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At least one of the unlockable Elite heads is round and looks the same size as a regular human marine head, so thee's definitely a centralised area that counts as a headshot, and external areas that don't. They wouldn't have altered the hitbox for every single model - it'd make everything massively unbalanced and unfairly weighted towards those players who've unlocked the smaller heads, and those are likely to be the players who don't need any kind of advantage over others.
Finished the campaign on Heroic difficulty a couple of hours ago. It's a huge improvement on the second game and, imo, possibly better than the original. No one area outstays its welcome, there are no areas that you can get lost in simply because every room looks the same throughout, indoor areas are used sparingly (after the second chapter). There is a Flood-specific level, but even that is pretty good fun to play through - I've heard a lot of people complaining about it, but I'm fairly sure that's just because of an instinctive negative reaction to anything to do with the Flood after the Library level in the first game. Once you understand how that different type of enemy functions, it's not that much of a chore to deal with.
The storyline is a mess in a lot of places, because Bungie aren't particularly great storytellers. It's a shame, because there are some wonderfully directed moments and some smart writing, but structurally, the story is all over the place. The whole backstory, for example - the stuff about the Forerunners, why the Ark is hidden on Earth, all of that - is told in some very short and confusing text, held within seven hidden terminals that you may well end up missing. And because a lot of the exposition is presented via comms chatter while you're playing, it's entirely possible to ignore it by accident and then think that you've missed a cutscene somewhere along the line.
But you don't really play it for the storyline, so it's not an enormous deal-breaker. There are some brilliantly-realised moments in here, still - some really epic stuff that recalls the first two games, but builds on and improves them. And it's also a polishing of the best aspects of the previous two - I'd almost forgotten just how perfectly integrated into the regular FPS gameplay the vehicles are in this series.
It's also learned a lot from the online multiplayer in 2, which it's taken onboard for the campaign. Anybody who's taken out a Wraith with a grenade to the engine port in H2 online will know how satisfying it is to pull off, and you get a number of occasions to do the same here.
Lots to return for. I love the idea of the meta-game - you can turn a scoring system on, which makes each level a score attack. Play it with any of the hidden skulls turned on (once you've found them, natch) and you get score multipliers for the increased difficulty. That'll keep people coming back to the campaign for a long time (although the old stuff like trying to break out of the the invisible barriers should guarantee that, anyway).
A lot of the reason why I got so much from 2 was Bungie's community support, and they've totally expanded that here. For those who didn't take 2 online, check this lot out:
Here, you can see all of my multiplayer and campaign games. Click on one of those games and you end up here, the detailed game breakdown page. Click on the 'Game Viewer' tab and you get different views of the map, plus icons showing where all the kills took place (this, annoyingly, isn't as clear as it used to be - it's not as easy to see who killed who, plus the icons at the botton are wqay too small). Click on my icon at the top of the screen and you get to the main profile page - from there, click on 'Career Stats' and you end up here, showing all the medals that have been obtained throughout the time with the game.
It's immense. Plus, I'm still mucking about with the replay/screenshot stuff - that could last me forever.
Catch!
It's the amount of care that Bungie put into the bits and pieces that surround the game that's most impressive, just as it was last time around. The difference is that there's actually a damn good single player mode in here as well, this time. |
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