Call of Duty 4 - Modern Warfare

I'm not really a big fan of the old military FPS genre, especially the squad-based ones, I think the last really good one I played was Operation Flashpoint and that must have been 6 or so years ago. They tend to be a bit samey, your comrades tend to be terribly retarded and the enemy tend to have either dreadful AI or the ability to kill you before they're even within draw distance. Not that the later is limited purely to military-based games. However, Call of Duty 4 came highly recommended by one of my friends, so I thought it was worth giving it a try and I'm certainly glad that I did.

Graphically, the game makes quite an impression; the visual direction is superb and everything feels suitably gritty and real, while the sound effects and voice acting really help to bolster the immersion. Unlike most games featuring a real world army, CoD doesn't make you spend your entire career as an American (Though you will get to play as a member of the USMC for a chunk of the game), instead opting to start you out as a new recruit in the SAS. After a brief tutorial, your performance in which the game uses to recommend a difficulty level, you and your oft-likeable squad are launched into action assaulting a cargo ship in the middle of a storm. For the record, this looks fantastic.

Following on from this mission is an excellent interactive cut-scene, which I won't spoil for you, to kick off the story proper. You then proceed to hop between SAS and USMC missions as you attempt to overthrow the clichéd middle-eastern terrorist despot that is seemingly required in all contemporary games. To be fair, the story isn't bad, it's just not exactly original. One particular mission really caught my attention; an excellently executed stealth/sniper mission, set in the past. Unlike most games it never feels forced, as if they've held a gun to your head and said "You. Stealth section. Now!", but instead blends nicely with the storyline and creates some genuinely tense moments as you try to avoid detection. The colours are all slightly washed out, giving a suitable flashback effect while greatly adding to the atmosphere of the desolate Chernobyl region in which it is set.

Inevitably your squad mates often act like morons, usually by leaning out into your line of fire or charging headlong into one of your freshly thrown grenades, but at least they spend most of their time helpfully gunning down the bad guys. As best I could tell, your immediate squad mates are all but immune to friendly fire, while your incidental allies tend to pop their clogs as soon as you stick a couple of rounds into them. Thankfully, they seem to be in plentiful supply most of the time.

In a similar vein to Gears of War and possibly starting a worrying trend, the game lacks any overt measure of your well being. Instead, after you have suffered a few significant hits, your screen gains a red border and you start breathing heavily; should you fail to take cover at this point, death is mere seconds away, while a brief pause behind a rock will remove the border of impending doom and allow you to continue on as if nothing had happened. I can't say I *like* it, but at least it's done in a slightly more acceptable way than GoW managed.

The single player game is short, only 6-8 hours really, but you do get some bonus options opened up when you've completed it and it's a *good* 6 hours, a fun 6 hours. The aforementioned bonus options include access to a variety of cheats as well as an Arcade mode in which you score points for completing missions with speed, accuracy and without dying - this includes a bonus bonus mission that wins major points with me purely for the totally unexpected Airplane! reference at the beginning. I haven't had a chance to try out the Multiplayer aspect of the final game yet, but the multiplayer beta was very highly regarded.

In conclusion, Call of Duty 4 is suprisingly excellent, a short sharp burst of entertainment that makes you wonder why more games can't display the same highly-polished sheen. Well worth obtaining, just don't expect an epic story or intelligent teammates (especially in multiplayer).

Crysis - First Impressions

I know it's not out in the UK until Friday and I know I've pre-ordered it and it's shipped, but I saw the RZR1911 release for download and I gave in to temptation. I've only played for about an hour so far, but so far I'm very impressed with what I've seen. The game is beautiful to look at when you whack the detail up; motion blur, HDR, focusing effects, water effects & very vibrant colours - and I'm not even running it with the full DX10 setup (as I've eschewed Vista in favour of an OS that occasionally works).

One thing I will say is this: EA, I know you don't really care much for your customers a lot of the time, but for the love of God, make your startup splash screens and cut scenes skippable. I don't want to have to sit through the animated EA logo, Crytek logo, Nvidia logo & Intel logo just to get to the menu and then pretty much have to sit through the entire trailer when I start a new game. You know things are bad when there's a scene release to remove said splash screens from the game.

I'll have something more concrete to say once I've played a little more.

Gears of Wha?

So, exactly which game have all you Xbox 360 owners been playing that's so pants-wettingly great it's got a 94 on Metacritic? I only ask because the PC game I just played was nothing short of awfully mediocre and I can't see anything about it that would make me want to play it for more than about 30 minutes.

Things started badly with the installer; I wasn't paying attention and so missed the "More Options button", meaning that after a single click the game was installing to the C drive. One quick cancel and restart later, I was treated to probably the longest install for a game that I've ever encountered, with a full 25 minutes of "Decompressing Files" after it had actually copied them.

Undeterred, I fired up the game, configured my settings and launched straight into action...or at least I would have were it not for the fact that the game helpfully informed me that I couldn't save my progress without a Windows Live profile - the dialogues for which only had the Xbox controls listed for navigation, making the whole experience somewhat tedious.

When I finally got into the game I have to say it looked very pretty and it had a suitably clichéd storyline, but the gameplay itself way just...flat, I guess. Run across open area, dive into cover, empty several clips into each identical enemy to bring them down pausing briefly to play the reloading minigame and then repeat ad nauseum. What really annoyed me was the seemingly random way in which your health is calculated; you can take an arbitrary amount of fire and then a red thing appears in the middle of the screen, then you take some more fire and a coloured-in red thing appears in the middle of the screen, then you take some more fire and die. Hiding for a few seconds makes the red things go away. No health bar, health gauge, health-o-meter or health display of any kind, just "OK, Not OK, Dead".

Maybe I'm missing something here, perhaps the game is stunningly amazing on the 360 and they've just fucked up the port - it wouldn't be the first time - but as far as I can see there is absolutely *nothing* special about Gears of War in any way and I certainly wouldn't pay £35 for it, in fact given the choice I doubt that I'd even download it again.

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts - Review

Before I start this review, allow me to preface it by saying that I love (Publishers of the game) Relic; I loved Homeworld 2, I loved Dawn of War and all its little expansion packs and I loved the original Company of Heroes. In the oft tedious world of RTS gaming, they are a shining beacon of excellence.

That said, Opposing Fronts is something of a disappointment, it promises so much - 2 new sides, the British and the German Panzer Lehr, 2 new campaigns, new units, better graphics, etc - but is sadly let down by poor design choices. Graphically, the game is very pretty, it boasts full DX10 support and the ragdoll physics and destructible environments really help to give the feeling that you're in the middle of a warzone, albeit a warzone with occasionally indestructible tanks. The expansion also introduces weather effects, which look fantastic, especially at night, although they don't make a huge difference to the gameplay.

The two new sides are markedly different from one another, but with a suprising number of similarities. The Panzer Lehr are basically the Germans from the original, with a few extra tanks and a dune buggy, while the British sport mobile command vehicles that tend to explode when sneezed at. Neither side can secure Strategic points in the traditional manner although both have alternative options; the Germans can booby-trap them with explosives, while the British can deploy a command vehicle nearby. In theory it's an innovative way of adding a little variety, in practice it means that you can rarely afford to secure most of your points.

The biggest issue, however, is that the game is just too bloody short - it only took me 6-8 hours to finish the game on Normal difficulty and when you consider that this is supposed to be a Standalone Expansion, that's pretty poor. Part of the problem is that both of the new campaigns start off with the usual slow & easy introductory missions, which means that around 1/4 of the game is spent being told exactly what to do. A single tutorial mission would have sufficed and all without hurting the main game, although I know that tutorial missions tend to be avoided these days in favour of "in-game learning", for reasons that escape me. At least with tutorials you can skip the bloody things if you know what you're doing. It's a real shame, because Relic's previous expansions for the Dawn of War series, have been excellent and almost complete games in their own right (In the case of Dark Crusade). Hopefully they'll listen to the feedback from the community and put a little more effort into the next CoH expansion, which I've no doubt there will be given the popularity of the game.

There was a lot of controversy on release due to the forced Relic Online login that is included with the game (and added to the Original if you install the 1.8Gb v2.x Opposing Fronts compatibility patch). Basically when you start the game it checks for an internet connection and, should it find one, it forces you to login to Relic Online in order to play. If it can't find an internet connection then it requires a CD check to play. Aside from the fact that the Relic Online servers were down more often than up in the weeks after release, the other issue is that it stops you from playing LAN games without having a copy of the game per player (which is what you're *supposed* to have, but it's usually been tacitly accepted by the games publishers that it's OK not to), not that hosting and joining LAN games is simple any more because it's all been bundled into the online game browser and by bundled I mean "shoved in without any real thought and hidden as best as possible".

All in all, this means that it really isn't worth the asking price of £30 RRP, even if you loved the original. However, on the 23/11/07, they are releasing a Company of Heroes Gold Edition containing the original plus expansion, available for £35 (or £18 on Play). This *is* worth getting, even if you've already got the original and certainly if you haven't but like RTS and/or WWII games.