Xeros612

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Two hours, twelve minutes. That is how long it took to beat this game, and that's including messing around in the options menus, pausing to disable motion blur, playing on the highest difficulty, and sitting through the credits. If that's not bad enough, consider the 2004 graphics in a 2009 title, nonsense weapon animations, dirt-stupid AI, and the ability to press one button and win a one-on-one fight instantly if you get close enough. The reason it still gets a 4/10 from me? It still managed to be somewhat fun, in the "I only paid $2.50 for this and I don't care" sense, and hearing the main character yell insults and expletives like a factory churns out its product remained somewhat amusing through the game's short tenure. If you can get it for under $5 and/or want a bunch of easy achievements for some reason, it wouldn't hurt too much to pick this up. Otherwise, don't bother. There are better games in the $9.99 price range.

Imagine a game where you mix the "shoot hordes of mindless enemies" gameplay of Serious Sam and Painkiller with a movement speed that makes Condemned feel fast paced. Imagine a game where the loading screens promise far greater graphical fidelity than the engine provides because at some point, the developers disabled the HDR, Shaders, and Normal Mapping and broke their functionality entirely. Imagine a game where more effort was put into "arthouse nonsense" cutscenes that fail to make any reasonable amount of sense than was put into the game. Imagine a game where the only remotely interesting components are the run-down Soviet-era locales, existence of a nice, if unrealistic, physics engine, and the fact that the menu UI looks like it was stolen directly from the (exponentially better) first entry in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. Imagine a game where you're more likely to fall asleep while playing than to finish it. This is that game.

Out of desire to play a Battlefield game before regenerating health plagued the series and simultaneously wanting something that would run well on my laptop, I decided to pick up this old gem. The install process is long and tedious, more so than it really should have been. Messing with options works nicely... except for control configuration. Rather than removing an old keybind when you choose to bind a key to a new function, it just tells you you can't bind it. A bit annoying, but doable... unless you want to bind left shift to anything, of course. No matter what, it tells you it's bound to something in helicopter controls (despite checking multiple times and seeing no such thing), so so much for my preferred crouch key. Widescreen support out of the box is non-existent or poor, and the 1.5 patch doesn't do much to fix it. The third party Widescreen Fixer program is practically necessary for a reasonable FOV. Another problem one is bound to run into is lack of server choice. This is to be expected in such an old game with many sequels released after it, but at this point it's not worth it at all to get anything more than the base game. Special Forces is completely empty aside from a few "server padding" bots (the sort that are in servers but don't spawn in or play, just sit there to inflate player count), and the other two expansions come free with patch 1.5. The remaining servers lack in variety, with very few non-"24/7 [map]" servers left, and unless you're lucky (unlike me) or have a group of friends to hop into servers with, you're likely to have a frustrating experience due to lack of players willing to go for the objectives and such. On a related note, many of the small number of servers left have rules that can be seen as ridiculous and unreasonable, so watch out for that. The balance is definitely lacking in the game as well. Infantry weapon-wise, it seems alright aside from LMGs that aren't the RPK having horrendous accuracy no matter what and grenades being far too "spammy". Air vehicles are wholly unbalanced against anything else, as they have a fairly easy time dodging any anti-air fire and ONE missile fired from an applicable aircraft is enough to destroy even a tank in one hit, without anything capable of doing the same against the air vehicles. Gunner beware, a single machine gun bullet from any aircraft hitting anywhere on a land vehicle seems to be enough to kill you. Relating to the last point, the accuracy of some of these pilots and chopper gunners is pretty questionable. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some aircraft aim-hack floating around that bypasses punkbuster seemingly flawlessly. Overall, despite how underwhelming my skill (and luck) at the game is and bad experiences all around, I'm likely to reinstall and play it again at some point.

I can see why many reviews absolutely trash this game. I myself didn't really follow the 15 year development cycle and attached hype, but I can see how, when one waits so long for a game and it ends up being average at best, the fury of a long-time fan can be released. Now, this certainly isn't Duke Nukem 3D by any means, nor is it a particularly great or even good game, nor is it innovative, but in the age of FPS games trying to emulate Call of Duty with little variation, it's a breath of fresh air... well, a breath of fresh air that's been sitting in a can since 2008 with a little bit of tweaking done to it three years later. While it may have taken a patch or three, the PC support is better than most modern games (even though the game was built for PC and ported *to* consoles...), with increased weapon limit, customisable FOV (50-90 if I remember right), actual, numerous, and functional graphics options, etc. Despite the Halo 2-style health system (Ego = shields, non-visible health bar, both regenerate) that completely ruins the Halo joke in the game, checkpoint-only saving system, and the constant feeling of everything being pieced together from various builds of the game (though very little seems to date back to the 1998 and 2001 builds based on their respective trailers) in both graphics (such as some textures looking on par for a 2008 PC game and some looking on par for a 2003-2004 game) and gameplay, the end result is an average, even pretty fun at times that, while not worth the $50 launch price or the much pricier special editions, is well worth the $20 I see it go for these days. I can't say anything about either of the DLC packs, having not purchased or played them myself, but the multiplayer map pack is questionable at best considering I doubt the player base is large enough to justify an extra $10. To summarise, it's linear like most FPS games, but not to the extent of, say, Call of Sequel: Money Maker X. It's a mishmash of 12 years of shooter "evolution" thanks to George Brussard's desire to have every new little thing in his game. It retains the classic Duke 3D humour (albeit a bit more prevalent due to more memory/storage space than in the DOS days and, in some cases, more low-brow). It mixes some more "old-school" FPS elements such as puzzles, useless-but-fun interactivity, platforming (made easier by full-body first person view) with modern elements such as two weapon limit (raised to 4 on PC after a couple patches), regenerating health, forced checkpoint only saving, scripted FPV cutscenes. Despite some performance issues and many of the gameplay elements being lifted or inspired by console games, it maintains some of the best PC support I've seen out of many a modern multiplatform game. It's something different from the "interactive movie modern military shooter with awful multiplayer" norm. Last of all, it's actually pretty fun.

I never paid much attention to pre-release hype, so perhaps my more positive outlook on the game stems partially from not having the opportunity for hype-based let-down. I was fortunate enough to get the game after a couple patches, so I was spared the early rough spot. That being said, it's overall a solid, but not great shooter. It's a lot of fun online; I've very rarely been frustrated while playing without having had a bad day prior to firing it up, which is something I can't say about most online shooters. While the SP mode certainly doesn't stand up on its own(especially not the Security campaign, being a sight more difficult with AI teammates than Resistance), and I'm usually strongly against games that require MP interaction to enjoy, the fact that story (light as it was) and meaning was given behind what you were doing gives it a lot more appeal to me than MP shooters whereby "they're shooting at me so I should shoot at them!" or "they're from a different faction/nation, I should shoot them!" is all the reason you're given to do anything. Also, the "tf2 clone!" argument is just silly. Would you consider Battlefield Heroes or Monday Night Combat "tf2 clones" if they were in first person? Stylized class based objective MP shooter does not a tf2 clone make. Onto specifics, having gotten rid of the "tl;dr" in paragraph 2(assuming the review posting maintains format): Graphics: Not mindblowing by any means, and with an odd color palette, but it shows that ID Tech IV (the engine that originated with and powered Doom 3 back in 2004) is still a usable engine in this day and age. (ID Tech III is still being used with CoD and Source is still being used by Valve, so engine age is a non-issue.) I can't comment too much further as due to my hardware I'm capped at 720p medium settings with all effects but VSYNC and Motion blur shut off. Gameplay: Shooting is a nice change of pace from the CoD-esque "everything's laser-accurate" system of modern games, requiring burst firing and intelligent usage of your weapon's given range to hit targets accurately. Objectives are fairly simple, but take enough time that teamwork or good subterfuge are required to get them done. Shame they mostly involve escorting or holding down the action button. On the plus side, k/d is completely irrelevant, so no need for some sorry fool to hop into a game to do a lot of killing and nothing else because nobody's going to see the stats. It's something that should be implemented into all competitive objective modes of games. The "parkour" system surely leaves a lot to be desired for fans of parkour, but sliding and climbing around (+ wall jumping for light body types) are workable enough and lead to good ways to get out of dodge when need be. I would have preferred normal jumping height to not be so terrible, though. Command posts offer a nice way to add a little extra buff to your entire team, if you can be bothered to stray away from the main objective long enough to capture one. Maps: I've saved the gameplay elements that apply specifically to maps for here. Nothing mindblowing in terms of detail, but they serve the job well. Objectives presented on the maps tend to fall into the whole "variation on a theme" deal, but for the most part feel different enough from map to map. The main flaw of the maps, and subsequently the game, in my opinion... is the "choke-point" focus. Security is likely to like Reactor and Security Tower while Resistance is likely to like maps like Container City. Why? It's easy to stop the other team at a certain point on each map for either a very long time or for the rest of the match. While decent/competent teams (even as random players as opposed to a party of friends) can easily break these eventually, less focused and/or "bot-filled" teams can get stuck and demoralized very easily. I hope the map packs fix this error. I give the game as a whole about an 82 or 83 out of 100. (Rounded to 8 out of 10.) Not amazing or mindblowing, but a solid and fun shooter. I just wish it were easier to find a server with good ping AND people actually playing it.