This is without a doubt the most frustrating game I ever played.
That goes for Boiling Point. A very ambitious, very pompous (altou not very original) game that screams "I wanna be like FarCry when I grow up!" from it's very box cover.
But let's just start from the beginning, shall we? In this game you hop into the shoes of Saul Meyers, a macho man who spent his last 10 years of life in the Foreign Legion. Voiced by Arnold Vosloo himself, this badass sets off on a quest of finding his dearly beloved daughter who disappeared somewhere in this stereotypical banana republic where the game takes place. And by "republic", I mean 1 small town surrounded by jungle and some villages.
First of all, I'd like to say that this doesn't add at all to the atmosphere, or the gameplay itself. The story is a ripoff from the corniest action movies of 1980's, and Arnold didn't do much to bring his character to life. I mean, heck, Arnold, I'm your big fan. You could've at least put some effort into doing a proper voice acting, instead of simply speaking your lines with all the emotional expression of a dead sea sponge. It'd make me a teeny-tiny bit happier. That IS your job as an actor, after all...
And the environments are nothing but the same old jungle for miles, which gets boring real fast. No great atmosphere at all, no cool looking tropical paradise. Don't expect FarCry, or Mercenaries here.
But let's say something about a game itself. To put it simply, this is a pure ripoff from the most popular games released in the last couple of years. You have an FPS-style gameplay that feels awfully like hybrid between Grand Theft Auto and Mercenaries. You have some fairly nice huge jungle environments of FarCry, and character and weapons development of Deus Ex. Add some salt and pepper, boil for 20 minutes and you got yourself a nice, big, tasty cliche. Yes, my dear reader, on paper it all looks great. It's the execution of all these ideas that sucks big time. Sure, you can drive vehicles. You can perform tasks for a lot of different factions. Your character gets a little bit more skilled throughout the game. But we've all seen it before. We've all done that before. Nothing new here... And the amount of frustration you will experience while doing all that is simply off the charts.
Why? Well, for one thing, the game looks horrible. Jungle environments look OK, but the characters (Oh God, they look ugly!!!), the vehicles, even the buildings look so disgusting it will make you vomit. It might've looked good in 2001, but for a game released in 2005 it's simply embarrassing. Not to mention the fact that game runs extremely slow at a times on the very same machine that made FarCry run perfectly. The second thing is the AI. The enemies are simply brainless. Brainless, impossibly accurate, always attacking by dozens and insanely fast when it comes to a gunfight. That alone is enough to make firefights horrible and annoying. And very often (on every mission, that is) the game is pitting you against tons of these super-soldiers who take about 5 or 6 bullets in the head before they hit the ground. They can see you through even the most dense jungle vegetation, they run about a 100 miles an hour when you fire at them and they all simultaneously shoot at you and hit you without breaking a sweat. Add to that your sloppy aiming, inability to aim down sight or even change firing mode of your weapon, limited ammo and dense jungle where you have trouble even seeing your target, and you can imagine what the firefights are like.
As for the missions, well, that's another story. Don't expect anything more than simple fetch quests where you have to gun down a battalion of enemies just to take a stupid map, or a laptop, and bring it to the guy who hired you. No, I'm not making this up. Those are real missions from the game. Your allies are brainless as well. Once, upon returning to a rebel base from a mission, I was talking to a weapon salesman in the rebel base, only to see him getting killed all of a sudden by a gunship that came out of nowhere, apparently looking for me for some reason. And yes, he knew where I was, even tough we were inside a building. He was aiming at me all the time, proudly ignoring anyone else, except maybe when he killed some guy by mere accident. Of course, despite the fact that a gunship just killed their supplier and was ravaging their base, none of the brave guerilla warriors even lifted a finger to fight. They never even moved. It was up to me to mount an AA gun and try to defend THEIR base. Of course, I was killed in a second, thanks to the sloppy controls and gunship's insane accuracy.
You want more? After stealing a laptop from a mafia base, I simply walked out into the jungle. Sure, I received a few shots, but after I ran a few meters into the jungle, I stumbled upon another mafia soldier. My character simply said "Don't shoot, I'm on your side!" and the soldiers simply let me go, despite the fact that his buddies were trying to blow my brains out a few seconds ago for stealing their classified informations. I was mafia friend again, in a mere second.
Had enough? I once entered a building in a military base, looking for some stupid map my employer wanted me to get. I simply took it from underneath a soldier's nose, and as soon as I touched it, the entire government army knew what I did and raised a crusade against me. They knew it before even a shot was fired. It doesn't make a difference if you try to shoot the only soldier in the room with a silenced pistol and take the map quietly (I tried, didn't work) or simply run and gun the entire base, as soon as you scratch a soldier, the entire army knows it.
Want more? Didn't think so, friend... To put it as delicately as possible, the missions are derivate, unimaginative, dull, repetitive and probably designed by a person seriously lacking any imagination.
Do I even need to mention tons of bugs plaguing this game? I played 2.0 version of the game, so at least it never crashed to desktop, or corrupt my save files. But the sound was full of glitches, you'd often hear noise from a mile away louder than the conversation you're having with the person next to you. Sometimes you wouldn't even hear entire conversations, sounds of car horns would annoy you over and over again as you're trying to talk to someone and all kinds of sounds would often got "stuck" in a certain place. Loading times are loooooooooong, and you can drive your horrible-looking vehicles even when the engine is off.
And one more thing... will the programmers finally stop putting pictures of their friends and family into their games?!?! I once entered a gun store, only to see a huge photo of some girl with a goofy facial expression behind the salesman. I mean, COME ON! As if the atmosphere hasn't been brutally killed over and over again in this game, but now I have to look at some programmer's girlfriend (or sister, or friend, or cousin...) while shopping for ammo for my underpowered AK-47 with only one mode of fire! A nice gesture, sure, but completely annoying for anyone who is not on that photo. Stop torturing the players, for the love of God!
Even tough it looks and feels promising during first few hours, this is a game that never should've seen the light of day.
This is without a doubt the worst game I have ever played... And I played A LOT!