Yes, it's an old game, but I only recently (past few months recently) started being able to play games not designed to run on computers older than Windows, and I want to complain about it so I'm going to.
I started off with the tutorial, which I thought did a good job of covering everything you need to know throughout the game. At this point I was greatly enjoying the game and indeed that continued throughout a lot of the early campaign. Innovative class structure with decent balancing, fun weapons and vehicles, and for most of the early game a great feeling of being part of a larger story; you're one soldier among many and therefore not doing all the world-saving yourself. However this feeling subsided around mid-campaign when missions started getting progressively harder.
Let's get one thing clear; I LIKE hard games. I like being challenged and I like having to work to overcome the challenge. However I don't like games that are hard because they cheat.
A good way to make an FPS hard is to make the enemy clever. It's fun to have to use your wits as well as reflexes.
Bad ways to make an FPS hard include making the enemy capable of killing you in one hit and able to absorb half a clip before falling, infinitely-spawning enemies, having those infinitely spawning tank-armoured nuke-wielding enemies outnumber you ten to one, and having said enemies concentrate solely on killing YOU.
Yes, this is where the feeling of being part of a greater whole ended. Your team-mates are thick and armoured just as flimsily as you are and many appear not to have any goal in life other than to end it all. At the end of each mission you're given the critical stats: how many of the enemy you and each NPC killed, how many times you and they died, how many points you each scored, etc etc.
Looking at them instantly deflates the sense of teamwork. I regularly topped the next-best character by a factor of ten for kills and points; sometimes even more. From memory I remember one occasion where I scored eighty-nine kills and my most effective teammate scored nine. Yes, it seems that rather than the mere grunt soldier, one among many (albeit the commander - supposedly - more on that later), YOU are meant to be your factions' most effective weapon; a one-man tactical nuclear strike, with your squad-mates only there to provide you with moral support. Remember; you're up against infinitely spawning enemies with a limited amount of team-mates and therefore a limited amount of respawns.
Basically you'd do better if the game ran on a timer for each mission and a limited amount of respawns rather than giving you team-mates. If you start off with a squad of forty, in a few minutes - which amounts to maybe a dozen kills for you and none for the rest - your team will have been divided in half. A new spawn, a repeat. In the end what it means is you can afford to die as many times as you like, because it's better you use up one of the 40 slots than a retard NPC. This leads to Rambo-style gameplay; since dying and respawning is a good thing,
why bother with caution?
Two other things that pissed me off to no end; the insane spamming of grenades, or thermal detonators, and the snipers. Often you'll see a teammate throw a grenade at a moving enemy, and because the grenades take five seconds to detonate after landing, the thrower, chasing the enemy, will be the one who explodes - he or some other hapless ally of yours - just one if you're lucky.
The snipers are also a horrible design flaw. From right across the map an enemy you can't even see even with the draw distance at maximum can one-hit kill you; there's no warning or avoiding it. It's basically a random element of the game; you can drop dead at any given second regardless of your skill. Rather than snipers the game could assign you a random chance of death every time you take your twentieth step and the gameplay wouldn't be changed much.
The next thing I disliked about the game was the lack of commander functions. Sure, you get to command a few allies to follow you around to act as both cannon fodder and alternate targets for the enemy, but you don't get to issue important commands such as "all units proceed to this area" or "everyone follow me". The reason these orders are important is because half of all campaign objectives are "Capture this CP at this point in the map". However, CPs are the areas you and your enemies spawn in, depending on who controls them. What this means is you need to have a stronger force than the enemy within a range of the CP for around forty seconds in order to capture it. During these forty seconds enemies will be spawning in from that very same XP, being shot/blown up and instantly respawning, decimating your unit complement with each spawn-in.
The game has an award system that rewards you for certain achievements, such as a dozen kills in one life with a particular weapon. In general the reward is an improved version of that weapon. The problem is, by the time you've achieved it you're likely low on health and going to die before you get any use out of the bloody thing.
The final thing I want to talk about is the redundant units. There're several different classes such as heavy trooper, engineer, jetpack trooper and the like - several of whom are useless for 99% of the campaign. Jet troopers are poorly armed and only slightly more maneuverable than ground-locked units, but make up part of your team anyway. I'd like to see more choice given to the player in this, perhaps at the start of each mission you could be able to designate how many of each unit you want.
All in all, this wasn't a great game. The instant action is fun and doesn't require any long-term commitment; there are several fun game modes and really they're not much different than campaign missions other than their lack of story. The campaign goes from fun and a fair challenge to, quite literally, impossible. It lacks both quick-save, regular save (during missions) and even checkpoints, so loss means repeating a possibly half-hour slog.
I won't rate the game in stars, numbers or as a percentage, but I will say that if you enjoy fast-paced FPS with a real war-zone feel to it, you'll like this game for its instant action and possibly the campaign. If you feel the need to complete a campaign, or problems like the ones above can actively piss you off as they do me, you'll hate this game.
I started off with the tutorial, which I thought did a good job of covering everything you need to know throughout the game. At this point I was greatly enjoying the game and indeed that continued throughout a lot of the early campaign. Innovative class structure with decent balancing, fun weapons and vehicles, and for most of the early game a great feeling of being part of a larger story; you're one soldier among many and therefore not doing all the world-saving yourself. However this feeling subsided around mid-campaign when missions started getting progressively harder.
Let's get one thing clear; I LIKE hard games. I like being challenged and I like having to work to overcome the challenge. However I don't like games that are hard because they cheat.
A good way to make an FPS hard is to make the enemy clever. It's fun to have to use your wits as well as reflexes.
Bad ways to make an FPS hard include making the enemy capable of killing you in one hit and able to absorb half a clip before falling, infinitely-spawning enemies, having those infinitely spawning tank-armoured nuke-wielding enemies outnumber you ten to one, and having said enemies concentrate solely on killing YOU.
Yes, this is where the feeling of being part of a greater whole ended. Your team-mates are thick and armoured just as flimsily as you are and many appear not to have any goal in life other than to end it all. At the end of each mission you're given the critical stats: how many of the enemy you and each NPC killed, how many times you and they died, how many points you each scored, etc etc.
Looking at them instantly deflates the sense of teamwork. I regularly topped the next-best character by a factor of ten for kills and points; sometimes even more. From memory I remember one occasion where I scored eighty-nine kills and my most effective teammate scored nine. Yes, it seems that rather than the mere grunt soldier, one among many (albeit the commander - supposedly - more on that later), YOU are meant to be your factions' most effective weapon; a one-man tactical nuclear strike, with your squad-mates only there to provide you with moral support. Remember; you're up against infinitely spawning enemies with a limited amount of team-mates and therefore a limited amount of respawns.
Basically you'd do better if the game ran on a timer for each mission and a limited amount of respawns rather than giving you team-mates. If you start off with a squad of forty, in a few minutes - which amounts to maybe a dozen kills for you and none for the rest - your team will have been divided in half. A new spawn, a repeat. In the end what it means is you can afford to die as many times as you like, because it's better you use up one of the 40 slots than a retard NPC. This leads to Rambo-style gameplay; since dying and respawning is a good thing,
why bother with caution?
Two other things that pissed me off to no end; the insane spamming of grenades, or thermal detonators, and the snipers. Often you'll see a teammate throw a grenade at a moving enemy, and because the grenades take five seconds to detonate after landing, the thrower, chasing the enemy, will be the one who explodes - he or some other hapless ally of yours - just one if you're lucky.
The snipers are also a horrible design flaw. From right across the map an enemy you can't even see even with the draw distance at maximum can one-hit kill you; there's no warning or avoiding it. It's basically a random element of the game; you can drop dead at any given second regardless of your skill. Rather than snipers the game could assign you a random chance of death every time you take your twentieth step and the gameplay wouldn't be changed much.
The next thing I disliked about the game was the lack of commander functions. Sure, you get to command a few allies to follow you around to act as both cannon fodder and alternate targets for the enemy, but you don't get to issue important commands such as "all units proceed to this area" or "everyone follow me". The reason these orders are important is because half of all campaign objectives are "Capture this CP at this point in the map". However, CPs are the areas you and your enemies spawn in, depending on who controls them. What this means is you need to have a stronger force than the enemy within a range of the CP for around forty seconds in order to capture it. During these forty seconds enemies will be spawning in from that very same XP, being shot/blown up and instantly respawning, decimating your unit complement with each spawn-in.
The game has an award system that rewards you for certain achievements, such as a dozen kills in one life with a particular weapon. In general the reward is an improved version of that weapon. The problem is, by the time you've achieved it you're likely low on health and going to die before you get any use out of the bloody thing.
The final thing I want to talk about is the redundant units. There're several different classes such as heavy trooper, engineer, jetpack trooper and the like - several of whom are useless for 99% of the campaign. Jet troopers are poorly armed and only slightly more maneuverable than ground-locked units, but make up part of your team anyway. I'd like to see more choice given to the player in this, perhaps at the start of each mission you could be able to designate how many of each unit you want.
All in all, this wasn't a great game. The instant action is fun and doesn't require any long-term commitment; there are several fun game modes and really they're not much different than campaign missions other than their lack of story. The campaign goes from fun and a fair challenge to, quite literally, impossible. It lacks both quick-save, regular save (during missions) and even checkpoints, so loss means repeating a possibly half-hour slog.
I won't rate the game in stars, numbers or as a percentage, but I will say that if you enjoy fast-paced FPS with a real war-zone feel to it, you'll like this game for its instant action and possibly the campaign. If you feel the need to complete a campaign, or problems like the ones above can actively piss you off as they do me, you'll hate this game.
. Snipers never bothered me, what bothered me is that the award sniper rifle was worse than the normal one.
