A FANTASTIC GAME.....shrouded under an iron blanket of problems.
PROS:
-The explosions are TO DIE FOR!!!! OMG! Most of them dont look realistic but the look amazing!
-Buildings dont only fall down when you eject enough firepower into them but now most things do it in pieces!!!!
-Cranes crumble like a deck of steel cards
-Many buildings destroy in sections so you can level half a house/high-rise building and then take cover inside
-The vehicles break apart very well
-Trees do the same but can also catch fire and are affected by movement
-Many small shack-like sheds, park benches, and w/e else can be driven right through with any vehicle or blown open(like in Crysis) with a small charge
-As always you can hijack any vehicle(outside jets/planes), destroy 99% of the world and/or call in some seriously devastating fire missions
-The cover system isnt much but does add that list bit of 'coolness' to the game and the combat
-Hippies can kiss my a$$, there is simply nothing better than calling in a fuel-air bomb onto 4 large oil tanks in the middile of a jungle...... just watch it burn, baby!!!!
-Even though the AI has many, many code issues, once they get worked around they should be very, very fun to play against. They take cover, help each other, utilize everything around you and call for backup
-Mass Effect took me 60 hours to play through my first time, this = 51 hours and I was only 85% complete..... amazing and has a great deal of replay potential
-Some of the AI-on-AI combat can be so fun to get involved in. The battles can get so hectic that you forget about all of the game's problems
-Speaking of which, the game seems to do a good job of certain types of optimization.. I have had prolly a hundred or more NPCs on-screen at once with physcs objects flying all around and explosion FX going off like crazy.... almost NO performance drop!!!
-Believe it or not some of the dialogue can be funny(a smerk at the most)
-The world feels very interactive. You can go up in destroyed areas, climb any ladder, many smaller buildings are enterable, you can move between pylons(like the area under a fishing dock)
-The gameworld is large, very large. Considering how big and well-organized it is it really makes you wonder how it feels so good even when your on-foot running around
-Sequence-based and vehicle-specific hijack mini games are a good idea and can sometimes add a serious tension to combat
-For Merc1 vets: the shooting of small arms isnt just a throwaway.... most weapons feel/sound good enough to shoot(not just pull out your cheat gun tongue.gif)
-Explosion sounds are very good! Ever play FFoW and say "dang, the echo and blast of the distance explosions sounds really good"?? Well, thats here too biggrin.gif
-Aside from many of the bugs there has yet to be one that break your missions
-You really get a nice variation of enviorments... many are really ugly and gritty, others are very urban and clean, some are tropical and beautiful and others are dense jungles
-Even though you can call in this fleet of aircraft to deliver payloads/gear/ammo the AAA-batteries scattered across the land and many infantry being anti-armor equipped really adds a nice balance to things
-Choosing who to fight for adds a semi-RPG feature to the game as dialogues, cutscenes and some missions change
-Many physics objects actually remain in-game for some time. I recal destroying these oil pumps and their ashes lay crumbled on a road for an entire mission.... sometimes destruction is a tactical tool smile.gif
-You cant possibly ever get bored!!! There are hundreds of missions, thousands of NPCs, tens of highly-dense battlefields and a very open and fun locker of weapons and fire-support
CONS:
-Missions are somewhat repetitive but not boring
-Game isnt very well optimized, especially with the shaders set to High
-I would say feels like a half-a$$ed port but supposively the 360/PS3s have the same probs
-The small-arms weapons are so f*^(*^(*^(*) inaccurate its just ridiculous. The rnds move so slow and all over you might as well be fighting with airsoft guns(the cheap-o kind)
-You can just barely bump a 16-inch thick palm tree with your bumper and it breaks, but you can do **** to houses with an M1A2 Abrams?
-Collecting Fuel really, really feels like a burder and chore you have to do. I would trully, utterly, completely prefer using just cash for everything like in the original
-Hijack mini-games are either too easy or too hard
-There is a tremendous lack of impact effects for bullets!!! Since when does glass shatter into dirt?
-Cant say I care for the no day/night cycles.... theme for UP-controlled territory: "Its always sunny in UP-land"
-Some missions are too difficult because of glitches with the gameplay, physics and/or AI
-There are tens of thousands of glitches, exploits, bugs and other problems in the retail game, I crashed approx. 4 times in-game over my first play through(beginning to end)
-The AI can be utterly dumb at times due to poor optimization of their codes, this could have been avoided so easily
-There are a few AI pathfinding problems, mostly in traffic jams and getting them to get into your vehicle
-There is a learning curve on all vehicles' driving but motorcycles/fast cars are about impossible to use
-Some Helos/tanks/other vehicles have far too low of a pitch speed so you have to quickly lift-up, drag and drop your mouse repetitively or else your dead
-You cant destroy rocks in the game but you can everything else?
-Heavy explosions from artillery/tanks/etc dont leave craters in the ground(not really a problem but c'mon, it would be that difficult, look at Fracture)
-Some of the fire support assets dont feel as satisfying(IMO) as they did in PoD, the artillery looks more like 10 aircraft randomly dropping precision bombs on an area
-Game doesnt ship with any modding tools nor the ability to even really mod your own .ini
-There is farrrrrrrr toooooo much political banter from the storyline and the NPCs, a funny feeling the game gives off is the US gov't is full of liers and the PRC is full of honest men! WTF??? (No comment, either way)
-Some of the things you can hijack just dont make any sense as you pretty much need an additional person to help operate them, what if you cant/dont play COOP?
-I like the idea of the cover system but we need an option to just crouch and one for just aiming, the way it is now you can only do both at once with a single key
-The AI spots you way too easily so it is more difficult to be stealthy than in BF2!
-If you are like me and try to enjoy the game, playing in a tank/on foot apposed to flying from A-to-B at max altitude, then you are going to die.......ALOT!!!!
-Some of the airstrike designations make NO F-'in sense!!!! A MOAB deployed by a smoke nade? I dont believe any jet-aircraft-payload is designated by smoke, just a beacon, laser or satellite!!!!!
-The story is too simple but not important anyway, the main problem is the stupid cutscenes, often fake and idiotic and ALWAYS repetitive dialogue
-The game doesnt have incredible sounds for most things like some guns, most environments and possibly vehicle functions(outside of shooting)
-The graphics dont look ANYWHERE NEAR where they should be for how difficult the game is to run, most models are very 'late-lastgen' on characters and object textures
-The movement feels mechanical(as most 3PS's do on the PC) but my main gripe is the lack of really nice sequence-animations, it feels like if you slowed the game down everything would look horrible
-Trees catch on fire but we dont get any napalm strikes???!!!!! WTF kinda' sick freakin' game are you playing with us, EA!!??!?!?
IN THE END:
Gameplay - 9/10
-The core gameplay is great and most of it amazing! Its really a shame bugs bring it down a notch.
Graphics - 7/10
-Pretty 'middle-of-the-road' here. There isnt a terrible amount of detail to anything, the lighting isnt great and many textures/models are decent at best, but the Depth-of-Field and effects are breath-taking!
Sound - 8/10
-While the explosions and many other sounds are great there are many that arent as good but are still decent. Even though the lines are cheesy the voice-overs are still okay.
Presentation - 4/10
-The game really suffers here. This is a "PORT" not a fresh build and as such the performance, menus and controls show it. I can run Crysis are medium-high but can barely run this at about medium? Performance aside there are soooooo many bugs that you will prolly do what I did and beat the crap outa' your keyboard and have to go out and buy a new one. It feels and looks like the game was complete past the beta since there is nothing game-breaking, but suddenly they moved to "bug-fixing stage" and they just said... "you know what? lets just go ahead and release this.... we can patch it later." Finally, the story: Well, the story is.......... terrible. Even the plot outline is simple and dull. Why do I get the feeling Jerry Bruckhiemer is buying the rights to the movie right now? tongue.gif
Thus I give the game a *drumroll please* .................7.0
Yes, I know its even lower than the IGN review but let me show you the totals for a more polished game:
Gameplay 9/10(You'd have to make a lot of changes to the engine and game to get a 10)
Graphics 8/10(slightly higher-res textures on players/vegetation and better weapon models)
Sound 10/10(If some more effort was put into certain weapons sounds, environmental sounds and a few voice overs then this would be upped)
Presentation 8/10(Fix all or nearly all of the bugs so the game didnt feel like a mid-late beta, optimize the AI and the graphics for better performance then this is doubled. The story needs a serious revamping and needs to drop the political BS before I could give it a higher rating)
That review rating.....................8.8 (9.5, story aside)