[another coma]

The premise is more interesting than the premise of any other cover-based shooter I can think of + the character design was emailed from 1997

THUMBS UP
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[another coma]

(if it's even a cover-based shooter, I guess I'll take what I can get)
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[another coma]

I just finished this and I liked it quite a bit. As you might have guessed from the trailers/demo it borrows its universe and story very liberally from a lot of movies and books... and I think it does a pretty good job of integrating it into a nice science-fiction pastiche, whereas most other games like this wouldn't have bothered. There's actually a clever moment where it pokes a bit of fun at itself (and the player) by outwardly acknowledging one of its more obvious influences... if you played the game up to the scene I'm talking about then I probably don't even have to say any more than that.

There's some rough edges certainly... in particular the first 30 minutes of the game seem oddly stale and underdeveloped compared to the rest of the game. But once it gets going, man, all is forgiven. Nothing feels better than just diving in the middle of a 12 robots, decapitating half of them so they malfunction and turn on their friends, then flanking to the opposite side to fire on the panicking survivors as your team cheers you on. Or getting the balls to use a charge shot to stun a large enemy so you can run up to it and finish it off only to realize that oops you can't do that and now you're totally exposed. Aside from some obligatory "bad" stuff that came along for the ride (vehicle segments, sewer segment etc.) the core shooting game is pretty damn satisfying.

I would basically agree with whoever said that the trust system is underdeveloped. Underdeveloped in the sense that it had the potential to have more depth: in practice it ends up being a bunch of repetitive dialogue wherein your teammates constantly remind you of shit. That said, it does redeem itself at specific junctures with these neat little optional dialogue/interactions that happen between all the shooting... stuff that will even change even depending on the combinations of certain squad members (for fun try putting two girls in your squad as soon as you can to immediately get fingered for being a pervert). Also I don't think it really needed to be developed any more than it was for you to form an attachment to some of the folks you end up fighting along side, and I get the sense that this was really the intention in adding it to the game... as you can imagine it ends up paying off in later plot developments. Hell, it was enough to get me to care about what was going to happen next, which is a lot more than I can say about most games I play these days, so bravo.