salaciouscrum

I wanted to love it. I did but what a pretty piece of nonsense. Amazing art guys. And straight up kudos to the marketing team at Bungie for duping everyone into buying this beautiful mess. You got me. Halo? RPG? In your dreams. Here are the issues: - repetitive, numbing game play and mechanics (what you do in the first 5 minutes of game play is what you do on a continuous loop for the rest of the game). - 3 character classes that are basically all the same (and feature customization which is irrelevant because your face is covered the entire game). - Constant reuse of maps which are very basic to begin with. - Also, your Mass Effect is showing, Bungie designers. There are blatant rip offs of creatures (800lb. war hungry planet destroying heavies anyone?), weapons and mechanics. If you're going to rip something off, then you could at least put a new spin on it. Don't reanimate a dead game into a bad version of itself. - There are literally two plots in the main game: 1) Go here and stand by a thing and defend your droid while he decrypts the thing so you can go to a new thing. 2) Go down a dark hole and have a repetitive boss fight. Re: story and character. I've completed the game and still don't exactly know what it was about. And I was attentive. Listening, watching every cut scene. It's apparent that little attention was paid to narrative which means no drama and cliche dialogue throughout. Please tell me why you'd book a start like Peter Dinkledge and then do zero performance cap with him, relegating him to delivering exposition that would have been robotic even if he wasn't playing a robot. Re: multiplayer. Forget it. Seems cool to roam around killing creatures with strangers but it gets old fast (especially when the respawn points are all the same). Even if you want to grind to level up, forget it. I was artificially stopped at lvl 19 because the game forces you to complete a plot and stop at level 20 until other criterion are met. Essentially, devoted players are handicapped. Player vs. player multiplayer was fun insofar as it reminded me of Quake meets COD but it's nothing new and doesn't feature considered game design. Uneven player matching makes it more frustrating than your average online ganked n00b experience. Don't buy this. Buy a pretty poster of the game art (which is wonderful). If you must buy it to see for yourself, wait a day or two. There will be a flood of used games on the market, including mine.

I hadn't been into the series in a while but, man, this game. It's like they cared. Like they made it for people like me. Forget COD run and gun jocks barking into your ear, Blacklist requires thought if you want to be elite. Favorite game of this year easily.