Recent reviews by TheUnforgiving

Pretty much exactly what you'd expect when you say "A single-player campaign, from the people who made the online multiplayer." It has some good ideas and cool little details, but it ultimately fails to improve in any meaningful way over Mechwarrior 4 (with the exception of draw distance).

Piranha understands the numerical aspects of a Mechwarrior game (tonnage, heat, weapon recycle speed, etc.), which they ought to after a decade of developing Mechwarrior Online, but they clearly fail to grasp the higher-level stuff like map and encounter design, as well as which 'Mechs are actually fun to pilot. They start you in a Centurion, which is a pretty boring 'Mech. It's very sturdy, but painfully slow to get around the battlefield, making it a sitting duck in the hands of novice pilots. And unfortunately, because the salvage system is rigged against you -- 'Mech wrecks have a low chance of appearing in the salvage list and, when they do, are often worth more than the maximum salvage value you could negotiate for -- you're stuck with the Centurion until you do a lot of grinding and get lucky.

With mods like Yet Another Mechlab, this game becomes passable if played a mission or two at a time, but ultimately it lacks the charm and care of design that makes Mechwarrior 4 so beloved. It has the unfortunate position of being unfavorably compared to not only its 20-year-old predecessor, but its contemporary in Harebrained Schemes' Battletech. Piranha doesn't leverage the Battletech setting nearly as well as HBS or FASA before it, and that leaves the game feeling hollow, because there is nothing to soften the grind, nothing to look forward to but another template mission on another template map.

Not worth buying unless (like me), you were *desperate* for some visceral 'Mech carnage and couldn't get Mechwarrior 4 to work for the life of you. Get Battletech instead.

Also, the HOTAS support is basically non-existent, which is just inexcusable. The community has assembled a document detailing how to add support for your specific HOTAS, but that's not the point. Even when you add the support yourself, the control binding UI is godawful, especially for the joysticks. Piranha does MechWarrior Online, they know the kind of person that is an Mechwarrior enthusiast. I appreciate their effort to lower the barrier to entry and making it more comfortable for newcomers by supporting standard gamepads, but MechWarrior's gameplay was designed for a joystick and they should know that.

Verdict: Passable

While more technically competent than, say, Skyrim, it's an incredibly jerky, ill-paced game that tries to do too much in its time span. Too many weapons, too many twists, too many bad guys, too many gameplay types. It's never really content to allow for falling action of any kind. As soon as you reach the final objective of a mission, it cuts to a loading screen, with hardly a line from one of your squadmates or anything to provide a moment of relaxation, a feeling that you've made it and, for the moment, you're safe. Alternating between the Rangers and TF141 on a mission-by-mission basis for the first two acts of the game ruins any sense of continuity between the missions -- with each feeling about half the length of a Call of Duty 4 mission -- further exacerbates the lack of fulfilment provided by the end of each mission, because each mission ends on a particularly poor and jarring cliffhanger and you're thrown into the rising action of another mission in another place with different people before you've had a moment to decompress. It may be that Infinity Ward was trying to keep the tension high. But, if that is the case, they confused tension with action. Yes, an all-out firefight can be tense, but it quickly loses its dramatic appeal the more you do it in a given span of time. And, since you -start- the game in a firefight and do little else besides move from one firefight to the next, aside from some parts of some of the TF141 missions, you're basically forced to keep an adrenaline high for almost the entirety of the game's runtime. This also prevents even minimal characterization. So, when characters are killed, there is no emotional impact because there was no time or cause for you to become emotionally invested in them. Even the death of Ghost is completely forgettable, because while he's present for almost the entirety of the game, he spends almost all of it off screen, and never does anything important or unique to distinguish himself from the rest of the TF141 mooks during the brief time he's a physical presence. While there are some things the game does well, such as the first mission with Roach and Soap and the way the end of "Of Their Own Accord" and the beginning of "Second Sun" tied together (the beginning of "Second Sun" honestly took me by surprise), they are few and far between, lost in the sharp scene changes and deafening non-stop gunfire.

I'd be lying if I said the story lacked drama, but most of what drama it has immediately falls apart when you think about how ludicrous the plot is. The villain's plan was needlessly complicated, bloody, and destructive, especially given its purpose, which could have been accomplished much easier and cleaner with the clever usage of media and politics. But what broke my suspension of disbelief was not how out of hand it got, not how far off the deep end the villain had gone to even consider it to be a good idea, but how willing the villain's lackeys were to let him carry on and how freely they seemed to provide their assistance. It is clear they are trying to top the first Modern Warfare. However, the first Modern Warfare was already pushing the limits of reason while still trying to set the stakes high. Modern Warfare 2 front-loads so much ridiculous escalation, much of it climax-worthy material, that you really can't help but think every time "It can'tget any worse." And yet it always does, and never in a good way. If I didn't know any better, I'd say there was a team at Infinity Ward that did nothing but sit around and play "One Up" for the entirety of the script-writing process, just to come up with new ways to turn up the heat, regardless of whether or not they actually made sense in the grand scheme of things. The scene of using foxholes and trenches to avoid machine gun nests on your approach to a ruined, Russian-occupied White House screams WWII callback. Aside from that, though, it does little but try to show the player just how bad things are in DC by stirring up patriotic anger. The same kind of patriotic anger that the game itself practically condemning, both in its plot and in the quotes that are displayed on screen after you die. And, by this point, the game has gone on far too long with its messages of treason through patriotism for that to be the point. Not to mention, the game isn't smart enough for it to have ever been the point to begin with.

When they announced the original Modern Warfare, Infinity Ward said they wanted to make the campaign feel a lot more like a film. And they succeeded. With a well-paced plot that followed a clear dramatic arc, parallel subplots that contributed to the overall scenario in a positive manner without weighing it down, missions that had their own miniature dramatic arcs, and the sense of danger and urgency needed to justify the faster-paced gameplay, Modern Warfare was a good action movie. While most of the actors went without characterization beyond "Spec-Ops hardass", "Military grunt", or "Total evil psychopath", such archetypes are pretty much standard for military action movies, and they were neither over-done nor hammed up, and were almost always present, leading to a solid core cast you came to care at least a -little- about by the end. Combine that with carefully-placed and well-handled twists -- the end of Jackson's subplot in particular was wrung out for as much drama as they could justify -- it was a game that, despite ending up as the spearhead of the subgenre that has taken over the FPS, stands out as an example of trying something new with a franchise without completely butchering the job. Modern Warfare 2, on the other hand, is the result of trying to capitalize on the success of a new idea without understanding what made the new idea good.

If you're desperately curious to find out what happened to Soap and Captain Price following the events of Call of Duty 4, or you just want to understand what all the fuss is about, Modern Warfare 2 is worth a play, with some emphasis on "a play", as in the singular. If not, perhaps you can help unmake the rest of the franchise by silencing its truth, leaving only the deaths of 30,000 Marines, and the sacrifice of the 22nd SAS to avenge them, that the horrors of that week would not return to haunt the future.

One of my favorite shooters of all time, and the game that desensitized me to most horror when I was a lad, FEAR is a wonderful, if not exactly groundbreaking, thriller-esque romp. The normal points of critique are not really where FEAR excels. The graphics aren't spectacular, even for their age (though there are about a billion particle effects), character facial models look like they're made of clay. The level design isn't particularly inspired, mostly taking place in industrial complexes or office environments. There are generally side-paths you can take to locate goodies or flank enemies, but it isn't as open as, say, Crysis. Bullet time is well-implemented and something of a necessity to deal with the rather intelligent enemy AI, but it's nothing new. The horror mostly amounts to jump scares, though there are some tense moments (and disturbing ones, for the faint of heart). The story is pretty cheesey, and is really nothing more than an excuse for the rather bizarre collection of sci-fi elements: clone supersoldiers, psychics, reflex-induced bullet time, guns that nail people to walls or roast them into charred skeletons or explode them into a fine red mist.

Oh yeah, there's those. While the gunplay isn't stellar, the weapon selection is actually pretty enjoyable. You start off with a semi-auto pistol (which you can dual-wield), a decent SMG that you're nonetheleses going to want to ditch, and an assault rifle with a double-drum magazine. These are the boring guns. As you progress, you find a seemingly-ordinary SPAS-12 knockoff that is capable of reducing mooks to a fine red mist at point-blank range in one or two shots and is so ridiculously common and has such a massive reserve ammo capacity you'll never need to discard it, a pneumatic rifle that fires 10mm spikes, capable of ragdolling mooks on death and nailing them to any nearby surface (think the crossbow from Half-Life 2, but with a magazine and an automatic firing mode), a particle beam that reduces enemies to skeletons when they die, a tri-barrel rocket launcher like something out of Quake or Unreal Tournament, and at least half a dozen more. Each has its uses and plays really well with the bullet-time mechanic, allowing you to pretty much wreck anything you come across, provided you have the right selection, and a sharp mind. Combine that with some kung-fu moves, and you're like an action hero.

Which is really what the game is, and why I love it. It's not some complex and deep BioWare-esque world or storyline. It's a silly 90s action movie that, while it isn't really self-aware, nonetheless doesn't try to take itself too seriously. You show up, blow off the heads of masked clones with your superhuman reflexes and martial prowess, and save the day from the psycho-terrorist. Not a smart game, but nonetheless made of awesome. If nothing else, it's a good way to kill a weekend.