Video Game Talk obviously barely played this game. Id be suprised if Nick Hartel played anything other than "Normal" difficulty which is basically Easy mode. 2 hours for the campaign? It takes a lot longer if youre on the right setting for you. He clearly didnt even brush the 50 levels of Arcade mode or the intense Dishwasher challenge mode. There are 2 single player story lines to run through and you can also run through the co op campaign and arcade levels with a friend off and online in co op. You can tell he didnt even try Pretty Princess difficulty either as he was definitely not pleased. Even if a reviewer doesnt fully like a game its their job and I wont trust one who hasnt even tried challenging himself with the difficulty or touched more than 1 mode in single and co op play. So far for me this is absolutely not only my game of the year but one of the best games you will get your hands on. Sure it takes getting used to but it is challenging, intense and fun to play with some really original weapons, a story which is really coming together over the past 2 games, some great modes and lots of hidden secrets. I dont care about achievements but it also has an achievement which is so genius it is the only one I have ever cared about earning.
I reviewed this as a 10 at first but gradually I have found more and more problems with this game. The "all new" career mode has even less depth than ever before, no youth system, no scouting, no picking backroom staff. Annoying e-mails from your assistant manager telling you that you have spotted a good player almost all the time. I KNOW THATS WHY I BOUGHT HIM! Micro freezing still hasnt been fixed. Player growth is poorly thought out, Lower league teams have all the kits and names but plain goalkeeper shirts. Why have they been so lazy as to exclude goalkeeper shirts? Instead opting to just a give a plain shirt wth no sponsor or badge. Pro clubs online has had a server update and more servers added but it still hasnt fixed anything. That mode doesnt work. Personality + is a BAD thing. You cannot have a competitive game that throws in so many random elements. The AI on your team sometimes randomly decides to stick a foot in with bad timing without you controlling it and get a player sent off for a menial challenge. For this next one fan boys will say "oh well get better duh" At times the passing is ridiculous, I will be stood with no pressure on me in an open space and all the time in the world, press A to then pass to a player right next to me and sometimes it has passed in completely the opposite direction because a players personality in real life will suggest that he is not good at passing. If Im playing a fighting game and I tell my character to hit a punch and the computer says "sometimes in real life this guy misses this particular punch so I will make this punch go out wide and miss his face" I wouldnt play it competitively. Fighting in real life is down to me controlling the situation. Football in real life is the same. It may seem random when looking at it but the way it is controlled is not random. A game needs to do what its told otherwise it basically renders a strategy or skill useless because it may or may not decide to do it. This is not realistic. My leg doesnt randomly decide to pass in the opposite direction to where my brain tells it in real life. Random environment events in a game work, randomising character controlled actions do not. This glitch happens everytime I play a friends league online. For example I pick Marseille as my team in the league. I then play head to head matches after I finish the league and pick Chelsea. My team and shirt are chelsea but if I go to team management it will have the Marseille team list. Go to start game with this and you will have a Marseille player in a chelsea shirt in the arena and then your game will freeze after about 6 seconds. This happens 90% of the time. If you do get a pro clubs game then your randomised team mates that arent pros probably wouldnt even be fit to play in League 2. They are easily out paced and muscled off the ball and so virtual pros stand out from the pack and can stroll through creating unrealistic high scoring games for both sides a lot of the time. This is after only a few weeks of the games release. Imagine what this is like towards the end of the season when the random AI players havnt grown with the virtual pros and the pros are now all much better than even Terry, Puyol, Messi or Ozil with 98% of the accomplishments complete! Its pointless. Im only on 30% and my pro is already better than half Chelsea or Man Utds players. What is good about this game? Well the keepers are fixed and I have scored only 1 lobbed goal and nobody has against me so thats not too easy. The actually gameplay is alright in terms of physics. Graphics are better than last year. Ummm, I can pick my own chants. Oh wait no I cant because if you create your own chants apparently the game cant deal with it and freezes. In all honestly now having played this game more I wish I hadnt wasted my money. Ive spent more time restarting my console with all the glitches and freezing than I have actually playing the thing. Apparently there is a fix on the way but I feel for people who play offline when a developer relies so heavily on updates they cant be bothered to test a game. I remember when online updates didnt exist and games had to be released in working order.
Don't waste your money on this if you can buy Gears of War 1 and 2 for half the price. Its basically a very clunky and duller graphics version of them. In fact Gears 2 was sort of ruined for me because of the change of online to sub par dedicated servers which meant the shotgun could make my body explode across the map if an American was firing it at me but even a full lancer wouldnt bring them down. Buy Gears 1. The onlne was much better.
The graphics are pretty average. Gameplay occasionally has some interesting puzzles but most of them are basically "go here, pull the lever, watch the camera pan over to a door and run through quickly" there are a few nice tense moments but overall can get a bit repetitive especially as its been done so much before. I actually felt like I played this game before the way I steamed through it because every puzzle I have done in some form or other before. The story isnt anything special and the voice acting is pretty poor. The sound design is also pretty generic and doesnt really stand out much. This game is far from a 10 on originality alone but the fact there is still no on line co op 2 months after it came out is a big loser for me. I may come back and bump the score up a little higher when they finally update the multiplayer co op to be online because its not something I have experienced as I live out of town and generally out of convenience it is me visiting my mates rather than them coming all the way out to me where theres no pubs and clubs and the average age of the women is about 72. Its quite hard to tempt them round to play some split screen XBLA reboot title of a previouslyl dried up franchise which I would have to say to them "may or may not be good I havnt played it with anyone yet" Until I experience more than half the game its not going to get more than half the score. This 3 is out of 5 for the singleplayer. When they finally release the multiplayer online and the dlc Ive heard about then I may come back and rate it higher if Im not playing RUSE or Halo or FIFA or something too much.
There seems to be a lot of people here ranting that anyone who gives this game a low score is a fan boy and then saying something like "Halo is the best game ever 10/10" Um? Really? Isnt there a little tiny bit of hypocrisy there? Halo is supposed to be the pioneering game for XBox. It defines the consoles success. MW2 is the fastest selling game. So if theyre that big and that good then why cant they have dedicated servers?! If Battlefield has it and it works perfectly well then surely the supposed "biggest 2 games of all time" can and should have it. It certainly eliminates the annoyance of host migration when youre just 1 bullet away from killing someone and suddenly everything stops and the screen goes black while the host changes. The campaign for Halo was unimpressive and for large parts quite boring and repetitive. Still probably better than CoD ripping off The Rock or Enemy At The Gates or probably Apocalypse Now or something now theyre in Vietnam for Black Ops. CoD fans can hush about CoD campaigns being amazing. They obviously havnt played Mass Effect 2. Thats how a campaign should be. The Halo universe is barely a scratch on MEs branching storylines and character relations. Reach has huge balance issues especially in its Invasion game mode and also its spawn points. I spawned in the same room as 4 guys in the blue team earlier. The problem was that I was on Red Team and on SWAT I think you can imagine the amount of holes that put in my head before I even took 1 step. Halo better than CoD, less consistent than Battlefield. Reach also has The Cage, possibly the worst multiplayer map ever in any game and its even got more contenders to that title in its 8 non forge map roster. It falls between the 2 for me with a 7.5.
Good game with one massive problem. The game is actually registered as an entirely different game to the normal version on the same console. They completely split the playerbase and the amount of people to pick up the colonies edition is so few it will always be hard to play online. Myself and a friend didnt realise this was the case. We heard the multiplayer was pretty good and played the multiplayer demo which is still on Live. We assumed colonies was like any other special edition and just included the download content from before. One of us bought colonies and the other bought a pre owned copy of the original only to find we had the same game but couldnt play each other. Seems like such a huge mistake to make for one of the worlds biggest publishers Capcom. Its not worth the hassle.
Not worth the money it costs. 1200 MS points is a lot for a game completed in just over an hour on normal. Too repetitive and unimaginitive to repeat on hard. A specially written co-op multiplayer campaign which you cant play online so if you have nobody you live with to play it with and you have something more fun to play or do with your mates when they come round then you probably wont touch it. Shame they actually hired people to write a story and then created a game in a way where the writers work is unlikely to be seen a deemed almost pointless. Couldve been the next CastleCrashers or Dishwasher Dead Samurai. Instead i've had more fun playing a poorly coded game of flash pool on facebook. Dont waste your time or money when Dishwasher Dead Samurai is just as well (not very well but at least equal to shank) written and more varied in enemy and boss types and has online co op. Forget Shank and get Dishwasher for less money and way better value.
