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Wednesday 5 March, 2008
ENTRTY #2
GAMEPLAY
So I continued on level 3, which turned out to be fairly entertaining. Set in the the canals of Venice, it provided all sorts of carnage and wild jumps. The timer actually is fairly short for each level, usually about 6-8 minutes, so everything is really fast paced and chaotic. This chaos is a main theme of the game design. The first time you play a level you experience this huge onslaught of information and necessary actions that create a very frantic gameplay pace. You must be aware of several different mission objectives at once, avoid dying to swarms of enemies, be careful not to kill civilians, and on top of all that you must do it under the time limit.
Of course, once you have played the level a few times (which is usually required to complete all the objectives) this overwhelming chaos becomes manageable and the levels become fairly repetitive. I had to play level 3 three times, then replay level one (the horrible training level) to get one more objective to unlock level 4. Despite this, Level 4 was almost ,worth the wait as it was a wild swamp level. However I never could complete enough objectives to advance to level 5.
DESIGN
The narrative discourse of this game is pretty underachieving. The first level starts with a poorly rendered movie of a bunch of men in suits talking about their satellites the "Four Horsemen." The heads of a huge evil corporation, these men represent your enemies and you must single handedly destroy thousands of enemies and structures to thwart them. As of level four, which is roughly a third of the way through the campaign, there are no story updates, except small level blurbs that come during the load screen.
The level design is interesting. The designers cram tons of enemies, destroyable props, and interactive objects into the levels. There are always jumps, ramps and secret passages. The levels are fairly linear, which helps with completing objectives, but definitely cuts down the replay value.
I feel this game is extremely limited, and that probably contributed to its relative lack of success. The system of rewards/punishments is extremely painful, it is like instead of making new levels they just decided to make you play each one SEVERAL times. Not the best idea, in my opinion. There isn't a whole lot of emergent complexity or complexity in any form, really.
Overall this game seems like a poor arcade game at best, and at worst like a torturous experience. Ok, so it wasn't that bad.
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