One of the greatest games in the history of all of gaming.
You are Storm 1, a bad ass soldier that is at the heart of all the action. Theres no special focus on your guy in particular. The game is more about the entire worlds effort to repel the invaders.
This is basically just a hella awesome FPS game where you fight against giant ants, spiders, walkign robots, cybernetically enhanced dinosaurs, flying robots, four legged robots, UFO Transports and a mothership. Theres only a couple of actual stages but they get heavily reused(but you wont care). There are some heavily metropolitan area's with multistory buildings, there is a beach, a mountainous area, and some underground tunnels.
The first thing to do is choose your weapons. You only get to take 2 weapons into battle. That kinda sucks but it makes it more tactical and stuff. The weapon catagories are: Assault Rifles, Shotguns, Sniper Rifles, Rockets, Missles, Grenades/Grenade Launchers, and Special(that includes flamers, turrets, land mines/claymores, and some other stuff). At first you have crap weapons.
The next step is to choose your mission. You can play the latest one you have unlocked or any of the previous missions. After you decide which mission to play you choose a difficulty which is IMPORTANT. First of all let me say that this game has awesome difficulty levels. There are 5 levels, ranging from(not actual names) super easy to insanely difficult. The difficulty is important because it determines what kind of loot you will get.
See one of the things that makes this game so awesome is the fact that everytime you kill stuff there is a chance for it to drop either Health, Armor, or Weapons. Health is just used to heal which you will need lots of =P, Armor permanently increases your max health. And weapons means you unlock new weapons!!!!! The difficulty you choose to play at determines how strong the weapons are.
About your health, You start out the game with 100 HP. For each armor that you pick up though you get +1. I think it maxes out at 9999. After about 30+ hours my guy only has 2600+ HP. This allows you to take more damage and play on harder levels.
You basically constantly finding new weapons to use and gaining more HP each and every time you go on a mission. There are only so many weapons per difficulty though so after awhile playing on super easy you will continue to find weapons but it will be stuff you already have.
Can you handle cranking up the difficulty so that you can get better weapons? You either have to play the later missions or go back to the early missions and play on a harder difficulty.
After 30+ hours I still am not able to play on the highest level of difficulty without getting crushed. Oh I forgot to say what changing the difficulty does. It makes you fight more enemies, they have more health, and they deal out way more damage, and in some cases lets them move faster.
The best part of the game though its that it is 2 player Co-op SPLITSCREEN!! Having a friend help really adds to the tactics and lets you play on harder levels.
The game has a radar that shows where your friend is, where npc soldiers are, where loot is, where enemies are, and where VEHICLES ARE!. The only crappy thing about the radar is that its green and the icon for loot is green circles so it makes it extremely hard to see them.
Thats right this game has vehicles you can take control of to. A jet bike, a tank, a mech suit, and a attack helicopter. Don't get to excited about this though. Most of the vehicles have god awful controls and get crushed almost instantly(literally). The tank and jetbike are good for moving around the map quickly. The tank can atleast take down buildings with its cannon. The chopper is a nightmare to operate and incredibly hard to kill anything with. The mech suit can die quickly but it is also the best vehicle. All of its weapons have really long range which makes it a good turret, but you will be screwed if stuff gets to close because you wont be able to dodge anything.
Thats right you can also knock down buildings in the game. If you have weapons that explode like rockets, missles, grenades, landmines then you can take out buildings. The game doesnt end if you trash the city or anything. Between you and the enemies most metro area's will be totally flat by the end of combat lol. Why go around a building when you can just go through it???
The worst aspect of this game has got to be freidnly kills though. You usually run into a bunch of NPC soldiers on each map. Usually called Ranger squads. These guys are the rank and file troops of the EDF and are sent in, in mass, to deal with stuff. Usually they are outgunned and tactically screwed and its your job to help them out. They are good fighters and can help out tons but chances are you will cut down the majority of them yourself and the enemy will kill the rest lol. They run in front of you constantly and if you have any weapons with blast radius's then you can kiss their butts goodbye lol. This also applys to your 2 player co-op. I really hate this aspect of the game and wish your troops would have been immune to friendly fire or AT THE VERY LEAST make it an optional thing.
It would have been fun to try and save Ranger squads now and then. Then again I am usually glad they are all dead by the end of a mission because then you can leave one alien alive and run around and pick up power-ups. I could understand how some people would hate having to pick up the power-ups constantly. It does suck to have to leave one guy alive and then run all over looking for them. They dont fade after time so they are always there at the end. It would have been nice to just recieve everything that dropped during the mission. Health should be the only thing you have to pick up. I mean if you dont have explosives sometimes power-ups get stuck up on buildings and worse sometimes on hillsides that are to steep to climb.
Another slightly annoying thing in this game is movement. One issue is that your guys can evasively roll faster than he can walk so if you want to get someplace fast you have to turn sideways and roll lol which really sucks after awhile. You should have a run button or just run faster by default. This is painfully obvious when you start trying to hoover up all the power-ups. The second issue with movement is enemy attacks. Some can slow you down and others can knock you down or up into the air. You are invincible while on the ground but its just a pain in the butt any time it happens.
Oh another fairly huge problem with this game is enemy corpses. Ants and Spiders leave behind massive corpses that can block bullets and movement. Blocking bullets is the worst part of it. If you have a swarm of enemies coming at you the last thing you want is for the corpses to prevent your bullets from tearing up the enemies behind the now dead guys. The kinda good thing is that bullets push corpses and after enough time passes and or it gets pushed around enough corpses disappear. But this really sucks when you should be killing stuff butt instead your just playing with a corpse. Bullets should definately pass through corpses.
Im not sure if this is good or bad but when you shoot and or kill stuff they spray blood or explode. If you are being swarmed(especially in tunnels) all the corpses and blood and or corpses and explosions can totally block your vision and make it impossable to see where your going. The ant attacks also screw with your vision. Maybe they should make it so things are translucent if your entire screen is getting filled with corpses and guts lol.
This game has so much freaking potential. Crank up the graphics, give it some weapon crafting/growth system so that you can improve on weapons you like, add in gatling guns, let us give commands to npc soldiers who join up with us( like defend, hold position, assault), revamp vehicles to make them into killing machines and let us upgrade their armor so they last in battle. Oooo and add more maps and let us fight over territory
This game is like dynasty warriors only with guns. Just pure fun shoot and explode gameplay. This should be the first game you add to any xbox 360 collection. Out of all the games I have ever played from the atari to now this game ranks way up their near the top. I pray this game gets many many many sequels(but I doubt it will =/ ).