[Mikey]

[Mikey]

There's an odd thing in Lost Planet, sometimes there are cinematics in the middle of a level (I'm thinking of Level 7 right now) and although you are still in the same level, you suddenly get reduced to your basic mission loadout (1,000 units of thermal energy, machine Gun w/300 bullets, 10 hand grenades) no matter what you had before the cinematic. In short I think that's bullshit and has made sections of the game harder than they should have been. If I go through the trouble of hoarding rockets for the first half of a mission, I should sure as hell have them for the second half, plot-holes be damned.

Thief 3 is an interesting example. For the first few missions, despite fairly even difficulty progression, they become a little easier if you start earning lots of money from stealing things; this allows you to buy a lot of items/ammo which combined with some item hoarding, essentially turns you into a bit of a juggernaut by early-game standards. You become less reliant on stealth than you should be, in the context of the game mechanics. Suddenly you've got half a dozen sleeping-gas bombs, and getting past guards in areas that should be challenging becomes a walk in the park. However, in a few specific missions and situations, this is mitigated by the introduction of enemies which are more or less or beatable only by very specific means, so you become suddenly reduced to sneaking around again. If you graphed out the difficulty it would probably wind up looking like some sort of sinewave.