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[Spider]

 

I think the DA2 demo went until the Flemeth scene.

 

One of the primary reasons for doing it was to show the combat differences (one could argue we hurt our sales, but honestly I'd rather have a lost sale with someone going "eh, that game isn't for me" rather than to be caught completely unaware.  Heck, due to preorders we already had people who were disappointed with the change).

 

The (catastrophic) intro until Flemeth + the somewhat more entertaining Isabela recruiting mission spliced in. Mmm, Isabela...

 

While I applaud the decision to make the demo, the intro level wasn't exactly the best one Bioware's ever designed (close to the contrary, I'd say), and probably succeeded in turning off a lot of people who might have been on the fence otherwise.

 

The demo actually got me to buy the game. It convinced me that while the camera was horrid, combat would still be fun, and the new flashy maneuvers was kinda cool. Though I kinda wanted an excuse to get the game, since I liked the first so much. My instincts told me no though, and unfortunately in the end they turned out to be right.

 

So yeah, demos are a double edged sword. Given their length, they can sometimes not show you enough, and sometimes not show you how tedious somethign will be after doing too much. but they're better than not having a demo regardless.

[Tasaio]

 

The (catastrophic) intro until Flemeth + the somewhat more entertaining Isabela recruiting mission spliced in. Mmm, Isabela...

 

While I applaud the decision to make the demo, the intro level wasn't exactly the best one Bioware's ever designed (close to the contrary, I'd say), and probably succeeded in turning off a lot of people who might have been on the fence otherwise.

 

I would rate DA2's intro as the second-worst in a Bioware game.

 

The worst is tied between Irenicus' dungeon in BG2, and ME3's "introduction". (I remember thinking, at the time, that I could write off the beginning as the worst part of the game. That was before I saw the "endings".)

 

RE: Demos

 

Demo is short for "demonstration", because it's literally a product demonstration. I think it's the publisher's decision to release a demo (or not); but I also think that the onus is on publishers to ensure that a demo is above-average, compared to the rest of the game. Demos should be carefully designed to either showcase the best parts of a game, or to involve the player enough that s/he wants to continue the story. In contrast to this, the DA2 demo was too rushed to involve you in the story, and only "demonstrated" the worst area of the game.

 

I actually think it would be to the financial benefit of publishers if demos today were longer, more complete, and more satisfying. The more time I invest progressing through a game (via its demo), the more I'll become involved in the story or gameworld. Old FPSes like Doom, Heretic and Duke3D were commercially successful, yet they made the first of three episodes shareware (about 1/3 of the entire game). Today, releasing 1/3 of your game as a demo would be seen as a radical move.

 

The only thing I don't agree with is cutting story from the main game, to place in the demo.

 

For example, Warcraft III's demo contains the entire "Exodus of the Horde" tutorial campaign that (Blizzard later admitted) had chapters 3-5 removed from the main game.

[alanschu]

I think RPG demos are a bit more challenging, for much of their gameplay elements can be difficult to appreciate in a condensed period of time, compared to say an RTS or an FPS.

 

The issue with a longer demo is that it ends up taking more time, when in reality I'd love to be using that time to focus on the main game.

[Gorth]

 

 

I think the DA2 demo went until the Flemeth scene.

 

One of the primary reasons for doing it was to show the combat differences (one could argue we hurt our sales, but honestly I'd rather have a lost sale with someone going "eh, that game isn't for me" rather than to be caught completely unaware.  Heck, due to preorders we already had people who were disappointed with the change).

 

The (catastrophic) intro until Flemeth + the somewhat more entertaining Isabela recruiting mission spliced in. Mmm, Isabela...

 

While I applaud the decision to make the demo, the intro level wasn't exactly the best one Bioware's ever designed (close to the contrary, I'd say), and probably succeeded in turning off a lot of people who might have been on the fence otherwise.

 

The demo actually got me to buy the game. It convinced me that while the camera was horrid, combat would still be fun, and the new flashy maneuvers was kinda cool. Though I kinda wanted an excuse to get the game, since I liked the first so much. My instincts told me no though, and unfortunately in the end they turned out to be right.

 

So yeah, demos are a double edged sword. Given their length, they can sometimes not show you enough, and sometimes not show you how tedious somethign will be after doing too much. but they're better than not having a demo regardless.

 

One thing to make sure of when you release a demo is, what is your selling point? Are you doing yourself favours by being "honest" (in what you chose to show)?

 

Entirely anecdotal, I know, but I was lined up for buying DA2 at release (since I liked DA:O) and dropped it like a hot potato after playing the demo. The "combat" and complete omission of anything even remotely resembling the game mechanics and skill system from the first was what killed it for me. Only much later, thanks to some persistent individuals here, did I pick it up on a bargain and gave it a serious playthrough (two actually). I still hate the game mechanics, but other parts, the characters in particular, to some degree made up for it. Ironically, none of those were shown in the demo

[AwesomeOcelot]

Dead Space's creator calls the increase in action elements a necessary evil

 

And the commentors completely ignore his comments in favor of bashing EA.

His comments don't really excuse them, it's clearly EA's pressure to broaden the fan base, therefore the "necessary" part of the "evil" is down to them. The expanding scope of the game, in terms of setting, clearly the developers are owning that decision. The wrong of this is that they want to keep the core fan base, so they call it "Dead Space" and they stick a 3 on it. I'm not a fan of Dead Space, but I can sympathise with fans when developers and publishers turn a series from one thing into another because of their obsession with expanding the fan base, "franchises" and aversion to creating new IP. Of course this is consumers fault as well, they were warned.

 

There should never have been a "balance" to strike, if the profit warranted it there should have been a real Dead Space 3, and this game could have had a new title. The same with Dragon Age 2, could have been Dragon Age: Console Edition or whatever like Unreal Tournament and Unreal Championship. Did the sales of Dragon Age: Origins warrant a proper sequel? I don't know, but I'd rather have no sequels than what's happening now.

Edited February 13, 2013 by AwesomeOcelot

[Volourn]

"The worst is tied between Irenicus' dungeon in BG2, and ME3's "introduction"."

 

Disagree on BG2. It ahs one of the best intros for any game ever. ME3, on the other hand, definitely is BIO's worst or at least top 3 though I cna't think of any worse ones at the moment.

[Nepenthe]

As someone who's played Colonial Marines I have to say it's not as bad as the reviews are making out. It's only an average game sure, but I'm having fun with both the co-op campaign and adversarial multiplayer and I think it is certainly better than AVP2010 in both areas. I can't see it having a lot of longevity (In fact, given how long it already takes to get matches started I expect the game may be pretty dead soon) and I'd definitely advise people not to buy it at full price but this is not the worst game ever made and I believe there is a certain level of bandwagoning going on in addition to valid complaints.

So it's just another Sega game getting harshly reviewed, just like Alpha Protocol?

[Morgoth]

 

 

Duck Aliens. And this is considered canon by the developer/publisher?

 

It sincerely hurts my soul how disrespectful these nerds and "fans" from Gearbox & Co, as opposed to creators and innovators a' la Obsidian, are treating IPs of such magnitude.

 

 

[AGX-17]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Duck Aliens. And this is considered canon by the developer/publisher?

 

It sincerely hurts my soul how disrespectful these nerds and "fans" from Gearbox & Co, as opposed to creators and innovators a' la Obsidian, are treating IPs of such magnitude.

 

 

 

 

General badness of the game according to reviews aside, the gif is kind of evocative of something Obsidian is frequently cited for having in excess. Edited February 13, 2013 by AGX-17

[Azure79]

I don't know anything about CM, but the video linked seems to be 'pacifist mode' which I guess makes the xenomorphs non-violent? It seemed that way in the video. So maybe it was done intentionally for a laugh. 

 

I can't wait for the next Arkham game. I thought the overall story for Arkham Asylum was a little anti-climactic, but everything else was great. I hope the rumors about a silver age Batman are false as I'd rather see the story continue from the aftermath of AC.

Edited February 13, 2013 by Azure79

[Volourn]

"creators and innovators a' la Obsidian, are treating IPs of such magnitude."
 

I like Obsidian but they haven't even innovated a single thing. i'd like to give them cedit for the innovation of delusional fanboys but sadly that has phenomena has been around for eons so no credit to them for that either.

[HoonDing]

I can't wait for the next Arkham game. I thought the overall story for Arkham Asylum was a little anti-climactic, but everything else was great. I hope the rumors about a silver age Batman are false as I'd rather see the story continue from the aftermath of AC.

As far as I am concerned, no Batgirl = no play.

[cyberarmy]

I don't know anything about CM, but the video linked seems to be 'pacifist mode' which I guess makes the xenomorphs non-violent? It seemed that way in the video. So maybe it was done intentionally for a laugh. 

Nope, sorry. This is how the (non-existant)AI works in game, you can run through aliens, check points and complete the level just like that .

And that .gif part is from semi-stealth mission. Appearently Aliens only sense you if they can hear you?!?

[Nightshape]

"The worst is tied between Irenicus' dungeon in BG2, and ME3's "introduction"."

 

Disagree on BG2. It ahs one of the best intros for any game ever. ME3, on the other hand, definitely is BIO's worst or at least top 3 though I cna't think of any worse ones at the moment.

... No... The BG2 intro sucked.

[BruceVC]

 

I can't wait for the next Arkham game. I thought the overall story for Arkham Asylum was a little anti-climactic, but everything else was great. I hope the rumors about a silver age Batman are false as I'd rather see the story continue from the aftermath of AC.

As far as I am concerned, no Batgirl = no play.

 

I thought Poison Ivy, Cat Girl  and Talia al Ghul were really hot.

But the whole game was very aesthetically pleasing, I am excited about the next one.

[WorstUsernameEver]

 

 

"The worst is tied between Irenicus' dungeon in BG2, and ME3's "introduction"."

 

Disagree on BG2. It ahs one of the best intros for any game ever. ME3, on the other hand, definitely is BIO's worst or at least top 3 though I cna't think of any worse ones at the moment.

... No... The BG2 intro sucked.

 

 

Only because it's an eminently replayable game and it gets tedious on replays tho'. First time it was p. okay with me.

[Nightshape]

 

 

"The worst is tied between Irenicus' dungeon in BG2, and ME3's "introduction"."

 

Disagree on BG2. It ahs one of the best intros for any game ever. ME3, on the other hand, definitely is BIO's worst or at least top 3 though I cna't think of any worse ones at the moment.

... No... The BG2 intro sucked.

 

Only because it's an eminently replayable game and it gets tedious on replays tho'. First time it was p. okay with me.

Sure... But its a massive flaw.

[Hurlshort]

"creators and innovators a' la Obsidian, are treating IPs of such magnitude."

 

I like Obsidian but they haven't even innovated a single thing. i'd like to give them cedit for the innovation of delusional fanboys but sadly that has phenomena has been around for eons so no credit to them for that either.

 

Alpha Protocol was an innovation of choice and consequence.  Sadly it didn't have the impact where that will ripple out to other developers.    

[Morgoth]

Xbox creator slams current Xbox strategy: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-02-13-creator-of-original-xbox-slams-microsofts-current-xbox-strategy

[Serrano]

 

So it's just another Sega game getting harshly reviewed, just like Alpha Protocol

 

That’s going too far in the other direction, it deserves low scores (by that I mean around 5/10) and criticism but people are going way overboard. It has genuine problems and it’s not going to last very long, the campaign took me 8 hours at most in co-op (But I plan to replay it today for whatever that’s worth to you). I tried the campaign solo briefly but didn’t get far enough to get a sense of how that feels in comparison to co-op. From what I hear the AI companions (usually there’s just one tagging along but sometimes there are as many as four running around with you and more marines for the big crescendo events) are not a great help and can cause a lot of frustration, especially when you have to expose yourself to weld a door or hack a pannel and they aren’t up to protecting you. The enemy AI isn’t entirely braindead, the aliens will flank you through vents and broken windows and by climbing under catwalks, the ceiling, behind stacked shelves ect. (Though not to mislead you, most encounters will have the swarm going for a direct approach and it’s only the only the odd few at a time that sneak up to cause interference. They’ll also pounce on you and you have to button mash to escape, leaving you vulnerable to everything else around you), and the enemy soldiers will take cover behind things and occasionally throw/fire grenades that can one-shot you. They’re not terrifically intelligent and in both cases it’s numbers not tactics that make them dangerous, but at the hardest setting most enemies have a high damage output and my entire team went down more than a few times. One of the reasons I may have had a better time than people playing single player was that in co-op if you lose all your health you are incapacitated and need to be rescued by a team-mate before a final life-bar runs out. You can still be hurt while incapacitated which makes your life-bar run out faster but if you do die you will just respawn at the next checkpoint. Having co-op partners could have saved me from having to replay sections that I may have been stuck on, possibly sparing me some frustration.

 

There is a very short stealth section (5-10mins tops) without weapons where you have to navigate what is basically a sewer with blind, shuffling suicide bomber aliens that are attracted to sound. They’re the ones in the video Morgoth posted and it’s the only time you see them (which is kind of a shame because they do monstrous damage and would have been quite deadly thrown into a battle with other alien types supporting). It was the only time I was actually bored playing A:CM but it was over so quickly that it’s barely worth mentioning.

 

You spend a lot of time fighting humans as well as aliens which people seem to be really annoyed about, which is fair enough, it’s an aliens game so you want aliens, especially if the game is short (I’m not sure what the ratio is for human/alien encounters but I’d guess around 50:50?). That said, I personally didn’t mind and think it works well enough. It changes up the pace, it allows for three way battles, gives you an excuse to use other weapons, provides opportunities for cinematic moments and it’s just fun to have firefights on Aliens’ backdrops like the Sulaco with enemies also weilding weapons from the aliens movies (Even if you feel it was executed badly here, you can’t tell me that seeing or playing Colonial Marines fighting other armies isn’t a fun concept).

 

The story is passable for an action game but it’s wafer thin and the characters are all shallow marine stereotypes. The returning characters don’t sound like themselves and the story twists as mentioned in reviews are obvious. I should also mention that the co-op campaign tells the story as if it were a single player game and only the host is ever acknowledged, the other players are just there. That’s not a problem in itself but it relates to game design choices that are a little jarring sometimes like how they handle checkpoints, when one person reaches a checkpoint everyone else is teleported there. Any notion given in interviews that A:CM was a worthy story sequel to the film was false advertising frankly, but it wasn’t that bad. But one good thing that may come of it is a decent movie sequel if there actually were meetings with Scott or Cameron about the game and it’s place in the continuity, fingers crossed.

Some bugs and gameplay issues;

 

* You can equip two main weapons, a pistol and a grenade/claymore. Unfortunately when you pick up one of the legendry weapons in the campaign it goes to the slot that your equipped weapon was assigned to, the original weapon disappears and as far as I can tell, can’t be re-equipped for the campaign, at all, even by starting a new game . I found myself with two shotguns for quite a time and lots of long-ranged ranged combat encounters where I was at a disadvantage because enemy soldiers do a lot of damage, especially when a bunch are firing at you making it difficult to close large open gaps and corridors. To add insult to injury you can’t even pick up pulse rifles from dead enemies, I had to wait a couple of chapters until I could pick up Hudson’s three-shot burst pulse rifle and frankly the fully automatic Pulse Rifle you begin with seemed superior to me. It’s also worth noting that you can customise the two original weapons with different sights and attachments (like an under slung shotgun for the pulse rifle instead of a grenade launcher) but the legendary weapons are not tweakable.

 

* It’s not entirely clear how matchmaking works but if you’re assigned to be the host, you can’t start a co-op campaign until four people are in the lobby (and drop-in co-op is not an option for the singleplayer campaign), that can take some time as not many people are playing at the moment, and it can take longer if not be impossible if you want to play a certain chapter. Once four people join, even if someone then leaves the game can start and people can join a game already in progress. If you are another person are in a lobby but the other two slots are empty then you can be waiting forever before being allowed to start the game. I assume that everyone so far who has joined a session in-progress is doing it through their Steam Friends lists because I have always joined co-op sessions from the start of a chapter, but I may be wrong.

 

* You can only mute people in the lobby and I don’t think you can kick people at all. If someone joins a match in progress and starts yelling, swearing and generally being really annoying there’s nothing you can do about it until the chapter/match ends and you are all taken back to the lobby.

 

* The game uses the COD Door System where you frequently (but not all the time) have to wait for an NPC to reach and open a door for you before you can progress. The NPCs can be slow and while I and my group were never waiting long, we did have to wait sometimes.

 

* In sections without the COD Door System you can run past enemies to the checkpoints and they will all disappear as the new set are loaded. This is poor design, I was lucky in that my group all actually wanted to play the game and didn’t take advantage of the exploit but if one person decides to sprint through the campaign it’s going to ruin the session for people.

 

You can customise weapons, alien attacks and appearances with points you earn from playing the campaign and adversarial modes. The COD style weapon mods may sound like pointless fanservice but there are only a few options for each gun and almost all of them make a real tangible difference to the weapon. The pulse rifle for example has an under slung grenade launcher by default, that can be replaced with a shotgun or a incindiary grenade launcher. The magazine can be increased at the cost of a longer reload time and you can choose between a better scope for longshots or a red-dot laser sight which is more accurate that the aiming crosshair (which is also disabled on the harder campaign settings).

 

I’ve mostly been playing campaign so I only have a sketchy view of the alien unlocks they look like they add some significant veriety too. You can choose between quick or heavy strikes, a tail spearing attack or a lower powered 360 degree attack, ect. with the warrior, different acid spit attacks with the ranged class and so on. You can also add traits like being able to move faster or being able to shug off some fatal damage.

 

I’ve found the adversarial multiplayer to be fun, fast but small scale (6 players per team max, depending on the mode and the maps are sized accordingly) , the sides seem pretty balanced at the moment and both teams have a turn at playing marines and aliens in all the modes, but this is before people unlock everything and figure out how to use all the attacks and equipment. There are a number of modes including Team Deathmatch, Extermination - which is where marines basically need to capture as many areas as possible before a timer runs out, Escape- which is like a mini-Left 4 Dead mode, there are a series of checkpoint doors along linear levels that the marines need to reach and are scored based on how far the get. It’s my favourite so far. And Survivor - which is where 4 marines have to surive until a time limit expires, and fallen marines come back as aliens. There are no AI controlled aliensin any of the adversarial modes, it’s always 4v4-6v6.

 

I enjoy the adversarial modes but I think that given how few maps there are for each and how limited it feels in terms of variety, the replayability just isn’t there. And there is already some waiting involved in getting a lobby together for matches so I’m not sure how long it will be possible to play CM online with random people.

 

Personally I enjoy how the alien controls in this game feel, there are visual representations to help you judge acid spits and pounces,transitioning from surface to surface is easier in A:CM than it was in AVP2010 but you aren’t as fast so you have to rely on ambushes more than blitzing around like a muderous roadrunner.

 

I’ve left some things out but I’ve written way too much here already, sorry about that. The reviews make it sound like there is nothing good about the game at all, and that’s just not true, I enjoyed it. But there are so many better FPS and action/horror games out there with a lot more content that it’s not worth buying A:CM at full price, especially when it’s been released within a week of Dead Space 3.

 

 

 

Edited February 13, 2013 by Serrano

[Deadly_Nightshade]

System Shock 2 is coming to GoG tomorrow! 

[BruceVC]

 

 

So it's just another Sega game getting harshly reviewed, just like Alpha Protocol

 

That’s going too far in the other direction, it deserves low scores (by that I mean around 5/10) and criticism but people are going way overboard. It has genuine problems and it’s not going to last very long, the campaign took me 8 hours at most in co-op (But I plan to replay it today for whatever that’s worth to you). I tried the campaign solo briefly but didn’t get far enough to get a sense of how that feels in comparison to co-op. From what I hear the AI companions (usually there’s just one tagging along but sometimes there are as many as four running around with you and more marines for the big crescendo events) are not a great help and can cause a lot of frustration, especially when you have to expose yourself to weld a door or hack a pannel and they aren’t up to protecting you. The enemy AI isn’t entirely braindead, the aliens will flank you through vents and broken windows and by climbing under catwalks, the ceiling, behind stacked shelves ect. (Though not to mislead you, most encounters will have the swarm going for a direct approach and it’s only the only the odd few at a time that sneak up to cause interference. They’ll also pounce on you and you have to button mash to escape, leaving you vulnerable to everything else around you), and the enemy soldiers will take cover behind things and occasionally throw/fire grenades that can one-shot you. They’re not terrifically intelligent and in both cases it’s numbers not tactics that make them dangerous, but at the hardest setting most enemies have a high damage output and my entire team went down more than a few times. One of the reasons I may have had a better time than people playing single player was that in co-op if you lose all your health you are incapacitated and need to be rescued by a team-mate before a final life-bar runs out. You can still be hurt while incapacitated which makes your life-bar run out faster but if you do die you will just respawn at the next checkpoint. Having co-op partners could have saved me from having to replay sections that I may have been stuck on, possibly sparing me some frustration.

 

There is a very short stealth section (5-10mins tops) without weapons where you have to navigate what is basically a sewer with blind, shuffling suicide bomber aliens that are attracted to sound. They’re the ones in the video Morgoth posted and it’s the only time you see them (which is kind of a shame because they do monstrous damage and would have been quite deadly thrown into a battle with other alien types supporting). It was the only time I was actually bored playing A:CM but it was over so quickly that it’s barely worth mentioning.

 

You spend a lot of time fighting humans as well as aliens which people seem to be really annoyed about, which is fair enough, it’s an aliens game so you want aliens, especially if the game is short (I’m not sure what the ratio is for human/alien encounters but I’d guess around 50:50?). That said, I personally didn’t mind and think it works well enough. It changes up the pace, it allows for three way battles, gives you an excuse to use other weapons, provides opportunities for cinematic moments and it’s just fun to have firefights on Aliens’ backdrops like the Sulaco with enemies also weilding weapons from the aliens movies (Even if you feel it was executed badly here, you can’t tell me that seeing or playing Colonial Marines fighting other armies isn’t a fun concept).

 

The story is passable for an action game but it’s wafer thin and the characters are all shallow marine stereotypes. The returning characters don’t sound like themselves and the story twists as mentioned in reviews are obvious. I should also mention that the co-op campaign tells the story as if it were a single player game and only the host is ever acknowledged, the other players are just there. That’s not a problem in itself but it relates to game design choices that are a little jarring sometimes like how they handle checkpoints, when one person reaches a checkpoint everyone else is teleported there. Any notion given in interviews that A:CM was a worthy story sequel to the film was false advertising frankly, but it wasn’t that bad. But one good thing that may come of it is a decent movie sequel if there actually were meetings with Scott or Cameron about the game and it’s place in the continuity, fingers crossed.

Some bugs and gameplay issues;

 

* You can equip two main weapons, a pistol and a grenade/claymore. Unfortunately when you pick up one of the legendry weapons in the campaign it goes to the slot that your equipped weapon was assigned to, the original weapon disappears and as far as I can tell, can’t be re-equipped, at all, even by starting a new game . I found myself with two shotguns for quite a time and lots of long-ranged ranged combat encounters where I was at a disadvantage because enemy soldiers do a lot of damage, especially when a bunch are firing at you making it difficult to close large open gaps and corridors. To add insult to injury you can’t even pick up pulse rifles from dead enemies, I had to wait a couple of chapters until I could pick up Hudson’s three-shot burst pulse rifle and frankly the fully automatic Pulse Rifle you begin with seemed superior to me. It’s also worth noting that you can customise the two original weapons with different sights and attachments (like an under slung shotgun for the pulse rifle instead of a grenade launcher) but the legendary weapons are not tweakable.

 

* It’s not entirely clear how matchmaking works but if you’re assigned to be the host, you can’t start a co-op campaign until four people are in the lobby (and drop-in co-op is not an option for the singleplayer campaign), that can take some time as not many people are playing at the moment, and it can take longer if not be impossible if you want to play a certain chapter. Once four people join, even if someone then leaves the game can start and people can join a game already in progress. If you are another person are in a lobby but the other two slots are empty then you can be waiting forever before being allowed to start the game. I assume that everyone so far who has joined a session in-progress is doing it through their Steam Friends lists because I have always joined co-op sessions from the start of a chapter, but I may be wrong.

 

* You can only mute people in the lobby and I don’t think you can kick people at all. If someone joins a match in progress and starts yelling, swearing and generally being really annoying there’s nothing you can do about it until the chapter/match ends and you are all taken back to the lobby.

 

* The game uses the COD Door System where you frequently (but not all the time) have to wait for an NPC to reach and open a door for you before you can progress. The NPCs can be slow and while I and my group were never waiting long, we did have to wait sometimes.

 

* In sections without the COD Door System you can run past enemies to the checkpoints and they will all disappear as the new set are loaded. This is poor design, I was lucky in that my group all actually wanted to play the game and didn’t take advantage of the exploit but if one person decides to sprint through the campaign it’s going to ruin the session for people.

 

You can customise weapons, alien attacks and appearances with points you earn from playing the campaign and adversarial modes. The COD style weapon mods may sound like pointless fanservice but there are only a few options for each gun and almost all of them make a real tangible difference to the weapon. The pulse rifle for example has an under slung grenade launcher by default, that can be replaced with a shotgun or a incindiary grenade launcher. The magazine can be increased at the cost of a longer reload time and you can choose between a better scope for longshots or a red-dot laser sight which is more accurate that the aiming crosshair (which is also disabled on the harder campaign settings).

 

I’ve mostly been playing campaign so I only have a sketchy view of the alien unlocks they look like they add some significant veriety too. You can choose between quick or heavy strikes, a tail spearing attack or a lower powered 360 degree attack, ect. with the warrior, different acid spit attacks with the ranged class and so on. You can also add traits like being able to move faster or being able to shug off some fatal damage.

 

I’ve found the adversarial multiplayer to be fun, fast but small scale (6 players per team max, depending on the mode and the maps are sized accordingly) , the sides seem pretty balanced at the moment and both teams have a turn at playing marines and aliens in all the modes, but this is before people unlock everything and figure out how to use all the attacks and equipment. There are a number of modes including Team Deathmatch, Extermination - which is where marines basically need to capture as many areas as possible before a timer runs out, Escape- which is like a mini-Left 4 Dead mode, there are a series of checkpoint doors along linear levels that the marines need to reach and are scored based on how far the get. It’s my favourite so far. And Survivor - which is where 4 marines have to surive until a time limit expires, and fallen marines come back as aliens. There are no AI controlled aliensin any of the adversarial modes, it’s always 4v4-6v6.

 

I enjoy the adversarial modes but I think that given how few maps there are for each and how limited it feels in terms of variety, the replayability just isn’t there. And there is already some waiting involved in getting a lobby together for matches so I’m not sure how long it will be possible to play CM online with random people.

 

Personally I enjoy how the alien controls in this game feel, there are visual representations to help you judge acid spits and pounces,transitioning from surface to surface is easier in A:CM than it was in AVP2010 but you aren’t as fast so you have to rely on ambushes more than blitzing around like a muderous roadrunner.

 

I’ve left some things out but I’ve written way too much here already, sorry about that. The reviews make it sound like there is nothing good about the game at all, and that’s just not true, I enjoyed it. But there are so many better FPS and action/horror games out there with a lot more content that it’s not worth buying A:CM at full price, especially when it’s been released within a week of Dead Space 3.

 

 

 

 

 

Wow Serrano thanks for the excellent and comprehensive review, I don't think a person can ask for information than what you provided. Nice one

 

For me in  life there are far too many good games out there so based on yours and others peoples reviews I am going to skip this one.

Edited February 13, 2013 by BruceVC

[WorstUsernameEver]

Sure... But its a massive flaw.

I don't know if it's a "massive" flaw, but it's so common that I find it difficult to think of games that don't present it. Edited February 13, 2013 by WorstUsernameEver

[sorophx]

Brutal Legend on PC:

finally

[Darkpriest]

 

 

 

"The worst is tied between Irenicus' dungeon in BG2, and ME3's "introduction"."

 

Disagree on BG2. It ahs one of the best intros for any game ever. ME3, on the other hand, definitely is BIO's worst or at least top 3 though I cna't think of any worse ones at the moment.

... No... The BG2 intro sucked.

 

Only because it's an eminently replayable game and it gets tedious on replays tho'. First time it was p. okay with me.

Sure... But its a massive flaw.

 

Nah, it's "a feature"...

 

It's a bit tedious once you've done it more than 2-3 times, but other than that I remember it very well the first time I've played... The introduction was really good!!! I can bear with such introductions, although I admit, that the most enjoyable introductions I've experienced were the ones from DA:O