User Rating: 8.7 | Shadow Ops: Red Mercury XBOX
Shadow Ops: Red Mercury, is a game that could have been better but isn’t bad. What this game lacks, which most games lack a lot these days, is its unwillingness to be different than any other squad based shooting game. Besides that, it doesn’t even live up to the standards of most games like that. Now first off, don’t let the 6.8 throw you off. The game is fun, and on a technical GameSpot found the game as a 6.8. First lets talk about the single player: The single player is pretty long. I have not yet beat it but GameSpot says there are over 24 levels. Here’s the huge problem with the single player: The saving. It becomes VERY annoying when you get half way through a level then just die. Leaving you with no choice but to start from the beginning which often makes me turn off my Xbox or go online to play. The A.I, is really pretty terrible. In games like Halo, the enemy would work together in spontaneous ways which was never the same twice. In this game, like the review says all the enemy’s actions are scripted. You’ll be walking and suddenly a door will fly open and someone will shoot at you. Occasionally somebody with a bazooka will run past a door and try to blow the hell out of you. Other than that, all you really see is one of three things: An enemy standing high on a building, an enemy standing behind cover and then leaning out to quickly shoot at you and go behind cover again. Most of the time they’re visible when they lean back and you can still shoot them, and so are you when you think you’re safe because all you can do to get behind cover is go behind something. The third is they will simply run at you with a gun, and not really react to what you do. The ammo in the missions are very scarce and you need to be conservative. This adds a sense of realism and is actually kind of cool. You sometimes find ammo laying around as well, either from a dead enemy or just laying in an empty small room. A lot of times in this game if you expose your self too much for just a second you will lose lots of health. Even if you stay behind cover you will still lose health. So in this game you will find that losing health will unavoidably happen a lot. But there are lots of health packs to be found but usually it is hard to have 80% or more of your health consistently. The online multiplayer (Via Xbox Live) can be fun at times. It is similar to counter-strike in a way there is really no interaction with your environment, and you just run and gun the other team, trying to stay behind cover as to do more damage to your enemy faster than he can do damage to you. There are four basic modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, V.I.P Escort, and Capture the Flag. One very annoying this is that there are no head shots. Shooting them in the head or torso will inflict more damage then the legs and arm but will not be an instant kill. Actually, you will find your self shooting them rapidly, a lot and still they wont nearly as fast as they should. This brings me to another very, very annoying point. When you attack somebody no blood comes from them. So you have no idea how accurate you’re being. It is like this offline as well. This is very annoying in situations where your leaning from a wall and your enemy is leaning from a wall further down a hall. You can be sure if your hitting him and doing any damage at all then before you know it you’re dead. The game modes themselves are all similar. In both deathmatch, and team deathmatch once you die you simply respawn. So it’s not which team loses all of its team mates first. This can be better if that’s how you like to play and I know some people will but it detracts realism from the game. What happen is instead of what team dies first, it’s what team gets a certain number of kills first, or what team has the most kills in a given amount of time. Also, something that is very disappointing is there are no leader boards. This means that it doesn’t record your kills and deaths and post them on some kind of ranking system. So you never know how good you are compared to the rest of the people who play. It feels like the people who made this game added a multiplayer option on Xbox Live because they felt like it. It is obviously rushed. Red Mercury is a fun game with very, very fast gameplay both online and off but lacks realism if that is what you want. If you want a very realistic shooting game get Rainbow Six. If you want an Unreal Tournament kind of game with a little more sense of realness to it buy, or go rent this game and give it a try.
