Release Date: October 10th 2007 Genre:First-person Shooter Developer: Valve Publisher: Electronic Arts Platform: Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Mac OS X, Linux, Shield Portable Players: 1 Classification: M (Mature)
I hadn’t realised it had been so long since I reviewed Half-Life
2 Episode 1 as it’s been a whole year and a bit since (7 years since my Half-Life
2 review) so I guess it’s High time I get the series review finished though
to be perfectly honest the way things are going with the mysterious third
sequel I think I’ll have more than enough time before that comes along. As
you can probably guess Episode 2
is a direct continuation of Episode 1 running with the same story (and game
engine) of Half-Life 2, this was the last of the ‘Episodes’ of Half-Life 2 and
the ending has sparked huge anticipation of a supposed Half-Life 3 as well as
much quarrelling, complaining and speculating of when it will finally arrive.
I’m not going to comment on much about the gameplay or graphics as we all know
this is the same as Half-Life 2 so I will concentrate on the adventure inc the
story, location and new friends and enemies.
So we when we left previously our two heroes Gordon
Freeman and Alyx Vance they were speeding away from City 17 on
the caboose of a train watching the Citadel after
the events of Episode One, the citadel then explodes and
everything goes black, Gordon then wakes up to Alex freeing him with the
Gravity
Gunout of the wreckage of the
train, miraculously alive again. The storyline
for the game as before is divided up into chapters of which once completed you
can re-do at any time. The first chapter To
the White Foresthas Gordon and Alyx
setting off to the White Forest base to deliver a data packet to Dr Kleiner and Eli Vance who are there
currently. I must admit it was good to get outside after being indoors for most
of Episode 1 and also in the great outdoors too similar to the coastal run you
did in Half-Life 2.
The spectacular view of the Citidel from the train wreck
Though this scenery was short lived as after battling
through a Zombie infested mine Alyx is injured by a new Combine Hunter enemy
which you don’t get to fight just yet and then you are saved by a Vortigaunt who takes you through the
beautiful Antlion caves, these caves are quite a sight to behold as they are
beautifully rendered and lit with the light shining off the rocks. It’s here
that you first meet Antlion Grubs and Workers,
the grubs being like fireflies as their glowing bodies serve as the primary
source of light in the caves and they are pretty disgusting as you have to hit
them with your crowbar or step on some to get past, the workers are new version
of Antlion that hurls acid at you that was easy enough to dodge, I had great
fun playing hunter with my shotgun and watching them explode when shot was very
satisfying.
I go hunting through the Antlion Caves
The next chapter has one of my favourite moments in the
Half-Life series, you are led to a resistance outpost in an abandoned mine
where you and two other resistance fighters have to defend a group of
Vortigaunts who are trying to heal Alyx who is lying on a table. The resistance
fighters have a sort of Antlion
Detector system going which uses red lights to tell how many Antlions are
approaching, the more lights, the more antlions and there is four tunnels they
can come from, why they chose this place to heal Alyx I would not know. You are
given access to reprogrammed Hopper
Mines and Sentry Guns though not quite enough to hold off
the antlions by themselves though I was still pleased by this as I love Sentry
guns with their auto-firey goodness and I had lots of fun repositioning them
accordingly until they both exploded L.
It looked bad but then a whole party of other Vortigaunts came and you kicked
ass with them, truly a great moment.
Hold the Line! man watching this makes me want to do it again, need more sentry guns
You then follow your Vortigaunt companion deeper into the mines
to find an Antlion Larvae to save Alyx and I saw quite a few sights along the
way as well as doing a brilliant cat-and-mouse sequence with an Antlion
Guardian, when you get back you get a brief visit from The G-Man
just before Alex is revived as he says that the was waiting for a time when the
Vortigaunts were otherwise occupied (as per their previous hinderance of him in
Episode 1) and gives a cryptic warning to the sleeping Alex before she wakes
up.
The Antlion Spawning Cave
The next chapters involve exiting the mine and another car driving
and stopping sequence similar to the coastal “Highway 17” chapter in Half-Life
2 except this time you have Alyx with you. There was a sequence I liked in
“Freeman Pontifex” where you searched through a mining town with Alex
supporting you from above with a sniper rifle, really saved some ammo that time
hah. The “muscle” car you eventually find has more bodywork this time and room
for two people and boy was that thing fun to drive, jumping over bridges and
hills though it was only in short bursts as it was always over so quick.
Shotgun!, oh wait I'm driving
The
“Riding shotgun” chapter was good as this was the first time you faced Hunters which
are bloody fast and tough to kill though not when you run into them of course
:D, you also have probably the closest encounter ever with an Advisor
where you can see what they do to humans first hand. You fight more combine
soldiers and Hunters and a Hunter-Chopper
along the way. The next chapter has a scene where you duck-and-cover through a
junkyard with an autogun firing over your head and then get in a massive fight
with combine soldiers and Hunters in the White
Forest Inn, you also meet Dog again who defeats a strider for you.
The Combine Advisor in the barn
Dog wrestles a Strider
Once you finally get to White Forest you are reunited with
Dr. Kleiner and Eli Vance and also a new character Dr. Magnussen,
another former Black Mesa Scientist who you saw previously through radio/visual
contact, I almost liked him as much as Dr Breen with his grumpy and aloof
demeanor. White forest is a large Resistance base where Dr.
Kleiner and Magnussen are organising the launch of a special rocket which they
plan to use, in conjunction with the satellite array launched during the events
of Half-Life and Alyx's data packet, to close the Combine superportal.
This part has a lot of speculation for the supposed sequel, Kleiner and Vance
decode the message that Gordon and Alyx brought and it appears to be a message from Judith Mossman in an arctic location saying that she has found the Borealis,
which is a ship that contained a secret project started by the Aperture
Science company who we know from the Portal series. Kleiner and Vance are at odds for the first time, the former saying they
should use the technology to fight the combine, the latter saying they should
destroy it to avoid another Black Mesa Incident, I feel like this may be a
choice in the future, woo that’d be a first for Half-Life.
The crew discussing Dr. Mossman's discovery iof the Borealis
This is where Alyx
speak the “unforeseen consequences” line to Eli without knowing it and then Eli
privately tells Gordon that the G-Man spoke those same words to him just before
the Black Mesa Incident.You then have
to defend the base from a huge combine attack of Hunter and Striders and
combine troops in which I used the muscle car to run over the hunters and the
special Magnusson Device which is a sort of sticky bomb
that needs to be shot to blow up, in order to defeat the Striders which is
difficult to do and had a bit of trouble this time with a Strider almost
reaching the base but managed to finish it.
Defending the base from Striders using the Magnussen Device and running over Hunters.
The rocket is then launched and successfully destroys the
combine portal effectively stopping the remaining combine from receiving any
reinforces from other combine worlds. There is a brief celebration then comes
the very climactic final scene where Gordon and Alex are about to embark on a
journey to the Borealis in a helicopter and we all know what happens then, if
you don’t then play the damn game, all of them if you haven’t, play the entire
series do it now! I can’t stress this enough if you haven’t played any of the
Half-Life series you should definitely play through the original Half-Life,
then 2 then the episodes as it’s a brilliant experience.
The Portal is finally closed
Saying that I can’t remember
whether that was the second or third time I’ve done that, possibly the third
and although sometimes it can be a bit of a grind, I purposefully play it on
easy to get through some of the repetitive shooting of mass amounts of combine
soldiers quicker but it’s amazing each time as the graphics are great and the
menu design is so click that I sometimes wanna play it just to use it again as
there’s nothing like it in other games really.
That slick menu
So that marks the end of the Half-Life 2 series of games
with the exception of Lost Coast
but that’s barely worth a mention, now we sit back and wait (patiently) for the
next installment. Frankly I don’t know which I’d prefer, for it to be the last
in the series and explain everything or fore there to be many, many more but I
expect the latter.
Release Date: November 3rd 2008 Genre: Action, Platformer Developer: Media Molecule Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Platform: Playstation 3 Players: 1-4 Classification: E (Everyone)
If I could think of a list of the most well-known
Playstation 3 games or characters, Sackboy and the LittleBigPlanet
(LBP) series immediately comes to mind. I was no latecomer to the series mind
you, I did play the original LittleBigPlanet
game over a long period of time at friends houses or anywhere else there was a
Playstation3 as they seemingly all had it. But as you know I’m not much of a
console gamer and only played the game rarely until I got my own PS3 and
decided to play the damn thing by myself finish the Story mode once and for
all. Of course I knew this was supposed to be a game you played with friends as
throughout the game there was always these various challenges that you needed
two or more players to do and I have had to get anyone around, housemate,
friends etc to help with them. But I was determined to do it in any case as I
had really wanted to see the whole game for a while and at least finish it
myself and get some closure. I don’t have many games on PS3 as it will possibly
be the last console I’ll ever own though I really need to spend more time off
the computer whether it’s movies or console, my love of Emulators
keeps me from going back to the Playstation and Super Nintendo, my dislike of
the Nintendo 64 controller keeps me from playing that console, and of course
you know from my last
post I have tried twice to emulate the Playstation 2 to no avail. There’s
also Skate 2 which I am
trying to avoid playing again as it’s one of those games you have a love/hate
relationship with and all of my other PS3 games I’ve now played many times
through or had enough of so that just left LittleBigPlanet.
The "first Steps" level in the Gardens, unfortunately I am unable to get any screenshots or videos from the game so the majority of the media you'll see on the page is courtesy of Zebra Gamer's Youtube playthough which was incredibly helpful
Anyway so in case you haven’t heard LittleBigPlanet is an
action platformer set in a 3D world where you move to the right in a 2D
platformer fashion while avoiding obstacles including traps, pitfalls and other
objects which can impede your progress. The difference between the traditional
2D platformers such as the Mario games is that LBP actually has 3 or 4 different
“lanes” that you can run and jump in, for example on most long flat surfaces where
you start a level you can jump to the background or foreground path which is
necessary to pass many obstacles and complete many puzzles. Another difference
is LBP introduces and makes heavy use of the characters ability to “grab”
things like felt and sponge type objects and also other players using the R1
button. This allows you to pull objects and jump and swing from ones that are
dangling from strings, they also provide a way of holding on while you are on a
moving object. The story behind the game is that when people dream their dreams
get stored in a world called LittleBigPlanet which is maintained by the Creator Curators,
one of which The
Collector has turned against the rest and is stealing the other curators
creations and not sharing them with the world. Throughout the game you help the
various curators across the world of LBP which is basically a miniature version
of earth made out of felt.
LittleBigPlanet, in all it's felt glory, this shot was taken from the intro so I'm not quite sure what the arrow is for.
Each of the Curators worlds is set in a particular
region for example the first curator The King’s
domain is the The Gardens and it is located in Europe, the second
Curator Zola
is a lion and his domain is The
Savannah which is on the African continent, I was hoping there would be
domain in Australia but I was unfortunately disappointed, I guess an ‘outback’
themed domain would be too much like the savannah. Each domain has three mains
level and 2 or 3 mini-games which are unlocked by finding keys in the main
levels, the mini games include endurance tests like skipping and see-saws,
races where you have to get to the finish in the fastest time possible and
obstacle course which you must complete before the time runs out.
LittleBigPlanet has a big emphasis on playing and sharing with others and that
is shown by the various puzzles throughout the game which require 2 or more
players and the ability to create and share you own levels with others around
the world.
The game starts in a very unique way, your Sackboy character
pops out hole in the darkness onto a bench or something and you have full
control over them right off the bat. You then are privileged to hear Stephen Fry’s voice as the
narrator and he instructs you on the basic controls of your sack person and how
you can change their facial expression and wave your arms around with the
bumpers. You are soon on you way to one of the best intro’s I have ever seen in
a game. You basically run along a linear path while the main credits for the
game along with the faces of the developers appear above you while you run and
jump and push obstacles around. I can’t explain the joy I had when doing this
for the first time, it was sublime, one of those moments where you are
like“this is amazing, I just can’t
describe it”. You also get introduced to your Popit which
probably the most important tool in the game, this is where you can access and
use stickers and decorations that you have found in order to attach them to
certain places in the world to gain more Score Bubbles, Prize
Bubbles and Keys, this is also where you can customise
your character with the material and costume items you have found along the
way. You also have the ability to chat with your online friends, ‘suicide’ in
order to respawn at the previous save point and change your poppit colour which
actually changes the colour of the Score bubbles you collect and changes your
characters clothes colour slightly, I thought this was pretty damn cool when I
discovered it.
This basically followed on into the main game but first you
were dropped into your Pod,
which is some sort of cardboard spaceship where you can see littlebigplanet
from afar, this is where you and friends (or in my case just me :’( can run
around in before you start a game or when going back to the menu. Apart from
you there is basically only one thing inside the pod and that is your Pod Computer
which is a replica of a PS3 controller and what’s even cooler is that when your
click to use the pod computer your Sack person moves the joysticks and hits the
buttons mimicking you which I thought was pretty damn cool. From your pod
computer you can access the story mode which is LittleBigPlanet itself, the Info Moon where you
can view your info and progress, see your friends list and news and where you
can view and try other players level creations, and the “My Moon” where you can
create and play your own levels.
The main screen with your Sackboy at the controls, you can see the Infomoon and My Moon in the picture too
You start the story mode in the King’s Garden and it’s a
good introduction to the basics as you would assume, running, jumping, grabbing
and pulling and collecting Score Bubbles
which are one of the three collectibles found throughout the game as well as Prize
Bubbles and Keys. Score bubbles are simply that, a way of keeping score on
the levels you complete and comparing to other players similar to the coins in
the Mario series though from what I can remember you don’t get an extra life.
Prize bubbles have stickers and character customization items in them and keys
give access to the mini games. It was fun enough running and jumping over
obstacles and enemies and I truly loved grabbing and pulling items and swinging
and jumping was great, it was like the old Donkey Kong Country
except everything was so much more detailed obviously with the realistic
character animation and sewn felt and sponges and wood and pretty much
everything. I loved your how your sack character jumped and flailed around
realistically while they bounced off objects with blocks bouncing and falling
around them with almost perfect physics, it’s all very beautiful to watch.
The Sensei's Lost castle level, damn those rollers haha
The Creator Curators
and other characters help you throughout the game with hints and tips and
sometimes come in the form of vehicles such as wheeled wooden horses,
skateboards, toy cars or odd things such as Don Lu’s Dog from the The
Wedding's level, The
Darkness in South America. It seems that apart from your Sack person all the
other characters are made from art and craft materials like cardboard, paper
and wood and speak in a sort of gibberish voice similar to the original Banjo-Kazooie game.
Controlling your Sack person is relatively easy, as I said before you can run,
jump with the x button and grab with the R1 button, sometimes I found a slight
delay on jumping but that may have been because my character was not full on
the ground or the particular objects I was on. The base game revolves around
making it through the level avoiding traps and obstacles and solving puzzles in
order to continue and it’s masterfully done, Some bits I found I enjoyed in
particular was flinging myself from object to object like hanging lanterns or
spinning windmills, riding characters and vehicles such as the skateboard in
the gardens and the car in The Metropolis and dressing up my character of course
as I loved how you got a whole new (male and female) outfit for each new world
you went to.
Don Lu's Faithful Dog!
I usually don’t have too much to say about the graphics and
music but in this case they were both absolutely marvellous. I loved the way
the worlds were made up of everyday art and craft materials like cardboard,
paper, wood, felt, sponge, plastic etc and how they all looked so realistic,
there was so much detail there in the foreground, the background, it’s funny
that a game that mimics so many 2D platformers looks so good in 3D but it just
does. The detail of all the levels is just amazing especially the European
medieval themed The Gardens, the South American Day of the Dead themed The
Wedding and the oriental themed The
Islands and I remember seeing it for the first time on PS3 and just going
“whoa” though funnily enough playing it again much later I can appreciate it
more. The music is great as well one of the main ones that stood out was the
music from the Wedding world’s “The Wedding Reception” level which introduced
you to the day of the dead theme and sounded fantastic along with the beautiful
visuals. The sound effects including all the bounces, pops and springs all
sound great too, though I would have appreciated actual voices in the game but
I guess it’s ok how it is also when you get new items the “You got new item!”
popup can be annoying when you get a few at once as it can block your view.
The Subway level in Metropolis, note the found item popup, now imagine it with like 5 of them XD
I didn’t dabble too much into the multiplayer aspect of the
game with this playthrough as it was the first few games I played with friends
where the multiplayer really shined though I didn’t appreciate it as much then
as I do now and getting people to play it now is kind of hard apart from the
times I could do the 2 player ones when there was someone around but haven’t done
more than two people for a while but I remember it being fun pushing and
pulling your friends around. Doing the two player challenges was fun when I
could get someone unfortunately I had to skip the 4 player ones and some two
player ones as well though I admit the game would be more fun with friends.
When playing through the story you actually had the option to “Play online”
meaning someone could join you when playing though I found having another
person from the internet just annoying as you couldn’t communicate and they
just rushed ahead. I had a look at the level creator but didn’t fiddle around
with it much, I had much more fun trying out other players levels via the info
moon, they were pretty cool, one was even based on Minecraft! and another was a
racer which was fun. I must remind myself to go back in and try more of them.
The very explosive Mexican-themed canyons world
In the end there’s not much more I can say about
LittleBigPlanet just that it was a great modern platformer and reminded me that
we can still have them in these days of Triple A, MMORPGS, RPG’s and FPS’s. LBP
was a game that was done incredibly well and with such dedication and love put
into it it’s hard not to appreciate it, everything from the gameplay to the
visuals was spot on and with the right amount of challenge to not be frustrating.
The only reason I could not give this game a 10/10 as it isn’t a game I can
continue playing it was perfect enough as is unless of course I went crazy with
the level creator but it just didn’t seem appealing enough and doing user made
levels is fun but gets boring after a while. But as always I encourage anyone
to give this a try, I have not actually played the sequels (of which there are
two) but might try to in the future, and maybe even try the karting game if it
gets cheap enough, I can never get enough of themed racers hah.
JD
9/10
Things I liked:
Immaculate presentation, great graphics.
Easy learning curve.
Terrific music and sound effects.
Lots of fun with friends
Just challenging enough to be fun.
Things I didn’t like:
Player controls can be a bit fiddly at times
No voice acting just gibberish speak and reading text.
Limited replayability
The LittleBigPlanet Official Trailer
p.s special thanks to Zebra Gamer for his excellent playthrough on Youtube
Release Date: Aus 2006 Genre: Third-person shooter Publisher: LucasArts Developer: Pandemic Studios Platform: Playstation 2, Xbox Players: 1 Classification: T (Teen)
Mercenaries:
Playground of Destruction was originally a suggestion then a birthday
present if I remember correctly from my housemate Brok who praised it as an
awesomely fun modern combat style third person sandbox game which he had played
on the original Xbox and then bought it for me on Playstation 2 which was very
nice indeed. Mercenaries was a creation by Pandemic Studios
an LA based developer with an office based in Brisbane who had created games such as Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2 and Destroy All Humans! and interestingly published by LucasArts.
I had never heard of this game before but was interested and said I would give
it a go.
Mercenaries tells a fictional story of in the Korean Theatre
of War called the Song
Initiative where the president Choi Kim
actually offers peace to South Korea which angers his son Choi Song
who stages a violent coup storming the capital and killing his father before
the country goes “dark” expelling foreigners and giving no communication to the
outside world. After it’s discovered by the Australian Navy that North Korea is
creating and selling Nuclear Weapons, the Allied
Nations led by Colonel Samuel Garrett forms and heads off to North
Korea on the offensive and is soon joined by the South Korean Union led
in secret by the American CIA operative Agent
Mitchell Buford, the People's Liberation Army led by Colonel
Zhou Peng and the Russian Mafia led by Sergei
Voronov.
The very epic title screen and intro
You are a Mercenary working for Executive Operations, or ExOps who are
apparently the league of kick-ass mercenaries and you are basically tasked with
capturing or killing the Deck of 52 for a handsome sum of 100 million dollars no
less. The Deck of 52 is basically a full deck of cards each one representing a
person of interest to the Allied Nations with the number cards being the lower
ranked and the royal cards being the more powerful VIPs with Song himself
included as the ACE OF
SPADES! You have a choice of three different characters Mattias
Nilsson, Jennifer Mui and Christopher Jacobs with Brok suggesting I use
Jennifer as she has some pretty good one liners and also because I hardly ever
use a female character so I thought what the hey.
The Deck of 52 from the Exops initial briefing screen, please excuse the subtitles it was the only one I could find.
This initial story is shown to you via actual live footage
pieced together then has one of the most terribly acted dialogues between one
of the officers in Exops and Fiona Taylor who is
your main contact in the organisation though unfortunately she sounds like
she’s come straight from an episode of Round the Twist as her high pitched
lighthearted sounding Australian accent is annoying and not suited to the role,
what I’d give for someone with a posh British accent either male or female
similar to M in the Bond films rather than this bimbo who would be perfect on
the set of Playschool. And having to listen to her updates every so often was
still draining but anyway. As well as the Deck of 52 you also do various other
mission for each faction sometimes attacking another faction that you were
previously working for resulting in your standing to drop with them. The
Chinese and South Koreans were the biggest enemies with the Russian Mafia
antagonising both and the Allied Forces being enemies with no-one except the
North Koreans of course which were permanently hostile.
The game intro was partly made of real-life footage
The game world is basically set up as a sandbox where you start
at the Allied M.A.S.H, this is your default starting area for the game and also
the place you end up when you die. From there you can basically go anywhere,
“commandeer” a vehicle and go visit any of the 4 factions, search for the
number cards or collectibles such as the national treasures, or just cause
destruction such as destroying North Korean Monuments, South Korean listening
posts or just random mayhem. One of the favourite things my friend Brok used to
do was come across a group of NPC’s from any particular faction fighting and
basically watched the action unfold, often with hilarious circumstances as this
unpredictability makes up the beauty of the game. Some faction missions
involved going after number and royal cards themselves though most show up as
emails on your PDA which
hint of their locations and you go and search for them. There are also some
“Car challenges” represented as dollar signs on the map that you can enter and
race to a particular area though most of the time I didn’t want to go wherever
it went.
You're just driving along then all of a sudden you come across a heated battle
Your PDA
(Personal Digital Assistant) is basically your access to intelligence and
support during the game featuring different screens including a map, your email
inboxes, the Merchant
of Menace shop which is provided by the Russian Mafia selling everything
from guns, to vehicles to airstrikes. There is also screen which has four
sections involving Deck of 52, bounties you have found such as Monuments,
WMD blueprints, National Treasures and South
Korean listening posts, and statistics of all the things you have done,
such as soldiers killed, distance travelled, favourite choice of vehicle and
other information about their exploits and a screen which shows the players
diplomatic stance with the various factions. You gain this and two other generic
weapons including an Assault Rifle and M67 Frag Grenade before driving backwards
out of a low flying plane into North Korea’s southern province which provides
the theatre of war for the first half of the game. So basically my goal was to
just finished the game, being the first time I wasn’t going to go for %100 completion,
it looked pretty good fun, sort of like a military version of GTA.
Your PDA screen showing you diplomatic stance
Unfortunately when I first started playing the game there
was one major issue, as I’ve probably mentioned before I don’t play any first
or third person shooters on console anymore with the exception of Red Dead
Redemption which had the lock-on feature most of the time but still got
annoying in the parts where you didn’t even if they were few. In Mercenaries
you don’t have the lock-on feature at all and it makes aiming and shooting and
general movement somewhat difficult and annoying when you are trying to shoot
specific enemies. This was especially annoying when trying to use a sniper
rifle and set aim on atarget but I
couldn’t get the thumbstick to line up as the feedback made it move too far to
one side or not far enough and this was even worse if you were under fire at
the time, I often had to resort to firing the sniper rifle from the hip which
was actually pretty effective with practice. Strafing while firing
also took some practice too
Daring frontal assault on a roadblock
This led to me delving into the realm of PS2 emulation again
which I had previously been unsuccessful at, I thought that If I could get the
emulator to work I could then be able to configure the controls to aim with my
mouse but unfortunately I could not get the game working properly. It had a
setting to use either the system memory or video memory and every time I had it
on system memory the screen would go all white with some sort of bloom issue and
on the video memory it worked but had massive slowdown especially when there
were a lot of particles (like dust) I made a video of my attempt to play the
game like this and it’s pretty damn hilarious.
My attempt to emulate the game, it ran a leeetle bit slow XD
The other problem was in cars the button for accelerating was
the X button and it was the same for reloading while on foot, so I couldn’t use
the W key for example to both walk forward and accelerate in vehicles. So I
don’t think I’m ever going to try and emulate PS2 anymore it just never works
properly which is a shame cause there’s a heap of games on PS2 I’d like to get
going via emulator to see what they look like. Failing this almost made me
refuse to play the game altogether but I decided to soldier on (literally, or
maybe mercenary on) and continue with the game, and I admit even with this flaw
it was still pretty good. I did dabble at first with an invincibility cheat
from the action replay but stopped using it when I realised it affected
vehicles too, so from then on it was gung-ho going the way it was meant to be
played… mostly.
It’s hard to a judge a game that was made in 2005 by today’s
standards but I’ve got to admit the gameplay was pretty good, even with my old
worn out PS2 controllers and the slightly jerky gameplay and having to move and
aim using the joysticks, I found that Jennifer the character I chose to play as
moved quite fast, probably the fastest of the three. I did have a bit of
trouble learning the controls as they were more complicated than most of the
PS2 games I used to play, you can jump and reload of course, and melee using
bash, which is one of the most important abilities I feel as unless you use a
stun grenade it’s the only way to stun a number card in order to perform a
takedown and handcuff them. There’s the action button which is mostly used to
get in and out of vehicles, there’s the L1 and L2 button which are used to
throw/select grenades which I managed to muck up under pressure several times
and then there was the R1 and R2 button which was used to fire your current
weapon or switch between them. The L3 and R3 buttons were for crouching and
using binoculars/weapon scope and the DPAD had a variety of functions.
This guy's gonna get it
Pressing up and down on the D-pad cycled through you support
options, these were often the difference between failing and completing a
mission depending on the difficulty. Support options include supplies such as
health, ammo, repair kit and weapons, vehicles inc jeeps, trucks and even tanks
and helicopters further into the game, and finally artillery and airstrikes
which were great fun to use. You obtained most of these when starting a mission
as they were given free of charge or cost a certain amount but could pick them
up on your travels or unlock them through completing the main game or various
challenges. The most important support item is the extraction beacon as this is
used to evacuate your subdued number cards. I found entirely by coincidence
that you get credit for capturing the number card alive as soon as you get them
on the chopper, if it is destroyed after it takes off you still get credit you
just lose money for the destroyed support chopper this led to me being very
sloppy and calling the chopper into some very dangerously hot areas though
funnily enough it never got destroyed by the enemy on the way in just on the
way out, I guess they just allow this so you can get credit for getting the
number card in alive. Another problem I had was that bashing an enemy once
stunned them bashing them while they are stunned kills them which led to me
accidentally killing a number card on several occasions.
I swear getting them on the chopper was a huge relief most of the time.
Other common support items are the Medivac which sends a
helicopter to take you back to the Allied M.A.S.H the mash is always your
starting point when you load the game after having saved and it always has some
jeeps and soldiers around to start you off again, this is also where you can
change your outfit when you acquire new ones. Another item that you pretty much
always have access to is C4, C4 is always useful for blowing up stuff provided
you can get close enough to set it and works on pretty much anything. Most of
the time I only brought in heavy vehicles and airstrikes when there was just
too much military presence to deal with or too many things to blow up with C4
though it made things difficult when a number card was in the thick of it
leading to me to decide it was just too hard to get bring them in alive and
carpet bombing the area was the simpler solution. I must admit It was only the
extra money that made we want to bring them in alive (you only got half the
bounty for them being dead) it was pretty much always the easier option to
shoot them or blow them up from afar but of course you want to strive for that
record as every time to jail or finish off anumber card it is reported on the number card screen of the PDA.
A video showing some of the airstrikes and vehicles you can purchase from the Merchant of Menace shop. This player is using the unlockable North Korean Elite model
Pushing left on the D-pad toggles the flags above friendly
and enemy soldiers heads allowing you to easily see which faction they are from
which is useful in a few cases. Soldiers which have a flag on their heads
permanently are officers who have the special ability of seeing through your
disguise. You “disguise” as I put it is one of the most powerful and useful
ability in the game I think, cannot count the number of times I used it.
Basically when you get into a north Korean vehicle out of view of any NK
soldiers or any kind of officers it shortly flags you as “disguised as North
Korean” and you are able to travel safely among them without fear of being
attacked, you can also do this in a civilian vehicle as the North Korean Army
will not attack civilians seemingly no matter where they drive. This feature is
obviously very powerful when used properly though there are a few things I
could nitpick like I’m driving around in a jeep with no doors and windows and
I’m still disguised apparently, and if I’m in a fully enclosed tank somehow
officers can still spot me. And how can civilians drive almost anywhere they
want, I swear I drove a civilian car into that many fortified military bases
and even crashed into a tank at one point but still my disguise was safe.
I'm a civilian news reporter! yes really. In case you didn't know these journalist trucks were regularly parked inside the M.A.S.H and you could listen to the news reports of what you had accomplished.
Playing the game felt relatively ok once I got used to the
controls and it did take me awhile as I had to have the instruction book open
sitting there so I could refer to it, but once I got that down it was all good.
The vehicles were quite fun to use with the ability to honk your horn to load
up your vehicle with friendly soldiers and with three different options for
example you could exit by yourself with everyone still inside, command everyone
else to exit or everyone gets out at once which was really helpful especially
when you were driving into the danger zone and wanted some cover for when you
got out though often I just led my allies to their untimely deaths which is why
I was glad the word doesn’t spread around and others refuse to get in for the
next mission.
Having allies in your vehicle is helpful as they can attack
enemies with the mounted guns available, Brok quickly pointed out that a
certain type of the South Korean Jeeps had a rocket launcher mounted on the
back and had unlimited ammo when used by an npc, this really came in handy and
was a hell of a laugh when I was driving along and watching the trigger happy
npc obliterate any North Korean vehicle that I drove past. The vehicles handle
pretty damn tightly, those jeeps I swear have uncanny handling, I was driving
like a bat out of hell and could still take corners like I was stuck to the
road whereas if this was any kind of realistic car game I would have been
wrapped around a tree long ago. Tanks and helicopters were easy enough to drive
(and fly) apart from the joystick aiming difficulty of course, I must have
driven dozens of tanks and heavy vehicles over the most ridiculous of terrain
and used helicopters numerous times to try and speed up a mission or just make
it easier. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t but it was all part of
the fun in Mercenaries.
Hold the line friends!
Accepting contracts and capturing or killing number cards is
the main part of the game obviously, the missions ranged from destroying an
enemy base to escorting or rescuing VIPs and even delivering a sports car to
the docks. The different factions often plot against each other and many
missions involve attacking another faction which is currently friendly to you, so it helped to do all one factions missions
in a row though they generally increase in difficulty as you go on. If I had previously completed a mission that involved antagonising a faction and they could change to unfriendly or hostile and would attack on site. I had to somehow make a furious dash into their base and then go to the guard outside the HQ and give him a bribe of a certain amount so I could start receiving missions from that faction again.
Oops wrong tower
Entering
faction bases involve going up to a soldier outside the HQ and then you can go
into the building/tent etc, the faction leaders themselves are generally quite
funny to listen to especially if you walk around while they are talking. I noticed that they voiced their displeasure if you had previously completed a mission from another faction that involved attacking them. One
neat thing I noticed was that Jennifer could understand what the Chinese were
saying when they spoke in their native language. After a mission is passed you
usually get a message of the whereabouts of another number card which can
actually be found randomly on the map even if you don’t have the message, most
of the royal cards are included in missions for the factions but some are also
found on the map.
"Well
if it isn't the Mercenary who destroyed my tanks and killed my men, well that money
helped so I'll instantly forget about it, here's some more missions. Oh and did you know you can press the Triangle button to STAND UP?"
Working through the Deck of 52 is obviously a long process
as I took three breaks from the game while playing as it took a lot of playtime
to get through, sometimes when trying to finish a hard mission I only got that
done for the entire play session for one night. Capturing or killing a card can be as easy or as hard as
you make it, often I tried going in with just what I had but obviously the more
you spend on extra vehicles, supplies and aerial support the easier it is. I’ve
had some trying times, losing cards to trigger happy allies, wayward bullets or
explosions, poorly aimed tank shells or airstrikes, one of the most common ways
I fudged it up at early game was accidentally smacking them twice killing them.
Of course once you do have them captured and cuffed it doesn’t end there,
getting the chopper down safely requires either escaping the area or ridding it
of enemy presence, and even then you need to find a reasonably flat spot so the
chopper can land, man the amount of times I saw that freakin “landing zone not
clear” warning was hella annoying, I’ve even gotten impatient and sloppy at
times and ended up getting credit for the capture then seeing the evac copter
blown to bits because I hadn’t made the area secure. Going After the Aces is an
entirely different kettle of fish as when you start an Ace contract you are
helicoptered to a different location as the Ace’s have their own area which
count as one big mission.
Gotcha!
I was impressed with the amount of weaponry and vehicles and
general resources available in the game, you’re able to carry a primary and
secondary weapon, most of the time I had an automatic weapon such as an M4 in
the first slot and an RPG or Sniper Rifle in the second and man did I have times
where I wished I had one or the other, at least at times when I had the sniper
rifle I usually had C4 to use. I spent most of my time purchasing jeeps and
helicopters from the Merchant of Menace as I often found tanks or knew where
the friendly factions kept theirs but man those airstrikes were oh so fun to
use, the smaller ones like the surgical strike were great for blowing up things
such as tanks while the larger strikes were for when you were just like screw
it I’m, just gonna blow everything to the moon. The way these were called in
varied, the airstrikes were usually way of satellite or ground laser. With the
satellite strikes you took control of a birds eye view camera to pinpoint the
location and were very accurate, the ground laser was done by a vertical laser
aimed from your location that you had to make sure that nothing was in that way
to block where you were pointing. The artillery strikes however had a very
dangerous way of marking as they were done by throwing a beacon onto the ground,
and did I mention that you couldn’t throw particularly far and after that
beacon was thrown you had to get the fack out of there fast as it didn’t take
long for the bombs to start falling, I hardly used artillery because of this.
Calling in a surgical strike via ground laser.
The size of the map in mercenaries was fairly impressive,
there was heaps to explore intentionally or unintentionally. Mercenaries is a
true sandbox in a way that there’s so much stuff happening around you, more so
then Red dead redemption and GTA for example as in those games the random
events seem to revolve around you, but in this game it seems you’re just
driving along and you all of a sudden drive into a full on pitched battle
between two factions with tanks and everything, sometimes I just screamed and
got the hell out of there as fast as I could, this was usually when I was on a
difficult mission and didn’t want to die, but other times listening to the
recommendation from Brok I just sat at a safe distance and watched the carnage
unfold and it was lots of fun to see out, who’s going to win? etc There are
places on the map that are permanently under control of one faction and you are
attacked no matter what you’re standing with them, there are places on the map
which seem to be constantly besieged by conflict, and then there are the edges
of the map where if you stray too far are identified as a deserter and are
bombed by allied planes. Goddamn that was annoying as it was usually by
accident and I was all like “Wait sorry, NO I’LL GO BACK NNONONONONONO AAAHHH!
‘BOOM!’ resulting in afailed mission.
Random things happen on missions too, mostly scripted but they are still good,
like when I was delivering that sports car for the Russians, you’d think it’d
be easy but no the game throws everything under the sun to try and block your
path and there’s also a lot of random funny things happening like npcs crashing
helicopters and falling from the sky.
Oops that wasn't supposed to happen
Regarding the collectibles Brok had to continually remind me
to look for them as sometimes I was just so intent upon completing the missions
I didn’t think of it, I ended up collecting a few though, enough to unlock some
extra features like new weapons and supply drops and the ability to use other
characters models such as Agent Buford of the South Koreans and even Indiana
Jones for some reason. Had a lot of fun with that and also destroying the
statues was pretty fun. Sorry if I spoil it but for those who don’t know it
there are actually two maps, you start off in the relatively warmer southern province with more vegetation and then after the first two Ace contracts you move
to the colder more snowy northern province. The map change doesn’t change too much,
just continues the story with new missions in a different environment and the
bases are all in different spots to change things up a little, also there seems
to be a bit more warfare happening then the last map and of course more
collectibles to er, collect.
Your PDA showing part of the Southern Province, you can see the South Korean base on the map.
The Ace contracts as I said before are each set in
entirely different instance on islands away from the main map, I was impressed
by the scenarios as they had some pretty impressive moments which I’ll
describe. In the Ace of Diamonds contract I was running through the jungle then
the a nearby car exploded and I was ambushed by covert jungle marines in
camouflage and at the end of the mission I had to blow up the base as it was
the only way to kill the Ace and a crane actually landed on him. Another moment
was when I was doing the ace of Hearts contract and had to fight through all
these enemies around cargo crates until from watching a video I realised I
could just summon an enemy jeep, put on a disguise and drive all the way to the
end bit, several moments like that got me shaking my head at the way you could
make things indefinitely easier with just a small change.
The Ace of Diamonds mission done on Xbox360, which features the covert jungle marine ambush i mentioned, though this player manages to get the Ace of Diamonds out alive even with enemy soldiers and tanks shooting at him no less, whereas I just blew up the base with him in it.. Interestingly enough someone made a comment on the video saying "The cheat way is to clear that base first, where the ace will appear.
Then go up and destroy the supergun, then you find the ace on his own" *facepalm* wish I'd thought of that.
The graphics in the game obviously look dated by today’s
standards, but it looked pretty damn good for a game made in 2005 as when the
PS2 was released the industry thankfully had gotten over that awful transition
to full 3D phase in the late nineties and early 2000’s, sure textures were muddy
and the view was blurry and hard to see into the distance but it was
workable.I didn’t have too many qualms
with the interface, the icons were relatively easy to see and things such as
circles which showed you where to get into vehicles which really helped. The
game’s graphics were fine not much more to say, I liked the little details like
the soldiers milling around in the faction bases and things like the miniature
map of the area in the Chinese base and some of the explosions were pretty
spectacular with almost no slowdown.
Good time to leave I think
The sound and music was pretty good, the
soundtrack at the start was quite memorable and the sound effects were spot on
apart from a few annoying voice actors and some acting in parts. I swear
there’s this bit in the final Ace Contract the Ace of Spades General Song who
I’ll add is fleeing with the codes for the country’s nuclear arsenal and a
captive you’ve saved says “you must stop him!” and she’s like “stop who?” and
I’m like “fackin General Song the Ace of Spades you dumb bitch! who do you
think?” and then the guy is like “he has the codes” and she’s like “the launch
codes?” Fuaaaarrrr! but yeh anyway otherwise it was fun to listen to. The
troopers themselves yelled different things and the allied were the funniest
obviously being in English telling you to get moving before they were even in
the vehicle and other things like “let’s see what this tin can can do”.
"Stop Who?"
Despite my issues with the game is was enjoyable overall,
sure there was the stick aiming using my slightly worn controllers, the
confusion of which button to press resulting in me flailing around, the sometimes
muddy graphics making long range sniping difficult and the fact that I just don’t
think I could go through that again for fun. Despite all this the game damn fun
and entertaining enough as Brok sat down with me to watch almost every session
I did, this was the beauty of this particular game, as if he was watching me
play Star Wars the Old Republic for instance he’d probably be bored shitless. Having
him there helped a lot though, having played the game through before had a lot
of advice which helped immensely, I never thought how useful it was to have someone
watch you play as they saw and suggested things that you would never think
about.
On to plan B!
A sequel Mercenaries
2: World in Flames was created in 2008 though Brok claimed that it was not
nearly as good apart from the upgraded graphics. I was talking to Brok about
the ideal situation where Mercenaries Playground of Destruction was remade on
PC with full mouse and keyboard support and how awesome that would be, if this
actually happened I would be ecstatic and would definitely try go through it
again and would place it in a much higher regard then I already do. Though we
can dream can’t we?
Release Date: June 1995 Genre: First Person Shooter Publisher: Lucasarts Developer: Lucasarts Platform: DOS/Windows/Playstation Network Players: 1 Classification: ESRB: Teen (T)
Awhile ago my friend Brok discovered the site www.gog.com Good old Games which sells many
classic games in an updated DRM-free format that can run on modern
systems. His main objective was to gain a working version of the X-Wing
and TIE Fighter collectors editions and we found
there was not only those but a whole host of classic
Star Wars games of which we purchased quite a few in bulk during the sale
inc X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and the
entire Jedi
Knight series. For those of you who don’t know, Star Wars Dark
Forces is the first games of the Jedi Knight series of games which also
include Dark Forces II, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy which you’ll know from a
previous review.
Once I had purchased them from GOG.com I decided to play them in order starting
with Dark Forces.
Hmm this hallway looks familiar
Star Wars Dark forces was released in 1995 the time where
the “3D” First person shooter was king and that king was for the most part the
king was the Doom
series, indeed being very similar to Doom the game was often compared to Doom
but reviewers always indicated that the game had many features that improved
upon its competitors. Dark Forces featured the ability to look up and down,
duck and jump and featured an additional resource battery powerto run various
equipment powerups such as the headlamp and night vision goggles. To make these
changes the developers had to create a whole new game engine simply titled Jedi, this allowed
them to create multi-levelled maps which unlike Doom had rooms directly above
or below each other that you could walk around, moving conveyor belts and some
objects that were fully 3D such as smaller starships (though these were quite
obvious when you saw them). It also had a much more engaging and involved
storyline then Doom, adding various puzzles and strategy to the game as well as
finding secrets and requiring keycards to advance. Atmospheric effects such as
fog and haze and animated textures and shading were also added to great effect.
You can't quite see it but there is red haze
Installing GoG games are fairly easy as the package is just
downloaded from the main site then extracted with a built in installer. This is
just as well as it uses Dosbox to run and I’ve messed around with that thing
before but never got it to work, but fortunately this did and I was able to
start playing. There has been many comparisons to GoG and Steam though there’s
one major difference that I found was summed up well by Jerry
Holkins (Tycho) of Penny Arcade,
he says that Steam is more like a jukebox that (supposedly) holds or your games
but if it goes offline or has login issues then you can’t play them, whereas
GoG is a vending machine that gives you full access to the product after you
pay for it. I’m not exactly sure which one I like more, I do like letting steam
take control of everything (installation/updates etc) and it’s great when
you’re trying to make sure you have the same game version as other people
especially with older games like Unreal Tournament 2004, Origin also helped
with Battlefield 1942 (as well as Warcraft 3) as I can remember a fair few
times where a group of us had problems getting the correct version in order to
play together.
Kyle ship The Moldy Crow currently piloted by Jan
Though the control setup menu the game provided was easy to
use, I found that I just couldn’t quite get the setup I liked, I could use the
mouse but it just didn’t feel right as the controls were set up in sections and
you didn’t have an options to change the alt fire to a mouse button (though I
didn’t use this very much). This was probably due to the fact that I had been
the Doom series with ZDoom which if you
didn’t know allows you to play any of the original Doom series with much more
features including much better graphics, and the ability to jump and use the
mouse to look free including up and down. So being used to this of course it
was kind of hard to play a whole game stuck in the same view, you did actually
have the ability to look up and down though this was used with keys and wasn’t the same as the free mouselook we’re
used to today. I did play a few levels in this mode but due to the difficulty
and annoyance of not having free look I decided to try to find a similar type
of mod to ZDoom I came across DarkXL
which is basically exactly what I was looking for and it worked very well as it
gave the game much sharper graphics and better controls.
A shot-in-shot of the DarkXL and the original in the top right
Though I soon found that although it worked well for the
first few levels there began to be many bugs inc no sound and crashing on
certain levels, impossible puzzles and blocked doors, missing cinematics and
the inability to use several late-game weapons, I found this out much too late
as it was only on the last few levels that I realised that I should have been
able to pick up certain weapons and enemies should have dropped certain weapons
though this hadn’t affected me as I did just fine with that I had. I did
eventually get through the game (and use the weapons for a short time) but only
through using various cheats though it was a lesser experience as a lot was
missing from the later parts of the game, some of which I had to go back to the
Dosbox version to see. I recently found that on the XL Engine site itself the game was actually listed
as being in its Alpha stage and 98% towards beta (if I had only waited a bit
longer XD) so basically I might go back to it again, either modded or unmodded,
but I experienced enough for this review nonetheless.
Pew pew! Forcing entry into the imperial detention centre to find Crix Madine
So with that out of the way on to the story. You play as Kyle Katarn who you may
already know from the other games in the Jedi Knight series, the developers had
actually wanted to use Luke Skywalker but due to gameplay and story constraints
they created Kyle Katarn as a completely new character. His brief history of
having previously defected from the Empire after he found they were responsible
for killing his parents (with the help of Jan Ors) and
was now working as a mercenary for the Rebel Alliance. The main story involves
Kyle investigating the Dark
Troopers which had been created by Imperial General Rom Mohc
about the massive starship the Arc Hammer,
so you basically go from level to level gathering intelligence with some
rescues and escapes along the way. Of all the planets visited during the game I
only recognised Nar Shaddaa and Coruscant
with the restincluding Danuta, Anoat, Fest, Cal-Seti and
many others which I didn’t recognise. I found the story pretty damn engaging as
it kept me going through all of the issues faced with the mod and it was great
to hear about all the new star wars lore and the origin of the Jedi Knight
series which I hadn’t known since playing Jedi Academy heaps of times.
Our hero Kyle Katarn, looking a bit older then he does in Jedi Academy
General Mohc, Darth Vader and the Republic Informant Crix Madine
As I mentioned playing the game with the DarkXL mod made it
much better (at the start at least) I could move freely with the WASD keys I
could look freely with the mouse, I could crouch and jump and touch buttons all
good, the graphics were much, much better as you could run the game with your
native desktop resolution. Basically the game plays the same way as Doom with
you running around shooting enemies and completing objectives though armor is
represented by “shield” power, I spent the majority of the time not using
cheats as compared to Doom as I found the difficulty not too bad. The guns in
the game are good and I had fun shooting down piles of Stormtroopers, you start
with a generic laser pistol before almost instantly getting hold of the
Stormtroooper laser rifle which basically becomes your mainstay weapon
throughout the whole game, the thing is that good, the ammo is plentiful (most
imperial soldiers drop rounds) and it shoots damn fast. My other weapon of
choice was the imperial repeater gun, this thing has even more pewpew and
shoots very fast but has weaker shots and takes power cells which are harder to
find, and my last weapon of choice was thermal detonators which are plentiful
on certain levels, when thrown these detonate on impact (unless using secondary
fire) and you are able to throw a ridiculous amount in a short period of time
(like 3 a second!) so taking down bosses with these was no problem at all.
Me pew-pew-pewing with the Stormtrooper laser rifle on Tak base, an early mission
Other weapons included the Jet fusion cutter which was a powerful but slow
firing laser bolt gun, the I.M mines which are basically claymores, the Mortar
gun which speaks for itself, the Stouker concussion rifle which is a long range
AOE blast that tore apart most standard enemies and the Assault Cannon which is
used by Dark Troopers and shoots both Plasma and rockets. The last three I
unfortunately didn’t use very much due to them not beingimplemented in the mod yet and me having to
add them in using cheats.
Fighting General Mohc with the Assault Cannon
I mostly plowed through the levels as I enjoy the fast pace
of these style of games but I did notice the subtle differences from the Doom and
Jedi engines that I mentioned before, specifically things like
"room-over-room" multi-levelled stages which had much more lift and
platforms then Doom and made traversing some levels very confusing when you had
rooms right on top of each other, there was also many instances which required
you to solve puzzles which included changing switches in a sequence to open
doors and moving entire ships to change from one section to the other. The game
had multiple objectives which were part of the storyline so it gave the game
much more depth than just randomly killing (and occasionally obtaining
keycards) to get to the end of the level. One thing I didn’t like was that you
couldn’t save anywhere you wanted like in Doom, you had respawn points but if
the game crashed for example you could load a save you just had to start all
over again which was a bit annoying.
As some places were multi-levelled, the map was had the ability to change which level you were looking at though it was still tricky. You also had the ability to view your weapons, inventory and objectives which was a great help.
I didn’t cheat throughout most of the game
(the actual invincibility cheat could not be used with the DarkXL mod) but I topped
myself up with health and ammo at times towards the end. In regards to pickups
there was you basic health and shield pickups as well as your laser ammo, power
cells for those weapons that took them were a bit more sparse the same with
mortar shells and rockets, most of the time you were overloaded with the ammo
that the enemies in the level dropped. Then there was the other items that used
battery pickups such as your headlamp, infra-red goggles and the air mask, the
latter of which I could not work out which button it was to use it lol as there
was also extra lives and restart points for when you died. Though by far my
favourite was the weapons supercharge which triples your rate of fire for a
short period of time, heaps of fun to use and together with the rest of the
pickups made the whole experience more fun and interactive.
Me fighting Dark Troopers and other enemies using a variety of weapons about the Executor, this also shows me using the weapons supercharge and smuggling myself on the Arc Hammer
As I mentioned before the graphics for the original game
were (understandably) quite poor as they only went up to 640x480 but the DarkXL
mod you could have your desktop resolution which made it great looking and much
sharper, whether you had the mod or not the locations still looked great, there
was plenty of areas that I recognised from the movies such as the white interiors
of some ships from that first scene in episode 4 and everything had that
distinct Star Wars flare. The new engine was able to create gameplay and
graphical elements such as fully 3D objects, atmospheric effects such as fog
and haze, animated textures and shading which was evident in the levels as
there were lots of things moving around such as bridges moving and ships flying
around outside and many kinds of moving 3D objects. The textures do lack that
flair that Doom had with the all the demonic imagery and gore but as this was a
Star Wars game the developers had to stick to the content and the game being as
old as it was you couldn’t do too much with just textures. The game’s retro sounding
star wars score soundtrack really stood out to me and it was great when you
recognised a tune and really added to the atmosphere and the situational music
helped too, the sound effects were equally great, all in stereo as well.
Some levels inc this ice level on Anteevy which features flowing water and moving assembly lines
Although my experience with Dark forces wasn’t fully functional
I suppose you say, I enjoyed it anyway and much more so with the Dark XL mod
and when the mod is fully finished I dare say I’ll play it again. It was great
to see the beginning of the Jedi Knight series one of which I am going to
continue playing to see out the series. As I’ve said before Star Wars Dark
Forces is not just a Doom clone, it has a whole new engine and many elements
that make it different if not better and I will maintain that stance throughout
the years to come. It’s said that almost every gamer has played an ID Software
shooter in some form but this is a game every Star Wars fan of all types should
play.
JD
Score: 8/10
Things I liked:
Overall storyline and missions designed very well.
Level design very dynamic, multi-level system new for the time
Fun and effective weapons and powerups
Things I didn’t like
Control system obviously dated and not able to be configured enough.
No save-anywhere feature, respawn system annoying when have to start again from game crash
Level textures somewhat dull due to nature of Star Wars Universe
I fist a Kell Dragon and then shoot up Jabba's ship
