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One other thing about the Star Forge: don’t bother trying to clear out some of the middle sections. There’s one bit in particular that got right on my nipple ends because Bioware thought that it’d be a good idea to populate it with a constantly regenerating, infinite number of Dark Jedi. Cheap.
Turns out I was a bit harsh on both Secret Weapons over Normandy and Pandora Tomorrow.
SWoN really starts to come together around the fifth mission. It develops a smart sense of time and place, the handling feels just right, the graphics have a lovely, consistent look to them (with washed out, but still rich colours painted over environments which evoke the places they're supposed to represent very well indeed) and the game itself becomes increasingly enjoyable the more time you spend with it. Missions are varied, with constantly shifting objectives, the difficulty curve is well-judged, dogfights become much more interesting once you open up the more advanced aircraft...
It’s also very adept at making you feel like you’re actually there. There’s a steady stream of airwave chatter, which is further enhanced through the intelligent decision of having all the characters speak their own language, with translations at the top of the screen, rather than the usual “Aha! Ve haff you now, Tommy!” bullshit that we normally get lumped with. Sound in general is truly excellent – the score is fantastic, voice acting is as good as anything else I’ve come across in a game, effects are meaty and fitting. So effective is the atmosphere it creates that when the first German-developed jets appeared in a mission my immediate reaction was to think that the developers had gone off on a sci-fi tangent, my brain being totally wired into the propellers and fabric wings.
It’s too short, though. That’s not as much of a problem as it could have been, because of all the added extras – co-op two player, competitive two player, versus two player, unlockable goodies for completing secondary and bonus objectives in the missions (which are all replayable once finished the first time), a generous number of downloadable missions via Live. Hidden treasure, really. Makes me yearn for a bit of the old X-Wing and Tie Fighter PC flight sims (from the same people, fact fans). Snap it up if you see it cheap.
Pandora Tomorrow is also a lot better than it first seems. Initial impressions aren’t brilliant, because you start off doing exactly the same things as the first and in exactly the same types of environment (office buildings, mainly). Once the levels get a bit more original, it turns itself around quick-sharp. Loved the mission on the moving passenger train. Loved the missions in the jungle. Hoping for much more of that sort of thing – while you’re still doing the same sort of things, the different environments make you alter your approach. The lack of destructible artificial light sources in the jungle, for example, really makes you hunt out and value the few shadows you can find that much more. Like the first game, the save points aren’t always in the most useful places, forcing you to redo relatively easy sections over and over again because of one tricky bit. Still, makes me wonder if I’d have enjoyed the original more had I known about the sniper scope from the beginning. |
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