Orphen: Scion of Sorcery

Today I'll be reviewing Orphen: Scion of Sorcery for your reading pleasure. I'm currently playing Dead Space for the 360, so next time I do a review I'll probably have that finished and ready to review.

Orphen:Scion of Sorcery

Overall:

Orphen was a PS2 RPG released around the time the console came out. It's based on some anime that is/was relatively popular in Japan but never (to my knowledge) made the jump to America. The game sorta seems to rely on this nonexistent star power but American audiences are likely to not really have any background going in. You play as a guy named Orphen who is as the title implies: a sorcerer. You get involved in a boat wreck while on a journey to find some quick money and end up stranded on an island with your two assistants and one of three passengers from the boat. The game has three possible paths for you to take and you can switch to a different person later in the game. While the game is marketed as an RPG there are actually very few battles and most of the gameplay is focused on dodging environmental hazards and a little bit of simple puzzle solving.

Pros:

For its time it had fairly impressive graphics as this was one of the earliest PS2 games but it didn't add to the game to a terribly huge degree (the fight near the end on the falling rocks was sorta a cool effect so I'll give them that)(+0.25).



I did like the idea you could do multiple paths and if you didn't like the one you were on you could go back and change it mid story(+0.50). And while checking something for this game I found out that you get something at the end if you complete all three story lines (I never did cause the game just wasn't good enough to be worth it) so if you have the patience you do get a scene and a "final" boss battle for sticking it out but I doubt many will actually care enough to play it for that long.

+0.75

Cons:

For a game that is supposed to be a RPG it doesn't have much in the way of RPG stat growth or battles, sorta a bait and switch(-0.50). This wouldn't be too bad if the adventuring and puzzle solving sections were up to snuff but they really weren't. Combat when it does occur is slow and fairly boring with not much beyond "attack with magic sword" and "attack with magic blasts" and it all happens so slowly you'd think it was lagging(-1.00). The characters that help you aren't that useful and the battles serve as a break from the bland... I dunno what you would call it, exploratory game? You don't do much platforming but you don't really search areas for hidden stuff like you would in Metroidvania type of game either. You basically just dodge hazards throughout the level and maybe a few small enemies that just hurt you when they hit you instead of a battle so you really don't DO much in the game (-1.00). While the battles technically serve as a break they're not very good and don't do much to improve the game(-0.50).

The fact the vast majority of American gamers have never even heard of the anime series hurts the game when they don't go into much more detail then "Orphen is a slacker, the chick is a prissy bitch, and the boy is a timid scaredy-cat" for characterization. So you have no real characterization(-0.50) and that extends to whoever it is your choose to help. There is very little story here and you're just sorta doing stuff the game tells you to do(-0.50).

-4.00

3.75/10

This game would have been fine for a tech demo and learning how to program stuff for the PS2, but it really shouldn't have been made into a game. Not a terribly long review, but there isn't much to say about the game other then it was lousy and had few redeeming features. When I wanted to review a really bad game a while ago and picked Eternal Ring, this came pretty close as I consider them both really bad release PS2 RPGs that had little to nothing going for them.

Drakengard

Sorry it has been so long (Seems I find myself saying that a lot), been involved with a girl recently and that has eaten up a lot of time. Literally every day for the past 5 days I have been hanging out with Ella or a friend from the time I wake up til like, midnight. Anyways, I finally got a chance to sit down and do some blogging and today we're doing Drakengard, a game I showed to my college friends for just how weird it is.

Oh by the way, Pandemic Studios (Known for the Mercenaries series and Star Wars: Battlefront series) shut down recently and some former employees made this Office Space http://www.giantbomb.com/news/pandemic-shutdown-leads-to-office-space-tribute/1768/ tribute.

Drakengard

Overall:

Drakengard is a PS2 RPG made by Square Enix who needs no introduction. In the game you switch between running around on foot killing hoards of soldiers and flying around on dragon back attacking ships and infantry. You play as Caim a man who made a pact with a red dragon to save his life at a critical juncture. In doing so he gave up the ability to speak (the game features a bunch of people who have made pacts and given up something in return.) but can ride around wrecking havoc with his bad ass dragon. You gain allies later on but can only play as them for a limited amount of time in each level and since each level is generally an exercise in persistence and patience with few bosses they don't help you too much. You are fighting an evil empire as part of "The Union", an army raised to fight for freedom and to resist the empire.

Pros:

The game does have a lot of weapons for Caim to use (+0.50) and they can level up so eventually you'll have quite a selection to choose from in regards to how you want to play the game (+0.25). It would take a lot of grinding to level them all up but all you need one good weapon of each type and you're set. You can bring a couple with you into battle so you can cover your bases in terms of having the right weapon for the situation (+0.25). As far as gameplay goes the dragon battles are usually pretty good with lots of explosions, a decent lock on system vs using a non-locked on but more powerful blast, and a bunch of enemies to fight (+0.75). They're also not too tough but you still have to try so the difficulty is about right.

I'm honestly stretching to think of other good points. The cut scenes looked really nice and were well done (+0.25). That's all I have.

+2.00

Cons:

The core gameplay here is the land battles where you fight on foot. The system is sorta interesting at first but quickly becomes really repetitive (-1.25). You don't have a lot of combat choices besides picking the weapon you use and whether you get a running start before you hit them or not (Charging in generally knocks over a formation of enemies and lets you pick off the survivors). You essentially run around in a circle until you get enough momentum and then charge into a group of enemies. And do that until you've killed the 100-300 enemies on the map. Since this is roughly 70-80% of the game this is a rather huge problem as you've seen all there is to the combat after 30 minutes and after 3 hours it has become really boring (if not sooner, I'm easily entertained).



Another problem is that the story is very very hollow (-0.75). You're part of this big rebellion but besides one or two story characters you literally never seen an Union soldier. I think you MIGHT hear one or two voices of an Union soldier during a cut scene somewhere. Even during a level that is supposed to be the ultimate clash between the Empire and the Union and you have to fight like 800 guys, you never see a single ally on the ground (-0.25) (it is a battle where you can go back and forth between the dragon) though you see the preacher guy NPC talk about what's going on in the battle you don't see squat besides a bunch of enemies. Usually they try to act like all the Union soldiers happen to be somewhere else for some reason, but there they couldn't hide it and didn't even try.

Another problem with the story is that it's a very basic evil empire type RPG story that has been done hundreds of times until the very end which is an Evangelion level mindfuck (-0.50). There are several endings and I'd usually count that as a plus, but they're all so crazy and nonsensical that they're only good to show to people for the WTF factor. I don't usually spoil endings but I would like to give an example. One ending has an armada of flying 8 foot babies descend from the sky and devour all of your party members before you fight them as they coo and giggle as you slaughter them. Then you fight a skyscaper sized pregnant woman who is apparently giving birth to these babies after being warped to modern day Tokyo. You fight her by completing a rhythm game. Then unlock a different possible ending that you complete by fighting a bunch of modern day jets firing missiles at you (-0.50). If that made sense to you, give yourself a pat on the back cause I am lost as hell. A different ending has you ending up falling in love with the dragon and wanting to fuck it (-0.25). I guess that's something for the scalies. Sadly GameFAQs/Spot didn't have a picture of the babies to show you.

The side characters they give you to switch between for a limited amount of time are rather lackluster and not very developed character wise (-0.50). They would be useful if you fought big bosses, but I generally only switched to them if I was running low on health and the level was almost done. The crazy insane chick killed babies pretty good but that was the only time I really used them.

-4.00

Overall Rating:5/10

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

I broke down and got the game 3 or 4 days ago, beating it in one extended sitting. I should have reviewed it a couple of days ago but real life gets in the way sometimes (Whoo hot date!) Anyway, I am now ready to review it.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Overall:

I'm gonna assume most people have heard of Modern Warfare 2 considering it had one of the biggest 1st day sales ever and has had plenty of controversy surrounding one of the levels (causing it to be banned in Russia actually). The game is a FPS made by Infinity Ward, known for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and basically all the "Good" Call of Duties. MW2 picks up where CoD4 left off with some of the same characters from the first one and set in the same world. You start off chasing a new bad guy, Marakov who is a Russian Ultra nationalist or some such. Basically he's a Russian terrorist and that's about all you need to know. In CoD4 you switched off between an American and an English guy and they keep that going in this one as well, but there are 2 Americans and 2 English guys this time you get to control. You'll travel all over the world, but this doesn't mean they send you on a bunch of random errands as they all are related to the overall story (which I won't go into too much out of fear of spoilers as the game does have a couple plot twists).

Pros:

This is a gorgeous game and the AAA work and polish really shows (+0.50). You occasionally see an odd texture here and there but overall the graphics are really good and the effects whether they be in-game or during a cut scene are very impressive. Speaking of cut scenes and action events this game has a lot of them which could be bad if done badly but this game does them right and some of them are jaw droppingly cool(+0.75). Now I wish I could tell you some of the cooler ones but again I don't want to spoil the plot twists and those are some of the best.

The campaign is well done and although short takes you to a variety of places and gives you a variety of situations to deal with. The selection of weapons is quite varied and uses the 2 weapons at a time system that the Halo series is known for(+0.50). Fortunately they don't force you to use a crappy pistol for your side-arm though you often start with one. They actually give you a reason to use a pistol, you can switch to it super fast unlike switching to a 2nd rifle. The predator drone missile strikes you get to use once in a while were pretty cool too, imagine the Nikita missile from MGS but you're firing it at the ground from high in the air and its 10 times as powerful and about 1/10 as controllable(+0.25). The vehicle segments were pretty fun(0.25) though the control on the boat and snow mobile were a little stiff. I appreciate the work they put into it considering that a very large (possibly the majority) segment of the people that play the game do so for Multi-Player.

The game also comes with a "Special Ops" mode where they test your abilities in a number of different situations such as holding out against waves of enemies or defusing bombs in a certain amount of time(+0.50). You can play these co-op or solo and you get stars depending on the difficulty you play them on. New ones open up once you get so many stars. It's not supposed to be the main thing you focus on by any means, but it gives you something to do to extend your non-competitive multiplayer time with the game and the missions are fairly fun yet still challenging.

Multi-Player is back and despite the backlash from PC gamers seems to be very alive and well on all systems that the game was released on. I haven't spent a huge amount of time on it, but while I got my ass kicked when I played it, I'm already desiring to play it again so I guess it did something right(+0.25). All your standard game types are there but the real star here besides the gameplay is the progression system where you game experience and rank up in an RPG fashion(+0.75). Now you can unlock little add-ons and modifications by doing certain things with a weapon like getting so many kills or headshots. They keep unlocking new stuff all the time so you always are close to getting something new via rank up (Your stats don't go up so newbies still have a chance of course)(+0.25).

+4.00

Cons:

My complaints about this game are all rather minor. Most people talk about the dedicated servers being removed and they took out the leaning feature in CoD4. I never used those but saying they were removed to "balance gameplay" does feel like just an excuse(-0.25). I think Infinity Ward didn't like how lean turned out but the gaming public liked it. One thing I actually did think was a negative was how short the campaign was(-0.25). I beat it in 5 or 6 hours my first time through and I by no means rushed. Not a huge problem, what there was of it kicked ass and there are a lot of parts where something awesome happens that I'm sure took a lot longer to occur then a regular level with no big set pieces.

Another minor complaint is how a lot of the weapons do the same thing, but you still have your standard variety, but a lot of the rifles and pistols are very similar. Tourney-fags might care that a certain gun does 1.1X as much damage or has one less bullet in the magazine but those don't count as significant differences to me(-0.25).

Lastly I've always sorta wondered why CoD4 and MW2 reward the team that's winning with airstrikes and weapon drops. I mean, if a team is doing well and gets killing streaks it probably means they're winning and if they're winning why give them stuff to turn the odds even more so in their favor? The predator missile reward is really powerful and can kill multiple people on the other side of the map easily. Just seems counter intuitive to give the winning team even more advantages(-0.25). Some of the minor ones are ok cause I can understand wanting to reward a player for staying alive for a while in a game where you die in 2 or 3 hits but spawning a helicopter gunship that hovers over your opponent's spawn and kills them just feels cheap(-0.50).

-1.50

Overall Rating:9.5/10

Killzone 2

Well it's time again for a review. Today I've picked a game that had a lot of hype when it came out, Killzone 2 for the PS3. I mentioned it in some of my previous entries and after getting sidetracked by Borderlands beat it a couple of days ago so now I suppose I should give my impression of it. It was supposed to be a big game that was gonna boost the PS3 and I know it caused its fair share of console war debates. Actually the original Killzone was sorta supposed to be the PS2's response to Halo but never managed to live up to that, apparently it did stir up enough debate that it got a sequel though and a second chance to prove itself.

Killzone 2

Overall:

You play the role of an ISA (Interplanetary Strategic Alliance) soldier named Sev who is with "Alpha Team" as they invade the planet of Helghan in response to the events of the first game where the Helghast invaded one of the ISA planets. As Alpha Team apparently has more experience and is battle hardened they (and thus you) tend to get sent behind enemy lines and to do the more difficult missions though generic ISA guys do appear fairly often to lend a hand. Your goal is to capture the Helghast leader Visari and assist in the capture of their capital city. The game plays as a FPS with a regenerating health and cover system and was made by Guerrilla Games (and published by Sony). It also incorporates the Six-Axis motion control thing in a handful of situations, but it was a pretty minor thing and I didn't consider it a positive or negative.

Pros:

The game looks good, really good. The graphics are definitely top notch and the explosions are frequent and well done(+0.50). While you do see a lot of destroyed city landscapes they do manage to give you a few different areas to fight in such as a moving train, a desert, and inside a spaceship so it's not all brown gritty city-scapes(+0.50). While there are only a few cut scenes they're really good, the opening propaganda piece done with Visari's speech in the background as you see the first wave of the ISA prior to the start of the game (you're in the second wave) get gunned down and totally dominated was really great and added a lot to the atmosphere of the game(+0.25). The ending one was also good but not quite as good as the opening one.

As far as in-game moments go you get a mixed bag. There are some moments that were really cool like holding a position near an enemy arc-tower early in the game and at the end when you're pressing forward with the last remaining ISA forces to reach your objective, that was really intense with gunfire everywhere and instilled a good frantic sense(+0.50). They're also good about keeping the ISA from doing too well and just being an overwhelming force because you're there as the super awesome human controlled player. You see a lot of cases where the ISA gets their asses kicked and it keeps the Helghast as a formidable enemy (if you just slaughtered them all the time they wouldn't be as dangerous)(+0.50). But as you'll see in the Cons section it isn't all sunshine on the gameplay front.



The game did have a good variety of guns to pick from and I liked the electricity gun enough to mention it as a small plus in its own right(+0.25). The enemies were cool, I like the look of the Helghast and they came in a couple of slightly different varieties so that was nice too(+0.25). The heavies served as cool mid-bosses and though it's not too hard to figure out how to kill them, they still look cool kicking your guys' ass(+0.25).

+3.00

Cons:

There are a number of gameplay issues that detracted from the Killzone 2 experience, some minor, others having a significant impact. One problem was that your character seemed so damn short, or at least where the camera was made it look that way, I always thought I was crouched and kept trying to uncrouch myself(-0.25). I came up to most of the other character's shoulders at best for some reason. Another issue I had was that they put in a bunch of "secret intel" to find and Helghan symbols to destroy but to find most of them you'd have to search but you nearly always have some guy yelling at you to keep moving so it was a pain in the ass if you wanted to look for them(-0.25). Also if you wanted to see what the intel said you had to go to some Killzone 2 website apparently and that's just lazy, the reason I halfway cared about the findable items in Gears of War 2 was cause it gave you a little more background info about characters and places, here where the story is better they could have taken even greater advantage of that but dropped the ball. The cover system was also slightly flawed in that you weren't completely covered and I died several times while in seemingly great cover(-0.25).

Another set of gameplay issues I had involved the weapons. There are plenty of weapons to be sure but besides the main ISA rifle, the generic Helghast rifle, and the heavy Helghast machine gun you would see most of the others maybe once or twice(-0.50). The sniper rifle has one level mid-game where they introduce it and it's common, and you see it during the last fight and that's about it. The best gun in the game, the electricity gun (I can't remember what it was actually called) was basically a Tesla Coil you carried around and kicked all sorts of ass with but you only get it for part of one level. Making this worse was the fact that you could only carry two weapons and one of them had to be your crappy pistol so you really could only carry one "real" gun(-0.50). This made it pretty hard to try out the decent variety of guns available as sometimes you basically had to drop a cool gun cause they had a section that was made for you to use a certain different gun.

Something else that bothered me were the difficulty spikes. The game itself was normally fairly average in difficulty with a few notable exceptions that made you want to rip your hair out(-0.50). The tank on the train and the infantry battle right before the final boss come to mind as the two worst. Questionable ally AI in these situations didn't help (Your teammate runs straight into literally 7 or 8 enemies and surprisingly enough goes down almost instantly)(-0.25).

-2.50

Overall Rating: 7.5/10

Yeah yeah, I know you guys bitch that I give too many games a rating in the 7 or 8s, bite me.

Hilarious thing I saw

Not a game review, just saw someone link to this on LL. Ben do you know anything about this?

NWS

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2009/10/16/oh-god-my-eyes-the-worst-sex-scene-in-comics/

Phantom Brave

I've finally gotten around to playing Killzone 2 and am making good progress with it, but I want to finish it before I review it, but I'm long overdue for doing a game review and while talking to Chris earlier we discussed Phantom Brave briefly and figured it would be good for a review.

Phantom Brave

Overall:

Phantom Brave is a strategy RPG by Nippon Ichi of Disgaea fame for the PS2 (with a remake on the Wii that I haven't played). You play as the "Chroma" Marona who is a young girl. A Chroma is their way of trying to be cool as mercenary sounds boring and the image doesn't mesh well with a little girl but that's basically what she does, though she takes on more benign missions then your average mercenary. She was born with the power to summon ghosts onto this plane of existence for brief periods of time by confining them to nearby objects. The ghost of her late parent's friend Ash hangs out with her and serves as a main character. The gameplay is a little different from Disgaea in that there aren't tiles you move around on, but your characters have a radius in decimeters (well it's dm, I assumed it was decimeters) for their movement and characters have a speed value for determining who goes when instead of the "your turn/my turn" Disgaea system.

Pros:

Like most Nippon Ichi games there is a fairly deep combat and leveling system at work here with many different classes of humanoid characters or monsters to pick from(+0.75). You have plenty of ways to construct your party though some are obviously better then others. The game also gets a nod for trying a gridless system when they could have easily stuck with what worked(+0.25). While the actual implication of the gridless system had a few problems (many of which were smoothed out in Makai Kingdom) it wasn't bad and I appreciate them changing up a fairly staple concept in strategy RPGs.

While they don't have the item world they have a random dungeon you can explore via the dungeon monk class. I don't think it's quite as polished or enjoyable as it could be as the benefits besides grinding as are somewhat limited. Still, kudos for having it as an option even if it's not as good or useful as Disgaea's Item World(+0.25).

The familiar pretty sprite graphics return to the game and are used well throughout combining some old school with the new(well, at the time new)(+0.50). The cut scenes use the anime cut scenes you see in previous and later Nippon Ichi games and do the job better then just text boxes. The game is mostly voice acted though in parts that can be a negative due to the painfully sugary sweet story and things they say(+0.25).



The combat itself is rather fun and the things you can use as weapons are humorous (fish, rocks, trees, ect.)(+0.50). Each character has different sword and magic proficiencies and the weapons you find or buy give you several different weapon and class combinations that are workable giving you further variation to your team. Being able to pick up allies and enemies as weapons was a nice touch (even if it's not usually very tactically helpful) as well(+0.25). The protection system where certain objects or enemies give protection to other enemies or items (which you can confine to for the bonuses) is an additional layer added to the combat for some more strategic fun(+0.25).

+3.00

Cons:

The story is waaaaay too sugary sweet(-0.50). Other games made by this company are often light hearted, here they just took it too far. In addition the game has a lot of chapters where nothing happens and they could have probably had half as many chapters without losing any important plot points(-0.25). Later on they get lazy and send you back to some of the previous islands you already went to cause they couldn't really think of any new places for you to go to and it probably saved a little bit on development time(-0.25).

Gameplay-wise one of my biggest annoyances was how all of your units except Marona would disappear after several turns of use because the ghosts couldn't stay in our world very long(-0.50). I think it was designed to try to have you make a large group of character besides just your "A" team. Once your guys started disappearing you could summon in some second stringers to finish off the fight. The reason I wasn't fond of this was that it basically required you to grind more to level up the extra guys or force you to try to rush in to take everyone out as fast as you could with your best guys before they were gone(-0.25). Ironically I tend to have a large group of generics in Nippon Ichi games but my team was relatively small here compared to their other games cause I went with the latter strategy.

A smaller gameplay gripe I have with this game is the stealing system and nerfed throw mechanics. To throw someone they have to not be holding a weapon so the usefulness of throwing one of your characters to reach an enemy is lessened(-0.25). You steal by basically trying to pick up an enemy while they are holding an item and if you're successful you pick up that item. Of course to steal you also have to not have a weapon equipped as a successful steal has you using that weapon(-0.25).

Also Ash needs to get some new lines cause he literally says the same damn thing before every boss battle. I can dig a character having a little motto or saying or something, but it just gets obnoxious here(-0.25).

-2.50

Overall Rating:7.50/10

Metal Gear Solid

Time again for another blog post. I bought Killzone 2 but honestly I keep getting sucked into Borderlands so I haven't really gotten to a point where I can review Killzone 2 (In fact I haven't even started it). So I'm gonna go back and review one of my favorite games of all time: Metal Gear Solid.

Before we start I found this earlier: http://xkcd.com/657/large/ and thought it was cool. xkcd is by no means new or even a comic I have in my webcomic reading list (Not that I think it's bad or anything) but someone linked this and while there is a joke at the end of the various movie time lines, the fact that the guy put that much time into the LoTR one is astounding.

Anyway, without anymore delay, Metal Gear Solid!

Metal Gear Solid

Overall:

Metal Gear Solid is a stealth 3rd person shooter (that has a weapon or two that takes you to first person) that played a significant part in creating the stealth genre. I am reviewing the Playstation version though a remake of it was made for the Gamecube called Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. In MGS you are Solid Snake (there is a tendency for phallic references throughout the series), a retired agent of Foxhound called out of retirement to stop a group of genetically enhanced super soldiers that formed the current Foxhound that have taken over a nuclear disposal facility on the Fox archipelago in Alaska. They're threatening to launch a nuke unless the American government gives into their demands and hands over the remains of Big Boss (a legendary mercenary from the original Metal Gear and later prequel MGS3). Snake is going it alone but has several contacts who have useful advice he can talk to via "codec". Originally your objectives are to rescue two hostages and find out whether Foxhound is bluffing about being able to launch nukes but things aren't what they seem and the story gets much more involved. I could go into more of the opening story but one could write a large blog entry (or several) on the story of MGS by itself so I'll move on. The game has you infiltrating a heavily guarded facility and you must find all of your weapons on-site cause you have to swim in and bulky weapons would have made that hard. You must sneak your way to various objectives and bosses who you have to fight and defeat in different ways meeting new enemies and allies along the way.

Pros:

This game has a strong story, easily the best of the games I've reviewed and one of the best I've played period(+1.00). There are always new plot twists and every time you think you've figured everything out something else throws you off and keeps you guessing. This is due in part to the strong characterization as most of the characters, even some of the bosses, have elaborate back stories and change as the game progresses, in many ways the game is a mystery that you unravel as you progress(+1.0). So this game gets high marks for story and characters.

The bosses all generally have a different way you fight them, the first boss involves a simple pistol fight to get you used to your side arm as well fighting a boss. Later bosses involve ones that have to have grenades used, melee, rockets, sniper rifles, and so on so you end up using most of your arsenal at some point and get a feel for all of your weapons(+0.25). The game also does a good job of making many of the boss fights stand out and feel epic (Anyone who has played the game remembers the trick to the Psycho Mantis fight) as well as plot important conversations(+0.50).

The game introduced stealth gaming to a wide audience and made people play the game in a way that many at the time had never done before (you could not go in guns blazing as even a single soldier could be a threat, especially in the beginning when you had only a tiny bit of health(+0.25). The game even had some laughs and often broke the 4th wall to good effect. That CD case confused the hell out of me the first time I heard it(+0.25).

The voice acting is really good as well and all the voices fit the characters as well as the VAs putting in emotion where it needs to be overall adding to the characterization mentioned early on in the pros section(+0.25). The music also added a lot and was quite well done, from the music for being spotted to post-boss fights to the escape scene. I still like the music after you beat Sniper Wolf to this day. The fact they changed it in the remake (along with redoing some of the voices) is one of the chief reasons I prefer the original (and the remake is less stealth based)(+0.50).

The little touches they added were cool too, at the time few expected footprints to be left in the snow much less for guards to notice them and follow them to you. The knocking one walls to alert guards was also useful and a nice touch. The infamous cardboard box was both funny and a helpful item, giving you another way to hide from your enemies. They paid a lot of attention to details like this, even in cases where it wouldn't be used much and they could have just skipped it to save time in development(+0.50).

+4.50

Cons:

Admittedly the gameplay with the socom (pistol) and famas (rifle) against regular guards is a bit awkward since the first person scheme they go with in later games is an improvement (though it does make the games more action oriented and less stealth based) and here you can't really see the guards from too far away(-0.75). You can look in first person, but unless you're using the PSG-1(sniper) or stinger rocket launcher you can't see them in the first person (or the guided missile I suppose) and attack and none of those are exactly good weapons to fight non-bosses with(-0.50).



The graphics are not anything to write home about nowadays of course and you can't really make out eyes or mouth movements in the character models (though some of the cutscenes still managed to be impressive such as those involving REX)(-0.25).

I honestly don't have many complaints with this game.

-1.50

Overall Rating:10/10