the resistance fighters are mostly civilians with civilian gear, police tac vests etc, obviously not allowing for a full combat loadout).
It’s not exactly bad though, but not really a strong-point of the game really… The story and such could have been (it’s red dawn without teen-agers, but cut ridiculously short for no reason/rushed and riddled with cliches… The red-dawn writer or whatever was involved, but apparently didn’t do much of a job here…).
On the one hand, there is some realism here… As mentioned, the resistance is made up of civilians and they don’t usually have military grade clothing etc and get their weapons from dead north korean troops.
So ammo loadouts are similar to what you get in counter-strike or even less(!). That works in CS because (last time I checked, like 8 years ago) that game is all about matches of 5 minutes or less, 5 against 5 or so.
But in Homefront, your 3 or 4 resistance dudes (including you… Occasionally there are more, some generic soldiers or resistance troops helping you out, but they don’t do much anyway) have to fight roughly 30+ guys every time they turn a corner… So this is where realism flies out the window because a hand full of civilians shoot their way through about 2000 north korean soldiers, sci-fi sentry guns (huh? Those things totally came out of the left field) and tanks and whatnot.
While the lack of ammo capacity is realistic in this case, and you can only pick up magazines from the same weapon/weapons that use the exact same mag design (first time I’ve seen that in a game I think), the enemy soldiers use roughly 10 different assault rifles, not counting all the other crap they have.
So you can imagine that if a single 10 man korean squad is equipped with 10 different rifles, you will have to switch weapons A LOT due to lack of ammo to be picked up for your favorite gun.
It gets a bit better once you get the SCAR-H drum-mag/saw version and such, but come on developers.
On the other hand, you do get some realism bonus again when your inept civilian resistance guys mess up their mortar fire support and almost light you and the totally superfluous female side-kick up with WP rounds.
There’s also another thing messing up realism.
These Korean’s wouldn’t last past the first day of their invasion due to suffering from the worst logistics nightmare of any war/army.
Real armies have enough trouble supplying everything their troops need in the field in the right quantities or types, but this fictional Korean/Japanese/whatever combination army can apparently keep track of the various mags, ammo, spare parts, orders and whatnot for their 40 different standard weapons and 5 different uniforms which they use, for no apparent reason? Right.
The american army (scattered and mostly defeated it seems. This made me go “huh?” at first, considering what push-overs the Koreans are, but then once you actually meet the in-game American forces everything quickly becomes clear) on the other hand are less adventurously equipped… But just as inept.
See last mission of the game (bridge).
To give you some idea of how the game goes:
You are captured form your home by the evil Koreans, driven in a bus to god-knows where (you see executions and such on the way, to establish that the Koreans are, in fact, evil), and predictably rescued by the resistance.
The rescue operation deserves special mention because HOW they rescue you is so retarded I’m not sure if it was not actually an attempt to kill you instead.
They simply drive a truck into your bus from the side, stuff explodes(I think), your bus does an involuntary cartwheel or two, everyone inside except you (but including your fellow prisoner, if I remember correctly) gets fatally injured or nearly so… And then some resistance puke comes in and helps you out. Gives you a weapon right away and trusts you with it (this is a recurring theme, you even get “sniper duty” quite early in the game. You, a guy they don’t know, who is a pilot by trade. Clearly the best guy available for sniping stuff?).
You make your way through the neighborhood yadda-yadda and end up in the resistance base.
Which is sort of a sub-urban area with camo nets over it for good measure. It’s all idyllic and stuff and the people there refer to it as oasis or so.
You can explore it for a bit (because there is no way you could be a spy or maybe not like the resistance for nearly killing you with their idiotic plan), but while there is a lot of attention to detail here on how people get by in their daily lives with self-made water pumps, children playing, growing plants under camo nets (hm), etc, no one really has a name or talks much… And the first time you step in here you KNOW that this little paradise is going to get trashed for the sake of drama and tragedy.
Now, this could have made a good actual base to return to and maybe build-up throughout the game, with people you could end up caring about and all that… But you literally don’t ever see it again, you get this one quick and forgettable visit and the next time you see it everyone is dead, the resistance leader (a black guy… Yes, they couldn’t resist killing off the black guy first… Oh, and they also give you a Korean-looking team member, who is of course an American actually, just to show that not all people who look asian are really EVIL motherfuckers… Or maybe to avoid law-suits from pissed minorities, I dunno) is dead as well, and now you, your Asian-looking techie team-mate, your female side-kick who serves no purpose in the game, and your redneck team-leader are on your own pretty much.
And very pissed off, especially the girl.
Then you attack the Koreans, end up setting some of them on fire, and Girl-soldier suddenly forgets all the dead parents, babies and friends and suddenly starts having doubts about roasting the poor evil-nazi-demon-worshipping (not really) Koreans. Uh-huh.
You find out that the city you are in is apparently surrounded by a wall the Koreans built (more stupid history references… Good grief, Homefront writer) to keep all the people in so they could antagonize them all day long for no reason (what are they even GETTING out of all this?) and you use your poor little robot tank as a suicide bomber (…) to blow that thing to hell.
Outside the city, there live the redneck survival-hill-billies. Who are apparently so powerful that the Korean’s don’t dare come out and fight them (mostly). They are, however, insane (because while they are the only ones who actually thought ahead and prepared themselves and tend to stick together and all, as opposed to the civilians in the city who betray each other all the time, they can’t possibly be sane. That would make the game even shorter because they could just steamroll the Koreans apparently), and so you have to fight them after an impossibly contrived conversation happens, to get one of their light attack choppers.
Good thing you’re a pilot, huh?
To cut a long story short, a short sneak mission and some bland combat later you are flying around escorting 3 trucks loaded with jet fuel, bound for the remnants of the American army… And so on. I wonder why evil armies don’t just buy better SAM technology, because what they are using can’t stand up to the equivalent of a Vietnam era Huey armed with miniguns and 4 endlessly replicating, unguided rockets that probably came from a WW2 depot.
You blow up some more shit, blow up a bridge, escape, and then the end-game begins. Yes, already. Though you don’t yet know that.
You and your new U.S. Army buddies, who are so glad to get the jet-fuel they apparently couldn’t get by themselves with their thousands of soldiers, tanks and whatnot, instead of you and your 2-3 civilian friends, plan to assault the Golden Gate bridge for reasons which escape me at the moment.
How do they do this? They send some vehicles there apparently, but before those arrive they pack you and some infantry into about 8-9 helicopters (with open doors of course, because no military transport heli in any given movie or video game is allowed to close it’s side doors for safety/protection in-flight… That happened in Crysis 2 as well by the way.) and just fly first over and then around and under the bridge from the other side… While under heavy fire from Jets and whatnot… Not trying to stay in cover or shooting back, losing several helicopters and infantry squats that way because this is apparently the fucking Normandy and that’s how it’s done?
I swear fictional militaries, no matter how powerful, would lose in the real world simply due to their incredible ineptitude. Or maybe game designers who go with military themes should at least have SOME inkling of basic military tactics.
Well, you take out some RPG guys with your rifle-mounted grenade launcher… Just so you get to use it once… The game tells you to do this btw, although just shooting the regular way would be quicker… And then you get on the bridge.
I mentioned sci-fi automated gun-towers before, right? Those are used by the Koreans to defend certain places.
Got a 20 mm (supposedly, feels more like 5.56 to me) automated gun and a cool blue scanner light or something. If the light sees you, the gun will start shooting in your direction.
They are mounted on something like a small crane car.
Early on in the game you defeat them by throwing a grenade behind the crane car thingies, supposedly to blow up the engine or controls or whatever.
That makes at least a moderate amount of sense at first, but at the end of the game you end up having to do that with 2 towers… WHILE 2 AMERICAN ABRAMS TANKS AND IFV’S AND WHATNOT ARE PARKED RIGHT IN FRONT, CAREFULLY NOT SHOOTING THE HELPLESS TOWERS TO PIECES WITH THEIR MAIN GUNS FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON.
Your allied vehicle convoy cannot pass these wicked spires of machine-gun-driven doom (the towers aren’t shooting the vehicles either, apparently rightfully scared of waking up the Abram’s gunners from their plot-induced stupor and afraid of eating 120 mm shells?).
This wouldn’t be half as ridiculous if the tower machine guns were something bad-ass, like a GAU-8 or something… And the tanks would actually stop somewhere behind cover, not, say, 20 meters in front and in plain sight of the sentry guns. Oh well.
In the Abrams’ tanks defense it should be noted that a single RPG hit from the front, against the angled part of the armor, is enough to blow said MBT to hell in this game. You get to see this right at the beginning of the bridge assault (last mission of the game) when an Abrams drives over the gates to make way for the rest of the force. Apparently no one thought of looking through the (I don’t remember if it was chainlink fence or bars) see-through gate to check for dangers ahead and maybe snipe them.
Then you fall off the side of the bride the whole thing happens on (which makes it the 50’th time you’ve fallen off some high place in this game due to explodey stuff… Even a character in the game comments on this. Apparently the developers noticed the idiocy… But decided to do it anyway.) right into the river and die, the end.
No, not really (though it would have been no less abrupt). Of course you fall onto a lower level, come up behind the sentry guns, throws grenades at them while your Abram’s tanks sit 20 meters away smirking at the big joke this all is while demurely batting their 120 mm main guns… You get the idea…
And then hop into a HMMV or some such (with a turret that is actually armored, for like, the first time in any movie or video game… They sure could have used some of those in Black Hawk Down) and defeat some enemy-controlled remote-controlled vehicle (you get to pick the targets for one of these of your own side earlier in the game, which is pretty much boring. Oh, and it apparently has more rockets stacked inside it’s launcher than the fucking Doom marine fired throughout the entire first DOOM game. Rockets that look very small but apparently can destroy a t-99 or whatever the fuck the current/future russian MBT is with a single shot. To the front. And are also used against infantry, because they are so cheap and the badly-supplied and equipped civilian resistance has unlimited access to them?).
That vehicle can take roughly 3000000 hits of your HMMV-mounted triple barrel minigun. So things get slightly tedious.
In order to defeat said vehicle, the end-boss of the game (you won’t know that then, or at least I didn’t, I thought that I wasn’t even half-way through the game), you follow it around until it runs into a disabled gas tanker, blow up the tanker (while you are parked 5 feet away), get blown up with it, survive, only to end up in the ending scene of COD MW 1, except slightly different. That is, you are helpless, a bunch of enemy tanks roll in, a fellow resistance guy (Connor. Yes, they named the guy who sort of leads you around for most of the game and is a resistance high-up Connor. Ugh) calls in an air-strike on top of them only to be told that your jets (apparently the Koreans have absolutely no AA capability anymore by this point) have no positive FF identification or some such.
So Connor sacrifices himself by, get this, lighting a flare and running into the middle of the enemy tanks.
Your jets see the flare (the enemy vehicle column does not see it and does not just shoot him dead?) and bomb everything to shit. On the fucking Golden Gate bridge, which was apparently built to withstand major combat and bombardment?
Oh, and Connor could have just thrown the flare most of the way, but that would have been less tragic and all, right?
And that’s it. The end. Your female side-kick cries at the poor guys’ death (or maybe because he was so damn stupid, I don’t know)… I guess we will get a sequel or lots of DLC because the developers apparently forgot to add the other 90% of the story.
This post was long and may have made it sound like the game is long, but trust me, it feels like you’ve barely got started for real and then it’s over.
Then again, with the game-play being so simplistic and repetitive (I got really tired at looking at the damn aimpoint attachment half-way through) and missing elements that could have made this a really interesting game, I suppose it’s just as well…
Shame, lots of wasted potential. DO NOT BUY FOR THE SINGLE PLAYER PART.
Don’t know about multiplayer, I guess that might be somewhat better.
Great reviews C_C
Homefront was very disappointing - I couldn’t recommend the single player to anyone, there’s too much downtime waiting for the NPC’s to finish stuffing about. There’s a stealth mission (very average) where you ‘watch’ the NPC’s go crazy for about 10mins, but I followed them around and it didn’t pick up on it.
Online isn’t too bad - but it’s no better than Black Ops or Battlefield, you might spend a bit of time on it; but you move on after awhile. If you do play it on PC - make sure you change the laggy mouse control setting, it’s terrible.
As for Crysis 2 - I wasn’t buying the game until I heard your thoughts, but it seems like it’s a pretty good game. So I’ll probably pick it up.
[quote]undecimber wrote:
Great reviews C_C
Homefront was very disappointing - I couldn’t recommend the single player to anyone, there’s too much downtime waiting for the NPC’s to finish stuffing about. There’s a stealth mission (very average) where you ‘watch’ the NPC’s go crazy for about 10mins, but I followed them around and it didn’t pick up on it.
[/quote] The most retarded part is that you just went through half the Korean army, but a few hill-billies require a stealthy approach?
And then you STILL have to fight them!
Well, it won’t exactly blow you away, but it’s definitely one of the better (best even?) recent shooters out there… I just found out that the story was apparently written by Richard Morgan… That’s a shock, because he is a great writer for the most part (esp. the Kovacs series)…
Oh well.
I heard that there is a DX 11 patch coming out for Crysis 2… I could have sworn it already looked like DX11 but oh well. Hope that won’t kill the performance.
What’s the ratio of human killing : alien killing in Crysis please?
I ask this only because killing aliens bores me to tears + they weren’t that great in the first one.
The last alien FPS I really liked was ‘Prey’ - they made an impact, if that makes sense. None of the sissy crap you see from the Halo games.