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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

First Person Video Games - Shooters and more

  
  

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Happy Dave Has Left
13:31 / 16.09.07
Okay, well, just completed Black on 'Normal', and well, wow, it was a lot of fun. 2,357 enemy dead, apparently - the death counter for your profile is just one of the little twists that make this game something a little bit different.

What appeals to me most about this game is that it rewards different styles of FPS gameplay at different points of the game. Over years of playing FPSs right from the DOOM and Duke Nukem days, I'd developed a fairly successful routine of run, cover, creep round, loose off short, controlled bursts at the enemy, duck into cover, repeat, reload, run to a new piece of cover. In part, I played the way I was taught to in the Territorial Army - for a lot of more realistic FPSs, actual small unit battle tactics work really very well - a sterling example of this is the 'Brothers in Arms' series, which feature very realistic squad-based actions, all in first person, controlled with shouted commands. I found myself using the training I'd gotten in the Army and winning pretty easily. However, it was almost mechanical sometimes - spot enemy, identify flank, shoot at them, flank them. Over and over again.

Black, by contrast, is different constantly. Some levels are wide open, with half a dozen riflemen shooting at you from cover and the open, and snipers shooting chunks out of the walls and headstones (I'm thinking of the graveyard section) around you. In that environment, you have to press forward as fast as possible, being hyper-aggressive, tossing grenades as you run and blasting whole magazines ahead of you to keep the enemies heads down, before mounting the edge of their position, tossing in a grenade and rattling off half a magazine into the nearest baddie. If you stay still for any length of time, the the snipers blast away your cover and you've got six different guys blasting their assault rifles at you.

Some of my favourite levels though were multi-level house/building clearances, working your way methodically through a building, tossing grenades up through holes in the ceiling, sometimes catching a bad guy off-guard and taking him out with a silenced headshot from your MP5. Fighting in these multi-level buildings is intense and satisfying. The first time I managed to shoot out the floor above me and watched an enemy plummet through two floors was awesome.

Where Black fell down for me was in a couple of the set-piece one/two level battles, where you came down into a balconied room and spent three or four minutes running around lobbing grenades, blasting with your shotgun and hiding in the oh-so-handily available side rooms (seemingly there solely to provide you with somewhere to hide and reload your M249. Even the very last bit takes this form, and they're just kind of wearing. Especially when they're essentially big, empty rooms with the ubiquitous crates n' healthpack FPS combo. Yawn.

Where Black got large indoor set-pieces very right was in the explosive, dust-filled mayhem of a couple of places, notably the showers in the wrecked asylum, and the fight in the foundry room. The Foundry battle was particularly cool, with a series of small objectives to hit as you were assaulted on all sides by the bad guys.

But by far my favourite areas were when Black mixed the two elements, having a nominally outdoor battle that was simultaneously claustrophobic and expansive. Fighting through trenches and fortified buildings in one of the town levels was immensely satisfying, and getting in to the asylum through a heavily fortified and entrenched courtyard battle with dug-in APC's and sandbagged roof runs was brilliant. RPGs coming streaking in from the rooftops were just the right side of annoying, particularly because their smoke trails disappeared so quickly, leaving you scanning building tops and open windows, looking for the little blighter before you hear another woosh and have a fraction of a second to dive right or left out of the way of the explosion.

All in all, a top game, well worth the second-hand price I paid for it, and with lots of replay value. A few flawed levels, but overall it's just the right mix of explosive action movie lunacy, sneaking about, blowing things up and desperate dashes through dust and debris filled streets and buildings. A minor classic.
 
 
Jawsus-son Starship
10:29 / 23.09.07
I've been playing the new Medal of Honor game Airbourne for the last few nights, and it's a fairly good romp. Fairly good, but not great.

THings I like; the initial layout of the levels, and the freedom parachuting in allows. When you first start out a level you'll be looking to land safely, get to cover, fire off a few rounds, move, fire etc. After twenty minutes you'll be a screaming eagle, landing in enemy nest, flinging grenades and machine gunning like a pro. It really allows you to pick your style. And for a closed off enviroment, it sure feels open when your falling from the skies.

But this is where the problem lies - every level is the same, all the objectives have been done before, and you're very aware that this is just the latest in a line of mediocre games.

Worse yet anything thats new feels tacked on, or becomes redundent - example, the upgrade system; why? it doesn't even make sense in the game. Every now and again, depending on how often you use a weapon, you get an uprgrade, which boils down to making you a better shot. But who throws a soldier a new barrel for his rifle mid fire fight. Even the jumps become repetitive by the end.

Also, is it not a little crass to make a game about WW2 in which you can kill Nazi's with rocket launchers - does it not in some way tarnish the real life heroism, and make the people who play it shallow odd balls who get enjoyment from another man's harrowing experience? Is it not wrong to insinuate that that was all just "a game" or make light of it by making it a game? I'm rambling.
 
 
Blake Head
22:26 / 31.10.07
Spent the past couple of days playing through F.E.A.R. which I eventually got to run, or at least walk, on my machine. With hindsight I should have delayed finishing it till tonight to extract maximum spookiness, but however. Very enjoyable generally. I didn’t really find it frightening, I have to say, in terms of content, but the general claustrophobic mood led to an enjoyable level of paranoia, sweeping through every room, checking nobody was sneaking up on you, clearing rooms of baddies before progressing, that sort of thing.

The appearance of the game, even at my miserable specs, was good, and as think mentioned elsewhere the office environments really do give you some of the feeling of what it would be like to rush around the nearest corporate environment emptying round after round into multiple pre-fabricated office dividers. That said, it kept to a fairly basic colour scheme throughout – I don’t really remember the last time there was an internal FPS environment I played that felt colourful and lush as well as realistic, the first level of Perfect Dark maybe, but that was ages ago. And the endless pipes! Definitely loses originality points for the default pipes, grates and crates.

Coming off the back of playing through Farcry I think F.E.A.R. suffers a little in comparison. Suddenly from having at least three or four possible plans of action (on the outdoor levels anyway) you’ve only really got one or two for most situations, and there’s a generally linear progression through each level. I also thought that the way the enemy acted seemed too scripted at times, while (in combat) the AI seemed fine, the way the enemy appeared felt artificial sometimes. Maybe I didn’t notice it so well, but I thought they could have done more with the sound as well, generally by the time you’d dealt with one group of baddies you could do whatever you want until you went onto the next “stage”. The levels didn’t feel as connected, in my opinion. It also felt quite short.

That might sound like I disliked it, but I didn’t, there were bits that were great, and without wanting to ruin it for anyone I thought some of the different enemy types and situations you were put in were really very inventive, whilst being quite simple. There was certainly a sufficient level of awwhatthehellwasthat double-take at those bad guys, and a shocked ohnotheydidn’t the first time I spread the limbs of a guard all over a stairwell with a proximity mine, not to mention a chortle when another guard asked the blackened skeleton of his buddy if he was “ok”. I think I was just a little surprised that a game I’d generally got the impression was pretty innovative relied on so many familiar elements from other games, and that’s not even as someone who’s particularly well versed in the genre. The most striking thing, the SloMo effect, gave a satisfying narrative reason why one guy could go through so many others, but in game terms personally I found it quite repetitive going from one area to the next when so much of the time the solution to the problem was stick SloMo on, peak round the corner, kill a couple of clone types, rinse, repeat. Maybe I should stick the difficulty setting up a notch see if that makes a difference.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
11:16 / 02.11.07
It physically hurts at higher difficulty levels. I appreciated the nasty little tricks to make you waste ammo, as well.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
17:47 / 02.11.07
Really didn't like FEAR. felt almost entirely soulless to me. Which, I appreciate, is a fairly vague complaint. There was something lacking almost everywhere - weapons lacked any real punch, the whole 'slow time' thing was underused, envirnments were dullsville (low poly, bland textures, office block).

I get what it was trying to do, but I didn't come away from it caring one way or the other.

Coincidentally, today's seen the release of something quite similar, TimeShift. This one's a whole world of awesome.

The setting's pretty great, for a start - alternate timeline 1939, screwed up by some megalomaniacal scientist dude inventing a time machine and jumping back in time to build his empire. The first couple of levels are, I think, an alt universe London (red phone boxes give it away), and it's almost completely successful in creating a sense of time and place. Airships, jet planes, a gigantic, four-legged mobile fortress stoming overhead. And rain - lots and lots of entirely believable rain.

The time powers work perfectly - you can slow time down, stop it entirely, or reverse it Prince of Persia-style. Stop time, run up to an enemy, steal his gun, speed time back up, let him look confused at the sudden disappearance of his weapon, then shoot him in the face with it. Or slow time down, kill the guy manning an enemy turret, jump into his seat and take out the rest of his squad with it before they've even realised that you've moved from behind your original spot of cover.

Some nice, imaginative puzzles in there which have the feel of some of Half-Life 2's. There's one early on featuring a balancing pipe that's amusing and effective. Not as many of them as I'd have liked, though.

Reverse time is used in one early set piece, where a corridor gets blown to shit and you reverse the explosion, running down the path as the brickwork's all zooming back into place, then watching it all get blown apart again when you get to the other side.

A really fun, fast-paced multiplayer in there, too, which has the time powers in the form of area-of-effect grenades.

Very much recommended. It's going to get lost in amongst the big name stuff that's come out recently or is due out around now, and it really doesn't deserve to be passed over. Get it.
 
 
Blake Head
10:16 / 03.11.07
That sounds intriguing. If it doesn’t spoil it, what’s the catch with that level of control over events? Limited use or challenging situations? The SloMo feels necessary for F.E.A.R., but that might be my lack of skill showing. The problem being, if it felt necessary, and you were using it all the time, and it didn’t cost you anything, you began to wish that it would just work automatically whenever targets appeared.

One of the things I liked about F.E.A.R., though, was the anonymity of the characters and setting, the sense especially that large empty corporate buildings would look a bit like that, that faceless special ops teams would act a bit like that, that presented typically and, well, soullessly, they’d be more convincingly reality-like. Which to some degree I think they messed up by making the overall path through the game so linear; it was scene-breaking how many times you’d go through a lift or a door or jump down to the next level because you knew that wouldn’t harm your progression. The moments I enjoyed best were the ones where there was an interaction between the drab environments and being hooked enough by the setting to shining a flashlight (what was with that crap flashlight anyway?) into darkened offices trying to spot hiding enemies. That’s not that necessary in the game at all, but I was impressed that the game got me thinking that way at all.

And I quite liked the ammo-wasting tricks too, mainly because when you’re not sure how necessary it is to shoot something most people are going to go with the “just in case” option…
 
 
Spatula Clarke
11:12 / 03.11.07
The time powers in TimeShift are just vastly more appealing to use, and more intelligently worked into the game.

The bar governing their use runs out faster than in FEAR, I think, which means you have to think about them a lot more. It also refills more quickly, though. It works a lot like Halo's recharging shield - you constantly need to be aware of the available cover so that you can duck down and let it recharge before running out into battle again. And that's a really addictive mechanic - it's got just the right balance of empowerment and risk.

What I've found myself doing a lot of the time is using stop time so that I can scout out a situation - fire it up, run into a room, check out the enemy positions, run back to cover to plan how I'm going to tackle it.

Also, the variety of the environments - and their solidity - is leagues ahead of FEAR. First level is set in muddy trenches formed by destroyed buildings and construction sites, like this weird alt universe take on the Great War. Then it opens out into an urban park space - you have to scrabble around for cover here, which is a fantastically judged change of pace from the tight corridors of earlier. Then it's straight into a battle outside a large government building. Whereas in FEAR, you're always fighting in the set from The Office.

The time powers work better in the context of the setting, too. I never understood what they were doing in FEAR - did Monolith even attempt to justify their existence within that game's narrative? This, though, is a story about time travel.

It's another highly linear game, but you don't really care about that while playing. It's a bit like Metal Gear Solid, in some respects - linear storyline, but the freedom comes from deciding how you're going to approach each set piece.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
12:37 / 03.11.07
I mean, here. This is what's just happened in the last fifteen, twenty minutes of the game. SPOILERS, obviously.

Starts off and I'm in a zeppelin, flying over a snow-covered mountain range. Enemy bombers appear, as do hot air balloons with flying mines attached, and I take control of a turret on the side of the zep. Shooting the bad guys down, I can still use my time powers to allow me to get shots in on the fast-moving targets and take them down before they know what's happened. Great sequence.

Then we land, and I comandeer a quad bike. Not before being attacked by another squad, including a tank with a guy shooting at me from the turret. Stop time, snipe the turret operator, take cover, use slow time to work my way through them.

So, quad bike. Riding it through the mountain roads, come to a bridge. My suit says "warning: unstable surface detected" and I switch to stop time, presuming that the unstable surface is the bridge itself and that it's about to collapse into the ravine below. Even now, I don't know if that was actually what was going to happen, but it's an indication of how natural the use of the powers quickly becomes.

A few more battles aong the way, I find myself overlooking a largish enemy encampment. Lots of soldiers stood around a wood burner, having a chat. Three of them are kitted out with jet packs. I slow time and snipe those three in the head, take them out before they can become a nuisance. The others react - slowly - and I duck behind cover. After taking most out, one's still manning a turret. I use stop time and keep jumping behind cover, working my way over to him while he thinks I'm still where I was originally. Pop up behind him and clonk him on the nut.

Then there's a gate blocking a railway tunnel that I need to get through. Pick up an eplosive charge frrom the enemy tents, plant it. The countdown timer flashes up with two seconds - no warning - so I flip into slow time and run away from it.

Then I get on the train and power it up. Riding the tracks until I spot in front of me that they come to a sudden, unexpected end, with a big drop. Slow time, jump off, let the train crash on its own.

Like I say, twenty minutes. Such a fantastic little game.
 
  

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