by Pink Panther on Tue Oct 19, 2010 7:37 pm
Okay, I'll try to write a review that will be helpful, despite how much I want to rant.
After reaching the train tunnel, I just gave up. This was quite clearly a learning project and I commend you for achieving so much material and original content, but the gameplay is just terrible. The first half hour of my playthrough consisted of wandering around a cramped apartment with absolutely no direction. First I jumped over the railing with the dead vortigaunt at the bottom - instant death despite the fall not being that severe. Reload (you were smart enough to put in autosaves at decent points, good job on that), try again. Wander around the apartments some more, pick up a key off of some dead guy at the front door, run all the way back up to the second floor to pick up a kitchen knife with which to cut up zombies and aliens.
Okay, of all my gripes, the knife mechanic had to be the most prominent (I'll get to the others later). You have the weapon play an impact sound when it hits ANYTHING - walls, floors, etc. . And the screen jerks around like someone is throttling you when you hit something. I have no way of telling if I'm hitting the dumb headcrabs apart from the blood particles (because I have no flashlight) and it's seriously no fun trying to run around and kill something that's 2 feet in front of you and miss.
That flooded room on the first floor -- seriously? Don't do that. From a realistic perspective, that room would not hold water. From a gameplay perspective, you're going to make a lot of people frustrated (myself, for one) when you lure us into an area with healthpacks, only to zap us if we touch the ground. Moving along, some Vortigaunt says a few lines... a weird hallway scene happens, we meet our sidekick; John.
John... I'm sorry pal, but you are the most annoying sidekick I have ever run across. Between having to babysit you so I can progress through the levels, to waiting for you to say a line BEFORE I can open a door/use a switch (more on that later)... you are just not a good sidekick. Your one-liners are flat out bad, your purpose in both story and gameplay is a mystery (in a bad way, never do with two characters that you can do with one), and hearing "PURSUNAL SPAYCE!!1!" everytime I need to walk down a doorway you're blocking gets really old, really fast.
So, John (somehow making it to the third floor of the apartment after meeting him on ground level -- makes no sense to me, also somehow locked a door behind him full of zombies that's "surely suicide") wants to rest in my apartment. We go back to my apartment, he 'rests' via turning on the TV, some report comes on announced by a girl who's accent was so thick it hurt to listen to anything she was saying (not that I cared). The TV report is about some big bad evil portal storm... thing, and after John's useless commentary; three vortigaunts spawn in my apartment. An unpleasant surprise, but I dispatch them. John's incredible wit and intellect deducts that he needs to find a wrench to open the door downstairs (why I can't just shoot it, we'll never know). We traverse the obnoxious apartments to find a wrench in a dark, closet sized workroom. The two of us head downstairs, and he opens it so I can go destroy (and I'm not exaggerating with this number) roughly two dozen zombies in a recently un-barricaded tunnel.
This is where things just get really bad. It's no fun to fight the same enemy over, and over, and over ad nauseum. Yes, perhaps it's realistic that several people were turned into zombies in that tunnel -- but that doesn't make it fun to fight them. Your item placement was sporadic and left me wandering all around the street trying to find health and ammo, and the difficulty was just absurd (on Normal, mind you).
The ironsights, whether this is poor playtesting or an oversight upon release just flat out do not work. No matter what key the toggle ironsight command is bound to, it just doesn't do anything in the campaign. Even the console command does squat. It works perfectly fine in the training course (which had no ending, by the way. Being left wandering around some lake after destroying a bunch of aliens/soldiers and a couple helicopters was a big letdown). This was frustrating beyond all belief. Half of my bullets were wasted hitting just NEXT to what I was aiming at, and the flashlight being attached to the end of (only some of) the guns was incredibly irritating. It's been said before by others on here, it's still true and I'm going to repeat their words: Excessive darkness in videogames is a frustrating chore, not a fun challenge.
There's no way I'm going to describe all of the things that frustrated me in enough detail, so I'm just going to try and sum things up:
The gameplay was really not fun. The flashlight being attached to only certain guns (which made no sense) was annoying, especially when reloading in pitch-black areas. The melee weapons (crowbar, knife) had far too much camera sway, and the way I was told whether I was hitting/missing something was poorly executed. The darkness was too extreme, you need more/brighter light in the ridiculously dark areas. The enemy spam was a chore, not fun (again, reloading in the dark with John McSissy blocking your retreat from a zombie about to eat your face is enough to cause an sv_cheats 1 godmode rampage). You need to differentiate between what can and cannot be broken. I ran all around the apartment after picking up the knife trying to break wooden planks, only to discover that they'd be broken when the game decided the story had to progress.
The NPC sidekick was a huge nuisance. Do NOT. EVER. NEVER. EVER. Make the player wait on an NPC when progressing through a level. Cut off the NPC's speech, and just assume the player isn't interested. (I'm looking at YOU, elevator in the sewer). His personality was just not appealing to me. His one-liners made me cringe, and having him point out something glaringly obvious that I discovered ten seconds ago just made me despise him. Don't drag me down to his pace, speed him up to mine.
The story... I didn't follow or even care about. Something about being in the Half-Life universe, we're trying to head to Amsterdam, there's a bunch of marines shootin' stuff up (Half-Life deja vu'...).
The mapping was pretty enough to look at, some areas were very blocky (the apartments) and others were so dark and identical looking (the sewers) that I found myself stuck and looking for a way to move forward only to discover a doorway right in my face that I couldn't make out.
There's so many things that need improvement, which is a huge disappointment because I was really excited to play this. I don't know who your playtesters were, but if you do make another SP game/map/mod, get input from people here and on other mapping forums -- they know what works and what doesn't.
"Here we go again..."
