titanictwist

I write this view from the perspective of one of the highest ranked 1v1 players in the game. This review is not on singleplayer, as I do not play single player in MOW, because I find it very boring, I would not recommend this game for singleplayer. Just like the first assault squad I see myself putting 1000+ hours into Assault squad 2. Their is no other multiplayer experience that is nearly as fun, or replicates the strategy and gameplay. I would never play another RTS after playing this one. The reason I am not giving this a 10 is because of a number of issues with the development and design choices. This game is nearly the exact same as the first assault squad. There are only a handful of new maps, there is less than 10 new units, there isn't really anything new. On top of that they have made a number of questionable decisions, such as adding in units that you need to unlock. However, many of the units that are locked for players are ones that are needed to win the game. Almost all the design time seems to have gone too doing back end improvements, things that don't really affect the gameplay. The game actually looks worse than the first assault squad in multiplayer because almost all players are forced to play on low settings, because all the new graphical and engine improvements have not been optimized. The only real notifiable improvement over the first Assault squad is using steam instead of gamespy for mutliplayer. If you played the first one you will know how big of an improvement this is. However, with barely any other additions, and some steps backwards, I only give this game a 6. Me and most of the competitive community feel this way. We will still play this game for thousands of hours, only because there is no other game out there that provides similar gameplay. Assault squad 2 was a wasted oppourtunity to improve on an already great game.

The destructible environments, strong gun play, and vehicles make for a very fun shooting experiences. The new maps (although not a lot), guns and levolution events make it worth purchasing even if you already own Battlefield 3.' However, on the Xbox 360 there are huge problems with the game. First of all, on the Xbox 360 player count is limited to 24, while on next gen and PC you can play the same maps but with 64 players. This means a lot of the larger maps can become very boring. Also in conquest this leads to situations where you spend a large amount of time capturing undefended points, then once you leave that point the other team just recaptures it. The biggest issue though for the Xbox 360 is the constant crashes and loss of connections. Sometimes you can play for a few hours without any problems. However, other days every 5-15 min your Xbox will either freeze or you will lose connection to EA. Either way you won't get any XP from the game you were playing and you will have to restart your Xbox. In my experience nearly 50% of my gaming sessions end in frustration because of all the crashes. Dice has acknowledged the crashes are a problem, but they have been looking into it since October and it still broken in January. Buy this game for a different system.

Rome Total War 2 could be a great game. Unfortunately the game becomes boring very fast. Why? Because your only opponent in the game is the AI, and the AI is about as smart as a baby. Playing a strategic game against a baby gets boring very fast. -On the campaign map the AI will barely ever attack you, and if it does it is usually not in a way that makes strategical sense (constantly sending 1 unit against your full stack). -In Field battles the AI is incredibly easy to beat. The only thing it cares about is the new Victory Points (bad feature). Therefore it uses the same strategy every battle of rushing straight at the Victory Point no matter how suicidal that is. You can win against armies 2-3 times your size without much effort. -Siege Battles are the worst as the AI doesn't even function on them. On defence the AI will stand around in one spot while you shoot it with arrows, You can win without losing a unit if you have enough ammo. On offence the AI will get stuck outside the walls, get stuck in their boats, and it doesn't attempt to capture gates or anything to let its troops stuck outside in. -Naval battles the AI actually can beat you. Only because your own ships rarely listen to your orders and often end up sitting around while the AI shoots them. If your a veteran of this series or are even decent at strategy games you will find even the hardest difficulty laughably easy. This is the worst AI of the series and therefore it is the worst game play of the series.