To be honest, I’m not sure why this game has gotten such good press. The controls are, in general, pretty clunky. The third person perspective more often feels like it’s getting in the way than a smooth FPS system would.
The use of cover seems damn gimmicky. I can imagine the meeting where they pitched the concept, and at some point, a line must have been uttered that sounded something like: “Okay, we’ve got it. We’re going to have a big, roided up armor wearing badass running around killing rather pale humanoid things. And, get this, he’s going to hide. All the time. All over the place. We won’t have a single part in the entire game where it won’t be absolutely required for him to hide behind something.”
Bah.
It’s also got a good few bugs. If you are revving the [del]chainsword bayonet on your bolter[/del] chainsaw bayonet on your lancer, and you get shot, it powers down. Okay, I can dig that. But if you’re close to an enemy and try revving it up again, it seems to never, ever work. You’ll just wait for enemies to kill you.
There is also evidently a bug at the final level of the game, right before you fight the last boss. The game gives you two compartments with unlimited ammo and two weapons, the torque bow and the sniper rifle. Fine and dandy… except you can only trade out a weapon for the rifle and you can’t reload the bow if you already brought it with you. I’m not sure if this happens to everybody, but it sure happened to me even with reloads, reboots, and replaying the entire level over from scratch.
As for weapons, most feel rather wimpy. There is a pistol variant that does decent damage, but its clip size is laughable and you’ll spend way too much time reloading in any major battle. Still… its zoom feature is useful for sniping. The alternate assault rifle variant is lame, firing only in six shot burst mode. And I hate that the game designers decided that you can only carry four weapons ever, and two of them always have to be a pistol variant and grenades. The ability to carry, say, a sniper rifle, shotgun and lancer would’ve made the game much more enjoyable (with much less backtracking to find dropped weapons).
The enemies are also a huge letdown. When I first saw them, I thought that they were other humans who were shooting at me. Most of the enemies in the game (at least unless you’re looking at them through a zoomed in view) look like pasty faced humans. They don’t have any of the style or uniqueness that, say, the enemies in Halo have. Not only that, their weapons aren’t “alien” either. Many of them will come at you, equipped with the exact same weapons are kitted out with. What… they live under ground, attack by burrowing up through solid concrete, but the most exotic weapon that most of them might carry is an assault rifle that… fires six shot bursts instead of full auto?
Perhaps the single most annoying factor for the game is the above mentioned clunky controls, though. Running feels like you’ve morphed into a drunken elephant, as turning becomes sluggish and finesse becomes impossible. You are, unfortunately, slow and ungainly if you’re not running. And let’s not forget that the same button that you use to run also makes you press yourself up against cover. Oh gee, whee. I wonder if the developers could have come up with a more frustrating scenario than making it rather likely that any escape attempt would wind up with you hugging a wall as you get perforated by incoming fire.
If you really, really want to play this game, rent it. You should be able to beat it in a few days (if you really feel like it) and can return it when you’re done. Far better than dropping 40-60 bucks on this waste of a CD.
