Mr John wrote:Damn! You're quick off the mark.
Many cut scenes?
Decent action?
Playability?
I got mine Thursday, finished it yesterday morning on veteran difficulty.
I have to say I really, really enjoyed it. The graphics were the main hype point for the game and they live up to that hype, reviews for the game has criticised the AI and the Alien design but I feel that some are being hyper critical.
Crytek had advised prior to this release that the AI was the most advanced in a video game yet, personally I feel that Halo Reach's AI on outshines Crysis 2 that said the AI is on the whole shocking but still has it's pluses. What I can say is that enemies do hunt you down and use co-ordination and comms. If they feel there's a threat or if they feel isolated they will release flares call for reinforcements, while they are waiting they'll bunker down and hold tight. Only when they have swollen numbers do they seem to sweep and hunt for you. You can hear them communicate and they react to each others comms which is fantastic. A nice touch is if you have an overview of a map with multiple enemies and are cloaked, hit a silenced shot on a far away barrel, the explosion sets off a chain of events where the majority of the enemies will abandon their positions to to hunt out the cause of the disturbance. The enemies switch off too easily after you hit stealth mode though. You can ping a mate in the head and they'll give up searching too easily, they often run into walls, each other and circle aimlessly which for me at the moment is a major bugbear.
The alien design I felt was strong, though some of the larger enemies were too reminiscent of the those big bastards from Halo. The game borrows extensively from Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, where gunplay and the tactical side is concerned and there are huge elements of Halo and Half Life 2 as well. The aliens are very Halo-esque and the balance of armour and stealth is almost the same as Halo 2 and 3's use of the Arbitor Elite. Shadow and light play a crucial role in this as even if ou don't have energy for the active camo, you can still sneak around. The human enemies behave and sound very much like the human enemies in Half-Life 2 and many of the street levels and the FDR level in particular seem to be either a not very subtle homage or plain rip off of some of the levels from HL2. Everything borrowed works well and everything borrowed were the things which appealed to me in those games, this coalition of ideas is a huge plus or me.
I loved how cinematic the game was and with dolby digital and decent sub this was an excellent and immersive experience, I found myself saying "holy-shit" on several occasions. Multiplayer wise the gameplay doesn't stray far from the Modern Warfare/Black Ops formula but it's tried and tested so why fix something that's isn't broke. As with games of this ilk you really can't play it on standard difficulty or else you'll get a warped perception of the game - I feel this factor has been the undoing of Halo: Reach for quite a few players of the game. The veteran difficulty on this wasn't that tough, though I did get snagged occasionally but you'd expect a reasonable challenge.
Two bugs surfaced during my Campaign, the first was on the second stage "Sudden Impact" where the game froze the Xbox completely. Resuming from the save state repeated the problem which meant you'd have to start the mission again. Crytek are aware of this and is set to patch this week. The other bug is increasing title music volume in multiplayer. The title music on it's second look increases in volume. If you leave it loop to reply it gets a little louder and so forth. In the end it's so loud that the sound distorts no matter how low you have your volume. I'm not sure if they're aware of that problem - how many people leave their games on idle at the title menu for prolonged periods?
I've gone back in on Supersoldier difficulty and have completed missions 3 and 4 on that difficulty without too many problems. The game has a huge flaw in it's AI but even this doesn't stop the game being one of the better FPS in a while. It's probably the most spectacular game I've played for some time.
Multiplayer is causing an issue at the moment as EA allegedly have not designated dedicated servers, so hosts for multiplayer games have a huge advantage. This is expected to change but who knows if it will.
Sharppie is my best friend.