Introduction:Game of the Year, Game of the Year; I kept hearing this title bestowed upon this game. I however had never played this supposedly superior gaming selection. When the game showed up on Steam, and was on sale for $2.50, I told myself. “Even if it fails at being great, it should be $2.50 good.” With that I bought it. To say I irked out $2.50 out of a game I spent over 12 hours completing is a little bit of an understatement. I beat it on either normal or hard.

Now, I find that my reviews tend to be more like designer documents, commenting on what works, and what doesn’t about many different aspects of the game. Therefore they often contain spoilers. You have been warned.

SPOILER ALERT

Story:

I know there is a story to this game, but it is impossible for me to tell you exactly what it was. It has startling complexity, with many different organizations and terrorist groups exerting their influence on the game's world. The main plot however revolves around JC Denton, one of the first augmented humans. Augmented in the sense that rather than mechanical advantages by implants; these humans have nanotechnology in their body that can change to fit the environmental need seemingly at will. JC Denton begins his journey working for UNATCO, which is a company that is seemingly bent on stopping terrorism. Their adversary is the terrorist group NSF.

The first few missions of the game have the story following this basic line, but soon many more companies are introduced, alliances broken, and characters added. The story is written like a novel and doesn’t seem toned down at all for the gaming audience. In a way this is very good, it fills the world with lore beyond what might be seen through one playthrough. Information on the story can be obtained through a number of ways, newspapers, data pads and NPC's conversations. The story lore, while usually not needed for playing the game, fill in expansive backstory. For example, while I initially read many of the newspapers throughout the game, I soon found out they were not mission critical at all. Therefore, similar to the Bioshock recordings, I either chose to ignore them with minimal loss in gameplay or quickly skim over them.

In my opinion, the plot becomes very deep quickly. Keeping track of one terrorist group was easy enough, but then having Majestic 12, FEMA, VersaLife, and a number of other protagonists: Bob Page, Tracer Kong, etc. quickly left me confused. Not to mention, stopping during the adventure and coming back later on left myself trying to remember why I’m being contact by one of these many beings. The basic premise of what I was doing at each mission seemed simple enough, download this, infiltrate that, but I didn't connect with the multitude of characters. Too many names, not sure why I should do things for any of them. This caused me to not want to stop playing the story aspect, as I didn't feel a driving force besides the gameplay itself. Those who are deeply entrenched with the story may enjoy following the complexities and subtleties of the plot, but I was not so drawn in. I'm still not sure why some things happened. Luckily, the augmentations granted later help break up the confusion with changing gameplay by which to entertain, but it doesn’t make the story more captivating.

Choices:

The storyline is linearly based, yet one of the game's best attributes in the choices the player can make. There is enough semblance of choice so that the player may play through the story again to see other choices, such as one would do for dialogue trees in Mass Effect. Of course, there are also more substantial changes depending on the player’s actions than just another voice clip. For example, big spoiler here, JC can either save his brother from dying or not, doing so yields not much difference in the conclusion of the game, but does allow for the brother to pop up at various points past that event, offering reflection on his survival. The developers have done the story well too, so that when the brother does stay alive and show up, his locations and speech do not seem out of place. It feels like an actual plot changing possibility. This felt much better than Mass Effect, where Shepard had to choose which one of his allies would stay to die on the planet to detonate a nuke. In that game, the ultimate conclusion has no large effects at all, just the loss of a teammate, and dialogue right after the event, though not sprinkled through the rest of the plot. In both game examples provided though, the outcome is still negligible.

The early portion of the game is a testament to choice. In fact, it is a shame that the developers were not able to carry through the rest of the game with how well designed the first few levels were in their ability to give the player a sense of control over the actual objectives. In the later game, JC is forced to complete objectives to advance the plot. Not so in the beginning. When I played through the statue of liberty level, I never rescued one of my fellow agents, and I killed the terrorist leader against orders. To my surprise, my boss later rebuked me for doing both, deducting my pay on the missions. If I did everything correct on the mission, my boss might still debunk me for entering the women’s bathroom back at headquarters. These events impressed me greatly. “Wow”, I told myself, even some recent games don’t pay attention to those little details. The second level has much of the same, I never found the ambrosia shipment I was supposed to find, and I killed a bunch of hostages in the subway. The game recorded those things, with the boss further angry at my inability to perform my mission objectives. These things seem minor, but I loved my sense of choice. Even little details were not completely overlooked, Walton Simons, who is one of the main antagonists, tells the player to buggeroff when he is interrogating some hostages at the UNATCO headquarters. If the player chooses not to, Walton Simons will comment on that fact near the end of the game. It is rare in FPS to feel as though my actions or even inactions have influences that decide details, however minor, to the overall construct of the storyline.

Like I mentioned though, these choices quickly drop off, and is one of the reasons I became more “bored” with the game as I progressed. Later on, my ability to change the plot was minimal, and I felt like most of my choices to affect the story had been extinguished in the early game.

Note, choosing to kill or not kill people is a “choice” but is not something I would consider more compelling in Deus Ex compared to every other game out there. The consequence of killing most characters is about the same as if I chose to smash a crate open or not. Like Oblivion, the game won’t let you kill mission critical NPCs which makes for discordant thoughts of the strength of the human body when it remains standing after coming in contact with a rocket. Interestingly, the game suggests not killing everyone. The player is granted non-lethal weapons, and almost every enemy can be subdued without killing them. Sadly, there are only a couple portions of the game where NPCs actually comment on sparing lives, and they all occur within the golden 1/3 of the game, filled with its many actual choices.

On that note, there is one portion of the game where the killing of usually mission critical personal IS allowed. This part, where Anna Nevera, one of UNATCO’s fellow mechanically enhanced humans, is holding an NSF leader at gunpoint, seemed one of the biggest morally unguided portions of the game to me. Similar to skipping mission objectives, the game doesn’t tell the player that they can kill her, but you can. This is amazing, and really gives the player that final sense of control, before the game begins to run mostly in autopilot. If you choose not to kill her there, probably because, like me, you didn’t know (or were too weak to do it) you will have the chance to kill her at a later time. Sadly, at this later time, despite the fact you can glitch your way around not killing her, the game forces you into the position of killing her. If you happen to glitch past her she will not make another appearance, and the game plays as though she died.

Not all choices were well designed, I was especially disappointed by the ending to this game and the choices available there. The endings mattered little on JC’s compounded actions through the game, and indeed he could choose an ending as easily as flipping a couple switches. JC chooses who he wishes to ally with by just following their advice on the very last stage. I chose an ending by accident, Everett’s advice, unaware that I was beating the game with those actions. Also, Deus EX does not allow JC to side with Bob Page, the “evil” antagonist, who I would think that in a supposedly free choice adventure like this, would atleast be an outcome. Who cares if he’s evil, I want the choice!

GUI:

The GUI also takes inspiration from traditional RPGs by allowing a quick selection of items, available at the bottom of the screen, and on the side. Augmentations are highlighted on the right side of the screen when activated, using the F# keys. Up to 9 inventory items are hotkeyable using the number keys. These items can be specified to items on the inventory screen. It is also possible to activate Augmentations through one’s inventory scene, but I never used the feature, and seemed to be there for those who like to micromanage every second of their bioenergy.

An interesting innovation for Deus Ex that I have not seen in any game that have succeeded it is location based damage that affects the player’s abilities. For example, losing the player’s legs prevents them from jumping or moving quickly. (The game says that agents in the field will be terminated if they lose both legs, but this doesn’t happen. Instead, if you cannot get a healing item and lost both legs, you will probably have to restart the game.) There is no explicit total health bar. A wireframe, similar to Starcraft’s, of the player on the left side of the play screen shows the conditions of each body part, from a healthy green glow, to a dangerous red. If the player’s torso fails, the player will die regardless of the conditions of the rest of his body; Important to consider, as radiation and electrical sparks usually target that portion of the body. This GUI element also houses the bioenergy meter and a useful compass.

Besides NPCs giving out information by mouth, there are also datapads, and newspapers. The game does not force the player to “read” any of these things. In fact the developers made it quite easy to access data pads, just to have the vital bits recorded to the player’s Conversation/Log menu. The player’s Conversation/Log tab under his inventory is perhaps the best feature of Deus Ex, for without it, the game would have required a pen and pencil and, to tell you the truth, I would not have completed the game. There are just too many login codes, passwords, and conversations to keep track of, not all are necessarily needed to complete the mission objectives either. Players can delete notes, which I never did, or they can add their own. The ability to add the player’s own notes was a nice feature, but one that I didn’t really need for anything, since the game does a fine job chronologically storing notes. Perhaps good for those who dropped items in a location and wished to note to themselves where the items were. It is too bad that there were more sorting features of the logs, such as sorting by passwords only, or user-created notes, but even without this navigating them wasn’t too much of a pain. The most vital and recent notes were usually at the top, and rarely were notes used from missions besides the current one.

Besides adding notes by oneself, players can also tag points of interest collected images. While cool for a military strategy game, or an RTS, I found it to be of limited use. Tagging people’s pictures? Eh? Facebook in 2000? This is not to say I dislike the feature of being able to tag images; I enjoy anything developers do to increase a players freedom without clutter. The issue is more that the game doesn’t give out images that are useful to be tagged, or the system isn’t robust enough. The images provided by the NPCs in most cases were either self-explanatory, or were maps of greatly varying usefulness. I could see the need to tag where personnel were on the map, but I felt this was more work than should be required. The game lacks an auto-map, which I think was a mistake. In the futuristic setting of Deus Ex, I would think that atleast constant top-down satellite footage would be available to a nano-augmented human, not just helicopter snapshots, and video hacked from a building’s camera. I can’t draw on the provided maps either like Myth or Alien Swarm, so charting paths is cumbersome.

Furthermore, since maps for all locations were not provided I ended up getting lost when navigating to places that I am told to explore. Following good design practices, the developers added landmarks, but this necessity could have been suppressed more with a proper map system. A player-self tagging system would even have been a useful ally. Tag where enemy are on the map to avoid them, or atleast tag where the player is currently.

When the player goes up to a computer terminal, they have a login screen. Assuming their hacking skill is trained, they are also able to hack the device. Hacking is boring. The player hits the hack button, waits a standard amount of time depending on their training level, and they are into the system. The continually dwindling countdown timer shows the remainder of the hack time and terminal access. If the terminal access time through the hack is exceeded, the player’s bioenergy will be drained completely. Improving the hack skill supposedly increases the time until lockout, but I usually had enough time to do everything the terminal provided in the time I had left. The only exception was the reading of e-mails, which usually contained nothing vital to the mission. If they did had something of importance, my log would contain it later. Therefore, the whole computer hacking, accessing, bit of Deus Ex feels empty.

Timesplitters: Future Perfect had an interesting take on computer access, complete with a mini-OS and that felt more active and full-fledged, despite being used only on a single level of that particular game. Besides hacking being un-interactive, it is also somewhat required. Without it the game forces you to find login information laying around, and this could be anywhere on the level. It is much easier to just spend a couple skillpoints into that basic hacking which lets the player do almost everything the terminal or computer provides, the absence being player controlled turrets. Furthermore, the game seemed against typing in the user-names and passwords since, despite them being in your log, you cannot access both the terminal and your logs at once. This forces you to depend ultimately on your memory, or a handy piece of paper. It would have been greatly appreciated if the developers had provided a screen where the compilation of login information could be accessed on the terminal screen. Alternatively, the hacking should be instantaneous as JC already HAS the information needed to login, so why would hacking even require millions of test permutations?

Graphics:

It is unfair for me to judge the game’s graphics. For I played it with the assistance of a DirectX 10 renderer, which wasn’t even out when the game first was released.

However, since that renderer did not change the character models, nor textures, nor style, I can still comment on those fronts. From what I have seen of other games during the same year, and the years before it. It seems that Deus Ex was slightly behind the graphical curve. Luckily, I feel this hasn't affected the game too much, as it seems to accomplish everything it wanted to do with the graphics it had.

I felt the game’s graphics were surprisingly good. There isn’t any bump mapping, or advanced shadowing and lighting, but the game still holds up. Textures have fine details on them when viewed up close, such as the interlaced bands of a television monitor, or the graininess of a wall. The textures are so good, that they even seem to surpass some modern games. Sticking my face onto a wall in more recent games will often confront me with a muddled cloud of color, baked lighting and an overall lack of detail. But in Deus Ex, even in close proximity the details keep their composure for the most part. This does not hold true for the textures on the character models, which do appear blurry and remind me of N64 games. But atleast for the world that JC explores, the textures never put me off as low quality for the time. I must give credit to the new renderer though, since I’m sure atmospheric filtering did help in warding off such blurriness at long distances. When textures are viewed up close, I think my comparison is fair, where the filtering is limited in its usefulness.

Deus Ex takes a somewhat cubist approach to both level design and character model. The world is not made of completely right angles, Chamfer and sloping do exist, but are not used to eliminate the look of blocks completely. The game carries off this style of blocks surprisingly well in the architecture of buildings, which are usually squares anyways, it is the various objects in the world that feel low quality. For example, a basketball in the game looks more like a oblong diamond than a round ball. Furthermore, Characters have rows of teeth that are squares, fingers are cubes (ala The Sims), and water coolers are pointy. These thankfully do not detract from the world too much, since the texturing is capable enough of adding details where the polygonal rendering could not. Yet, rounded edges will be pleasant to your eyes when you leave the game.

When Half Life 2 was still in production, I talked with some of my fellow co-workers about it. One was extremely hyped about the game, saying that players would be able to destroy walls with rockets, anywhere they want to create a path. When I played Half Life 2 I was disappointed to find out this was not so. The world was sterile and the only objects that were destroyable were bottles, cardboard boxes, and specially pre-programmed events. Sadly, 2001’s Red Faction had a more truthful realization of a player pathing their way with destruction. Playing Deus Ex, I found another gem of world destruction. Unlike Red Faction, you can’t blow holes in walls, but the game has many other things to blow up, both for strategic or nefarious purposes. For examples, to proceed through a locked door, forget having to pick it, or find a key, just attach a LAM explosive to the door and bust it open. Nearly every door, besides mission crucial ones, can be removed via this design, and it allowed the player another sense of charting ones path.

Besides doors, various other objects can be disposed of. Chicken hanging in Hong Kong not your type of beef? Smash it. Boxes in your both, dematerialize them. Glass windows? Gone. The player can also destroy bodies. This is for those people who are moving over from Quake, and wish to destroy their fallen enemies’ corpses for their masochistic ways. I suppose it will also prevent guards from finding bodies, but given the stupid AI, I never tried it. Whenever an object that is destroyable is hit, it will turn a darker shade of gray, until it becomes black and explodes. This is a simple, but effective mechanic of showing how much damage something receives. It also has the bonus of informing the player if their attacks are doing any damage, since unlike doors, objects do not have apparent heal meters, and it isn’t until the player is strong enough that their attack may do any damage at all.

Gameplay:

Deus Ex is all about choices, or a semblance of choice. Choices of who lives and who dies, and choices of how to carry out mission objectives. Do you plan on sneaking your way past the guards, or would you rather kill them all? But how would you kill them? Would you dispatch them with their own turrets, move up close for a crowbar to the back of the head, or might I interest you in a fine sniper rifle with that? There are many ways to do things and this is the game’s biggest draw. When I played through the game I choose to have JC specialize in Melee weapons and pistols. I would sneak up to people and bash their bones to make my pleasure but if that failed, I could shoot my pistol to finish the job. However, it was gun combat that showed a major weakness in the game’s formula.

Guns are not accurate. JC must not move so that he can aim properly. While this may make sense for some of the larger weapons, such as the sniper rifle, it doesn’t feel correct for small arms like the pistol. Furthermore, even if JC stands extremely still, and the crosshair focuses to its maximum extent, showing maximum accuracy, the game will still not make it a perfect shot. Consequently Deus Ex is not a run and gun game. Any attempt to do this will usually result in the enemy having the upper hand (atleast until JC receives augmentations). Even towards the end of the game, when I had maxed my pistol’s abilities with upgrades; a laser pointer, increased range and more. I could still not use it as one would in Counterstrike, running and shooting. Sadly, this lowers the “choice” element described forcing the player to adopt a crouch, go, repeat. Thankfully melee was unscathed in design. A hit is a hit, and there is less of a dice roll of getting a shot off that kills.

The game is an RPG, and so consequently, JC has skills that he can build up and specialize in. As I mentioned before there are melee and pistol skills, but there are also heavy weapons, computer hacking, and many more. Skill points are earned through progressing through the story and discovering locations, so the game doesn’t force the player to kill people. Except that, having killed so many people, or atleast knocking them out, I was not rewarded for my skills at all, so I’m not exactly sure why they are “skill” points. One would assume that I would become more skillful from use of my pistol. Instead, I can visit a hotel and magically know how to use it better. I would have wished for some “reward” for my hands on-ness. I guess that the developers did not want the players that took the forceful, rather than stealth, approach to be rewarded too quickly by grinding their skill points. Through this way, the allocation system is somewhat of a weakness, though it does increase the player’s ability versatility, choosing to perhaps specialize in another secondary skill without putting effort into directly training it.

Because the game does not force, though it does hint, the player to play a certain way, the developers had to accommodate paths for the unskilled. This was another neat addition to the game. For example, there are generally two or more paths through any situation. One path may have the player, strong in swimming, swim through underground piping to infiltrate an area. The other may force the player to fight more enemies directly. Similarly, some paths may involve disabling security systems or traps, which those who are unskilled in demolitions or computers would have problems bypassing. They can however, take the front door and liquefy some people though. I like the choice of the paths given by the developers, they kept things fresh, but did add some confusion. I would traverse one path only to go down one of the other skill tree specialized routes, and end back where I started, losing time and more resources than needed. A minor plaint, which’s benefits outweigh the annoyance. You know, if I had that auto-updating map, or even a mini-map though, the backtracking by accident would probably have happened less often.

Weapons:

Deus Ex has a couple different weapon types, but not too many varieties as one would expect in an RPG. I.E. One sniper rifle found is the only sniper rifle found. There are two pistols types, and one machine gun. Etc. The weapon selection that does have the most variety are the melee weapons, probably due to their inability to be upgraded. Due to the limited weapon types, they have some special features that other FPS do not have.

For one, in the essence of an RPG, the weapons can be updated with state modifiers, but as I mentioned they didn’t seem to make a big different to me. (They will not make this a pure FPS no matter how many upgrades for weapons are procured.) A weapon’s range determines how close an enemy has to be to “target” them with the ridicule for increased accuracy. The bullets will travel large distances even without proper targeting though the chances of hitting the target are slim to none. There are also upgrades to decrease reload time, no Gear of War-esque action key to speed reload. In addition, the weapon’s capacity for bullets can be upgraded, for times when one does feel like having a firefight. As far as I could tell, weapon damage was determined by skills, and not by upgrades.

The player may also choose to change the ammo type in the weapon. If a robot chooses to clank on by, the player could load up some Sabot bullets in their shotgun, while traditional bullets would be just fine for the normal troops. For the tranquilizer crossbow there are also some different dart types some to knockout, some to light up the area etc. These different bullet types are an interesting touch, but most players will probably only use different ammo types when they run out of the former.

Inventory management captured the essence of the likes of Resident Evil 4, or Dungeon Siege, where the items picked up through the adventure take up a limited space in the inventory. Since there are not too many items in the world of use the non-expandable inventory is usually sufficient. Also, picking up more of the same item stacks them, allowing one to magically carry 5 cans of soda, but perhaps not have room for a pick lock. Not all the items in the game make sense for the space they occupy. Lockpicks are bigger than soda cans and pistols, and a beam sword acquired through the adventure, which lights up like a lightsaber when equipped, still takes up space in the inventory as though the sword were ignited the entire time. The inventory is also highly simplified, one cannot rotate objects to make them fit better. Thankfully, this is usually not required, I only once remember needing to move objects around to fit another item. Instead, I have qualms, not with the inventory system, but the item pickup system.

See, to get items off dead bodies, you need only to right click on their body and JC will strip search them of all their goodies. Unlike most RPGs, no inventory dialogue box comes up, and it keeps the pacing fast like a traditional shooter. Unfortunately, it means I pick up every knife I find, even though I’ve ditched the last 5. I’ve kept my inventory full to avoid this annoyance. Cannot pickup knife? THANK YOU. Here’s a tip to all you developers out there. It makes sense to automatically pick up items that the player already has. He is carrying around 5 sodas? Add another, if it stacks no problem. He is loaded out with this one type of ammo, obviously he is using it, so give him some more. For these situations, no problem, screw the dialogue box. But for everything else, it is probably wise to bring up some choice of the player if they want that item or not. If they do want everything, there can be a take all button, like Morrowind. Having to drop the same items till the end of time is ridiculous, especially since I must open the inventory, and then find suitable space on the ground to drop the item.

Augmentation:

The Crysis before Crysis was released, a spiritual predecessor. You want super strength? Get “Combat Strength” and bash open doors, and pop people’s skulls with your melee armament. You want to Jump high? Get “Speed Enhancement”. To get these though, JC must find the Augmentation containers around a level and then install them using a medical bot. They can be further upgraded using upgrade augmentation containers, though these do not require the use of a medical bot. I found it odd why a medical bot was needed for one and not the other. The game makes it seem like the upgrade containers contain more efficient firmware, so to speak, and so are easily integrateable, but I personally think they should have been installed through the medical bot also. I spent some time trying to find out why my upgrade augmentation containers were not showing up as available to install on the medical bot screen until I realized you could just install them through the inventory. I think the game could have made this clearer, and atleast go with “logic”.

Augmentations are the game’s bread and butter. Without this, I might have stopped playing it halfway through. However, I wanted to see what other augmentations I would find, and turn myself in the super-human I was supposed to be. And let me tell you, once you get enough of the augmentations going, JC is truly a killing machine. He can destroy missiles in mid-air, see in the dark and through walls, he can dispatch a tiny investigative prob, he can pick up huge objects and more. I felt a bit like Neo from the Matrix will all the special abilities, and it was better than some Matrix games out there. Many augmentations can be chosen and activated at once. The augmentations come in pairs, two per container, though only one can be permanently chosen, the other lost permanently, so the player must investment wisely. Using Augmentations requires bio-energy. Bioenergy can be recharged using bio-cells scattered around a level. These are useless at the game’s start, but at the end, they are more precious than health packs, since the player can heal quickly with an augmentation later in the game. This bioenergy teaches conservation, though spurred by intensity, often used it all up quickly, leaving myself with boring, weak and slow JC.

AI

The AI is average to retarded, in the strictly psychological sense. The enemies care little for cover and seem to have primarily three modes of function. Patrol; where the enemy will follow its programmed walking and exploring path, Attack; where the enemy will fire at you, and if out of range, will run to find you, and retreat; where the enemy will run defenselessly from you. Patrol is under the map maker’s direct hand, and the patrol routes on most of the levels are good, the enemies do not get stuck, and are made to give JC possibilities to get into position to attack or sneak by. Attack is where the poorness arrives in a black van with tinted windows. The enemy will fire and strafe you until you leave their sight. The next part is the predictability. They will then usually rush your position allowing you to predict where they will come from. Either that, or they tend to roam around the level helplessly, where you may find them later, wondering how they got there. Worse, the enemies seem to forget where you went very easily. You just need to run behind a shipping crate and crouch out the way, and they will quickly give up. “I guess it was just my imagination.” Really trooper # 467? The intruder alarm could still be blaring and the enemy will just go back to standing around normally.

Storytime! On one level I was hiding in a basement area. I crept up a floor to find a bunch of guards standing around, upon seeing me they started to rush around and fire their weapons. I retreated into my cave. Some of the enemies chose to charge headfirst. Due to their numbers they could overcome me, but that was about their only strategic advantage. This also made laying traps, and throwing out explosives quite effective. After I dealt with the attackers, I went back up a floor, and found that to “look for me” some of the enemies had run up another level of the building. They then began to rush down to attack. Sometimes, to gain the advantage against the enemy, it is as simple as hiding behind some boxes and taking pot shots.

Considering that this game was made in 2000, I shouldn’t assume that AI technology would impress me much, except this is the kind of behavior I’ve seen in 1990s games. As for the AI’s retreating, they will do this when they have taken a nearly fatal amount of damage. They will drop their gun and run off. I assume that they will never turn back to killing you, since they appear to go stand in corners, but I’ve never let one live to find out.

The AI of the robots is superior to the humans, but this is a byproduct of them not having to prove their sentience, and they be superiority tactically equipped. A huge robot has no need to charge you and so will keep on its patrol route, dealing fatal damage if you choose to rush it.

Sound:

Sound for this game is below average, but the voice acting is definitely better than average. Every character interaction is voice acted, which beats out some RPGs, such as Morrowind; which only had partial voice acting. Most different characters have uniqe speaking lines too, so two civilians would say diverse things instead of being cookie cutters of each other. No overflow of Nolan North here. Considering there are so many characters to voice act, that is another detail that makes Deus Ex noteworthy. Furthermore, even for the year 2000, the voices do not sound like they are being spoken into a microphone, and are clearly pronounced. However, unlike Chronicles of Riddick, there are not too many witty lines to go around for the Guards. Throughout the entirety of the game, the guards will have bored you with their repetitious responses to your presence. However, this is overlookable for quality of the non-guard lines.

At some point in the game JC will come to Hong Kong. Other reviews of this game have said that the accents for the characters sound extremely fake. For one character I must definitely agree on this mark, the newspaper lady sounds like she is trying too hard, but for the rest their voices and tone didn’t distract me enough to remove me from the setting. I assumed that due to the futuristic setting, with meat marts lying next to multi-billion dollar corps, that the little shops selling flowers and other useless items are a front, and guise to the true be-hind the scenes actions going on in the city. For that reason, it would make sense that the accents all sound fake. The game may not state this specifically, but I’ll just take it like that. It also supports why there would be so much police action in the area, and the freedom of the rival gangs in the area.

Sounds were a bit meeeeeh. The game is good with audio indicators of various actions: shutting down of augmentations, a sound for when the key chain works (So you don’t try and hit the key ring over and over), a sound to let the player know when a camera is about to spot them, the sounds of a turret swinging about to shoot at the player, BUT, some sounds are horrible. Picking up a wooden chair or grate and throwing it to the ground sounds like a wooden toy that a child would use. This is also a problem for other pickup-able objects, and strike actions. For knives, hitting a window and breaking it sounds quite good, with the tinkling of glass on the ground, but a knife hitting an unbreakable glass barrier results in what sound like smacking a metal grating under water. Why? I must hate the knife all around because another sound it makes is like a whip. Now I haven’t stabbed anybody in real life, but I can tell you it would be more squish than “woop-ish”. I can understand there not being 5 sounds for each action, since memory was more scarce in 2000, but I think the sounds that were chosen could have been less tinker-tonk.

Music was good with some reservations on its execution. The theme of the game, the one that plays on the title menu, doesn’t play much of a part in the initial levels, but it shows up boisterously and mixes itself with level action themes later on through the game, which I thought was kind of cool. That way it wasn’t all up in the player’s face like in Chronicles of Riddick. However, a method by which Riddick’s was superior was its dramatic-ques. For Deus Ex, sometimes the slightest enemy provocation will cause the action variant of the soundtrack to go blaring through the speakers. Get seen by a camera, even with no apparent danger? Action Theme. One weak guard sees you? Action Theme. It switches on too quickly. It doesn’t seem want to want to cooperate with the existing soundtrack, deciding to barge in and raid the metaphorical ear fridge. On Riddick’s front the action music sort of fades in, and was a subset of the level’s theme. While it also had the tendency to jump on, it felt more graceful. There shouldn’t be a technological excuse between the games for this, seems like a styling problem on Deus Ex’s end.

As for non-action oriented music, it was usually very atmospheric. There was an emphasis on the darkness of the setting, such as New York’s night scenes, or dankness of subways and caves, playing downbeat tunes. These worked well. I also liked the Hong Kong theme, which made it very obvious when one was in the bustling city sector, though it, and the party scenes, were perhaps the most obvious and easily noted soundtracks. (Action themes withholding)

Conclusion:

Deus Ex is a first person shooter/RPG hybrid with more focus on the Rolepaying aspects than a traditional first person shooter. It has a complicated plot which may scare off those who are looking for movie-style cinematic first person shooting experience. Also, the game’s length is more detrimental than advantageous, as the player is whisked off to locations that seem to drag the plot out. However, the game is exceptionally good in its sense of player choice, allowing multiple entry routes and solutions to puzzles. While the player’s choice in the main story arc is limited to a few choice opportunities, these opportunities stand out from other games in the genre as having noticeable changes in the storytelling, though not the conclusion. Sadly, the multitude of these choices happen within the first third of the game. Voices are good nevertheless sound barely squeaks by as acceptable in some situations. Music fits the emotions of the game, but breaks it too quickly for action encounters. The user interface is intuitive and gives the player the ability to be a detective with notetaking and image collection, though the use of paper maps for a player worth over a billion dollars makes the governmental bodies seem like idiots. Overall, I would recommend this game for those who like a story, and also wish to experience a game that allows the player to specialize in their own skillset and still succeed.

Misc:

The save games for this game are HUGE. I saved over 200 times, granted, but I wasn’t expecting my save games folder to top 3.64GB. That’s larger than the entirety of the game which is 2.4GB. Couldn’t they have used form sort of compression mechanism for save games? A little bit of extra load time wouldn’t be too concerning, especially since in 2000, there is no way that 3.64GB would be small change when harddrives were about 60GB at that time. I compressed my Save Games Folder using the Best RAR compression scheme and it gave it a 1/3 compression ratio, which while not perfect, is still much better.

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by Zott820

I had already written a written a review for the remade Butcher Bay campaign for Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena, but now, having played through the Dark Athena Campaign, I can finally complete my review of the full box offering. This review will focus on the single player campaign of Dark Athena. If you are interested in my other review, I suggest checking out my Riddick Butcher Bay Campaign review. Most of the mechanics from that review stay true to this one, IE weapon selection wheel, and fast loading times.

Storyline: The story takes place just after the events of Butcher Bay. Johns and Riddick are resting in stasis aboard their ship when they are grappled in by a pirate vessel, the Dark Athena. This begins Riddick's adventure to discover new characters and new places; relatively.

The first portion of the game is sort of a refresher of the game's mechanics being another tutorial/dream stage. Unlike the first game's tutorial, this one felt more individualized, in that it could have been its own little mini-story. It served to introduce the new Drone that Riddick would be facing for most of the game which are a bit different than the usual human fare as will be discussed later. Unfortunately, since the dream sequence effect was used in the first game, its use was not as original and surprising when the game cut to the actual storyline.

Dark Athena starts the game off quickly. Riddick finds the usage of guns from the arms of drones. While the first game eased the player into the use of hand-to-hand, and then transitioned to firearms, Dark Athena does the opposite. After being able to shoot a couple bullets from drone hand guns, Riddick obtains the ulaks from a guard for more personal fights through the bowls of the ship.

Along the way Riddick finds that there are prisoners on the ship, and somewhat similar to the lower level prisons in Butcher Bay, Riddick must talk to these characters, find out what they want, bring the item they request, and advance the story. Unlike Butcher Bay, there are fewer optional questions. This means that the story, which was linear anyways, has that linear-ness especially stuffed down the player's throat. This isn't to say it is bad, linear games are good at building a cinematic experience, but the experience for story in this game is a mixed bag to begin with.

These fetch-quests from the prisoners grow tiresome and annoying since there are about four of them in tandem. It is depressing to bring one items to someone only to be commanded to find another item for another person in jail, only to have them give you yet another quest.

Thankfully, the game keeps these "fetch" quests from getting boring by introducing more spaces on the Dark Athena to unlock and play around in. These areas are not poorly designed either, so this choice plot advancement and design could have been far worse. Sections where Riddick is forced to backtrack are usually repopulated with enemies to dispatch, and thankfully makes sense within the storyline; meaning the guards do not suddenly appear out of nowhere.

After completing the fetch quests Riddick is able to release the prisoners and escape from the Dark Athena. However, this is where the game should have ended. Most of the plot points were tied up as far as I was interested in them, and it didn’t feel like there needed to be more from the game. Sure, the little girl may have been stuck on a ship, but it wasn’t Riddick’s problem to begin with. But, ala Butcher Bay, when the game feels like it is going to end, it doesn’t. There is another whole chapter of the surface of a planet, which is devoted to just pure action. There really is little character development, and gameplay, while following the same Riddick mechanics, feels very different.

After the interlude on the planet, Riddick returns to the Dark Athena to redo most of what he had already completed. He even fights the same boss again, one who I thought he had killed, but noOOoo, I guess a knife to the throat doesn’t do it now a days.

There are too many sections of the story that feel incomplete and unnatural. For example, the game never shows what happens to Johns. Johns has to survive, since he appears in the movies, which take place after the games, but still, what happened man? Last, we see him, Revas has him in her arms on the prison block, but then we never see him again.

On that note, during the part of the game where the prisoners are released and fighting the guards, I was unsure who died, and who lived. People I thought I saw bodies of lying on the ground seemed to be alive at later times. During that same prisoner release scene, apparently Revas and Johns were there, judging by the wall textures, but I never saw them anywhere close after the cutscene. The whole prisoner release scene did not feel fleshed out, and so in its raw state I wasn’t sure who lived, who died, and what happened. There are a couple other cutscenes like this, and I was disappointed that the cutscenes distanced me from the game rather than draw me closer into it.

Characters:

Revas: Evil Ship Captain, has two lives.

Riddick: Same from the last campaign, but this time with ulaks to kick ass with.

Spinner: Second in command, cooler than Revas but all talk, no substance. Doesn’t have much of a hand in the plot.

Johns: Irreverent

Dacker: Mercenary whom helps Riddick, but if you know about what happens to people who help Riddick, you probably know the rest. Stays in contact through radio links throughout the ship.

Prisoners: Men and women who need Riddick’s help, or not.

New Enemies:
Drones: Slow until you show yourself. They generally care little about themselves and will rush out into danger. Riddick can use their hand guns for as long as it has ammo and is quite accurate and deadly; one of the better guns in the game.

Alpha Drone: A poorly designed enemy that only appears in the second portion of Dark Athena. The game doesn’t tell the player how to defeat them. I tried bursting a air burst shots on one, once at a time, in the hopes to decrease his health slowly but surely. No matter how many times I tried this, the beast wouldn’t die. Turns out, you have to stack about five on an Alpha Drone bursting them all at once. After bursting the shots, it would put the enemy in a weakened state where he could be finished off with a melee quicktime event. I wouldn’t have known how to win against this foe if it wasn’t for a game walkthrough. The game gives no hints what to do. Worse, if the player fails to do the quicktime event in time, the 5 burst combo as to be done again. It goes without saying, that getting all these shots to hit their mark is difficult under pressure, so doing it twice sucks.

Spider Drone: Another very annoying enemy. The drones hide on walls before the player arrives, or they will crawl up the wall as the player arrives. A red laser signifies its presence. Once the Spider Drone sees the player and plays an alert noise it the player has about 2 seconds to dispatch the horrid device before it locks on the player and fires devastating shots. Once it does so there is no more two second grace period, the spider drone is ruthless. The shots’ damage is crippling, almost a whole block of health per dart; this is on the normal difficulty mind you. If the player leaves the area of fire and returns, the spider drone almost always gets the first shot off. The developers would have wise to either decrease the damage per shot, letting the player absorb the damage to dispatch the beast, or they would have reinstated the 2 second lag time to fire when the player gets out of range and then back into range.

New Weapons:

Air Burst Grenade launcher: Slow, but has unlimited ammo. Fires a yellow pellet that can be remotely detonated. Low Radius of explosion, but up to six can be released at once.

SMG: Fires many fast and weak bullets. Large Clip size. Not the best weapon, but good for rushing positions when the player doesn’t have the opportunity to reload.

Drone Gun: Fires Strong accurate bullets. Limited by mobility. Because the guns are part of the Drones, the bodies have to be dragged around. Riddick can either weld the gun and only move slowly backward, or he can opt to leave the gun position and throw the drone around manually for faster positioning, but lack of offense. The guns are limited to a small supply of bullets which do not recharge.

Gameplay: The game follows much of the same method as Butcher Bay. Guns are just as bad as they were before, and I still can’t recommend their use. I recall firing at point blank range at enemies and still missing. The shotgun also seems less effective than I remember. Therefore, go for the Ulacks or other melee weapon, and catch guards when they are alone. The stun gun continues to be a viable offensive weapon, especially in some of the earlier close quarter areas of the Dark Athena. It also works against drones, disabling their link to the human controller, and shutting them down. Curb stomp them to sever the connection permanently.

Dark Athena copies the Mech scene from Butcher Bay, except in space rather than a hanger. I was hoping for more originality, but at least they fixed it to make it more exciting. Mechs are now more representative of their visual strength and so the player’s cannot really go 1 to 1 with them. Therefore, when in mech suit himself, Riddick has to act decisively, for the enemies do not simply spaz out and die like before. Later Riddick is able to control a Drone, which makes up for the replicant mech scene.

The artificial intelligence seems about the same as the Butcher Bay Remake. Enemies would generally do a fine job of acting their roles. Drones would wander around slowly, and ignoring cover, since they were less concerned with life preservation. The humans on the other hand were good at taking cover from behind boxes. One thing about the AI that felt new was that when the grenade launcher, a new weapon, was used. Human enemies would not only dodge the grenades when you chucked at them, but when they landed on the ground, waiting for their remote detonation, the AI would seemingly avoid that part of the ground, as they should. This made the grenade launcher extremely difficult to use to kill enemies unless it was a direct hit, and players took into account the dodging, predictively firing the second shot as the enemy moved out of the way of the first. The AI while good doesn’t stop the occasional hilarity; enemies that walk right off cliffs. It happened only once making it funnier to see, a human retreating one moment, and gone the next, flying off into a gravity generator.

This game is hard. Just like Butcher Bay, it throws a large number of enemies at the player at one time and expects the player to be in able condition to be able to dispatch them with their equipment as given. Sadly, the given equipment is either not good enough, or the odds are seriously against Riddick. A few examples where this felt especially true include one where I fought two Alpha Drones at once, and another where I had to fight an Alpha Drone in a tiny room, not given any space to hide or avoid the behemoth enemy. Also plentiful and annoying were rooms where I had to take down 5 enemies, but only had the air burst grenade launcher. These enemies would all just rush me and I couldn’t even fire fast enough to take them down. Either that, or the enemy was far away and sniping me. An attempt to counter snipe was futile with the inaccurate guns, and their ability to dodge my air burst grenade launcher. Throwing the spider Drones into the mix made these scenes worse. These baddies had impeccable aim and dealt disastrous damage. Thankfully, the hardest parts of the game were at the end, usually planet side, or else I might not have finished the game. The odds are really that much against Riddick, hiding doesn’t either since the planet is a sunny outdoor daylight, and sadly that is like 1/3 of the game mechanics thrown out the window. One reprieve is that if Riddick dies, he will recover one block of health. This will stack, so that if Riddick dies twice, he will come back with two more blocks of health than when he went through the checkpoint. Dying became necessary to survive, if that makes any sense.

Getting around the game is a bit of a chore due to vague objectives and enigmatic level design. One such moment was the following: I had just opened up a vent but since I couldn’t jump and grab the ledge now in view after countless tries I figured it must not be the right way and backtracked through the game. Finding no suitable path, I simply quit. It took me many more tries after returning to the game to grab onto that ledge, which turned out to be the correct path. Other situations of inability to grab ledges were also present. I never quite figured out if I had to press a button to get Riddick to grab a ledge or if it was automatic. Sometimes it felt automatic, other times it didn’t. I know that pushing a button was required for overhangs, but they had a visible indicator thankfully. On that same note, there were situations in the game where Riddick had to do a lot of dangling and grabbing. One “stage” planetside had me doing this for 5 minutes over a watery death, with no enemies to bother me. It felt like it belonged in a game like Uncharted, based on its design, rather than the sneaking/shooter that is Riddick. I’m fine with a couple jumping up here, shimming across here, just not so much that it feels like a chore, or breaks the flow of the game. Heck, it would have worked better in the tutorial stage, to introduce Riddick’s move rather than the near endgame it was. Riddick in not Nathan Drake, don’t make him hop around like he is.

It is this getting lost and stuck that caused me to pine for a map or hint system. Sadly, the developers chose to remove the toggle able room map compared to Butcher Bay’s. Instead, room maps appear on the ship’s walls, which are not immensely helpful at finding goal oriented routes. There was one time, one time, where the game gave me a hint on where to go, and what to do. I was in awe when it did, for I hadn’t seen a hint through my entire play through of Butcher Bay, and indeed not one following this occurrence. I had reached a puzzle that required me to drag a drone through a vent and use its gun to shatter a window. It seems simple, but since the drone and window are in different rooms, it doesn’t “feel” right. The developers threw in a hint which appears after a certain duration telling me what to do. THANK YOU! I liked this a lot, but why is it not more prevalent? I could have used it for fighting the Alpha Drones, I could have used it when I wandered around for twenty minutes finding the proper path. Such a great figure doesn’t have to ruin a game, or remove the sense of exploration. It doesn’t even have to have a path mechanic like Dead Space or Army of Two. Just throw up a hint. Or make it an optional one, with a window to open if the player chooses. In either case, I like what was done for that room, but the hint system overall could have been more robust to remove the tiresomeness.

Graphics:

The game engine is the same one that I reviewed for the Butcher Bay Remake, so I won’t go too much about what I have already talked about. Instead, I will say that this game does utilize the more advanced features of the new engine that were not utilized for the remake. The developers did not want to change up the gameplay of the original Butcher bay too much, so it makes sense that not all the features of the new engine would be used for that particular campaign.

For Dark Athena, it seems that the developers did a better job with the use of light sources. This isn’t to say the lighting is better, it seems about the same, but there are parts of the game that are designed to specifically to use flashlight/searchlight graphics of the new engine. IE There is a level where the player has to stay out of the light as he climbs some cargo crates. If he is spotted with the light, then the enemies open fire on him. The light sources gracefully scan the sides of the cargo hold, as the accompanying shadows move smoothly.

Another good use of graphics was the water in this game. This game has perhaps some of the best water in a game that I have seen. This comes with a large caveat, the water is not interactive. You can shoot into it, fall into it, or throw things into it and it remains in the same motion that he had before attempts to distort it. This was a little sad to see, since it was so beautiful and it called to me like a kitten to be touched and played with. However, water plays absolutely no part in the game besides an instant death hazard, ala Mario, and so it makes sense for the developers not to waste time programming particles effects for it. Especially since this may have decreased the visual splendor. Best water in a game I’ve seen sans Crysis.

Another cool graphical effect that really had me oohing and ahhing was the bump mapping on the broken glass of a mech later in the game. The red emergency light reflects off the strange angles of the shard but not all over. The alpha blending and selective overlay really caught my attention during that part of the game. If I am not mistaken, the original engine for Butcher Bay had bump mapping back when it was on the Xbox, but the implementation on the HUD just looks so good, that I’m considering it a bonus of the new engine.

Yet one more highlight on this roll was a gravity room. Here enemies would die and fly towards a spinning gravity generator. Bodies of the fallen would slide off platforms and so would their weaponry It was clearly different than most other games, especially since it wasn’t just gravity manipulations that affected the player, but indeed all the enemies in the game too. It is one thing to do a puzzle using gravity, but to have to dodge the enemy, and avoid being sucked into a gravity well, that’s different. It is too bad that the bullets from the gun did not curve, but one cannot have everything.

Sadly, the game fails for destructive environments. Even when Riddick gets a grenade-launching weapon, it doesn’t even make a whole in the game world. The only thing truly destructible that I found were wooden doors on the planet, but they were not satisfying one bit in their already halfway demolished state. The Butcher Bay remake had a cool mech scene where the floors would just explode when missiles hit them. How is it possible that a remake has more next-gen features than its sequel AND uses the game engine made FOR the sequel. Even the Dark Athena mech scenes don’t have destructible environments. Red Steel for Wii has destructible environments, and that is working with the Wii’s limitations. The materials of the Dark Athena must be light-years ahead of the Butcher Bay Prison, for it is tough to believe it could be so indestructible.

Sounds and Music:

The voices in this game are the highlight. There is enough diversity in the accents and voice actors that characters do not sound the same. This is so much better than walking into a room and having all the characters yell at you in the exact same way. I didn’t feel as though the characters were distant from their characters either.

The voices fit the personalities. Riddick maintains his terse verses, but other characters are much more outdoing. The prison section of the game probably has the bulk of the dialogue there. The crazy former captain sounds out of his wits and feeble. The crazy prisoners jump around their cages, swearing at Riddick and threatening his death. I will admit I was slightly masochistic and make sure to listen to all of their swears and insults. There were more interactions than I expected, each with a slightly different animation to accompany it. I am glad that the game did not skimp in the voice acting category. Unfortunately, Johns, who I quite liked the character of in Butcher Bay, says absolutely nothing throughout the entire game. It is possible that the developers did not hire his voice actor back for a second showing. Johns only has a slight showing but I would have liked him to at least say “Riddick” once in the entire game.

AS for the enemies that Riddick fights, I was amazed at the freshness of the guard voices. By this I mean there was quite a plethora of things for them to say. It was rare for me to hear the same death taunt multiple times when fighting Drones, a testament to the voice acting quantity. They insulted me in so many ways that I can’t even feel insulted, but just stunned with the sharp selection of their vocabulary. I guess the developers knew that their game was hard, and gamers would be dying a lot. My accolades to all those who wrote and acted the voices.

The voice syncing is as good as the Butcher Bay Remake though still not perfect. I never felt that the characters were miming their words, something that helped to listen to some of their extended dialogue scenes, but they did not match up 100%. This did not bother me too much, having played games from long ago, where voices would emanate from motionless faces, ala Perfect Dark.

I can’t really speak much about the music. During the sections of the game I was focused on the gameplay and did not often notice it. The stuff I did notice were the songs carried over from Butcher Bay. In fact, a lot of music was reused between the campaigns. I will forgive them since it wasn’t bad music, it is just that having to play through two games with the same music causes what is noticed to become repetitive.

As for the rest of the sounds, many of the weapons from Butcher bay were carried over, and so the sounds and their quality are the same. For sounds I especially enjoyed, one would have to be the full sounding boom on the rocket launcher. A good second is the mechanical creaking and hydraulics of the Drones, reminding me of the cybernetic Borg in Star Trek.

Multiplayer:

Despite my attempts to find a game, I never could. Consider it dead. It must have not been memorable enough on the PC scene for continued play. A shame since the multiplayer looked decent from videos I saw of it.

Misc.:

I had difficulty installing this game on Windows 7 x64. Apparently, the Direct2Drive version had some DRM that was not compatible with the new windows. The solution, go download the newest version of the DRM off the website of the DRM developer. I had to override the included Tages installer with a newer version during the installation of the game. I found it disappointing that I had to install DRM of my free will to get the game to work. I guess you could also use a Crack for the game, though I did this the more legal way.

Instead of collecting cigarette packets this time around, the player can pick up bounty cards, which tend to have humorous writings on them, and allow unlocking of bios on prisoners and other characters.

The Alpha Drone’s Missiles, during your first encounter with the beast, seek Riddick through walls. And the missiles clip through the walls. What is up with that?

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by Zott820

I came across this game when I saw it in a video highlighting a 48 hour game creation competition. This game came in first in the competition and I was interested to know what made it so good. The video did not yield any answers on its own and so I decided to play the game myself and figure it out.

I’m glad I did for this game was actually quite fun and its simplistic design doesn’t hold back the gameplay. I shall review this game as I do normal commercial games.

Graphics: Most enemies consist of a couple spites, at the minimum they have 2 frames for walking, such as the main tiger protagonist. The graphics are nothing special. The background is unchanging per level and a representation of some of kind of zoo and corresponding kennels. This background looks like it was drawn in Microsoft Paint and took no longer than 5 minutes tops. Still, it sort of fits the style of the game. I wouldn’t have let it go if it were photo-realistic in this cartoon world, so for that reason it is not bad.

The part when Graphics start to hurt gameplay occurs when the 3 or so different types of blocks are not varied enough in their appearance that they become confusing. There are cloud blocks, impermeable dark metal blocks, and light metal blocks that allow the tiger’s passage through them. In actuality the impermeable block on is only slightly lighter than the passable varieties. This messed me up in a couple of situations, with I trying to pass through what I mistakenly could not. I would have increased the contrast on the blocks or atleast made a completely different color to lock it on function.

Based on the placement of clouds in the game, I assumed that the developers originally thought of having them disappear after the tiger stepped on them, ala Mario games and other plat formers, though they act as normal solid blocks as it is.

The best part of the graphics would have to be the guts that fly out of those consumed in the tiger’s hunger. It isn’t so much gory as delightfully humorous to see the red “guts” fly out in all directions; macabre, but light.
The game runs in a window, no full screen is available, but I would personally prefer the crisp graphics in a window that stretchy pixels in full screen. The window for gameplay is at a generous resolution as it is.

Sounds and music: Simplistic but delightful. The synthesized music in the background doesn’t hurt the ears and I did not find myself hating it even after hearing it repeat itself through the levels of the game.

There are cutesy sounds, with an “oh no” male’s voice, and a couple of “wha wha whaaa” as if a minor epic fail had been done at the starving of the tiger. Besides sounds corresponding to win/loss conditions there really aren’t too many other sounds (Besides the once again sadistic yet hilarious chomping sound), which is fine, the game doesn’t need them.

Gameplay: What I liked best about this game is that it is very cute and the developers were aware of it, making the game light-hearted, but still focusing on the gameplay aspects. The player must guide his girthy tiger through stages to get to the “Do not feed Animals” Sign. On my first play through I was unsure where I was supposed to go, and what was or wasn’t landscape. For this reason, the sign was probably not the best indication of the level end, but it isn’t too much a problem after grasping what is supposed to be done. Luckily the developers were very wise in allowing the player to play around with the levels. There are no lives and so players have the chance to just try out strategies and get used to new enemies and obstacles that appear. For example, the game doesn’t tell you what you can and cannot eat. While not try and eat everything? Alas, the man with the tiny net is not edible as he captures your “hero” and puts him back working for now wages as an attraction. NO, tigers need to eat. Eat the zoo keeps as they run, and eat the dart men. These dart men’s darts do not harm the tiger as a one hit kill as I originally suspected. Instead they make the tiger slower and unable to jump high for a limited time. Not too bad until the tiger dies from hunger. Like I said, he needs a lot of food to maintain his girth and strength. Why else does he take up a large horizontal space in the world?
Due to the one screen nature of the game, probably making it easier to program, there isn’t much opportunity to break away from the basic elements of the game. The tiger needs to avoid the net man, as he slowly followers the player in purely horizontal directions, he must dodge tranquilizer darts, and he must eat men, all in a limited time span. No bosses, no scrolling screens, and a mostly linear game.

Despite all this, the game is challenging. Eating people replenishes the hunger bar, and yet it decreases so rapidly, that for the tiger to frolic in the clouds or stop and wait would mean death. There are a couple levels near the end that are very strict in this regard, preventing the player from even missing a bite if he hopes to survive the stage. Another reason to like this game, the difficulty ramps up but without too much penalty for doing so; if you fail, just start the stage again. The game is short and can be beaten in 10 minutes, but in those ten minutes I was more entertained than horrible games that I tried to persuade myself that were good for the hour(s) I spent on them.
While there isn’t enough substance in the game to really push it to commercial size, indeed much of its charm comes from its brevity and simplistic mechanics, I think it would have been cool to have a map editor on the side. I know that I’d just fill the screen with food, but still, it increases the lifespan of the game past what the developers might envision.

Installation: The game installed easily enough except that it unfortunately required the Microsoft XNA development kit be installed, which I wasn’t pleased about. I had to install that separately requiring more work on my part to get this game up and running. I wish the game could have had what it needed to run packaged in with it besides making me install things on the side.

Conclusion: Go play this game. It’ll give you a quick break from work or school (besides the annoying installation). The graphics will not impress you, but the sounds will make you smile, and the music is good. A good show for something made in merely 48 hours.

Interview with creators: http://www.popten.net/2010/04/qa-with-the-winners-of-sid-meiers-game-competition-zoo-escape/
Download the game here: http://wolverinesoft.org/game/144/zoo-escape

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by Zott820

I purchased this game from the Direct2Drive store for $7.50. I had heard average reviews from other sources and so did not immediately pioneer myself a copy. Seeing as I would have likely had to pay more than $7.50 if the games were bundled, about $30 at the time of this writing, I decided to splurge and see how the game was first-hand. I have completed all the new mini-campaigns on expert, and played the new gametypes in multiplayer.

There are three included campaigns and a couple extra multiplayer missions plugged into this mix. First, let me talk about the single player experience.

Single Player

Tiger Ace: In this mode, the player takes control of a single tank and drives it around wiping out the enemy. While initially one has to be careful not to die with all the anti-tank guns and PIATs, the commander upgrades slowly make the Tiger an unstoppable ace.

This campaign was only slightly challenging on Expert. As long as the player was careful around the anti-tank guns than his tank had no problem clearing out everything. It also helped that the computer on the third mission would repair your tank if you stood still, whether intentional programming or not. This made the difficulty on that one portion decrease by quite a lot. Without computer assistance, the Tiger crew has no means in which to repair itself; this is where the caution comes in. While the tank becomes nearly unstoppable in the late campaign due to the turrets great rate of fire, the tank still has to be careful of the enemy getting their shots off first. The damage by them is low, but their small irreversible input adds up over the course of the mission.

A cool difference between Tales of Valor and the main campaigns of the past is that the commander upgrades transfer over to the next mission, and more importantly, are almost completely new. For the Tiger Ace campaign, the special weapons were useful in that they increased the speed of attack or movement and imparted special bonus powers. Besides the natural abilities, such as firepower and speed though, the rest of the available upgrades were generally not as useful nor utilized as much as I wanted. IE, the anti-personal mine launcher required close range to be effective, but it was better to switch to explosive rounds than move close to short-range attacking position. Another more useful example is the smoke screen which has an appealing pop, pop, pop sound as smoke canister are launched to cover the tiger’s movement. Still, I appreciate their inclusion as they give slight replayability, since the player can choose to use different tactics on the next play through using those special powers. There were also some innate special powers that appeared to either become available after a set time or set damage. These include being able to deploy a tank commander (For some reason he can un-deploy, but he doesn’t seem to die, so I’m not sure why that is needed at all), as well as tank awareness. I wasn’t sure what most of these innate powers did except they appeared in the notification window the left side. I wish there was a better indication or help dialogue to explain their addition to the strategy of the command.

Since the three new campaigns each has three missions each, the CPs are capped at a certain amount per mission. This unfortunately tips the player off that there are more missions, and is a psydo-spoiler, but also prevents the units from becoming super powered at the beginning, and the rest of the missions being boring with nothing new to unlock.

With the use of the command trees and the upgrades for your Tiger Ace tank it soon become a powerhouse. Even on the expert difficulty it is easy to destroy tanks with one shot with the Tiger Ace. While this is actually quite realistic, the gun soon becomes an 88 machine gun, dropping everything around it at probably 2 shots per second. Ultimately, it made this campaign feel more like an arcade game than the more realistic approach the campaigns in the original game had going for them.

Two of the three missions are tank based. One of the three Tiger Ace missions had the five members of the tank crew navigating enemy territory to escape. I much enjoyed this mission. It was one of the harder missions in the campaign, mainly because it wasn’t a run and gun mission; it was perhaps the only mission in COH that seemed to advocate stealth over brute force. Furthermore, since the tank crew was on their own, they were given the ability to revive their fallen squad mates. This was a necessity for when fighting was no other option. It didn’t make the squads invincible, but did prevent squads from dying nearly instantaneously under heavy fire. As an added element of avoidance of, British sappers build sandbag defenses and the like during this mission, forcing the player through new directions of movement lest they wish to be brutally slaughtered. These sandbags and traps also appear in the later mission through mission persistence, adding nice continuality.

Causeway: My least favorite campaign of the three new campaigns. Here the player takes control of two nearly indestructible squads. Even on expert the only way I lost one an entire squad was when a building containing one of these superhuman squads collapsed, killing all inside, but I digress. With these super powered squads, the player mows down infantry and tanks without even a wink.

Able squad is a machine gun squad, and it does a fine job at spraying an endless supply of bullets. It apparently only takes one bullet to kill the German infantry of all varieties and so volksgrenadiers do not even have a chance to move into position before they are lying on their backs. Baker squad is the anti-tank division. While it takes longer for Baker to kill tanks than it does for Able to kill infantry, they are also still extremely over powered.

The combination of these two squads is what makes the campaign boring.

I’ll post a walkthrough now, since it really is too simple a formula.

The first mission is all about attacking the enemy. Simply rush these units in, and kill anything till they reach the final point.

Mission two has the squads defending a point from a counterattack. This is even more boring than the first mission, since by now the player has likely gotten enough CP points to spend on upgrades for the squads to make them somehow more destructive. Just let them sit in the square and they’ll be fine for the most part. There is too much delay between the attacks too, causing situations of idle boredom. Furthermore, it is better to not explore the countryside with the units, since apparently it slows down the spawning phase of the enemy for reasons I cannot understand, making the lengthy wait for pathetic units to kill lengthier. If one is bored, they can lay mines in fun shapes.

Mission 3 changes the formula a bit, but the squads are still juiced up like Bane. You also get another super unit, who I’m not sure is a mission necessary unit, or expendable. Besides the new unit the super-squads are not even worth managing except occasionally to heal using the new unit, and to revive the rarely fallen squad members. The real challenge in this mission comes from the tension building “timed” encounters between allies and the enemy. Your allies don’t stand a chance, but by using the super-squads, you need to work quickly enough to wipe out the passive resistance.
As far as storytelling for this campaign, it is up to standards in both narrative and design as the original company of heroes, it is simply the gameplay that fails due to its simplicity. It loses all the strategic nature that makes Company of Heroes a great RTS.

Falaise Pocket: This third Campaign is the second best in terms of design. It consists of three missions that are more of less the same. They are all "defend the base" missions. There isn’t any base building, in fact, none of these new campaigns had base building, but you have to occupy outposts where you can build units. Unlike the traditional build method, the units are called in from off the map, so that has to be carefully coordinated. Units will not just appear outside the building, and immediately help you defend, if that was one of your goals.

What makes this campaign superior to Causeway is due to the conventional Company of Heroes strategy. Despite this, it still isn’t the most fulfilling gameplay. The computer is content just wasting its almost limitless supply of units, rushing them in, with the chance of breaking through the players lines. Sadly, this is very effective.

The first mission has the player wake up troopers, by occupying buildings, and defending a panzer legion stationed around the map. The panzers are relatively useless and will not help the player. In addition, it is better they don’t since once the enemy reach your panzers an air raid will bomb them out of commission. This is a sad since it dances with that rushing mechanic of the enemy. Once the enemy reaches your panzers, they don’t have a chance of surviving, since the planes make short work of them. In this way, the attacking units don’t even care about their own lives as long as they get past you and to those helpless tanks. On expert this is quite difficult too, as the enemy will not keel over instantaneously, unlike Causeway. The Germans are not granted any super-soldiers.

The second mission is more or less a repeat of the first mission except, instead of defending tanks the player has to defend outposts. Once more, the enemy does a lot of rushing.

Lastly, the final mission has the player defending a retreating convoy. The enemy doesn’t do as much pushing on this map as the previous ones. Also, it was a bit misleading what was meant when the objectives stated to retreat my units. Do I press T for retreat? No, I have to manually walk them over to the exit marker. The same for tanks. Also what sucks, is that every time I build a new unit, I would have to walk them over to be evacuated also, only stationary defensive structures do not count towards the evacuation pool.

For a strategy without merit, I suggest the following; the convoy that is retreating can be manually commanded. HOWEVER, this does not count into the medal for retreating the convoy. What this does allow is a nearly limitless supply of units. The tanks have the engines crippled and their health low, but the convoy also includes engineers. By holding back vehicular units a bit and repairing them, or building repair bunkers, a defensive rush team can be made.

Sadly, the retreating convoy seems to think it is best to engage the enemy in their weakened condition. This is bad since once the British enemy begins to nearly timelessly build up a defense in your base, gob-smack in the center of the retreat line, none of the convoy will make it through without your help. They will simply fight and die. They will not just keep running by to get to the exit marker. Why must I do everything around here? It doesn’t help that the enemy can build their trenches and MG nests much faster than normal, and the units on expert are extremely overpowered, but I suppose this is part of the challenge.

None of the three missions are impossible, but with the amount of units the enemy rushes with, some strategy is lost for chaos.

All three missions reminded me of World in Conflict, and a couple spammy points I did not like about that game. Unlike World in Conflict, resources/points are not unlimited, but similar to that game the player’s units are against such overwhelming attacking forces that they die quickly if not ideally played, and are therefore expendable. The player gets extra munitions and resources for killing the enemy, this being important for the next point.
The command tree is a mix of all the Wehrmacht powers. As such, artillery and V1 rockets are available. By utilizing these effectively (especially on the second and third missions where they are unlockable) the player has a better chance against the odds. What this does though is make the player’s ground units bait; get the enemy together to fight your units, and the bomb them all to a charred mass. Once more, strategy is thrown out for just using your special powers. Feels like World in Conflict to me.

Multiplayer:

There are a couple of new gametypes in multiplayer. Honestly, the maps and gametypes are a novelty that will be played a couple times before returning to the normal victory point and annihilation gameplay.
For those that get tired of the new gametypes there are a couple of new units for use in multiplayer. These new units are strictly replacements, with one unit being a skin/voice pack, and so players must choose between the newly added ones and the vanilla versions. The new units can certainly throw off the enemy if properly utilized. These units are appreciated additions and if players find absolutely nothing in the expansion that they like, they can at least gain an advantage with more units to choose from to decimate the enemy.

Panzerkrieg has the player command a tank, of the 3 available for his allegiance, and try to dominate the map by capturing map victory points. Of the three tanks per side there was usually a light, medium, and heavy variety. With all but the best strategists, the medium tank was usually the best deal. The light tank died too easily for its own good, and the heavy tank, while powerful, was too slow to action.
Each tank has its own command points and upgrade structure. These powerups are what make the gameplay more than the average and offer a mild chance of replayability. I say mild since in most games it is possible to upgrade to the last unlock and so only six games are needed to experience them all. It doesn’t help that there are only 2-3 maps in which Panzerkrieg is usable on. If the gametype was compatible with existing and future maps, it would have been appreciated and increased its life span.

Tales of Valor seems to be leaking strategy. While Panzerkrieg is fun, I found that a lot of the time it was just a tank rush to a spot, where there was a duel, and then one of the teams had to respawn, repeat ad fin. The upgrades then made one of the two teams more powerful until they dominated the map. The best games were the ones where careful placement of defending infantry kept the enemy distracted long enough to come and engage them, but then they had a plan of their own, having their ally rush around back to support.

Assault lines: Of the new multiplayer gametypes, I enjoyed Assault lines the best, though found it to be played less than ideally. In it, the player chooses a class and similar to DOTA or HoN, for which it is based, they will attempt to assault an enemy base, killing bunkers, eliminating respawn points, until the enemy refinery is reached and blown to bits. While some people would choose the gunner classes for their pure power, those that stacked the defensive bonuses such as the medic’s healing and the officer’s speed and heroic boost often came out above. The best games had the teamwork that this gametype required.

Sadly, I found few games that emphasized strategy over brute force. I would have liked to see more team action going on with all the stacked bonuses I mentioned. Instead I find there to be a high level hero doing all the work and enemy team having no chance to defend against it due to all working independently. Sort of like DOTA, the team that loses the edge initially, loses the game in the end. In addition, I found there would be lots of gunner classes, and both teams would rush, leaving nobody but the weak computer to defend.

Stonewall: I played this gametype before in Company of Heroes Online Beta that is available in Chinese only. It remains relatively unchanged for the American release included in Tales of Valor. In this mode, up to four players defend against waves of enemies. There is an unlock tree for units, but no commander tree. For example, the player might spend manpower to unlock the sniper, or they might spend it on an upgrade that speeds up the building times.

The player can choose to either play as the Americans and defend against attacking German forces or vice versa. As a disappointment, there are no British or Panzer Elite units, despite being available in Tales of Valor, but not in COHO. I would have appreciated more strategic options in what is almost a cut and paste between COHO and TOV. Also, I feel that the enemy is strong enough to fight against a collection of both race choices together. The British want their appearance, they are a defense-oriented race, and this is a defense-oriented map! I suppose I will have to rely on third party solutions like Joint Operations to fulfill this market.

For those that wonder, the only differences that I seemed to see between the COHO and TOV renditions was the inclusion of the American narrator for actions on the map and a possible increase in difficulty. “Possible” only because it seemed as though there were more units thrown out per wave. Also, a couple of strategies were foiled. One being that as playing as the Germans one would build many bunkers and have them be repair depots to continuously heal the player’s tanks. In TOV, the bunker can only be a MG nest.

The gameplay is hectic, and the attacking waves are quite difficult. Sadly, I find that this mode pushes a niche strategy of buying only certain types of units, such as snipers. While one could unlock the latest and greatest tanks, it is probably a more wise to invest in the cheaper varieties and use the money to buy more of them. Weirdly the bunker is the same cost as in the normal game, which is outrageous considering that prices for everything else is adjusted to be lower and more in tune with the gameplay. IE a sniper costs about 10ManPower. A German bunker costs 100 MP. In addition, the bunker can only be a MG nest, not a more beneficial medic or repair center. When the bunker has a high chance of dying in late game when tanks roll in, its construction is a serious waste of funds. I could understand the significant cost if I still had the choice of its other two functions but as it is, the bunker is a wasteful investment.

After the player beats Stonewall, they won’t be back. There is only one map, and one difficulty setting. The player could choose between the races they want, but out of the two, that makes a minimum of two times beating the gametype. I found that since I nearly had to use a limited selection of units to win that there was little reason to play it again if I would have to use the same method. However, your mileage may vary. I could see someone trying different novelty methods to try to win, such as all mortars, or all snipers, while the rest do anti-tanks.

Direct Fire: Direct-fire is a new addition to Tales of Valor. It applies to all the new campaigns, but does not transfer over to multiplayer or any of the old campaigns. Frankly, I do not miss it. Tiger Ace is the only campaign where direct fire had any usable purpose. When trying to juggle multiple units with direct-fire it just becomes too much of multi-tasking. The gimmick is that you get to choose what to fire at. This works acceptable for a tank that has a long reload, and requires a precise and powerful one-shot-kill. The turret of the tank could then be primed in the direction of approaching tanks, something the game would not do automatically if the enemy is out of shooting range. However, when direct-fire is given and used with infantry, it is a little confusing, and seemed less effective than just letting the computer do it. Am I really that much better in control of a MG machine gun than the computer? The icon for direct-fire tells the amount of firing left, and shows a cool-down meter as well when all the shot power has been spent. As I mentioned though, my reflexes and microing skills are not as effective as the computer at finding that exact moment to choose when to fire. I was fine clicking on a squad with the right mouse button to issue an attack order and letting the squad do the rest, having to hold down the left button on the target to spray with machine guns seems a little bit a waste of my time. Sadly, even in the Tiger Ace campaign lining up the turret early was a waste since the turret becomes super-fast at firing and turning by the campaign’s end, negating the need to do a lot of microing.

Mission persistence: Tales of Valor overdoes the mission persistence. This feature was heavily emphasized as a selling point for Opposing Fronts, but also appeared in two levels in the original Company of Heroes campaign. It now makes an appearance in Tales of Valor. To put it in simple terms, the terrain keeps the damage from the last mission on the map. This has its pros and cons. For one, if you destroy everything on the map, then for the next mission you will have no buildings to position your men in. What sucks about mission persistence in Tales of Valor, is that each campaign’s 3-4 missions take place on the same map and you cannot proceed to complete mission objectives that appear on the next mission, even though you can reach them on the current map. This same disappointment struck me when I found out many of Opposing Front’s missions took place on the same maps. The freedom of choice and the interest of a new setting are dimmed. I will say that at least being able to navigate the full map in TOV beats the sort of “invisible boundary” that Opposing Fronts created with artillery lines, but not by much. Furthermore, the positioning of units is reset at the start of each new mission, lowering strategic interest. While I understand this was done for compatibility, it makes setting everything back the way it was a bore. The units are stashed in a safe spot when the next mission begins on that map.

Graphics: There are no extra additions to graphics that are worthy of mention. The same things that continued to amaze in the first game are still good. The graphics are beginning to look a little outdated in Direct X 9 mode, but I don’t have the horsepower to switch to the more intensive but artful Dx10 mode. The addition of ambient occlusion with Nvidia cards is nice, but I too didn’t have the horsepower for the slight increase in realism it provides.

Sound & Music: There are a couple more musical interludes for the cinematics but I did not notice any new in-game soundtrack. This was fine though, the game had excellent war music anyways.

There were new voice actors for some of the new campaign characters. They did as good of a job as on previous games. This almost sounds insulting by how little time I spend writing about it here, but it is good enough that there are really no glaring faults except for what is included in the glitches section. The writing for the voices also continues to be intact, with lines delivered naturally while still including those all-encompassing anecdotal statements that make the player feel they know all about the war philosophy.

I do have one complaint for the voices. In the Stonewall gametype the American voiceover artist sounds like he is gruffier, in a way that makes me want to clear my throat in empathy each time I hear it. It sounded natural in the first game, but in this most recent expansion, it just sounds off. I’m not sure if these lines are newly recorded or if all were recorded at the same time as the original game. Whatever the reason, I found the VO for this particular section to be distracting and not to my liking.

Glitches: I’m sad to say, that for a fully up to date game, this expansion still had its share of bugs. For one, mission selecting the third deployment of the Tiger Commander campaign left me unable to use the HE rounds, clicking on the icon started the switching timer, but there was no ultimate change in weaponry. This command tree power was also already unlocked too, so I am not sure what the problem was.

I know this isn’t a glitch per-say but bothersome to me. In the Causeway mission, Bravo squad loses its voice halfway through the second mission and for the rest of the campaign. It makes sense for the storyline, but they should have thrown a generic airborne sound in then because it is very awkward to be selecting units and not have that audio feedback telling me I am doing actions like attacking and moving.

Conclusion: Tales of Valor started out as a collection of downloadable content. I don’t have an objection for it being packaged together and sold, but the price for what is at heart a collection of novelty is a bit steep at the $30ish dollars at the time of this writing. Instead, I feel the pack would better suit a $10 dollar range. The campaigns introduce some new features, such as reviving squads, as well as some new methods of controlling them, but many of these features are either underused or novelties. Those gamers seeking an expanded Company of Heroes experience, akin to Opposing Fronts or the original game in design, should look to third party modifications. Tales of Valor seems like an expansion for people who might like to see what an arcade-like touch to the game engine may be like. The new multiplayer modes are mixed in their fun-ness, some have deepness and I could see myself playing those for a long while, but the rest will likely be a once through and then ignored. There isn’t anything especially notable in the sound department. The game retains its excellent sound, with some minor additions, one sadly gruff voice actor, and no new mission music. The same goes for graphics; they retain the look and feel of the original game, which is good, though nothing knocks our socks off. If you see this game on the cheap, go out and buy it for a change of stride.

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by Zott820

During Direct to Drive's 5 year old sale, where they were selling games for 5 dollars, I jumped on two games at discount prices. World in Conflict Gold was one of those games, and after playing through the single player on the normal difficulty I have constructed this review. I had not had the chance for playing much multiplayer for this game, so I won't reflect on it much. Instead, this review will focus on the single player aspect of both the original campaign and the interlaced Soviet expansion pack missions.

World in Conflict is a game which reminds me a lot of Command and Conquer with bits and pieces of other RTSs thrown in for a somewhat appealing and occasionally satisfying experience.

Story: The story takes place during the cold war, 1989 including additional historical pieces. During both, the allied nations are dealing with the threat of the Soviet Union, had it not fallen at the end of the cold war. In the American Campaign, the player takes control of a commander named Parker, and is joined with the help of AI Co-commanders, such as Bannon, with both of you being directed by Colonel Sawyer. While other characters come into play, those 3 are the ones of major storyline importance.

The story is original as far as videogames are concerned, though a lot of inspiration comes from movies such as Red Dawn; an invasion of the United States by Russia. The story carries from initial landing in Seattle to Oregon and places in-between. Halfway through the game there is a flashback to initial battles between NATO forces and the Russian's European invasion, being the back-story for the major characters cited above.

As far as the characters are concerned, many are 1-trick ponies. Bannon is a whiner, and starts and ends that way. Only in his last mission does he "man-up", though I felt little empathy for one of the most annoying characters of the lot. Sawyer is more interesting, always badgering Bannon and giving orders, but he too falls to the same routine mission after mission; giving orders, yelling at Bannon and yelling at everyone else.

Something interesting for the player's character Parker is his portrayal. He is shown in the game, but his face is not, therefore you'll find him standing listening in to Sawyer during cutscenes. It took me a while to realize why there was a soldier who's back was always facing the camera till I realized it was the character I was playing. I'm not saying this is bad, just a little interesting how a "silent" hero in a RTS was accomplished. Plot-wise it doesn't seem to harm or hurt the narration.

Some of the characters that were not major, but appeared in the cutscenes and cinematics such as Mike, Anton and Webb, seemed to have more humility and I could better connect to these characters. Unfortunately, most of the first half of the game only focuses on the big 3 mentioned before, which were probably my least favorite characters. Luckily after the half of the game, where some of their storylines were sorted out, the others could display their own superior better war commentary.

Now, World In Conflict Gold came with a Soviet Campaign as well as the American one, but soviet missions are spliced in between the American's. This is a little disappointing, since as an expansion it forces a complete replay through the game to find all the new content, rather than having that option as well as a mission/campaign select for just those special missions. Regardless, if one is playing World in Conflict for the first time, the inclusion of the Soviet missions certainly helps explain some of the story arcs as well as scenes occurring simultaneously in the storyline.

In terms of characters there are better-quality soviet versions. Rather than go into the names, I will simply say the Colonel feels more human than the American chatterbox equivalent, and stronger emotionally. He is sort of that stereotypical hero that one sees from movies such as from "Letters from Iwo Jima" that knows the enemy and respects them. His interaction with his associates also brings up more politically charged topics: execution, guerilla tactics, patriotism; which feel more in terms with the game's story than some of the early shallow dialogue occurring between the American counterparts.

The cut scenes are told in a similar vein as Company of Heroes' with illustrated storyboards that pan around; over these are placed the characters narration. These tell of side events in the story, not always addressing the current or upcoming missions, work to nudge in humility to the war. These scenes show such events as one soldier trying to get his army paychecks cleared, a solider phoning his father, and Soviet propaganda. I enjoyed these scenes, since just like COH, they were played off extremely well, and helped to set the tone of the war.

The American cinematic operation overview maps are narrated by an "unknown voice" and describe the thoughts of the current attack plans and reasoning. They include story of the map you will soon be visiting, but not each objective you will have to do on it. They are similar to Call of Duty 4 in storytelling style, but a more slow and morbid version. These are different than COH, which only play off the strategy of the map at hand in-game, with the operation overviews being separate in the animated cinematics.

Overall, while the story is interesting overall, dealing with nukes, and some plot twists, it only really starts to get exciting in the latter half of the game. This isn't because the initial levels are tutorials, but just because emotionally they feel stronger, and the gameplay is superior. I will say more about this further into the review. There are 15 American/NATO missions while there are only 6 Russian missions, but of them all, there are only about 5 great American missions, and 4 great Russian missions, making the expansion pack better overall in design, even if it is shorter.

The ending on the American side is a little disappointing, not because of how it ends, but how it is handled. There is no winding down. There is simply a dialogue that informs that the player has succeeded, one short story tie-up, and then the credits roll. There isn't any aftermath footage or epilogue. Especially disappointing is how the character Parker, whom was being played the entire game, has no post story. The Soviet Campaign has it a little better, the ending doesn't have a cinematic either, but it is definitely more fulfilling at at-least giving an inkling of the post-op of the characters in an in-game cut scene.

Graphics: World in Conflict is all about the environmental details. The graphics in World in Conflict are spectacular for an RTS, on the same vein of Company of Heroes, and increasingly becoming a standard for RTS graphics in general. Much like Company of Heroes, there is much in the way of visual splendor being produced; from the cloudy ash from a newly deconstructed building, to the pits where forecasts of artillery rain were correct; details are added quite stunning. One way in which World in Conflict really stands out amongst the RTS graphical crowd is in the tiny details. Company of Heroes has details, but as I'll continue to parallel the two on their focus, COH focuses on the people, and WIC focuses on the environment.

For this I only need to point at the towns, cities and farmlands in WIC. Each building has a very elegant, as far as explosions are concerned, destructible animation, with smokestacks falling to the ground and roofs collapsing. It is all very pleasing. Unlike COH, these destruction animations seem damage oriented, in that once the building gets to 50% health it may burst into flames, while in COH, you could destroy each side of the building individually. Overall, it seems a choice of scale. Since the camera is much farther out in WIC, they take buildings to be more terrain placeholders, rather than of maximal strategic importance with specific window placement etc. Buildings are especially easy to destroy in WIC compared to COH, removing some of their strategic usage for damage protection. Both still have canned destruction animations, and in both, not everything is destructible.

Anyways, WIC's importance of detail really makes the believability of invasion. There are signs and graffiti on the walls of the shops, with little details such as non-repetitious names added to each building. Furthermore there are scattered props like cars, lamp poles, freeway overpasses and more that add many "big picture details". The terrain is also stellar and while still a stretched texture over a mesh, is very highly detailed. The landscape texture is likewise, with volumetric clouds and a looming parallax moon. There is even a mission with an aurora borealis in it that animates beautifully, as killer whales dance below. These random props immerse the game in realism. At times it just amazes me that the developers included so many nicks and nacks, which have no affect on gameplay at all. There are things I would have never even considered including. A testament to the keen eyes and modeling skills of the developers.

There is occasionally grass added to the scene; not only can tanks run over the grass and leave their treadmark, the grass gets removed in the path the tank navigated, leaving the rest alone. It is quite fun to draw pictures with tanks with this effect. The same applies for snow, where even infantry leave their footprints on the ground, with brown and white representing the dirt smudging beneath soldier's feet. The grass and snow will return once the camera focuses away, but this is understandable for memory conservation sakes and don't detract from the experience of the moment.

Dear to my heart was a themed level with Christmas decorations, santas, and snowmen, and lights. Themes of this nature, while few, served to match the date of the mission and while serving 0 tactical advantage the details were appreciated for their pathos.

Trees and shrubbery are also well done. One mission is near a lighthouse in Europe. The steep bank of the cliff is mostly rocky but realistically there are some trees, and on a couple of plateaus of the cliff. There, some lone grass grows stranded from the majority. Each tree is also randomly generated using Speedtree technology. As they look over the boats in the harbor and birds fly overhead, I absorb the scene. It is details like this that I do enjoy in games.
Did I mention trees can catch on fire? No? Well they can, and it is sweet. Dropping napalm on trees and watching the leaves burn off to render a husk of bark and debris is what I call romantic. Thankfully they are virtual trees or else I might feel guilty basking in their warm glow. The developers must know how cool this effect is that they included for they have you napalm a bush of trees to flush out the enemy. Strategic use of fire. From its inclusion in Far Cry 2, many games before it, fire is quite a staple of coolness.

While the details are crazy good, not everything is passable with the graphics. Some of the bane occurs from poor design choices rather than pure graphics, however. The biggest thing that annoyed me graphically, and not design-wise was that many of the scorch marks on the terrain look very flat and boring. Even in older Games such as Myth there was added physical depth from explosion marks. Large explosions do cause pits, but it doesn't change the zoomed-out look. In WIC, as they constantly overlay the texture making their believability much much less. With the terrain limit for these marks set extremely high, the cartoony factor begins to show up. This happens in other games, but usually the camera never lets you see more than a couple sorchmarks at once. in WIC, seeing 100+ nearly identical marks is detracting.

Further graphical shame comes from the units. Soldiers all robotically run in the same march stride animation as they move about the world, no individual thought for the soldiers in this game. This is a big difference from COH, and certainly plays up the environment (Big Picture) vs. units (Up-Close) details I mentioned before.

Another problem arises during cinematics. During the wonderful cinematic, the last storyboard shot always seems to get cut off just before the in-game cut scenes began. I am not sure if this was purposely done, or if it happens by accident, but it happens on the majority of the missions that I am unsure what to think about it. The sounds seem to match the cinematic as they play, so I am confident that the sound is not finishing early and cutting off the final storyboard drawing. Not game-breaking, but an annoying detail.

Lastly, the textures have LOD applied to them; so higher quality versions will load as you get closer to the textured object to help with optimization. I appreciate this, since it makes the game run so smooth. Unfortunately, there is a long load delay as you wait for a while focused on an object or scene to have the high-resolution textures appear. I'm not sure if this is a hardware limitation or RAM limitation, but it was slightly annoying to "keep the camera steady" to avoid the blurry shot. On the plus side, the pop-in is not as bad as games like Mass-Effect's blurry jack-in-the-box texture mess.

Controls: World in Conflict does not have any revolutionary control features that I haven't seen anywhere else, but it does have a couple changes that I appreciate.

For one, I can select a unit with a special power, such as a healing unit and right click on a unit in my taskbar to have the healer ride over to that unit to heal it. This is a very useful time saver. It also works similarly for the enemy. In combat it is often a pain to have to select a unit to attack it amongst a cluster of units, clicking on the type indicator for that unit which floats above their head works just the same as clicking on the unit directly. Another helpful advantage.

The game makes use of the WASD keys to move around the camera. This is appreciated, since it gives my hand space to rest on my keyboard, rather than dealing with my rather cramped arrows keys. I know why most games just use the arrow keys though, the use of WASD for camera removes them as viable hotkeys. But in World in Conflict this isn't much of a problem. There is no base building, so that eliminates a lot of required hotkeys, plus the two that are needed, special weapons, are E, and R respectively, being right next to the camera controls of easy access. The camera is also well designed and I had no problem panning and orbitting about the playing field smoothly. The camera also has a built in height-pan speed adjustment. In this way, zooming in slows the camera's top speed down, versus what it is at the maximum camera height. This lets the player enjoy the many visual details without zooming past them by struggling with the spotty camera controls.

World if Conflict gets a lot correct in controls but not all is beautiful. The icons in the bottom right that pertain to functions is a mess of highlation , meaning some are visually available and others not. Plus it is so cluttered that the reinforce button doesn't even sit in the container and floats lonely on the side. Thankfully I rarely had to use that area for anything rather than the huge special weapons icons, highlighted boldly their importance.

The game includes waypoints, by holding shift, but it didn't work for what I wanted it. Moving units around using it was fine but for some reason the game refuses to queue healing. Whether it just wants to make it harder on the player, or if I'm doing it wrong is up for debate, but all I know is I had to manually order my repair vehicle around for it to do its functions.

Another nitpick I had was that all units follows the speed of the slowest commanded unit. While I understand this is to keep units together, it proved annoying to order my troops to a spot and have them get there too late to do any good, with the jeeps being as slow as the infantry. I had to order my troops in groups to get to destinations so that they would follow their maximum movement speed for better strategic usage. Hopefully there is a setting I'm missing that disables the "guarding" mechanism, since I currently don't like it as it stands.

Gameplay: World in Conflict plays like Command and Conquer. This is not one of the early Command and Conquer(s) either, it is more in tune with Red Alert 3, or C&C3. There are controllable units, and clicking on the units gives a choice for special weapons, with most having two "unique" ones. Ground units of infantry are joined into squads; unlike COH, these squads were treated as merely another unit, and there was little in the way of individualism.

Unlike both C&C and COH, there is no base building. WIC takes the camera far out, and makes the player a commander, not bothering with trivial stuff like base building. However, results in both bad and good consequences. It is good, since base building can sometimes be annoying, and it faces the player with a source in which to lose. Lose one's base;lose the mission. Here's where the negatives start to roll in. In terms of the single player campaign, there never felt like much of a deterrence from simply throwing units into the fray, having them die and simply dropping more in. The strategic aspect was lost of me; unlike Myth II, where you could not build more units, and strategy was involved as there would be rarely any more given. Occasionally missions will try and match this setup, preventing extra drops for a time period, usually at mission beginnings, but it rarely adds much strategy; it just prevents temporary stupidity.
In terms of units there are the predictable ones. There are air, artillery, infantry and armored divisions, with the single player being a combination with major focus on the armored and infantry divisions. Occasionally the player would be given air and artillery to use, but for the most part tanks and ground forces are the staple.

Units did not feel completely balanced, owing more to the lack of strategy required. I usually could just build a whole fleet of APCs and win a mission, or build a fleet of light tanks and win, depending on the situation. Sometimes it was wise to go completely Anti-tank infantry, as these seemed completely overpowered, their only weakness being other infantry, snipers and the chance of being run over. (I liked this touch of being able to run down infantry, another carry-over from the C&C series. Alas, it was usually confusing to hear "Unit lost", and look for a whole missing unit only to find that only half a squad had been road raged by an enemy tank.) The game may have been more balanced for multiplayer, which I did not have the luxury of playing in mass quantities, but as far single player was involved, there really was no reason to dash one's unit selection with anything except that one unit that works, and perhaps an anti-air.

As the player destroys the enemy they are granted points to spend on off map assistance. These include the aforementioned Napalm, as well as tank busters, cluster bombs, and artillery. In essence a lot of these felt the same, differing mostly on the area of effect and damage done. Since killing the units using the special power often resulted in more points, there was seemingly an endless supply of off map death waiting to be rained down at times. I appreciated the assistance of these special powers and many missions seemed focused around their usage, sending hoards of tanks your way, which happened to cluster up, calling for use of focused artillery on their position.

These special support powers are easy to dispatch the enemy but on the other hand, they are far too easy to use and perhaps too often required, removing their uniqueness , and just making them simply another standard tool in the arsenal. This also devalued the ground units, they did their thing, usually without a lot of help, and the player focused mostly on where the bombing runs would go next. The ground units were just used to resupply the needed points if the bombing runs failed to do the same.

As for missions, many were largely the same. Sadly, this is the game's biggest fault. Every mission felt like a repetition of the last one, with perhaps one different unit being added to your pool. This sadly did not change up the game a lot, since as I mentioned, only one real unit was needed to complete each mission regardless. The game also suffers greatly from repetition due to this structure. Often the maps had the player attack a point, or defend a point. There was rarely chances for diversion from this tactic. Certain areas had to be attacked to be captured, holding special places on the ground to build up defenses, then there would be a counter attack, and the player had to hold off the enemy. This predictability and subsequent use in almost every mission became dull beyond belief. The use of timers in later missions did not help ease the boredom.("What, you want me to attack that point within 40 minutes? OK. Next Mission: Attack it in 30 minutes? Fine. Next: 20? You got it.") What also proved irritating was that while some missions gave timelines for how long positions had to be defended, some just let you sit there for who knows how long. Yes, in real life one is clueless to reinforcement timing, but in this game, since you can call in help at all times, it truly provides no additional realism, just annoyance. I suppose it is telling if I had to focus on time spent defending rather than the action to say just how exciting the commanding was.

Only in the later half did the game try to mix up the gameplay, but unfortunately it was too little. One Soviet Mission allowed the player only artillery to help the AI hold off an attacking force. This meant that player had to keep an eye out for enemies and make sure to try and predict enemy movement. This was challenging and appreciated. Another Soviet Mission had the player escort a convoy of trucks to a position. It was actually more like a standard Attack/Defend mission, but at least tried a different approach to it. An American mission forced the player to use only helicopters. Carefully navigating the islands as the player defended New York, avoiding the Anti-air, preventing casualties, and racing against a clock were all engaging and actually challenging. Lastly, a notable American mission forced the player to support their allies by repair, as they salvaged wrecks along the snowy peaks. All these were great improvements, but were rare in the game. Basically, any mission that either limited the amount of units to a select couple that weren't over powered, or changed up the mission structure from something other than attacking and defending were the superior ones for gameplay.

One mission in the game in which I really enjoyed the gameplay was on the Soviet side, it dealt with the elimination of the guerilla camps. This mission got a couple things right. Firstly, it had clear objectives, eliminate the Anti-air sentries. Next, it limited the units to a couple infantry varieties. Only two were really needed, snipers and Anti-Tank crews, but even with these two, it felt as though the player had something important to do. Focusing on this select amount, and lining them up, keeping the tanks away from the snipers, and the ground troopers away from the anti-tank proved exhilarating. To leave one would doom the other. Unfortunately, the latter half of that mission proceeded down to the same trend of monotony, with tanks and the like clogging up the flow, but that initial part was beautifully designed, with a good story too. It is a shame there aren't too many missions that adopt this structure. They certainly help the game's recycling.

Perhaps the developers knew that they didn't have that much in the way of variety for mission objectives so they added optional secondary missions. These, if accomplished, added badges to the victory screen, which just like COH, add nothing except for bragging rights and completion tracking. These secondary missions were greatly appreciated, especially in those initial missions to keep the game from getting too stale amongst the usual boredom. They also were original, having to keep certain things alive, and beating time limits actually became main objectives for me, as I kept my interest by making those main priority goals. None of these secondary objectives were very difficult on the normal difficulty setting and so it is likely any player playing the game on normal will accomplish these secondary goals with little or no extra work.

Another disappointment in recycling comes from the 3 available armies. The 3 armies in the game, NATO, American, and Russian, play exactly the same. Therefore, when playing the expansion pack, do not expect anything extra in terms of strategizing goodies. Also, the differences between a lot of them are negligible besides their special weapons. If one can afford the best unit, there is little reason to choose the lighter variety unless they especially need that special weapon. IE, the light tank has a weapon good against heavy tanks, but the heavy tank has a special weapon good against light tanks. Therefore, it is kind of moot which one to choose. But, for the helicopters, the heavy attack helicopter has a special weapon to kill only ground units, which the light version has an air to air missile, making it the better choice for engaging enemy air or getting a couple to help support the heavy air choppers.

Units gain veterancy over 5 levels. The icons are confusing for those that don't have army insignias memorized, but it is really no matter, the veterancy didn't seem to change my tactical outlook much. This is not like Company of Heroes where a level 3 tank dominates a unvetted one. The level differences for units adds slight advantages for the unit in WIC, but considering the spammy nature of units in WIC anyways, its game-changing moments in single-player missions are slim. There is also apparently a damage based location system, but without any indicators like in COH, and hardly any noticeable difference as far as I could tell through the entire game, this feature was squandered.

AI: The artificial intelligence is good at doing its job, but that is all. The computer allies go about their own business, holding off the enemy, and the enemy does the same thing. There seems to usually be an equal amount of pushing and pulling from both sides since on most of the maps, the allied units are not often overrun by the enemy, or vice versa. They stagnate their positions just to add more diversity and scale to the battle. Sadly, this means if you assist your ally in killing the enemy force attacking them, the ally will just hold position and not move forward; same for the enemy. This makes it easy to predict where the enemy will stop to engage, and special support artillery drops make quick work of the stationary and camping, enemy.

As for the AI navigating your own units, they seem to be apt at targeting proper units attune to their strengths. IE, the anti air seems to prioritize the attacking helicopter, while the Anti-tanks crew goes for the tanks with their recoilless rifles. Of course, like Command and Conquer, practically any unit can harm the others, it is merely efficiency to take into account. So the infantry can still harm tanks slowly, it is just better that they engage infantry instead, which they appear to do. Ground units are also proficient at path finding, so I'm happy I don't have to complain abut them getting stuck on bridges.

Don't expect to be amazed or challenged by the AI in single-player, it is good at spamming, like much of World in Conflict is based around, but is not apt at handling the strength/weakness mechanics provided.

Sound and music: The sound in this game is average. Compared to COH the unit voices are exceedingly sterile and disappointing. Once more I was reminded of the standard C&C units with their 3-6 responses for everything. Also, the notifications of "unit lost" seemed very vague, and unhelpful, not pinpointing me to any of my lost units.
As far as voices for the main characters, they were believable and fit the characters, though it only worked to fit the characters, it did not improve their faults, which I have already mentioned.

Explosions are repetitious and while the game changes the volume and pitch a small amount depending on camera distance, it works, but does so standardly.

I was so transfixed on the visuals the majority of the time that music took a backseat. There is an orchestrated score, which must be good since I hardly recognized it, and it definitely wasn't a silent scene. Consider the music fitting, but there didn't seem to be any overarching theme, which I appreciate in games that want to be either franchises, or have memorable, hummable music. There are a couple oldie sounding songs to try and fit the era. Occasionally they worked, but sometimes them stood out too much from the war scene. I'll let them slide on the preacher moment, as that seemed to work alright, and I was amused on how it ended.

Extras & Other Notes: Firstly, one great bonus of this game is the hidden loading bar. Imagine Call of Duty 4, and how it loads as the cutscene is being played. This is exactly how World in Conflict does it, except it hides the loading bar. The loading bar only appears during the cutscene if you try and skip it; in which case the loading bar will appear to warn the player that it understood what they wanted, but isn't finished with the undercover loading. I wish more games took this approach. This is even a method that WIC has over COH, even though they both seem to use similar style cutscenes. This method does its job well because of its player influence. It makes the game appear to have absolutely no loading at all, and makes the transitions from main menu to in-game that much more fluid and uninterrupted. Hiding it is also clever, since it stops it from detracting from the scene, unless it is absolutely required from the player wishing to skip. Thankfully, as a side note, all dialogue and videos can be skipped, regardless of whether you had seen them or not before. More games need to allow this.

Another positive note is that the game appears quite optimized for DX 9. My laptop is not the most powerful one out there, but even its 9700m GT can run the game at 1680 x 1050 with almost every setting on high. In fact, it runs very smoothly, and only a tremendous amount of explosions slows it down. This is quite impressive for the scale that the game is going for, being able to zoom way out, and then back in freely without transitions. Sort of like a more detailed version of Supreme Commander. DX 10 is unfortunately another story, and requires a more beefy rig, but as described in the graphics section, the game is quite impressive graphically regardless.

The credits include outtakes and photos from development, which make watching scrolling text more entertaining to the common man.

I had a small glitch happen to me where I was trying to choose my dropzone; a tutorial window appeared, and all the places where I could place my marker disappeared. I couldn't reproduce it, (Didn't try too) but could be annoying had it not been an early mission.

Cutscenes are done in-game which is quite cool as the craters from the current mission as well as units are portrayed as they stand in the cutscenes as they do in the mission, for the most part. However this reveals problems occasionally. The game has the tendency to spawn units where there were previously none after a cutscene triggering objective, making your previously well-off units suddenly surrounded.

Conclusion: World in conflict is a beautiful game, there is no doubt about it. There are details everywhere that are simply amazing by having being considered and implemented into a game. A highlight in graphics for RTS of 2007. A seemingly well-optimized engine brings the graphics to the user smoothly. However, while the graphics stun, even by today's standards, the game play is lacking. Units are too much cookie-cuttered and there are no unique powers or units for the different armies. Furthermore, gameplay is too much based around spamming single units, or simplistic combinations. Therefore, with unbalanced units for single-player, strategy is minimized for an RTS. Units are easily replaced and there is no emotionally connection at all for the soldiers and units lost or killed. The AI is average and only does its job; nothing more or less. Voice acting is good, but the sound department overall isn't overwhelmingly stunning. Storyline is original, and stays away from the saturated WWII market. Storyboards portray the story elegantly. However, some characters, especially on the American side, are too shallow. A fine line is not established between minor and major characters. Expansion pack adds 6 extra missions which tend to be better overall than the American Campaign. Missions are based too much around the same goals, there isn't enough originality in the objectives. Optional secondary goals add minimal, but still appreciated replayability. Controls are easy to learn and useful, but some cleanup and additions would have been preferred. Destructibility of the environment is pleasing, almost everything can be destroyed to some degree. I would recommend World in Conflict for those looking for a Command and Conquer experience without the base-building aspect.

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by Zott820

Story: Here come the SPOILERS: The gameplay builds heavily on Resident Evil 4. Cut and paste the basic Granados enemies into “Africa”. Remove the scarier Plagas human infestations and replace them with flowers. Yes, I feel that the Majini are less intimidating this time because there aren’t huge parasites coming out of their body and the African culture is muted. The Los Illuminados cult was very unexpected and well executed with the robes and the castle. I expected more reliance on African culture of shaman, voodoo and other racial/cultural heritage to be utilized for the fifth Resident Evil. Yet Capcom has given into the fear of Resident Evil 5 appearing racist by including white Majinni (How many times do I have to see the Mexican looking guy with a mustache and the bald looking white guy?). The tribal village middle of the game attempted to rise to the occasion, but there wasn’t any good sacrifice of people, possession from spirits, or dense jungle fever. Please let me officially raise the bar for future games set in Africa that won’t be afraid of appearing racist:

Weskar may be able to dodge bullets Matrix style because of increased reaction time due to multiple viruses, but he sure fails at killing a steroidal mini-tank named Chris and a knife wielding “African” British sounding woman named Sheva who specializes in kicking and flipping moves. Weskar’s repeated failure to remove these two people, and its plot device, forces Capcom to come up with a story where Weskar with his epic skills, can’t kill mere mortals. Instead only his passive actions are successful like any good villain would have it (Weskar killing Excella with the Uroboros injection). Is this divine intervention from god ala the action commands? No, it comes down to the elite training of the two agents.

Chris has taken a course in epic action commands learning the famed punching moves from Captain Falcon. Chris PAUNCH with a “Straight” and Chris KIIICK with a “Stomp.” or “Kick” to the enemies face or back. The Straight and Stomp moves have the ability to completely explode a Majini’s face. Chris has made a fundamental flaw in his training that makes his move-set incomplete. He seems to be lacking the crucial “Suplex” that Leon spontaneously learned by entering a castle. Since Chris doesn’t enter a castle, he doesn’t learn how to suplex enemies which is a shame. In exchange, Chris has the combo action command of “Haymaker” and “Neck Breaker” which almost make up for the loss, but not quite. I can’t forget the first time Leon did a suplex with a “Huh” and the enemy’s face exploded. All I was expecting was for Leon to kick the Granado in the face, not pull out epic skills.

Sheva has been training in the Tiki Lounge, learning how to be a “powerful” woman while remaining helpless for annoying plot devices (final boss fight where she is forced to slip and hang on). She does have a sort of suplex move where she gets on the enemies head and does a backflip 3:14 in the YouTube video above. It’s always great to see Sheva get all personal with Jill while Chris pulls at her chest. Anyway, in reality Sheva’s family was killed by the initial people who discovered the flowers which created the first Resident Evil virus for Umbrella. Her backstory is severely underdeveloped as she is just there for a reason to have a second person. Her voice is British sounding to make her entitled for vengeance and her skin color isn’t black enough. Thus her parents must have been a mixed couple. You know that color black, the presence of all colors? Sheva is closer to the white spectrum of being devoid of all color (especially on PS3). Why does Sheva need Chris to flip across gaps if she is empowered? Sheva exists so that Kirk can be awesome (aka human).

Kirk is member of Sheva’s military team who joins forces with the BSAA. He has a great voice, excellent skintone, and reminds me of Louis. All of these are pros in my book. It’s just a shame that he isn’t a playable character for Co-op or for multiplayer. WHY?? I would much rather have Kirk on my team than Sheva. Kirk is a minor character that only serves a purpose of tying Sheva to the black community.

Umbrella is able to live on as Tricell, another “pharmaceutical” company intent on creating biological creatures of mass destruction. So for some reason, there are more Granados with Las Plagas than Uroboros, the black worm like creatures that swarm the hosts. There is some really annoying Brooklyn guy that serves no purpose other than he sells the biological agents to terrorists and has worse development than Sheva in the story department. I don’t even know his name offhand, that’s how poor his development is. His real role is very small and he does nothing because Capcom cares more about co-op this time than story and meaningful action sequences.

Weskar once again manipulates every single person he meets so he can develop biological weapons in missiles. Why not just launch them if Uroboros can’t be stopped? So instead of firing the missles, he decides to load up his one plane, carrying maybe two missiles so he can drop them himself. Chris and Sheva completely forget about all the stockpiled missiles in the bases and decide that two missiles and Weskar are a greater threat than the Majini accidentally stumbling around and activating one with their flowers.

I just want to say that Uroboros is more racist in this game than Africans. I am deeply offended by worms being show in a black color. Pink worms or I boycott the game.

Gameplay: The gameplay remains faithful to Resident Evil 4 but the gameplay is expanded to incorporate co-op. The best new aspect of gameplay is the ability to “help” your partner when grabbed and to be able to do combos with action commands. I assume gentle reader that you are familiar with the basic mechanics of the hit game Resident Evil 4, so there is no need for me to go into generalized stuff about how you have to hold X to run and backward X to turn 180.

The ability to strafe is not a gameplay enhancement as each character’s strafing is too slow to avoid thrown objects or attacks. The C and D play styles are only there to entice FPS players on the 360 to give Resident Evil 5 a try. Those players are going to be frustrated at the stop, aim, shoot mechanic and will HATE not being able to run and gun. This focus on shooting and action is probably why a lot of people think the Resident Evil franchise has departed too much from the Horror genre.

Resident Evil 5 was never created to be a FPS and games like Metal Gear Solid 4 failed in this use of the first person perspective. I shouldn’t have to hold a billion buttons to be in first person in MGS 4 and I shouldn’t have to hold buttons to keep the gun/knife out in RE5 (this was later half fixed in the PC version with the quick knife button). I like the controls on the PS3, but I still feel better using the Gamecube controller (obviously since I played RE4 on Gamecube and didn’t own a PS2). Having to push “B” to help your partner results too often in my character saying “Come on”. Yes, I need to “come on” and help my partner. At least I died less often because my partner was there to save me. This changed my mindset from survival to using Sheva as portable first-aid spray. The mean the computer Sheva will automatically try to heal any small amount of damage with whatever she has.

The controls are responsive to what I want to do. There are only a few problems and they revolve around the inventory menu and me not being able to switch weapons or items fast enough. The designers actually let you reload weapons by moving the ammo onto the weapon in the inventory screen. This is a very handy feature that inadvertently makes the game even easier for me and is essential for keeping the Mercenaries combo going with slower reloading weapons (magnum and shotgun).

MINIBOSSES

I characterize any enemy that has a one hit kill attack or does massive damage as a miniboss. They take a little longer to dispatch because a grenade won’t instantly kill them. An example is the axe wielding dude at the start of the game. This classification extends to the different variations of this enemy.

Here are what I consider to be other minibosses: the bag chainsaw guy, the tribal masked giant, the initially very annoying bug creature, the big mini-gun RE4 guy (this time he is packing heat with a cigar), the humanoid mouth creature with the closed hard shell/fleshy leg (because it is annoying), and the Lickers (Beta). The minibosses are for the most part well executed. I still find the Lickers to be really powerful and a challenge to take down since their tongue attack is very powerful and there is no chance of escape without partner assistance. The chainsaw people are extremely easy for the veteran RE4 players since they are old hat and feel a lot weaker this time. The only difference is that on higher difficulty levels, the chainsaw enemy will get back up after defeated and go into a wild chainsaw swinging motion. This is instantly fatal and you can put the enemy back down permanently with more firepower.

The best part about the minibosses is that most of them have action moves you can do against them to attack, dodge or something in between. It’s a lot of fun to let off an action command, your partner goes in for their action command, and then you can follow up with the powerful move like the haymaker. It is very dynamic and feels intuitive.

Bosses

Let me rank the bosses. The most creative boss award goes to the Weskar and Jill fight. It was refreshing and my first time fighting them was exciting. My mindset was “Oh, I see Weskar dodging all my attacks. Ok, well Jill is able to be hit.” So I unload many rounds into Jill only to see Jill die and Chris yell “JIIILL!” That apparently wasn’t the right way to beat the boss. It was a while before I found out that Weskar can kick open the door and open up the upper level. I will say that surviving the 7 minutes the first time was nerve racking but not in the same level of survival.

Most disappointing boss: This award goes to the El Gigante, the on rails boss fight where the car is not moving. Way to go Capcom! You turned one of the most dynamic boss fights into a stationary shooting gallery. The new boss is no fun. All you do is fire and fire. The action button to dodge his attack is strange because Sheva and Chris duck and El Gigante doesn’t FEEL like he wants to crush the people and the truck. Why do I have to target random Majini at the same time while I am fighting this boss? Oh, it’s because the Majini need to be added to add some “action” into the battle. There are some high expectations when you use the most well known boss from Resident Evil 4 again in this game. A small consolation prize is that the El Gigante is named something else and looks quasi African with a goatee.

The coolest looking boss: the spider boss inside the bio lab. I didn’t know you could feed it grenades the first time I beat it. The in-game description says that Chris and Sheva only fought one type of the spider boss. I would have rather fought this twice than the flying bat boss.

Gameplay FLAWS

When on Veteran, I usually only too damage because I was reloading or missed shooting projectiles out of the air. Professional presents a plight: I like the added difficulty that a single hit puts your character in the critical state. What was done poorly here was when the other player tries to “revive” the “downed” player. On Professional, it is near impossible to health the other character in time with a can of First Aid Spray because by the time your character gets out the car, the other character has already died. So literally, the player falls to the ground while the green spray is still coming out of the can. Yet, if you didn’t have the can of First Aid Spray, then the “revive” button would instantly work and the player would be saved. You better hope you are standing a cm. away from the other player if they get hit and you have a can of First Aid or else you lose on Professional. Optimally, I wish Capcom would fix this stupid gameplay mechanic that inadvertently punishes players for carrying healing items who want the Professional level of difficulty.

Like I mentioned earlier, the new action commands are great forms of gameplay. (I am referring to the punches and kicks and not the reduced number of Quick Time Events in the game) but the Quick Time Events are poorly implemented in this version. The reduced number of these Quick Time Events (QTE) has actually hurt the franchise. Leon showed us how he could do the impossible as long as you got the button presses correct. Need to jump across a bridge, no problem, just press ( A + B ). Want to dodge danger (a pit, a thrown knife, a defeated boss?), just press ( L + R ). Resident Evil 5 thought that randomizing the buttons made it too difficult so the actions are always the same if you die and have to replay the cutscene. This is a gameplay design failure. There are also few QTE during boss battles.

Your partner is really never in any trouble, especially if they are grabbed from behind where the enemy does NO damage. Being grabbed from behind could actually be a great strategy in the Mercenaries mode as the enemies LOVE to grab people from behind. The CPU controlled Sheva is not up to my level of expertise since Capcom didn’t want to make a partner that plays the game for you. Potential deadly enemies are only the ones that are instant death ala the “regenerator cricket bug” as one could call it. I don’t know how many times Zott was owned by the bug creature before we developed a correct strategy to dispatch it. I guess Weskar’s whip arms could be considered instant death but Chris enjoys swimming in magma just like Weskar.

There is no reason why Sheva needs to be flipped across a gap to become helpless with an onslaught of summoned enemies. I mean, there is no one there, and then just for game design, about thirty Majini are spawned. Then you have to assist the other player if they aren’t good enough to handle it on their own. I am good enough to handle it on my own. My partner is just there for support so I can do all the epic gunplay and action commands; they will provide healing support and action combo potential.

There is more use of the “cover” mechanic in this game. It makes more sense in this game since later on there are a lot more projectile enemies. I like and dislike the ability to fire behind cover. I like how it makes sniping really easy with the protection but makes the player TOO powerful with cover. I dislike how the cover controls make it difficult to get off the cover. I would like to be able to get out of cover faster somewhat similar to gears of war where I can just push a button and back on the controller.

Chris and Sheva should have the option of using ammo that fires healing anti-plagas medication at the people. In my mind, this would be some sort of lightbulb or taser system that would activate a bright light inside the target, killing the plagas from the inside with a flash. Then ammo could be limited on a recharge meter before it could be used again. The Majini would then be able to break free of their plaga, sometimes helping Chris distract the enemy, sometimes running away, sometimes hiding, there are many options. There could even be an entire mod where players play the game with only this weapon on a cleansing mission.

There needs to be more infected women in the game. There was one female character enemy in the game and it was only in a small part of the village. Like I mentioned in what I would do with the game, I want more woman shaman, more women showing off their physical power, an actual woman boss, more controversy.

If the game threw in children who were infected, like an diary article alludes that they were, then the game would get so much criticism but it would be more realistic. If the game included infected babies, I don’t think there would be much backlash since Dead Space was able to do it (I got a laugh out of Issac drop kicking the baby aliens). If the designers included pregnant women who were infected, this game would be boycotted internationally and reach a level of infamy that ManHunt 2 and Hot Coffee reached.

Graphics: The first impression is that the graphics are both next gen but lacking the graphical punch that the Resident Evil series usually brings to the table. The best graphics are the Uroboros worms, the bosses, the character models and the final volcano areas. Chris’ character model is excellent with great bump mapping for his huge muscles and decent texture work. Sheva is also pretty good with a solid face texture and well rendered body. For best character model, I would say it is a tie between Weskar, Jill and the tribal miniboss. Weskar’s moonlight jacket is very well designed and looks photorealistic. His glasses and character design are top notch and deserve to be praised. This level of effort on Weskar paid off since he was the main focus of the game. Jill also benefited from a very sexy “Zero Suit Samus” character design. I can’t say no to a girl with a ponytail who isn’t afraid to show off her hot bod in skin tight clothing. The tribal miniboss is the tall huge Majini with the mask who has some really well rendered facemask and sweat streaking his body. He attacks by doing the jumping and sweeping of his melee weapon; he also has a amusing kick attack.

The environments look great but feel much smaller than Resident Evil 4 in a few areas. I would have liked to have some fights in the savannah where my character can walk around. There are some large areas but they are mostly large just from the amount of open air that is above the characters. It’s good that the developers dropped their intense heat and shade gameplay since the shadows in this game are not dark enough to contrast with the HDR. My favorite set-piece in the game is the prison Mercenaries map because the volcano environment and Fire Axe Executer mini-boss look amazing.

I really don’t have many complaints with the graphics. The engine is effective at rendering enough zombies for the single player. At certain points like explosions, there is a little lag below 30 FPS. The cutscenes are all in-game which is always a good step in the right direction.

Sound: The music is a less adrenaline pumping than Resident Evil 4. The music is very environmental so it accomplished its goal of players not paying it any attention. The bat boss music sometimes irritates me because of the jarring sounds. The enemy voices are decent but it comes down to the voice acting of Chris, Sheva, and Weskar to make the game special. Chris always sounds confident and does sound like an emotionless machine even when he is talking about Jill. Sheva seems to have more emotion in her voice. Both have some corny lines. How about Chris: “Now Sheva shoot him! Sheva: I can’t without hitting you! Chris: Then shoot through me!” anyone? Luckily I like cheesy dialogue.

Weskar’s voice actor really enjoys pronouncing each of his lines with precision and excellent timing. I was more excited to hear Weskar’s dialogue than any other character. His over-the-top dialogue about genetics and superiority is well done with cheese.

A majority of the menu and gun sounds are reused from past Resident Evil games including 4. The sound in this game was overall good enough where I don’t have to focus on it.

PC Version: Since this review took a long time to complete due to distractions, the superior PC version came out. I have no reason to buy this version except I want a real challenge of more enemies with the PC version. Capcom seems to want to release this game like 3 more times with different controls, side missions and skins. I’ll probably end up reviewing the re-release version on PC if it comes out. Otherwise, they better have Leon with voice acting if they want me to buy an add-on.

The Bottom Line: I am satisfied with Resident Evil 5 even though it is not as revolutionary as Resident Evil 4. The game would have benefited from a little more story and character development so I can feel connected to a mini hulk and an “African” woman. The first part of the game was decent, the gas facility/terrorist man was not well developed and the final part was excellent sans ridiculous lava plot. The game could have really used more African elements as this game felt like it could have taken place anywhere in the world. Also, the coop was good for single player but split-screen coop should have had a menu option like the demo instead of having to start the game and then selecting “start” on the second controller. If you are going to buy the game, wait for the new versions coming out since it has more content. If you don't care, get the PC version or the 360/PS3 if your computer is too old.

PS3 Reviews Game: My framerate may be a little worse than the 360, but I can render black worms too. I just glad I can render a lot more zombies than the Dead Rising port on Wii but I'm not displaying the large amount of people from the early RE5 E3 videos. Having Capcom hide their Versus mode in a patch and then paying for it is not worth $5.

*Images from Capcom's Resident Evil 5 website. Note they were from development some look better than PS3 version. Also some elements have changed from images.

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by BlueZero

My review of this game comes almost comes by luck. Why? Well, there was a Direct2Drive promotion not too long ago that sold games for 5 dollars apiece. It just so happened that one of those games was Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena. It had been marked down from $40 in the promotion, an eye catcher if any. I had heard positive notions about Butcher Bay on the original Xbox, many praising the graphics, perhaps some of the best on the system. A quick trip to Metacritic showed an average rating of about 90. More convincing was not required. For 5 dollars, if it sucks, then it is no big loss. I have paid more for worse games (especially when $10 is considered bargain-bin prices.)

The deed was done, and I proceeded to install the 7GBs of data needed to play this sucker, which would eventually uncompress to about 10GB. Hefty Hefty Hefty.

This review will only encompass the re-mastered Butcher Bay campaign. Having never played the original Escape from Butcher Bay, I felt that it should be given its own review. Therefore, I’ll consider the two campaigns as completely separate games, and thus two unique reviews. The review for the Dark Athena campaign can be found here. Everyone who has reviewed this game has seemed to complain about it being remade. Well, I don’t have any bias toward the original, since I never played it, so this should be a fresh perspective.

First off, I beat the game on normal once through, with most graphics settings on high, except at a resolution of 1440x900 and one setting at 8-bit to avoid extra lag for possibly negligible graphical increase.

This review contains SPOILERS.

An unofficial list of changes of this remake from the original can be seen here:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/genmessage.php?board=939612&topic=49738144

Story: You are Riddick, scourge of the universe, or so it seems. To be honest, I haven’t seen the movie that this game ties into. You start off being escorted by Johns, whom is some mercenary with enough guts and skill to capture Riddick somehow. Then, the player has a short tutorial level, which was cleverly implemented, giving the ability to explore some of the game’s tactics early on, while usually throwing them by the wayside for the rest of the game.

(IE: Guns are DNA locked most of the game, yet the tutorial gives them to you no problem). From here you meet Hoxie, the warden of the non-quotidian Butcher Bay Prison. It isn’t made clear in the game, but the prison is multi-layered, with towers and deep subterranean pits. Riddick is initiated into the prison in a Call of Duty 4-esque walking sequence. Perhaps Infinity-Ward was inspired by the original?

Once properly deloused the player has the option to talk to various characters, as well as walk around freely. The game is not open world, but similar to an RPG in that not every quest is a requirement; there are missions that can be completed to grant additional equipment. These periods of rest in the story, without action, reminded me of the puzzle sequences of Half Life 2, as well as the calm ship exploration scenes of Star Trek: Elite Force.

From this moment on, Riddick cranks out authority, and escapes that prison part. He fights some monsters then repeats this structure 2 more times. After that there is an underwhelming final boss(es) to end the game.

This light summary may make it seem as though the story is repetitive but it is only in the fact that you seem to keep escaping and being recaptured. Each time Riddick is recaptured, I was expecting an ending to the game. In fact, each pre-capture feels like a climactic ending yet the game will not end. Instead, each restraint results in Riddick’s transmission to a new sector of the prison; somewhere with new characters, new enemies, and new environments. In this way, while the basic gameplay remains more or less the same, the player now has new venues to explore, joined with a new cast of characters. Though… all the characters whom Riddick help pretty much end up dead. Or he kills them, your choice.

The game is still linear at its heart. Riddick is free to move around in the prison sections often using the ducts as a slipstream to new areas. This includes sometimes circuitous backtracking if Riddick wants to finish optional quests down the line. Overall, the freedom of movement gives the game an open-world feeling, even though it is prison, and largely confined. Riddick cannot move back to zones post-capture(s) (I.E. Riddick cannot go back to the starting Prison level after being sent to the second-tier prison level) but this is not too bad, except the chance of finishing earlier segment missions is then removed at those points.

There was only one multiple-path section in the game that I recognized; happening in the second-tier prison. It was a choice between killing lots of people in a fighting ring, or getting caught with drugs. I chose the pure killing route, and it was straightforward. The drug path choice, as far as I could tell, was more complicated; I was unsure how to even start it. Regardless, it too involved killing though had additional plot elements. Both ultimately resulted in the same solution, but it was nice for the developers to add a sense of choice, and possible replayability.

There are a couple sections of the story that are unexplained. Riddick gets super-darkness seeing eyes about 1/3 of the way through the game. Yet, despite there being a women’s voice, I have no idea why he got these powers. There is also an intro and outro to the game that star Riddick hunting a yeti-like creature with the same women voice-over. I’m not sure why he’s doing that ether. These cinematics don’t play automatically in the remake, which adds to the confusion; they are found in the extra content part of the menu. I think the makes more sense without the random movie sequences, so I can see why they were left out, but on the same note, what is their background? Perhaps the women and the movies relate back to the movie tie-in that I haven’t seen. Either way, the movies and the voice felt out of place or perhaps just a plot device to give Riddick the special “eyeshine”. Consider me uninformed.

Characters: There are a bound of characters in the game, but honestly, few are really important, and these are people that are reoccurring. The game is not afraid to kill off characters, main or not; realistic, raw, and fitting.

Riddick – Man of few words. Virtuosic killer whom likes the darkness. Bio complete.

Johns – Mercenary who keeps getting screwed over when capturing Riddick multiple times.

Jagger Valence – Dude that helps Riddick.

Abbot- High Ranking Guard, antagonist of early segments of the game.

Hoxie – Warden of Bucket Bay. Not really evil, just a shrewd businessman.

Soldier – Dies

Riot Guard – Dies harder. Takes more critical flinching damage from behind.

Pope Joe – Doesn’t die, but doesn’t do much either. “Gives” Riddick Eyeshine.

Monsters – Come in different varieties but act much the same. Xenos, mutants etc. Die; Gib familiarly.

Turrets – Most annoying enemy in the game. Changes from instant kill varieties to major damage type with no visual indication. Very weak health-wise, but if it spots Riddick, it is usually too late. They tend to respawn, making them that much more persistent and horrible.

All other characters are just well voice-acted quest vendors. I will compliment the developers for creating such a wide assortment of characters, not just their personality and dialogue, but also their modeling. It is a compliment when there are not five characters standing around that are cookie-cuts of each other. The soldiers are, but that is because you fight so many of them through the course of the game. Even among soldiers there is usually some distinction on their visible features that set them apart; some wear helmets and hats.

Regarding enemy strength, there is no initial indicator to tell how strong one enemy is to another. For this I must give an example. In one situation, Riddick commandeers a Riot Guard and must plow through the facility. Along the way he meets other, bigger and different-looking Riot Guards. These enemies seem like they would be a suitable match, and yet pumping bullets into them sends them into a twitching frenzy, in which they don’t return fire, and just die. During that same phase, a communication by the guards mentions that they must send in some super robots to stop me. These super-robots only appear at that point in the game and the player has absolutely no idea how strong they are, but just pumping bullets into them seemed to work like it did for regular riot guards.

On foot, Riddick is meat to robots and Riot Guards unless he can sneak behind them to their weak spot or use a heavy weapon such as a chaingun. With this in mind, the later portion of the game throws the player for a loop by introducing big white robots, which while looking stronger than Riot Guards, are taken down easily with one or two shotgun blasts. There are also floaty robots that are even easier; one shot of anything will kill them. When the thought of robots was previously “strong”, it is unclear what hierarchy of power exists. The confusion continues later with bosses, and how seemingly strong they look, yet tactically simple to kill they are.

AI and Gameplay: Just to mention it, each box of health is a portion of the health that is recoverable by waiting. If a box is lost, only a health station can get it back. There are special health stations that give an extra bar of health permanently. These were rare, and the game could be beaten without them, but they do help. Med-stations that run out of their “four squares” of juice can be refilled with health canisters.

Moving through different areas of the game results in a load screen like Half Life 2, but the big difference here, is that the load times for Chronicles of Riddick are whopping fast (Maybe 10 seconds or less). I seriously mean this. This includes the initial load too. Compared to other modern games, I am surprised at the pace. Even Half Life 2 doesn’t load as fast as this game, and it is older with lower requirements. I was very, very impressed by the loading speed. It is annoying to walk back through a load portal and have the game have to reload, but thankfully, I don’t have to waste my life waiting for this game to queue and complete.

The AI in the game is acceptable. It is not a very intelligent AI, but it fits the purpose of the characters it is portraying for the most part. Most usual guards tend to stay far away from Riddick. They will not simply rush up to him (to be bashed to bits) if they have cover. Instead, it was often I who had to come to them. They also didn’t fire and retreat either, a flaw or a clever plan?; forcing me to get shot at as I approached. Let me tell you, the guns do a lot of damage to Riddick. This is more than likely used as a method to keep the game sneaking based, and it works. I often had to rethink attacking strategies to incorporate stealth.

Guards are both facile and execrable at spotting Riddick in the dark. Sometimes I will make a noise and they’ll come rushing to me. Or they will see where I hid and search it. Other times, when I attacked, and then rushed to hide, the guards will change into seek and destroy mode, moving slowly with gun-mounted light on, and making easy targets for Riddick at less than 1 ft away walking by.

Other enemies, like the robots, tended to not have much of an AI at all. They simply stood there and got shot, or shot. Sometimes they changed positions and repeated the behavior. The same simplicity applies to the Xenos and pit dwellers, but their simply programming is Left 4 Dead style pack rushing.

Graphics: Imagine walking into a prison, and instead of being greeted with grit, you found yourself face to face with lots and lots of shiny things. The prison looks anything but sere. That is how this game is. The new game engine definitely added something more to Bucket Bay. I haven’t played the original, but from what I’ve seen from comparison videos, there are definitely items that have more detail attached, such as the health dispensers and character models.

The lighting is also better, giving the shadows and textures a sense of more depth. The darks and shadows are inviting. The only problem is that secularity. While not the bloom that plagued Mirror’s Edge, it might as well be, for it does detract from a couple scenes. The only spots where the secularity is fitting are the near ending portions that revolve around “clean-rooms” in which case the graphics engine makes the rooms feel futuristic and on key. A legally required recreation chamber is an especially outstanding example of the lighting done correctly. (And an offbeat section of the game too) In a prison though, not the best. The flatness of the original game engine might have been better at giving off the dullness of the prison. Overall, certain objects should have kept the shiness, and others not so much. I’m not sure if this unsightly shine was intended, or an oversight by the developers to save time and not have to reformat all the textures with new bump-maps.

The addition of motion blur and field of depth add a lot to the game. Especially giving a more cinematic touch to many of the cutscenes, and a ferocity of Riddick's moves during gameplay. Both are pluses, and they are integrated so well that they don't have any of the annoyance that plagues their use in some games. Bravo.

Special attention was paid to the graphic indicators and HUD. With this I mean effects that relay information to the player. When Riddick is in darkness and well hidden, the hue of the screen will turn bluish. Similarly, when Riddick is using his eyeshine, he is given a slight tunnelvision/fisheye, as well as increased brightness overall. These effects were well integrated, and they were not detrimental to the game I felt.

On that note, the developers seem to have opted for a different way of signaling objects and character names. In the original Butcher Bay, there were HUD elements where descriptive text would hover over an object or person, with a line connecting to that person. In this remake, that has been replaced with a fade in of the same text in the bottom left and right corners of the screen with no connective elements. This works more effectively, as it doesn’t make Riddick seem like a robot wearing an eyepiece. It also enhances the integration into the game world, Riddick knows these objects and so the fading in is almost signal of a recollection of his memories. Unfortunately, it forces looking into the corners of the screen to see who or what is being interacted with, but this is only a problem initially, once you get used to the areas and objects, there is no reason to even think about the text. The health in the top left corner IS important however. The developers made the boxes signifying chunks of health more shaded which make them look nicer and fit better with the rest of the UI.

Color blending is an issue in the dark areas, where bands of color can be made out when they shouldn’t. I can only say that it may be due to the graphics settings I had chosen, the 8-bit lighting with the off occlusion setting, and so cannot lay absolute judgment on this unfortunate outcome until further analysis is done. There is a cool grain effect placed all of the game's visuals. It isn't as prevalent as in L4D thankfully, and I only noticed it through the screenshots. If it played any part, it was subtle. This grain effect is not the color blending problem.

In the later parts of the game when Riddick are controls a Heavy Guard, the rooms become quite destructible. This is really the only section when you can do this. Every other destruction scene of the environment is scripted, especially when the guards throw path-opening grenades. During this particular scene, there isn’t a plethora of things to destroy, mostly pillars and flooring, but it was nice to see that something came apart in the game world. This may have originally been a 2004 game, but a little bit of physics is appreciated, bringing it up slightly to more modern gameplay standards.

Sounds and Music: Sound quality was good. None of the sounds were washed out or overly compressed. It is difficult to describe sounds in particular that stood out, but they were good enough as to not needing mention.

Sadly, the sound seems to de-sync on the cutscenes. It didn’t happen all the time, but occasionally would become noticeably off from the actor’s lips and movement. Now, the lips of the characters are not as good as the ones from Half Life 2 at matching what the character is actually emitting from his orifice, but even then I could tell the sounds were off. Furthermore, taking the many snapshots for this review resulted in de-synced sound. Apparently the engine is not capable of taking a snapshot and keeping the sequences up to date. Disappointing.

Apparently, some of the music was changed in the remake compared to the original release. I can’t tell any in particular, given this being my first time playing Butcher Bay, but some people said that the prison break song and others were changed.

Overall, the music seems very atmospheric in this remake, at least when sneaking. There are a couple up-beat action tracks, especially when the Xenos attack, or when driving some of the mechs around, but generally it is just atmospheric background. I can’t complain, even if there were changes. What did stick out was the use of a “Riddick theme” which popped in and about the songs too often. I could have used a little less of that during my playsession. It may even have been the same song repeating, but whatever the case, I seem to recall noticeable annoyed at the theme being so prevalent. This is bad when the music, not the enemies are causing annoyance.

Voices: Dialogue is of high caliber and quality with the NPC’s characterization correctly played out. Riddick’s ethos is one of strict independence, a man of few words; even when answering people’s questions, which one might think would require more than 3 words, somehow he finds a way.

There are parts of Butcher Bay where Riddick can stop to listen to the characters speaking about events. These are not like Oblivion in which they are random; they happen as you enter the areas for the first time. Still, I liked the option of listening to these optional dialogues, or just interrupting them, never to hear them again. On that note, conversations can be skipped, and it doesn’t skip the whole dialogue tree either, only what the person is saying at that instant. I found this feature useful, as in many games I prefer to read the dialogue through the provided captions than wait 4 times as long for the actor to finish speaking. Also, on subsequent playthroughs, I may not want to hear all the same lines again.

There is some subtle humor written in for some of the NPCs. The Heavy Guard constantly insults the Riddick for being a poor driver. There is Craps, who lets Riddick play dice, along with some interesting professional/unprofessional terminology of the mini-game. Running around and beeping all the doorbells in another section rewards completely frivolous dialogue to please oneself. I liked all these diversions; my accolades to the developers to put some humor in an otherwise serious game.

Controls: Good and bad. What makes the controls iffy is the feeling that they are not as precise as they could be. There are moves that should be pulled off, and they are not. Blows that should hit in hand to hand combat, and are deflected. An enemy attacks you by raising back for a blow. There is supposed to be a moment in which you can counter the move, or do a finishing blow. This feature works accurately when countering guns, but if you are fighting a foe with a switchblade or club, it hardly, if ever, works. Is it supposed to? I think it should.

Attacks are dependent on the movement of Riddick when a button is mashed; moving forward while attacking yields a different offensive strike than if moving left and attacking. While these were supposed to play a strategic role in hand to hand combat, I found it hard to accomplish to any real degree of skill, and was just random button mashing with the hopes of a hit. To win any of the hand to hand showdowns, it was timing, gap between characters, and weapons that mattered most.

I know I am beating this game with its controls, but I must continue to crush them. Mouse look was also slightly odd the first time the game was played by me. The freelook had an almost limited degree of motion, something that I’d grown accustomed in very old games like Marathon. By this, I mean the degrees of look are not all possible positions, but are limited to certain angles of movement. This only appeared when moving short spans of look and did not detract from overall gameplay as one got used to it, but initially it felt offbeat. Could this have been something ported from the consoles? If it is something real, and not just part of my imagination/ gaming setup, why put it in?

So many bad controls can only means one thing…. Console port. Well, the developers included a weapon wheel, but unlike Crysis; no you can’t change weapons with the middle button effectively, and no you can’t go through all of them with the number keys. Thus you must hold down X, and either pin a weapon to the two available assignable slots (1, and 2 only), or just use the clunkier than Crysis selection menu. I’m not sure why I can’t use the number keys to change weapons, the weapons all occupy specific spots anyways and there is no customizable inventory, so they can’t be rearranged. You won’t be changing weapons often in this game, but why such a stupid limitation? The number keys were there for a reason, and especially in this day and age the scroll wheel should be perfected in quick weapon switching and killing. Arg!

I will compliment the vehicle scenes. Both felt clunky and heavy as they were supposed to. The Riot Guard scene didn’t change too much for the controls, but the Heavy Guard added noticeable delay and mass, which I felt were comfortable integrated with the style of the beasts.

There is actually a decent amount of user interactivity in the world. Riddick can open lockers, flush toilets, Flip beds, turn off lights, ring doorbells, pick up weapons, talk to people, poison food, use health machines, open vents and more. A lot of these actions are required by the game to proceed, but a couple, such as the toilets and lights, are merely methods to get players more involved in the gamespace. Granted, there are no PhysX or Havok physics at work here, so objects stay stationary for the most part, and the barren prison is just that, barren; but I appreciate the extra “optional” interactivity the developers put in. As something fun and strategically important, bodies can be dragged into the shadows to avoid alerting the guards. I frankly didn’t find it all that useful. I appreciate its inclusion for the true Splinter Cell players and for throwing bodies into flesh hungry blades, and off cliffs. I only wish that like Arkham Asylum there might have been some atmospheric debris floating around…

Navigation: When Riddick is jumping, he can sometimes catch onto objects. The problem is, the objects that are grabble are not clearly defined. This isn’t like Mirror’s Edge where you can climb anything. This is like Mirror’s Edge where you want to climb a ledge and find you don’t seem to stick. Riddick tries to jump again, and again, but it turns out you aren’t even supposed to get on that box. Sigh* Also, Riddick likes to lose his grip when getting shot while climbing up. I know it is more realistic, but from a gameplay standpoint, it meant enemies on platforms above could neither be shot, nor reached as they camped the spot. This happened rarely, but was still annoying, especially towards the end of the game, when the monstrous Xenos attack.

As I mentioned, the prison is navigateable through ducts and Riddick can visit most of the facility that he is stationed in freely. To help guide the player through the many pathways and labyrinths there is a map. This map is useless. I couldn’t even tell where I was on it, and even worse, the map just shows room names on generic squares. Instead the proper way to get around is just by learning the environment. Luckily, there are useful guiding signs to help maintain sanity. Some lunatic had been kind of nice to paint/etch the names of areas the ducts are leading with an arrow pointing the way towards those stations. I usually stumbled across the correct path to get to my destinations, but for those wishing to explore more, this writing in the duct is very useful. It also prevents the player from backtracking down the same duct by accident, which due to the similarity of textures and lighting, happened on occasion.

Weapons: In this game, weapons are a mixed bag. There are some criteria for weapons that must first be brought up. There are melee weapons, and there are shooting weapons. Every shooting weapon can be used as a melee weapon though, as well as a flashlight. With that note, let me go over some weapons.

Shotgun- Best weapon in the game. Use it in close range for instant-kills, use it at longer range to suppress till you have gotten within close range, repeat.

Rifle- Inaccurate. Use as a last measure, or if out of shotgun bullets. Frankly, it is almost better to snipe with the shotgun than use the rifle. The rifle is good if the target is close for dealing a lot of damage quickly, but then, that is what shotgun is for. Later down the line you can find an enhanced prototype rifle, I have no idea what was enhanced about it besides the shape.

Gun- It is a generic “gun” in the game, but is really a pistol. It isn’t prevalent, but can be better than the rifle, though weaker.

Gatling Gun - Strong, fast and seems to have unlimited ammo. Sucks at close range though, since it takes a while to spin up, ALA the Team Fortress 2 Heavy.

Shiv- Ranging from screwdrivers to scalpels to various shapes of metal, they all perform the same.

Clubs – Pretty much the same as a Shiv, though has a different attack pattern, so I’ll count it different. Not sure how much better it is, though usually costs more than a shiv.

Knuckleduster/hand-to-hand – This weapon attaches to your knuckle and possibly adds more damage, it is difficult to tell. It is not removable once equipped, unless switching it for a different looking one. Surprisingly, the guards do not care if you wear this around them, especially during the Tower 17 parts. I guess this is attributed to the fact you cannot remove the item, and killing anyone is that part will have you die anyways.

Stun gun- Shocks people, unlimited ammo. The victim will recover after a while, but can be stomped for an instant death. As good as the shotgun, except it takes a long time to recover per shot. Useless against robots and Riot Guards.

As can be observed, there is not a wide selection of weapons. The melee attack of the guns seems weaker than using the shiv or clubs, and so is not recommended. Unfortunately, due to the controls, easily switching weapons in case of ammo depletion is not possible; something to keep in mind.

Finishers are awesome. They make your effort to kill a person have that extra surprise at the end. There are no gun finishers, though the shivs, club, and hand to hand do have some. These finishers are usually gruesome [Shiv in the eye anyone?] and happen automatically if the target gets below a certain health. There appears to be enough frontal finishers that I rarely saw many repeat.

However, for stealth finishers, I found that the same animations occurred too often for my taste. It was either a crepitating neckbreak; for hand-to-hand, a stab in the head; for shiv, or a strangling/bashing; for the club. For a game based a lot on stealth, I think there should have been a couple more of these stealth finishers. The shiv is also slightly strange for its stealth finisher. The stab in the head works no matter what gear they are wearing. It is awkward to see Riddick smack a piece of metal through a soldier’s metal helmet; guess Riddick is super strong.

The game doesn’t go overboard with the guns, thanks to those RPG-esque missions sequences as well as limiting their use. Guns are locked down the majority of the game with DNA, forcing Riddick to use what is presented to him. Through the second half of the game this includes the Stun Gun, which is amazingly effective at killing. The stun gun is limited by the reload time, so a couple areas of great guard density force its holstering for sneaking. This helps keep the balance between pure power and stealth in the game.

Extras: For collecting cigarette packages the player is given extra art. The art is good, but doesn’t feel worth it to collect the cigarette packages for it alone. Also, the art is not so high quality that players can zoom in, like Soul Caliber 2 allows. I suppose disk-space might have been an issue for that. To make up for the averageness, each pack had some pseudo-witty quotes on them, and are interestingly named. That is the real draw; at least it was for me. Also 100% completionism with achievements, but I am not one of those people. The commentary that was in the original director’s cut is removed which is a serious disappointment. I can only suppose the game is so big already that perhaps it wasn’t cost effective to include it on the “DVD” too.

There is money in the game. It is used to buy items, pay off guards or enter bets. It is only useful for the second portion of the game, while in second-tier security. After that, the use of money seemingly disappears, and also stops showing up around the level. No problem gameplay-wise, just something noticeable if the player pays attention.

Conclusion: For $5, I definitely cannot complain. Even at full price I’d say the game is worth getting if you have never played it before. Butcher Bay is good on its own, even if I find that Dark Athena sucks, this portion is worth the price of admission. Graphics were above average though wet and shiny. Sound was quite good. Music is repetitious. Characters and voices were stellar for being unique, even better than Oblivion’s. Enemies do their job, but misleading strengths. Mech scenes are fun. It is refreshing to find games that have RPG elements, but they aren’t forced down the player’s throat, and give a chance for the player to relax in an FPS. Cigarettes and concept art are a nice treat. Confusing story if not in the know. Characters die in gruesomely effective and spectacular ways. HUD and graphical effects are useful without going overboard. Missing extras from previous versions of the game disappointing. Desyncing cutscenes is very sad. Appreciate a game that gets loading done correctly. Getting around the mines is somewhat of a confusing mess, but horrible map, but there are some helpful pointers around.

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by Zott820

Note: One of our faithful readers sent this review in to us. Appreciating biased videogame opinion, we post it here for your pleasure.

By ZenOnion

I found the other day, a game that made me smile when I thought back on the hours I spent playing it— NHL Hitz 20-03 by Midway Home Entertainment. As a Mom of biased gamers, I was challenged by my sons to learn this game. Since they had many years of practice, they were the experts, I was the beginner and to play together was crazy. If you do not have access to experienced gamers who can show you the controls and offer advice it is a good idea to complete all lessons at the Hockey School and then go on to one of the 6 Mini Games to learn how to handle the controls. This I did since the boys decided to keep some controls secret just to mess with me. Much laughing and snickering occurred around me as I provided hour of entertainment for them. This was evident during the many hours I spent in The Hockey School as I learned how to handle the controls and make a fool of myself. I enjoyed the various mini-games and became a better player because of these elements. I found out that expert gamers get very competitive and creative during these mini-games so be for warned. The entertainment value alone in what strange things can occur between players showing off and trying to win is both time stealing and at times indescribable. Many tricks were learned by me by just sitting back and watching. The most enjoyable mini-games to play for us were in this order:

1. Shootout You as Goalie need to protect your goal or you as the shooter try to score. One on one action.
2. Three in a Row Tic-Tac-Toe via stick to puck. The secret to win is to block the shot.
3. King of the Rink Check or sweep players to gain the most points. A player knocked out of the rink earns extra points.
4. Shooting Gallery Shoot the most windows out of a building while on rooftop across the way. Try getting them all in a row, diagonally, or make a design.
5. Own the Ice Grab the puck and skate over 5 areas of the ice trying to change them to your color while your opponent steals the puck trying to do the same.
6. Keep Away Gain points for highest time of puck possession and most successful passes to your team mate.

Now to an actual hockey game—to begin with we would all yell out our preference for the various special themed ice arenas such as “let it snow in the disco arena”. We had customized the Viking team into our franchise team by adding players to match our personalities and physical characteristics. We made a player named Mr. Big who was gigantic— as big and tall as we could make him and who was announced on the ice as “Slim”. There was our favorite female player the “Black Knight” and our high scorer “Mark” followed closely by “Zeus”. I was of course named Mom, but was announced on the ice as “Mummy”. We had the most fun and challenges when we had a total of 4 players competing against each other. A player could change his position on the ice depending on the action or player he wanted to be (forward, goalie, etc). Since I was a beginner to start with I usually locked myself into one position so when I got lost I could scan the rink to find out where I had skated off to by looking for my number on the ice rink. Also by locking in my position I didn’t mess up the game so to speak by getting in the way of the action. As I became a better player I was able to not lock in and could change my playing position as needed. The intent of winning as many games as possible and performing certain tasks or goals was to unlock certain rewards which could be used in future games. It was strange to see elk and other strange characters as players as rewards. You could also earn equipment and experience points to boost your player’s attributes which was our goal. The ultimate challenge for the expert gamers in our house was to see if their Goalie could skate all the way down the ice to the opponent’s goal with the puck and score a point while leaving his goal unattended. The other players did their best to steal the puck.

Lately other games have gotten my attention and the gamers are not around like they use to be. Once in a great while when we have the time, we get the game out and find Hitz 20-03 was always fun to play and still is.

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by Zott820

With the upcoming release of Tropico 3, I felt inspired to go back to the original, and play it. Here, I will lay down my thoughts for you. But first, let me say that the Mucho Macho edition which I have includes the Paradise expansion pack built in. I am unsure how many features were in the original, and which have been added, so I shall just review this complete version and eliminate a two part-er. [Whew…]

Tropico for PC is a Caribbean island simulator, sort-of, it almost crosses the line into overly realistic. You are a dictator whom is cooped up in his palace, and runs the island with an iron first, mostly. At heart, despite trying to be a dictator, you are more often than not a pawn of the people, as I shall go into in more detail.

I’ll start off by going through the modes, and you’ll get a feeling of how the game plays from that.

Build Mode: Here you lay down buildings. The interface is slightly unintuitive. For example, some buildings have an arrow next to them that lets you rotate them. Yet, I’m not sure why this doesn’t appear on all buildings. Are some square and so the turning is negligible? I’m not sure. Even if this were the case, I should still be able to change the facing of the building for my own personal satisfaction. Nothing requires being set next to a road, but I would still like to perhaps makes things face a road for atmospheric reasons.

The elusive arrow has another function; on some buildings, such as farms and mines, it will switch which type of product will be produced from your placed structure. Thus you don’t have to go and change it once it is built, though you can. You cannot rotate these buildings since the arrow occupies the same space where the rotation would be. The developers could have Ameliorated this with two different graphics for the different functions, or at least moved them around. They should also let me rotate buildings with type selectors as well.

Once a building is placed, you have to wait for some construction crew to come by and build it. This can take a VERY long time. The reason for this is that the crew do not like building things far away from them. Thus you’ll have to build a couple of construction crews throughout your city. They will build closest objects first unless you change the priority of the buildings, thus you will want to place one in the center of your city’s extensions. Thankfully the developers included this option otherwise some buildings would never BE built. It is changed by clicking on buildings under construction and choosing one of 4 priority settings. Also, I believe walking tires them, so when they do reach your far out building, they may only work for a little while before heading home.

It gets slightly more troublesome when constructing the building is a pain too. The workers must first remove the trees, which isn’t too bad. Then they must level the ground. This is where the real pain is. If your island is anything but flat, buildings could take forever, especially large ones. For example, the airport, the biggest in game structure, could take practically the whole game to be built, just because the workers spend so much time leveling the terrain. A pure nuisance, despite being quasi-realistic. The developers took it too far with that one. (Thankfully, it seems to be mostly cleared up in Tropico 3, as far as I could tell in the demo)

Finally, after all that is complete, the building can finally be constructed as its yellow building hue becomes fuller and the building pops into place complete. Construction in this game is very crucial; everything revolves around it, and yet is hindered by inclement mechanics. Thankfully the rest of the game is more pulled together.

Ways to make money: Now that you know how to build things, you need to know how to make money, and feed your people. This is done by building structures, which are occupied by workers, and ultimately ship a product. Besides building placement, you don’t have to worry too much about most of the steps in the industry.

Farming - Farming in Tropico has several levels of realism to it. Clouds fly overhead, and change the fertility of the soul. They rain and help the crops. Thus, you must place your farms where they are going to be growing in correct conditions. Luckily when placing a farm, and any resource gathering building, the ground changes to shades of green and red to show where the most suitable places for that building are… at that time. Corn is the easiest to grow of the foods, and usually most of your island is cultivated with this resource. However, it doesn’t make the most money. The rest of the crops are more profitable, yet have more specific growing conditions. One thing I must mention is that you don’t want to place the farms ON the green parts of the map when choosing the fertile land. This is misleading, but your crops are grown on that green, so the workers will plant it there, and they can’t do it if you have just placed a farm on it. It took me forever till I realize this. (I tend to ignore tutorials). Finally, your crops go through a cycle of growing, filtering and harvesting, which have different animations, and are satisfying to watch. Out of all the things included, it seems that farming was a place where assiduity was placed. Kudos. I must mention one thing I did not like about farming. You must grow food to feed your people, yet, you cannot control which food goes to your people, and which goes to your exports. Thus, you might be planting papayas and bananas to export, and your people are eating your expensive produce. Arrgg. A little clicker button for Export only would have been nice, especially when so much else was done.

Mining, Logging, Fishing – Easy resource gathering economies. Just place the building, and the workers take care of themselves. Mines should go near the places where the resources exist. Logging camps should be placed near trees, and fishing near the shortest distance towards the best fishing hole. Fish can be fed to your population, but once again, you cannot control export/local feeding. Trees cut down by the logging camp are renewable to an extent though are sparser than the original tree placement. What is cool is that each tree that has fallen has multiple sections that are cut out. So one tree is not just one log, many of the tree cutters can come by and collect sections of the fallen tree; another welcome attention to detail on the part of the developers.

Ranching – I wanted to mention this one separate from the 3 above. Granted, it is like the others, you just place it down and they take care of themselves, but more micro-details make me fill with glee. I love these micro-simulations because they remind me of the old Maxis games; but enough reminiscing. Ranching is cool because you have a choice of cows or goats. The cows and goats can have children, which will eventually grow up to build up your Bovinian empire. You start each ranch with about 2 cows, and from there they multiply out. The best part of the simulator is the fact the cows and goats terra-form the terrain in real time. You can watch them eat the green landscaping as it transforms to barren brown. It is quite fascinating, and at the same time puts a maximum on the amount of cows you can have. They work to find the green, but eventually they will eat your island bare if there are too many. I guess it is almost representative of the world at large now, but perhaps I’m thinking too far into it.

Industry - All the things listed above are basic money makers. You can dramatically increase your profit margins if you take the raw resources and transform them into things. That is what canneries, cigar factories, and jewelry makers are built for. Granted, it takes more people, and for some reason these structures require workers with high school educations (It beats me why. You have guys cutting down trees but they can’t make a chair out of it? ) At this point, the money made from these structures usually puts the player out of needing money the rest of the game, assuming you don’t spend like a madman or get hit with a hurricane.

Tourism – I’m not sure if this existed before the expansion or not. If it did, the expansion heavily increased the available options for it. Basically, you have to build special structures, like hotels and resort sites. I never fully grasped the intricacies of making money through it, and with the much easier methods of farming/ranching available; I didn’t see much need, unless the mission required it. However, there are a lot of options for hotels and entertainment. Unfortunately, the local populous tend to ignore these places themselves, so in vanilla games they tend to be widely useless. It would have been nice if once again there was a button to make the tourist place a pure local entertainment building. Why can’t my farmers play mingolf?!

The expansion adds new tourist types, which I’m not sure affect much except they have new sprites, sounds and varying types of money. Always good to have more people types just to break up the monotony.
Those are pretty much the major ways of making money. Other ways exist, such as in the output of the entertainment venues you place, and newspaper coupons but they are usually not enough to keep your island growing productively. You can make money though US/CCCP stimulus, but the same idea applies.

The People/Factions: Each person has a set of motives which they follow. These include things, such as food and rest, the two basic needs of Tropicans, as well as entertainment, health, and religion. These contribute to overall happiness. There are more, such as liberty, housing quality, environment, crime that also contribute. Overall, a lot to keep track of. And this is why I tend to juggle them poorly.

Not only that, but each person may be part of a special faction, such as the militants, communists, environmentalists etc. These people feel more strongly about those motives and so if you are failing in those categories, it carries more weight on their overall happiness.

In this way you have to build your infrastructure so that buildings that satisfy the needs are not too far from each other. Therefore, you might have to build a church, a clinic, marketplace and housing right by each other so that the people can satisfy all their wants. This makes for a lot of duplicate structures being needed at the end of the day.
But wait, there is more. People also want good pay relative to other people. But of course you can’t have everyone making the max amount of money or else the relativeness is null. Furthermore, people want jobs that fit their education. Thus you need to make buildings that satisfy the jobs. Luckily, churches and clinics need high school and college educated people respectively, so you’ll always have those to fill as you need to have many to serve the masses anyway.

People also have stats, such as intelligence, courage and leadership. Education level decides what jobs are available for that person to occupy. There is also a “skills” group which shows how skilled the selected person is at each job. They don’t even have to be human; more skilled goats find greener grass better than unskilled goats. The higher the skill, the faster and better they do their job. More educated people learn things faster. More courageous and leading people will rise up against your government more readily if you do poorly.

Besides the information that is vital, there are a couple ever sections that show up per person. You can see a list of “thoughts” which tell you what the character is going to do/joke comments. You can also see the nearby family of the person, (No Sims Family Tree though), age, as well as their birthplace.

All and all, there are a lot of micro-simulations going on for each person of the island. When there are 200 or more people, it can be quite a headache to keep them all happy. And let me tell you, I usually am unable too.

The Almanac: Luckily, there is this tool that helps generalize, and categorize the people of otherwise equivocal needs on your tropical paradise. It also lets you see how close you are to reaching your overall objective for the mission or the score for free-play. You can look at detailed statistics of your population, arranging them in to graphical overlays of education, or sorting them by political faction.

While detailed there are still wants to be had. This is no Excel, nor is it a Google Stock chart. You can watch charts that show popularity over time, and click on and off different factors such as housing’s affect on it, but these things are mostly useless for me. It would have been nice if I could scale the chart freely to see my lifetime happiness as it progressed over time in relation to the other factors, then move it to just the current month, not limited to a set time range. Furthermore, when sorting my population by say, intellectuals, I would have much preferred the game to count the people for me, instead of showing me graphical representations of the people lined up under titles. At least give me the percentage of people in each title per the entire population. These things would help me more accurate gauge the population on certain ideas. Same goes for unemployed/paycheck. At least you can click on the graphically represented people to see who they are in game. This is probably not very useful if there are 100s in the category, but proves the depth that some players could go into running their empire.

Some parts of the almanac are genuinely useful, but getting there is somewhat of a forest maze. For example, to get to export prices, you have to go through 2-3 submenus, the same goes for finding out who is the leader of each faction and what they think about you. I didn’t even know factions had an actual leader that you could see in game until this week! I’m not sure how to fix that without adding more clutter to the overall almanac menu, but I’m sure it could be better integrated.

Despite these hiccups in GUI accessibility, the almanac is very sophisticated and complete. You can find charts of happiness, threats to power, numbers of citizens, where their allegiances lie, how much they are eating, expenses, what kind they were, the economy of the island, how much I am making in each sector, how much rent is costing/making, tourism ratings and profits, and relations to the foreign powers etc. There is A LOT to look over. You could get very deep into the numbers and analysis of your island with everything they have included for you to look over. I’m sure it is useful to some power users, but I find that I ignore the almanac except for looking for specific problems and my player score. Still, I am impressed with how many variables the developers let you look up.

It is hard for me to find anything seriously wrong with the almanac besides the clutter of options available. But, I will add some cavaliers; with so many things already put in why not add in the ability to see where people are living on a mass scale, as well as let me see where they are working. This might make it easier to do a mass firing. Also, it would be cool if I could find out how many strong leaders exist among my population to easily combat. Furthermore good developers, let me bribe and use my militaristic power on the almanac menu, for example, if I wanted to eliminate all the farmers in a mass genocide, I could do it. (There is an option under the Info mode to show the respect of each faction if I wanted to pick them out, but then I’d have to move around to select each one, why not put them all in one place?)

Alright, now that all that is covered we can actually start with the reviewing part.

This game is very complicated as it has many many MANY variables disguised under simplistic graphics. To me, this game has more things to look out for than Sim City. Pretty much the only thing that Tropico doesn’t have to manage that Sim City does is Traffic, though even then, you have to manage layout and distance rather than cars on freeways.

Graphics: Tropico is 3D and 2D. Ships are 3D with poor textures and some sort of single pong lighting. Birds are the same, though you can’t tell since they are small and don’t suffer from the lighting grossness that plaques the ships. The terrain is also 3D, as shown when the constructions workers elevate and terra-form it. Everything else is 2D, including the clouds that hover above the ground.

This is fine as I’d rather have the charming colorful people be high quality 2D sprites, which they are, than the flat ugly 3D models they tried to stick in. I guess it would also be taxing for 200+ 3D models to be roaming around in 2001 when graphics cards weren’t as advanced as they are now. (Heck, there are settings for the quality of the 2D sprites, so that you wouldn’t run out of RAM playing this game. On max settings Tropico uses a whopping 60 Megs for sprites! The whole game was using about 75 Megs at one time. Kind of makes me crinch when Firefox uses 300+ Megs)

The sprites are beautiful, as the walking and acting animations are clean, and each character has their respective job looks. This is cool because ala TF2, you can tell what class someone is/where they work, without having to think twice about it. The characters do twitch as they change directions, but it isn’t noticeable on the fastest setting, which I usually play on anyways.

You can rotate and zoom the camera, though it is not free-flowing. This is fine for the most part, except it has the problem that most isometric games game, some things get blocked. The partial remedy is the “B” key, which makes buildings transparent, but that just makes them look like they could be under construction, minus the yellow hue. Still, it is better than nothing. I still find that to be slightly a problem on densely placed structures.

The game also includes all the tiny micro-simulation details which I mentioned above, such as the farming and grass. Workers stack up their products at their place of business outside, and so you can visibly detect which ones have output to be shipped. They are not a generic package either. Logging camps have logs that stack up, while the ranches output meat “things”. This style reminds me of another game, Stronghold, which uses the same mechanic to show food stores, and an efficient method it is.

There are a couple more problems besides the ugly 3D boat however. Hardware mode for me did not work at all. Whenever I did, I had a skewed screen display with graphical fuzzies all over. I was forced to switch back to software to make it playable. Furthermore, while I like that the resolution can go to up 1600 x 1200 or (possibly) more, I couldn’t get the game to switch to it. I guess my max resolution of 1680 x1050 is just too little under it, and the game doesn’t want to scale it. This is not too much of a big deal though, the game looks good at the 1080x 1024, though is stretched to fit my widescreen monitor. (This is not visible in the pictures here)

One last nitpick on the graphics are a couple of the characters, notable the dockworker have some sort of unclean walking transition where the shadow of the foot seems to stay in one spot till the animation repeats. Hard to explain, but noticeable on the closest zoom. In no way a game-breaker though.

Story: There are mini-campaign missions which have stories, but there is no one main story. Each campaign mission has a different goal, but they are usually similar to as follows: Attract X number of tourists, Build X building, gather X number of Y.

You can program your own missions with external tools, which are available elsewhere on the web. However, there is a built in editor for simple things like adding more workers, or changing the landscape of the island. It was nice for the developers to include this “unsupported” feature. [Hold Ctrl and type editor to access]

Though not a story per-say, the game does have a losing condition that is the same across every mission. Every 5-10 years there is an election. If you lose, you lose the game. Let me tell you, it is not always easy to win these things. In fact, despite the option to rig the election, you can still lose, though from slightly other methods. Choosing to ignore the election often leads to the same results.

If the citizens on the island find the election unfair, and you won, they have the tendency to jump onto the rebel side and try and take down your regime. Not only that, your own military tends to be quick to follow if not happy. So pretty much it is game over if you don’t have enough respect among your own men and decide to cancel or rig the election.
Overall, I found the elections to be quite frustrating. It was hardly ever the actual mission conditions I was failing, it was usually just the elections. I found myself having to cheat past the elections, to try and reach endgame. Quite sad. With the vast plain of variables mentioned before, it is difficult to get a majority, and harder to please everyone.

You can also apparently lose if a foreign power takes over your island, though this has not once occurred to me.

The missions included though are quite fun, and although there is a limitation to the variations of winning conditions which aren’t just different values of other missions, PopTop kept the game flowing with interesting and witty writing, and some missions specific choices which could have any number of outcomes..

Controls: As I mentioned in the almanac, the GUI is both robust, and slightly a pain. Besides merely building things as a dictator, you can also do much more. You have the ability to set wages per each job, and per building as well as the price of admission for that building. I loved the inclusion of this feature, but at the same time, having to choose specific values for each building seemed like an accountant’s dream and a nightmare for players. You can change them based on education level, but I rarely did. Thus, I left most buildings on their default wages and prices. I found messing with them caused more problems with the economy than it is worth and I’m not Timothy Geirner. (Random namedrop, whoot).

In the same ballpark as the wages, you can edit some mini options about how each building is run. Despite the different names for the different jobs, it basically comes down to a couple repeated settings: Running the business for more lucre/maintenance cost for better overall satisfaction, working the workers for less time, changing the output/purpose of the business, and lastly keeping certain people out. I’m sure if I was doing a segregated town the keeping the “undesirables” out might be useful, but I usually don’t. As for increased maintenance costs for less population/increased satisfaction; later on when money is nearly a nonissue, you can pump these settings up just for the heck of it.

As El Presidente, you must do the best for your people, or what you want. Edicts are your imaginary grip on the land. Building and setting wages are but one sense of control, edicts let you actually get some foreign policy magic working. Under this panel you can have people eliminated, always fun if you don’t care about winning, have people fettered, extend relations to the US or Russia, and enable a number of policies that help/hurt your relations with various factions. Overall, I don’t have any criticism of the edicts present, nor are there any that I felt needed to be added. I will say though that some of the prerequisites to use some of the policies are a pain to reach, but not all are truly required to win a mission.

You can also control game speed. I have the same problem with this game that I do with Roller Coaster Tycoon and The Sims 3, the fastest speed is just not speedy enough (and in the case of Roller Coaster Tycoon, there is only one speed…). This means many of the longer missions are drawn out. Plus, you don’t have to do super micro-management like the game does of its own people, so you can usually just let it sit on the fastest setting till you have money to build something. Then you have to wait again, which is why faster speeds are needed. Also, the game pauses whenever you get a news brief. I would have liked to either turn an option on that keeps the background going when I get these, or a at least have a 5 minute limit before it automatically closes. This way, I can leave the game on and do other things, and still have my people slaving away. I might get voted out of office, but that’s what autosave is for.

Sounds and Music: If I had to choose one thing about this game that truly made it remarkable, it would be the music. Every time I hear the main menu theme, it makes me just want to jump back into the game, regardless of how much I sucked at it, or why I stopped playing. The music washes away all doubts, and I’m back again. I suppose my last Video Game Menu Music is one reason this review/strategy article is being written.

The music is hard for me to explain, it just feels like it belongs. Apparently the expansion added more music to the game, but it continues to fit so well that I hardly noticed an extreme variation in style. Out of all the songs, I love the main menu one the best, but there is also an upbeat rumba song that plays every now and then, and it makes El Presidente feel like he’s doing a good job.

Clicking on each character results in them saying a few saying, nothing super impressive, and it isn’t different for the different jobs, which is a little disappointing, but overall, the character voices were unimportant. Tourists from the expansion pack are unique in that there appears to be various foreign language selection voices, IE Some German, French, and English accented ones. These are definitely a step up from the original game voices but not much more than that.

Plenty of bird sounds inhabit the island, as well of the sloshing of waves. They fit naturally, so they are not noticeable until you find them audible when you ALT-TABed out of the game. Glad they are in there. The best sounds are the ones that you don’t notice; it is because they fit so well.

But, above all is the narrator. This, like the music, will draw me back by just making obscure references to it. It has something to do with the delivery and psydo-cuban accent more than anything. This is akin to the narrator of Majesty, whom is memorable for these reasons in his own right. Hearing Tropico’s tropican Hierophant plead to me about how my people are bored staring at grass brings some mild joy during my people’s hardships. Unfortunately, while I do love the adviser and his voice, I wish the developers had perhaps added a couple more variations, or at least changed up the beginning word. When I hear “Presidente” being said to me, followed by “your people” for maybe 3 of the different things I need to watch out for by audible notifications, I have to wait for the whole phrase to be suttered before I can get any feedback. It isn’t instant, even when playing for a while. “Do my people need health care or food? Tell me already!”

It also would have been rewarding to hear the narrator read out the campaign text in his memorable voice, yet the text stays silent. I can understand how it isn’t possible for user scenarios, but put them in for the ones included with the game, pleeeease? Awwww.

Conclusion: This conclusion will largely ignore what I have written and just try and put an overall view of the game. Tropico is a game for people who like economics, and who would love to have a subtle, and not so subtle hand in the way an island of technology-deprived people can live. You can set wages, you can change the living conditions, you can educate your population, or not. You can specialize in a couple different money markers, with some very cool micro-simulations going on in the background if you want to watch them. The almanac included to help run your people is a blessing, and also somewhat of a GUI mess. There is too much to manage, and at the same time, you aren’t really directly managing any of it. Music is wonderful and catchy, as well as the narrator’s voice. With so much included, it is a disappointment that some things were slightly overlooked/left out. If you love watching charts then look at no other game. Sim City pales in comparison to some of the things you can manage here. 2D graphics are pleasant with minor issues, 3D graphics are just ugly. Some technical problems. Building just takes too darn long on the fastest setting, and without the ability to move the game faster than its current fastest, it is slightly annoying. (And no, I don’t want to build 10+ Construction buildings). Voting is both suitable for the game, but a large pain overall, and detracts from the campaign missions, better suited for free play. Witty humor is always a plus.

Even if you don’t like to control everything, I still recommend this game. I can’t remember why I originally got this game, but all I know is that it is fun to play. The game can now be found on the cheap, sometimes maybe less than 10 dollars. He music alone is worth that, so why not get the game and have a vacation down south?

Glitch: Just because I’m cool, I’ll let you in one a glitch I discovered. First of all, the furniture factory was in the expansion, so you may not have it in your game. I haven’t tested it with any other building, but let us continue with it anyways. Hold the furniture factory out like you are going to build it, but don’t place it down. Wait till some construction people come by, and they will try and build it. The building will proceed to get LESS filled in, and when it finishes will be a pile of rubble on the ground. Apparently my game crashed right after, so I’m going to blame that on this glitch. I held the building next to something else I was waiting to be built, and I did not have enough money to build the furniture factory, so it was red. I couldn’t get to it be repeated, though, it happened to me, so it could happen to you if you were trying for it.

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by Zott820

This is one of the few games that I bought based on the demo I played of it. A pre-release demo was put on a PC Gamer disk. I hadn’t heard of the game, yet I tried it once. That transition from CGI to in-game engine had won me at the start, and the graphical bonanza with enthralling action grabbed me deeper. I knew this would be a good game. I put it on my want list. Later, I checked out reviews, and after seeing a 96% from that same magazine, I knew an instant buy was made.

But let me give you my unabridged feeling of the full game. This will be from pre-expansion, since I will save that for another time. This review will however take patch 1.71 into account for Direct X 10, though I’m not sure of the balancing at this point or currently anyways, so it is all relative.

Storyline: Able Company has just landed on the beaches of Normandy. Fox Company joins you. Both must fight their way inland to put an end to the Nazi regime. Missions have you doing various tasks such as holding a hill, eliminating panzer tank divisions, capturing towns and raiding V2 rocket battery sites.

There is a story to this RTS, and most (good) RTSes I’ve played do have stories, so this was not a surprise. I was never strongly emotionally attached to the main heroes, but they helped provide some commentary. There are two allied men that serve as the protagonists; Captain Mackay and Sergeant Conti. They basically talk about the plans for the mission and put the camera on the ground-level, so to speak.

While there are many enemies, further into the game, a primary antagonist is made. He isn’t overly important, but tries to put a temporary face on the evil. (As well as through his “evil” deed)

Overall, story wouldn’t be the reason to plan this game, but it does exist.

The AI in the story mode does a fair job of putting up a fight, but since most of the campaigns have units given to the computer, you don’t really see it build up. In skirmish where the playing field in equal, the AI, even on expert, can be very predictable, and easy to beat. (The newest patches help rectify this, but I’m still counting this only up to 1.71, as that was the last “vanilla” version of CoH)

Graphics: The graphics for 2006 were stellar. Many people, at least from what I heard, though this would be a FPS. (I can’t judge this since I heard about the game just before release), but it could certainly look the part. Both the ground and units are bump mapped, and the lighting looks really good. Bullets wiz by and pick off squad-mates as they dart for cover, Mmmm.

Furthermore, graphics interact with game-play many times, setting it apart from most other RTS. One example is that units can take position behind cover to get bonuses, while those out in the open will be pinned, with units prone and immobile accordingly.

Tanks and vehicles take visible damage if their components are destroyed, with smoking engines, and empty gunner seats.
Smoke effects are clean and have many layers of particles. While most look alike, it is understandable, and really isn’t a problem.

Once again, graphics interact with game-play in another sector of the game. When driving a tank, or even using a well equipped infantry unit, you can blast holes through fences, hedges and walls. This lets both the tank and infantry pass through, and opens up new paths of attack. This seems to happen normally during game-play with explosions, so it isn’t as though you have to think about doing it, though there are times, especially when only infantry are on the field, when you can catch a human player unsuspecting of your unorthodox entrance.

Houses are also destroyable, making any occupants at risk of being crushed if their hostel takes too much fire, or has its supports run out. Tanks cannot run buildings over, but they can smash into its walls, removing support, and taking a lot of health out of the building.

As you can see thus far, the graphics really matter in this game, as the game-play would not be the same without it, but wait there is still more.

Buildings have windows, and while this might seem like common sense, infantry cannot shoot through walls. Thus, if the enemy approaches your fortified building from a side without a window, there is not much you can do about it. While you cannot shoot out at them, they can shoot at you. (For reasons, I’m still not sure why).

Killed unit may or may not be dead. They may be severely wounded. In which case you can zoom in and see them struggling for dear life. They may also drop their weapon when downed. Get some medics over there pronto, and you may be able to rebuild a squad of zombies. Efficient and moral, don’t let your men suffer. You may even be able to salvage that dropped weapon before the enemy does.

Enough about graphics. As you can see, they are brilliant. And, at this time they could run on an average video card at decent frame-rate, so don’t think it is too powerful for you.

But wait… Direct X 10.

Company of Heroes was one of the first games to be released as Direct X 10 compatible. Let me say, that Company of Heroes doesn’t need Direct X 10 to look amazing, it already does. Even today it holds up quite well even though it has been 3 years since release. Better than I can say for some games. But when turning Direct X 10 on for CoH you do get some bonuses. For one, the smoke supposedly looks better because it won’t intercept buildings like most textures do to 3D objects. Furthermore, all light sources are now dynamic besides the global lighting. This means on night missions the lamps should emit their own independent light, effecting shadows in the vicinity. This also adds additional detail to characters, whom while retaining the same textures, seem to have additional depth. In addition grass has been improved, along with more ground debris to mess with.

But, all these extra goods do have a downside. For one the game in that mode runs like a dog, even today. It was bad when the patch for it came out, but now I still think it likes to drop your frame-rate badly. I’m going to say 15 frames are munched on over the DX9 Version. If you have frames to spare, go ahead, but don’t just turn it on for the sake of best quality. When the game looks great already, I feel it just isn’t worth it.

I’m not sure if the problem still exists with the clouds and reflections in the water, but I’m going to assume it is currently fixed.

Cutscenes: With such a great graphics engine, it is only fair to use it right? Relic has two types of cut scenes, similar to Mirrors Edge. In one, you have a pre-load pre-game cinematics that is stylized as though a watercolor painting. These are great looking, though are not “action packed” They are a moment to withdraw from the battles, and think of the entire operation, sort of a narrative flashback. Moving troop markers and arrows compliment the cutscenes.

The second type of cutscene are the in-game ones. These are slightly dynamic too. This I mean, if you destroyed a lot of buildings, the cutscene will show more buildings. Or, if the cutscene is highlighting a road and you built lots of mines and wire across it, then you will see it. They won’t affect the cutscenes, which is a good thing, trust me, but it’s nice to know it really is in-game, unlike some versions of Resident Evil 4’s cutscenes. The syncing of the voices with the mouth movements is good, what makes it more impressive is to remember that this is an RTS, not a FPS. Thus, any mouth movement is setting the standard in my book.

Camera: Control is important in games like this, and it doesn’t fail. You can zoom in to ground level, or pan around units and characters by holding down the ALT key while manipulating the mouse. Pressing Backspace twice will reset your camera quickly if you get caught examining the scenery too much in a firefight. I loved being able to zoom in and out at will, especially with the strong zoom. It let me enjoy the graphics on the characters much more than other games, which may be a few shaded polygons (Ala C&C, even Red Alert 3). I wish that I could have zoomed out a little bit more than the limit, though it is hardly game or strategy breaking. For the most part, the camera will probably remain in its default position throughout the game, but it is nice to have a sense of full control over its placement.

Sounds and Voices: Here is where the game definitely impresses. Graphical leaps were going to be a usual anyways, but the method that Relic (the developer) took with sound made me gasp. Here is why; Take Warcraft 3 for example, if you attack an enemy, your highlighted unit will say something and then go attack. Or if you click to move the unit will say something and then move. Or just click on the unit and it will talk. Company of Heroes has all that, but it goes farther. Move your unit, VO, Click on unit; VO, Attack with unit: VO, Getting attacked: VO, idling: VO, Upgrades: VO, Units Dead: VO, and these are just a few instances. Now you may be thinking that with all these Voiceovers there are too many clogging up the sound stream, but you’d be wrong.

Sounds that are important are sent over the com to you, such as getting attacked, and buildings completed, but others such as the idling and “storytime” do not. By storytime, I mean that occasionally, moving or idling the unit will say something that relates to what they are doing or just a story. Some of the ones involve made-up characters that you’ll never see but are fun to hear about. (Ala, Bobby shot his head off yesterday.) This is amazing, something completely unimportant, and yet also non-distracting is being said, that is fun to hear. It gives the player a sense that the units are “alive”, as per Relic’s intentions. To hear these stories you’ll have to be zoomed in near the units, so it isn’t something that will happen unless you are trying, or waiting for the enemy assault. These sounds happen appropriately too, there won’t be any storytime if the units are being attacked, though they may mutter some remarks about their current predicament. Units that aren’t even yours may be heard if you zoom in close proximity to them.

Now, some games may have 3 different sounds for an action, CoH has more. I’d say there are probably 5 or 6 different voiceovers for an action. Some are different dialogue, but some are the same dialogue but said in a slightly different tone. This guarantees that while you may hear these VOs many times over the course of the game, they aren’t repetitious. I wish most games, RTS or not took this approach. Furthermore, the VOS relate to the situation in a helpful way. You may hear units complaining they are under attack by a halftrack. Not only do you know they are under attack, in the case of Starcraft, but you know by what. Without looking you could rally necessary forces to combat the threat. Another way in which Relic excels in the sound department here.

If a unit is talking and you move the camera off of it, it may either fade out, if unimportant, or if it is a critical VO, will be overlayed with static, as if transmitted by radio. Another immersion effect to good use.

The Germans speak English in an accent, as well as saying a few lines in actual German with some English equivalents. Both work well, and it beats them all speaking in fake British accents.

In regards to other sounds, gunshots ECT. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the sounds but I will say that they sound good. Explosions ring out, and bullets can be heard whizzing by the camera. Sounds off-screen are also more muted, but audible, fitting if they are the loud explosion of a V1 rocket on the home-base.

Units: Here is what really matters, the units and how they interact can make or break an RTS. Let me say, that while this game is not 100% balanced, and will probably never be; it is good enough to play without one unit type getting spammed all the time.

There are two armies available, the Allies, and the Wehrmacht. They both play differently but have similarities. Each army can build 4 basic units, a pioneer/engineer squad, a sniper, a mortar team, and a MG crew. These are the same for both armies, though some slight adjustments to the stats, IE the Wehrmacht mortar team has a longer range than the American equivalent, or the American engineers have 3 men instead of the German’s 2.

Other than those, there are no “duplicates” between the armies. Each has different tiers with different results. In quantity, the Wehrmacht have more units to build in their hierarchy, yet some units are just more powerful equivalents of older ones. The same applies for the Americans, except that the units are hardier, and so can be upgraded to be effective even at game’s end. This isn’t to say that units become outdated for the Germans, but if not supported early units will die quicker end-game.

Company of Heroes different from most other RTSes is that you don’t necessarily have one unit win over the other. Different factors such as range, rate of fire, unit health, and cover matter. By this I mean:

In Warcraft 3: Basic Unit 1 will always beat Basic Unit 2 in combat 1 on 1.

In Company of Heroes: Basic Unit 1 may be stronger than Basic Unit 2, but if Basic Unit 2 is in heavy cover, it may win the fight. Though if Basic Unit 1 rushes the cover, it will take more damage while approaching, but might win in the end.

This is what makes the game enthralling, you have to think about unit placement and how one unit compliments the other correctly if you want to win. You have to position your MG behind sandbags, but also perhaps put an anti-tank gun behind it, so that a tank may be tempted to easily take out the MG, but will not know there is a threat in waiting out of sightline. Or you may have to do the same with a flame tank, if enemy infantry is expected to approach from the rear. Another example is supporting mortar teams and anti tank guns with weak scout cars. The cars are fairly useless at fighting once tanks are on the field, but they give a great sight view, and let the other units fire even out of their own viewing range. It is difficult to describe all the different situations, but needless to say, spamming one particular unit is not the most effective.

There are basically three types of units, ground units, light armor, and heavy armor. Ground units are the usual infantry, and anti-tank guns that inhabit the world. They can be retreated, granting them resistive bonuses as they dart to HQ, and reinforced at less than the cost of new units. This keeps you on your toes, gauging when to retreat, and when to keep fighting, at the chance of losing a precious unit. Light armor includes half-tracks and Greyhound light tanks. These are not as easily damaged by conventional fire, but they will be killed if left with the enemy’s peashooters. Heavy armor is invincible to machine-guns and ordinary weapons. In this case, you better hope you have some Panzershrek RPGs (for Wehrmacht) or Stickybombs (For American Infantry), at least. Different than other RTSes where GIs or marines could take out tanks no problem with their rifles.

It would be a mess to talk about every unit in the game in this review, so let me simply say that there is enough to keep the game strategic, and there are a variety of well-voiced units.

Command Trees: As you play through the game, killing the enemy nets you with command points. These can be sent on one of three available upgrade tech trees. Each army has 3 separate ones, so that is when things start to get messy. In Single player the computer will not use the command tree, though you can, so that is not an issue. Command tree bonuses would be given to the computer in that case automatically. Bonuses granted are not of one type. For example, the Germans are granted the ability to reinforce units at their bunkers if the defense command tree is chosen, while the Terror Command tree may get the fiercesome King Tiger Tank as one of theirs.

Command trees are very important, as once the decision is made to choose one track, you cannot change it. Thus, you have to think carefully of how the enemy will assault you, and choose the best countering special abilities.
Command trees add great replayability online, since it adds a great sense of uncertainty. You may know what units they have, but you may not know what they can call from the air, or summon from the edge of the map to wipe you out, or when.

Multiplayer: To be honest, anything besides the Story section is applicable to multiplayer. Up to 8 people can play. As a side note, there is no “Unholy Alliances” which means that Allies will not be sided with Axis forces. This keeps things “simpler” though I still would have liked the option as I could see some crazy potential, though I know that would make balancing the game even more of an impossibility.

One problem with multiplayer is that the winner can be decided in bad games in as little as 10 minutes. Since the one who controls more resources can build more, they do build more. But, that’s not the problem. The problem is that by capturing points, they also have the potential to build more units, their pop cap goes up. This basically means that the side that has fewer resource points and thus fewer pop cap cannot even build the same magnitude of an army as the other side, even if they have the resources. This makes the weaker side’s fall quite exponential, as they tip more and more into no ability to resist.

With this in mind, the best games are the ones where both sides take heavy losses, and it is never really clear whom is going to win, as every rifleman down is a tip of the balance.

There are two multiplayer gametypes, victorypoint and annihilation. Annihilation is as it sounds, destroy your opposing army. Victorypoint has you capturing specific territories that train the opponent's ticket supply. Unlike the Battlefield series, kills don't drain tickets, so camp away. Alas, some Victorypoint games are just Annihilation games at heart since players often build an army, and rush right into your base, removing you from the game, and making the point of tickets null.

Music: Company of heroes has pretty good music (though the Opposing Fronts expansion has slightly better music). There are a few main themes, as well as some per army. There is a mellow music for your army, and then an action packed music. It fades in and out depending on what is going on on screen. For the most part it works, though sometimes when moving the camera from your base to some soldiers fighting a bike and the sounds blasts to a loud portion of the fight song it just seems wrong

Conclusion: Great game, great replayability. Multiplayer will keep you on your toes. Graphics are phenomenal, for the time, and even now. Sets new ground for RTSes I’ve played. Somewhat glitchy at points, even with the latest patches (Not gamebreaking like Crysis Warhead). Voiceovers are simply amazing, and don’t make me want to tear my ears out, in fact some of the sayings get stuck in my head. Gameplay keeps you on edge.

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by Zott820