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Helldorado
- Viva Media
- Spellbound
- Strategy
- Release: Apr 9, 2009
- ESRB: Teen
Helldorado
Excruciating difficulty makes this latest addition to the Desperados family one frustrating trip back to the Wild West.
The Good
- Missions are numerous and huge.
The Bad
- Grueling difficulty
- Out-of-date visuals with some frame rate problems
- Not enough atmospheric audio or vocal cues from sentries.
Don't let Helldorado confuse you. Despite the snazzy new name sported by this real-time stealth strategy game set in the Wild West, this is actually the third release in the Desperados series from German developer Spellbound. As with many strategy sequels, don't expect to be treated kindly. Everything about this unbelievably hard tactical game assumes that you have logged serious hours with the previous two Desperados. If you haven't, then say howdy to big-time frustration. Every mission is so spectacularly grueling and the settings so thoroughly rigged against you that you feel like a guy with a broken hand drawing six-guns against Wyatt Earp. The extreme challenge is certain to drive away almost everyone but Desperados veterans itching for another fix and hardy Western aficionados willing to endure anything for a trip back in time.
The story, setting, and characters could have been pulled out of an old Gunsmoke episode. Everything is just as cliched as in the previous Desperados games: You control a team of Wild West stereotypes that includes gruff-but-lovable gunslinger John Cooper, sexy gambler Kate O'Hara, dimwitted Mexican thug Pablo Sanchez, slippery explosives expert Sam Williams, creepy old Doc McCoy, and a Native American tracker named--yes, seriously--Hawkeye. Just in case you don't immediately understand that these are all cornball rip-offs of stock characters featured in oat operas for the past century, each of these clowns underlines the point with goofy order acknowledgements, such as Pablo's expressions of love for tequila, Hawkeye's continual references to the "white devil" and buffalo, and Sam's "Yippee-yi-yay!"
As with most games of this type, each hero has a specific set of abilities. Cooper, for instance, is quick with his six-guns and can make silent kills with a throwing knife. Kate can seduce opponents into a stupor or knock them out with the special powder in her makeup compact. Hawkeye can shoot arrows and throw a tomahawk. Sanchez is a muscleman who can blow baddies away with a shotgun and leave bottles of tequila lying around to tempt guards into drinking themselves unconscious. Gee, a stupid, drunken Mexican bandit. It couldn't be any more of a racist stereotype unless he were constantly wandering off to take siestas in the noonday sun.
All of the characters are drawn up along the same lines as those in the prototypical tactical stealth game, Pyro Studios' Commandos. You go into missions with a team and have to work together to get out of whatever scrape you find yourselves in. The overall story is sketched out roughly and is kind of hard to understand. Not that it matters much. You don't need to know a whole lot about being blackmailed by a mysterious femme fatale into committing various dastardly deeds, because the objectives of the multipart missions are cut-and-dried. Basically, you need to make it from point A to point B in each of the 12 single-player-only missions without attracting the attention of the guards who are between you and the goal. And that ain't easy.
You know how most tactical stealth games tend to place a handful of sentries at key points in levels? How they structure maps like puzzles, with a few guards walking patrol routes with vision cones regularly overlapping so that you need to watch for patterns and sneak on through only when the time is right? Well, that same design pattern is followed here, but with the addition of dozens of enemies wandering around, hanging out having a smoke, waving guns for no particular reason, taking a whiz in the bushes, manning guard towers, and so forth. So as you might expect, the difficulty level in Helldorado is beyond belief, no matter what difficulty setting you choose. If you make a single mistake, a pack of enemies instantly leaps into action to gun you down. Instead of tracking one, two, or three sentries at any given moment, you have to keep an eye on the vision cones of at least half a dozen.
The missions are more tedious than tense. You need to methodically eliminate the opposition one by one to open up a passage through the many, many guards. For instance, in one chapter of the second level, you need to guide Pablo and Sam around a train depot guarded by more US cavalry soldiers than Custer had at Little Big Horn. These troops are scattered across the map in groups of five or six, with all of their vision cones intersecting in such complicated ways that you simply cannot sneak past them. Instead, you need to knock them out, but in a very careful fashion that doesn't alert the whole train station.
First you have to come up with a plan of attack, which requires you to treat each mob of baddies like a logic puzzle and set a pecking order. Then you need to start luring victims off to a quiet spot where you can conk them over the head without raising an alarm. Generally this is done with Pablo's ability to distract enemies with conveniently located bottles of tequila. You need to get close to a vision cone, drop a bottle, retreat posthaste, and then either club the soldier over the head when he wanders over for the free booze or wait for him to chug it down and pass out. Finally, you have to tie up the unconscious enemy with Sam and use Pablo to carry him off to an out-of-the-way spot. Sound like fun? It sort of is at first, but you need to repeat this same formula over and over again to make progress through the level. Just about every enemy along the route you choose to reach the end goal has to be eliminated, because there are few seams to exploit and almost no shortcuts to take.
Actions also sometimes have to be coordinated with multiple team members by using the game's quick action feature. This lets you script attacks and then set them off concurrently, but it can be tough to script everything so that guards are gooned simultaneously. One slight slip is all that's needed for a baddie to get off a gunshot and bring the whole level down on your head. And even when you do pull off some derring-do that would have impressed Sergio Leone (which you can watch in a close-up cinematic camera), chances are good that you will still wind up spotted by a guard you missed. It's just about impossible to see every sentry in a first run-through, because there are so many of them hanging out in the shadows. Most don't say anything unless they spot you, either, so you don't get any audio tip-offs to a nearby enemy presence. Aside from an odd whistle and an even rarer conversation, you're stuck using your eyes, not your ears.
The game quickly turns into one of those immensely annoying "experiment, die, and try again" cycles where you spend more time loading saves than you do plying your sneaky trade. This might be enjoyable for hardcore types who have mastered the previous Desperados games, but most players are going to quickly become discouraged. By the time you hit the fourth mission, you're starting levels up against too many enemies to count, with your team spread out in starting positions all over the map. It's so daunting to look over what's to come that it can be hard to suck up the courage to even start these levels. Missions are massive. The maps consist of sprawling towns, train depots, saloons, and so forth, and they're covered with dusty streets, staggering drunks, water towers, wooden sidewalks, and all and all sorts of other Wild West accoutrement. Every location looks great, too, although the graphics are dated, the characters are a tad pixelated, and the levels are often so packed with enemies that the frame rate gears down until you're in single-digit territory, making progress so choppy that the game verges on the unplayable with the camera zoomed out. Each of the 13 missions takes a good two to three hours to finish, and given the current sub-$20 price of the game, you're getting a good bang for the buck. Still, it's hard to count this as much of a plus when you might be spending those many hours tearing your hair out from frustration.
Challenging strategy games are always appreciated, but Helldorado takes a good thing too far. The difficulty is so extreme that just the act of starting a new level can be depressing, especially after you pan the camera over the landscape to reveal the dozens of enemies that need to be sneaked past or knocked out. Only players who have experience with the Desperados franchise or its inspirations, such as the Commandos franchise, need apply here.
Stalin vs. Martians
- Mezmer Games
- Black Wing , N-Game Studios
- Real-Time Strategy
- Release: Apr 29, 2009
Stalin vs. Martians
Do not play, look at, or even think about this mangled wreck of a strategy game.
The Good
- Dancing Stalin.
The Bad
- It isn't fun, and it isn't funny
- No strategy involved
- Frustrating, broken missions
- Excruciating sound design
- Loads of technical problems.
Don't be offended by Stalin vs. Martians' subject matter. The genocidal communist leader may figure heavily in this budget-priced real-time strategy game, but it's hard to be outraged when he's gyrating his hips to the beat of Russian dance pop, or signing off his written missives with "xxooxx." No, be offended because Stalin vs. Martians is an abysmal game that represents the dregs of game design. It isn't strategic, it isn't fun, and as hard as it tries, it isn't even remotely funny. This is perhaps the worst RTS game ever created, worth neither the 1s and 0s that were used to program it nor the mental exertions expended on this creatively bankrupt waste of hard-drive space.
Actually, calling Stalin vs. Martians a strategy game is a bit of a stretch, though to its credit, you do control units in real time, so at least it gets that part right. You start each of the 12 missions with a given supply of units, and you generally move them all en masse across the map, killing a bunch of aliens while completing the oft-broken mission objectives. When Martians die, they frequently drop gold and power-ups; you spend gold on reinforcements or on special powers, whereas power-ups enhance a unit's armor or attack damage, or perhaps replenish the unit's health. It sounds like an interesting idea designed to keep the action moving. In actuality, it's an absolute mess. Power-ups disappear if you don't maneuver a unit over them, but moving forward toward a sorely needed gold drop may bring you closer to a deadly, goo-spewing greenie. Poor enemy placement and bad pathfinding make the whole process a lame, frustrating war of attrition as you slowly whittle enemy numbers down while summoning replacements for your lost units. And just as the "S" is missing from "RTS," there is no "I" in the AI; your foes either wait for your attack in their assigned position or follow scripted paths, but in no way do they ever require you to think strategically.
Premission briefings from Stalin give context to the proceedings: Martians are invading 1940s Siberia! The concept had potential, but the missions themselves are a complete disaster. A few are so easy and straightforward that you can complete them within 10 minutes or so. Others drag on endlessly, forcing you to move your sluggish tanks from one corner of the map to the other. It's anyone's guess why they move so slowly when you issue a move order but develop a sense of urgency when you issue an attack order. But even when you manage to get your units to their destination, you'll be banging your head on your computer desk out of pure frustration. In one mission, you can lose if Martian units invade a village. The final objective in the same mission involves killing a roaming, buglike alien, which might be near the village center when the objective is triggered, and thus can count as an invasion. This abysmal mission structure can lead to a loss not based on your actions, but rather on thoughtless game design.
Similar issues plague several missions, such as those in which units clip into level geometry and jitter around trying to extricate themselves, but even the functional ones are beyond irritating. Poor balancing and cheap attacks lead to numerous annoyances, such as in one mission in which you must use only infantry units to destroy enemy artillery that can wipe away almost all of your soldiers in one hit. This leads to a lot of trial and error, forcing reloads of your saved games until you know exactly what the game expects of you. But mission design aside, Stalin vs. Martians doesn't even get the basics right. Trying to drag a selection box around units can be nigh impossible if the mouse pointer is near the edge of the screen; the absence of significant visual and audio feedback makes it hard to tell if you've activated a special power, or whether you're actually firing at an enemy; and infantry units will go wandering off in some direction other than where you commanded the control group to go.
A few ear-splitting musical videos break up the putrid gameplay, and they offer the only seconds of so-bad-it's-good amusement that Stalin vs. Martians provides. You won't be inclined to laugh at scenes of zombified communists and be-bopping aliens, though, as much as you'll stare with your mouth agape. The game clearly aims for broad satire. Three-eyed Martians are ripped directly from Pixar's classic animated film Toy Story, and swarms of tiny ETs resemble the charming creatures from the acclaimed Pikmin games. Selected units bleat out such gems as "I am like Bolshevik on bicycle!" and the apparently homoerotic "My name's Ivan, I like you." But every lame grab for chuckles falls totally flat. (What image is a Bolshevik on a bicycle meant to convey anyway?) The forced humor lacks charm and wit, and though it aims for the tragically ludicrous mentality of a camp classic, it's just plain tragic.
The production values struggle with similar attempts at energy, but their exertions will exhaust both you and your system. The sound design deserves special mention for its limited selection of awful house music and tinny array of Martian bloops and beeps. Some onscreen activities don't even produce noise, which is a rather welcome glitch, given that your ears will need a break from the excruciatingly aggressive soundtrack and overlapping, nonsensical chatter of selected units. The environmental visuals are at least colorful, though all of the maps look the same until you reach the final missions. Some of the Martians are cute, though the art design displays absolutely no creativity; for a game featuring alien lizards and Russian tanks on the same battlefield, Stalin vs. Martians looks completely generic. That's a shame, considering that a clever visual slant could have helped veil the decrepit technology powering this dud. There are no graphics options whatsoever in the game menus--no antialiasing or anisotropic filtering, not even an option to change the resolution. How unusual, then, that the frame rate takes occasional dips, and that the game crashed multiple times on multiple systems during our testing. The mouse pointer disappeared after every musical interlude, forcing a restart each time. Changing the "Do you like cats?" menu option from "yes" to "no" had no apparent effects on these issues.
You can play only as the communist forces, and there is no multiplayer, but why on Earth, or on Mars for that matter, would you want to extend an experience like this? Don't play Stalin vs. Martians, even if you are a big fan of communism or Martians--or even both.
Tunnel Rats
- Boll AG
- Replay Studios , Team Toro
- Historic First-Person...
- Release: May 15, 2009
Tunnel Rats Review
Five buggy hours of tunnels, booby traps, and laughably bad dialogue.
The Good
- Hmm.
The Bad
- Ugly, monotonous, unrelenting tunnels
- Deadly traps demand nonstop pixel hunting
- Unpleasant protagonist
- Short, but not sweet.
Tunnel Rats: 1968, inspired by the movie of the same name, is the brainchild of infamous German director Uwe Boll, who has made a name for himself adapting video games into movies. A single-player first-person shooter set during the Vietnam War, Tunnel Rats attempts to express something terrible and disturbing about the horrors of war, and in a way, it succeeds. After spending an hour with the game, you'll begin to understand how terrible it is, and after two hours you'll be profoundly disturbed that you bought it. In fact, the game gives itself away from the start. "You tunnel boys like things real deep," remarks a GI during the opening cutscene, "like deep down in your own dark tunnel of the soul."
You play as Brooks, an American soldier stranded alone in an inhospitable Vietnamese jungle. Brooks is one of the least sympathetic heroes you'll ever play as; he's a cruel, foul-mouthed jerk who is often deranged but never witty. He is apparently supposed to be on a character arc that sends him to the cusp of madness, but in reality he's insane from the start. Brooks' eccentricities are revealed primarily through frequent, awkward monologues, which vary schizophrenically from antiwar rants to "That's what you get, you commie bastards!" The other glimpses you get into your character's psyche come in the form of images from Brooks' childhood and life back in California. You discover, for instance, that he has a bizarre neurosis related to hunting with his father, which never makes much sense.
The character's voice acting is just as clumsy and inconsistent as the writing, and his inappropriate attitude is reflected throughout the game. From one perspective, Tunnel Rats deserves credit for daring to defy political correctness. However, a consequence of Tunnel Rats' zealously anti-PC approach is that it will offend just about everyone. For instance, the game's portrayal of American soldiers goes from bad (Brooks) to worse when you encounter a GI who has turned into a shrieking cannibal, and to offend the other side, your character issues a steady stream of anti-Vietnamese slurs and goes out of his way to desecrate every Vietnamese corpse. Granted, ripping the ears off of your slain enemies is optional, but since it increases your total health, only the most principled individuals will be able to abstain. In addition to the obviously poor taste of this "feature," the game makes the experience (and its less disgusting counterpart--taking dog tags from dead GIs) especially painful in two ways: first, you can't interact with just any part of the body; you have to find the right pixel to "use" in order to get the ear. Second, for each trophy you collect, you have to listen to your character's insipid, psychotic ramblings, such as, "Beats your precious stag heads, eh, Pops?"
Most of the game takes place in the tunnels, a dreary, subterranean world of endlessly repeating dirt-brown walls, one-hit-kill traps, and Viet Cong, with the occasional addition of a room, usually consisting of several boxes and a portrait of Ho Chi Minh. Navigating the tunnels can go from wearisome to downright nauseating as you spend what feels like hours staring at the floor and looking for unavoidable traps. You disarm one variety by completing pointless, irritating quick-time events and the other with the use key, but once again your cursor must be in exactly the right spot, so attempts to traverse the tunnel at greater than a snail's pace will frequently be rewarded with instant death. Easier to outwit, but equally deadly, are a handful of tunnel-dwelling snakes, who have, for all practical purposes, forged an unholy alliance with the Viet Cong. If all the instant-death obstacles aren't sufficiently frustrating, the checkpoint-only save system forces you repeatedly through the same trap-infested tunnels, unless of course you get the loading bug, in which case you'll have to restart the level entirely. Another bug will send you clipping into forbidden areas from which you can't escape, and additionally, every time you die, you lose the ability to throw grenades for the remainder of the level, so do adjust your strategy accordingly.
Aboveground sections are a welcome relief from the underground torments that make up the majority of the gameplay. Although the jungle is still full of traps, you can jump over them or avoid them entirely, and the Vietnamese enemies are more plentiful out here, so you can indulge in some typical linear shooter action (sans grenades, in all likelihood). For your aiming needs, don't bother using the iron sights; the crosshairs are much more accurate, particularly on the "commie" weapons. As for your enemies, they'll have no trouble shooting you, but that's about the most advanced tactic in their arsenal--some will even charge you with a knife as they stare down the barrel of your AK-47. Graphically, the outdoor scenes are beautiful in comparison with the tunnels, but objectively they don't come close to modern standards, most notably in the character and weapon modeling departments. Sound is likewise underwhelming throughout the game, and you may even notice that the ambient bird sounds from the jungle occasionally filter deep into the tunnels, as if to mock you.
Tunnel Rats: 1968 seems to have a strange notion of what constitutes "fun." Does anyone enjoy searching for booby traps in repetitive, brown tunnels or listening to a psychotic man-child rant about his father? The whole concept is fundamentally flawed, and the game's brevity, its suicidal AI, and its exasperating bugs and other annoyances only compound the problem. Don't blame Uwe Boll--he merely inspired the game--and don't expect the developers to take responsibility, because they don't even mention the game on their Web site. Perhaps Tunnel Rats mysteriously emerged from somewhere hellish and deep, "like deep down in your own dark tunnel of the soul."
Hinterland: Orc Lords
- Got Game Entertainment
- Tilted Mill
- Real-Time Strategy
- Release: Jun 9, 2009
- ESRB: Teen
Hinterland: Orc Lords Review
Hinterland: Orc Lords plays like a remake of a very old game, but for once, that's mostly a good thing.
The Good
- Inventive hybrid design crossing up RPG and RTS genres
- Appealing, fast-flowing game matches
- Cuts out the mindless, monotonous combat that afflicts other action RPGs.
The Bad
- Totally randomized game events
- Low production values and no tutorial.
Hinterland: Orc Lords may be one of the best games never released for the Commodore 64. OK, that doesn't sound complimentary in 2009, given that the computer system in question is a Cyndi Lauper contemporary. But this mash-up of a hack-and-slash role-playing game and a base-building real-time strategy has a refreshing old-time feel about it. Indie developer Tilted Mill (best known for 2006's Caesar IV) has put together a likable, fast-flowing hybrid that manages to feel like a remake of a golden oldie but also brand new. While the game isn't entirely successful, due to inconsistent difficulty, poor production values, and the lack of a tutorial, it delivers some appealing action for a bargain price of just $20.
At first, however, Hinterland is a tad frustrating. The game does not come with a paper manual or an in-game tutorial. An Adobe manual is automatically installed with the game, and the main menu tries to lure you to the official Web site with the promise of information in the forums; but, really, you shouldn't have to hunt around to uncover basic information on how to play a game you just bought. Thankfully, it isn't that complex. Aside from a few irritating early moments while you figure out the interface and maps, there aren't many stumbling blocks. Still, some sort of training mission should have been included.
Still, chances are good that you've seen all of this before, even if you haven't seen it all crammed into a single game. You play a typical RTS/RPG hero tasked with both building a medieval settlement into a full-fledged town and hacking the countryside to bits. A couple of dozen D&D archetypes are offered for the choosing as your alter ego, including such been-there, done-that sorts as an elven archer, a goblin thief, and an undead warrior. Oddly, there are actually only a few orc options. Regardless of skin color or pointed ears, the heroes are pretty much interchangeable. Each comes with skill bonuses that affect characteristics relating to settlement development and battle bonuses, but they otherwise could have rolled off of a Gygaxian production line. This sameness is further emphasized by generic visuals and sound. Buildings are typical medieval structures; maps are dull stretches of flowery grassland dotted with rare unique features, such as ruins and mushroom fields; and the music is a collection of triumphal odes that could have been clipped out of any RPG released in the past decade.
Your time is divided between managing a town as in a traditional Age of Empires-style RTS and roaming the wilderness looking for fights as in a traditional hack-and-slash RPG, such as Diablo. You begin in control of one location on the map with the goal of expanding your village while branching out to conquer neighboring territories randomly generated for each game. Victory is achieved by killing all enemies over the entire map, which varies between 20 and 50 enemy territories, depending on the size option you choose in the beginning. But fighting isn't all that interesting, even though you can do some nifty things, such as recruiting and outfitting town residents into makeshift adventuring parties.
Town development is really where it's at because settlements grow organically in a way not seen in a typical RTS. Instead of cranking out peasants, you rely on tourists. Every few days, your settlement attracts visitors with skills in such areas as farming, trapping, growing herbs, praying, selling stuff, and playing soldier. The catch is that they only stick around if you meet strict conditions. First, you need coins to build them their digs. Second, you need to fulfill a range of prerequisites, such as settlement quality and access to items; these include crystal balls and dragon eggs. Finally, you need to be famous. Even a bottom-rung sharecropper won't sign on to a lord without a high enough fame score, which is built through killing enemies and taking over territories on the map.
And this is where things get tough. While it is pretty easy to boost your fame in the beginning by killing the goblins, skeletons, spiders, dogmen, orcs, and other fantasy villains that populate the maps, penalties can cripple you. Getting killed, for instance, knocks a whopping 30 points off your fame, while failing a quest assigned by your monarch takes off an even more formidable 40 points. As peasants ask for a fair bit of fame to set up shop in your town, this can quickly put you behind the eight ball. A lot of the game is also random. Peasants of varying levels can seemingly show up at any time. When you've got 15 fame, you might see farmers and merchants popping by with demands of 50 or more. When you're loaded and looking for experienced help, you might see useless grunts arriving who ask for fame under 20. Monarch quests seem totally arbitrary, too. The big guy can ask for something impossible right off the bat, such as access to human souls when the only location on the map with a graveyard is guarded by ninth-level minotaurs that you can barely scratch. Later on, though, when you can offer up the big stuff, that same monarch might just ask for tiny donations of food and gold. At least you can turn off monarch requests.
The difficulty can seriously vary from one game to the next depending on your luck. There is only a single save slot, too, and games can only be saved when exiting, which prevents you from even trying again if you get killed at an inopportune time. Still, it's damn near impossible to stop playing. Although the random elements may feel a little unfair, there is something compelling about being kept on your toes by so many unforgiving surprises. Combining such a challenge with catchy, easy-to-play mechanics is another plus. This approach will be familiar to anyone who played strategy games a couple of decades ago because they were similarly built around simple hooks accentuated with brutal, haphazard difficulty. Games also fly by. Territories are guarded by no more than 10 or so enemies apiece, which keeps you from getting bogged down in too much monotonous clickfest combat. You can wrap up a match on the small map in about an hour or so, and even games on the medium and large maps tend to take no more than a single sitting of three-to-five hours to finish.
Although an old-school attitude makes Hinterland: Orc Lords a hard sell to the masses, the game is well suited to dedicated strategy and old-school gamers looking for a challenge. A few more options to ease the randomness would have been appreciated, but there's fun to be had here regardless.
CrimeCraft
- Vogster
- Modern Shooter
- Release: Sep 1, 2009
- ESRB: Mature
CrimeCraft Review
This "persistent world next-gen shooter" gets the shooting right but the "persistent world" part pretty wrong.
The Good
- Fun PVP multiplayer
- Lots of depth to the combat.
The Bad
- Poor value for the money
- Little sense of immersion
- Poor PVE gameplay and questing
- In-your-face ads are prevalent.
When there's a single entity that dominates its niche as thoroughly as World of Warcraft dominates the massively multiplayer online game space, it's a daunting task to go head-to-head with it. Thus, a company that wants to get in on that massively multiplayer money needs to go to the margins and explore new gameplay styles and genres in order to interest players looking for something beyond the world of orcs versus humans. This has contributed to an exciting explosion of MMOGs for every taste and style. Vogster Entertainment was banking on this with CrimeCraft, an MMOG built around an enjoyable carnival of gunplay and mayhem. If CrimeCraft's world lived up to its aspirations, it might have become the "WoW alternative" one might expect from an MMOG with "Craft" in the title.
The basic premise is simple enough. A worldwide economic depression causes the collapse of civilization. The United States falls into anarchy with individual cities and regions controlled by warring corporations and the remnants of local municipal governments. The last remaining "free city" is Sunrise City. This former beach resort town, which resembles Miami, is run by an interlocking assembly of six rival gangs who keep the peace in the city center while defending it from the assaults of outsider gangs and other cities that constantly splash against the city walls. You play as a refugee from the wasteland looking to make a new life in Sunrise City and work your way up from the streets to the upper echelon of gang leadership.
Like Guild Wars, CrimeCraft is completely instanced; it's built around three city zones that act as game lobbies and social areas. These offer you the chance to load up with different weapons, weapon modifications, clothing, and accessories that give a variety of bonuses and special abilities. From these zones, you'll have access to a dozen or so maps that run the gamut from "industrial warehouse full of junk" and "dockyard full of junk" to "chemical plant full of junk." Once in these areas, you'll run and gun at other players wielding a variety of traditional shooter weapons. These range from pistols and shotguns to sniper rifles and rocket launchers. Given how much time you'll be spending in these areas, it's good that this player-versus-player portion of the game is its strongest attribute. While CrimeCraft is controlled from a third-person perspective and there's no jumping (bunny hopping is replaced with an equally effective roll maneuver), it shouldn't take long to get the hang of the game's slightly unusual skill requirements. You'll quickly be able to delve into the many nuances and strategic options that make the gameplay varied and quite interesting.
For example, crafting is built around four different professions (tailor, gunsmith, engineer, and chemist) that create upgrades, armor, boosts, and weapon mods that can significantly affect your killing power in combat. These items are created using crafting materials that drop in player-versus-environment instances and give even the hardest of hardcore PVPs a reason to occasionally get into a bot match. The game also offers variations on traditional shooter gameplay modes, including Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and Assault and Defend on every map, which keeps the player base rotating through the different scenarios and the PVP from becoming stale. Even better, the PVP shooting is well balanced enough that despite the variety of weapons, boosts, and armor available, it's skill and teamwork much more than equipment and character level that separate the winners from the street meat. A level-20 character may not have an easy time against a level-40 character, but it's certainly possible for the 20 to take the 40 down, especially if the level-20 character works with a team.
The problems with CrimeCraft really begin with the minimal MMO shell that's been put around the good-but-unexceptional PVP gameplay. PVE content is thin on the ground and poorly constructed. Much of it consists of basic questing for the first seven or so levels. The rest is the traditional "kill 10 foozles and bring me their heads" along with a decent achievement-style system that offers experience, cash, and perks for completing certain goals in combat. This simplicity isn't the real issue, however; it's the fact that the PVE questing zones are the same maps used in PVP--only populated by rapidly respawning bots. That means you'll be running around shooting things randomly in a zone that isn't crafted to provide any sense of place, narrative, or progress. There is a boss that spawns in after a few minutes, but there's often no reason to kill him. And even if there is, it's awfully tough to get a group together to kill him when the rewards are often greater for just hanging around the treasure drop points (which never change) than completing quests. It's no wonder that players are keeping their time in PVE instances to the minimum that is necessary for keeping the crafting professions supplied.
Indeed, the game's biggest issue is that it's not really much of an MMOG at all. Because the game has no shared world outside of the noncombat city zones, there's no sense of exploration or connection, no identification between players, and no opportunities for the spontaneous stories that develop from chance encounters. As graphically attractive as the three city zones are (and they're all suspiciously clean with a ton of advertising for such real-world companies as Atticus and Best Buy), it doesn't take long before you realize that they are annoyingly large multiplayer lobbies that force you to run around to do stuff that could just as easily be handled by a series of menus. This sense of disconnection and player fragmentation is worsened by not having combat in these shared spaces and nothing but traditional PVP gameplay and poorly constructed PVE missions. Where's the actual "crime" in CrimeCraft? For all that, you're supposed to be a member of a criminal gang, but you don't rob banks, run drugs, mug old ladies, or do drive-bys. Instead, you'll behave in ways that mark you as more of a soldier operating in a well-ordered fascist state than a supposedly lawless thug in anarchy.
From a technical standpoint, CrimeCraft seems to be operating well. Servers have been up pretty consistently while the level of bugs and major lag spikes seems minimal. There has been an issue when the server population gets too high. We've seen a bit of lag in both the lobby areas and the combat instances, but it's never been so bad that we considered leaving the game to wait it out. Considering its complexity, the game kicked off in a remarkably well-balanced way, though even here, there are certain problems. Players have quickly figured out the optimal specs and loadouts that give too much of an advantage in combat, and at the moment, light machine guns and sniper rifles are the combos to beat. The dev team seems active, though, and has been in communication with the player base since launch.
Ultimately, what really hurts CrimeCraft is completely separate from the game itself: the price tag. The game's initial MSRP was $49.99 US plus a $10 a monthly subscription fee (the first two months are free). This was quickly lowered to $39.99 but even at that price, the game raises more expectations than it's prepared to fulfill. You'd think that a "persistent world next-gen shooter" would have a persistent world. What you get instead is a static universe filled with traditional non-player character vendors, crafting facilities, auction houses, and a distinct lack of adventure. Players can form themselves into gangs to compete against other gangs, but this is nothing more than a ladder and scoring system. Nothing the player does effects the world one iota. There's no fighting over turf, and nothing you do will actually affect the city. As fun as the PVP battles are, they're ultimately meaningless in a larger sense. What CrimeCraft offers is available in a lot of other shooters that give players their endless battles without the monthly fee. Players who want to truly customize their avatars even have to use more money in a microtransaction system that feels excessive on top of the monthly fee. When you add the in-your-face ads all over the place, you might start to wonder why you're paying good money to be marketed to and nickel-and-dimed.
Aion
- NCsoft
- Fantasy Online...
- Release: Sep 21, 2009 »
- ESRB: Teen
Spotlight On: Aion: Tower of Eternity
We recently had a chance to see the updated content that will appear in Aion: Tower of Eternity at launch. The new updates are part of the "1.5 update," which has already gone live in the original Asian version of the game (NCSoft plans to keep the Western version of game more or less up-to-date...
We recently had a chance to see the updated content that will appear in Aion: Tower of Eternity at launch. The new updates are part of the "1.5 update," which has already gone live in the original Asian version of the game (NCSoft plans to keep the Western version of game more or less up-to-date with the Asian game within two months' worth of updates), and the US team already has an established pipeline to take content from Asia and translate it into English while also localizing the content for Western audiences by adding many more quests and story-driven details. The US team suggests that about 75% of the content remains the same, but a great deal of content is still added by the localization to make the new stuff more-relatable; for instance, many new "Western-looking" character faces that resemble well-known Western actors have been added. Also, humor is a big part of Aion's lore (both in the original version and the Western version), but not all jokes translate from culture to culture.
The pre-release version of Aion just got a bunch of new pre-release content with the 1.5 update.
Otherwise, Aion's prerelease preparation continues to chug along with more than a million players in the beta and more than 3 million hours logged worldwide; the game is, again, already up and running in Asia and planned for launch in North America and Europe soon, with approximately 6 servers per territory to make sure each area gets good performance. The 1.5 update adds 14 new zones to explore, many of which focus on player-versus-environment ("PvE") gameplay, including new hunting grounds and new raid bosses to challenge. Interestingly, players in Asia have actually requested additional PvE and raid content--uncharacteristic for an audience that typically seems to crave heavy-duty player-versus-player ("PvP") content, though some of Aion's higher-end PVE content has a competitive bent to it, since raid bosses carry the best loot and rewards, so in many cases, teams of players will compete to see who can get to the boss and the loot quickest.
Aion's Western development team described the ongoing reception of the game to Western players as being positive. The game has several features that might appeal most strongly to really hardcore players, such as a positional combat system that grants minor offensive and defensive bonuses to characters who are moving while fighting, and a "stigma" system that lets you customize your character's role by embedding stigma stone items into your weapons and armor--the recent 1.5 update actually added three new additional slots and new ways for stigmas to branch out so that players can create even more-customized characters.
But the team is also looking to build in other features for players of all skill levels. For instance, Aion will have various chat channels for different languages, as well as a handy auto-join group feature that will let you search for and remotely (and automatically) join open groups. In addition, even though Aion's characters start out as tall, shapely humanoids, it offers a full body customization that some players have really taken to, even going so far as to create entire legions (the game's version of guilds) that look similar--for instance, there are no dwarf characters in the game by default, but some players have gone so far as to create dwarf guilds that recruit only characters that look like dwarves.
You can fly into action in Aion later this year.
We then jumped into the game itself to see some of the new zones that have been added, including an Abyss PvPvE zone full of new "Balaur" monsters (the fiends that inhabit the Abyss that separates the two halves of Aion's world), as well as a higher-level version of the game's early training ground, overrun by the Balaur, who have started to emerge into the other parts of the world as part of the 1.5 update's storyline. Like with Aion's other zones, the new zones are colorful and detailed, as are the monsters and characters.
Aion's beta events have come to a close and the game is gearing up for its launch in September.
The pre-release version of Aion just got a bunch of new pre-release content with the 1.5 update.
Otherwise, Aion's prerelease preparation continues to chug along with more than a million players in the beta and more than 3 million hours logged worldwide; the game is, again, already up and running in Asia and planned for launch in North America and Europe soon, with approximately 6 servers per territory to make sure each area gets good performance. The 1.5 update adds 14 new zones to explore, many of which focus on player-versus-environment ("PvE") gameplay, including new hunting grounds and new raid bosses to challenge. Interestingly, players in Asia have actually requested additional PvE and raid content--uncharacteristic for an audience that typically seems to crave heavy-duty player-versus-player ("PvP") content, though some of Aion's higher-end PVE content has a competitive bent to it, since raid bosses carry the best loot and rewards, so in many cases, teams of players will compete to see who can get to the boss and the loot quickest.
Aion's Western development team described the ongoing reception of the game to Western players as being positive. The game has several features that might appeal most strongly to really hardcore players, such as a positional combat system that grants minor offensive and defensive bonuses to characters who are moving while fighting, and a "stigma" system that lets you customize your character's role by embedding stigma stone items into your weapons and armor--the recent 1.5 update actually added three new additional slots and new ways for stigmas to branch out so that players can create even more-customized characters.
But the team is also looking to build in other features for players of all skill levels. For instance, Aion will have various chat channels for different languages, as well as a handy auto-join group feature that will let you search for and remotely (and automatically) join open groups. In addition, even though Aion's characters start out as tall, shapely humanoids, it offers a full body customization that some players have really taken to, even going so far as to create entire legions (the game's version of guilds) that look similar--for instance, there are no dwarf characters in the game by default, but some players have gone so far as to create dwarf guilds that recruit only characters that look like dwarves.
You can fly into action in Aion later this year.
We then jumped into the game itself to see some of the new zones that have been added, including an Abyss PvPvE zone full of new "Balaur" monsters (the fiends that inhabit the Abyss that separates the two halves of Aion's world), as well as a higher-level version of the game's early training ground, overrun by the Balaur, who have started to emerge into the other parts of the world as part of the 1.5 update's storyline. Like with Aion's other zones, the new zones are colorful and detailed, as are the monsters and characters.
Aion's beta events have come to a close and the game is gearing up for its launch in September.
R.U.S.E.
R.U.S.E. Multiplayer Hands-On
We took part in the Battle of Normandy in another hands-on with this exciting strategy game.
Ubisoft was showing a new mission for R.U.S.E. at GamesCom, and we were lucky enough to try it out for ourselves. The new mission is based on Operation Dragoon, part of the Normandy invasion in World War II. Located in the south of France around the areas between the towns of Peillon and Gorbino, the map featured steady rain, dark clouds, and lightning, which certainly helped to create a sense of dread. We played as the British, whose speciality is air superiority. Germany, on the other hand, specialises in tanks and artillery, whereas the USA is an all-rounder. This mission was Britain versus Germany, but others will let you play as France, Italy, Russia, or the US.
Ruse cards give you access to special abilities and make up a large part of the game's strategy. On this map, we relied on the blitz card, which speeds up your units in one of the map sectors. The map had around 23 sectors, and we used the card on the sector where our base was located, allowing our resource-collecting trucks to earn us money twice as quickly as usual. We also used the spy card, which exposes an enemy decoy card in any one sector. As its name suggests, the decoy card is used to create a decoy of fake units, which is useful when trying to mask genuine units. You earn one ruse point each minute to spend on any card you have, and you can reuse the same cards in a mission. The points accumulate too, so you might prefer to wait until later in the game and use the spy card on every sector of the map, for instance, before planning a mass assault.
Since the British specialise in air superiority, our plan involved building several air bases, with each supporting up to seven air units. An added bonus of the air superiority bonus is that air units are cheaper to build, and this made our job a bit easier. After the airfields were complete, we built an Avro Anson reconnaissance plane, to scout for enemy troops, and several Hawker Typhoon and Lancaster bombers. We also built some AA guns to take care of enemy planes, and some tanks to guard the road into our base.
Rather than destroy the enemy's base, this particular game mode requires you to reach a certain score before your opponent by destroying as many units as possible. With a formidable squadron of bombers at our disposal, we set about destroying any convoys or troops we found and also used our recon plane to verify as many as possible. About 20 minutes into our mission, we finally defeated our enemy. (We later discovered that his strategy of amassing a large tank force had taken longer than he thought it would.)
From what we've seen, R.U.S.E. is looking like a very solid and addictive strategy game, and we're looking forward to playing it again in the future. R.U.S.E. is heading to the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC later in the year.
MotoGP 08
- Capcom
- Motorcycle Racing
- Release: Oct 28, 2008
- ESRB: Everyone
MotoGP 08 Review
MotoGP 08 is meat-and-potatoes racing with enough challenge to keep two-wheeled gearheads busy for weeks.
The Good
- Three different series of bikes provide some nice variety
- Excellent handling physics
- Great track list
- Fine sense of speed.
The Bad
- Game physics are sometimes haphazard
- Career mode only lasts five seasons
- Limited online options
- Very little bike/rider customization.
After snagging the official MotoGP license from THQ in 2007, Capcom released MotoGP 07 on the PlayStation 2; a promising, if far too difficult, rebirth of a game license that had previously thrived in the hands of developer Climax and publisher THQ. MotoGP 08 is Capcom's series debut on the PC (as well as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3). While the game likely won't create a new generation of virtual racing fans, those who have some two-wheeled gaming experience will find a demanding driving model and plenty of stiff competition to keep them busy.
There aren't any surprises in MotoGP 08's list of game modes--you've got the standard list of single-player modes you'd expect from a racing game: Single Race, Time Trial, Championship, Challenge mode, and so on. The highlight on the single-player menu is the Career mode, which gives you a chance to create a rider from scratch and work your way up through three bike racing series (125cc, 250cc, and, the pinnacle, MotoGP). As you enter races, any points you score by placing high enough in the final results will earn you attribute upgrade points you can apply to one of four aspects of your particular bike: top speed, acceleration, braking, and traction. You can then take your souped-up bike online and enter the competition in online racing events against up to 11 other online riders.
While Career mode is certainly the best single-player mode in the game, it has its quirks. First of all, your career ends after five years regardless of how many series championships you've won. Second, once you've selected from the game's various AI and handling difficulty levels, you can't change them for the entirety of your career. This is especially frustrating once you've maxed out your bike and can smoke the easy or medium-level AI opponents. It would have been more user-friendly to give players the chance to tweak options in between seasons to keep up the challenge.
This lack of career option flexibility is a shame because MotoGP 08 is all about the challenge. While the learning curve is a bit gentler than in last year's PS2 debut, even an experienced MotoGP vet will find some challenge at the default difficulty level. If you bump that up to hard or champion level, you'll face cunning, hard-charging AI opponents that won't give you an inch; you'll be fighting for every position and having a fine time of it (except when you're cursing out loud at your own lack of skill).
Fans of motorcycle racing games will relish the game's bike physics, which are excellent. There are three handling settings to choose from: easy, advanced, and simulation. With a little track time, MotoGP vets will likely be able to settle in at the advanced handling level with little trouble, but throughout every race, the emphasis on the racing line and careful acceleration out of corners is a hallmark of the game. The advanced handling setting is touchy enough; when riding in the simulation setting, even the slightest error on the throttle while deep in a turn will result in a spill. When running against the upper-tier AI opponents, any mistake you make is magnified by their unyielding aggression, and you'll find yourself in yo-yo battles for position at nearly every corner on the track.
While the feel of the bikes in MotoGP 08 is just right, the riding model is not without its problems. The developers have chosen to downplay the consequences of contact between riders. While it is possible to be knocked off your bike by an opponent (and only slightly more difficult to dismount him with some dirty driving), more often than not, you can run into a rider ahead of you with little consequence. In fact, once you've gotten used it, you can actually use this to your advantage by using a rider ahead of you as some extra braking when approaching a corner too fast. The tracks, too, have their quirks. For example, in some corners, the game will penalize you for cutting corners by instantly slowing your bike down to a crawl. It's a fine idea in theory, but its implementation is inconsistent; with enough experience, you'll know exactly which corners you can take advantage of and which you'll need to play straight.
As with the console game, up to 12 players can hop online to race in the PC version of MotoGP 08. Actually getting online is confusing, and neither the game manual nor the game itself does a particularly good job of explaining the process (you need to fill out a form on the game's loading menu). Still, once you're online, network performance is decent--even if the lack of features leave you wanting. You can only run races one at a time--there's no option for virtual championships where players can run multiple races for points--and can only bring your Career mode bike into a race if the host allows it. Even when using custom bikes, however, there's not much in the way of customization; you're stuck with the actual team leathers and bike paint schemes, as well as a series of unique helmets from which you can choose. In an era of customization in such games as Forza 2 and Midnight Club: Los Angeles, next year's MotoGP game simply must have more options for making your rider appear unique.
The game's system requirements are modest, and on the Intel 2.13 GHz machine we ran the game on, the frame rate was solid throughout. That said, the game has its graphical high and low points. Best of all is a thrilling sense of speed (especially on such long, straights tracks as Shanghai and Mugello) that really puts you in the seat of the rider. Unfortunately, decent speed doesn't make up for certain tracks that are simply a bore--with plain backgrounds and sometimes grainy asphalt textures that aren't impressive. New details, such as the night race at Losail, and the brand new Indianapolis GP track set at the historic Indianapolis Motor Speedway are great additions to the game. The hardcore fans will also find a lot to like with the game's audio presentation; not only is there a big difference among the 125cc, 250cc, and MotoGP bike engines, but individual constructor bikes have an engine sound all their own.
A slightly more approachable learning curve coupled with a great deal of challenge means that MotoGP 08 provides enough to keep you busy for months to come while not being as punishing on new players as the previous game in the series. Now that the series has moved to the next-gen consoles and the PC, the real work begins. Next year's game must primarily make sure that it has the same suite of offline and online features that players have come to expect from modern racing games. There's a lot to like in MotoGP 08's meat-and-potatoes approach to two-wheeled racing; here's hoping that next year's game offers a more extended menu.
Tom Clancy's EndWar
Tom Clancy's EndWar
While the console versions are solid, the PC version of this unique strategy game is too stripped to stand out.
The Good
- Innovative voice command mechanic makes you feel powerful
- Persistent online campaign makes matches meaningful
- Different match types make good use of uplink capture mechanic.
The Bad
- Single-player campaign has no story to speak of
- All three factions play the same way
- Limited unit types make for simple rock-paper-scissors skirmishes
- Success of voice recognition varies depending on player's headset.
Tom Clancy's EndWar is a real-time strategy game created for consoles that has now found its way to the PC. How's that for a twist? With its innovative voice controls and strong production values, EndWar was an enjoyable experience on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, granting armchair commanders a sense of high-tech supremacy. Yet on a platform overflowing with quality RTS options, its core simplicity is far more obvious. Its three near-future factions all play the same way, the rock-paper-scissors relationships between units are incredibly straightforward, and the single-player campaign doesn't tell any story to speak of, which is a blatant missed opportunity. Nevertheless, a novel multiplayer mode and persistent units that carry from one mission to the next keep things interesting, and on the whole, EndWar is a mildly enjoyable game, even if it never feels like a comfortable fit on the PC.
To get the most out of the experience, you'll need to plug in a headset. To order your units about, you issue a series of preset commands by holding down the space bar and speaking your directive into the microphone. This runs the gamut from attacking enemy squads ("Unit two, attack hostile four") and bringing in reinforcements when they are available ("Deploy gunships") to centering your view on a particular group ("Unit three, camera") and ordering special attacks ("Air strike, hostile six"). There are limited possibilities, so don't expect to plan out multiple waypoints or set up tank patrols. Nor can you rely completely on the microphone--at least, not if you intend to be competitive. Actions like garrisoning infantry in a building or ordering your units to unleash special attacks require some key presses, so there is a bit of light micromanagement in this regard.
If you'd rather take a traditional approach, you can use a mouse and keyboard, but doing so makes EndWar more frustrating than fun. Because the camera must be focused on a particular unit, you can't scroll across the map and issue orders with ease. You can enter a "sitrep" view, assuming your command vehicle hasn't been destroyed, which makes issuing orders with a mouse more feasible but is visually unappealing. Should you decide to use a headset (which you should, if you want to experience EndWar at its best), you may need to mess around with settings in Windows and within the game menus to get your hardware to work properly. A standard Logitech headset recognized most voice commands, while others were less successful (or completely unsuccessful) in consistently recognizing instructions.
The units themselves are products of EndWar's World War III setting. In the game's version of near-future events, The United States, Russia, and a unified Europe have become superpowers, and the US plans to launch a military space station to tip the worldwide balance of power in its favor. Unfortunately, terrorists destroy the station upon liftoff, thereby igniting global conflict. Yet as interesting and far-fetched as the setting is, it's mostly backdrop. The campaign is just a series of battles against the AI that emulates EndWar's main multiplayer mode, so don't expect much exposition, larger-than-life personalities, or political intricacies. You can play as any of the three factions, but while your own commander (and his or her blatant accent) will change, there's no story to involve you, aside from mission updates and news blurbs. Thus, there's no reason to play the campaign with another faction if you've finished it once already. This lack of narrative is a big disappointment, given Tom Clancy's pedigree of political page-turners.
Nevertheless, EndWar has a way of drawing you in, not just because of the unique control mechanism, but because it lets you closely follow your squads into battle. Regardless of your faction, the basic units are the same: Infantry comprises riflemen and engineers; tanks and artillery have the armored advantage; gunships take to the skies; and transports not only whisk your infantry about the battlefield, but offer necessary antiair support. Most of the time, you'll be switching your view from squad to squad, and the camera's close-up vantage point has quite an impact when you're engaged in combat. Bullets fly, gunships fall from the sky, and artillery fire rains from above, and some visual glitches aside, it's all exciting and cinematic in a way that most other strategy games just can't accomplish. Using sitrep view lets you get a quick overview of the battlefield, which is useful but not particularly dramatic. The rapid zoom of the camera when you move in and out of this mode and from one unit to the next, however, is slick.
While it may be authentic to have so few unit types and no striking difference between factions given the setting, it doesn't make any side worth playing more than another. The relationship between units is always the same--tanks beat transports, gunships beat tanks, and so on--so there's little subtlety to the gameplay. Instead, strategy is delivered on a broader level, starting with the mission objectives. There are four main mission types: assault, conquest, siege, and raid. Assault is the simplest (kill your enemy), while in Raid, you must either destroy or defend certain buildings on the map to achieve victory. Conquest is the most interesting mode, taking its cues from the Battlefield games in addition to EndWar's closest RTS cousin, World in Conflict. Here, you must use infantry to capture control points, called uplinks, scattered across the map while fending off the enemy and sabotaging their attempts to do the same. Siege battles are much less common than other types and involve an assaulting player attempting to capture a critical uplink while the defending player struggles to maintain control of it.
Tactics are generally obvious in all of these situations, but they can still generate a tense tug-of-war between players as each jockeys for position. Uplinks are present in all modes, and they are a critical part of the gameplay. Most importantly, they help you earn command points, which you need in order to call in reinforcements and perform other actions. However, uplinks can be taken only by infantry, so even if you aren't playing a conquest map, you'll still want some riflemen or engineers in the field. Uplinks also hold a second key to victory: upgrades that allow you to engage support powers like air strikes and electronic attacks. These powers are invaluable in a sticky situation but also cost command points, so you'll need to weigh the advantage of bringing in another transport to defeat your gunship-heavy opponent against a quick strike that could do immediate damage. There are even short-range nukes to deploy in certain circumstances that can immediately turn the tide of battle and produce a spectacular explosion.
All of these battles are given context within a larger turn-based map called the Theater of War. The offline theater is good for practice, but it's the online theater that provides the meat of the experience. This semiglobal map is persistent, so as opposing players engage one another, the results of an entire day's matches represent a single turn within the theater. Once the day's turn is complete, new battles open up as each faction spreads its dominion. This is a great idea that may remind you of a similar mode in the mech action game Chromehounds. But while the sameness of each faction makes it hard to feel particularly loyal, it's involving to watch your faction's color spread across the map, whether that means establishing your presence in Florida or burning Paris to the ground. A few days after the game's release, however, relatively few players seem to be participating in the theater, making EndWar's long-term viability unclear.
Your battle prowess has global consequences, but success brings more than a victory for your faction. You'll also earn a supply of credits after each battle that you can then spend on upgrades for your units. Surviving units gain levels, which gives them access to purchased enhancements, which could mean faster movement speed, new support powers (being able to designate a new drop point for reinforcements is ever so helpful), or additional attacks that can be triggered when you are following the unit that can perform them. Like the Theater of War, this feature seems like it's supposed to make you feel emotionally attached to your faction's success, and it works to an extent, giving you an incentive that functions on a more personal level. While new attacks open up some minor micromanagement options, they don't bring drastic changes, because most battles are still won or lost with quick uplink securing and a basic understanding of rock-beats-scissors dynamics.
While EndWar's tactics were designed on a broader scale, its presentation attempts to throw you into the midst of battle. When firefights get heavy, the screen fills with units and explosions, and it's fun to watch the destruction on the ground from the vantage point of a gunship squad firing at tanks or engineers from above. Some smaller touches make an impact, such as the authentic-looking behavior of engineer squads as they enter a building or a transport. However, the PC version looks much less impressive than its console counterparts. Textures are bland, while lighting, shadows, and other aspects are simply average, so even with all settings turned up, the quality of the visuals doesn't seem to justify the relatively high system requirements. EndWar also suffers from occasional performance problems, which affect not only the frame rate, but the speed of the entire game, which can suddenly start chugging for no obvious reason.
The sound design does a better job of immersing you in battle. This is partially due to the din of combat--perfectly appropriate for World War III. However, it's the constant radio chatter and responses of your units that have the greatest impact, making you feel as though you really are in the role of a military commander. The sound effects aren't just cosmetic, however: EndWar's constant feedback is an important tactical tool, letting you make split-second decisions that could mean life or death for your squad. Unfortunately, there are too many times when crucial feedback ("Check unit nine") comes far too late for it to do any good.
EndWar's voice command mechanic makes it unique among strategy games, and it's this innovation that stands out above all of its other features. Strip it away, and you'll find an RTS game that can be fun but is ultimately too simple to stand out in a crowded genre. But even if strategy veterans won't find all the complexities they'd expect, there's something to be said for EndWar's smart match types and persistent campaign. Hopefully as its community grows, so too will the game's long-term possibilities.
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