So to continue on from Half Life 2 I’ve nabbed my housemates 360 (as I mentioned in my last post) and raided the house for a ton of PS3 and 360 games. I’m just gonna blast through a ton of games, get them complete and out the way. However for the most part I’m avoiding RPGs, take far too long. But I will work on them after I’ve done this pile of games.
So first off the block was Modern Warfare 2. I recently got MW in a Steam sale, and it was alright. Seeing as I’d not paid for it it seemed like a good deal. No harm if I utterly disliked it. It certainly lived up to it’s reputation of a shite story. I don’t really have any idea what was going on, and even worse was a couple days after completing it I’m trying to recite what went on in it and I got mangled up very quickly on. It basically felt like Infinity Ward had dumped a suggestion box in the middle of the studio and said ‘come up with a level idea’. Then they pulled them out of a hat and put them in the game. In the order they pulled them out of the hat.
The story felt like I was were just being dragged through and it was a simple case of shoot at anyone who isn’t obviously on your side. I never really grasped fully what was going on or why. Why was I sent undercover after Makarov? Why did we have to break out Price in the middle of a war? Why did Price fire the Nuke? How did the Americans not spot the Russian invasion? Especially the Russians invading the East coast. It did seem like they were mostly aiming for shocks and set pieces. Just ‘hey this sounds cool, lets throw it in the game’ regardless if it needed to be in or if it made any sense. The ending also exactly the same as the first; All hope is lost. The bad guy has beat the shit out of you all and you’re lying paralyzed on the floor. Then you pull out a weapon, slow-mo style you aim and fire. In this case you also have to pull a knife out of your chest.
Overall a disappointing game, especially storywise. The shooting was fun I guess, and in an FPS I’d imagine it’s the crucial part you want to get right. But the framework it was hung on was flimsy and hollow. Stories in games these days I tend to expect more than a simple ‘this is enemy. you shoot enemy. you finish game’. Especially with MW being a decent game, it all went a bit downhill apparently.
After MW2 I moved onto Darksiders for a bit. Only got a few hours in before I moved on. It was a bit exhausting, requiring far too much work to kill even the most basic of mobs. I liked the style though, and it looks like a promising game. I’ll have to get into the mood for it later. I will say that Mark Hamill needs to learn more than one voice.
With Darksiders over with for now I moved on from the 360. I still had the taste for console FPS so I put in Killzone 2, a game I’d already played through half of before (or so I thought, turn out I’d only played it for shy of 2 hours). Certainly different from MW2. The story was much more followable, even if it was at the expensive of being pretty simple. The game is also incredibly short, the campaign stats tell me I completed it in under 7 hours. The ending in this was also rather unfulfilling. You shoot out waves of enemies then take on Radec, who happens to have a personal invisibility shield and/or teleport. Who was much easier than I expected, requiring you to just be quick on the draw with aiming at where the sparkle noises and flashes come from on the edge of the screen and squeezing the trigger. I didn’t die at all in the mano-a-mano fight with him and even got a trophy for finishing it in under 2o minutes. The shooting in KZ2 felt much more meaty, I did find it annoying that you had a finite supply of ammo in your starter gun and apart form a bit towards the end no way of replenishing the ammo. Meaning you’re going to eventually end up using the Helghast rifle with it’s crappy iron sights. I did have much fun with the electric cannon you can pick up later. It was a bit OP, but I guess that’s why I enjoyed it. Killzone 2 was overall brutal and unrelenting, much like Helghan. And I guess I enjoyed it for that. Sure the constant deaths could be annoying, but I felt like I’d accomplished something when I got through a level fine.
That’s me so far. I’m currently on the early stage of Mirrors Edge with Bioshcok planned after that and I’ve been playing a fair bit of Minecraft in amongst this too (you can read my impressions at PressXorDie) so I’ll come back with my impressions of those later on. Also some FFXIV, but NDA’s tie me back on mentioning my impressions of that, and when it drops it’ll be going up on PXOD.
I leave you with ‘11’, a track on FFXIV that I quite like. It is awesome to have Uematsu back.