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Thursday 6 March, 2008
GAMEPLAY:
After another hour and a half of gameplay, and beating the first real level, I come back to write another game log. Wow is all I have to say. As soon as I picked up where I left off, they started throwing my tiny team against waves and waves of mobs. Each room you fight in has about 20 enemies to kill, set against you in waves as they dig up from underneath you. It can get overwhelming at times; each enemy take a significant amount of time to kill, maybe 10 seconds. However, every 30 seconds 5 more will spawn and attack your position. It leads to situations where your cover isnt protecting you from all angles of attack. Use grenades can change the tide, but only if you know how; the UI makes you change weapons into nades before you can actually use them, resulting in a bit of a delay.
However, what really interested me was the boss battle against the Berserker at the end of the level. To defeat it, you had to lead it outside a building. It is blind, but had good hearing, so you lure it out by gunshots or movement. However, doors stood in your path that could only be destroyed by making the Berserker run head first into them. To make matters even worse, 1 hit meant death. However, once you got the beast outside one of the most satisfying deaths ever happens. You kill it by using a laser from orbit to blow it up.
DESIGN:
The design, while leading to excellent gameplay, did nothing extrodinarily different from any other FPS. The main difference I noticed was in how quickly you died, and the boss battle. Both relate to one another; they forced me to use my head in order to survive. Your quickly diminishing life does not allow you to storm a turrent directly. Instead, you have to find ways to kill the gunner without being in their sights. For instance, at one point I had to kill the gunner by breaking into another room, climbing up a few floors, and shoot up from a window high above him.
Another way the game makes you think is the boss battles. The one I fought made you lure an enemy to the only place I could deal damage to him; outside. MY bullets did no damage to him, and only a special gun that only works outside could kill him. But, as he is blind, I had to manuver him through a tight maze of corriders using sound as a lure. It was an interesting element of gameplay that was a nice change of pace.
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