Well, here is part 2 of the Fallout 3 DLC, and boy, is it a huge improvement over the last one. I’m not going to explain much about Operation Anchorage, but it was linear, stripped away most features, and was kind of boring (check out reviews elsewhere). The Pitt actually adds a whole new city, which is post-apocalyptic Pennsylvania. You are to free slaves there and find a cure to the rad poisoning that’s getting to everyone and turning them into “trogs.”. Yes, trogs are a new creature you’ll discover and are even creepier than those ghouls.
The Pitt is fairly large, and you start out on a bridge that was once a freeway that led into Pennsylvania, so you’re right on the border. Once you cross the bridge, you lose all your equipment (don’t worry, you’ll get it back!). and talk to these poor people and fight in a gladiator arena to win an audience with a man named Ashur. I won’t go any further since this will spoil stuff, but The Pitt has an awesome new weapon and, mainly, a great story and new setting.
The Pitt is very industrial, with a huge steel mill and a steelyard that goes hundreds of feet above the ground. To get an idea of how big The Pitt is, you need to take the Citadel, Rivet City, and the whole area around the Capital Building (you know, with the Washington Monument and that huge lake), and you have The Pitt. While most of it is indoors and in the steelyard, you’ll spend a good four hours exploring this amazing place.
Thankfully, there are reasons to go back here (which I won’t reveal due to spoilers), so this setting isn’t a one-shot deal like Operation Anchorage. The Pitt is just very gritty, more dark and mature than the Capital Wasteland, and much more dangerous. The whole place feels scarier than the Wasteland (which just felt really lonely), and this place feels haunted. There are raiders everywhere, and there’s no way you can fight them all off like you can at the Falls. The new weapon added is the Auto Axe, and boy, is it sweet!!! This thing spins a deadly blade and will do almost a one-hit kill in V.A.T.S. I highly recommend buying this, but also buy Broken Steel for the level 30 cap!
Fallout 3 is just one amazing experience, one of the best games I’ve ever played, and one of my top ten for this generation. I’m not going to write a review for Fallout 3. This review is really for Fallout 3 fans who paid $10 for this addon and for those who are thinking about it.
Operation Anchorage is the liberation of Anchorage, Alaska, from the communist Chinese. You’ll be helping out the Brotherhood Outcasts and will have to travel a great distance from the downtown metro area to get there. Once you help some outcasts fight off some super mutants and help escort them to their bases, you enter a computer simulation of this liberation. This is where Fallout 3 goes weird and doesn’t really feel like Fallout anymore. Everything is covered in snow, first off, and second, it turns Fallout 3 into a linear FPS. You still have everything, like your Pip-Boy and your RPG bits, in tact, but there’s no looting or anything like that. You have health and ammo dispensers spread throughout, and you’re only allowed the weapons the simulation wants you to have.
You have to help these people infiltrate the Chinese base in the mountains and disable three AA guns. After this, you have to take out a listening post, a tank depot, and then a pulse field to finally get into the headquarters. The DLC feels very derivative, with only two new enemies and one or two new weapons. The only new weapons I saw were the awesome Gauss Rifle, which uses microfusion cells (yeah, you actually use those now!) and is a one-shot super sniper rifle. The other was a Chinese officer’s sword, but I think that might be old. You can get troops that can help you battle things out, but this was a weird turn of events for Fallout 3.
On the plus side, though, you have realized this is a simulation, and it helps ease the pain for people wanting to wander the Capital Wasteland. The whole purpose of this DLC is to unlock some pretty sweet loot (I won’t spoil it!) in a vault that can’t be accessed unless the simulation is completed. You can complete this DLC in about 3–5 hours, depending on your play style, and it’s not worth the $10. I would honestly skip this one and go get The Pitt and Broken Steel. If you really want more Fallout, then pick up OA, but Bethesda’s first foray into DLC wasn’t a great one.
These indie games just keep getting better and better and more like full-budget titles. Zeno Clash is no exception, with an original, wonderful art style, fun gameplay mechanics, and a very intriguing story. ZC puts you in the mind of Ghat, a runaway man who is hunting his “Father-Mother” and wants to release his or her secret.
During your meeting, you meet a few interesting characters, and you play through flashbacks occasionally. The game is an FPS/melee game with some pretty deep combat mechanics. You use your fists by using the left mouse button and right mouse button (for strong attacks), which you can lock on by using E and using space as a block. While you’re blocking, you can dodge attacks by hitting D or A, and if you time it right, you’ll get a slow-mo queue to punch. You can create combos, and then when the enemy is stunned, you can knee-bash them or throw them around. I found the best tactic was to charge your strong attack while backstepping and then let it go. This is a bit repetitive (just like the whole game), but it’s effective and works when you are up against four-plus enemies. All enemies have a health gauge, and so do you; thus, having to eat orange flowers will give you health.
Sometimes you’ll get weapons to use, and these are neat little things that can be used to shoot the enemies, causing massive damage. Most guns have no more than a few shots in them (this game has a tribal theme to it), so you’ll have to aim very well since reloading can take longer than you want (sorry, this isn’t Call of Duty). While most of the game consists of this pattern: Run, fight a batch of enemies, cutscene, rinse, and repeat. Thanks to the short length (about 5–6 hours), you won’t get too bored. One level, however, is a lot different from the rest: You are running through a foggy plain (the fog will kill you since it bites!) and you have a crystal torch. You must keep it lit with candles littered throughout the level and use it to shoot fireballs as shadows that come after you.
Zeno Clash has a wonderful premise to all of its gameplay, but ultimately it’s all the same and can actually be really frustrating towards the end. If there are too many enemies, you can get boxed in and beaten to death, and I found the most frustrating part about the game to be that if you get hit while you have a weapon in your hand, you drop it. This usually happens during a reload and can piss you off a lot. There aren’t too many weapons, but you have a single-shot rifle, a dual-shot crossbow, a sledgehammer, a bone bat, and a grenade launcher. But these are tribal-looking weapons, so everything is made from what you see around you, which is pretty slick.
The game uses the Source Engine (the updated one, not the old one), and the graphics are just bizarre and way out there. The creatures are something straight out of nightmares, and some of the speech is pretty odd too. Nonetheless, it makes the game even better, and the visual splendor is probably what saves this game. If you think there’s something to come back to (there isn’t), you can play challenges, and there are a bunch of Steam achievements to unlock. I highly recommend Zeno Clash to any FPS or indie game fan.
claps Yessss, thank you, Sega, for making one of the few mature-rated games for us adults out there. Thank you. House of the Dead: Overkill plays more on the great HotD series that started back in the early 90s in the arcades. You play Agent G with his foul-mouthed partner Isaac Washington (yes, he’s black!) as you figure out why zombies are plaguing the US. While the story is hilarious, vulgar, rude, and completely dirty, there are tons of funny voice acting and dialog to enjoy. The characters are played out very well, and you get pretty attached early on (there are only about 8 levels or so), along with the major hottie, Varla Gunns.
The game plays like a typical on-rails FPS where the game controls where you move and you just worry about the shooting. The game has many locales, from jails to hospitals to swamps to theme parks, so you won’t get bored one little bit. There are many guns to buy and upgrade, along with some great unlockables for beating the game. While you wander through levels, there are a few temperature upgrades you can shoot (I wish there were more), such as health, grenades, green blobs that slow downtime for a little while, and gold braids. Yes, collect all these brains, and you unlock artwork, videos, etc. Now upgrading your weapons is mandatory, such as less recoil, clip size, damage, and the whole nine yards. You can have up to two weapons equipped, and switching back and forth between these two is a great strategy when you have too many zombies to deal with. You start off the game with a pistol, and if you save up your money (more on how later), you can buy more weapons. Buying a shotgun first is great since you use all your rounds to clear most of the zombies out and then switch to your pistol to finish off stubborn stragglers.
One great thing about OK is that it never gets too frustrating. When you die, you start off right where you were with no continues. Of course, you take a score hit, but people who don’t care about this won’t break their Wiimotes in anger. The levels are just the right length, taking about 10–15 minutes to complete with super-fun boss fights. Each boss will have their weak point circled in red, and all you have to do is shoot whatever projectile they fire at you and keep on them. The bosses are disgusting, grotesque, and very funny-looking. You’re probably all great, but there’s more!
MULTIPLAYER MAN!! That’s the best ever. While it’s the same as a single player, having someone help you can always be fun. Now, if you beat the game, you get the director’s cut (I won’t say what it is!!). Along with being able to dual-wield weapons, yes, it’s sweet, super fun, and adds lots of replay value. Wouldn’t that make the game too easy, you say? Well, use the “Extra Mutants” tweak before each level, and you have an extra challenge. Sadly, there is no online play, but hopefully, a future HotD will have it. I HIGHLY recommend this super fun game to any adult who has dust collecting on their Wii.
Once again, Valve brings us another great game using their source engine that brings all the elements of Left 4 Dead to life (or death???) The first thing you’ll notice (mainly Valve fans) is that the Source engine has had a next-gen upgrade (even more so than Portal), and everything looks amazing. While HL2 fans will notice some sounds and elements of the engine from those games, it doesn’t really bother you. The game looks stunning with excellent lighting effects, awesome AI (enemy and friendly), great character models, high-res textures, and just everything you’d expect out of the source engine. L4D, however, isn’t really a single-player-only experience; in fact, you won’t even see the full potential of this four-player game unless you play online.
The game is comprised of four campaigns, and each campaign has five levels. Each level gets longer and more and more difficult, with a final level where you have to face off hundreds of zombies until your rescue transport arrives. At the start of each campaign, you get to choose the four characters (each character just starts out with a different weapon). Speaking of weapons, I was disappointed in the small selection that there was (just pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and a sniper rifle, along with bombs and Molotov). The basic idea is that these four characters have to cover each other’s butts through these levels while you face off massive hordes of zombies. The whole idea is a bit more in-depth, with some gameplay elements thrown in there. For example, zombies are attracted to noise and light, so if you keep your flashlight on near zombies, they’ll charge you. Shoot a car that has its headlights on, and you’ll have to face off with dozens of zombies charging at you because you set off the car alarm. Killing these zombies is fairly easy since a few shots will bring them down, but it’s sheer numbers that make up for this.
There are over 150 different zombie types, but there are a few “special” zombies that are harder to take down. These are the Tanks (massive zombies that will take all four people to bring down), Smokers (these guys have super long tongues that snatch you up), Boomers (no, not like in Gears of War, if these guys vomit on you, they attract more zombies, and the same if you blow them up if they’re too close to you), Witches (you hear them cry through levels, and if you disturb them, they’ll take you down and you are down until someone revives you), and Hunters (which are super fast-moving zombies that pounce on you and eat you until someone saves you). This changes the gameplay up, along with certain sections requiring you to do something, such as hit this switch to move this, and while this is happening, you have to fend off hordes of zombies. The game is probably the only “zombie simulator” out there because they just act and look so real, and you really do feel helpless in the middle of nowhere with hundreds of zombies around you.
Of course, you’ll blow through the four campaigns in about 3–4 hours, but it’s the great online play that extends the replay value. The way levels are played out is very original as well since you have to get everyone into a “safe room” at the end of the level (look for the red door) and close it, thus the next level loads and you get to restock on health and ammo. Throughout the levels, you may find rare ammo stocks, pipe bombs, etc. It’s the final levels that really are hard since you have to fend off so many zombies, and this can be hard for a single player since the AI won’t go anywhere unless you do. When your transport arrives, you must start heading towards it before it gets to you, because if you’re surrounded by dozens of zombies, you’re dead. If your teammates die, they tend to respawn in closets or behind closed doors. Once you run out of health, you can be healed by other teammates or take pills to temporarily fill your void. L4D is a wonderful game, but it’s tight on content and lacks more maps that we need (Valve sucks when it comes to DLC). I highly recommend this game as a great online multiplayer game.
Legendary is yet another game this year that has been released and has totally let all of us FPS fans down, but what a surprise, right? FPS games are probably the most prone to failing terribly due to lazy level design, bad stories, bad physics, and anything else you put in an FPS. Unfortunately, Legendary does almost everything wrong and hardly anything right, but you can still squeeze a few drops of fun out of this weekend rental. Legendary puts you up against Pandora’s Box’s creatures that start taking over and destroying the world while trying to be controlled by the evil LeFey.
While the plot sounds semi-interesting, it takes a face dive right into a mud pit once you start playing since you don’t really give a crap after about thirty minutes. If playing the game is hard enough as it is, the mechanics the game is built around are totally slapped together and not very well done. Even when I saw videos of this game, I knew it didn’t look complete, and they actually shipped the game unfinished. First and foremost, the main culprit is the Unreal 3 engine. Now, I’m not bashing the engine at all; it’s just that many developers tend to think U3 will make the game for them, and they just have to tell it what to do, which is not the case. There are a lot of similarities to BioShock, in fact, from the animus powers shooting out of your hand (with almost exact animations) to the same glowy look on everything you interact with. While the game looks halfway decent, everything looks like it was copied and pasted into the game instead of built there. You’re wandering around a war-torn London and New York, and you don’t even feel like you’re there since the game doesn’t replicate the cities at all, not even famous landscapes for Christ’s sake! On top of this, the physics are way off, and everything seems to stick like glue or something, and it’s just really weird. There’s terrible collision detection where enemies will go through walls, stick there, and start flopping around.
This is also coupled with cramped levels and linear levels, and everything just looks the same. Turn this wheel here, kill these creatures here, shoot these wire suspensions here, and bypass this keypad here. The game is very tedious, completely retarded, and put together so poorly. Even moving your character is a pain since when you get hit on one side, you stop moving that way for some strange reason, and I have no idea why. You’ll be strafing left and then get attacked by your left, but you just stop dead in your tracks, and you have to jam the stick left a few times before even moving again. The guns don’t feel powerful at all and are just completely retarded with almost no recoil; they are all standard, such as shotguns, machine guns, rocket launchers, and a weak pistol that does NOTHING. The most original weapon is probably an axe, but even the more powerful weapons take a while to tear down foes coming after you. The enemies are just absurdly difficult to bring down, even in the easiest setting. For some unknown reason, the weakest enemy (blood spiders) just swarms after you, and you have to find the sac holding them. Getting there can be a pain since this leads into the lame healing system. Other enemies range from werewolves, minotaurs, and griffons—you name it.
These are cool enemies and shouldn’t have anything go wrong, but it does anyway! They throw so many enemies at you, and you never feel powerful enough to take them down, so you’re constantly scrounging your health with the difficult healing system. You have this power from your hand called Animus, so you take Animus Clouds from dead creatures, and you use this for health. You hold down Y to take it, but it takes so long to absorb it all, and this is not good when you have a ton of guys shooting at you or creatures clawing at you. You hold down Y again to heal yourself, but as you can see, using the same button to heal and absorb is not going to work very well. When you’re near clouds, you absorb them instead of healing, and vice versa. If you double-tap Y (why are we double-tapping with so many buttons?) you can do an animus push to stun enemies, and this does absolutely nothing. Now, when it comes back to combat, you can’t use any melee attacks; there is no cover system. NOTHING, ZERO, ZILCH, SQUAT! You have to hide behind everything and peek out like a stupid old PlayStation game from six years ago. This makes things ridiculously annoying during the unbalanced levels that are badly designed.
This game just has so many things wrong that you wonder what there is to like. Well, it’s for the sheer epicness that the game seems to pull off with a 300-foot Golem, a HUGE Kraken you fight in London, and even the giant Griffons are cool to kill. If you can bear through this 6-7-hour campaign, you can find some fun in this game. With a different story, decent graphics, cool enemies, and lots of big bosses, you can have fun all at once. Legendary, this definitely is not.
Boy, do I love this game? Actually, I hate this game and love it at the same time. This is probably one of the best-looking DS games out there right now. With this FPS survival horror running at 60 FPS, it’s fast, smooth, and very creepy. Yes, the game is actually creepy, kind of like Silent Hill creepy. The game is full of weird monsters, mind-boggling puzzles, and a creepy atmosphere and ambiance.
The game controls really well, but the actual size of the DS makes your wrists cramp up and go numb all the time. If you’ve played Metroid Prime: Hunters, then you know the whole setup, but if you haven’t, then I’ll tell you. You move your reticule around with the stylus, so this feels real and also makes things a lot easier (yeah, PSP!) while you move around with the A, B, X, and Y (if you’re left-handed) or the D-pad (if you’re right-handed). You have your inventory right under your health bar (which is your heart monitor), so you can just touch the weapons you want on the fly, and this makes combat easy and fast.
While the gameplay is pretty straightforward (double tap B or Up to run), you just run around shooting the weird monsters and solving the annoying puzzles. Yes, I said annoying because the hallways all look the same, and it’s easy to get lost in the labyrinthine buildings and hallways with a terrible map and no sense of direction. This is not good since your wrists are cramping and going numb while you hold them in 20 different positions. The map is just a bunch of lines with yellow dots for doors, and there’s no way to tell where you have been. You can write on your notepad and leave notes, but this proves useless for the map and only good for jotting down clues and codes for keypads.
The whole level design is just stupidly annoying, with fallen-over vending machines, desks, chairs, and anything else a hospital has blocking hallways and doors, so you have to find your way around everything. Since you lose track of where you were last, you’ll tear your hair out because of the retarded save system, and this kills the whole game. You’ll spend a good 20 minutes on one level and then die because there are 10 enemies coming after you and you only have 3 bullets. Dying forces you to restart the entire chapter all over again, even when you and the boss fight at the end of the chapter. I really tried loving this game since I absolutely adore survival horror games and I’m very forgiving with them (read my Alone in the Dark review), so I suffered through 5/16 chapters. The thing is, it wasn’t so bad until I picked up the game again four months later and realized why I stopped playing—the retarded save system.
I also really hate how ammo is so scarce in the game when there are so many enemies to fight off; this and the fact that enemies respawn when you re-enter a room means all the ammo you saved up for the boss is now spent on enemies you killed four times already. I don’t know what Gamecock was thinking, but they must not play survival horror games much. Survival horror games need to have really good maps, a way to save clues, no respawning enemies, and a good save system. The whole point is to “survive,” so you have to scrounge what you have around you. This game really shows how to NOT make a survival horror game, so please just consider this before even renting this game.
What made me actually want to like the game is that it looks so amazing and plays so damn well. The game is very creepy, with eerie music and spooky sound effects such as babies crying, water dripping, doors creaking, lightning, thunder, and rain pounding on roofs. The game is also very dark, so you need your trusty flashlight, and this is where the “Doom 3 meets Silent Hill” aspect comes in since you can only either use your flashlight or your gun. Since the DS isn’t very powerful, there’s a black “fog of war” all around you, so when you turn your flashlight off for some reason, you can only see two steps in front of you, but your flashlight can illuminate a 30-foot hall. This is actually a hardware fault and nothing on the developerspart, but you really don’t even notice it. The game’s monsters are very creepy, with zombies that have their chests open up and shoot poison at you, weird creepy things that crawl around the ceilings, nasty slugs that give out high-pitched sonic screams, and really freaky bosses that I can’t even begin to describe. There’s blood all over the walls, broken windows, papers, books, and whatever you can think of thrown everywhere, so the whole place feels deserted and you feel like you’re all alone.
I don’t remember much about the story, but I do remember that you wake up in a hospital and you are trying to find your way out, so it has a Silent Hill feel there. The game also has highly detailed textures and great lighting effects (as I’ve described), like lights (and your flashlight) flickering on and off, and there’s lots of detail in everything. Puzzles are solved by finding papers and clues as to where to find keys and codes, and even by solving certain random puzzles to open boxes, doors, etc. If you want an idea of what the puzzles are like they are exactly like the Silent Hill puzzles we have all grown to hate so you know what to expect. Overall, the game looks and plays great, but the punishing saves system, scarce ammo and health, maze-like hallways, and terrible map ruin this otherwise great survival horror experience.
For one, I rarely buy games like this on day one without knowing that I’ll at least want to play them 2 or 3 times, and Mirror’s Edge was a great buy, but I wish I would have waited for a price drop first. Now don’t get me wrong, go spend $60 on this and you’ll have one hell of a time, but for the length and content, ME cuts it a bit short. ME is a parkour/free running/building jumping/limber skinny people running around like monkeys on rooftops game and is very well executed.
The first thing I’d like to mention is the warming soundtrack EA created for this game. EA has finally listened to the fans and got rid of the horrible EA Trax, a bunch of wannabe punk and metal bands mixed with lame hip-hop and R&B that everyone with half a brain and decency turns off. EA’s new IPs (Dead Space and ME) have an original, rich soundtrack that fits the game very well. ME has a slow, soothing OST with lots of low basses and some poppy techno thrown in. The game’s main theme by Lisa Miskovsy (ironically titled “Still Alive”) is a charming song that really gets the feeling of the game across. A woman and message deliverer for the resistance named Faith, who’s sister was framed for murder, must find the killer of the person her sister, Kate, was framed for, and must bring all of this to an end. In a rebuilt city corrupt and full of backstabbers, Faith must scour the rooftops to find entrances into buildings to find her targets.
Scouring these rooftops is both fun and beautiful, thanks to the game’s amazing graphics. EA’s next-gen engine (used and updated from Skate.) makes ME one of the best-looking games ever made. Everything is highly detailed, with buildings as far as the eye can see, reflections off of windows, and everything is just highly detailed. The game looks similar to Portal (hmmm…just mere coincidences here?) with lots of HDR lighting and lots of blinding whites, blues, reds, and oranges. The art style really helps the game’s feel and works brilliantly. The cut scenes, however, are a bit different and detract from the feel of the game with cell shading similar to those Esurance commercials (with that hot pink-haired Esurance chick that has tons of porn available everywhere). While this style works, it really is a detraction from the actual game. The voice acting is really good here, and the characters are decent except Faith, who is the only character you get attached to thanks to the game’s absurdly short length (6–8 hours, depending on how you play).
Now back to how the game plays: it plays well and feels well, with a few flaws. The game’s control scheme has its plate full of lots of different button combos that take a little while to get used to, let alone master. You have all of the parkour moves available to you, such as building jumping, wall running, pole swinging, zip lines, three-step jumps (LB, RB, LB), wall climbing, shimmying, etc. Additionally, you can make runs faster by pulling your legs up instead of double-stepping jumps or hopping over rails. This makes time trials go faster and keeps your speed up. Finding your way in ME is fairly simple since you have “runner’s vision,” which makes certain items turn red, and you use them according to what they are. Boards leading off buildings usually mean to jump down; small objects in front of a larger object mean you double-step your jump and vault to a ledge; you can crawl in vents; and a lot of the time you must climb poles attached to walls and even jump to them! The game is fast and very smooth, and you don’t have to be afraid of sluggish controls. The whole game is responsive and reacts to your commands.
The biggest flaw in the game, however, is the combat. Most of your enemies have guns, and you don’t. This always proves a problem. Most of the time, you just run away, but when you’re forced to fight, you must take on 5+ enemies in one room using melee combat, jumping kicks, sliding kicks to the nuts, etc. The combat itself works well, but actually using it against enemies with machine guns, shotguns, etc. doesn’t work out too well. Try taking down five guys in one room with shotguns just with your fists—not too easy. This requires disarming (timing is a must, of course) and either using their guns against other enemies in classic FPS action or just being very fast and outsmarting the enemy with kicks off of walls and all that. While the combat is manageable, it’s flawed and makes up most of the trial-and-error in the game. The game has little trial and error outside of combat since most of the deaths are on the player. Try finding out where to go without a runner’s vision while 10 guys are shooting at you; that can be very tough to do, and in some spots, I had to try 20+ times just to get it all right.
With that flaw aside, ME proves to be an amazing game and should be played by all FPS fans, Parkour fans, or just action-adventure game fans (PoP fans can come out of hiding now!) With ME’s wonderful soundtrack, graphics, art style, story, and gameplay, you will stay busy with the time trials and speed run. I hope ME2 improves upon all of this, and I will be there when it comes out.
Man o’ man, does this bring back a lot of good memories? I remember almost dying because my mom’s computer couldn’t run HL1. I begged her to get the computer upgraded (at the time, not even knowing how this was possible or the cost), but she just wouldn’t do it. All I could do was stare at videos and screenshots until I thought they would be forever da-da-da! until I heard about the PS2 port! I was so excited that I babysat my bratty sisters for a whole summer and laid down $200 in smackeroonies on a used PS2, but to my luck, HL was nowhere to be seen. It turns out that not many copies of the game were made, so they were scarce. Settling with a rental, I finally was able to play the game, but it was starting to feel old because I didn’t get ahold of it until late 2003. Realizing that I was missing out on a lot at the time, I wound up losing my save and, being so angry, never touched the game again. Four years later, I can finally play the game again thanks to Steam (I actually ordered the HL1 Anthology off of EB games for $20), and I have definitely realized what I missed now that I have finally been able to finish the game.
While Half-Life never looked as good as Unreal, Valve, it pulled some strings and did some custom stuff with the physics, water, and lighting effects. HL isn’t just your regular run-and-gun shooter; the story is told all in real-time by running into certain characters, and by just progressing, you get an idea of what’s going on without much dialog. This was revolutionary at the time, and so were the weapons, graphics, sound, physics, and enemies. The game has your usual weapons like machine guns with grenade launchers, pistols, revolvers, etc., but HL has some weapons up its sleeve that were never seen before. Such weapons happen to be laser-guided rocket launchers (you guide them with your mouse!). I remember people buzzing about these weapons back in the day, and they’re still pretty cool. You also have the Bee Gun, which is a weird slimy thing that shoots killer bees. You also have some strange electricity guns, mines, laser mines, satchel charges, etc.
The enemies were also something never seen before, like the Head Crabs, Head Crab Zombies, the Ichthyosaur, the Vortigaunts, etc. The game also had huge bosses, which were amazing back in the day and seemed very epic. The game was dark, creepy, and very hard as well. Most shooters back in the late 90s were just run-and-gun nonsense in dark tunnels, military complexes, etc. Half-Life is not innocent and does do this, but there are other places to see, like climbing a HUGE canyon and looking out over the ugly vista that looks like the Grand Canyon. Today it looks like someone slapped a low-res JPEG image in the background, but in the late 90s, things like this seemed like you were staring over a GrindLift in Gears of War 2. Half-Life was just so real and so amazing back in its day that it really kind of shocks you how such an old game can still make that kind of impact.
The game also consists of a lot of maze-like halls that you can get easily lost in, and I found this to be the main problem with HL. Some of the puzzles were a bit confusing to do, and navigating the endless halls calls for a much-needed walkthrough. While the level design is excellent and you pretty much know where to go, there are those occasional moments that make you wander around the whole area a few times and look in every nook and cranny, wondering what switch you missed or what you need to go through. Some neat things back in the day were being able to have the Blue Shift men help you and ask scientists to open doors for you. While this is standard these days, this kind of AI was unknown to late-90s PC gamers. This added to the realism and made you feel like you really were stuck in Black Mesa trying to fight off the alien invasion.
You’re probably wondering what the story is, right? Well, it’s really simple: Gordan Freeman (that’s you) arrives at Anomalous Hazards as a regular employee, an experiment goes awry, and Gordan must escape the facility and figure out the source of the alien invasion. The story, as I’ve already said, isn’t told through cutscenes but rather in real-time while you play. This helps add to the experience, but of course it may bore most younger PC gamers who are used to FEAR, Crysis, CoD, etc. Half-Life is for hardcore old-school PC shooter fans only and really takes cunning skill to finish. The game will give you less and less health as you go, and you’ll have to figure out how to take out a room of 10 bad guys with only 2 health. While this isn’t impossible, it can be done and requires precise skill (thus only for hardcore fans).
Most of you have probably played HL2 already, and these games are pretty much completely different besides the content. You still have your hazard suit; most of the weapons are the same, but there is more stuff in HL1. About 40% of the weapons and enemies in HL1 aren’t in HL2. HL2 is more realistic, while HL1 is more of a sci-fi type of game. Thankfully, you can play HL2 without even touching HL1 (which I did), but HL1 explains a lot of things that aren’t explained in HL2, and there are bits in HL2 that are for fans of HL1 that you normally wouldn’t know about unless you played this game.
Now, of course, HL1 has a lot of flaws, like floaty physics, being able to run 100mph, cheap deaths, and poor graphics, but these are flaws seen with age. If you were to go back to 1998, the game was almost flawless. Now, when it comes to upgrades and mods, there is an endless ocean. There are a ton of amazing multiplayer and single-player mods available, and I have spent hours and hours on most of them. You must go to FilePlanet.com and download these mods, because they are super fun. HL1 also has a free hi-def pack that you can download to update the graphics a little bit. If you want to go even further, pick up Half-Life: Source, which uses HL2’s engine to make things look more modern. I highly recommend the Source version for people who just can’t stand “old graphics,” but old-school shooter fans should just get the hi-def pack just for nostalgia’s sake.
The only way you’re going to like Fallout 3 is for two reasons. 1. You loved Oblivion, and 2. You love the Fallout series. Otherwise, you’re probably going to hate the game and think it’s “boring.” I say this because the game relies a lot on you finding out what to do and where you should take your next steps. The game is 100% nonlinear and features a perfect balance of FPS action and RPG stat building. The game is more than just “Oblivion with guns,” and the reason people say this is because Bethesda uses the Oblivion engine for this game. Just like in Oblivion, you take quests from people and complete them as you wish. You can be good, bad, or neutral in the world. You can find mini-encounters or free-form quests that are separate from the main and side quests to unlock achievements. I don’t want to spend this whole review comparing this game to Oblivion since it is its own game.
The first thing you’ll notice is how amazing the graphics are. The Oblivion engine has been refined, and everything looks amazing. Step out of Vault 101, and your eyes will adjust from the dark, and you’ll witness a beautiful yet desolate wasteland that leaves you wondering, “Now what?” Don’t be scared since the game does guide you a little bit, so you aren’t completely lost. Just wander around to find Megaton and just talk to people, and you’ll get quests eventually. Of course, you always know where to go for the main quests, and every quest has arrows on your map that point to where to go. You may see places on your map, but you can’t fast-travel there unless you actually walk around and discover them yourself. This forces players to explore the vast world of DC and really get to know the place. There are two sections to the game: the Wasteland, which takes up about 70% of the game, and DC, which is cluttered with metro stations, fallen buildings, and all the main landmarks like the White House, the Library of Congress, the Pentagon, etc.
The only way to travel around in DC is through the metro tunnels, and I found this kind of annoying since it may be tough to figure out which tunnel goes where. I just really can’t express how amazing the game feels, and you really do feel alone and empty when you go through stores and buildings that are completely trashed. With the melancholy music, you sometimes get a bit depressed since it’s just so amazingly surreal. Thankfully, Bethesda injected a bit of dark humor to keep you from feeling this way, and one way is with VATS. The Vault-Tec Automated Targeting System is one of the main gameplay elements. Hit RB, and you’ll pause time and zoom in on your enemy, and there will be parts of his or her body you can hit. The percentage is your chance of hitting that target, your AP is your action points, and each weapon takes a certain amount of them every time you queue up attacks. If you do enough damage, you can cripple a limb and either make your enemy drop the weapon, lower their accuracy, or make them walk slower. Once you get to higher levels, a few shots and you can blow their heads off in a heaping gory mess, and it never ever gets boring. Sniping someone from 200 feet away, watching the camera follow the bullet, and having someone’s head fall off their neck is just so satisfying. I played for 54 hours and never got bored with it.
Of course, you can fight in real-time combat, but you don’t get the advantages of VATS like critical hit strikes, etc. The game has many weapons, from mini-nuke launchers to rocket launchers, 10mm pistols, combat shotguns, sledgehammers, hunting rifles—the list just goes on and on. You can also make your own weapons by finding schematics and collecting the items you need to build various weapons, like the Rock-It Launcher, which lets you shoot anything you find, and the Railway Rifle, which lets you shoot railroad spikes and impale limbs on walls. The game is huge, amazing, and awesome, and all of the combat is very satisfying, and there are endless ways to approach a situation. Don’t you like fighting? Use a Stealth Boy to sneak your way through places, plant live grenades in enemies’ pants, and watch them explode! Like fighting with your fists? Walk around with a power glove and bash your way through the wasteland. Now that combat is out of the way, let’s get to stats. Your menu is your Pip-Boy, which is attached to your arm, features an easy-to-navigate interface, and makes it really easy to find what you want. You can level up to level 20 (which is lame since you’ll get to level 20 way early in the game and be maxed out), and you have several options once you level up.
You can add points to yourself for things like your medicine, small guns, big guns, explosives, speech, barter, energy weapons, lockpicking, science, etc. Then you get to pick a perk (say that five times fast!) and these are another unique gameplay idea in Fallout 3. There are over 40 perks, but you can only pick up to 20 throughout the game, so choose wisely! Perks range from giving you more health, increasing your regular abilities, automatically giving you another level, making animals in the world your friends, revealing every location on your map, making you a law bringer, and if you bring every finger off a bad enemy to a special HQ, you get caps (currency in the game) and good karma. The stats are also affected by items such as Buffout, Jet, Mentats (post-apocalyptic drugs!), etc. These have temporary effects and will get you out of a tight situation. You can trade and repair your items with people around the city and become rich. You can also just shoot everyone in the cities and get bad karma, so as you can see, there are no restraints.
You can also pass time by “waiting,” which skips hours. You can heal your crippled limbs by sleeping or going to a doctor. Getting too irradiated? Take some Rad-Away! Getting addicted to a certain drug? Go to the doctor! You can eventually get your own place in Tenpenny Tower, and you can buy things like a workbench, doctor stations, etc. I just can’t express how HUGE this game is, from its vast size to being able to pick up anything you see to use as ammo, trade, or sell. You really do feel like you’re struggling to survive in a hostile wasteland, and that feeling never goes away, even after 100 hours of play. Of course, you’ll eventually conquer the wasteland and not be afraid of even the strongest enemies in the game.
Now there are issues with the game, but they’re minor. There is loading between each section of the game, such as going from the main world into buildings, etc. The level 20 cap is extremely annoying and makes you quit trying really hard to find places to fight in. The game is really similar to Oblivion, and people who played the F out of that game will feel too familiar here. That’s why this game didn’t get a 9.5 from me like Oblivion did because I’ve kind of “been there, done that” with this engine. While there are so many subtle things in the game, like having followers (including a dog!), the many types of weird enemies, and all the different people you can talk to, it’s insane. I could spend hours telling you about every location and person you meet. Just stop what you’re doing and go play Fallout 3, and you’ll spend dozens and dozens of hours surviving the vast wasteland! Go grab an Ice Cold Nuka-Cola and watch out for the hostile factions (Raiders, Talon Company Mercs, Slavers, etc.), and good luck out there!
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Try multiplayer. A lot of fun !