theworldisadrag
2003
I absolutely hate this game.
2014
truly awful game
unequivocally one of the worst games I've ever played.
not great, obnoxious unfair difficulty and insanely short and visually boring compared to IV.
looks lovely but way too cheaply difficult. had me missing SotN's breeze
Truly miserable game. Some of the worst animation ever pressed to disc. The controls just scream "we wanted to make this a lightgun title but ran out of time and/or money"—there is really just no excuse for an FPS from 2000 to play like this. PS1 DOOM, while flawed, is entirely playable and it came out five years earlier on the same hardware.
In spite of itself, it does manage to actually have atmosphere in some areas. Most of it owes a debt of gratitude to recycled RE2 assets. This is spoiled every thirty seconds, though, by what I am confident calling the worst videogame voice acting of the last 25 years. The protagonist sounds like a dopey cartoon beaver trying to find his car keys.
In spite of itself, it does manage to actually have atmosphere in some areas. Most of it owes a debt of gratitude to recycled RE2 assets. This is spoiled every thirty seconds, though, by what I am confident calling the worst videogame voice acting of the last 25 years. The protagonist sounds like a dopey cartoon beaver trying to find his car keys.
Some of the cinematic scenes they stole from the PC version are reasonably ambitious for its day, but when you look at the AI, animation, movement and remember that Halo 2 came out the same year, it's harder to be so generous.
Let's get the only good parts out of the way: The Rhine crossing mission rules conceptually and mechanically, and its theme is the cherry on a generally strong score. Unlike its PC brethren, it does make an old college try at writing dialogue intent on character development. Even though the writing overall is worse than its predecessor, it does make the missions feel a little higher stakes and a little more lived in. But that's about all I can say.
The in-engine scenes just do not have the same choreography and composition of its source material. Not to mention, the original has such variety — trench warfare, espionage and infil, daring escapes, sieges. Meanwhile you spend probably 85% of Finest Hour in crumbling buildings or city streets. The North African stretch is a nice touch, but where are the fields? The villages? The snowy forests? At least we have plenty of underground tunnels!
Truly horrible character mobility. The look system has a screwy and floaty dead zone, quite unlike its contemporary console/analog stick FPS cousins, and it feels like you're walking through a swamp. Not to mention getting glued in place if you're being shredded by a buzzsaw MG42 or within 20 feet of a grenade.
The gunplay is where things get really rotten, though. Often I'd have an enemy dead in my iron sights 10 feet away and still miss. Good luck if you need to murk a sniper and you ran out of anything but MP40 ammo. I get it if you want guns to be less accurate to feel more realistic, but if you're going to design a game around that concept, you should probably not also require enemies to take 5-8 bullets to the head before they die on EASY difficulty. I truly couldn't believe how grueling the endgame was. I will say the tank movement and shooting feels relatively fine, but like almost all tank combat in gaming, it is too sluggish and imprecise to really be that exciting. And there is a LOT of tank combat here.
More than a few times, the mission trigger didn't pop and I got stuck, which meant I had to go back to the previous awfully designed checkpoint and often lose like 10-15 minutes of progress. Who designed this? CoD PC is a brutal game, but it at least acknowledges itself and gives you quicksaves and fairly frequent checkpoints.
I'm a big fan of the series and the early PC games had a cinematic quality that make them the definitive WW2 sim experience for their day. But this, this is just cash-in garbage farmed out to a team that either misconstrued or was technologically incapable to deliver what worked so well about the original.
Let's get the only good parts out of the way: The Rhine crossing mission rules conceptually and mechanically, and its theme is the cherry on a generally strong score. Unlike its PC brethren, it does make an old college try at writing dialogue intent on character development. Even though the writing overall is worse than its predecessor, it does make the missions feel a little higher stakes and a little more lived in. But that's about all I can say.
The in-engine scenes just do not have the same choreography and composition of its source material. Not to mention, the original has such variety — trench warfare, espionage and infil, daring escapes, sieges. Meanwhile you spend probably 85% of Finest Hour in crumbling buildings or city streets. The North African stretch is a nice touch, but where are the fields? The villages? The snowy forests? At least we have plenty of underground tunnels!
Truly horrible character mobility. The look system has a screwy and floaty dead zone, quite unlike its contemporary console/analog stick FPS cousins, and it feels like you're walking through a swamp. Not to mention getting glued in place if you're being shredded by a buzzsaw MG42 or within 20 feet of a grenade.
The gunplay is where things get really rotten, though. Often I'd have an enemy dead in my iron sights 10 feet away and still miss. Good luck if you need to murk a sniper and you ran out of anything but MP40 ammo. I get it if you want guns to be less accurate to feel more realistic, but if you're going to design a game around that concept, you should probably not also require enemies to take 5-8 bullets to the head before they die on EASY difficulty. I truly couldn't believe how grueling the endgame was. I will say the tank movement and shooting feels relatively fine, but like almost all tank combat in gaming, it is too sluggish and imprecise to really be that exciting. And there is a LOT of tank combat here.
More than a few times, the mission trigger didn't pop and I got stuck, which meant I had to go back to the previous awfully designed checkpoint and often lose like 10-15 minutes of progress. Who designed this? CoD PC is a brutal game, but it at least acknowledges itself and gives you quicksaves and fairly frequent checkpoints.
I'm a big fan of the series and the early PC games had a cinematic quality that make them the definitive WW2 sim experience for their day. But this, this is just cash-in garbage farmed out to a team that either misconstrued or was technologically incapable to deliver what worked so well about the original.
Arguably even more spectacular to revisit after a year. In spite of a deep and constantly engaging combat system, the difficulty pacing is sadly kind of a mess. There has to have been a sweet spot between letting casual players button-mash through most fights and forcing you to wait to tackle Hard mode on a second playthrough. Otherwise flawless. It's remarkable how much they didn't screw up any of the characters, and it has some of the best music of the last 20 years (even if, yeah, most of them are arrangements of da classics, baby).
2019
The alternating funereal dirges and luminescent flamenco songs don't sound on paper like they'd work so well together, but this is the finest and most standout videogame soundtrack in a quarter of a century.
Haven't finished the sequel but based on what I did play (🥱🥱🥱), I hope the composer has their sights set on bigger and better things, because they are dramatically outpacing the games.
Haven't finished the sequel but based on what I did play (🥱🥱🥱), I hope the composer has their sights set on bigger and better things, because they are dramatically outpacing the games.
[7 grenade warning icons at once]
2013
When you think of a Call of Duty game's campaign and dialogue being tacky and macho and meat-headed, this is what you're thinking of. A couple great Woo-level setpieces in this one though. Aliens mode also very sick. Docked a full star for a dreadful underwater level.
2018
The kind of game that makes you wish you were 21 again and had more friends with whom you could play co-op without making plans 2 weeks in advance and only playing for an hour.
My only Vanillaware game to date and the art style deserves its reputation, for better and for worse.
My only Vanillaware game to date and the art style deserves its reputation, for better and for worse.
Well, the first problem is that I can't stand how skinny your dude's sprite is. He's tiny! Some neat ideas and great rearrangements of series classic songs, hampered by an obnoxiously disconnected map and a deeply stupid RNG loot-based magic system. Not to mention that entering the pause menu to switch spells means you'll be using 2 or 3 spells for the entire game. A really fun and brutal final boss at least.
I'm not saying every FPS campaign map ever made since should be modeled after Crew Expendable and Heat, but
This remaster zooms out and makes the game less gruelingly slow, but I'm not sure that's a good thing. Nevertheless, lives up to the hype. The sequel is ironically probably a better intro for someone who has never played a CRPG before, because low-level DM-less D&D is just as dull and tedious as you'd expect it to be.
The new characters are MOR but the middle campaign Dragonspear is excellent insofar as giving you a taste of what real fun combat will look like in 2 and Throne of Bhaal.
The new characters are MOR but the middle campaign Dragonspear is excellent insofar as giving you a taste of what real fun combat will look like in 2 and Throne of Bhaal.