Time extended: February 2013

Just like with Virtua Tennis 4, I bought this from greenmangaming.com when it was on sale a few weeks ago. I knew it got somewhat mixed reviews, but for €6 or something I figured it was worth trying out myself.

Well, I finished the game yesterday, with a total of 10 hours of play time. Most of it was fun, some of it was stupid, some of it was frustrating, but in the end I would say it was worth my money - and time.

The game is very much the Japanese take on games like Gears of War and Mass Effect, in the sense that it's a squad-based third person shooter in a sci-fi setting. The gimmick here (because every game needs a gimmick right?) is the consequence system (basically a team mate trust system), and also the voice commands. Both, unfortunately, are flawed.

The trust system is a good idea in theory, but its implementation is rather crappy. One reoccurring problem I had was accidentally shooting a teammate in the back and thus losing trust as you might expect. Why did I shoot them in the back? Because the AI was so incredibly stupid to run into my line of fire - while I was shooting.
It's not just that though, sometimes, mostly after an action scene, a teammate will start talking to you and you have to respond to what they say. While you have some options, most of the time just saying "yes" or "okay" will increase trust. So you start wondering what the point of these scenes is exactly.

Which brings me to the voice commands - I can honestly say I turned off that option after half an hour or so. It works, kind of, but since I was using my laptop mic it worked too much, and picked up sounds that weren't made by me, and made it's own interpretation of it. Which annoyed my teammates. So yeah, I chose the simpler option where you just choose commands and dialogue options with the press of a button.

Might as well complain a bit more - it has the typical Japanese stereotyping, so one of your squadmates is a big, smack-talking black guy. And the tendency to give stupid, "unique" names to things is also there. "Hollow children", really? They're just androids, you know.
The main character - what was his name again? - is just as replaceable as any other main character in most action games. The game's difficulty is also a bit off, it has some frustrating boss fights, especially in the middle of the game, but towards the end it becomes a cakewalk. Personally, I hated chapter 4, the structure was awful and I had the most frustrating moments in it (but then I absolutely loved chapter 5, so that balances it out I guess).
Lastly, sometimes the cutscenes are longer than the gameplay sections - I can get very annoyed at this as I want to play a game and not watch it.

As for the good things: shooting up robots feels great, taking them apart piece by piece is visually very satisfying. Where you shoot them has an impact as well: shoot their legs off and they'll come crawling to you, while still firing. Shoot their gun arm off, and they'll pick up the gun and start shooting with the other arm. Shoot their head off, and they'll malfunction and shoot the other robots. It's a fun system really.
The boss battles are a bit of a mixed bag, and most of them basically come down to "shoot the glowing bits!", but some of them are quite satisfying.

The story then, only really starts getting interesting in the last two chapters. For the most part it's not exactly subtle, and sci-fi fans have surely come across this kind of story before (see: Star Trek The Next Generation: is Data a person or a thing?) They don't handle it too badly though, and I thought the ending was fairly satisfying. There are multiple endings based on the consequence system, and mine was a happy ending for most characters, but one guy died. How are they going to explain that death in the sequel, hmm? :)

Well, there probably won't be any sequel since the game didn't sell enough and got only average reviews, but I would be interested in one. As long as it has more robot shooting, less cutscenes, and better team AI.

Anyway, while I listed plenty of reasons why it's not a great game in my opinion, I had fun with it. I won't recommend the game to everyone, but if the concept of shooting hundreds of robots to little pieces appeals to you, and you can overlook some of the flaws I mentioned, you'll enjoy this. If I used a score system to review games, this would be a 7.5/10. But I don't, so ignore that.

To conclude, a few pics I took:

Commander Shepard?

It's the Cole Train, baby!!!

Very slick shop front.

Big robot.

Even bigger robot.

I saw this game on a lot of "best game of 2012" lists, so I bought it last month from amazon.com for PC/Steam (it was $10 together with 2 other games I think).

I'm not a big fan of military shooters to be honest, but from what I've read about the game, it's not quite your average Call of Duty game, and the story is also about the morality of war and violence. I certainly liked the sound of that!

But even then, it might be "different" but that doesn't automatically makes it good. So, I started playing it a week ago, and finished the game after a little over 6 hours of play time (on normal difficulty).

I absolutely loved the setting. Dubai more or less destroyed by a huge sandstorm gives the game a bit of an apocalyptic atmosphere, which I always enjoy in videogames and other media.
It plays out like a typical military squad shooter for the most part, so expect to hear things like clicks, MO, and things like that.

The actual gameplay (in which I mean the actual running and gunning) is alright, but in no way exceptional on its own. If it weren't for the setpieces, story and very dark last hour or two of the game, it would've been an average game. The best thing you can do is go on spoiler free, but even when you know what's going to happen, the journey you make in the game, and the end result, is very satisfying. I don't know how others felt about it, but I was sort of...emotionally tired at the end of the game. Calling it shell-shocked would be an exaggeration, but certainly the feeling was similar. In those 6 hours you see some awful things, you do some awful things, and in the end you've killed hundreds of people, for what, exactly?

I'd recommend this game even to people who aren't into military shooters. The first two hours or so might be typical military shooter stuff and mostly very cliché, but later on it gets a lot darker, and once you get what the developers tried to do with this game, you'll enjoy the ride. Like I said, the setting and atmosphere are great, and outweigh the somewhat average gunplay.

I took some pictures while playing, I guess some are sort of spoiler-ish as they're taken in the last 2 hours or so of the game, but it doesn't reveal anything story-related.