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Published by: Cenega |
By Flaviu Volosciuc
Published: November 2, 2006
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In general the gameplay resumes to a close combat fight, without having time of applying different strategies. From the beginning you will be thrown in a huge fight with your enemy. You don't have time to breath between two killed enemies.
Eventually just push the quicksave button. The rate of pushing this button will increase from level to level at almost one push per killed enemy. Quite frustrating when you think of it. And this situation is on the normal level of difficulty. But why it seems to be so difficult? Because the developers wanted to introduce many realistic features. The AI of the enemy is really aggressive, but not too clever. So you won't see any revolution in this field. Sometimes the AI cheats. I was running towards a crate from where an enemy was throwing grenades at me. I stopped in front of that crate while he was behind and I still don't know how he could throw another one in less than a second exactly on my position. That means that the grenade took right on the corner of that crate and hit me! Of course the next step was F9 quickload.
The good thing is that the enemy won't stay in the same position and they know how to use the environment while they will attack you. They will dodge from behind crates or doors to shoot you and hide again while they have to reload their weapons. They use a lot frag and flare grenades and their shooting range is much more accurate than yours. Their huge number and aggressiveness will make you problems in getting further into the game. There are notable differences between guns based on fire power, fire rate and recoil. This seems to be a good implementation of the shooting effect but the recoil will make you real problems. While in other shooters the Kalashnikov is a medium range weapon with a high recoil, in the demo this was the best from the whole arsenal.
Unfortunately the game has nothing original in it. This method of crouching almost all the game while sneaking behind different environmental objects (crates, doors, walls) and shooting from covered positions is very similar to Kill Switch.
While almost everything else is from Max Payne. The back-person view, the slow time feature and the bullet-time jump. The bullet-time effect looks very good compared to the original one from Max Payne but is not so efficient. The idea of it is to become faster than your enemy in slow motion. But the problem here is that the enemy remains almost fast as you and the accuracy of your shooting will be really low. So in time you will not use these features anymore because you will realize that a more normal approach of the game will be much more efficient. I will give you a hint: running in crouch position is a little faster than running in normal position. This is the method that you should use despite of bullet-time effect.
The good thing about this game is the graphic engine. It looks great also at a lower resolution. That's because of the high resolution textures implemented in the game. Beside this, the game supports all the modern graphical effects such as: vertex\pixel shader rendering pipeline, full scene shadow mapping, pseudodynamics lightmaps, bump mapping, facial animation, etc.
Another good thing is the in-house physics engine. It comes with a great rag-doll effect and with some destructible surfaces (tables, pillars, doors). Unfortunately these surfaces can be noticed from the start without shooting on them. This makes the environment not so realistic. The new feature of this engine is the deflect effect. Depending on what surface you are shooting, the bullets will penetrate the surface or deflect in another direction. This effect can be practiced in the training mission present in both demos.
The EAX sound is great and helps the gamer to feel the battle at high voltage. Trying to recreate a more commercial atmosphere, the game uses some music along the missions to increase the intensity of the battle. But can you feel yourself as a DEA agent while some stupid techno music sounds in your ears? Come on guys! Be realistic until the end!
The game requires 1GB of RAM memory if you want to run it smoothly. Otherwise you will have problems while you are trying to exit the game because of the overloaded RAM memory. The game still has some bugs, such as weird rag-doll positions or graphical errors. While I was trying to make a quickload of the game, the camera began tilting again and again. I had to restart the game in order to stop this error.
No multiplayer, but the game has the capacity to have one implemented. Maybe in the full version. Anyway I'm sure that the one implemented will be very similar to Counter strike due to urban environments and the huge amount of guns.
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