Tunnel Rats

Posted by Sishu / at 11:44 AM / / 0 comments

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."

War is hell.

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.

Exploring the tunnels is every bit as exciting as this screenshot suggests.

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."

CrimeCraft

Posted by Sishu / at 11:34 AM / / 0 comments

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 shared world is attractive, though the ads are in your face.

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.

PVE gameplay consists of randomized bot matches.

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.

While PVE gameplay has things like bosses, there's not much structure to the missions.

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.

Any serious avatar customization is handled via a microtransaction system.

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.

Painkiller: Resurrection

Posted by Sishu / at 5:53 AM / / 0 comments

Painkiller: Resurrection

• DreamCatcher Interactive
• Homegrown Games
• Fantasy First-Person...
• Release: Oct 27, 2009
• ESRB: Mature

Painkiller: Resurrection Review

Painkiller: Resurrection is a buggy trip into hell.

The Good

• Spooky levels play a little like Halloween funhouses
• Creepy monsters and heavy-metal attitude.

The Bad

• Extremely unstable and packed with bugs
• No co-op mode, despite it being a promised feature
• Confusing level design
• Idiotic enemies.

Every loading screen in Painkiller: Resurrection is emblazoned with the tagline "Homegrown: fan_made_product." And boy, they are not kidding around. Although this slogan actually refers to the name of the developer responsible for this mess, it really just rubs in the amateurish and awful quality of this way-late-to-the-party sequel to the 2004 shooter. Confusing levels, idiotic enemies, loads of bugs, and missing modes of play will make you drop your mouse to reach for the ibuprofen.

Heavy-metal monsters so sinister that you can almost hear Bruce Dickinson howling in the background.

First, there is no way that Painkiller: Resurrection is ready to be foisted onto an unsuspecting public. The game as released to Steam is extremely buggy. Hard lockups requiring system restarts, constant crashes during multiplayer, objects getting stuck on you, hang-ups during already-long level loads, enemies that spawn in right on top of you, and hyperactive rag doll animations are just some of the many, many flaws that you can find here. And if you're considering dropping in to check out the cooperative mode of play, which would be sort of a Holy Grail to Painkiller fans because the original strangely didn't include the option, forget about it. Despite what the developer and publisher have promised, co-op isn't in the game out of the box. They have issued a workaround on the official forums, but that involves manually moving around map files and hosting a dedicated deathmatch server. Not only is such a manual workaround unacceptable, but it doesn’t result in the true co-operative experience promised. More pledges are being made in the official online forums about cleaning up all the bugs and adding proper co-op support in the future, but it's obvious that you're paying for a work in progress by buying the game at launch.

Even if you don't care about co-op and manage to get everything to work properly, there isn't much here of interest. The thin storyline is something of a reworking of the original story, with you playing as an assassin who winds up in purgatory after losing his life attempting to save innocents from a car bomb that he set. You think you're going to hell, but you actually wind up in an eerie middle ground populated by lost souls that have apparently morphed into weirdo monsters. The logic behind all of this is a little fuzzy, though, unless you can figure out why murdering thousands of creatures should get you a ticket to the pearly gates. Anyhow, as in the original Painkiller and its expansion, the goal here is simply to go from point A to point B in every level, killing everything that gets in your way. Action is simple and fast paced, with you using mostly standard shooter weapons to gun down hordes of skull-faced ghouls, doughy monsters, cowled grim reapers, undead Saxons with giant swords, and other assorted freaks that look like rejects from Iron Maiden album covers. Generic hair metal guitars sometimes wail in the background during battles, too, and the protagonist utters moronic comments like, "Die in pain!" repeatedly during gunfights, so the rawk attitude is entirely intentional.

Levels have an eerie atmosphere, but their layout and the frequent lockups are far scarier than any ruined cemeteries.

Not that there's anything wrong with all that; dumb shooters can be great. But Painkiller: Resurrection is just too dumb in too many ways. Level design in the six-mission campaign is extremely confusing. While the settings look sufficiently spooky in an old-school way (you can't escape the fact that the game engine is well over five years old, and wasn't cutting edge even back then), complete with ruined churches, rainy cemeteries, dank dungeons, and the like, the layouts are seriously misleading. There is little rhyme or reason to any of the level design. Maps are all just massive areas that lack any sort of structure needed to push you along to battles and end goals. So you wind up getting lost constantly and forced to hunt around for ages trying to find a fight you might have missed. Or you end up looking for slender cracks in walls leading to hidden chambers, and so on. This adds a ton of unnecessary frustration to what is otherwise a run-and-gun shooter. You just shouldn't be getting stuck in this type of game. And speaking of stupid, enemies are totally brain-dead, with virtually no awareness of objects, terrain, or level architecture. They appear to have been programmed to come straight at you, which isn't always possible given such complications as corners, shrubs, tombstones, and the like. So the creatures wind up getting stuck and pump their legs running in place until you mercifully end their struggles. It's not so much that you're fighting monsters trapped in purgatory as it is that you're fighting monsters trapped on the Stairmaster of the Damned.

Painkiller is one franchise that appears to be better off dead. While the original game is still a treat for old-school shooter fans who won't let go of DOOM, all of the expansions and stand-alone add-ons have been pretty much atrocious. Let's hope that Painkiller: Resurrection is the last nail in the coffin.

Mirror's Edge

Posted by Sishu / at 4:48 AM / / 0 comments

Mirror's Edge

• EA Games
• EA DICE
• Modern First-Person...
• Release: Jan 12, 2009 »
• ESRB: Teen

Mirror's Edge

Mirror's Edge offers occasional thrills, provided that you can look past some awkward stumbles.

The Good

• Flawless runs provide a total rush
• Clean, striking visual design
• Fantastic sound effects and music.

The Bad

• Frustrating amount of trial and error
• Cramped jumping puzzles trip up the momentum
• Combat and gunplay are weak.

Like its heroine, Faith, Mirror's Edge tries to hurdle some significant obstacles, but unlike Faith, it can't always make the leap. No doubt, this fascinating action platformer possesses its share of innovations, from a first-person perspective to a clean and crisp visual style, yet it looks to the past more than you may initially notice. This is a modern-day iteration of an old-fashioned platformer, in which you're meant to play and replay sequences of jumps, grabs, and slides until you get them perfect, or at least perfect enough to continue. But unlike its ancestors, Mirror's Edge is more about speed and momentum, and when you can connect your moves in a flawless stream of silky movement, it's eminently thrilling and satisfying. Unfortunately, Mirror's Edge has a tendency to trip over its own feet, keeping you slipping and sliding blissfully along, only to have a tedious jumping puzzle or hazy objective put the brakes on. Leaderboard chasers looking to set a speed-run record will find Mirror's Edge to be pure gold. Others will give up, alienated by the inherent trial and error of the game's basic design. At the very least, there's nothing quite like it, and it deserves a cautious look from anyone who appreciates games that hew their own path.

No matter how fast she runs, Faith can't always escape danger.

Faith is a runner, in more ways than one. In the oppressed society of Mirror's Edge, runners are an underground network of couriers, carrying sensitive information and documents from sender to receiver. The content of these messages is never clear, and it doesn't matter much; rather, the story's conflict revolves around Faith's sister, a cop who is framed for the murder of a mayoral candidate who promised to bring change to the totalitarian government and bring hope to the runners living on the fringe. Soon, Faith is running for a different reason: to uncover the conspiracy at the heart of the murder and clear her sister's name. The story is straightforward, but it's interesting enough to keep you involved, and though it ends with a sequel-hinting cliffhanger, it wraps up things enough to feel fulfilling nonetheless. More intriguingly, the story plays out between missions in stylishly animated cutscenes, as well as scenes within the game engine itself, which also look attractive but feature a completely different art style. Both types look good, but the disparity is a little odd.

And so you run, across rooftops, through train stations, and along walls. As you run, you pick up speed and are able to string a number of moves together in rapid succession. You can slide under pipes, bound over railings, and leap across impossible-looking chasms, among other techniques. Of course, the most obvious twist in Mirror's Edge is that you do all of this from a first-person view, rather than with the typical third-person camera that we've come to expect. It's an interesting spin, if not wholly new, and it has a way of immersing you as you speed toward your destination. Actions such as balancing on a narrow beam, sliding under a ledge at top speed, and tumbling when you land a long jump are fun to execute and look neat, but it may also make you wonder how much fun it would be to see what Faith looks like when she pulls off these neat stunts, which isn't possible in this game.

Nevertheless, Mirror's Edge excels when you hit that snappy stride, and once you've found the best route through a particularly tricky scenario, it's exhilarating to rush through it without a care to weigh you down. But this doesn't happen the first time you do it, or even the fifth time. You will need to experiment and hone your skills, given that a simple mistake can send you plunging down onto the street below, or will at very least interrupt your stride. You're expected to play each level multiple times to learn the routes that best propel you along, which is great the 10th time around but is often an infuriating series of false starts, mistimed jumps, and full stops during the first few attempts. If you need a hand, you can hold a button to activate runner vision, which turns the camera toward your destination, but it's an imprecise solution that sometimes points you toward a short-term objective and at other times points you toward your long-term goal.

Geronimo!

Another inconsistently helpful tool comes directly from the game's impressive art design. Mirror's Edge is a game of visual contrasts, in which stark white environments contrast with vivid colors. It looks beautiful and clean, and it's a great way of demonstrating both the bleakness of an authoritarian society and the unique manner in which a runner would see the world--as an array of landing points and jumping opportunities. Important ramps, doorways, ladders, and other points of interest are painted in a vibrant red, which is an important visual cue in some of the broader levels. However, this element too is delivered inconsistently; in some cases, the red hue may not fade in until you are close to the pole or vaulting point in question, and in other cases, Mirror's Edge expects you to figure things out without this visual assistance.

For a game that relies on so much forward momentum, Mirror's Edge has a way of bringing the pace to a halt. Sometimes this is because of the nature of trial-and-error gameplay: fall, die, reload checkpoint. At other times, it's because you're faced with an intricate jumping puzzle that eschews the sense of speed entirely, such as one that has you descending into the depths of the water-supply system and then up again. These aren't bad, but they're not particularly engaging, either; you're likelier to feel relieved rather than fulfilled when you reach your destination. Or you'll be zooming along, only to find yourself in an elevator, reading the news crawl on the wall's electronic panel while the level apparently loads in the background. In all of these cases, you're torn from the experience and reminded that this is, after all, just a game.

Armed enemies further complicate matters. It's best to run right past them when possible, but their bullets have a way of bringing you to your knees as you rush around looking for the best escape route. Some foe-heavy scenarios are particularly annoying, such as a sniper-loaded sequence in the final level. You can confront the threat head-on in some cases, but it requires careful planning and excellent timing. You can perform some close-combat moves such as jump kicks and punches, but these are best when used as hit-and-run tactics; trying to engage in melees with more than one or two enemies at a time is a quick path to the most recent checkpoint. Conversely, you can disarm an enemy in a quick-time event, pressing the disarm button when your foe's weapon flashes red. If you want to hold on to it, you can fire off a few shots until the clip runs out. However, Faith is ultravulnerable to gunfire, and the gunplay is loose and unfulfilling. If you have trouble keeping things in check (it takes some split-second timing to land a pitch-perfect disarm), you can enter a limited-use slow-motion mode, which comes in handy and makes some of these action-focused moves look cool, though it ultimately doesn't add much to the gameplay.

If you can overlook the array of quirks long enough to find your stride, you'll want to check out the beat-your-record races and level speed runs. Both modes feature online leaderboards, and both cater to the players likeliest to get the most out of Mirror's Edge. In a sense, the single-player story is simply a practice run for being a virtual show-off, yet the players repeating these levels (who will learn them to perfection) are also the ones likely to see Mirror's Edge at its most thrilling. You will want to break out an Xbox 360 controller if you want to get the most out of the experience. The keyboard-and-mouse setup is decent but occasionally awkward, and it can't compete with the interesting (but intuitive) gamepad controls.

You'll be seeing red, both literally and figuratively.

The unusually crisp visuals have seen some nice additional touches on the PC, such as fluttering industrial plastic over a few doorways, and symbolic flags undulating in the wind. The audio also deserves high praise. Sound effects such as Faith's breathy heaves and plodding footsteps are authentic touches that heighten the sense of speed and tension. The voice acting is equally terrific, but it's the pulsing, driving soundtrack that impresses most. Its rhythmic flow augments Faith's most fluid runs, whereas subtle ambient chords fill in the silence during downtimes. The superb musical journey culminates in a fantastic vocal track that plays during the game's final credits.

Mirror's Edge is many things: invigorating, infuriating, fulfilling, and confusing. It isn't for everybody, and it stumbles often for a game that holds velocity in such high esteem. But even with all of its foibles and frustrations, it makes some impressive leaps; it just doesn't nail the landing.

Medal of Honor Allied Assault

Posted by Sishu / at 11:37 AM / / 0 comments

Medal of Honor Allied Assault

• Electronic Arts
• 2015
• Historic First-Person...
• Release: Jan 20, 2002 »
• ESRB: Teen

Medal of Honor Allied Assault

Medal of Honor represents the absolute best that action-packed, event-driven shooters have to offer.

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, the first PC installment of Electronic Arts' WWII-themed shooter series, is superb. However, if the realistic setting has led you to expect a serious combat simulation along the lines of Ghost Recon or Operation Flashpoint, you're going to be surprised and perhaps disappointed. Medal of Honor is first and foremost a run-and-gun shooter--a really, really excellent run-and-gun shooter. A lot of clever scripting and precisely orchestrated mayhem lend it a sustained intensity that more open-ended tactical shooters often lack. Relatively short but very dense, it's like one-half game and one-half amusement park ride.

Medal of Honor is intense and exciting all the way through.

Medal of Honor isn't very heavy on story. Instead, the game is split into six more or less disconnected missions spread across more than 30 different levels. Rather than focus on creating memorable characters or surprising plot twists, the developers at 2015 have taken an arguably more effective route by constantly introducing memorable set pieces and surprising new gameplay elements. As in Half-Life, you witness everything from the fixed first-person viewpoint of your character. All the "cutscenes" are seamlessly integrated into the ongoing events of the level. Control is never taken away from you. Just as in Half-Life, this technique is incredibly effective for creating a sense of both urgency and of attachment to the game's environments. It's an ongoing mystery as to why developers don't use this uninterrupted viewpoint more often.

Over the last couple of years, 10 to 15 hours appears to have become the standard length for single-player shooters. Medal of Honor doesn't break this trend and should take you slightly longer than 10 hours to complete on the standard difficulty setting. However, it packs a lot of content into those hours. You won't ever have to force yourself through the game. This is mainly due to the wide variety of interesting things and unexpected events that happen on a regular basis. It seems as if the developers have tried to inject every level with some completely new challenge or new combination of elements from previous levels. It's a testament to this variety that to give many specific examples would be to ruin the surprise.

The Omaha Beach landing is just one of the game's memorable scenes.

Even so, at least one specific example is in order, just to give a sense of how involving Medal of Honor's missions can be. You begin the first level riding in the back of a truck with four members of your squad. The squad leader informs everyone that you're attempting to infiltrate a Nazi-occupied village. You can see another truck driving behind you. Both vehicles stop at a checkpoint, and a German guard approaches the rear truck and begins talking to the driver. As the conversation drags on, your squad becomes progressively more agitated. Finally, the driver of the rear truck pulls a gun and shoots the guard, at which point alarms sound, gunfire erupts all around you, and the rear truck explodes in a fireball. Your squad jumps out of its truck and you follow. With the leader barking orders, you all advance on the village gates, eventually making your way to a courtyard. There, you're ordered to check a door. As you do, German soldiers appear all across the rooftops and balconies surrounding the small courtyard. You're trapped and chaos ensues, as bullets and grenades rain down on your squad. Eventually, a door is blown open and you're ordered to enter a building, get to the second floor, and commandeer a mounted gun that's currently being used against you. Once you do that, and turn the gun against the Nazis, an ally joins you and tells you he'll cover you from a window while you head to the far end of the courtyard. By the time you make it, the entire rest of the squad is dead, and you're forced to continue to the next level alone.

This isn't the first mission, but rather just the first level. Things continue apace from there. While not all of the following levels are as eventful as the first, virtually every one breaks up the traditional straightforward run-and-gun action with some twist. One level that re-creates the Normandy beach storming scene from Saving Private Ryan is quite likely the most intense and well-executed set piece in shooter history. It's the perfect implementation of Medal of Honor's apparent design philosophy: the heavily scripted level that somehow feels alive and completely spontaneous.

In what has become a disclaimer that, at this point, should probably just be left implied in every shooter review, the enemy artificial intelligence is not as good as Half-Life's. However, it's not bad either. The Nazis don't exhibit any real squad-based behavior, and they'll sometimes come running single file around a corner as you shoot each one in turn, but those that don't come sprinting after you tend to use cover well. They also know how to toss grenades and get out of the way of incoming grenades. If fact, you can provide cover for yourself by tossing grenades and then advancing while the Nazis are busy scampering out of the way.

The action takes place in a variety of distinct locations.

Two things contribute to making the fights especially intense. First, other than snipers who are sometimes frustratingly accurate, the rank-and-file soldiers you'll face aren't perfect shots. Gunfights usually involve bullets spraying all around you, instead of merely straight into you. Second, when you do get hit, you become incapacitated for a brief moment, and your viewpoint is knocked aside accordingly, leaving you open to more hits. This means you can't simply roll toward an enemy while absorbing hits like a tank. Moving from cover to cover becomes an indispensable tactic, which ends up making the fights feel more real, in spite of the fact that you can absorb an unrealistic amount of damage and can instantly replenish your health with med packs.

Medal of Honor uses the Quake III: Team Arena engine, and its graphics are generally excellent. It may not look quite as crisp as Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but it's no slouch. Character animations are especially good, as are more subtle effects such as lightning storms in the distance and trees swaying in the wind. It also features some of the most impressively destructible environments ever created. However, to ensure a teen rating--previous Medal of Honor games for the PlayStation were also rated T--the game is completely bloodless. If that turns you off, think of it this way: Maybe they took out the blood so it wouldn't obscure your view of the death animations, which are gruesome to say the least.

The graphics are very good, but the sound is phenomenal. Every level is thick with ambient sound effects. The voice acting is excellent, and there's plenty of it. Best of all, the Germans actually speak German. A lot. The music is fine and usually appropriate, but the game is smart enough to sometimes forgo music. The soundtrack for the Normandy beach level is nothing but gunfire, waves, screaming, and the overlapping conversations of groups of panicked soldiers, which ends up being much more effective than any score could have been.

Medal of Honor's single-player game is a blast.

Medal of Honor offers a few different multiplayer modes, including deathmatch and objective-based team matches. There's nothing really wrong with them, and the realistic World War II-era weapons are interesting, but there's nothing here that's overly compelling. Nothing like the marginal but significant advances to teamplay offered by Return to Castle Wolfenstein are present in Medal of Honor. Worse, there are some severe implementation issues. Rather than offer a built-in server browser, Medal of Honor relies on the GameSpy program for finding games. Quitting out to a third-party application every time you want to switch servers is a pain to begin with, but the developers have made it even more obtrusive by forcing you to sit through three uninterruptible logo animations every time the game loads. Three! Someone will probably come up with a workaround to this, but a workaround shouldn't be necessary. There's also already a rampant cheating problem. It's possible to enter god mode in multiplayer and become an invincible opponent or, worse yet, an invincible team killer. Complementing this problem is the fact that there's no clear menu-based voting system. Voting exists, but it's only available through console commands, and only then if you check the advanced console setting in the options menu.

So, if you're looking for the next great online game or a deep tactical shooter, Medal of Honor isn't for you. For anyone else, it's hard to recommend it strenuously enough. At a time when shooters seem to be evolving into two distinct kinds of games--either focused on realistic tactics or on arcade action--Medal of Honor represents the absolute best that action-packed, event-driven shooters have to offer.

Today a patch was released that addresses many of the multiplayer issues mentioned in this review.

LOTR: Middle-earth II

Posted by Sishu / at 10:59 AM / / 0 comments

LOTR: Middle-earth II

• EA Games
• EA LA
• Real-Time Strategy
• Release: Mar 2, 2006 »
• ESRB: Teen

LOTR: Middle-earth II

The Battle for Middle-earth II improves on 2004's game with a better strategic mode and a much broader scope that encompasses the whole of Middle-earth.

The Good

• Fast-paced real-time strategy with authentic Tolkien flavor
• War of the Ring mode lets you really battle for Middle-earth
• Excellent production values, beautiful graphics, great sound.

The Bad

• Single-player campaigns are fairly generic
• War of the Ring mode suffers from many weird logical gaps.

With the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy more than two years in the past now, it seems a bit weird that EA is still pushing ahead with its Lord of the Rings game franchise. After all, 2004's The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth already covered all the ground from the movies. EA's solution, though, was to unify the movie franchise with the general Tolkien license, so now the games can feature content from both the movies and the many Middle-earth books that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote. Armed with this unified license, EA has gone about and created The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth II, a real-time strategy game that features all of Middle-earth, and not just the stuff we saw in the movies.

Battle for Middle-earth II features new battles in both the north and south of Middle-earth. The original game focused just on the latter.

Battle for Middle-earth II focuses mainly on the northern part of Middle-earth, where elves, dwarves, and goblins battled it out while those pesky hobbits trekked to Mt. Doom. That means there are new races and factions that we didn't get to see in the original game, complete with their own heroes and specialized units. The elves are supreme archers, the dwarves are miners who build giant war machines, and the goblins rely on spiders and sheer numbers to swamp you. Battles take place in familiar places, such as the Shire, and in unfamiliar places, unless you've read the books, such as Dol Guldur. And if you liked the factions and settings from the original game, don't worry, because they all appear in the game's overarching War of the Ring mode in one form or another.

The two single-player campaigns in Battle for Middle-earth II, one for good and the other for evil, are easily the weakest part of the game, in that they consist of the same, cookie-cutter real-time strategy missions that you've probably played countless times already. There's little here that hints at originality, a situation made worse by the decision to remove some of the more unique ideas from the original game, such as building nodes. In the first Battle for Middle-earth, you could construct buildings on only a few predetermined points of the map, which eliminated the base sprawl problem seen in most real-time strategy games. It also forced you to spread out in order to seize the remote building nodes, which meant that your forces were usually stretched thin trying to defend remote outposts. While Battle for Middle-earth II does try to force you to spread out by the way farms and mines work (you can't concentrate resource centers because it limits their cumulative effectiveness), you usually needn't worry, because all you really need to do is build up a huge core base and defend it. So basically, much of the strategy in these missions involves "turtling up" in a defensive shell until you manage to research all the unit upgrades, and then sending out a massive force to sweep the enemy off the map.

While the single-player game is fairly generic, it is at least saved by some of the rich Tolkien mythology. Once again, you command armies in the form of companies and hero units. Soldiers, archers, and cavalry come in company formations of about 20 to 30 units in size, and they form the bulk of your army. Your hero units include notable characters from the books and movies, such as Aragorn and the Witch King, and they're far more powerful than regular units, with special abilities that they can bring into play. They're also far more expensive to purchase. Meanwhile, once again, you can draw upon special army powers that you purchase by accumulating certain points. These powers can range from summoning a fiery balrog to instantly turning a portion of the battlefield into a lush forest, which confers bonuses to any good units in its midst. Also, it's worth noting that the artificial intelligence is better than it was in the original game, as it's usually pretty good about hitting you where you're vulnerable, which means that the computer can send units around you from the sides.

The good news is that things get really interesting once you play with the new War of the Ring mode. Essentially, War of the Ring links all the real-time battles to an overarching strategic campaign, but one that's deeper than the superficial strategic mode in the original Battle for Middle-earth. There are a number of different War of the Ring scenarios to choose from, but the basic goal is that you will try to lead your side to victory by conquering all of Middle-earth, province by province. You can re-create the entire epic scale of the war, with the elves, dwarves, and men battling the goblins, Mordor, and Isengard--you control one of the factions, while the computer controls the others. Or you can set it up so perhaps the dwarves and elves battle each other, or any combination.

The War of the Ring mode lets you try to battle for all of Middle-earth, your way.

The strategic mode in War of the Ring looks and feels very much like a board game, such as Risk. This isn't a complex or incredibly detailed strategy game, and EA keeps the overall management rather light. Your main job is to manage territories and move armies around the map. And since there are only two building nodes per territory (and only four building choices), you have to make some basic decisions about each territory's role. You might want your rear territories to house all the farms, which lets you recruit larger armies, while your front-line territories contain barracks to pump out units and fortresses to provide defense. Each territory confers certain bonuses to take into consideration as well, so that may go into your decision making. In addition, if you conquer whole regions, you'll gain even more bonuses. When two opposing armies meet, you can choose either to have the computer automatically generate the battle results or to play the battle yourself in real time. If you do play the battle yourself, you'll drop down to the province map and have to play it out just like you would a regular skirmish game, though any units or strategic buildings that were in the province at the beginning of the battle will show up on the battlefield. Needless to say, to win, just wipe out the opposing force.

War of the Ring does suffer from some issues, though. For one thing, the world's not as persistent as it should be. You can develop a huge base in a territory during one battle, but if the enemy reinvades that territory, most of your structures will disappear and you have to start from scratch again. And while it's understandable that this is so (a contest between a fully developed real-time economy and a nonexistent one isn't really a contest), it's a bit frustrating, not to mention illogical, to have to rebuild everything all over again. The same goes for armies on the battlefield. Only the units that you build on the strategic map are persistent, which means that the huge armies you may build during a battle disappear once the battle is done. And while those strategic units gain experience, it still doesn't make much sense to see fully developed armies suddenly vanish in the middle of war. It's these kinds of issues that prevent War of the Ring mode from being the ultimate Lord of the Rings strategy experience that many of us have been waiting for, but it still makes for a good lightweight strategy game.

You can still summon superunits, such as the balrog, and these can turn the tide in a battle.

EA has made some changes to the battlefield gameplay mechanics, though not much has changed. Naval warfare is a pretty addition, thanks to the shimmering reflections of ships on the beautifully rendered water. However, ships are featured only a handful of times in the campaign, and they don't come in most of the time during the War of the Ring mode, since most territories are landlocked. Meanwhile, the new emphasis on being able to build defenses such as walls seems a bit misplaced, since walls can be incredibly easy to knock down and defensive towers are something of a joke, making their value suspect. Other new features in Battle for Middle-earth II aren't fully fleshed out. For instance, the new build-a-hero function is pretty lightweight. Basically, you can create your own hero or heroine, and he or she appears as a hero unit in the game. However, the actual build-a-hero function is quite limited, since you can't alter your character's appearance aside from selecting between a few armor types, weapons, and colors--you're stuck with the physical features that EA gives you. Normally, this wouldn't be a big thing, but since practically every other EA game features a much more powerful build-a-character mode, Battle for Middle-earth II's build-a-hero mode comes off as disappointing.

The game's multiplayer suite is also one of its strengths, though be prepared for some brutal and wild matches online. You can play in the customary skirmish game in one-on-one matches or in teams. The new resource model becomes the huge linchpin in multiplayer skirmish, since you have to spread as many resource-gathering centers as possible over the map. This means that the winner is usually the side that can quickly eliminate a handful of the opposing side's resource structures, which is an incredibly easy task. After that, it becomes a huge battle of attrition, as one side has a resource advantage to bring to bear. Heroes and other powerful abilities also come into play quite a bit more during multiplayer, since human players are much smarter about using them than the AI. Hero units like Gandalf are worth their weight in gold, as they can quickly wipe out swaths of an opposing army. Meanwhile, the War of the Ring mode is also playable in multiplayer, though as you'd expect, these games take a long time to play through (we're talking days, not hours). Thankfully, you can save a game's progress and pick it up at a later time. EA has also done some good work in terms of making games easy to find online--the server browser is nicely organized, and the game persistently tracks performance so you can easily gauge your chances against a potential opponent by examining his or her experience level.

Visually, Battle for Middle-earth II packs a few graphical improvements over the original. For instance, there seem to be a few more shader effects at work, so surfaces such as ice have a nice sheen to them. There's also some improved lighting and shadowing at work. But in general, the graphics haven't evolved much from the first game. That's not a bad thing, though, as the original game still captured the look and feel of Middle-earth quite well. Though the battles are nowhere near as large as those seen in the movies (or in the game's own cutscenes, for that matter), you still get a sense of the clash of arms as companies of human soldiers clash with hordes of goblins and orcs. And, once again, the biggest units in the game are some of the best looking--you can send impressively rendered dragons and fellbeasts into battle or watch the noble eagles swoop down from the sky and rip apart an enemy building with their talons. It's interesting to note that the in-game cutscenes taken directly from The Lord of the Rings have disappeared in the sequel, probably because the developers would have had to recycle the same cutscenes over again given that there has been no new movie footage since the first game.

The build-a-hero mode isn't as powerful as it should be, but at least you can still create your own avatar in the game.

The sound effects also remain strong, and Howard Shore's memorable music from the movies echoes throughout the game. Meanwhile, some of the voice work from the original carries over to the sequel, and die-hard Lord of the Rings fans may feel a chill down their spines whenever they hear Ian McKellen's Gandalf or Christopher Lee's Saruman declare victory after a battle. And EA managed to find decent substitutes for the other big-name roles.

The Battle for Middle-earth II is certainly a better version of 2004's great strategy game. With that said, for all the things it does new or differently than before, some aspects feel a bit undercooked. Still, this is probably the best Lord of the Rings RTS available, and by encompassing the whole of Tolkien's mythology, it really lets you battle for all of Middle-earth this time around.