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Black Ops thoughts
So I finally got around to completing Call of Duty: Black Ops’ singleplayer. I can’t say that I really enjoyed it as much as others seem to have. To me it felt much too scripted. To elaborate on that is that I ran into quite a few moments where because I did not do what the developers intended for me to do, I broke a sequence or got royally screwed over very quickly. Situations where I ran into enemies literally spawning infront of me in the open and my team being way behind me in an otherwise empty area. Why? Because one enemy out of their sight was still alive. He wasn’t even shooting at them, nor could he even see them.
Other than such moments it’s a competent shooter but I have to say that script-breaking really takes you out of the game and I often found myself thinking “Right, what do I have to do to get A or B to happen here..” As for the story I really enjoyed, it’s just such a shame that the big ‘twist’ towards the end was so obvious. I won’t go in to detail about it to prevent spoiling it for others but very early on there’s some things that gave it away. All the time after that I was thinking “But that’s not entirely true, or this doesn’t really make sense.”. As for my Veteran-run, screw that. I still died a couple of times(mainly just in 2 or 3 specific shots) but I really don’t feel like pushing myself onward for that, I really just wanted to have the singleplayer over with.
Overall it’s not a bad campaign but I much prefer Medal of Honor’s campaign. Maybe that is to do with the fact that I acted more like the developers expected me to or maybe I just got lucky as a lot of people have had similar complaints with both games. Medal of Honor has the better singleplayer experience and a competent multiplayer while Black Ops has a lackluster singleplayer but a bigger multiplayer aspect. Saying that I’ve had more issues connection-wise with Black Ops with people lagging, hosts dropping, lobbies hanging and other stuff.
So make whatever you want out of that really, it’s a mixed bag.
Why I love the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games
So I recently bought both Stalker – Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat, after having played some on release. The reason being that I love the stalker world, it really gives you that feeling of just being in an open world where people do whatever they feel like. But just now within 2hours of play, one of the stalker-esque moments happened. But let’s first describe what these games actually are.
The stalker games are first person shooters which are based around chernobyl where now adventurers are looking for furtune as there’s artifacts to be found which are worth a lot. The world is filled with mutants and lots of stalkers, as the adventurers are called. What’s happened though is that some stalkers have grouped up and move in groups and others have created factions, which battle against eachother for territory. Other than stalkers there is also the military which seek the control the zone and the stalkers are unwanted.
So you start the game with amnesia, but your pda has a memo to kill strelok, which will be the main storyline. Other than that many stalkers have missions to give you as well as well as some people in the “towns” around the zone. So you get a mission to help take back a position from some bandits with some other fresh stalkers. All you have is a knife and a small handgun with limited ammunition and you’re on your own. So while killing those bandits every other stalker that came along managed to get themselves killed while only taking out 1 out of 4 bandits, so clearly this was an issue but after several deaths and reloading and managing to grab the dead bandit’s shotgun, I managed, albeit barely.
So with my new weapon I complete some other small tasks, mainly gathering some artifacts for collectors and looting hidden stashes which I learned of from the dead stalkers and bandits from the very first mission. Then I’m turning in a mission in the stalker camp as I hear shooting outside, turns out that the military decided to wipe the camp out of existence and sent 10 heavily armed troops. Even with my shotgun I could hardly dent their armour and my minimap quickly indicated that it was me vs 5 or 6 soldiers with 3 stalkers crying out in pain. Let’s say that this sudden challenge took me tens and tens of reloads with attempts to just kill 1 soldier or to quickly pick up their weapon and ammunition. Often times a soldier would just run around the corner or shoot from long distance with their machine guns which meant I died.
I probably didn’t deserve to make it out of there alive but I did, though at one point 3 soldiers were sitting in a small room next to mine and my 2 grenades I threw in there made short work of them. After said battle though the conclusion is that the camp is gone, other than those 3 I revived with first aid, I’m rather rich for a fresh stalker from selling all the guns and I have a good ammo supply, which can also be critical in Stalker.
Thoughts on the Medal of Honor beta
As you may have read in the previous post I have pre-ordered Medal of Honor, with that came access to the beta. Now I, myself had been wondering what to do with this game, it’s made by 2 studios, each focussing on a different aspect and even using a different engine for it. Now I’m a fan of Battlefield Bad Company 2, which is made by DICE, who also are making the multiplayer for Medal of Honor.
So what does the beta offer? It has 2 maps and 2 modes, 1 map per mode. There are 2 teams, US Forces and the Taliban as it’s set in Afghanistan. Furthermore there are 3 classes which have different focusses. There’s the rifleman who is a straight up fighter with assault rifles and 40mm grenades(which aren’t as powerful as in BC2 or ‘noobtubes’ in MW2), the engineer class with a lighter submachine gun and a rocket launcher and finally a sniper, who’s focus should be pretty self-explanatory.
When you kill another player you’ll get points(standard 10), with bonuses for knife kills, defensive kills etcetera. At 40points, you’ll get access to a killstreak, the interesting thing is that there’s 2 kinds: Offensive and Defensive killstreaks, these seem to be given randomly as an offensive is mostly a kind of airstrike of which I’ve seen Mortar Strike, Mobile Rocket Strikes and even Missile Strikes. The defensive ones are much more interesting as they will offer your entire team a bonus, for example a UAV to show enemy locations, ammunition resupplies, flak jackets etcetera. This way you don’t know what you will get and you’ll have to consider the options given the current situation.
I’ll give a brief example of how these killstreaks can work out, I was on the taliban team and the goal was to defend an AA-station which was getting assaulted by an M3 Bradley APC and about to get overrun as someone had activated the UAV so I could see the amount of enemies rushing forward. I popped up from cover and quickly sniped 2 guys down with 4 shots, which gave me enough points for a killstreak, I got a missile Strike which I immediately pointed at the APC as we didn’t have anybody to take it out. It managed to destroy it and in the process take down 1 or 2 soldiers standing around it, this gave me enough points for another killstreak which was a mobile rocket strike, which does less damage but over a bigger area(or so I believe) so I threw it down around a big rock that’s part of the assaulting team’s cover and managed to kill 4 guys, giving me another killstreak by which time I got another killstreak and my team had taken positions again so I got a nice Flak Jackets for my team to make them survive longer and I ran forward to get into a better position where I got great cover from my team and managed to snipe down another 6 players who were running towards the goal. It’s moments like that which make you love a game, such perfect storms are rare but mindblowing.
About the modes, there’s a direct team deathmatch in which it’s just all about score. The other mode resembles Rush from Bad Company 2 where one team is rushing for objectives, be it blowing up a barricade, disabling Anti-Aircraft stations or holding a village. I’ve played roughly 2hours of each so I think I have a decent idea by now. I’m quite curious what else they could be adding to the game, I’m expecting a Conquest mode(Holding territory to gain points) and a Capture the Flag-type of mode.
What’s my impression then? As others have previously reported it’s quite a mix between Modern Warfare 2 and Bad Company 2, but to me it’s mostly the engine as it’s the same as Bad Company 2. It doesn’t have the swiftness of MW2, but it feels like it’s doing it’s own thing, which is positive. Now what can I say about the visuals? It looks really good, believe me. it’s also not as demanding as Bad Company 2, while looking better. But the most important aspect, how does it feel to play? It feels really good, much to my surprise. The action is a ton of fun and the AK-47/74 and M4/16 are really precise, which makes it awesome for ranged kills, you can literally just sit down, aim and throw out 3 short bursts and the person’d be dead.
That brings me to the next point, don’t expect to survive much in this game. If someone spots you in the open – you’re pretty much dead. Weapons are really accurate as I said and you don’t take much punishment at all. What this causes is really quick action where you both have to be alert and careful. The only thing that can bring this game down is bad support, lack of maps, weapons and unlocks in general. Another little part that I don’t like is the look of the red dot sight, the acog sight is quite alright. But it’s probably something I have yet to get used to.