Shadowgrounds was a pretty decent shooter a few years ago, but Survivor doesn’t really do much new and is pretty boring. As a top-down shooter, you play as a marine who is trying to escape a ruined base that is overrun by aliens. The weapons are pretty generic, with shotguns, assault rifles, flamethrowers, grenades, etc. You can pick up health packs, ammo, and OK, you know this formula already.
Unlike other better shooters like Alien Shooter, the game doesn’t even offer intense moments. There are a few straggling aliens coming after you and maybe a few hard ones, and that’s it. You can easily kill these guys, and it doesn’t feel very satisfying at all. You can shoot barrels, toss grenades, or just run around holding the fire button, and you’ll beat these guys. Ammo is plentiful, so you never feel like you’re “surviving,” and it’s pretty hard to die.
There is an upgrade system that you use by finding “parts,” and when you level up, you can use points for different upgrades like sonar, health boosts, etc., and each character you play has the same upgrades. That’s pretty lame. While each character has a different loadout, there’s just nothing exciting about it at all. The game is fun, however, since it’s good for more casual players who don’t like the intensity of other top-down shooters, but even the aliens are generic-looking. Instead of creepy, deformed things, you just get the typical bug-like aliens.
The game doesn’t look or sound too good either, and the music almost seems nonexistent while the game looks pretty bland. The level design is also pretty bad since I wandered around areas and didn’t know where to go, like shooting a glass panel to open a walkway. There is no hint; the panel doesn’t even light up or flash. So this is bad level design, and the whole freaking game just feels boring! The game is a little fun if you’re bored or just want a decent top-down shooter.
I love first-person shooters with a great atmosphere, and Cryostasis pulls this off well. While the story is pretty confusing and never really makes any sense at all (even at the end), you at least know why you’re here. You are moving through a Russian nuclear icebreaker that was destroyed after hitting an iceberg (sound familiar?). You walk around finding dead bodies, and upon touching them, you can relive the moments leading to their deaths and try to prevent them so you can continue getting through the area that is blocked. This also provides more backstory on how the ship actually hit the iceberg and why.
The game is a first-person shooter, so you get some guns, but the game is slow-paced and not a high-octane shooter like most people like. You move very slowly, and you have to take your time aiming since these guns don’t exactly fire at a high rate. You get several different types, such as bolt-action rifles, a Tommy gun, a water cannon (that uses icicles!), and even a flare gun. The aiming is slow, like I mentioned, and you just feel like you’re shooting in slow motion. This isn’t entirely bad since you can take your time and aim because ammo is a tad scarce. You do, however, never feel like your guns are very powerful, even against weaker enemies. But you don’t get guns right away since, for a good 25% of the game, you get to use melee weapons.
The enemies in the game are pretty unique and not just average cannon fodder. These enemies are pretty creepy, look great, and behave decently towards your actions. Some swing axes and some shoot back, but they are all pretty hard to take down, especially the bigger guys later on.
The game doesn’t really consist of puzzles, but it is sometimes a linear maze. You do flip switches and activate heat sources (more on that later), but there are no actual puzzles in the game. This game makes things a bit dull and feels monotonous since the tone of the game never really changes, and even the atmosphere wears thin before the end. You’re opening a lot of doors, flipping a lot of switches, and shooting some bad guys, and that’s about it. This game is really only for people who are into atmosphere and stories.
You can use any heat source, such as lamps, lights, heaters, fires—you name it—to recharge your health. There are two meters, and the outer one shows how warm the room is or the heat source. You can only heal up to where that meter stops, and then you have your endurance gauge for sprinting.
The game looks pretty good, and you need a monster rig to run it with DirectX 10 and get the best-looking settings. The textures are highly detailed, and you can even watch the ice melt and watch the water run down walls in real-time. Of course, this was one of the very first DX10 games, so there are plenty of glitches. The PS 4.0 has a problem making animations jerky, so you have to fiddle around with minimizing to the desktop and changing it from 3 to 4 to get it to stop. The game will crash at random sometimes, and there are some weird, out-of-nowhere glitches throughout. This makes the game very frustrating to play, even if you have a hefty rig.
The game can feel like a chore towards the end because the pace never changes and is just deliberately slow, and the story just never makes sense. However, it has something about it that makes you keep playing regardless of all this, but people who like fast action should stay away. Cryostasis could have been a lot better with a more stable engine, better shooting, and a more steady pace instead of just being slow throughout. If you have the rig to run this game and the patience, then Cryostasis is your thing.
Update (06/14/18): The game has actually been pulled off of Steam as of late and does not run on Windows 10 or modern GPUs. This is such a shame, as it can easily be run on any GPU from the last 5–6 years with no problems. If you want to pick up a copy, you need to find someone who has it in their Steam library.
Silent Hill 4 is a continuation of the long-running Silent Hill series that started on the PlayStation way back in 1998. As a kid, I remember how incredibly horrifying SH was and how ridiculously hard the puzzles were, thus sending the rental back due to complaints of nightmares to my mother. Fast forward to 2004, and we get SH4, which is a mediocre approach to the amazing survival horror series. For some reason, Konami changed everything for this game, thus making it less fun and a major chore to play. You play Henry Townshend, who wakes up in his apartment one day with the front door chained up. You walk into your bathroom, and there is a hole in it that is a wormhole to these creepy SH worlds. You are following the murders of a man named Walter Sullivan and must release his soul and find out why he’s killing all of these people. The story is very interesting, yet there are few cut scenes and very little dialog, so most of the story is told through diary pages and memos that you pick up, which is actually kind of bland and boring (and lazy on Konami’s part).
SH4 is very strange in the sense that the game uses an initial gateway between levels, and you travel back and forth to heal, save, and unlock the rest of the world. After you finish the world, you get warped back to your apartment room 302, and you are free to roam around. This is in a strange first-person view, and you can save (this is the only save spot) and dump stuff into your trunk for later storage. You only get about 10 slots in your inventory, so going back to your apartment via red holes is essential. While this isn’t so bad, there’s so much backtracking and repeating of levels that it will make you sick. While you’re on a level, you wander around in the same SH fashion, picking up strange objects and using them in puzzles. The only problem is that the memos that give you the puzzles are so unbelievably vague that you will have almost no idea what to do unless you wander around aimlessly, just trying everything out. In most SH games, you do this, but it’s pretty obvious where to go. If you use a little bit of brainpower, you will get it. In SH4, things are so obvious that you will completely miss them.
This is all tied together because SH4 has the worst level design ever, and those are just paths that lead nowhere. You will wander around hallways and go up and down ladders that lead to dead-end rooms or send you back to places you don’t recognize. Not only this, but if you miss certain items (like the Swords of Obedience), the “boss” later on cannot be fought, and there’s no way to go back. Thanks to the whole gateway system, if you miss an item, you cannot go back, unlike in past SH games. There are four worlds that you must complete by finding a placard at the end of each level. In SH fashion, you must complete weird puzzles by putting the right pieces in the right places, and this is figured out by the memos you pick up. As I explained above, they are so vague that you can’t really figure out what to do except look through a walkthrough.
After you complete the world, you go back to your apartment, look through the peephole in your door, and read all these pages to advance the story. After you complete the fourth world, everything changes, and your room becomes haunted. You must use holy candles that you find throughout the world and place them down in front of these demons on your walls to rid them before they kill you. I found this extremely annoying and pointless gameplay element, which just makes this SH game very weird and a bad departure from the series. After completing these four worlds, you open up another whole of your washroom (yeah, what?!). With the four placards, you go back through these worlds again, trying to find God knows what, but the levels are continuous, and you don’t get warped back to your apartment (thus not getting healed). I found this really annoying and very boring since I just spent hell in these worlds and I have to go back?!
Now the boss fights are really stupid since they aren’t traditional SH bosses; they just look like regular enemies, and you must hack away at them till they fall, then stab them with that sword of obedience I mentioned. This is both boring and stupid since if you miss a word, you just have to run away from this boss until you finish the level. Now, if I should mention improvements, the combat is actually really great since you just lock on and whack away. You can charge attacks, but that’s about it. If you play on a harder difficulty, you’re going to be SOL because the game can be extremely tough since they throw dozens of enemies at you at times. The only weapons in the game are melee weapons, a pistol, and a revolver. Yeah, lame. Where’s the shotgun? Halfway through the game, you have your neighbor, Eileen, following you everywhere, and this is extremely annoying since you can’t leave her behind, and she hobbles on one leg, so she’s very slow. She has to be near you before you go through doors, or you leave her behind. This was a huge gameplay mistake, and it’s probably just as bad as the level design.
Now the only thing I haven’t mentioned is the scary factor. Is it as scary as past SH games? The answer is no. The enemy designs are a little creepy, but not out of this world terrifying like the past SH games. Are the levels creepy? Not really. Sometimes you’ll see something weird in the background, but you won’t really notice it. The atmosphere is a little spooky, but nothing that’ll make you crap your pants. The past SH games scared the living hell out of me, but SH4 didn’t really do much for the scary factor. I feel SH4 is really toned down, and Konami tried to do something new but failed at it. The siren doesn’t even go off in SH4!! C’mon… If you played the hell out of the other SH games, then go ahead and pick this up at bargain bin prices, but don’t expect a whole lot.
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.
Well, well, well, EA finally pulls itself together. After this and the upcoming Mirror’s Edge, I think EA finally got some brains that we’re full of new IP and original content. Dead Space is a superbly gruesome and atmospherically terrifying game that goes above and beyond the call of duty (no pun intended) when it comes to atmosphere, story, and gameplay ideas. The story is really unique, and it’s been ages since a great new original story has blossomed in the horror genre. You are Isaac Clarke, who is a repairman sent out to the Ishimura to find out why there are no communications on that ship. The ship is known as a “Planetcracker” and is carrying a mysterious relic called “The Marker,” and Isaac finds everyone aboard dead and the place deserted, except for extremely creepy monsters, a couple crazy doctors, and his girlfriend. Yeah, it’s a superb story, and it’ll keep you hooked throughout, but it won’t really unfold until the last three levels.
Let’s go right into gameplay. You can buy five different weapons (yeah, this game needs more weapons). They are the plasma cutter, ripper, flamethrower, force gun, contact beam, and line gun. They are all cool weapons, yet there is a twist: they’re tools, not guns. Isaac is a repairman, not a one-man-army mercenary or ex-military dude. This guy was not trained for combat, and he must learn very quickly how to defend himself. This makes the game feel even more creepy and makes you feel more helpless since you have to make do with what you have. What I loved is that everything is displayed visually, so there are no meters, bars, or gauges telling you your health and ammo. Everything is displayed to you. You have your health bar, which is a bar on your suit; your stasis bar is on your back (more on stasis later); your ammo is displayed holographically when you’re using your weapons; and so is your flashlight.
Everything in the game is easily accessible, and the controls are well mapped out. You can use melee combat by stomping on enemies or punching them. While you’ll not want to do this since it’s a bit clunky, it saves your butt in hairy situations. The way you kill enemies is by dismembering them to do extra damage. If you shoot their legs off, they’ll crawl to you. If you shoot their arms off, they’ll bite you to death. If you shoot one arm and one leg off, they’ll still crawl to you, decapitate them, and well, they’ll still try to kill you! If you get overwhelmed, just use your stasis and slow them; this is a must-do for some creatures like the Twitchers, who run ultra-fast. The creatures are very disturbing and are probably some of the sickest and most twisted things created in a game I’ve ever seen. These things are nasty, and you just feel the pain when you realize they were all once humans (most of them). There are also lots of cinematic sequences, like when a tentacle arm grabs your leg and it’s dragging you down a hall while you’re trying to shoot it off. There are HUMONGOUS boss fights, some turret gun sections, etc.
You’ll never get bored with the game since the scores vary so much. You’ll walk down a hall and a guy will be petting his dismembered leg and then fall over dead; you’ll hear a nurse laugh hysterically and blow her brains out; people will be killed behind bulletproof glass, etc. The game has a very disturbing atmosphere, and you really do get scared with all of the amazing ambient sound effects that will keep you on the edge and make you jump constantly. Dead Space does everything differently from other horror games since it’s all so surreal because of the way it’s done. You really do feel abandoned on a ship that once bustled with life. The graphics are also absolutely amazing; these are some of the best graphics seen so far, and they are breathtaking. There’s not much I can say except see it for yourself; you’ll be blown away!
There are segments that have zero gravity and vacuums. Zero-gravity sections have you jumping around the room, solving puzzles, and shooting things. These are very interesting, and they change the pace a lot. When you enter a vacuum, you are on an air timer, and if you don’t have any spare air, you’re dead! You can upgrade everything via workbenches by finding or buying power nodes. These work like “trees,” where you have to fill a path to that upgrade with nodes. Each weapon has different upgrade specs, and you won’t be able to upgrade them all in one play-through. In fact, it’ll take about two playthroughs to get all the achievements. There is plenty to do in the game, and the achievements are not impossible to get (like in FEAR!!! or Burnout Revenge!!!), so don’t panic.
All I have left to say is that Dead Space is absolutely amazing, and I’d give it a higher score if there were more enemy types, more weapons, and just a bit more variety. There’s enough to keep you interested through a couple of playthroughs, and I hope there will be a sequel (wait, it’s EA, of course there will be!) (Until we hate it.) There are six Dead Space comics available that you can pick up for about $15 each. I HIGHLY suggest reading these since they fill you in about a few weeks before the game takes place. They have the same atmosphere and storytelling as the game, and they are a really good read. Dead Space is one of the best horror-action games made, and this will be a piece of gaming history. I also look forward to the next few sequels.
Silent Hill was one of the first survival horror series that was 3D, along with Resident Evil, Clock Tower, Alone in the Dark, and Parasite Eve. While Resident Evil and Silent Hill became more successful, Silent Hill still remains the most frightening survival horror series ever made. Homecoming is no exception, with lots of fog and lighting effects, unbelievably freaky creatures, a great story with lots of plot twists, and a new and improved combat system. I have to first mention that there are so many little things in this game for hardcore SH fans, such as homages to the movie (which most of this game is based on), such as the “Otherworld peeling” effect, barbed wire in the church, ash or snow, the Grand Hotel, and the nurses. There are references everywhere that mention famous horror authors, horror movies, etc. Most people may never find these, but they are there, such as the streets being the last names of famous horror authors.
This is really great, and thankfully Konami kept all of this in mind for fans, but what if you’ve never played an SH game before? Well, then you came in at a great time. Most people’s concern is if the game has the same creepy atmosphere, and it does. There are fewer “out of the closet” scares, however, because the game concentrates more on the sheer atmosphere. Everything is dark and creepy, and we have the same spooky, unnerving sound effects and music that we’ve grown to love. The combat system is what I was mainly concerned about. Gone are the fixed camera angles and tank controls. The game controls very well in a third-person-style action game. You lock on to enemies and use light and heavy attack combos to kill them. This may be very repetitive and simple, but it’s better than being broken. Shooting is easier as well because you know how to control the gun in a Resident Evil 4 way.
Also introduced are button-pressing sequences, and this helps the intensity because if you don’t do this properly, you could die, and the game is totally up to you. Also new is a way to control the outcome of the story. Certain moments in the game require you to make a choice, and this will decide your ending (there are five altogether). There are a lot of weapons to pick up, such as knives, pipes, axes, shotguns, pistols, rifles, etc. There is nothing we haven’t seen in an SH game before, but you have to decide which weapon is best for which enemy.
If you want to go on the story side, it’s good, and it’s here. You are a man named Alex Shepard who comes home from being in a war, and everyone in Sheperd’s Glen is missing (just outside Silent Hill), and his brother Josh is missing. You must find the deep secrets of Silent Hill and why your brother went missing. There are tons of plot twists, and it’s probably one of the better, less confusing stories. The puzzles in Silent Hill are still as weird and confusing as ever. I had to get a FAQ for almost every single one because they require you to write down stuff and rattle off riddles in your head, and, well, they’re still confusing. The game is a bit short, however, and you can beat the game in about 8–10 hours, depending on how you play.
There is plenty of replay value thanks to the multiple endings, different costumes, and new weapons you can find after you beat the game. There are also collectibles to find, such as drawings, photos, and serums, to unlock achievements. The game is just very well put together, but you can tell the developers didn’t do anything risky with the formula. It’s pretty safe and basic, but you’ll want to visit Silent Hill again thanks to the excellent story, voice acting, graphics, atmosphere, new enemies, and button-pressing sequences, not to mention the humongous, disgusting boss fights! If you love survival horror, this is probably the best one of the year so far (Alone in the Dark was almost a disaster).
I was so excited for Alone in the Dark for such a long time that I never thought it would be an (almost) bad game. I don’t want to rag on this game since the developers did try really hard, so as a courtesy, I’m going to start with the positives. The first thing you’ll notice is the visuals; they are amazing. The graphics have high-res textures, amazing lighting effects, and creepy fog, and it’s all very dark and surreal. You’ll be playing John Carnby, who is trying to find out the secrets of Central Park while trying to stop Lucifer from taking over the world through “The Path of Light.”.
At the beginning of the game, everything is very cinematic and pretty fun. The game walks you through the “mixing system,” where you look in your jacket and mix tons of things together at your will. If you want a Molotov cocktail, stick a handkerchief in a glass or plastic bottle, light it with a lighter, and BOOM! Hey, you want it to stick to solve a puzzle? Add some sticky tape, and you’re good to go. Need to light your way through a dark tunnel but need it to land in one precise area without bouncing? Add some tape to that, or you just take an explosive bottle and shoot it in mid-air. Don’t worry, John keeps track of the bottle in slow motion; it’s just your job to time the shot.
There are also environmental weapons such as setting 4x4s on fire and lighting enemies up with them, using them to light your path, taking fire extinguishers to put out the fire, or using them as battering rams to take down doors. While the combination system is really fun, it does have its limits, but we’ll get to the downsides later. The next thing you’ll come across will be the combat, and there are more downs than ups to this. The one good part is that you can use anything at your disposal. While you can only kill the demons (they are pretty damn creepy) with fire, there are multiple ways to do this. Have a health spray or any type of aerosol? Use your lighter for a mini flamethrower.
Another great aspect of the game is that everything is seen visually. There are no meters or bars anywhere, so your health is indicated by the wounds on John’s body. Bleed too much, and you get a timer to find some bandages fast. There are also car scenes, and Central Park is kind of a Grand Theft Auto-type map where you can get in and out of random cars to kill “evil roots,” which are a huge pain if you know what to find, but more on that later. What’s really cool is that if there are no keys, you can hotwire the car to start it by matching colored wires, so this gives the game more of an “I gotta hurry and get the hell out of here” type feeling. While these are the main elements of the game, there are just way too many downsides.
The physics in the game are busted, so everything is either really floaty, really heavy, or just plain wonky-looking. Nothing really moves around right in the game, and this really stinks since a lot of the game is built around physics. When it comes to combat, the game just wants to hate you. While there are very few supplies in the game, to begin with, it’s so hard to kill eight demons when you only have one spray can. While you can only kill with fire, which is really dumb since you have a gun, it won’t kill them unless you pour gasoline on the bullets. I found this really stupid, and when you try to kill the evil roots near the end of the game, you will go mad trying to use the little supplies you have for the root while trying to fend off the demons.
The controls are just really wonky and don’t really work. In the third person, you can only move with the left stick and swing things around with the right, but the movement is just really limited. This really sucks when an enemy is behind you and you have to fiddle with the left stick to get John to turn around. The driving is also another pain since the physics really stinks. You’ll be stuck on the slightest slope or little rock, and your car will go flying. Demons can come to rip you off of your car—or rip the car off of you—and it’s really hard to shake them off. Thanks to the crappy physics, if you just slightly bump something, they go flying off, yet they can jump 400 feet.
The controls just feel stiff and sluggish, and they aren’t very responsive sometimes, so this makes everything overall harder than it should be. At least the last positive is that the voice acting is good, the story is great, and the DVD-type skip feature really helps. I can’t recommend this game unless you feel like struggling through this annoying game. It’s worth playing for the visuals, story, and great gameplay ideas, but you’ll struggle more than a smile.
This marks the fourth installment in Johnny Boy’s Quake Brainchild. Running all the way back to 1994, Quake was kind of a “palette swap of Doom,” with its strong point being multiplayer. Quake 4 changes that with an excellent single-player experience. Unlike Doom 3, Quake 4 is more of an “on-rails shooter,” where it guides you through a lot of scary and tense scripted events. These work for the game and separate it from its brethren. You play Kane, who is a soldier who has to help stop the Strogg invasion by destroying them at their core, the Nexus. As you make your way to the Nexus, you can pick up a ton of cool weapons and upgrades and even turn into a Strogg yourself. The weapons range from your piddly blaster to a dark matter gun. You have your railgun, a nailgun, a shotgun, a lightning gun, etc.
Throughout the campaign, you can unlock upgrades for these weapons, like clip extenders, scopes, and extra damage. This lets you easily change your strategy around what gun works in what situation. The game has some pretty neat enemy types, ranging from Grunts that rush you with their bulky bodies to Berserkers, who are all about melee. You have floating enemies that shoot rockets at you; you have giant spider robots; and you even have massive Strogg with shields and railguns. These are all gruesome-looking enemies that are both terrifying to look at and really fun to fight. The game sports great AI, with enemies dodging your shots and ducking behind cover. Each enemy has to be taken care of differently, so you have five weaker enemies and two guys with railguns. You take the five weaker ones out with a grenade or a rocket, then deal with the railgun guys with your dark matter gun, or you can shoot rockets at their feet. This allows you to create a strategy that works best for you. I just really love the atmosphere Quake 4 delivers. You’ll walk through rooms, and lights will dim and enemies will run across corridors. Your teammates will get dragged off and tortured, and there are also some really cool vehicle sections. You either mount a machine gun, drive a tank, or use a mech. All are handled really well, and these sections are both fun and challenging. This is a nice change from Quake, which has always been on foot.
Now, when it comes to multiplayer, the game is fun, but nothing really special. What doesn’t help is that no one is playing online (which really stinks), and the one map I did play was really boring. The game does have a lot of downfalls, though. The game does have major frame rate issues but isn’t as bad as what people say. It only bothered me a few times in the game. The graphics are really good, yet the Doom 3 engine is really dated and can’t be pushed any further. While the game does have weapon upgrades and vehicle sections, it still feels redundant and has the dumbest ending ever. So, if you want a good single-player experience that’s worth a rental or purchase (it’s less than $10 everywhere), then play Quake 4.
I remember when Doom 3 came out for the PC in 2004, and it looked astounding. Compared to today, it’s a bit ugly, but it did shine on the Xbox. While, even on the Xbox, it looks dated, the game keeps a constant focus on the action. Through the whole 5–6 hours it takes you to beat the game, you’ll be on your edge and jumpy.
The graphics engine is exactly the same as in Doom 3, even in the way it plays. The only additions are a few new enemies, such as a big burly guy who has two giant cannons on his arms and head, Vulgar, who is a bat-looking thing that can teleport at you, and the Hazmat worker, just to name a few. You also get some new weapons like the Ionized Plasma Rifle (Think: Gravity Gun Half-Life 2), Double-Barrel Shotgun, and a new Heart Artifact that lets you slow downtime. These essentially help the game with its extreme difficulty in many ways. You now have a flashlight on a gun! Except it’s on your pistol, so it still doesn’t make a difference, but at least you can defend yourself now. You now have to defeat the bosses using the heart, and it also gets you out of a pinch.
The “Gravity Gun” lets you throw back energy balls and whatnot, and this is good for preserving ammo. The story has you playing as a clean-up crew for what happened on Site 1 two years ago. You discover the heart, and you have to return it to Hell. While there are very few cut scenes in the game and the PDA files aren’t as interesting as in Doom 3, you’ll mainly just play for the action. Another note is that no one is playing this online. I tried connecting three days in a row, and not one person was playing. So if you just want a great, fun single-player game, then pick this up. I also should mention that the game has backward compatibility issues with the Xbox 360, such as movies in the beginning not skipping and some slowdown.
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