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The Podcats: Shooter Shootout Pt 1

Homefront and Bulletstorm dissected

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Review: Medal of Honor

Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PS3, PC. Developed by Danger Close (single player, DICE (multiplayer. Published by EA.

After Saving Private Ryan was released in 1997, Steven Spielberg hadn’t yet gotten WWII out of his system. A gamer as well as adirector, he helped found Dreamworks Interactive to make games like Medal of Honor for the original Playstation. FPS’s had never really taken off on the PSX but the first MoH showed you could make a pretty good shooter on the hardware, even if the Germans looks more like Autons than Teutons. Both MoH and it’s first sequel, MoH: Underground were well received at the time and it is these games that laid the foundations for a franchise. Unfortunately for EA, that franchise just happened to be Call of Duty…

Several things happened. MoH was a hit so EA absorbed Dreamworks Interactive, then gave Medal of Honor to 2015 for them to make a PC game and the result was MoH: Allied Assault, which is still recognised as the series’ peak. After AA, several of the team left to found Infinity Ward making the original Call of Duty and the rest is history (and we know history repeats like a bad taco). Medal of Honor, as a franchise, floundered (as did 2015 who made a poorly received shooter Men of Valor and promptly disappeared like Amelia Earhart) through an ill-advised and badly executed foray into the Pacific Theatre; then slowly attempted to rebuild with various console titles such as European Assault and Airborne, all of which tried to alter the classic formula with promises of less scripted levels and open worlds;  before we arrived back at Medal of Honor, now set in the present and so thoroughly copying Modern Warfare that it makes Dante’s Inferno look like an outstandingly original piece of art with no basis in God of War.

Ok, so you know how to play CoD right? Well close your eyes at the loading screens and pretend it is. It’s not hard and that’s obviously what EA were going for. The result is a CoD game that is locked at 30 frames per second on consoles (unlike the acyual CoD games) and using Unreal Engine 3 for single player and DICE’s own Frostbite engine for multiplayer though you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference. So apart from temporal resolution, it still looks and plays like CoD.

You play as various soldiers in Afghanistan. Like Black Ops, you generally have someone with you for most of the game telling you what to do at each and every turn. Listen to his advice and be glad it’s not Sam Worthington. While the controls and missions are much like CoD, one thing is missing from most of the game and that’s the hyperbole and hysteria that the action in single-player CoD is now all about. Less bro, more schmo. MoH has its intense firefights but they really don’t get to the level of the latest from Activision (though they try). But while this lack of constant intensity is a nice change, it also means the game doesn’t have a tension that other slower shooters like older Ghost Recon games had. It’s like playing CoD on mute. It’s just missing that spark.

I did have fun with the single player as a sharp relief to the over the top wall of enemies I experienced in Black Ops but it seems for all of EA’s hype before the game’s release (a game they seem to be publicly disowning now), things like enemies facing the wrong way and other rough edges with presentation lead you to conclude it’s missing some of CoD‘s spit and polish as well a the charm. It has beards but so do the Taliban Opposing Force combatants so in some missions it’s often hard to know who you actually are shooting.  To mix things up there are some turret levels, helicopter gunners and the like and occasionally you get to site weapons for air support, but this doesn’t give you much of a thrill since it’s doled out fairly regularly.

As I received my copy the day after Black Ops was released (I’m not using Zavvi again for anything I’m busting to play), multiplayer was a ghost town of 30 fps CoD-lite. It’s been described as being part way through DICE’s own Battlefield games and CoD. No, it’s CoD. It was good but with no one to play against it was a bit sad since the multiplayer was probably the strongest part of the package from what I could see. I played a decent game with the three others and I think they must be desperate for people to play against (I received friend requests from all three afterwards). Listen guys, never talk about marriage on the first date!

The graphics are mostly good and the sound is great but at the end of the day this is one of EA’s most egregious examples of “Hey let’s make a competitor to the market leader and just copy them exactly without offering anything new ourselves.” It’s an opportunity squandered as the talent was there but I get the feeling the pressure from above was just to remove anything that would scare off CoD fans.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with MoH. Multiplayer is a bust not because it’s bad but because it’s got less life in it that King Tut’s cat. The single-player (which is not all that long) may entertain you but you’d want to be getting this game supremely cheaply (ie when it comes down to Brutal Legend levels)

Controller1.com rating 1/3

Review: Call of Duty: Black Ops

Reviewed on PC. Also on PS3, Xbox 360, Wii Developed by Treyarch. Published by Activision

A year after Modern Warfare 2, which was either the worst game ever or the besterest, depending on to whom you are talking, their age and the pitch of their voice; we have another Treyarch CoD game. But a funny thing happened on the way to the web forum. BLOPS isn’t all that much more than World at War, yet the internal combustion at Infinity Ward has guaranteed BLOPS would be released without being in someone else’s shadow.

The Single player campaign starts off in the early Sixties’s during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. You play (mainly) as Alex Mason, a bland Australian actor posing as a CIA agent (which is ironic since that also describes Mason’s voice over artist Sam Worthington) as he recounts, seemingly under duress, a number of his recent missions (it’s right there on the menus when you boot up so it’s not really a spoiler). With action splintered across several locations such as Cuba, Vietnam, some icy place in the USSR, some shanty town in somewhere or other; it follows the hyperkinetic story-telling techniques as used in MW2, but without the most important story info imparted to you in boring-as-plain-cardboard loading screens. The game never lets up on the excitement. It’s quite a contrast to the rather muted and serious MoH reboot.

There’s nothing particularly new in terms of movement or combat (you can swim now and then, but only when the game wants you to) but this is a formula adhered to by every clone game (Medal of Honor) so why shouldn’t Activision? The use of flashbacks and disorienting graphics perfectly complement the all-over-the-place story (i.e. it covers the silliness with a veneer of credulity like dressing a clown in a tuxedo). Does it make any sense? No. It’s no worse or better than MW2 it seems, but it is a pretty cool roller coaster ride if you don’t think about it too much. Even if every mission has someone to tell you what to do every step of the way.  Even though the action is scripted you have giant HUD elements pointing you in the right direction and NPC’s reiterating your current objective as nauseum. Even more action and even more jam on the lens!

But because it doesn’t mess with success, it plays really well and Treyarch have managed to produce a great set of levels with less of the overt me-too rehashes of IW’s more successful missions. One new element pushed to the fore here are the missions where you control a vehicle such as a chopper or gunboat. They control as well as the rest of the game (something too many FPS’s don’t get right when they add a new element for one mission-think of Alan Wake‘s awful driving) although the controls don’t let you get into too much trouble. Yyou can’t crash your chopper, for instance. Thing aren’t as finessed as the vehicles in Halo:Reach for example). I rather enjoyed these almost fail-free missions a lot more than the skidoo/ seadoo levels of previous CoD games.

WaW’s standout contribution to CoD was always the Zombie mode that is unlocked once you’ve completed the single player campaign. It makes another appearance here and although I won’t spoil it for you, I will say it is definitely worth playing through the game to get to it. The character you play as nearly made me soil my pants from laughing so hard.

Of course, being a CoD title, there is a large proportion of the game’s playerbase who don’t care and just want Multiplayer. It’s probably the most balanced MP of any Call of Duty game to date with only a few Killstreak rewards ruining the game for the rest of us (those damn attack helicopters turning a close game into insta-lose!). I’ve had quite a bit of fun with MP though I can’t say I’ve had the burn I’ve had where I’ve NEEDED to play it a lot (ie several times over the course of a day, every day). I still anticipate playing it for a few more weeks at least (though I am tempted by the Vietnam expansion for Bad Company 2), but then I can’t see much else in the short term that’s going to compete with it. One nice thing- PC gamers get dedicated servers back (albeit heavily controlled) and gosh wouldn’t it be great if more devs took Epic and EA’s lead to introduce dedicated servers on more console games. CoD on consoles always had one thing going against it and that’s IW’s peer to peer networking code/ matchmaking is awful compared to Bungie’s. Bungie doesn’t have radio controller explosive cars, though. I love me some RCXD.

The presentation looks as good as previous CoD games (or as decent as my gaming rig can handle. Word on the streets is that the 360 version is slightly prettier than the PS3 (probably in such a small increment that it hardly matters) and the PC, if it’s beefy enough, would probably outshine the console versions, particularly the Wii (at least Treyarch caters for Wii owners). CoD sound has always been great. Stirring music and sound design is only let down slightly by a lead actor who hangs on to his accent with such a tenuous grip that you feel like giving him some supaglu. Enunciate, Sam.

So overall, it’s a good to great game (though not quite excellent). You will not lose sleep if you don’t play it, but if you have any interest in shooters, BLOPS has much to recommend it. If you think the score is low, get a life. It’s a very good game just not a must-play.

Controller1.com recommendation 2/3

Now Playing: Call of Duty: Black Ops

Forget God of War, Mass Effect 2, Fallout New Vegas, Final Fantasy XIII,  Halo 3, GT5, Kinect, Move or Donkey Kong. Black Ops is the biggest game of the year. And it’s here.

Biggest doesn’t mean it’s the best, just the biggest. But that statement doesn’t exclude it from being good. It is good. Very good. And a lot of fun to boot. With the implosion of Infinity Ward, Treyarch no longer have to toil in the shadow of the series’ originators but can release a game that is as anticipated and enjoyed in its own right. Black Ops shown how much they have grown since making PS2 versions of CoD games.

Black Ops manages to build on the hyperactive action sequences that Modern Warfare 2‘s single player campaign seems to be vilified for but managing to make the story somewhat rooted in reality. It’s still aimed at the same target market and pushes the same buttons (i.e. giving 13 year old boys something else to do with their hands) as MW2, but in a way that seems credible. Make no mistake, it’s still bullshit. Just more believable bullshit.

What mistakes have Treyarch learned from MW2? Dedicated servers on PC, for one, even if the lag so far seems about the same as you’d get on a 360. Also, the killstreaks seem to have been reigned in somewhat so it’s not camp-and-nuke like MW2 had degenerated into. OK, the radio controlled car with the explosives is going to become annoying for all, but you at least have to control it in order for it to be effective. The single player story still has the Michael Bays about it, but that’s no reason to hate it. Treyarch still relay a lot of their story via cutscenes during loading screens but they aren’t the dry snoregasms from MW2, but explosive cinematics in their own right.

Are we getting sick of annual servings of CoD? Black Ops says not yet.

Review: Left 4 Dead 2

Reviewed on PC. Also on Xbox 360. Developed and published by Valve.

Valve’s first annual sequel caused a ruckus when it was first announced in mid-2009, but  here we are close to year after release and what happened? Left 4 Dead 2 is a good game but one that wasn’t perhaps the smash hit the original was (funny that).

Like its antecedent, Left 4 Dead 2 pits you as one of four survivors of the zombie apocalypse and it’s your job to stay alive until you reach the safehouse at the end of each level (or extraction). There are several campaigns, each with several chapters and you can start at any chapter. Billed as a co-op shooter, L4D2 can be played online with friends or on your own (how I played it).

L4D2, available on PC, 360 and astromech, manages to pull off a neat trick. It is almost exactly like the first game with only a few minor tweaks, so perhaps the angry L4D fans had a point in felling miffed. What it does add is the option of replacing your pistol with melée weapons such as baseball bats, guitars, golf clubs, swords, chainsaws and more. This alone makes the game worthy of your time, it is also the main reason the game was banned in Australia. Melée adds gore, and lots of it to the mix, but it’s so hectic you rarely notice what it is you’ve done unless you’re taking copious screenshots.

There are more options for thrown objects and health pickups than the first game. You can also collect vials of bile that you can throw to distract zombies, defibulators to kick start your heart. Whoa. Yeah. I found these less useful than the returning pipe bombs and molotovs. One actual gameplay enhancement are the objectives in some missions. No longer limited to getting to the safe house at the end of the level, now you have missions where you need to activate to deactivate machines, which are needed to progress, but might also attract the horde. A few missions ask you to collect gas cans to power up a motor of some description, and they crop up a few times, but every little enhancement goes some way toward making this a better game than the original.

There are a few new enemy types in the mix but they’re generally on par with what has returned. Overall, its not the enemies, but their placement thanks to Valve’s AI director. The game will give you breaks before ratcheting up the intensity. And each time you play through a level, the enemy placement will be different.
The presentation seems to have been. Improved, not that L4D was an ugly game, but now it’ even nicer. Dynamic music and sound effects set the scene for a survival horror experience that manages action and chills.
Overall though, Left 4 Dead 2 is not a must have. If you didn’t click with the first game, then there’s nothing here that will make the follow-up change your mind. If you did like the first, then I definitely recommend the sequel, and now that the game has popped up in the odd steam sale, you can at least know its possible to get it for not much more than an iPhone game.

Controller1.com rating 2/3

Review: HALO REACH

Reviewed on Xbox 360. Developed by Bungie. Published by Microsoft

After five Halo games, Bungie are riding off into the sunset, off to work on multi-platform games with Activision. Reach is their swansong to the franchise that took them from a Mac game developer to makers of the defining console FPS franchise. Bought by Microsoft and later gaining their independence, Reach is the best thing Bungie have done, and that’s no mean feat.

A prequel of sorts to the Masterchief starring trilogy of Halo 1-3, Reach puts you in the suit of Noble 6, replacement trooper in a squad stationed on the planet Reach. At the start you think you’re dealing with rebel colonists but things get shitty very quickly when you find yourself defending against a Covenant invasion. Being a prequel, it’s not a spoiler to say things don’t end well for Reach, but Halo Reach is a game where the journey is its own rewards.

Being a Halo game, you can shoot and melee opponents, drive vehicles (and steal them from foes), activate the odd switch and take control of some turrets. Reach adds new weapons and new vehicles to the Halo formula, but also adds armour abilities such as jet-packs, sprinting, holograms (to draw fire away from yourself), shields and armour lockdown (and no, I still can’t work out what the hell that last one does). If you’ve played a Halo before, you know pretty much what to expect. Bungie have given fans what they expect, but added new elements to the mix.

Each Halo game seems to have fun in rebalancing the weapons in the game. Reach gives us the DMR, which is more like an M1  or M14 semi-automatic rifle than the battle rifle of old and occasionally the grenade launcher which fires a bouncing shell. There’s still the standard assault rifle, a scoped pistol, sniper rifle, rocket launcher and a new grenade launcher on the human side, but it’s the Covenant who have received the most munitions upgrades. Easily my favourite is the Needle Rifle which is like the Needler but with a slower rate of fire, a scope and longer range. The Beam rifle and the carbine don’t seem to be in Reach in any form but the plasma rifle now has an automatic rifle version in the form of the Plasma repeater. The energy sword from Halo 2 and the Gravity Hammer for Halo 3 are back. Like ODST, there is again no dual wielding of pistols.

The above-mentioned new things include being able to drive more prosaic vehicles like Forklifts and trucks as well as Covenant Revenant (which replaces the Choppers from Halo 3) but the big ticket item are the Space Battles. Yes, you get to fly a starfighter and for about 20 minutes the game becomes Ace Combat or Rogue Squadron. While the game seems to made it very easy for you to hit anything, it is very well done and just shows that Bungie have taken the “cut and paste” design criticism over the years to hear and taken positive action.

So that’s the single-player. There’s this other thing that I hear the kids are into called co-op. Four friends can apparently play through the single-player campaign as a team, though with difficulty that scales with the extra players. I haven’t tried Reach with coop but I did find Coop useful for beating tough areas in Halo 3. There’s also Firefight which is an extension of the mode from ODST (really the only new thing ODST brought to Halo’s multiplayer), now with matchmaking.

But while I ignore most games’ online components, Halo isn’t one of them. These days, most games offer ‘new takes’ on multiplayer but in the end, most gamers stick to one or two favourite modes. Reach, whilst keeping the best of earlier games in the series, has a fair few new modes worth investigating. The beta introduced players to the objective-based Invasion mode, which pitted Spartans Vs Elites for the first time in Halo multiplayer. There’s also my new favourite, Headhunter, which is like a mix of Team Deathmatch, Headquarters and Capture the Flag. Each time you kill someone,  they drop a flaming skull. To actually score points, you have to collect the skull and head to the randomly appearing collection zones for your score to be counted. Of course, if you die, those skulls fall wherever and you score nothing. And anyone can collect your fallen skulls and claim them. This is fun until all the kiddies start stealing your skulls. Mates don’t steal Mate’s skulls. Mate!

There has been some criticism of the number of maps included, some of which are all created on Forge World (bundled tools allowing you to build your own levels) but at the end of the day, whilst MS probably have designs on selling a few map packs, they are also allowing you to play other people’s maps for free (hi, Activision). Bungie have, by far, the best console network code outside of games using dedicated servers and the matches I’ve had have all been lag- free so far, even when my connection wasn’t always optimum (ie- my wife watching streaming videos on her computer-”Honey, I’ve taken out the trash but you may possibly be lagging me, dear”). A large local player-base probably helps reduce lag as well and I hope MoH and CoD developers remember to add those filters into their matchmaking solutions at launch (it took Infinity Ward several months to patch MW2 with that ‘feature’).

So whilst the gameplay in Halo has always been lauded, on area that hasn’t always had an easy ride was graphics. The first two games looked great on the original Xbox (though Halo 2 did have that horrid texture pop where the high resolution texture would load a little later than was optimum), but Halo 3‘s graphics had a far more mixed reception with horrid looking human characters. Reach looks, in a word, superb. Every model looks great, every texture detailed and apart from a few minor framerate hitches, the game runs near perfectly. And at 720p (Halo 3 was derided by pixel counters for its sub-HD resolution). The particle effects have also had a noticeable jump in quality and apart from a motion blur effect that takes some time to adjust to, this game looks better than not only all previous Halo titles, but almost any other Xbox 360 game. Gears of War,  with it’s corridor based gameplay, still has the edge but without having to draw the vast open-air vistas as seen in Reach.

Sound is again great. We have an almost totally new score from Marty O’Donnell which only occasionally cribs from the Halo catalogue and some top-notch voice work all round. But the sound effects, always a high point of the series, sound beefier here than any previous game. Also, the low-gravity level has some serious audio processing that gives that space so much more atmospheric than you’d normally find (despite the literal lack of atmosphere in that level).

After playing it, you can’t help feel this is what Halo 2 needed to be, a Halo game that everyone felt beat the original game. I didn’t feel the buzz that I got when I got the first Halo game, but I didn’t feel shortchanged in the way that some fans felt they were by Halo 2, Halo 3 and ODST. It offers an excellent single player with replayability, co-op, firefight and excellent multiplayer. You sure get a lot out of your $60 (OK- add a few bucks for XBL Gold).

Controller1.com Rating 3/3 (Get this unless you really dislike Halo for whatever reason, or you can’t stand  shooters)

REVIEW: BIOSHOCK 2

Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on: PC, PS3 Developed by 2K Marin, Digital Extremes (multiplayer), Irrational Games, 2K China, Arkane Studios. Published by 2k Games

The sequel no-one wanted to a decent-selling but critically-loved game, Bioshock 2 shouldn’t work as well as it does. The original’s story wasn’t shouting out for continued adventures; the original studio wasn’t involved (apart from the crew who developed the PC version of the original); multiple dev studios all served to engender the sequel with a “it should fail” aura. But here we are, the game is out, has sold well enough and the game itself doesn’t actually suck. It’s quite good without feeling like a mere expansion.

In BS2, you are a Big Daddy named Delta, stuck in Rapture several years after the death of Andrew Ryan. Dr Sofia Lamb, one of Ryan’s former advisors/rivals, has her own plans for Rapture, plans which you aren’t a part of. Melding her interest for controlling others for their own good and social experimentation, Lamb’s own daughter is the Little Sister to your Big Daddy. The story is a simple, yet unusual for a game, tale of family, megalomania and the recovery of humanity, though without the dramatic plot twists of the original game, nor the iconic philosophy of Andrew Ryan (though his sayings do occasionally crop up in some of the audio diaries).

The game itself is very heavily based on the design of the original with a few crucial changes. You can’t customise weapons in BS2 though upgrades are still available. If you choose to rescue a Little Sister, you need to hunt down corpses from which your ward will extract precious ADAM you miss out on due to altruism. Of course, this is more or less an escort mission since you have to keep the hordes of enemies away from your charge. You still have a large variety of plasmids and gene tonics to alter your character’s abilities but its’ still a case of “red M&M’s, blue M&M’s, they all end up the same colour in the end.”

So if you rescue the little sisters, you then have to guard them while they extract ADAM since you get less of the stuff this way than if you just harvested them. In BS2, once you’re accounted for all of the Little Sisters in a level, you then have to face off against a Big Sister, who are faster and more agile than Big Daddies, but still pack a mean punch.

One criticism of the first game was that many found the way the Vita Chamber/ Checkpoints worked made the game feel a bit easy, something that was made optional in a post-release patch. Here they work much the same way, retaining the option to turn them off. But, if you happen to die whilst protecting a Little Sister during an extraction, you will return to the last Vita Chamber and have to restart the extraction process. However, all the ammo you may have expended in unsuccessfully defending her is gone and you may find yourself having to fend off splicers with no ammo and no money to buy more.

So it feels like a sequel to Bioshock and feels new enough to be worthwhile. The texture work seems a bit hit and miss compared to the original and the sounds aren’t always as crisp as other games. But they do set the mood very well. The actual art and sound work is still top notch. There’s even effective lip sync here.  The script is excellent even without the massive twist the first game managed so well. The shocking parts here aren’t quite as shocking but it’s an interesting story and Sofia Lamb’s philosophy provide and interesting counterpoint to that of Andrew Ryan.

There is apparently some multiplayer, which I have not tested. By all accounts it’s competent but not worth buying the game for.

A good game, worth playing if you’re after a good single player FPS. It’s as different from Call of Duty, Killzone, Halo and Battlefield as you’re likely to get yet is a better shooter than Mass Effect 2 or Fallout 3 or Borderlands.

Controller1.com rating  2/3

(3/3 if you think you’re entitled to the sweat on your brow)

REVIEW: BATTLEFIELD: BAD COMPANY 2

Reviewed on PC. Also on: Xbox 360, PS3. Developed by DICE. Published by EA

Sweden’s DICE are back to the Battlefields with their latest release. It’s an interesting release for various reasons and it’s also one of the better games in the series. The first game in the series came out for PC in 2002 with two decent expansion packs before the law of diminishing returns started to kick in and we had the unloved Battlefield Vietnam and that’s where things went all over the place. There was the somewhat-loved Battlefield 2 with a DLC fragmented player base, its late to the party console versions BF: Modern Combat and the best forgotten Battlefield: 2142 and Battlefield Heroes. The first Battlefield Bad Company was DICE’s first designed for console-only title and was loved by most of those who played it, though the lack of a PC version was bemoaned by many (which is fair considering it was a defining game franchise in the PC shooter space). Bad Company was sold as a single player-focused game with a multiplayer component, but it felt like a single player shoehorned into the wide-open multiplayer maps. BC’s multiplayer was excellent (I played it on PS3/PSN) with its infantry combat now being useful and not 100% dominated by whoever camped long enough for a Tank or can fly a chopper for more than 20 seconds without crashing. It also brought with it the excellent Gold Rush mode, where one team attacks and the other defends its bases. Once two crates in each base had been destroyed, the action moved to the next base until the defender’s bases were all destroyed or the tickets of the attackers had exhausted. That said, it was unfortunately ignored by a lot of long-time BF fans w. many of whom aren’t interested in FPS games on a console. The still console-only but soon to be PC Battlefield 1943, which remade 3 maps from the original game using the Bad Company Frostbite engine, made a of those people sit up and take notice (BF1943 is apparently the first game on XBLA to sell over 1 million units. This also sold well on PSN, so that’s a lot of people taking notice).

BC2 came out early in 2010 and brought with it a PC version. Before release, the PC diehards were still waiting for a true sequel to Battlefield, but having played the PC version to death since release, they need not wait as this is what they need. I do, however, find the need to write a review to attempt to extricate myself from its charms and its vices.

BC2 has several modes. Single player feels like a fun version of a scripted classic Medal of Honor or CoD single player experience, though here, instead of tough and gruff professional soldiers, we have a bunch of whiny slackers. The single player campaign on its own is not worth buying the game for but could be a pleasant enough diversion if you find yourself unable to connect to EA’s servers (which occasionally happens). The real meat and potatoes (or tofu and potatoes for vegetarian readers) is in going online in Rush mode. Yes, there’s BF’s traditional conquest mode, plus Squad Deathmatch, Squad Rush, etc but I’ve only played Rush. It’s a pity that there aren’t more playing Rush on PC (surprise, surprise- more PC players are playing Conquest). Rush offers and intense experience that Modern Warfare 2 removed by going down that arcadey, badly networked path; an experience that targets the action very well, funnels you to the action quickly without having to walk across the entire map due to a poor spawn choice. Squads, first introduced in BF2, allow you to spawn alongside people already in the thick of it which can save valuable battle time. It also means, you can spawn in the middle of a mortar strike or your opponents spawning squad members in the middle of a pistol duel can shift the balance very quickly.

There are four classes you can play as in BC2. The grunt with the assault rifle and grenade launcher is not as overpowered as in MW2, though the grenade launcher is at least usable in BC2 (it was so incredibly weak in BC). The Engineer has a sub machine gun, can repair vehicles and carry mines or a rocket launcher to take out tanks and APCs. The Medic runs around with an light machine gun and drop medkits and later on can revive fallen team-mates so they can go back into battle and get shot again by the same enemy within 3 seconds or resurrection. The last class is the recon, AKA sniper AKA sniping fuckers. Snipers will generally sit back in their ghillie suits and snipe from a very long way away and pepper the field of battle with mortar strikes. Even with BC2 making sniping trickier by having bullets falling away, a good sniper will be able to make a defending team’s life miserable. However, due to the perception that sniping is easy, you sometimes end up in a game where all of the attackers are sniping, meaning no one gets around to setting charges. Oh well.
The more you play the more gadgets and weapons you can unlock. Unlike MW2, if you unlock a new sniper scope, you can equip it the next time you respawn rather than between matches (on PC, anyway). The progress and unlocks does encourage farming. I recall one sparsely populated server where there 5 members of the one clan used a public server to unlock a boating medal. That’s fine, we just used them to farm our sniping stats.

Of course, there are vehicles in BC2. You have a few tanks, armoured personnel carriers, mobile anti aircraft, jeeps, quad bikes, boats, jetskis and helicopters. And unlike previous games, you have far better tools, as ground forces, to deal with them. Some of which are improved by improving your stats to unlock specialties, better vehicle armour, improved reload times, etc. Missing, are the artillery batteries but we have the UAV which is a remote controlled chopper that can be used to send in a missile strike. Fortunately, Tamiya doesn’t build them very strong so a few hits from an M16 should see them right. Engineers can use a variety of rocket launchers to take out vehicles, Snipers can use mortar strikes or place charges on a tank, Engineers can use the LMG to pound the choppers plus there are a profusion of mounted machine guns and stationary rocket launchers dotted around the maps. It’s not like the original game where you were totally fucked once someone who could fly got into a cockpit of a Zero.

An online game is only as good as your community and it seems all popular games are going to be full of dickheads. BC2 started off well in the first few weeks when everyone was learning the ropes, but once the tricks start emerging, most games quickly degenerate. With BC2, it depends on the server you’re on but generally seems to have far fewer abusive players (or maybe the worst ones are the ones with headsets, which I have muted anyway).
The Frostbite engine produces great graphics and the sound for BC has a unique real world sound you don’t hear often in games. It sounds loud even when it’s not.One technical aspect that has cast a vast shadow over this game is network code. It’s just not as god as you’d expect from DICE on a PC title. Back wen I played the older games on PC on bog standard 512k ADSL, a ping of 70 was average for a server in the same country as me. Years later with much much faster ADSL 2+, pings of less than 150 are wishful thinking. That said, you can have a decent game playing with people in other countries, so long as you don’t use sniper rifles. The server browser was not working that well at launch and I took to using the matchmaking for a week or two.

It’s certainly a pretty game that runs well, plays well and you will have fun playing. Until the fucking snipers get you. Spawn and again. Overall, if you like shooting games, BF games and are sick of MW2 and/or the extortionate price of the ‘stimulus to Kotick’s wallet,’ give BC2 a spin.

Controller1.com rating 3/3

Play if you like Bad Company, Battlefield Modern Combat, Battlefield 1943, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Modern Warfare 2

Don’t play if you like: Single player, Final Fantasy XIII, Heavy Rain, Tetris

The Top Games of 2009 According to this Site

Controller1.com’s top games of this past year.

Sleeper of the Year (aka The game that came out of nowhere, the one you expected to ignore but couldn’t because of the great word of mouth)
RED FACTION: GUERRILLA. Volition and THQ’s third RF game came out of nowhere to be one hell of a blast of supercharged entertainment. Sure, Volition misunderstood the difference between easy and insane. But the core mechanics of the game and the freedom you had to progress meant few stumbling blocks to gaming nirvana. I have no idea what the story was about so let’s assume it’s rather ordinary and skip to the good bits: blowing things up. I can’t name a game where destruction has been done better.
Runner Up: Borderlands

Overhyped Game of the Year (AKA The game that was expected to make coffee, bend time and rule all but in the end was a bit meh)
KILLZONE 2. Sony and Guerrilla Game’s follow up to the justifiably ignored Killzone was meant to be many things. Here’s what it was and wasn’t.
IT WAS: A decent FPS, put together well and looked beautiful.
IT WASN’T: a system seller, or a particularly great game.
Year of PS3 got off to a false start and was almost disqualified from the race with KZ2.
Runner up: Scribblenaughts

Most Disappointing Game (AKA Games with buzz and hope that just didn’t deliver)
Wolfenstein Coulda, should but didna. Wolfenstein squandered the hope that long term fans had for a worthwhile follow up to Return to Castle Wolfenstein. What they got was a good single player that seemed to need a teeny bit more polish and content and a terrrrrrrrrible multiplayer. Do you get this game? Do you like MP more than SP? Flip a coin.
Runner Up: Modern Warfare 2

MOST IMPROVED (AKA They fixed the shit in the first one that was busted)
Assassin’s Creed II. Oh Lord is it ever so much better than the first game. In every single way, this game is more fun than the original. The content is better organised so that the game is not “here are 10 things you can do, go do each of them 500 times.” The whole concept is still a bit silly and Kristen Bell’s character looks like she had a lip transplant from the original Kryten but overall any game that has Uncharted Guy doing voices is good.
Runner Up: Uncharted 2

BEST DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT: SHADOW COMPLEX

BF1943, GTA episodes and Trials were there but Shadow Complex was by far the best DL only game released in 2009. A Metroidvania that’s probably more palatable to a modern audience (since it has Uncharted Guy doing voices, of course), the game managed to astound, entertain, stir up controversy and offer a good few hours of gameplay.
Runner Up: Halo 3 ODST (no, not really, but it should have been)

Best Game Only on Wii: NEW SUPER MARIO BROTHERS WII
OK, so it was really only one of two Wii games I bought this year. But it was the one I didn’t sell (HotD: Overkill). It’s frustrating as all fuck, has a save system that’s as pointless as the one in Dead Rising and I’m not playing it right now. Why am I not playing this right now? I don’t know.

Best Game Only on PS3: UNCHARTED 2
Sony had two really good games this year. Uncharted 2 and Infamous. Infamous is blown out of the water by Uncharted 2. Uncharted 2 is the quintessential adventure game. Whereas the first game promised platforming but delivered a gears of War Clone, the sequel mixes things up so successfully that you never realise when the game is going to go from one style to another. yes, you know at least once per chapter there will be something you’re standing in collapsing around you leaving you hanging from one arm but that’s beside the point.

Best Game Only on Xbox 360: SHADOW COMPLEX The 360 almost had a gap year with the only big exclusives being Forza 3 (which a LOT of people love and recognise as the driving game of 2009 to play), Halo 3: ODST which really was just a bit too much recycling with such a short single player campaign.

Best Game Only on PC- this is the year 2009.

Best Game on Everything: Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. IW may have pissed off as many people as they please with MW2. There’s the story that eschews any semblance of realism for moments of turkey-slapping-a-sleeping-lion thrills, OTT Multiplayer perks and combos, poor matchmaking and the various PC issues that made the game into a must play for many into a meh for some.

Best Pissing Away Goodwill. TIE: Infinity Ward and Activision.
Infinity Ward for doing the dirty on PC gamers and Activision for driving Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero into the ground. Oh, and splitting Starcraft II into three different games.

Most Improved: Sony. They cut the PS3 price from hysterical to merely funny (after three years it’s finally at the PS2 launch price), released the Slim and released Uncharted and Infamous. It still takes way too long to download and install a patch and most people still spend more on Blu Ray than they do on PS3 games, and PS3 ports are still often slightly lagging behind 360 in terms of graphics but it’s basically where it should have been three years ago. Just in time for God of War III

Most Potential for 2010: Microsoft. Really, they sold the 360 well but didn’t release that many 1st party games so you’d think game over, but then you see they have Crackdown 2, Halo Reach and Alan Wake. And then there’s Natal.

Least Potential for 2010: Wii
So we have a vitality sensor as the big piece of hardware? Really? Few games still support Motion Plus. Few gamers care and the signs are than grandma doesn’t either.

Game of the Year: Uncharted 2. Are you at all surprised? Naughty Dog redeem themselves after the disasters that were the Jak and Daxter sequels. This is the only game this year that a non-gamer will sit and watch as if it were a movie and enjoy it.
Runner Up: Modern Warfare 2.

It was a pretty good year overall. The only disappointing part of the year was the end. While we had some cracking titles such as Uncharted 2, ODST, Left 3 Dead 2, Assassin’s Creed II, MW2 and Super Mario Wii it still felt like something was missing.Oh that’s right about 2 or 3 more must-haves in the lead up to Christmas that we wouldn’t get to play till 2010 anyway. Having them all come out in the first quarter of 2010 seems to have upset the natural balance.

Review: Modern Warfare 2

Reviewed on Xbox 360 and PC. Also on PS3. Developed by Infinity Ward. Published by Activision

Call of Duty’s beginnings as more or less a straight copy of Medal of Honor Allied Assault (which was more or less made by most of IW when they were at 2015) don’t really set the scene for this latest game. Call of Duty was never a popular franchise with the hardcore player who were more interested in Counterstrike, Quake III, Battlefield and Unreal games. It was a hit, but with the people who enjoyed Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers- a more casual type of PC gamer. It was a mainstream hit, but always looked down on by people who were in clans or lugged their 21 inch CRT monitors to LAN parties, fragfests and virginal circle-jerks. All that changed with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare which ditched the WWII setting of the previous CoD games and sold more copies than a street vendor in Moscow selling genuine Rolex watches.

CoD4 was a surprise hit with the hardcore and even the Treyarch WWII-based World at War sold well. So MW2 was so big that almost every publisher put back a large number of their biggest titles to early 2010 just to get out of MW2′s way. But how does it play?

SINGLE PLAYER (may contains traces of nuts and spoilers)
The single player story had a lot to live up to. The WWII CoD games had a basic story to get you into a mission but the overall theme was “defeat the Axis powers before the end of 1945.” CoD4, not being based on anything in particular (parallel to the current wars around the world), need a more defined story. MW2 takes that, runs with it, amps up to 11, char-grills it, over-inflates the bouncy castle and just generally makes the stakes higher. Before we had a nuke going off in an unnamed Middle Eastern country of GAFghanistan, a main character dieing and a race to stop things getting worse. In MW2, it gets worse. An undercover American operative being implicated in a terrorist massacre of civilians in Moscow causes an all-out war. The story is told in two parts with half of the game played from the perspective of SAS operatives and the other half as a US army Private attempting to de-red dawnify the Continental United States. The scale of the story is rather undersold since most of the set-up is done in the form of rather dry voice overs during the loading screens that lack the punch of the similar screens during WaW’s load screens. And it’s way too tempting to just skip these as soon as possible.

The actual game itself is great even though it’s the same as the original MW. Just different settings and perhaps a tad more over the top in its scale. The game is intense for most of the time you’re playing, which isn’t all that long. IW have thrown in a lot of things to mix things up constantly, from snow mobiles to rafting. But mainly, there are lots of levels that make you think “Hmm, I did this on CoD4.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Graphics are crisp and clear with a constant 60fps on 360 and since it’s an enhanced version of the engine used on CoD4, it will run well on most medium spec computers. Sound is the usual fantastic mix of effects and voice, now with added Hans Zimmer music. Even though the game on consoles runs at technically a sub HD resolution, there is very little to indicate low resolution. It looks crisp and runs smoother than peanut butter at a gigolo convention. The only major gripe is the jam gun the enemies fire at you. This is the new blood effect that splatters across the screen to let you know you’ve been injured. Fall from a reasonable height and you will tear a major artery in your eyes.

MULTIPLAYER
Well, since a large number of people skipped the single player of CoD4 entirely and have been playing the multiplayer fairly solidly for two years, you’d think IW would just make new maps and be done (after all, that’s more or less what Treyarch did for WaW). But no. IW have ramped it up to the nth degree. CoD 4: MW’s ranking and perks system helped extend the appeal of the multiplayer modes in this post WoW/ achievement whore world we live. MW2 takes that, jolts it 50, 000 volts up each leg and give it a raise. Now you have a far bigger combination of perks and weapon options, customization kill streaks, emblems (though I’ve yet to see anyone not use the pot leaf), tags and so forth. So not only can you select which killstreak rewards you receive, you can also have a deathstreak, which helps you out if you get spawn-raped by a camping sniper noob who’s been playing for 17 hours and hates the game. This thing will have legs since the number of combinations means it will be a while before everyone just uses the same three or four combos as they did in CoD4.

The netcode is probably a bit better than CoD4 and WaW, but the matchmaking still is a pain since it will routinely hook you up to a game where everyone else in another country- something that doesn’t make the game all that much fun. They could learn a thing for two from Bungie when making peer-to-peer networked games work. Of course, MW2 also brings the PC player into a realm they don’t normally visit: p2p networking without the latest episode of Lost to show for it. In my brief playthough on PC game online, I had no issues, but I did only play two rounds. The problem is you can’t play on a dedicated server as you can for most other PC games, nor can you choose what server you are on- It’s all Matchmaking with one player as the host (whether they like it or not). So far the main issue is listening to the whingeing of the master race (though they have a point- the best online console experiences -Halo 3 aside- have been those with the dedicated server model). My CoD4-playing colleagues at work have been entertaining me with their attempts at playing the game together at lunch. They don’t want to play private games since they won’t get XP. Oh well. Infinity Ward! You got some ‘splaining to do!

There’s also a third mode called Spec Ops which can either be played solo or coop (either splitscreen or online). I haven’t tried it since I can’t see any reason to play this with so much crap in Multiplayer to unlock.

So there you have it. Game of the Year? Well, it’s certainly the shooter of the year and the multiplayer game of the year, for me at least. It’s knocked down on PC simply there’s no reason for the basic server stuff to have been stripped out unless Activision want to start charging for maps on PC as well. Which is likely.

Controller1.com rating 3/3 on console (2/3 on PC)