Winback has had a relatively large resurgence in popularity over the last six years, and this is entirely deserved, as it is a revolutionary game that laid the groundwork for the cover based third person shooter gameplay style. By playing Winback, one discovers a game that runs with its simple mechanics all the way to the finish line and becomes one of the finest titles on not only the N64 its self, but third person shooters in general.
While this review is based on the N64 version of the game, I will briefly touch on why you should avoid the PS2 port in a series of bullet points right before the closing paragraph of this review. While I certainly won’t delude myself into thinking I will convince absolutely everyone to avoid that version, as there is a sizable contingent of the internet gaming populace that will simply play the newer port/remake of something just cause, and the fact that said internet gaming populace still hasn’t grown out of the playground logic that “new automatically means better cause new”, I still strongly encourage everyone to read the full review proper before going over the PS2 bullet points I will lay out near the end. I am not someone who will ever advocate for playing a retool/remake/enhanced port first, as that is never the developers original vision. And the bullet points will show that Omega Force forgot their original vision of Winback when creating that port.
Winback’s greatest mechanical strength is in how simple and minimal it all is. The core gameplay loop is simply taking cover, planing out which target to fire at, then shooting them. Jean Luc can snap to cover on 99% of surfaces, and popping out of cover gives you just enough time (as well as your enemies) to fire a few shots before retreating back into your safe zone. To fully encourage this mechanic, all but one of the regular enemies and two of the bosses will not try and flank you, planting themselves firmly at their positions. Add to the fact that 3-4 shots will kill you, and you have a brilliant way of communicating to the player “embrace the core gameplay, or die”.
While Koei created Omega Force with the intention of developing games divorced from their usual strategy games, Winback still retains the core of the publishers more tactical titles to a great degree. The player must rely on the Handgun with infinite ammo for most situations, as its fast firing rate and generous hit stun make it a reliable all rounder for any situation. The player will then have to weigh the risk of using the SMG or Shotgun for high volumes of grunts, or saving them for the challenging boss fights.
Despite either approach, Winback has an in game time limit of 24 real hours before the terrorists fire off the satellite canon for the final time.
To help mitigate this need for aggressive progression, the player can activate a hard lock on that will instantly narrow in on the closest enemy, which you don’t even have to shoot at if you don’t wish to as changing targets is a breeze with the left and right C buttons. Because of the potential for players being able to abuse hard locks for easy head shots, the devs cleverly balance the mechanic out by also hard locking your laser sight to the enemies chest area, which is the most durable. This presents the player with two equally viable approaches to offence, they may either fall back onto the hard lock for efficient, but slow damage, or if skilled enough, pop in and out of cover using the camera, soft lock, and free aiming to pull off head shots, and with the low range of the N64’s control stick paired with its octagonal gate, this becomes second nature due to the high precision it offers.
Winback would be quite miserable to play if the enemy design wasn’t created with the time limit in mind, but thankfully, Omega Force colour coded the soldiers you’ll be mowing down for hours. Green, tan and blue grunts wield SMGs, red and orange grunts wield shot guns, and black grunts will attempt to flank and rush you. After the first mission your brain will be properly trained to always shoot black grunts first so they don’t flush you out of cover for a quick death, how to prioritize shooting shot-gunners due to them being able to deplete your health bar in two hits, and to be aware of SMG gunners do to them always being the quickest foes who can throw you out of cover and push you back just enough to almost guarantee your death 90% of the time. This simple, minimal approach to enemy design ensures the player will remain sharp for the entirety of the play through while never feeling overwhelmed. With enemies also shouting “freeze” if alone or “over there” when in a group, you’ll always be able to plan accordingly.
Winback never attempts to confuse the player with its level design, due to the timed nature of the game, Omega Force made sure that the levels funnel you constantly forward. As long as the player heads towards enemies, they will never get lost. And while deaths are easy to come by, with the low health music adding to the tension that you will hear semi frequently throughout your playthrough, health kits will always restore your meter to the green “safe” zone, giving a great feeling of relief every time you use one and the regular music for the level resumes.
To help break up feelings of repetition, you will sometimes have to deal with laser traps, with the aforementioned enemy funnelling, finding the boxes that power the lasers takes little time, and the moments where you must avoid lasers via dodge rolling or precise movement greatly contributes to the overall tense atmosphere, as touching them even once instantly kills you, and while the checkpoints can feel very sparse at times, repeat attempts further optimize your runs of the missions, meaning that with each subsequent attempt, you will be faster. This is a great way to bring less skilled players up to speed, should they die to much and get locked into one of the non canon endings of the game due to time lost.
Winback also features some incredibly cool set pieces. You’ll be carefully aiming to avoid a toxic gas
canister, riding in a container locked to a rail on a roof in a homage to time cop (one of the games aesthetic influences), and have several moments of nailing grunts from roof tops with stylish, cinematic camera angles.
Sometimes you will be faced with enemies using mounted turrets. This is where conserving your special weapons comes in handy, as the player pointlessly wasting their rocket launcher on a boss fight or grunts can make them SOL and leads to a great sense of satisfaction if you are aware enough to keep the launcher for these segments.
Winback’s boss fights are generally well designed fights, with the majority of them having perfectly exaggerated animations (one boss even forces you to have perfected your dodge rolls as he always fires his rockets from the left) and audio cues to clue you in to pop out of cover and let loose with SMG or Shotgun. The desire to risk free aiming and end fights quickly with head shots will be tempting, as they deal significantly more damage and can speed up the process to getting the best ending. With that being said, using hard or soft locks and playing it safe is just as tactically viable as well, as bosses do not have bloated health and the majority go down at most after maybe 3 minutes of gameplay.
Unfortunately there are two outright awful boss fights at the midway point and near the end of the game, both bosses constantly rush at you and are accompanied by regular enemies who can snipe you from afar, this run and gun gameplay is obviously not what the game is designed around, and you will more than likely die a few times to these two. Your best hope is to have the maximum amount of SMG clips and pray that your trigger finger and dodge reflexes are quick enough to do an 180, and shoot and run for three minutes. You could also use the near useless C4 in these fights, but given how rare it is and the fact that you can only carry one at a time, you’ll want to employ the former strat instead. If you can stomach these two fights, you’ll thankfully have the rest of this well designed game to look forward too.
The boss design peaks during the final two fights.
The first one has you using free aim to hit explosive barrels to quickly melt his health bar, or risk your own being melted by his magnum, then having to trip an unavoidable laser trap to wisp away his last sliver of health, the game thankfully balances this final step by providing you with a health pack if he managed to get one hit on you in the previous phase, leading to the end result feeling tough but fair.
The true final boss has and easy and hard way to fight him, the easy way is to simply stay on the lower level you start on, running out and back to cover, chipping away at his health, which is a good test of the players cover skills. The hard way involves running up one of the ramps, constantly moving in and out of a moving instant death laser trap to free aim at the boxes powering it, all the while taking cover from the bosses magnum, to finally deactivating the trap and mounting a turret for a final moment of catharsis and empowerment, killing the man who has been murdering your squad and terrorizing you the entire game. It was one of the most satisfying final boss fights I had played in years and is right up there as one of the best in the genre.
If you are skilled enough to complete the first 23 missions in under 4 hours, you’ll unlock the ability to replay the game with infinite ammo upon completion of the story. This greatly speeds up the process of getting the non canon endings if the player wishes to go for them, if the player did not gain the canon ending in their first playthrough, they can perfect their runs each mission with the unlocked trial mode upon gaining any ending, which is a great tool to bring one up to speed if someone is less experienced with 3rd person shooters, while not being condescending.
Winback does feature a tacked on multiplayer mode, and its not worth bothering with, as its played more in a run and gun style, which as mentioned before, is not the style the game is designed around. It’s a shame Omega Force was probably forced to include this, as it adds nothing of value.
Winback’s visuals are exceptional from an artistic standpoint, and highly competent on a technical level.
Any N64 enthusiast knows that if a game featured fog, that most developers would embrace it and try and work it into the game in someway. Winback uses fog for setting its atmosphere, from the opening cutscene establishing that the S.c.a.t team is using overcast to try and sneak in covertly, to the innovative use of fog indoors to convey minimal lighting (they even use it to convey a weapon being several miles tall), and you’ll be in for an atmospheric game that cleverly embraces the limitations of the hardware.
The gradual changing of the time of day outdoors perfectly ties into the 24 hour time limit you have, conveying just how desperate your situation is.
Of course the gulf facility feels just as much a character its self here. With its clean bureaucratic appearance conveying the importance of the weapon housed within. The lack of any survivors and emptiness of nearly each room establish that the terrorists are not fucking around and that they are out for blood against the US, destroying anything that could assist them and wanting to use their own weapon of genocide against them.
It’s undeniable that Metal Gear Solid was an aesthetic influence for Winback, with the main antagonist obviously being based on Liquid snake. And many of the Crying Lions bosses sharing some personality traits with Foxhound. But to reduce the game to just MGS influences would be selling it short. The MC Jean Luc Cougar is an obvious tribute to Jean Claude Van Damme. Particularly his appearance in the film Time Cop, a film about a special agent who wears a blue uniform with a bullet proof vest and who’s weapon of choice is a hand gun with a laser sight. And many of the other characters look very similar to the cast of another Van Damme film, Cyborg. And while Winback wears these influences on its sleeve with pride, it features more than enough originality in gameplay and story execution and setting to not come off as over inspired.
On a technical level Winbacks fidelity is at a high bar for the N64. Textures are sharp, clean and sleek, perfectly in line with the government facility you are infiltrating. Lighting cleverly uses N64 fog to convey that the terrorists have shot out some of the overhead lights, adding to the sense of dread when you have little idea what kind of squads will come at you.
Winbacks character models are of high quality, though to most likely save space, in cutscenes they reuse many canned animations and can be outright stiff many times. Thankfully the story is compelling enough to make up for this short coming. Animations in game in contrast are highly competent. Having just the right level of exaggeration to give you ample time to react. The models do suffer from some ugly smear textures during cutscenes, but they aren’t in anyway bad enough to take you out the experience.
Winback is very well optimized. With the frame rate only dropping to the low 20s during the moments when Jean Luc is flashing while taking damage, the frame rate immediately stabilizes after the flashing ceases, and you can expect a rock solid 30 FPS sans this one instance.
Winback’s OST ended up being one of my favorites on the console. From the iconic “Ground” with its heavy use of snares and xylophones, giving a tense, brisk paced vibe of of survival. To the dark, haunting synths of “Office”, and the droning horns of “Control Center”, Winbacks score provides one of the most atmospheric OSTs in a shooter.
Winback’s story could definitely be the weakest aspect of the game for some, as Omega Force intentionally went with having a fairly large cast of characters to help with the overall vibe that despite your initial strength in numbers, Jean Luc is on his own against near impossible odds, with his team mates being shot down mercilessly and easily in cold blood through out the entire mission. I can see the intentional lack of character development rubbing some the wrong way, but I found that Omega force writing the cast as simply knowing each other only professionally refreshing, as Jean Luc continues to fight his way through the Gulf complex, his initial detached professionalism slowly fades as the reality of his isolation sets in, and gives way to a well earned outburst of emotion at the stories climax.
The motivations of the Saroczian terrorists is incredibly grounded and believable. After constant failed revolutions at the hands of a US backed dictatorship which does not want to give up its satellite state, they seek to destroy the nation that denies their freedom, but like every political movement in existence, several players are in it for only themselves, with a major motivation of one of the Saroczians being to purely line his pockets out of a pure grift, or the infighting amongst the groups leaders about who was the right vision for the movement, causing its gradual implosion over the course of the game. The plot has become one of my absolute favourites in the genre, handling its political themes with realism while not forgoing the need to make a stellar and engaging game play experience to work with it in tandem.
I will now list 16 bullet points that I mentioned earlier to warn you as to why you should avoid the bad PS2 port, if you don’t wish to read any of these and just want the closing paragraph, Ctrl+F to “16”.
1. All enemies zerg rush you now instead of just black uniform grunts.
2. It is much more difficult to get the true ending in the ps2 version due to the constant suppression fire wasting a ton of time.
3. Mission 24s art direction is heavily modified to remind the player they are in a tech hub with pulsing neon lights, The n64 version already conveyed this perfectly with it’s server rooms and desktop pcs everywhere. This comes off change for the sake of it and feels insulting to the players intelligence. The n64 version used the low draw distance to make the giant pillar that the mission is centered around look miles deep in the ground and added heavily to the tension, here, the floor is lit up and the pillar looks about 50 feet at most.
4. The ps2 version forgets what it’s strengths were, the n64 version was so well balanced because if you left cover, you’d die, and the enemies ran by this logic as well. So the gameplay loop was a very tense wack a mole. In the ps2 version, the constant supressing fire and flanking enemies forgets this design philosophy for artificial difficulty.
5. The color coding of enemies is gone, taking away much of the initial strategy of encountering enemies
6. The outdoors have inconsistent lighting with the 24 hour timelimit. The 1st mission has a bizarre jump to early day after the helicopter crash when in the n64 version it lead into mission 1 instantly, many missions show no progression of time.
7. You will be using your shot gun and smg way more to clear out grunts, leaving the feeling of importance they had in the N64 version feeling much lesser.
8. The fog has been removed, making many areas over lit and less atmospheric.
9. Mission 20 is when the awful enemy placement of the ps2 port starts to make the game borderline unplayable. It loads up grunts in the nooks of the moving sea containers, which is incredibly cheap design.
10. Grunt voices are muffled and compressed on PS2 when they were loud and clear on n64
11. The awful sgt thunder boss fight is even worse now because the tram cars the grunts ride in have extended invincibile hit boxes which make them harder to hit, and one of them is constantly laying down suppressing fire with a shotgun
12. The pause screen map is much harder to navigate, each room is a puke green and the objective arrow is never accurate to the entrances like the n64 version
13. You have to skip two intros in the ps2 version every time on boot
14. The ps2 version adds voice acting which destroys cutscene direction. Due to the fact that Omega Force just copy and pasted the n64 animations, they end up speaking very fast because they never bothered to redo the cutscenes. Some of the lines are even digitally sped up. Many lines are also constantly cut off in both the Japanese audio track and the horrendous English dub.
15. The tram car set piece that was an homage to time cop is ruined, because instead of feeling like a bad ass super cop using an unconventional method to mow down grunts, you’ll just be hiding in a bucket until they stop firing.
16. The police locker aesthetic of the menus has been replaced with generic early PS2 y2k hexagons
Winback’s resurgence and rise in reputation is entirely deserved. It is a revolutionary title that ties ground breaking, genre defining gameplay with a tense atmosphere, and a grounded story that weaves into the gameplay framing your journey perfectly. It is an absolutely essential game for N64 owners and Shooter fans. And while the poor tacked on multiplayer mode and pair of two terrible boss fights do bring down the package a bit, that shouldn’t deter you from playing one of the finest third person shooters you’ll ever play.
9/10.
While this review is based on the N64 version of the game, I will briefly touch on why you should avoid the PS2 port in a series of bullet points right before the closing paragraph of this review. While I certainly won’t delude myself into thinking I will convince absolutely everyone to avoid that version, as there is a sizable contingent of the internet gaming populace that will simply play the newer port/remake of something just cause, and the fact that said internet gaming populace still hasn’t grown out of the playground logic that “new automatically means better cause new”, I still strongly encourage everyone to read the full review proper before going over the PS2 bullet points I will lay out near the end. I am not someone who will ever advocate for playing a retool/remake/enhanced port first, as that is never the developers original vision. And the bullet points will show that Omega Force forgot their original vision of Winback when creating that port.
Winback’s greatest mechanical strength is in how simple and minimal it all is. The core gameplay loop is simply taking cover, planing out which target to fire at, then shooting them. Jean Luc can snap to cover on 99% of surfaces, and popping out of cover gives you just enough time (as well as your enemies) to fire a few shots before retreating back into your safe zone. To fully encourage this mechanic, all but one of the regular enemies and two of the bosses will not try and flank you, planting themselves firmly at their positions. Add to the fact that 3-4 shots will kill you, and you have a brilliant way of communicating to the player “embrace the core gameplay, or die”.
While Koei created Omega Force with the intention of developing games divorced from their usual strategy games, Winback still retains the core of the publishers more tactical titles to a great degree. The player must rely on the Handgun with infinite ammo for most situations, as its fast firing rate and generous hit stun make it a reliable all rounder for any situation. The player will then have to weigh the risk of using the SMG or Shotgun for high volumes of grunts, or saving them for the challenging boss fights.
Despite either approach, Winback has an in game time limit of 24 real hours before the terrorists fire off the satellite canon for the final time.
To help mitigate this need for aggressive progression, the player can activate a hard lock on that will instantly narrow in on the closest enemy, which you don’t even have to shoot at if you don’t wish to as changing targets is a breeze with the left and right C buttons. Because of the potential for players being able to abuse hard locks for easy head shots, the devs cleverly balance the mechanic out by also hard locking your laser sight to the enemies chest area, which is the most durable. This presents the player with two equally viable approaches to offence, they may either fall back onto the hard lock for efficient, but slow damage, or if skilled enough, pop in and out of cover using the camera, soft lock, and free aiming to pull off head shots, and with the low range of the N64’s control stick paired with its octagonal gate, this becomes second nature due to the high precision it offers.
Winback would be quite miserable to play if the enemy design wasn’t created with the time limit in mind, but thankfully, Omega Force colour coded the soldiers you’ll be mowing down for hours. Green, tan and blue grunts wield SMGs, red and orange grunts wield shot guns, and black grunts will attempt to flank and rush you. After the first mission your brain will be properly trained to always shoot black grunts first so they don’t flush you out of cover for a quick death, how to prioritize shooting shot-gunners due to them being able to deplete your health bar in two hits, and to be aware of SMG gunners do to them always being the quickest foes who can throw you out of cover and push you back just enough to almost guarantee your death 90% of the time. This simple, minimal approach to enemy design ensures the player will remain sharp for the entirety of the play through while never feeling overwhelmed. With enemies also shouting “freeze” if alone or “over there” when in a group, you’ll always be able to plan accordingly.
Winback never attempts to confuse the player with its level design, due to the timed nature of the game, Omega Force made sure that the levels funnel you constantly forward. As long as the player heads towards enemies, they will never get lost. And while deaths are easy to come by, with the low health music adding to the tension that you will hear semi frequently throughout your playthrough, health kits will always restore your meter to the green “safe” zone, giving a great feeling of relief every time you use one and the regular music for the level resumes.
To help break up feelings of repetition, you will sometimes have to deal with laser traps, with the aforementioned enemy funnelling, finding the boxes that power the lasers takes little time, and the moments where you must avoid lasers via dodge rolling or precise movement greatly contributes to the overall tense atmosphere, as touching them even once instantly kills you, and while the checkpoints can feel very sparse at times, repeat attempts further optimize your runs of the missions, meaning that with each subsequent attempt, you will be faster. This is a great way to bring less skilled players up to speed, should they die to much and get locked into one of the non canon endings of the game due to time lost.
Winback also features some incredibly cool set pieces. You’ll be carefully aiming to avoid a toxic gas
canister, riding in a container locked to a rail on a roof in a homage to time cop (one of the games aesthetic influences), and have several moments of nailing grunts from roof tops with stylish, cinematic camera angles.
Sometimes you will be faced with enemies using mounted turrets. This is where conserving your special weapons comes in handy, as the player pointlessly wasting their rocket launcher on a boss fight or grunts can make them SOL and leads to a great sense of satisfaction if you are aware enough to keep the launcher for these segments.
Winback’s boss fights are generally well designed fights, with the majority of them having perfectly exaggerated animations (one boss even forces you to have perfected your dodge rolls as he always fires his rockets from the left) and audio cues to clue you in to pop out of cover and let loose with SMG or Shotgun. The desire to risk free aiming and end fights quickly with head shots will be tempting, as they deal significantly more damage and can speed up the process to getting the best ending. With that being said, using hard or soft locks and playing it safe is just as tactically viable as well, as bosses do not have bloated health and the majority go down at most after maybe 3 minutes of gameplay.
Unfortunately there are two outright awful boss fights at the midway point and near the end of the game, both bosses constantly rush at you and are accompanied by regular enemies who can snipe you from afar, this run and gun gameplay is obviously not what the game is designed around, and you will more than likely die a few times to these two. Your best hope is to have the maximum amount of SMG clips and pray that your trigger finger and dodge reflexes are quick enough to do an 180, and shoot and run for three minutes. You could also use the near useless C4 in these fights, but given how rare it is and the fact that you can only carry one at a time, you’ll want to employ the former strat instead. If you can stomach these two fights, you’ll thankfully have the rest of this well designed game to look forward too.
The boss design peaks during the final two fights.
The first one has you using free aim to hit explosive barrels to quickly melt his health bar, or risk your own being melted by his magnum, then having to trip an unavoidable laser trap to wisp away his last sliver of health, the game thankfully balances this final step by providing you with a health pack if he managed to get one hit on you in the previous phase, leading to the end result feeling tough but fair.
The true final boss has and easy and hard way to fight him, the easy way is to simply stay on the lower level you start on, running out and back to cover, chipping away at his health, which is a good test of the players cover skills. The hard way involves running up one of the ramps, constantly moving in and out of a moving instant death laser trap to free aim at the boxes powering it, all the while taking cover from the bosses magnum, to finally deactivating the trap and mounting a turret for a final moment of catharsis and empowerment, killing the man who has been murdering your squad and terrorizing you the entire game. It was one of the most satisfying final boss fights I had played in years and is right up there as one of the best in the genre.
If you are skilled enough to complete the first 23 missions in under 4 hours, you’ll unlock the ability to replay the game with infinite ammo upon completion of the story. This greatly speeds up the process of getting the non canon endings if the player wishes to go for them, if the player did not gain the canon ending in their first playthrough, they can perfect their runs each mission with the unlocked trial mode upon gaining any ending, which is a great tool to bring one up to speed if someone is less experienced with 3rd person shooters, while not being condescending.
Winback does feature a tacked on multiplayer mode, and its not worth bothering with, as its played more in a run and gun style, which as mentioned before, is not the style the game is designed around. It’s a shame Omega Force was probably forced to include this, as it adds nothing of value.
Winback’s visuals are exceptional from an artistic standpoint, and highly competent on a technical level.
Any N64 enthusiast knows that if a game featured fog, that most developers would embrace it and try and work it into the game in someway. Winback uses fog for setting its atmosphere, from the opening cutscene establishing that the S.c.a.t team is using overcast to try and sneak in covertly, to the innovative use of fog indoors to convey minimal lighting (they even use it to convey a weapon being several miles tall), and you’ll be in for an atmospheric game that cleverly embraces the limitations of the hardware.
The gradual changing of the time of day outdoors perfectly ties into the 24 hour time limit you have, conveying just how desperate your situation is.
Of course the gulf facility feels just as much a character its self here. With its clean bureaucratic appearance conveying the importance of the weapon housed within. The lack of any survivors and emptiness of nearly each room establish that the terrorists are not fucking around and that they are out for blood against the US, destroying anything that could assist them and wanting to use their own weapon of genocide against them.
It’s undeniable that Metal Gear Solid was an aesthetic influence for Winback, with the main antagonist obviously being based on Liquid snake. And many of the Crying Lions bosses sharing some personality traits with Foxhound. But to reduce the game to just MGS influences would be selling it short. The MC Jean Luc Cougar is an obvious tribute to Jean Claude Van Damme. Particularly his appearance in the film Time Cop, a film about a special agent who wears a blue uniform with a bullet proof vest and who’s weapon of choice is a hand gun with a laser sight. And many of the other characters look very similar to the cast of another Van Damme film, Cyborg. And while Winback wears these influences on its sleeve with pride, it features more than enough originality in gameplay and story execution and setting to not come off as over inspired.
On a technical level Winbacks fidelity is at a high bar for the N64. Textures are sharp, clean and sleek, perfectly in line with the government facility you are infiltrating. Lighting cleverly uses N64 fog to convey that the terrorists have shot out some of the overhead lights, adding to the sense of dread when you have little idea what kind of squads will come at you.
Winbacks character models are of high quality, though to most likely save space, in cutscenes they reuse many canned animations and can be outright stiff many times. Thankfully the story is compelling enough to make up for this short coming. Animations in game in contrast are highly competent. Having just the right level of exaggeration to give you ample time to react. The models do suffer from some ugly smear textures during cutscenes, but they aren’t in anyway bad enough to take you out the experience.
Winback is very well optimized. With the frame rate only dropping to the low 20s during the moments when Jean Luc is flashing while taking damage, the frame rate immediately stabilizes after the flashing ceases, and you can expect a rock solid 30 FPS sans this one instance.
Winback’s OST ended up being one of my favorites on the console. From the iconic “Ground” with its heavy use of snares and xylophones, giving a tense, brisk paced vibe of of survival. To the dark, haunting synths of “Office”, and the droning horns of “Control Center”, Winbacks score provides one of the most atmospheric OSTs in a shooter.
Winback’s story could definitely be the weakest aspect of the game for some, as Omega Force intentionally went with having a fairly large cast of characters to help with the overall vibe that despite your initial strength in numbers, Jean Luc is on his own against near impossible odds, with his team mates being shot down mercilessly and easily in cold blood through out the entire mission. I can see the intentional lack of character development rubbing some the wrong way, but I found that Omega force writing the cast as simply knowing each other only professionally refreshing, as Jean Luc continues to fight his way through the Gulf complex, his initial detached professionalism slowly fades as the reality of his isolation sets in, and gives way to a well earned outburst of emotion at the stories climax.
The motivations of the Saroczian terrorists is incredibly grounded and believable. After constant failed revolutions at the hands of a US backed dictatorship which does not want to give up its satellite state, they seek to destroy the nation that denies their freedom, but like every political movement in existence, several players are in it for only themselves, with a major motivation of one of the Saroczians being to purely line his pockets out of a pure grift, or the infighting amongst the groups leaders about who was the right vision for the movement, causing its gradual implosion over the course of the game. The plot has become one of my absolute favourites in the genre, handling its political themes with realism while not forgoing the need to make a stellar and engaging game play experience to work with it in tandem.
I will now list 16 bullet points that I mentioned earlier to warn you as to why you should avoid the bad PS2 port, if you don’t wish to read any of these and just want the closing paragraph, Ctrl+F to “16”.
1. All enemies zerg rush you now instead of just black uniform grunts.
2. It is much more difficult to get the true ending in the ps2 version due to the constant suppression fire wasting a ton of time.
3. Mission 24s art direction is heavily modified to remind the player they are in a tech hub with pulsing neon lights, The n64 version already conveyed this perfectly with it’s server rooms and desktop pcs everywhere. This comes off change for the sake of it and feels insulting to the players intelligence. The n64 version used the low draw distance to make the giant pillar that the mission is centered around look miles deep in the ground and added heavily to the tension, here, the floor is lit up and the pillar looks about 50 feet at most.
4. The ps2 version forgets what it’s strengths were, the n64 version was so well balanced because if you left cover, you’d die, and the enemies ran by this logic as well. So the gameplay loop was a very tense wack a mole. In the ps2 version, the constant supressing fire and flanking enemies forgets this design philosophy for artificial difficulty.
5. The color coding of enemies is gone, taking away much of the initial strategy of encountering enemies
6. The outdoors have inconsistent lighting with the 24 hour timelimit. The 1st mission has a bizarre jump to early day after the helicopter crash when in the n64 version it lead into mission 1 instantly, many missions show no progression of time.
7. You will be using your shot gun and smg way more to clear out grunts, leaving the feeling of importance they had in the N64 version feeling much lesser.
8. The fog has been removed, making many areas over lit and less atmospheric.
9. Mission 20 is when the awful enemy placement of the ps2 port starts to make the game borderline unplayable. It loads up grunts in the nooks of the moving sea containers, which is incredibly cheap design.
10. Grunt voices are muffled and compressed on PS2 when they were loud and clear on n64
11. The awful sgt thunder boss fight is even worse now because the tram cars the grunts ride in have extended invincibile hit boxes which make them harder to hit, and one of them is constantly laying down suppressing fire with a shotgun
12. The pause screen map is much harder to navigate, each room is a puke green and the objective arrow is never accurate to the entrances like the n64 version
13. You have to skip two intros in the ps2 version every time on boot
14. The ps2 version adds voice acting which destroys cutscene direction. Due to the fact that Omega Force just copy and pasted the n64 animations, they end up speaking very fast because they never bothered to redo the cutscenes. Some of the lines are even digitally sped up. Many lines are also constantly cut off in both the Japanese audio track and the horrendous English dub.
15. The tram car set piece that was an homage to time cop is ruined, because instead of feeling like a bad ass super cop using an unconventional method to mow down grunts, you’ll just be hiding in a bucket until they stop firing.
16. The police locker aesthetic of the menus has been replaced with generic early PS2 y2k hexagons
Winback’s resurgence and rise in reputation is entirely deserved. It is a revolutionary title that ties ground breaking, genre defining gameplay with a tense atmosphere, and a grounded story that weaves into the gameplay framing your journey perfectly. It is an absolutely essential game for N64 owners and Shooter fans. And while the poor tacked on multiplayer mode and pair of two terrible boss fights do bring down the package a bit, that shouldn’t deter you from playing one of the finest third person shooters you’ll ever play.
9/10.
BigBossHayabusa
1 year ago